The Northwest Ordinance: Essays on its Formulation, Provisions, and Legacy
The Northwest Ordinance: Essays on its Formulation, Provisions, and Legacy
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| ISBN-13: | 9780870139697 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Michigan State University Press |
| Publication date: | 01/01/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 255 KB |
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The Northwest Ordinance
Essays on Its Formulation, Provisions, and Legacy
By Frederick Williams
Michigan State University Press
Copyright © 1988 Michigan State University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87013-969-7
CHAPTER 1
Ambiguous Achievement: The Northwest Ordinance
JACK N. RAKOVE
Department of History, Stanford University
IN 1971 A DISTINGUISHED GROUP OF HISTORIANS gathered at Williamsburg, Virginia, charged with the task of assessing the remarkable burst of scholarship which had recently produced sweeping reinterpretations of the American Revolution. The honor of presenting the keynote addresses at this conference rightly fell to the two men whose work had precipitated the great transformation of Revolutionary scholarship, Bernard Bailyn and Edmund Morgan. In their papers, both men found occasion to refer to the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, that landmark act of state which is customarily heralded as the one undisputed achievement of the postwar Continental Congress. For Bailyn, the Ordinance's "brilliantly imaginative provisions ... for opening up new lands in the West and for settling new governments within them" embodied the "expectant stretching and spirited, hopeful striving" which the Revolution had released among Americans of all classes. Morgan, for his part, saw the passage of the Ordinance not only as an affirmation of Revolutionary principles, with the new states and their citizens acquiring an equal status with the original members of the union, but also as an early example of that process of bargaining and compromise that would soon become so essential a feature of American legislative politics.
One doubts whether anyone in the audience raised so much as an eyebrow at these comments. They were entirely consistent with the received view of the Northwest Ordinance, and with the view that prevails today. Three years later, however, a rather different assessment of that act was offered during the course of an exchange between Bailyn and Gary Nash, whose review of the published proceedings of the Williamsburg conference had been less than kind to Bailyn's contribution. In a rejoinder to the letter of protest that Bailyn had submitted to the William and Mary Quarterly, Nash raised a new charge. Bailyn's tribute to the opening of the West, he now argued, only revealed the dubious value of a conceptual scheme that "equates 'progress' with the expansion of 'republican' forms of government." Under such a scheme, Nash continued, "Nothing needs to be said about the subjugation of the demographically and technologically weaker peoples who inhabited the Ohio Valley; or about the dictated treaties of 1784-1786; or about the 'brilliantly imaginative' techniques of warfare devised by St. Clair, Wayne, and Clark for the conquest of Indian societies." The movement into the northwest had to be understood for what it was: a renewal of "the lawless white expansion into Indian lands" which Britain had sought to arrest during the decade prior to independence. Far from serving as an example of enlightened legislation, Nash implied, the Northwest Ordinance might better be regarded as a legal facade for the expropriation of Indian lands.
Gary Nash's objections to an uncritical celebration of the Ordinance cannot be dismissed simply as a familiar expression of the radical historiography of the late 1960s and early 1970s. This disparity between the high purposes of the 1787 Ordinance and its ominous implications for native peoples is impossible to ignore. Before the empire of liberty could be extended, extensive Indian lands had to be liberated, and the history of that struggle is one episode that no bicentennial ought to celebrate. Yet neither will it do to dismiss this famous act of 1787 as simply another step along the trail of tears. For one thing, the aspirations of the Ordinance were more noble, more enlightened, than the acquisitive policy it was meant to enforce; for another, had the Ordinance itself never been adopted, had the process of expansion gone forward wholly unchecked—as it inevitably was destined to go forward—the fate of the aboriginal occupants of the Northwest Territory would have been exactly the same.
To strike balances between high aspirations and mundane motives, between great expectations and unintended consequences, is (arguably) what historians like to do best. The inherent ambiguities of the Ordinance emerge if its framing is viewed from three perspectives. One can begin by asking, in the first place, how and why the organization of this territory became so crucial an issue for the American Revolutionaries of the 1770s and 1780s. Second, one can juxtapose the adoption of the Ordinance with the other major event Americans commemorate this year: the Federal Convention of 1787. Finally, a sense of justice requires a return to the issue raised at the outset, in order to examine the less than ambiguous legacy that the Ordinance had for the aboriginal occupants of the Northwest Territory.
At the most general level, the great questions that the Northwest Ordinance ultimately proposed to settle all involved determining exactly how frontier territories would be integrated into a republic founded and controlled by the much longer settled societies along the seaboard. In one sense, the basic issues were political. Would the western territories be admitted to the union on terms of equality with the original thirteen states? Would their residents enjoy the same political rights as their countrymen closer to the Atlantic—or would they suffer something of the same "abridgement of liberties" that Thomas Hutchinson, the last royal governor of Massachusetts, had mistakenly thought the American colonists should gratefully accept in exchange for the benefits of membership in the British empire?
These were questions that it had become possible even to frame only on the eve of independence. Until fairly late in the colonial period, the question of how the West would be governed had not figured prominently in the politics of either the American colonies or the British empire. In the middle of the eighteenth century, the overwhelming majority of the population still lived huddled close to the Atlantic—in modern terms, a drive of no more than an hour or two from the coast. Where migration had moved inland, the axis of settlement lay along the great river systems—so that access to the coast remained easier than travel into the interior. In their cultural orientation, too, the colonists still faced eastward across the Atlantic, toward the mother country and its great metropolis. The idea that the conquest of the frontier would serve as the great testing point of the American character would have struck many colonists—and especially the articulate, elite classes who dominated public life—as absurd.
The final two decades before Independence, however, brought a sharp and accelerating shift in American interest in the settlement of the interior. The struggle with France for control of the Ohio and upper Mississippi valleys ended in a decisive British victory that lowered the political barriers to movement westward. Perhaps more important, the exponential population growth of the colonies was reinforced by a remarkable upsurge of immigrants from the home islands, and beyond. As Professor Bailyn has noted in his recent study of this migration, a quarter of a million immigrants reached the colonies in the final fifteen years before the outbreak of war in 1775. At least half of these immigrants hailed from protestant Ireland, Scotland, and England; perhaps another third were enslaved Africans; most of the remainder were German protestants. Many of the British and European immigrants headed almost immediately for the frontier: entering through the great ports of Philadelphia and New York, they took up lands in southeastern Pennsylvania, or headed north up the Hudson and then west along the Mohawk; or else they filtered down the Shenandoah Valley and into the southern backcountry as far south as the Carolina and Georgia frontiers, and as far west as Pittsburgh. In their own way, slaves contributed to this migration, too. Their increasing numbers allowed the greater planter families of the tidewater to expand their holdings even further, thus spurring the flight of poorer whites to the frontier—where the planters' younger sons sometimes followed them still, slave gangs in tow. And even in New England, the region that immigrants found entirely unattractive, four generations of fruitful multiplication by the Puritans and their descendants had created a pool of potential emigrants to the West.
The period just before independence, then, saw a major leap in the area of eastern America opened for settlement. It inspired ambitious and complex speculative schemes, as entrepreneurs well aware of rising land values in the east foresaw the profits to be made from the settlement of the West. Perhaps most important, it was this surge of settlement that first raised some of the key political problems that the framers of the Ordinance of 1787 would have to grapple with more than a decade later. Three of these sets of problems deserve particular mention.
The first set of problems stemmed from the simple difficulty that existing authorities experienced in keeping up with the rapid pace of migration and in providing a working framework of basic institutions for the frontier. To organize even the minimal apparatus of government was a daunting task, especially because, outside New England, the sheer physical dispersal of settlement made it difficult for legally constituted authorities to maintain ready access to the population. Churches—which might have been expected to step into the vacuum left by government—faced even greater problems. Dispersed populations could barely assemble for services ; frontier settlers were ill prepared to defray the costs of hiring a minister; and even if they were, a severe shortage of ordained ministers made it difficult to find one.
Even after a rudimentary set of local institutions could be organized, it remained to be decided—in the second place—how frontier settlements were to be incorporated into the larger provincial communities of which they were nominally a part. Would interior areas be granted equal rights of representation in the colonial (or later the state) assemblies? Royal governors were under instructions to limit the size of the colonial legislatures in order to make those truculent bodies more manageable; frontier settlements were sometimes the victims of this limitation. But the political questions also touched the conduct of local affairs. Would these settlements gain effective control over local institutions of government, or would these be staffed by men who owed their loyalty not to local interests but to the existing colonial authorities further east? Would there, in other words, be two classes of citizenship within any colony or state: a superior status reserved for residents living in the original settlements, an inferior one relegated to migrants along the frontier?
This question in turn implicated a third set of issues. It was one thing to extend equal political rights and the effective support of church and state to one's own descendants moving west. But to the extent that settlement along the frontier depended disproportionately on new and strange groups, it was not immediately apparent why they deserved the same rights and privileges of the predominantly English groups whose forebears had come first. It was no less enlightened a spokesman for the rising glory of America than Benjamin Franklin who as early as 1751 wondered (in his essay Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind) why Pennsylvania should even welcome the "Palatine Boors" and other "swarthy" peoples who were swarming into the colony. Good and sober workers they might well be; but how could these people, with their strange customs and language, ever be integrated into the existing society? And conversely, what loyalty did these new groups in turn owe to the established authorities in any particular colony or state? There was never any love to be lost between the Anglophobic Scots-Irish Presbyterians who were scattered from Pennsylvania south, on the one hand, and the creolized English Americans who dominated the colonies in which they settled.
This concern with the assimilation of alien population elements was genuine and plausible, and it was recognized as such by other observers, who, however, sometimes looked ahead more optimistically than Franklin was originally disposed to do. In his famous Letters from an American Farmer, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur had rightly asked what allegiance the displaced peasants of Europe owed to the countries from which they had fled to come to America.
What attachment can a poor European emigrant have for a country in which he had nothing? The knowledge of the language, the love of a few kindred as poor as himself, were the only cords that tied him; his country is now that which gives him his land, bread, protection, and consequence; Ubi panis ibi patria is the motto of all emigrants.
But allegiance to particular governments, Crevecoeur also understood, would not come into existence immediately. "Europeans submit insensibly" to the new conditions under which they found themselves living in America, he observed; and then, "in the course of a few generations," they would become "not only Americans in general, but either Pennsylvanians, Virginians, or provincials under some other name." Their first loyalties would be to the New World itself, Crevecoeur implied ; more immediate and particularistic allegiances would follow only in time.
Compounding all of these problems was the one additional factor that would most powerfully affect the creation of the national domain after independence. The rights of government that individual colonies and states claimed over the interior rested on the swampy soil of seventeenth-century charters and other tenuous claims. These were weak reeds on which to lean when dealing with migrants who owed little if any inherent loyalty to the existing political elites. If the existing provinces could extend their jurisdiction into the interior, then the allegiances of the frontiersman might be secured; but the question remained, could those jurisdictions be established?
All of these issues were somehow involved in the post-revolutionary efforts to organize the frontier, but the one that mattered most was the question of jurisdiction. As is well known, the basic struggle over the future of the West lay between two blocs of states: the landed states of Virginia, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Georgia, and New York, who had claims of greater and lesser merit to extensive lands in the interior; and the landless states of Pennsylvania, Delaware, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Maryland, whose western boundaries were clearly set by their colonial charters. In practical terms, the dispute centered on the question of when, and under what conditions, the landed states would cede their claims to the union, thereby creating a national domain that could in turn be organized into new states.
None of the landed states' claims seemed particularly persuasive, if taken on their merits. Notions of North American geography had not attained the level even of crude knowledge when sea-to-sea clauses were placed in the original charters of Virginia, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. Yet when independence was declared, Virginia insisted that its claim to the territory northwest of the Ohio River had to be honored. Meanwhile, Massachusetts and Connecticut were preparing to jump over New York in order to reactivate claims that would begin somewhere around the Finger Lakes and run west through lakes Erie, Huron and Michigan until they hit the western boundary of the new republic—wherever that might turn out to be. And New York was in a class by itself. Lacking a formal charter, it rested its claims first on its special political relationship with the Six Nations of the Iroquois confederacy and then on the Iroquois claim to supremacy over the western tribes above the Ohio.
This conflict between landed and landless states was the dominant practical problem that the framers of the Articles of Confederation had to face. In an effort to provide a painless solution to the enormous financial burdens the war promised to create, the landless states sought from the outset to give the Continental Congress broad power to limit state boundaries and to control the national domain that would be created beyond. They rested their case on three main points. They argued, first, that the purported boundaries set by the colonial charters were both fanciful and unreasonable; second, that the actual control of this territory could be wrenched from Great Britain only through the united force of all the states, who should therefore acquire joint title to the entire region; and third, that the recognition of these individual state claims would work a basic injustice. The landed states could defray much of their share of the costs of war simply by selling territory; the landless states, by contrast, would have to levy heavy taxes—and thus perhaps force their own citizens to emigrate to the lands of their better circumstanced neighbors.
Against these claims, which seem so equitable on their face, the landed states literally held their ground. They succeeded in pruning almost every clause relating to western lands from the final draft of the Articles of Confederation that Congress submitted to the states in November 1777. In doing so, they did not deny that a national domain should eventually be created; they implied only that its existence would depend on the voluntary cessions of the claiming states.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Northwest Ordinance by Frederick Williams. Copyright © 1988 Michigan State University Press. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Page,
Acknowledgements,
Introduction,
I - Ambiguous Achievement: The Northwest Ordinance,
II - The Northwest Ordinance and the Balance of Power in North America,
III - Battling Infidelity, Heathenism, and Licentiousness: New England Missions ...,
IV - Slavery and Bondage in the "Empire of Liberty",
V - The Development of Public Universities in the Old Northwest,
APPENDIX - An Ordinance for the government of the territory of the United ...,
Select Bibliography,