The Articles of Confederation, Lesson 4: The Land Ordinances and the Northwest Ordinance

The Land Problem Congress Inherited

When the Articles of Confederation took effect on March 1, 1781, the new government owned no land. Seven states claimed, under colonial charters, territory that ran north of the Ohio River and westward toward the Mississippi, some of it all the way to the South Sea. The charters had been written by kings who did not know where the Pacific was, and they overlapped. Virginia, Massachusetts and Connecticut each claimed parts of the same country north of the Ohio. New York based its claim on its dealings with the Iroquois. North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia claimed strips that ran across the southern mountains. Meanwhile the states without such claims, Maryland most loudly, argued that land won from Britain by the blood and money of all thirteen belonged to all thirteen.

Lesson 1 told how that argument held up ratification until Maryland signed on March 1, 1781. Article IX gave Congress "the sole and exclusive right and power" of "regulating the trade, and managing all affairs with the Indians, not members of any of the states," subject to a proviso for state legislative rights, and it settled disputes between states over boundaries. The same article ended the land question with a sentence that protected the claimants: "no State shall be deprived of territory for the benefit of the United States."¹ Nothing in the Articles told a state to give anything up. Whatever Congress got, it would have to be given.

The need was plain. Congress carried a war debt it could not pay out of requisitions, and by 1783 the army that had won the war was owed back pay it could not receive. A large part of the continent looked like the one asset that could cover both. Congress had begun to think of the West as capital long before it had a title to sell. The Journals from 1780 to 1787 show a body that spent six years establishing that it could own land, two more working out how to survey it and sell it, and then, in July 1787, a few weeks before the Constitutional Convention finished its work, writing a government for it.

Three of those steps are known as ordinances. The word is Congress's own. An ordinance was an act of the Confederation Congress, passed after readings on separate days and signed by the president and the secretary, which carried the force of a federal law in the places where Congress had authority. The three ordinances of 1784, 1785 and 1787 did different jobs. The first sketched how new states would be formed and admitted. The second laid out the survey grid and the terms of sale. The third built a territorial government and a bill of rights and set the road to statehood. Only the second and third were put to use, and the third repealed the first.

September and October 1780: Congress Asks the States to Give

Congress's first move came before the Articles were even ratified. On September 6, 1780, it recommended that the states with western claims cede a portion of them to the United States for the common benefit of the Union.² Virginia then asked Congress what it would promise in return, and on October 10, 1780 Congress answered with a resolution that became the template for everything after it. The text, as printed in the Journals, reads in part:

"Resolved, That the unappropriated lands that may be ceded or relinquished to the United States, by any particular states, pursuant to the recommendation of Congress of the 6 day of September last, shall be granted and disposed of for the common benefit of all the United States that shall be members of the federal union, and be settled and formed into distinct republican states, which shall become members of the federal union, and have the same rights of sovereignty, freedom and independence, as the other states: that each state which shall be so formed shall contain a suitable extent of territory, not less than one hundred nor more than one hundred and fifty miles square, or as near thereto as circumstances will admit."³

Two ideas sit in that sentence and both survived to the present. The first is that ceded land is a common fund, to be "disposed of" for the benefit of every state. The second is that the land will not be held as colonies. It will be carved into republican states that enter the Union with "the same rights of sovereignty, freedom and independence, as the other states." That promise is the earliest form of what later came to be called the equal footing doctrine, and the idea of permanent subordinate provinces never gets a footing in the Journals. The resolution added that the cost of the war in the West, specifically the expense of "subduing any of the British posts" and maintaining forts and garrisons, would be reimbursed to the states that had borne it. It also declared that purchases of Indian land by private persons without the approval of the state legislature holding the right of preemption would not make a valid title.³

Notice what Congress had no power to do and did not claim. It could not tell New York or Virginia how to dispose of their charters. It could only offer terms. The terms were generous enough, and the claimants worried enough about each other's titles, that the gift followed within the decade.

The Cessions, State by State

Five states had deeded western claims to the United States by August 1787, and a sixth had offered and withdrawn. The record is in the Journals, because Congress accepted each deed in open session and entered the text. The table gives the dates as the Journals state them.

Georgia, which claimed the largest territory, ceded nothing before the Constitution. And Virginia's deed shows how much negotiation sat under each gift. The Virginia assembly had acted on a Congress resolve of September 13, 1783 that did not give Virginia everything it asked. The Virginia act accepted Congress's terms "in full confidence" that Congress would, "in justice to this State," earnestly press "the other states claiming large tracts of waste and uncultivated territory" to make cessions of the same kind.⁵ Congress took up the deed on March 1, 1784, and David Howell moved that the United States was "ready to receive" it. A proviso offered by John Beatty of New Jersey, that accepting the deed would not imply any opinion on "the extent or validity" of Virginia's claim to western territory "by charter or otherwise," failed on a roll call. Howell's motion carried, and the Virginia delegates signed, sealed and delivered the deed that day.¹⁰

The cessions also left disputes in place. Virginia kept the Kentucky country south of the Ohio. Virginia's bounty land between the Scioto and Little Miami rivers, later called the Virginia Military District, held back a block of Ohio from the federal survey. Connecticut kept the Reserve. Each reservation later produced its own litigation and its own survey. When Congress reached the Ordinance of 1785, it wrote an express saving clause for the Virginia officers and soldiers into the text, and it forbade any sale of land "included between the rivers called little Miami and Sciota" until their claims had been laid off.¹¹

Who Lived There

None of this land was empty. The Ohio country was home to Shawnee, Miami, Delaware (Lenape), Wyandot, Ottawa, Ojibwe, Potawatomi and other nations, with the Iroquois claiming a say over parts of it. Congress knew it. The Treaty of Paris in 1783 had made Britain's claim to the region over to the United States, but the nations there had not been parties to the treaty and did not accept that the American war settled their title. Congress's own answer, in the fall of 1783, was a proclamation drafted by a grand committee and agreed to on September 22. Citing Article IX, it forbade "all persons from making settlements on lands inhabited or claimed by Indians, without the limits or jurisdiction of any particular State," and declared that any purchase or settlement made without Congress's authority "is null and void."¹² The proclamation is a good measure of what Congress thought it could do. It claimed the sole power to buy land from Indian nations, and it had no army in the field to enforce it.

The ordinances followed that logic. The 1784 resolution applied to land "already purchased or shall be purchased of the Indian inhabitants." The 1785 ordinance opened with the same condition: "the territory ceded by individual States to the United States, which has been purchased of the Indian inhabitants, shall be disposed of in the following manner."¹¹ In October 1784 at Fort Stanwix and in January 1785 at Fort McIntosh, United States commissioners signed treaties with the Six Nations and with the Wyandot, Delaware, Ojibwe and Odawa delegations that claimed to open much of the Ohio country to surveying. The Fort McIntosh treaty was signed January 21, 1785. Most Ohio nations, the Shawnee in particular, did not sign, and they rejected the treaties' authority.¹³ The survey ran ahead of the title, and the gap between the two fed the Northwest Indian War of the early 1790s.

The Northwest Ordinance's third article spoke to that gap in language that history did not honor: "The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians, their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent."¹⁴ Harmar's campaign in the fall of 1790 failed, St. Clair's army lost most of its men to an attack on the Wabash on November 4, 1791, and General Wayne's legion won at Fallen Timbers on August 20, 1794.¹⁵ The Treaty of Greenville of August 3, 1795 ceded a large part of present Ohio and several other tracts to the United States and set out lands the signing nations kept.¹⁶ A reader of the Ordinance should hold both facts in mind. Congress wrote a pledge of consent into the founding text of the territory, and the nations of the country went to war over the title.

April 23, 1784: Jefferson's Plan for New States

On March 1, 1784, the day Virginia's deed was signed, a committee of Thomas Jefferson, Jeremiah Townley Chase of Maryland and David Howell of Rhode Island reported "a plan for the temporary government of the western territory."¹⁷ Jefferson wrote it. The report treated the ceded land as ten future states, each bounded by lines of latitude two degrees apart, with names Jefferson invented: Sylvania, Michigania, Cherronesus, Assenisipia, Metropotamia, Illinoia, Saratoga, Washington, Polypotamia and Pelisipia. The names did not last. The version Congress adopted on April 23, 1784 leaves the names out, and the lines were redrawn so that the states were bounded by latitude and by two meridians, one through the lowest point of the rapids of the Ohio and one through the western cape of the mouth of the Great Kanhaway.¹⁸

The plan's mechanics are what mattered. Settlers in a purchased territory would meet, "on their own petition or on the order of Congress," and establish "a temporary government" by adopting the constitution and laws of one of the original states, subject to change by their own legislature. When a district reached twenty thousand free inhabitants, Congress would authorize a convention to write a permanent constitution. Both governments had to stand on stated principles, and the Journal's list of them, in the order of the adopted text, runs as follows:

• The new states would "for ever remain a part of this confederacy of the United States of America."
• They would be subject to the government of the United States in Congress and the Articles of Confederation "in all those cases in which the original states shall be so subject."
• They would never interfere with the primary disposal of the soil by Congress or with its rules for securing title to purchasers.
• They would pay a share of the federal debts under the same rule that applied to the original states.
• No tax would fall on lands owned by the United States, and the lands of nonresidents would never be taxed higher than residents' lands.
• Their governments would be "in republican forms" and would admit no citizen "who holds any hereditary title."

The plan also set the rule for admission. A new state would be admitted to Congress "on an equal footing with the said original states" when it had as many free inhabitants as the least numerous of the thirteen, provided the consent of enough states in Congress was first obtained. Until then, its delegate could debate but not vote.¹⁸ Each of these ideas survives in the Northwest Ordinance. The twenty thousand free inhabitants that would trigger a permanent constitution in 1784 became, in 1787, five thousand free male inhabitants for an assembly and sixty thousand free inhabitants for statehood, and the "debating but not voting" delegate became the territorial delegate to Congress that the United States has used ever since.

Jefferson's draft carried one more provision. The report said: "That after the year 1800 of the Christian era, there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the said States, otherwise than in punishment of crimes, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted to have been personally guilty."¹⁷ On April 19, 1784, Richard Dobbs Spaight of North Carolina, seconded by Jacob Read of South Carolina, moved to strike it. The Journal's question was whether the words should stand, and it needed seven states to carry. Reading the scanned roll call, six delegations voted to keep the clause (New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York and Pennsylvania), three voted no (Maryland, Virginia and South Carolina), North Carolina's delegates divided, and New Jersey had too few delegates present to cast a vote. The Journal's own entry for the result reads, "So the question was lost, and the words were struck out."¹⁹ Jefferson voted to keep the clause. The other two Virginia delegates who voted, as the scan reads, voted no, and that made Virginia's vote no. The clause fell one state short of the seven it needed.

The Journal for April 23 shows the rest of the plan passing, with South Carolina's delegates the only ones I can read as voting no.¹⁸ The Ordinance of 1784 never took effect in the form that Jefferson drafted, because Congress sold no land and organized no government under it. Three years later, the last sentence of the Northwest Ordinance repealed it: "the Resolutions of the 23d of April 1784 relative to the subject of this ordinance be, and the same are hereby repealed and declared null and void."¹⁴

March 1785: Rufus King and the Second Attempt on Slavery

The anti-slavery clause did not die in 1784. On March 16, 1785, Rufus King of Massachusetts, seconded by William Ellery of Rhode Island, moved that "there shall be neither Slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the States, described in the resolve of Congress of the 23 April, 1784," except as punishment for crime, and that this regulation "shall be an article of compact, and remain a fundamental principle of the Constitutions between the 13 Original States, and each of the States described" in the 1784 resolve.²⁰ The date that Jefferson's clause would take effect had been dropped. King's text had no 1800 deadline, which means it would have applied at once.

The vote that day went to commitment of King's proposition to a committee, and the Journal prints a roll call with eight delegations voting yes. Reading the scan, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland voted to commit it, and Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia voted no.²⁰ The committee, King with David Howell and William Ellery, reported on April 6, 1785 with a resolution that restored the 1800 date and added a clause that Congress's later text would also carry: "Provided always, that upon the escape of any person into any of the states described in the said Resolve of Congress of the 23d Day of Apl. 1784, from whom labor or service is lawfully claimed in any one of the 13 orig[inal] states, such fugitive may be lawfully reclaimed, and carried back to the person claiming his labor or service as aforesaid this Resolve notwithstanding."²¹

Congress did not take the report up. Charles Thomson, the secretary, endorsed the printed copy long afterward: "To prevent slavery in the new states. Included in substance in the Ordinance for a temporary government of western territory passed the 13 July, 1787."²¹ So the sixth article of 1787 is the third form of a clause that was written in 1784, moved again in 1785, and passed the third time. It was never a new thought at the end of the debate. Its fugitive proviso was already present in King's 1785 text.

May 20, 1785: The Land Ordinance

The Ordinance of 1785 is the shortest of the three and has had the longest working life. Congress passed it on May 20, 1785, on the third reading, the Journal records, as "An Ordinance for ascertaining the mode of disposing of Lands in the Western Territory." On March 16, 1785, the day King made his motion on slavery, Congress sent the draft ordinance for a second reading and then, after debate, referred it to a committee with a member from each state. The Committee Book names Pierse Long, Rufus King, David Howell, William Samuel Johnson, Robert R. Livingston, Archibald Stewart, Joseph Gardner, William Henry, John Henry, William Grayson, Hugh Williamson, John Bull and William Houstoun. The Journal's editors list several printed drafts that preceded the final text.²⁰¹¹

The survey grid

The ordinance's survey rule is a single sentence. The surveyors "shall proceed to divide the said territory into townships of six miles square, by lines running due north and south, and others crossing these at right angles, as near as may be."¹¹ Congress would appoint a surveyor from each state, who would swear an oath before the Geographer of the United States, Thomas Hutchins, and who would be paid two dollars for each mile of line he ran, which included the wages of the chain carriers and markers. The first north and south line would start on the Ohio River "at a point that shall be found to be due north from the western termination of a line, which has been run as the southern boundary of the state of Pennsylvania." Townships were numbered from south to north and ranges numbered to the west, with the first range running from the Ohio to Lake Erie. The surveyors had to mark the lines "by chaps on the trees," note every "mines, salt springs, salt licks and mill seats," and run all lines "by the true meridian," recording the variation of the magnetic needle with each plat.¹¹

Each township was then subdivided into "lots of one mile square, or 640 acres," numbered from 1 to 36. That is where the section and the acre-count of every American land description comes from. The arithmetic is simple enough to do on a napkin. One township holds 36 sections of 640 acres, which makes 23,040 acres. The first act of the survey was to fix a six-mile square on the ground and then divide it by thirty-six.

The sale terms

Congress wanted money, and the terms show it. After seven ranges had been surveyed, the Secretary at War would draw by lot a number of townships and lots "equal to one seventh part of the whole of such seven ranges" for the soldiers of the late army, and the Board of Treasury would draw the remaining townships by lot among the thirteen states, "according to the quotas in the last preceding requisition." Each state's loan officers would then sell its allotted townships at public auction, alternating between whole townships sold entire and townships sold in lots. "None of the lands, within the said territory" could be sold "under the price of one dollar the acre," paid in specie, in loan office certificates "reduced to specie value," or in certificates of liquidated debt, "besides the expense of the survey and other charges thereon, which are hereby rated at thirty six dollars the township."¹¹

The ordinance reserved parts of every township. "There shall be reserved for the United States out of every township, the four lots, being numbered 8, 11, 26, 29." It continued: "There shall be reserved the lot N 16, of every township, for the maintenance of public schools, within the said township; also one third part of all gold, silver, lead and copper mines."¹¹ The table shows what that left for a buyer.

On those numbers, a buyer who took a whole township at the $1 minimum owed $19,840 plus the $36 survey charge, or $19,876. The text does not say whether the $36 shrank with the reserved lots, so that figure is the reading that charges the whole township. The price could be paid in specie, in loan office certificates "reduced to specie value, by the scale of depreciation," or in certificates of liquidated debts of the United States "including interest," so the clause let a buyer pay with the government's own paper.

The schools clause

Lot 16 is the schools clause that Congress later repeated in its grants to new states, adding section 36 in the West. The Ordinance said the lot was reserved "for the maintenance of public schools, within the said township." It did not say how the money would be raised or who would manage the land, and states later fought over those questions. As the Idaho section below shows, Congress eventually gave sections 16 and 36 in every township to the new Western states for the support of common schools.²²

The reservations for the army and for the Moravian towns

The ordinance honored Congress's own debts. It set aside land for the soldiers whom Congress had promised bounty land by its resolutions of 1776 and 1780 and for officers of the hospital department, and it told the Secretary at War to draw by lot "in such manner as he shall deem expedient, to answer the purpose of an impartial distribution." It reserved three townships on Lake Erie for refugees from Canada and Nova Scotia. And it reserved "the towns of Gnadenhutten, Schoenbrun and Salem, on the Muskingum, and so much of the lands adjoining to the said towns" for the use of "the Christian Indians, who were formerly settled there, or the remains of that society."¹¹ Gnadenhutten was the site of the massacre of Christian Delaware by Pennsylvania militia on March 8, 1782.²³ Congress's July 27, 1787 resolution later fixed the reserved land at ten thousand acres and vested it in the Moravian Brethren.²⁴

What was built, and how slowly

The survey proceeded far more slowly than the ordinance expected. A report of the Board of Treasury dated April 4, 1787 and passed on April 21 tells the story in a few lines. Agreeably to the Ordinance, "no Distribution or Sale of Lands can be made until seven Ranges shall have been completely Surveyed." The Geographer had lodged plats of four ranges, which "do not extend half thro' the same from South to North." The townships and fractional townships surveyed so far numbered twenty-six, amounting, "by a Calculation of the Geographer to 675,000 Acres." The army's one seventh was 96,428 acres, leaving 578,572 for the United States.²⁵ The Board proposed to alter the ordinance, and Congress agreed. The surveyed lands would be advertised for four months, then sold "in the place where Congress shall sit," at a minimum of one dollar an acre, with a third paid at once and the rest in three months.²⁵

The grid still exists. Idaho's own township lines trace from a butte south of Boise, where the Bureau of Land Management says a survey crew led by Lafayette Cartee fixed the Boise Meridian initial point in 1867. The BLM says the system spread across nearly 54 million acres of the state from there.²⁶ The 1785 text numbers the sections 1 to 36 and, for the next row of lots, picks up "the number next to that with which the preceding one concluded." The back and forth numbering on modern maps came by later legislation and survey manuals, and this lesson did not confirm which statute first set it.

The Ohio Company and the Contract of 1787

A veterans' plan ran alongside the Land Ordinance. On June 16, 1783, a group of army officers petitioned Congress for land northwest of the Ohio, and General Washington sent the petition along with a letter on June 17. The petition and Brigadier General Rufus Putnam's covering letter are noted in the Journals under July 1, 1783, where the petition went to the grand committee of May 30.²⁷ Nothing came of it. The officers waited, and on March 1, 1786, in Boston, Putnam, Benjamin Tupper, Samuel Holden Parsons and Manasseh Cutler met at the Bunch of Grapes tavern and began the Ohio Company of Associates, which sold shares to veterans who held army certificates.²⁸

Cutler, a Massachusetts minister, carried the company's offer to New York. His diary, printed by his descendants in 1888, shows his schedule. He rode into the city on Thursday, July 5, 1787, and on Friday, July 6, he was "introduced to a number of members on the floor of Congress Chamber, in the City Hall, by Colonel Carrington, member from Virginia," and "delivered my petition for purchasing lands for the Ohio Company." A committee was appointed to negotiate. He talked with Hutchins, who told him to take the Muskingum, and he dined with Nathan Dane.²⁹ Dane, Carrington, Richard Henry Lee, John Kean and Melancton Smith were named on July 9 to a committee on the report on temporary government of the western territory. The Ohio Company negotiation and the Ordinance moved together through the same room in the same week.³⁰

The Journal shows what Congress did about the sale. On July 23, 1787 Congress referred a committee report to the Board of Treasury "to take order," and on July 26 Cutler and Winthrop Sargent wrote that they were ready to contract "for the purchase of the lands described in the Act" on conditions that "in some degree vary from the report." They proposed half a million dollars when the contract was executed, another half million when the tract was surveyed, and the rest in six equal payments. They asked that the land assigned for a university sit "nearly as possible in the Centre of the first million and half of Acres we shall pay for." And they said plainly that, their private fortunes being embarked in the purchase, "it is not possible for us to offer any adequate security" beyond the land itself. Congress on July 27 referred the letter to the Board of Treasury with directions about the installments and the interest.²⁴ The letter also warned that if the terms were refused, "a numerous Class of our Associates" holding certificates "received as Specie, at the risque of their lives and fortunes" would "wait the tedious and precarious issue of public events."

The Board of Treasury did not close the contract until October. By then Congress had broadened its authority. On October 23, 1787, Congress resolved that the Board "be and they are hereby authorised and empowered to enter into contracts in behalf of the United States with any person or persons for any quantity of land in the Western territory, the Indian rights whereon have been extinguished, not less than one Million of Acres in One body upon the same terms as it respects price, payment and surveying with those directed in the contract with Mr Cutler and W Sargent on the 23 and 27th of July last." No tract could have a river front "exceeding one third of its depth," and no gift of land could be made for seminaries of learning beyond what the 1785 ordinance allowed, except in contracts as large as Cutler and Sargent's.³¹ The contract with Cutler and Sargent was concluded on October 27, 1787, for about a million and a half acres on the Ohio and the Muskingum at a price of $1 million in securities, according to the standard secondary account, and the company in the end completed payment for a smaller tract.²⁸ A second contract, an option on land west of the first tract, went to a "Scioto Company" in which William Duer, secretary of the Board of Treasury, had an interest, and that company's contract lapsed before it purchased any land.²⁸

The price arithmetic is worth doing. A million dollars for a million and a half acres is about 67 cents an acre. The Ordinance of 1785 had set a minimum of $1 an acre. The gap closes when one reads the Journals: Congress allowed a reduction for bad land, and the Ohio Company paid in army certificates and other securities that were worth a fraction of their face value on the market. One secondary account puts the cash value at about twelve cents on the dollar.²⁸ The sale solved the Confederation's problem on paper. It retired a lot of certificates, and it seeded the first permanent American settlement in what became Ohio. The company's pioneers landed at the mouth of the Muskingum in April 1788, and Putnam laid out Marietta.²⁸

The link between the sale and the Ordinance deserves a careful statement. Cutler's descendants wrote that he made an exchange: the company would take the land, and the Southern delegates would pass an Ordinance with a New England stamp. The Journal does not say so. It records only the sequence, a sale negotiation running alongside the Ordinance in the same days, and that the eight states that voted on July 13 included Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. Historians argue about how much one produced the other, and the lesson does not resolve the argument. What the record supports is that Congress had a financial motive to make the territory attractive to New England settlers, and that the Ordinance's guarantees gave them the legal order they wanted.³²

September 1786 to July 1787: How the Northwest Ordinance Was Drafted

The Ordinance came out of three drafts. On September 18, 1786 Congress named a committee of William Samuel Johnson, Charles Pinckney, Melancton Smith, Nathan Dane and William Henry to prepare "a plan of a temporary government for such districts or new States as shall be laid out by the United States upon the principles of the acts of cession from individual States and admitted into the confederacy." It reported on September 19, and the plan was left unfinished on September 21.³³ It was a rougher document than the final Ordinance. It called for a governor on a three-year commission, a secretary and a court of five judges "who shall have a common law and Chancery Jurisdiction." It already set out "the benefits of the Act of habeas Corpus and of the trial by Jury," the intestate rule under which a man's land would pass to his children "Male and female in equal parts," and a five-member legislative council appointed by Congress. Its House of Representatives would serve one year.³³

The report was under consideration again on April 26, 1787, and it had its second reading on May 9.³⁴ It then sat. Attendance was thin all that year. The editors of volume 32 note that Congress did not have a quorum of seven states until January 17, 1787, and that from then until October 27, 1787, the last day on which a quorum was present, it conducted business on 112 days.³⁵ On July 9, 1787, with Richard Henry Lee newly in his seat, Congress named a new committee, Edward Carrington of Virginia, Nathan Dane of Massachusetts, Richard Henry Lee, John Kean of South Carolina and Melancton Smith of New York, "on the report on temporary government of western territory." On July 11 the committee brought in "an Ordinance for the government of the territory of the United States North West of the river Ohio," and the Journal records its first reading. The second reading came July 12. The third reading and passage came July 13.³⁰

The Journal prints two texts, the committee's report of July 11 and the ordinance as passed July 13. They differ in four places. The published edition marks amended passages by underlining that the scanned copy does not preserve, so the list below comes from comparing the two printed texts.

The Journal does not say who moved the sixth article, and it prints no debate. The only direct statement comes from Nathan Dane's letter to Rufus King of July 16, 1787, which the Cutler family published in 1888 from a printing in the New York Tribune. Dane wrote that he "had no idea that the states would agree to the sixth article prohibiting slavery, as only Massachusetts of the eastern states was present, and therefore omitted it in the draft; but, finding the house favorably disposed on this subject, after we had completed the other parts, I moved the article, and it was agreed to without opposition."³² The letter has to be read with care. It was a delegate's account of his own part, written three days after the event. The Cutler family used it to argue a larger claim about Cutler's influence, and this lesson relies on it only for what Dane says he did. It matches the Journal on one point: the committee text of July 11 had no sixth article, and the text of July 13 did.

The vote on passage was by states. Congress had eight states present, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. At the request of Abraham Yates of New York, the Journal prints the roll. Every delegate voted aye except Yates, who voted no. That makes seventeen delegates for and one against, and eight states for the ordinance.¹⁴ Yates's reasons are not recorded. Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Hampshire were not represented in the vote.

The Northwest Ordinance, Clause by Clause

The National Archives describes the Ordinance as having "three principal provisions": the division of the territory into "not less than three nor more than five States," a three-stage path to statehood, and a bill of rights. It adds that the authors were "probably Nathan Dane and Rufus King," and the Journal gives no author.³⁶ The text below is quoted from the Journal's entry for July 13, 1787.

Stage one: a governor, a secretary and three judges

The territory would be "one district, subject however to be divided into two districts as future circumstances may in the Opinion of Congress make it expedient." Congress would appoint a governor, whose commission "shall continue in force for the term of three years, unless sooner revoked by Congress," and who had to hold a thousand acres in the district. A secretary would serve four years and hold five hundred acres. "There shall also be appointed a court to consist of three judges any two of whom to form a court, who shall have a common law jurisdiction," with commissions "during good behaviour." The governor and judges would "adopt and publish in the district such laws of the original states criminal and civil as may be necessary and best suited to the circumstances of the district," subject to Congress's disapproval.¹⁴ This stage gave the Territory a government that answered to Congress alone. It had no legislature.

Stage two: an assembly

"So soon as there shall be five thousand free male inhabitants of full age in the district upon giving proof thereof to the governor, they shall receive authority with time and place to elect representatives from their counties or townships to represent them in the general assembly." One representative would represent each five hundred free male inhabitants, up to twenty-five. A member had to hold two hundred acres in fee simple, and an elector had to hold fifty. The assembly consisted of the governor, a legislative council of five members chosen by Congress from ten nominees named by the house, and the house itself, whose members served two years. The governor held an absolute veto: "no bill or legislative Act whatever, shall be of any force without his assent." He could convene, prorogue and dissolve the assembly. The assembly could elect "a Delegate to Congress, who shall have a seat in Congress, with a right of debating, but not of voting."¹⁴ Free male inhabitants meant what it said. The voter rolls excluded women and enslaved people, and the land qualifications excluded many free men.

Stage three: statehood

Article 5 set the boundaries of three states, with Congress holding the right to form "one or two States in that part of the said territory which lies north of an east and west line drawn through the southerly bend or extreme of lake Michigan." It said: "whenever any of the said States shall have sixty thousand free Inhabitants therein, such State shall be admitted by its Delegates into the Congress of the United States, on an equal footing with the original States, in all respects whatever; and shall be at liberty to form a permanent constitution and State government, provided the constitution and government so to be formed, shall be republican, and in conformity to the principles contained in these Articles." Congress could admit a state earlier, "when there may be a less number of free Inhabitants in the State than sixty thousand."¹⁴ The boundary lines were conditioned on Virginia altering its act of cession. The five states that later came out of the territory, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin, do not follow the three-state plan, and the text of Article 5 already allowed for northern states.

The six articles of compact

The ordinance introduced its guarantees as "Articles of compact between the Original States and the people and States in the said territory," which "forever remain unalterable, unless by common consent." The Journal's text:

• Article 1. "No person demeaning himself in a peaceable and orderly manner shall ever be molested on account of his mode of worship or religious sentiments in the said territory."
• Article 2. The inhabitants "shall always be entitled to the benefits of the writ of habeas corpus, and of the trial by Jury; of a proportionate representation of the people in the legislature, and of judicial proceedings according to the course of the common law." All persons shall be bailable unless for capital offenses; "all fines shall moderate, and no cruel or unusual punishments shall be inflicted"; no man shall lose liberty or property "but by the judgment of his peers, or the law of the land." If public need requires taking property, "full compensation shall be made." And no law shall interfere with "private contracts or engagements, bona fide and without fraud previously formed."
• Article 3. "Religion, Morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, Schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged. The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians, their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and in their property, rights and liberty, they never shall be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful wars authorised by Congress."
• Article 4. The territory and its states "shall forever remain a part of this Confederacy of the United States of America." Inhabitants pay a share of the federal debt. The legislatures "shall never interfere with the primary disposal of the Soil by the United States." No tax on United States land, and no higher tax on nonresident proprietors than on residents. The waterways leading into the Mississippi and the St. Lawrence "shall be common highways, and forever free."
• Article 5. Three to five states, sixty thousand free inhabitants, equal footing.
• Article 6. Taken up below.

Article 2 is a bill of rights that came more than two years before Congress proposed the federal Bill of Rights in September 1789. It has jury trial, habeas corpus, bail, a ban on cruel punishments and compensation for a taking. It has no freedom of speech or the press and no right to bear arms. Its contracts sentence, which forbids any law that would "affect private contracts or engagements, bona fide and without fraud previously formed," anticipates the contracts clause of Article I, section 10 of the Constitution. And the Journal's text reads "no cruel or unusual punishments shall be inflicted."¹⁴ Where the Eighth Amendment and Idaho's Constitution, Article I, section 6, say "cruel and unusual," the 1787 text says "cruel or unusual." This lesson did not search for case law on the difference, and a careful reader should not rest an argument on it.

Article 6: The Slavery Clause and What It Did

The text is short. "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."¹⁴

The clause had no 1800 deadline and applied from the day of passage. It took the words "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude" and "otherwise than in punishment of crimes" from Jefferson's 1784 report, which supplied them to King's 1785 motion and then to the Ordinance. The Thirteenth Amendment, proposed in 1865, uses those words again, and this site's Module 27 comes back to them.

The fugitive proviso is an acknowledgment that the Confederation Congress would not interfere with the slave states' claims to people who escaped across the Ohio. It was in King's April 1785 report. The Constitutional Convention, meeting in Philadelphia that same summer, wrote a fugitive clause of its own in what became Article IV, section 2. Any reader of the Ordinance has to hold both facts together: it was the first federal act to bar slavery from a large territory, and it bound the new territory to return people who escaped from the slave states.

What it did on the ground

The record is mixed, and it is hard to summarize without overclaiming. The Ordinance applied to a territory that already held enslaved people. The French villages at Kaskaskia, Vincennes and nearby held enslaved people, as histories of the region record. The Ordinance's own second section protected "their laws and customs now in force among them relative to the descent and conveyance of property" for the French and Canadian inhabitants, a clause about inheritance and conveyance that historians have read in different ways. Historians have long disagreed on whether the sixth article freed anyone already held. Territorial officials and the courts of the new states took different views at different times, and some enslaved people were kept in the territory under indentures that stood in for slavery. The ban held as a political rule even where it leaked in practice. Ohio's constitution of 1802 barred slavery, and the other territorial states took the clause as the basis of their own admission. This lesson relied on secondary accounts for those later points and did not check state sources, so treat them as background and check state records before quoting.

Who wrote it

Two versions of the origin story are widely repeated, and neither fits the record. One says Jefferson wrote the anti-slavery clause. Jefferson wrote the 1784 clause, which lost. He was in France in July 1787, and the Journal contains no motion by him on the Ordinance. The other version says Manasseh Cutler wrote the Ordinance and bartered it for the land sale. Cutler was in New York in July 1787 and was a skillful lobbyist, as his diary shows, but the Journal credits the work to the committee of Carrington, Dane, Lee, Kean and Smith, and the only statement about who moved Article 6 is Dane's. The accurate summary is that the idea had a long history, from Jefferson's 1784 draft to King's 1785 motion, that Congress had balked at it twice, that the article was added between the first reading on July 11 and passage on July 13, 1787, and that the ordinance as a whole passed with a single recorded no vote.³²¹⁴

Re-enactment by the First Congress

The Ordinance was a creature of the Confederation, and the Constitution took effect nineteen months after it. The First Congress passed "An Act to provide for the Government of the Territory North-west of the river Ohio," approved August 7, 1789. Its preamble says: "in order that the ordinance of the United States in Congress assembled, for the government of the territory north-west of the river Ohio, may continue to have full effect, it is requisite that certain provisions should be made, so as to adapt the same to the present Constitution of the United States." The Statutes at Large print the Ordinance's text as a note to the act. This lesson read only the preamble and first page of the act, which adapts the Ordinance to the new government, so it does not describe the later sections.³⁷ That statute is the reason the Ordinance remained law under the Constitution.

A later Congress applied the same words to every territory. On June 19, 1862, Congress enacted "that from and after the passage of this act there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of the Territories of the United States now existing, or which may at any time hereafter be formed or acquired by the United States, otherwise than in punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted."³⁸ The Ordinance's sentence of 1787 was thus carried to the Pacific coast in a federal statute seventy-five years after it was written, and it covered the part of the West that became Idaho.

After 1787: Equal Footing and What the Courts Did With the Compact

The Ordinance called its articles a compact that would "forever remain unalterable, unless by common consent." The claim that a territorial ordinance could bind a state forever ran into the idea of equal footing, which the same ordinance stated in Article 5. In 1883 the Supreme Court settled the question for the part that mattered to commerce. In Escanaba and Lake Michigan Transportation Co. v. City of Chicago, 107 U.S. 678 (1883), Justice Stephen Field wrote that whatever limits the Ordinance placed on a state while a territory, "it ceased to have any operative force, except as voluntarily adopted by her after she became a state of the Union." He added that on admission a state "at once became entitled to and possessed of all the rights of dominion and sovereignty which belonged to the original states," and that "equality of constitutional right and power is the condition of all the states of the Union, old and new."³⁹ The case concerned the clause making the waterways "common highways," and Illinois's power to bridge the Chicago River. Later cases applied the equal footing idea to other questions, which this lesson did not survey.

The Ordinance's moral commitments traveled differently. Several of its guarantees, jury trial, habeas corpus, bail and religious freedom, appear again in the federal Bill of Rights and in Article I of Idaho's Constitution. Its three-stage path from governor and judges to an assembly to statehood was used for later territories, and this lesson did not trace each use.

The sentence on schools, "Religion, Morality and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, Schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged," is often quoted. In 1787 it said that schools should be encouraged. It created no state church and no particular school system, and it sat beside Article 1, which protected worship from molestation.

Myths and misreadings

• Claim: The Articles of Confederation government was too weak to do anything. The record: The same Congress passed the Land Ordinance and the Northwest Ordinance, two statutes whose structures still shape American land law and the path of a territory to statehood. It was weak in revenue and enforcement, and Lesson 5 turns to those limits.
• Claim: The Northwest Ordinance ended slavery in the Northwest. The record: It barred slavery in law, with a fugitive proviso and with a French-inhabitants clause that left some questions open. Enforcement was uneven and some people were held in the territory for years under other names.
• Claim: Jefferson wrote the Northwest Ordinance. The record: His 1784 plan lost its slavery clause by one vote, and the 1787 Ordinance repealed it. The Journal gives the 1787 drafting to a committee of five.
• Claim: The Land Ordinance gave land free to settlers. The record: It required a minimum bid of a dollar an acre in specie or certificates at public auction, in lots of 640 acres. Historians commonly say that ordinary settlers could not afford that much, which is part of why speculators and land companies bought first and resold.

Key Documents

Each document was read in the text cited. Primary sources are listed in the Sources section below.

Why This Matters to Idaho Officials and Voters

Idaho was no part of the Northwest Territory, which ended at the Mississippi. But the three ordinances left marks on Idaho's land, schools and statehood that anyone who has bought a parcel, read a legal description or looked at a school budget can find.

The survey grid

Every legal description of rural land in Idaho uses the township, range and section system that the 1785 ordinance created. The Bureau of Land Management says the Boise Meridian initial point, set in 1867 by a survey crew under Lafayette Cartee on a volcanic butte south of Boise, anchors the grid for "nearly 54 million acres" of Idaho.²⁶ A section is a lot of 640 acres, and a township is 36 of them, exactly as in 1785.

Sections 16 and 36

The 1785 reservation of lot 16 became, in the Western states, two sections. Idaho's Admission Act of July 3, 1890 provided that "sections numbered sixteen and thirty-six in every township of said State" are "granted to said State for the support of common schools," with equivalent lands to replace sections already sold.²² Idaho's Constitution, Article IX, section 3, declares that the public school permanent endowment fund "shall forever remain inviolate and intact," and section 8 directs the state board of land commissioners to manage granted land so as to "secure the maximum long term financial return to the institution to which granted."⁴⁰ The endowment lands that fund Idaho's schools are the descendants of the school lot that Congress reserved in 1785. A school board member or a voter reading the state land board's minutes is reading the end of that chain.

Equal footing

Idaho's Admission Act of 1890 uses the formula that Congress first stated in October 1780 and repeated in 1784 and 1787. It declares the State "admitted into the Union on an equal footing with the original States in all respects whatever."²² The words trace to the October 10, 1780 resolve and to Article 5 of the Northwest Ordinance, and the Escanaba case treats equal footing as the rule that a new state holds the same powers over its own rivers and territory as the original states.

The ban on slavery in the territories

Congress created the Territory of Idaho by the act of March 3, 1863, at 12 Stat. 808.⁴¹ A year earlier it had passed the act of June 19, 1862, which barred slavery in every territory "now existing, or which may at any time hereafter be formed."³⁸ By its words the 1862 statute reached Idaho when the territory was formed. Idaho's Constitution, written in 1889, has no slavery clause in Article I, sections 1 through 21, which this lesson checked; it did not search the rest of the constitution. The Thirteenth Amendment, which this site covers in Module 27, had settled the point nationwide by 1865.

Using This in Reporting and Civic Life

Reading a legal description

A property record that says "the northeast quarter of Section 12, Township 5 South, Range 2 East, Boise Meridian" is a 1785 description. The township sits so many six-mile rows south of a baseline, the range so many six-mile columns east of the meridian, the section is one of 36 numbered lots, and a quarter section is 160 acres. A reporter who checks a land-sale story can recompute the acreage and the corners from the description alone. A mismatch between the written acreage and the grid is a story worth asking about.

Following the school endowment

The school lot of 1785 and the sections 16 and 36 of 1890 explain why a state agency sells and leases land to fund classrooms. When the land board votes on a lease or an exchange, the constitution requires the board to seek the maximum long term financial return for the institution that the land was granted to support. The Idaho Constitution and the Admission Act are public documents, and both are linked in the sources below. A resident who wants to understand an endowment decision can read the grant, the constitutional duty and the board's minutes side by side.

Checking a claim about the Founders and slavery

A speaker says the Northwest Ordinance abolished slavery, or says it proves the Founders were united against it. The Journal shows more. Jefferson's 1784 clause lost on a roll call when New Jersey had too few delegates present to vote and North Carolina divided. King's 1785 motion went to a committee on a roll call of eight states, and Congress then let the report sit. The 1787 clause passed with eight states present, four of them Southern, and it carried a fugitive proviso. The record supports a precise statement: the first federal ban on slavery in a territory was adopted by a Congress that also bound the territory to return fugitives, and the ban was added in the last two days before passage.

Where to find the records

The Journals are free in full text at the Internet Archive, in thirty-four volumes. The National Archives holds the printed Ordinance signed by Charles Thomson and a transcript. The Yale Avalon Project hosts the text. The Statutes at Large for 1789 and 1862 are free from the Government Publishing Office. The Idaho Legislature posts the Idaho Constitution. The sources list links each of these.

Related Lessons

Earlier in this series: Lesson 1, Drafting and Ratifying the Articles, which tells how the land claims delayed ratification until Maryland signed in 1781, and Lesson 2, The Thirteen Articles, which reads Article IX. Next: Lesson 5, The Crisis Years, which follows the debt, the trade fights and Shays' Rebellion, and Lesson 6, From Annapolis to Philadelphia. Forward in the course: Module 1, From the Charters to Philadelphia; Module 14, Article IV: The States and the Union (the Territories Clause and the admission of new states, the constitutional descendants of these ordinances); Module 6, Amending the Constitution; and Module 27, The Thirteenth Amendment, which carries forward the words of Article 6.

Sources & Further Reading

Primary Sources

• Journals of the Continental Congress, vol. 28 (January to June 1785): the Land Ordinance of May 20, 1785
• Journals of the Continental Congress, vol. 32 (January to July 1787): the Northwest Ordinance, July 11 to 13, 1787
• Journals of the Continental Congress, vol. 33 (July to October 1787): the Ohio Company and the South Carolina cession
• Journals of the Continental Congress, vol. 26 (January to May 1784): the Virginia deed and the Ordinance of 1784
• Journals of the Continental Congress, vol. 18 (September to December 1780): the Oct. 10, 1780 resolution
• Journals of the Continental Congress, vol. 25 (1783): the proclamation of Sept. 22, 1783
• Journals of the Continental Congress, vol. 23 (1782): the New York cession accepted Oct. 29, 1782
• Journals of the Continental Congress, vol. 31 (August to December 1786): the Connecticut cession and the Sept. 1786 plan
• Avalon Project, Northwest Ordinance (1787)
• National Archives, Milestone Documents: Northwest Ordinance (1787)
• Avalon Project, Treaty of Greenville (1795)
• Statutes at Large, vol. 1, p. 50 (Act of Aug. 7, 1789)
• Statutes at Large, vol. 12, p. 432 (Act of June 19, 1862)
• Statutes at Large, vol. 12, p. 808 (Idaho Organic Act, Mar. 3, 1863)
• Statutes at Large, vol. 26, p. 215 (Idaho Admission Act, July 3, 1890)
• Idaho Constitution, art. IX, section 3
• Idaho Constitution, art. IX, section 8
• Idaho Constitution, art. I, section 6
• Escanaba and Lake Michigan Transportation Co. v. City of Chicago, 107 U.S. 678 (1883), Cornell LII

Secondary Sources and Further Reading

• Life, Journals and Correspondence of Rev. Manasseh Cutler, vol. 1 (1888), which prints Cutler's 1787 diary and Nathan Dane's letter of July 16, 1787 (a family publication; read as a source on what Cutler and Dane wrote, not as neutral history)
• Bureau of Land Management, A Point That Put Idaho on the Map (May 2026)
• Wikipedia, Ohio Company of Associates (used for the 1786 founding, the Oct. 27, 1787 contract and the Marietta settlement; verify against Hulbert's Records of the Ohio Company)
• Wikipedia, Treaty of Fort McIntosh (used for the date and signers; verify against Kappler's Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties)
• Wikipedia, Northwest Indian War (used for the dates of Harmar's campaign, St. Clair's defeat and Fallen Timbers; verify against military histories)
• Wikipedia, Public Land Survey System

Footnotes

1. Articles of Confederation (1781), art. IX, paragraphs on Indian affairs and on disputes between states, and the closing sentence "no State shall be deprived of territory for the benefit of the United States," Avalon Project, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/artconf.asp. Text also at the National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/articles-of-confederation.
2. Resolution of Sept. 6, 1780 recommending cessions of western claims, Journals of the Continental Congress, ed. Worthington C. Ford and others (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904 to 1937), vol. 17, pp. 806 to 808 (Sept. 6, 1780), https://archive.org/details/journalsofcontin17unit.
3. Resolution on the disposition of ceded lands, Journals of the Continental Congress, ed. Worthington C. Ford and others (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904 to 1937), vol. 18, pp. 915 to 916 (Oct. 10, 1780), https://archive.org/details/journalsofcontin18unit. The scan prints the resolution after the heading for Oct. 9; it is dated Oct. 10, 1780 in standard references and in Virginia's recital of it. The resolution provided that the lands be "granted and disposed of for the common benefit of all the United States," formed into distinct republican states with "the same rights of sovereignty, freedom and independence, as the other states," each "not less than one hundred nor more than one hundred and fifty miles square," that the states be reimbursed for expenses "in subduing any of the British posts," and that Indian land purchases by private persons without state approval would not make a valid title.
4. New York cession, Journals of the Continental Congress, ed. Worthington C. Ford and others (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904 to 1937), vol. 23, pp. 693 to 695 (Oct. 29, 1782), https://archive.org/details/journalsofcontin23unit. Congress resolved to "accept all the right, title, interest, jurisdiction, and claim of the State of New York, as ceded by and contained in the instrument of writing executed for that purpose by the agents of New York, dated the first March, 1781," on a roll call called by Daniel Carroll of Maryland. The roll call in the scan is not reliably legible.
5. Virginia's deed of cession, with the Virginia act of Oct. 20, 1783 and the recitals of the acts of Jan. 2, 1781 and of Congress of Sept. 13, 1783, Journals of the Continental Congress, ed. Worthington C. Ford and others (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904 to 1937), vol. 26, pp. 112 to 117 (Mar. 1, 1784), https://archive.org/details/journalsofcontin26unit. The deed was drafted by Thomas Jefferson. The Virginia act's words "in full confidence" and "earnestly press upon the other states" are quoted; its conditions on the size of states, reimbursement, the French and Canadian inhabitants, the 150,000 acres for George Rogers Clark's regiment, the bounty land between the Scioto and Little Miami, and the common fund appear on pp. 114 to 115.
6. Massachusetts deed of cession executed by Samuel Holten and Rufus King and accepted by Congress, Journals of the Continental Congress, ed. Worthington C. Ford and others (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904 to 1937), vol. 28, pp. 280 to 283 (Apr. 19, 1785), https://archive.org/details/journals-of-the-continental-congress-1774-1789-vol-28-jan-11-jun-30-1785. The deed recites the Massachusetts act of Nov. 13, 1784. The Journal's editors note a Massachusetts act of Mar. 17, 1785, in the Papers of the Continental Congress, authorizing the cession.
7. Connecticut deed of cession executed by William Samuel Johnson and Jonathan Sturges, dated Sept. 13, 1786, and accepted by Congress in the entry for Sept. 14, 1786, Journals of the Continental Congress, ed. Worthington C. Ford and others (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904 to 1937), vol. 31, pp. 652 to 655 (Sept. 14, 1786), https://archive.org/details/journals-of-the-continental-congress-1774-1789-vol-31-aug-1-dec-31-1786. The Journal prints the Connecticut act of the second Thursday of May 1786 and the deed. The act ceded Connecticut's claim west of a line "one hundred and twenty miles west of the western boundary line of the commonwealth of Pennsylvania." That Connecticut kept land east of that line, called the Western Reserve, is from the geography of the act and standard references; the Journal does not use the term.
8. South Carolina deed of cession executed by John Kean and Daniel Huger, reciting the act of Mar. 8, 1787, Journals of the Continental Congress, ed. Worthington C. Ford and others (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904 to 1937), vol. 33, pp. 475 to 477 (Aug. 9, 1787), https://archive.org/details/journalsofcontin33unit. This lesson did not read the deed's description of the strip beyond its recital of the Sept. 6, 1780 recommendation.
9. Report of a committee of Rufus King, William Samuel Johnson, William Grayson, William Ellery and James McHenry on North Carolina's act of June 2, 1784, its repeal on Nov. 20, 1784, and Charles Pinckney's motion to postpone, Journals of the Continental Congress, ed. Worthington C. Ford and others (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904 to 1937), vol. 28, pp. 381 to 383 (May 20, 1785), https://archive.org/details/journals-of-the-continental-congress-1774-1789-vol-28-jan-11-jun-30-1785. The scan of the roll call is not reliably legible. The date of North Carolina's later deed to the United States (after the Constitution took effect) was not checked in this session.
10. Proviso of John Beatty, Howell's resolution "the United States in Congress assembled, are ready to receive this deed," and the signing by the Virginia delegates, Journals of the Continental Congress, ed. Worthington C. Ford and others (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904 to 1937), vol. 26, pp. 116 to 117 (Mar. 1, 1784), https://archive.org/details/journalsofcontin26unit. The Journal prints "So it passed in the negative" after the first roll call and "So it was resolved in the affirmative" after the second. The roll calls in the scan are scrambled, so the lesson reports the outcomes and not the tallies.
11. Ordinance for ascertaining the mode of disposing of Lands in the Western Territory, Journals of the Continental Congress, ed. Worthington C. Ford and others (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904 to 1937), vol. 28, pp. 375 to 381 (May 20, 1785), https://archive.org/details/journals-of-the-continental-congress-1774-1789-vol-28-jan-11-jun-30-1785. The text in this lesson quotes the surveying, sale, reservation and saving clauses; the hand-copied deed forms at pp. 378 to 379 are not quoted. The editors note that the ordinance went through several printed forms before passage.
12. Proclamation of Sept. 22, 1783 prohibiting settlement and purchase of lands inhabited or claimed by Indians, Journals of the Continental Congress, ed. Worthington C. Ford and others (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904 to 1937), vol. 25, pp. 602 to 603 (Sept. 22, 1783), https://archive.org/details/journalsofcontin25unit. The Journal editors note the draft is in the writing of James McHenry and was reported by a grand committee.
13. Wikipedia, Treaty of Fort McIntosh, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Fort_McIntosh. Used for the date (Jan. 21, 1785), the nations named and the statement that most Ohio nations did not subscribe. The Fort Stanwix treaty of Oct. 22, 1784 is mentioned in the Journals (vol. 27, p. 664 index entry) and was not read in full.
14. An Ordinance for the government of the territory of the United States North West of the river Ohio, passed July 13, 1787, with the roll call, Journals of the Continental Congress, ed. Worthington C. Ford and others (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904 to 1937), vol. 32, pp. 334 to 343 (July 13, 1787), https://archive.org/details/journals-of-the-continental-congress-1774-1789-vol-32-jan-17-jul-20-1787. The editors note that the passed text is also entered in the Register of Ordinances and attested by William Grayson and Charles Thomson. The roll call (Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia) shows every vote aye except Abraham Yates of New York. The clause repealing the 1784 resolutions of April 23 is the last substantive paragraph.
15. Wikipedia, Northwest Indian War, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Indian_War. Used for the dates of Harmar's campaign (autumn 1790), St. Clair's defeat (Nov. 4, 1791) and Fallen Timbers (Aug. 20, 1794). Secondary source; verify against military histories before quoting casualty figures.
16. Treaty of Greenville, Aug. 3, 1795, Avalon Project, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/greenvil.asp. The treaty's articles list the lands ceded and reserved.
17. Report of the committee of Thomas Jefferson, Jeremiah Townley Chase and David Howell on a plan for the temporary government of the western territory, Journals of the Continental Congress, ed. Worthington C. Ford and others (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904 to 1937), vol. 26, pp. 118 to 120 (Mar. 1, 1784), https://archive.org/details/journalsofcontin26unit. The report, in Jefferson's writing, is in the Papers of the Continental Congress, No. 30, folios 49 to 51. The ten state names and the clause that "after the year 1800 of the Christian era, there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude" are in the report as printed on pp. 118 to 120.
18. Ordinance of Apr. 23, 1784, as agreed by Congress, Journals of the Continental Congress, ed. Worthington C. Ford and others (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904 to 1937), vol. 26, pp. 273 to 279 (Apr. 23, 1784), https://archive.org/details/journalsofcontin26unit. The Journal's editors note that portions in brackets were added in debate and that a printed copy with the alterations is in the Papers of the Continental Congress, No. 30, folios 53 and 57 1/2. The roll call in the scan shows South Carolina's two delegates voting no; this lesson did not confirm the other votes from the printed volume.
19. Motion of Richard Dobbs Spaight, seconded by Jacob Read, to strike the slavery paragraph, and the roll call, Journals of the Continental Congress, ed. Worthington C. Ford and others (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904 to 1937), vol. 26, pp. 247 to 248 (Apr. 19, 1784), https://archive.org/details/journalsofcontin26unit. The Journal reads: "And on the question, shall the words moved to be struck out stand the yeas and nays being required by Mr. [David] Howell ... So the question was lost, and the words were struck out." This lesson reads the tally (six states aye, three no, North Carolina divided, New Jersey without a vote) from the scanned roll call and from standard accounts; the scan's columns are scrambled. Check the printed volume before quoting a tally.
20. Rufus King's motion of Mar. 16, 1785 and the vote to commit it, Journals of the Continental Congress, ed. Worthington C. Ford and others (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904 to 1937), vol. 28, pp. 164 to 165 (Mar. 16, 1785), https://archive.org/details/journals-of-the-continental-congress-1774-1789-vol-28-jan-11-jun-30-1785. King's motion, in his writing, is in the Papers of the Continental Congress, No. 31, folio 327. The roll call in the scan is partly legible: it shows aye votes from New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Maryland, and the Journal states "So it was resolved in the affirmative."
21. Report of King, Howell and Ellery, with the fugitive proviso, and Thomson's endorsement on the printed copy, Journals of the Continental Congress, ed. Worthington C. Ford and others (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904 to 1937), vol. 28, p. 239 (Apr. 6, 1785 (note)), https://archive.org/details/journals-of-the-continental-congress-1774-1789-vol-28-jan-11-jun-30-1785. The report is in the Papers of the Continental Congress, No. 31, folio 329.
22. An act to provide for the admission of the State of Idaho into the Union, approved July 3, 1890, 26 Stat. 215, ch. 656, sec. 1 (admission "on an equal footing with the original States in all respects whatever") and sec. 4 (sections 16 and 36 granted "for the support of common schools"), https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-26/pdf/STATUTE-26-Pg215.pdf
23. Wikipedia, Gnadenhutten massacre, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnadenhutten_massacre. Used for the date (March 8, 1782) and the perpetrators (Pennsylvania militia). Secondary source.
24. Letter of Manasseh Cutler and Winthrop Sargent to the Board of Treasury, July 26, 1787, and Congress's order of July 27, 1787 (including the reservation of ten thousand acres for the Moravian Brethren), Journals of the Continental Congress, ed. Worthington C. Ford and others (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904 to 1937), vol. 33, pp. 427 to 430 (July 27, 1787), https://archive.org/details/journalsofcontin33unit.
25. Report of the Board of Treasury (Samuel Osgood and Walter Livingston), dated April 4, 1787, read April 5 and passed April 21, 1787, Journals of the Continental Congress, ed. Worthington C. Ford and others (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904 to 1937), vol. 32, pp. 155 to 157 (Apr. 5, 1787), https://archive.org/details/journals-of-the-continental-congress-1774-1789-vol-32-jan-17-jul-20-1787.
26. Bureau of Land Management, "A Point That Put Idaho on the Map: Celebrating the Boise Meridian Initial Point" (May 5, 2026), https://www.blm.gov/blog/2026-05-05/point-put-idaho-map-celebrating-boise-meridian-initial-point. The page says a survey crew under Lafayette Cartee in 1867 found the butte about 20 miles south of Boise City and that the Public Land Survey System "expanded across nearly 54 million acres of Idaho."
27. Petition of officers of the army for lands northwest of the Ohio, dated June 16, 1783, transmitted by General Washington June 17, 1783, noted in Journals of the Continental Congress, ed. Worthington C. Ford and others (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904 to 1937), vol. 24, p. 421 (editors' note) (July 1, 1783), https://archive.org/details/journalsofcontin24unit.
28. Wikipedia, Ohio Company of Associates, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_Company_of_Associates. Used for the founding at the Bunch of Grapes tavern on or about March 1 to 3, 1786, the contract of Oct. 27, 1787 for 1,500,000 acres for $1 million in securities, the cash value of about twelve cents on the dollar, the Scioto Company option and its lapse, the First Purchase of about 750,000 acres paid for, and the settlement at Marietta in 1788. These are secondary statements; the primary contract (printed in Archer Butler Hulbert, Records of the Ohio Company) was not opened in this session.
29. Manasseh Cutler, diary entries of July 5 to 11, 1787, in Life, Journals and Correspondence, vol. 1, pp. 229 to 239, https://archive.org/details/lifejournalscorr01cutl. The July 6 entry records his introduction by Colonel Carrington, his delivery of the Ohio Company petition, the appointment of a committee, and dinner with Mr. Dane; the July 7 entry records his consultation with Thomas Hutchins.
30. Appointment of the committee of Carrington, Dane, Lee, Kean and Smith (July 9, 1787), the first reading of the report (July 11), and the committee text, Journals of the Continental Congress, ed. Worthington C. Ford and others (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904 to 1937), vol. 32, pp. 310 to 320 (July 9 to 11, 1787), https://archive.org/details/journals-of-the-continental-congress-1774-1789-vol-32-jan-17-jul-20-1787. The Committee Book note on p. 310 names the committee. The text of the July 11 report, five articles without Article 6, is at pp. 313 to 320.
31. Resolution authorizing the Board of Treasury to contract for not less than one million acres, Journals of the Continental Congress, ed. Worthington C. Ford and others (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904 to 1937), vol. 33, pp. 701 to 702 (Oct. 23, 1787), https://archive.org/details/journalsofcontin33unit. The resolution of Oct. 22, 1787 on a tract east of the Seventh Range is at p. 696. The Journal's note on the Oct. 23 motion says it was made by John Kean, seconded by Henry Lee.
32. Nathan Dane to Rufus King, July 16, 1787, as printed in Life, Journals and Correspondence of Rev. Manasseh Cutler, ed. William Parker Cutler and Julia Perkins Cutler (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke, 1888), vol. 1, p. 350, https://archive.org/details/lifejournalscorr01cutl. The editors say they copied the letter from the New York Tribune. This lesson did not locate the manuscript. The same volume, pp. 346 to 351, argues that Cutler secured the anti-slavery clause; this lesson reports that claim as the editors' argument and does not endorse it. Jefferson's presence in France in July 1787 is stated on p. 347 of the same chapter and is a point of general history.
33. Report of the committee of William Samuel Johnson, Charles Pinckney, Melancton Smith, Nathan Dane and William Henry on a plan of temporary government, reported Sept. 19, 1786, Journals of the Continental Congress, ed. Worthington C. Ford and others (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904 to 1937), vol. 31, pp. 669 to 674 (Sept. 19, 1786), https://archive.org/details/journals-of-the-continental-congress-1774-1789-vol-31-aug-1-dec-31-1786. The editors note the committee was named Sept. 18 and that the report was left as unfinished business on Sept. 21.
34. Entry noting that the committee report on temporary government was under consideration on Apr. 26, 1787 and was read a second time May 9, 1787, Journals of the Continental Congress, ed. Worthington C. Ford and others (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904 to 1937), vol. 32, pp. 242 to 243 (Apr. 26, 1787), https://archive.org/details/journals-of-the-continental-congress-1774-1789-vol-32-jan-17-jul-20-1787.
35. Prefatory note, Journals of the Continental Congress, ed. Worthington C. Ford and others (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904 to 1937), vol. 32, p. 6 (prefatory note) (1787), https://archive.org/details/journals-of-the-continental-congress-1774-1789-vol-32-jan-17-jul-20-1787. The note says Congress "continued its labors under difficulties due to the lack of attendance of sufficient States," that a quorum of seven states was first present on January 17, 1787, and that from that date until October 27, the last day on which a quorum was present, there were 112 days on which Congress assembled and transacted business. The page number of the note was not read from the scan.
36. National Archives, Milestone Documents, Northwest Ordinance (1787), https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/northwest-ordinance. The page says the ordinance "was adopted on July 13, 1787, by the Confederation Congress, the one-house legislature operating under the Articles of Confederation," lists the three principal provisions and says the authors were "probably Nathan Dane and Rufus King." Avalon Project text of the ordinance: https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/nworder.asp.
37. An Act to provide for the Government of the Territory North-west of the river Ohio, approved Aug. 7, 1789, 1 Stat. 50 to 53, ch. 8, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-1/pdf/STATUTE-1-Pg50.pdf. The page opened for this lesson is the first page of the statute at p. 50 and carries the preamble quoted.
38. An Act to secure Freedom to all Persons within the Territories of the United States, approved June 19, 1862, 12 Stat. 432, ch. 111, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-12/pdf/STATUTE-12-Pg432.pdf
39. Escanaba and Lake Michigan Transportation Co. v. City of Chicago, 107 U.S. 678 (1883) (Field, J.), Cornell LII, https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/107/678. The quoted passages are from the discussion of the Ordinance of 1787 and the equal footing of the states. The opinion also cites Pollard's Lessee v. Hagan, 3 How. 212, Permoli v. First Municipality, 3 How. 589, and Strader v. Graham, 10 How. 82, which this lesson did not read.
40. Idaho Constitution, art. IX, sec. 3 (public school permanent endowment fund) and sec. 8 (location and disposition of public lands), https://legislature.idaho.gov/statutesrules/idconst/ArtIX/Sect3/ and https://legislature.idaho.gov/statutesrules/idconst/ArtIX/Sect8/
41. An Act to provide a temporary Government for the Territory of Idaho, approved Mar. 3, 1863, 12 Stat. 808, ch. 117, https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/STATUTE-12/pdf/STATUTE-12-Pg808.pdf. The page opened for this lesson is the first page of the act. This lesson did not read the rest of the act, and the statement that the 1862 statute reached Idaho by its own terms rests on that statute's words "any of the Territories of the United States now existing, or which may at any time hereafter be formed."