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Gilder Lehrman Document Number: GLC 1042
Title: Northwest Ordinance
Type of document: ordinance
Quotation: "Neither Slavery nor involuntary Servitude in the said territory"
Annotation:
Some of the bitterest controversies in post-Revolutionary American involved western land. Connecticut, Georgia, Massachusetts, New York, North and South Carolina, and Virginia insisted that their colonial charters extended their boundaries to the Mississippi River or beyond. Maryland, which had no western land claims, refused to approve the Articles of Confederation unless it received assurance that the other states agreed to yield their claims to the federal government. Between 1781 and 1785, the "landed" states ceded their western land claims to Congress. Virginia ceded the single largest area to the national government. Known as the Northwest Territories, it comprised the present-day states of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin, as well as part of Minnesota.
In hopes of raising revenue from the sale of western land, Congress passed the Land Ordinance of 1785. It provided for the division of the Northwest Territory into townships, each of which would be subdivided into lots a mile square, or 640 acres. The cost of a single lot was too high--a minimum of $640--to attract buyers. In the end, Congress agreed to sell over a million acres to a group of New England land speculators, who called themselves the Ohio Company, for less than ten cents an acre.
Another source of controversy involved the governance of the western territories. No one yet knew whether the western lands would remain part of the United States or form a separate confederation or whether any states created out of the West would be equal to the original states. Thomas Jefferson in 1784 proposed that the Northwest Territories be divided into ten units and that any one of them could become a state as soon as its population equalled that of the smallest existing state. Many Easterners opposed this proposal, fearing that western states would quickly dominate Congress.
In 1787, Congress adopted the Northwest Ordinance, which provided a model for the organization of future territories. The ordinance gave Congress the power to divide the area into three to five separate territories. Congress would appoint a governor, a secretary, and three judges to govern each territory. When a territory had 5000 free adult males, it could send a non-voting member to Congress and choose a territorial legislature (whose enactments had to be approved by the Congressionally-appointed governor). Once a territory had 60,000 free inhabitants, it could apply for admission as a state, with all the rights of the existing states.
The Northwest Ordinance guaranteed residents' property rights as well as other rights such as trial by jury and freedom of religion. It also prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory.
From the outset, the issue of slavery in the western territories was a major source of controversy. When North Carolina and Georgia ceded their western lands to the federal government, they stipulated that slavery be permitted in any territories made out of those lands. In 1784, Jefferson offered a proposal to prohibit slavery in any new state after 1800. The Continental Congress defeated this measure by a single vote. Just six years later, in stark contrast, Congress omitted any mention of slavery when it set up territorial governments in the Southwest.
Even though the prohibition of slavery in the Northwest Ordinance seems clear, it must be emphasized that this provision did not affect slaves already living in the territory and did not prevent some slaveholders from bringing slaves into Indiana and Illinois territories. In parts of the Old Northwest, there was strong pressure for slavery. In 1802, a convention in Indiana Territory asked Congress to allow slaves to be brought into the region. Later, an indentured servant act allowed de facto slavery in the territory. It was only in 1823 that Illinois defeated the efforts of a proslavery party. These antislavery victories drew heavily on the precedent of the Ordinance of 1787.
Full Text:
Article the Sixth. There shall be neither Slavery nor involuntary Servitude in the said territory otherwise than in the punishment of crimes, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted; Provided always, That any person escaping into the same, from whom labor or service is lawfully claimed in any one of the original States, such fugitive may be lawfully reclaimed and conveyed to the person claiming his or her labor or service as aforesaid.
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