miles, and that of the ten States, each having 22,500 square miles, will be 225,000 square miles. The area of the State cessions in the Northwestern Territory is estimated at 265,877.91 square miles. Thus, Mr. Jefferson's plan of dividing the Territory into ten States was quite consistent with the resolution of Congress of 1780. Numerically, the extent allowed to each State came as near as could be expected by Congress.

1

Now let us proceed to other points in the ordinance. It provided that the settlers, under the authority of Congress, should be granted the right to establish a temporary government, adopt the constitution and laws of any one of the older States, and erect townships or counties for legislative purposes. There was no property-qualification required for the exercise of these political rights. Free males of full age had civic privileges. This temporary government had to continue until the population in the new State reached 20,000 free inhabitants, when a permanent constitution and government could be established. After the organization of a temporary government, the settlers could have a member in Congress as their representative, with a right to debate, but not to vote. when they should have increased to the number of the inhabitants in the least populous original State, their delegates, with the assent of nine States, as required by the eleventh of the Articles of Confederation, could be admitted into Congress on an equal footing with the original States.

But

Besides the points enumerated, the ordinance contained some other features of great importance. They were the general principles upon which both the temporary and permanent governments had to be established. They were as follows: 1. The new States shall remain forever a part of the Union. 2. They shall be subject to the Articles of Confederation like the original States. 3. They shall bear a part of the debts contracted by the Federal Government. 4. Their

'Public Domain, 11.

governments must be republican, and shall admit no person as a citizen who holds any hereditary title. 5. After the year 1800 A. D., there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the new States.

Such were the provisions of the ordinance as submitted by Mr. Jefferson and his committee on March 1, 1784. The ordinance was finally passed on April 23, 1784, with some omissions and some additions. The additions were that the States should not interfere with the primary disposal of the soil by the United States; that they should not tax lands which were the property of the United States; that they should not levy higher taxes on the lands of non-resident proprietors than on those of residents; finally, that the articles of the ordinance should be formed into a charter of compact, and should stand as fundamental constitutions between the thirteen original States and each of the new States, unalterable except by common assent. The omissions consisted in striking out clauses that gave fanciful names to the new States and assigned boundaries to each of them; that which referred to the hereditary title of citizens; and lastly, that which prohibited slavery after the year 1800.1

The slavery clause was stricken out on the motion of Mr. Spaight, of North Carolina. The six States, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New Hampshire, New York, and Pennsylvania, stood for, and Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina against, the clause. Mr. Spaight's own State was divided. The rest of the States-Georgia, Delaware, and New Jersey-were not represented. It lacked only one vote to pass this anti-slavery clause, the votes of seven States being necessary to carry any measure in the old Congress.

"The defeat of Mr. Jefferson's anti-slavery clause was regarded at the time as a great calamity," says Mr. W. F. Poole, of Chicago, in his excellent paper on the Ordinance of

See, for the ordinance, Public Domain, 147-149; Cole's History of the Ordinance, 7-10; Bancroft's Constitutional History, I, 153–159; St. Clair Papers, II, 603–606.

1787; but he adds that "Northern men soon saw that it was a most fortunate circumstance; for if slavery had been allowed to get a foothold in the Territory for sixteen years, it could not have been abolished at the end of that period." The defeat proved fortunate, indeed, because of the later ordinance that prohibited slavery at once and forever in the Northwest after the passage of the fundamental law.

993

The Nestor of American history, Mr. George Bancroft, says: "The design of Jefferson marks an era in the history of universal freedom." But it proved an initial attempt, rather than actual accomplishment. Mr. Jefferson seems to have been fully conscious of the defeat of his anti-slavery clause. Two years afterward he said: "The voice of a single individual would have prevented this abominable crime from spreading itself over the new country. . . . Heaven will not always be silent; and the friends to the rights of human nature will in the end prevail.' This "single individual," the mover against the anti-slavery clause, was one whom Jefferson styled "a young fool." In his declining years Jefferson again referred to the Ordinance of 1784, and said: "My sentiments have been forty years before the public; although I shall not live to see them consummated, they will not die with me; but, living or dying, they will ever be in my most fervent prayer." The dying statesman's sentiments, originally cherished in the prime of his manhood, were realized forty years after his death" by the "Thirteenth Amendment" of 1865, when the curse of slavery was removed forever by the constitutional law of the United States. Mr. Jefferson's Ordinance of 1784, shorn of its chief glory, the proscription of slavery, became a law of the land. Soon after its passage,

1 W. F. Poole in North American Review, April, 1876, 238.

2 Bancroft's Constitutional History, I, 156.

Jefferson, IX, 276.

*Jefferson to Heaton, May 20, 1826; quoted in Bancroft's Constitutional History of United States, I, 158.

'Jefferson died July 4, 1826.

the author of the law left Congress for a mission abroad. Jefferson's connection with the ordinance then ceased.

WASHINGTON ON TERRITORIAL GOVERNMENT.

The ordinance, however, was a dead letter. "No settlement of the Territory was made under it." Washington was early and always aware of the importance of developing the Western country. Under the date of December 14, 1784, he wrote to R. H. Lee as follows: "Nature has made such a display of her bounty in those regions, that the more the country is explored the more it will rise in estimation. The spirit of emigration is great; people have got impatient; and though you cannot stop the road, it is yet in your power to ✔mark the way." Again, under the date of March 15, 1785, Washington wrote to the same gentleman and argued that Congress ought to point out the most advantageous mode of seating lands in the Western Territory, in order that good government might be administered. He says: "Progressive seating is the only means by which this can be effected." He suggested also that one State should be marked out instead of ten, in order to avoid any sectional conflict in the West.

We have already seen that Jefferson's plan of dividing the Western Territory first came from the suggestions of Washington; but here we find him advocating the marking out of one State instead of ten. This change of view might be attributed to the defeat of Jefferson's anti-slavery clause, and the probable change in political conditions of the Northern and Southern States. Massachusetts abolished slavery in her Constitution of 1780.4 So did Pennsylvania. Connecticut made a partial abolition in 1784. The Northern and Eastern

1 Poole's Ordinance of 1787, North American Review, April, 1876, 238. 2 Sparks, IX, 80-81.

3 Quoted in Bancroft's Constitutional History of the United States, I, 177, from MS.

4 Poore's Charters and Constitutions, Part I, 957.

States were thus abolishing slavery. But if, according to the Ordinance of 1784, ten new States were to be erected in the Northwest, where slavery was not prohibited, the anti-slavery States of the North would lose their political vantage-ground with the recognition of numerous slave States in the West. It must have been to quiet political uneasiness in the minds of Northerners that Washington suggested the marking out of only one State. Indeed, it would not be too much to say that this idea of Washington, leading to what he termed the "progressive seating" of Western lands, was another " "pioneer thought" in relation to the Ordinance of 1787, wherein the entire Northwest was organized as a single Territory, to be gradually formed into States not less than three nor more than five.

Congress did not take any further initiative, nor did the settlers petition that body to form a temporary government in the Western Territory according to the Ordinance of 1784. Accordingly, no government was organized under that ordinance, and the great Northwest remained but a wilderness. The census taken sixteen years later, in 1800, shows that the entire Northwest then contained but 50,455 inhabitants, distributed as follows: Ohio, 45,365; Indiana, 2,517; Illinois, 2,458; and Wisconsin, 115. From the year 1800, Ohio showed a very rapid increase of population. She doubled it in every two years throughout the succeeding decade. But this great frontier State had only a few detached settlements at the time when the ordinance of Mr. Jefferson was passed. In fact, the entire Northwest, except at Kaskaskia, St. Vincent's, and neighboring villages, was the home of roving Indians and wild beasts. The settlements named were mostly colonies from Canada and Louisiana, and the settlers were slaveholders, for slavery was established by the French laws of Louisiana. Besides, the emigrants from Virginia who emigrated to the Northwest, after the capture of French

'Tenth Census: Population, Part I, 4.