American organic legislation creating Northwest Territory
This article is part of a series on the
United States Continental Congress
Independence Hall in Philadelphia
Predecessors
Albany Congress
Stamp Act Congress
First Continental Congress
Declaration and Resolves
Continental Association
Petition to the King
Second Continental Congress
United Colonies
Olive Branch Petition
Committee of Secret Correspondence
Necessity of Taking Up Arms
Lee Resolution
Declaration of Independence
Model Treaty
Franco-American Treaty
Articles of Confederation
Perpetual Union
Court of Appeals in Cases of Capture
Congress of the Confederation
Bank of North America
Land Ordinance of 1784 / of 1785
Northwest Ordinance of 1787
Members
List of delegates
Presidents of the Continental Congress
Secretary of Foreign Affairs
Superintendent of Finance
Secretary at War
Board of War
Marine Committee
Secretary of the Continental Congress
Related
Journals of the Continental Congress
Carpenters' Hall
Independence Hall
Henry Fite House
Nassau Hall
Maryland State House
French Arms Tavern
Federal Hall
United States portal
v
t
e
Events leading to the American Civil War
Economic
End of Atlantic slave trade
Panic of 1857
Political
Northwest Ordinance
Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions
Missouri Compromise
Nullification crisis
Gag rule
Tariff of 1828
End of slavery in British colonies
Texas Revolution
Texas annexation
Mexican–American War
Wilmot Proviso
Nashville Convention
Compromise of 1850
Fugitive Slave Act of 1850
Kansas–Nebraska Act
Ostend Manifesto
Caning of Charles Sumner
Lincoln–Douglas debates
1860 presidential election
Crittenden Compromise
Secession of Southern states
Peace Conference of 1861
Corwin Amendment
Social
Nat Turner's Rebellion
Martyrdom of Elijah Lovejoy
Burning of Pennsylvania Hall
American Slavery As It Is
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Bleeding Kansas
The Impending Crisis of the South
Oberlin–Wellington Rescue
John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry
Judicial
Trial of Reuben Crandall
Commonwealth v. Aves
The Amistad affair
Prigg v. Pennsylvania
Recapture of Anthony Burns
Dred Scott v. Sandford
Virginia v. John Brown
Military
Star of the West
Battle of Fort Sumter
President Lincoln's 75,000 volunteers
v
t
e
The Northwest Ordinance (formally An Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States, North-West of the River Ohio and also known as the Ordinance of 1787), enacted July 13, 1787, was an organic act of the Congress of the Confederation of the United States. It created the Northwest Territory, the new nation's first organized incorporated territory, from lands beyond the Appalachian Mountains, between British North America and the Great Lakes to the north and the Ohio River to the south. The upper Mississippi River formed the territory's western boundary. Pennsylvania was the eastern boundary.
In the 1783 Treaty of Paris, which formally ended the American Revolutionary War, Great Britain ceded the region to the United States. However, the Confederation Congress faced numerous problems gaining control of the land such as the unsanctioned movement of American settlers into the Ohio Valley; violent resistance from the region's indigenous peoples; the continued presence of British outposts in the region and an empty U.S. treasury.[1] The ordinance superseded the Land Ordinance of 1784, which declared that states would one day be formed within the region, and the Land Ordinance of 1785, which described how the Confederation Congress would sell the land to private citizens. Designed to serve as a plan for the development and settlement of the region, the 1787 ordinance lacked a strong central government to implement it. That need was addressed shortly with the formation of the U.S. federal government in 1789. The First Congress reaffirmed the 1787 ordinance and, with slight modifications, renewed it with the Northwest Ordinance of 1789.[2]
Considered one of the most important legislative acts of the Confederation Congress,[3] it established the precedent by which the federal government would be sovereign and expand westward with the admission of new states, rather than with the expansion of existing states and their established sovereignty under the Articles of Confederation. It also set legislative precedent with regard to American public domain lands.[4] The U.S. Supreme Court recognized the authority of the Northwest Ordinance of 1789 within the applicable Northwest Territory as constitutional in Strader v. Graham,[5] but it did not extend the ordinance to cover the respective states once they were admitted to the Union.
The prohibition of slavery in the territory had the practical effect of establishing the Ohio River as the geographic divide between slave states and free states from the Appalachian Mountains to the Mississippi River, an extension of the Mason–Dixon line. It also helped set the stage for later federal political conflicts over slavery during the 19th century until the American Civil War.[6]
^"Land Ordinance of 1785". Ohio History Central. Retrieved December 16, 2018.
^Horsman, Reginald (Autumn 1989). "The Northwest Ordinance and the Shaping of an Expanding Republic". The Wisconsin Magazine of History. 73 (1): 21–32. JSTOR 4636235.
^"Primary Documents in American History: Northwest Ordinance". loc.gov. The Library of Congress. Archived from the original on December 11, 2019. Retrieved 7 April 2020.
^Shōsuke Satō, History of the land question in the United States, Johns Hopkins University, (1886), p. 352
^Strader v. Graham, 51 U.S. (10 How.) 82, 96–97 (1851).
^Horsman, Reginald (1989). "The Northwest Ordinance and the Shaping of an Expanding Republic". The Wisconsin Magazine of History. 73 (1): 21–32. ISSN 0043-6534.
and 27 Related for: Northwest Ordinance information
The NorthwestOrdinance (formally An Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States, North-West of the River Ohio and also known as...
The Ordinance of 1785 put the 1784 resolution in operation by providing a mechanism for selling and settling the land, while the NorthwestOrdinance of...
Established in 1787 by the Congress of the Confederation through the NorthwestOrdinance, it was the nation's first post-colonial organized incorporated territory...
Ordinance of 1787, commonly known as the NorthwestOrdinance, that created the Northwest Territory Ordinance (disambiguation) Land Reform Ordinance (disambiguation)...
people who wanted to enslave free people in 1787 by passing the NorthwestOrdinance of 1787. The law appeared to outlaw enslavement, which would have...
outline for the process was established by the Land Ordinance of 1784 and the 1787 NorthwestOrdinance, both of which predate the U.S. Constitution. The...
organization to regulate itself Local ordinance, a law made by a municipality or other local authority NorthwestOrdinance, July 13, 1787, an act of the Congress...
territory north of the Ohio River, which would subsequently become the Northwest Territory, but initially retained its remaining trans-Appalachian claim...
further augmented with the Land Ordinance of 1785, and superseded by the NorthwestOrdinance of 1787. This latter ordinance provided for civil liberties...
enacted the NorthwestOrdinance, which created the Northwest Territory in what is now the upper Midwestern United States. The Ordinance specified that...
Confederation enacted the NorthwestOrdinance, which created the Northwest Territory. The first settlement under the NorthwestOrdinance was at Marietta (Ohio)...
States Constitution). The NorthwestOrdinance created the Northwest Territory in the land west of Pennsylvania and northwest of the Ohio River and set...
the NorthwestOrdinance, southerners denied that it could serve as a lawful antecedent for the territories of the Louisiana Purchase, as the ordinance had...
be. The NorthwestOrdinance of 1787, passed just before the U.S. Constitution was ratified, had prohibited slavery in the federal Northwest Territory...
especially the Virginia Declaration of Rights (1776), as well as the NorthwestOrdinance (1787), the English Bill of Rights (1689), and Magna Carta (1215)...
formulate the NorthwestOrdinance while in Congress, and introduced an amendment to the ordinance prohibiting slavery in the Northwest Territory. During...
by the Congress of the Confederation in 1787, the NorthwestOrdinance forbade slavery in the Northwest Territory, a vast area (the future Ohio, Indiana...
as the NorthwestOrdinance, a 1787 act enacted for the creation of the Northwest Territory north of the Ohio River. The NorthwestOrdinance's provision...
century and called Illinois Country. In 1787 the NorthwestOrdinance was enacted, creating the Northwest Territory, which was bounded by the Great Lakes...
Following the passage of the NorthwestOrdinance in 1787, the Surveyor General of the Northwest Territory platted lands in the Northwest Territory. The Surveyor...
territory created from lands of the Northwest Territory, which had been organized under the terms of the NorthwestOrdinance of 1787. The territorial capital...
private institutions of higher learning. Prior to statehood, the NorthwestOrdinance of 1787 included a provision to establish an institution of higher...
Ocean to the Oregon Country. Similarly, during the drafting of the NorthwestOrdinance, the map's inaccuracy in depicting where an east–west line drawn...
phrasing on the NorthwestOrdinance of 1787, which features an identical exception. Thomas Jefferson authored an early version of that ordinance's anti-slavery...
accordance with the land ordinance of 1785, partly because slavery had been excluded in Indiana by the NorthwestOrdinance. Abraham Lincoln claimed many...
banned by the NorthwestOrdinance, but that was not enforced for those already holding slaves. When Illinois became a state in 1818, the Ordinance no longer...