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THE NORTHWEST ORDINANCE

After the American Revolution, the new United States acquired lands from Great Britain called the Northwest Territory—frontier land west of Pennsylvania, bordered by the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and the Great Lakes, that today are referred to as the Midwest. Various ordinances passed by Congress between 1783 and 1787 divided the lands into self-governing districts and for this territory to be surveyed and subdivided. In 1787, Congress passed the last Northwest Ordinance, which outlined how the territory would be governed and how the various districts would be admitted as states into the union. The ordinance established a population threshold of 60,000 residents for an individual territory to gain statehood, while also guaranteeing civil liberties, providing for education, and promising decent treatment to Native Americans. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 also outlawed slavery from the lands of the Northwest Territory. Consent for the ordinance’s passage had to be unanimous, and while the establishment of new, permanently free states would have offset the overall balance of free and slave states, multiple factors allowed slave states to, in relative comfort, vote to pass the ordinance. First, the concern over the balance of free and slave states had not taken hold as strongly as it would in the early decades of the nineteenth century, especially since Kentucky and Tennessee had already been admitted as states where slavery was allowed. Economic factors played into the ordinance’s unanimous passage as well. The major cash crop grown in most plantations was tobacco, a crop that required slave labor to be profitable. Keeping slavery out of the Northwest Territory protected southern tobacco planters from competition that would eat into their profits from the tobacco market.

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Seeds of Discord