The Northwest Ordinance

The Northwest Ordinance is a serious contender for being one our founding documents. Its purpose was to determine how the country northwest of the Ohio river (roughly the modern states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin) would be administered, developed and brought into the union.

It was adopted by the Confederation Congress on July 13, 1787. With minor modifications it was adopted again in the first congress under the new Constitution and signed by G. Washington on August 7, 1789. Why should anybody care? Well below is a list of some of the things that it did either through the force of law or the power of precedent.
1. It established the principle that new states would be admitted into the union on a completely equal basis with the original states! That is, the new American nation would not treat acquired lands as colonies (as the Europeans did), provinces (Rome), or soviet republics (Russia). Shortly thereafter the Constitutional Convention wrote this principle into the fundamental law. (See the next installment of American exceptionalism.)
2. It provided for an orderly transition from territorial status to statehood through a process which followed the nation across the continent in the next century.
3. It specified certain rights of habeas corpus, freedom of religion, and due process (before the Constitution and Bill of Rights).

But the most important thing is that it prohibited slavery in those territories!

When the civil war came these 5 states had a population that was approximately the same as the white population of all 11 of the seceding southern states.

That is why July 13, 1787 was the day that the South lost the war.

Well, enough about these little games about when the South lost the war.

Tomorrow we will go to something much more profound about this event.

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