Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance

By Peter S. Onuf

This new edition of Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance, originally published in 1987, is an authoritative account of the origins and early history of American policy for territorial government, land distribution, and the admission of new states in the Old Northwest. In a new preface, Peter S. Onuf reviews important new work on the progress of colonization and territorial expansion in the rising American empire.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Release date: Feb 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9780268105488

Peter S. Onuf

Peter S. Onuf is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History, emeritus, at the University of Virginia. He is the author and co-author of fourteen books, including, with Annette Gordon-Reed, "Most Blessed of the Patriarchs": Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination.

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Statehood and Union

STATEHOOD

AND

U☆N☆I☆O☆N

A HISTORY OF THE NORTHWEST ORDINANCE

Peter S. Onuf

UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS

Notre Dame, Indiana

Copyright © 1987, 2018 by Peter S. Onuf

First Midland Book Edition 1992

Published in 2019

by the University of Notre Dame Press

Notre Dame, Indiana 46556

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Onuf, Peter S., author.

Title: Statehood and Union : A History of the Northwest Ordinance / Peter S. Onuf.

Description: Notre Dame, Indiana : Univerity of Notre Dame Press, 2019. | First Midland Book Edition 1992. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018059040| ISBN 9780268105457 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 0268105456 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780268105464 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 0268105464 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780268105471 (pdf) | ISBN 9780268105488 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: United States. Ordinance of 1787. | Northwest, Old—History—1775–1865.

Classification: LCC E309 .O58 2019 | DDC 977/.02—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018059040

∞ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48–1992

(Permanence of Paper).

This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at [e-mail]

Dedicated to

Kristin Kirkman Onuf

C☆O☆N☆T☆E☆N☆T☆S

MAPS

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PREFACE TO THE 2019 EDITION

INTRODUCTION

1. Liberty, Development, and Union

Visions of the West in the 1780s

2. Squatters, Speculators, and Settlers

The Land Ordinance of 1785

3. New States in the Expanding Union

The Territorial Government Ordinances

4. From Territory to State

5. Boundary Controversies

6. Slavery and Freedom

7. From Constitution to Higher Law

NOTES

INDEX

M☆A☆P☆S

Map 1: A Map of the Federal Territory (1788)

Map 2: A Map of the United States of N. America (1787)

Map 3: Detail from a Map of the United States (1795)

Map 4: Detail from a Map of the State of Ohio (1835)

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Much of the research for this book was done at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, where I was a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow in 1984–85. With its unparalleled collections and excellent staff, the AAS is a wonderful place to work. I am grateful to Director Marcus McCorison and staff members Keith Arbour, Nancy Burkett, John Hench, Dennis Laurie, and Joyce Tracy for making my stay at the society so pleasant and productive. Other scholars in residence, most notably Michael Bellesiles, James Henretta, Linck Johnson, and Steve Nissenbaum, provided good criticism and stimulating fellowship.

Earlier versions of several chapters were presented at scholarly conferences. The hospitality and support of the Claremont Institute, the Center for the Study of Federalism, the Liberty Fund, Ohio Historical Center, and Johns Hopkins University are gratefully acknowledged. Terry Barnhart made me feel particularly welcome in Columbus, as did my mentor Jack P. Greene in Baltimore. Portions of the book have been previously published: substantial sections of chapters 1 and 2 appeared in the William and Mary Quarterly, 43 (April 1986); scattered sections of chapters 4, 6, and 7 are taken from Ohio History, 94 (Winter-Spring 1985).

I am indebted to numerous friends and colleagues for criticism and support. Over the years George Billias has regularly provided good advice and a sympathetic ear. Joyce Appleby, Terry Barnhart, Robert Berkhofer, Jr., Drew Cayton, Paul Finkelman, Jack Greene, Drew McCoy, and Dick Ryerson read portions of the manuscript, offering useful criticism and encouragement. Timo Gilmore pushed me to be more assertive in developing my argument. Several chapters have been markedly improved by Robert R. Dykstra’s superb editing and many insightful suggestions. Ruth Smith’s helpful reading of the entire manuscript spurred me through revisions. As has been so often the case, many of my ideas were developed through conversation and collaboration with Cathy Matson. Herb Sloan, in typically generous fashion, gave the completed manuscript a close, critical, and extremely useful reading.

My biggest intellectual debt is to Nicholas Onuf, a brilliant man and a loving brother. My daughters Rachel and Alexandra are a constant joy to me. Kristin, to whom this book is dedicated, is my source of strength.

PREFACE TO THE 2019 EDITION

The success of the American Revolution depended on the creation and expansion of a more perfect union of free republican states. In the summer of 1787, as delegates of twelve of the original thirteen states (Rhode Island was not represented) gathered in Philadelphia to draft a new federal Constitution, the Congress of the old Confederation, meeting in New York City, enacted an ambitious plan for the creation of three to five new states in the national domain north and west of the Ohio River. That the Philadelphia framers were able to negotiate a peace pact for their quarrelsome, virtually disunited states was, contemporaries agreed, nothing less than a miracle. But it was a notoriously ineffectual Confederation Congress that took the boldest leap into futurity, envisioning the spread of white settlement and formation of new governments in a contested borderland far beyond its effective control. Adopted on July 13, 1787, the Ordinance for the Government of the territory of the United States North West of the river Ohio—or Northwest Ordinance—was the blueprint for a great American empire of continental dimensions. If the framers had failed and the existing union had collapsed, the Ordinance would have been a dead letter. Yet if the establishment of a new national government gave life to the Ordinance, the Ordinance’s vision of national greatness animated the framers’ new order for the ages.

As they tottered at the abyss of anarchy and disunion, Americans dreamed of empire. Statehood and Union is a book about the new and improved vision of empire that American statesmen sought to implement in the early republic’s formative years. It was the republican alternative to the empire that had failed to fulfill the aspirations of Anglo-American patriots in the years leading up to independence. In a passage that the Continental Congress cut from his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson lamented the demise of Anglo-American union: We might have been a free & a great people together.¹ King George III failed to sustain that union, thus squandering the boundless prospects afforded by victory over the French in the Seven Years’ War. Westward the course of empire, Bishop George Berkeley exulted in 1726.² But it was not to be. Instead of unleashing a westward surge, penny-pinching bureaucrats set a western limit to settlement in the Proclamation of October 7, 1763. The imperial government seemed determined to suppress the colonies’ population and prosperity and transform them into subject provinces. When Parliament in one of its so-called Intolerable Acts of 1774 extended the jurisdiction of the formerly French province of Quebec to include the trans-Ohio region—so abrogating the charter claims of Virginia and other British colonies—the evil intentions of a corrupt ministry could no longer be doubted. Anglo-American patriots wanted to turn the clock back to the Peace of Paris in 1763, when they could still see themselves as agents and beneficiaries of imperial expansion. Without such an empire, the British connection—and allegiance to George III—seemed increasingly problematic, even pointless. Were subjects of the Crown free men or slaves?³

Revolutionary Americans were imperialists who made war against the British imperial government and finally, with great reluctance, declared independence. Large numbers of loyalists balked at that fateful choice, seeking refuge in other parts of the empire, retreating into neutrality (when and where that was possible), or joining the counterrevolution against their former countrymen. Of course, the logic of rebellion was articulated, or rationalized, in terms of fundamental principles: self-identified Americans mobilized in defense of their liberties and rights.⁴ Yet even though these claims were all framed in universal terms, they derived from British sources, evoking colonists’ experience under their common law jurisdictions, customary colony constitutions, and what they imagined to be an imperial constitution.⁵ What they all assumed was empire, a great, expansive domain within which property rights—the foundation of all other rights—were secure, even sacred. Breaking with the British Empire thus precipitated a great crisis. As the greatest power in the modern world launched a war of conquest and occupation against its erstwhile subjects, nothing could be secure. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness were promises Revolutionaries made to themselves and to future generations, an unprecedented experiment in the enlightened science of republican politics.

The most urgent question was whether Americans could recover and reconstitute the empire they had lost. If the British Empire had failed, how could the United States succeed? Both terms, United and States, raised fundamental and enduring problems. Without the Crown, the former colonies had no recognized constitution or connection, only the ad hoc networks of communication, persuasion, and coercion that they had improvised in the name of the common cause.⁶ Without the sovereign powers of recognized, civilized states in the western state system, they were only states in a minimal sense: they might launch a rebellion, but they could not legitimately make war. Americans could only establish an effective continental government with a credible claim to sovereignty by recurring to the supposedly original source of authority in the people and then reconstructing the federal constitution of the old empire from the bottom up. When the drafters of the Northwest Ordinance provided for the creation of new states, they could not assume that statehood had a fixed meaning: they could only stipulate that new states would be equal (another ambiguous term) to the old, original states. Some clarification on this perennially confusing question would soon come from Philadelphia, as the framers recalibrated the deteriorating relationship of the federal whole to its constituent parts. And the meaning of union—the other term in my title—would also come into clearer if by no means definitive focus. The meanings of these two terms were relational and therefore—as we will see—subject to ongoing negotiation and redefinition.

Lawyers and political theorists customarily focus on the legitimate powers exercised by different levels of government in the federal system and warranted by authoritative texts. The myth that the federal Constitution is the source of (more or less) fixed original meanings may seem to justify this hyper-textualism.⁷ But there is no community of commentators to breathe continuing life into the text of the Northwest Ordinance. As its provisions were debated, amended, superseded, or ignored, the Ordinance’s importance as a text diminished accordingly; even the Articles of Compact that supposedly set forth binding promises to territorial citizens about their political future offered little guidance to future interpreters (except when they were incorporated in new state constitutions). But for contemporaries in this era of popular constitutionalism, the intentions of constitution-writers did not yet carry a sanctified aura, and there was no clear distinction between partisan political negotiation and judicial interpretation.⁸ Nor, for settlers in the Old Northwest, did the clause of the Constitution empowering the new government to administer federal territory and provide for new states (Article IV, Section III) clarify the relationship between new states and old states. How their settlements would be organized and incorporated into the union remained to be seen.

Like the Declaration of Independence, the Northwest Ordinance made promises about the future, pledging the good faith of the founding generation for their ultimate redemption. For enterprising, liberty-loving, land-hungry settlers those promises focused primarily on secure land titles and property rights; the boon of republican self-government would be gained in the fullness of time. The Declaration and the Ordinance were extraconstitutional documents: each articulated fundamental values, thus rising to the level of higher law, but neither constituted a political community on an enduring foundation. Both therefore depended on the ongoing commitment of successive generations. The Spirit of ‘76 was thus expressed in celebrations of the 1787 Ordinance, the document that enabled Northwestern patriots to declare their independence of a tyrannical territorial regime and claim an equal place in the American union.⁹

Yet if the two documents seemed to merge when statehood was achieved, they evoked fundamentally different visions of America’s future. The Declaration spoke in the universal language of natural rights to and for all peoples, everywhere; for American Revolutionaries, it vindicated the corporate rights and collective identities of existing political communities, or states. The Ordinance focused on a particular region and the peoples that would emerge there under Congress’s tutelary authority and within boundaries it specified. In effect, the federal government assumed the Crown’s creative prerogative to make states by granting land. The critical difference between the old monarchical and new republican regime was that these states would not be reduced to the degraded level of subject provinces—the dreadful outcome that had precipitated the war for independence—but would instead become independent through incorporation in the American union. In short, the Northwest Ordinance was a blueprint for the kind of empire that Anglo-American patriots envisioned, under the aegis of a true patriot king, in the years before independence.¹⁰

If the Ordinance’s compact articles made promises to settlers, the main body of the document, operating in tandem with the Ordinance for ascertaining the mode of disposing of Lands in the Western Territory adopted by the Confederation Congress of May 20, 1785, articulated the specific, immediately effective policies for implementing the Confederation’s colonial policy. In seeking to manage the ongoing colonization of the northwestern frontier, Congress resumed the progress of empire-making that war with France and the ministry’s postwar reforms had interrupted.¹¹ Congressmen enjoyed crucial advantages over their parliamentary predecessors. When, beginning in 1763, the empire sought to centralize western policy, it had to contend with powerful, well-connected interests in the respective provinces that historically controlled the colonization process. But with the cession of the states’ western land claims (including, most importantly, Virginia’s in 1784), Congress could exercise direct authority over the Northwest Territory. In theory, at least, the new national domain cleared away the confusion of competing land speculation schemes, illegal settlement, and chronic conflict with Indians that characterized the imperial west and played such a crucial role in bringing on the Revolution.¹²

The challenge for congressional policy makers was to generate a revenue stream from land sales that would uphold the creditworthiness of an impoverished Confederation government. This meant making federal lands attractive to enterprising settlers by guaranteeing collective security, good titles, and access to remunerative markets. None of this was possible without the capacity to survey and sell land, establish courts, deploy troops, and develop infrastructure. The Confederation would have to become a state before it could implement an enlightened colonization policy culminating in the creation of new states; it would have to invest resources it did not have before it assumed a commanding position in a highly competitive land market. The short-term problem, as Michael A. Blaakman brilliantly shows, was that pent-up demand for land could not be unleashed and exploited at a time when speculators monopolized scarce capital and cash-strapped state governments sought a quick fiscal fix by selling their own public lands to them at bargain prices.¹³

Without the ratification of the federal Constitution and what Max Edling calls a revolution in favor of government the Northwest Ordinance could not have functioned as a blueprint for a new and improved version of the old empire.¹⁴ It instead would have been an obituary of sorts, eloquently testifying to the ultimate failure of the American Revolutionaries’ original intentions. Rather than solving its desperate financial problems, Congress’s western policy simply would have underscored the Confederation government’s imbecility and impotence. Without an energetic federal government capable of investing in the union’s expansion, George Washington lamented, the disunited states would be nothing better than wretched fragments of Empire.¹⁵ Washington and his fellow Revolutionaries had mobilized to save the British Empire from ministerial misgovernment, not to destroy it. The father of his country had no doubt that the United States was a rising empire.¹⁶ But to secure its appropriate position among the powers of the earth and guarantee its continuing ascent, the new nation had to embrace its imperial identity.¹⁷

The United States had to become a state in order to create new states on its frontiers and so guarantee its imperial future. Recent scholarship has increasingly focused on the problem of union in the founding era and over the course of the early republic’s history until the union finally collapsed in the Civil War.¹⁸ The most compelling challenge for the overextended republic was to control powerful centrifugal, counterrevolutionary tendencies in the new nation’s contested borderlands: the loyalty of American settlers, squatters, and speculators could not be taken for granted as Indian nations mobilized in defense of their homelands and imperial rivals exploited what theorists of international relations called the resulting state of nature. If American independence finally was won on the battlefield, not in the hearts and minds of (often outnumbered) patriots, empire depended on vindicating American sovereignty in the West in a state of war that persisted through the War of 1812 and beyond.¹⁹ To become one of the powers of the earth and fulfill its imperial aspirations, the new federal government had to develop the capacity of a fiscal-military state that could credibly claim to monopolize the legitimate exercise of coercive force.²⁰ A radically destabilized middle ground remained a zone of danger until dangerous imperial rivals could be eliminated, borderlands gave way to borders, and Indians were effectively removed from the geopolitical equation.²¹

What kind of state was Ohio when it was admitted to the union in 1802, or the other Northwest Ordinance states, Indiana (1816), Illinois (1818), Michigan (1835), and Wisconsin (1848)? Clearly, they were not equal in all ways to the original states, or to Vermont and Kentucky, new states formed out of old states that did not pass through a period of federal territorial administration. After statehood the Ordinance states could not make claim to federal public lands within their boundaries (though they formed alliances with other public land states to gain various concessions from Congress); nor, given the Ordinance compact article VI banning slavery, did these states have the right that Missouri successfully claimed to enter the union as a slave state. Had the Ordinance states been states in any meaningful sense before admission, the conditions annexed to admission would have been unacceptably onerous. Because they were not, Congress could instead enable territorial subjects with no control over their own boundaries—and therefore no fixed civic identities as peoples—to rise to the level of citizens in the old states, with all the limitations and liabilities that membership in the new, more perfect union entailed.

Independence and constitutional reform transformed the status of former British provinces and led to the creation of new states that were in some ways, but not all, similar to their predecessors. So too the poorly defined, customary, extraconstitutional, British imperial union was supplanted by a different sort of federal union among the newly united states. This union may not have been something new under the sun, as an exultant Jefferson claimed after he had ascended to power in his Revolution of 1800.²² Despite (and perhaps because of) all the energy they invested in writing things down and seeking to fix constitutional meanings, law-minded Americans found themselves badly divided over what sort of empire their union would be. The greatest difference, Jefferson and his followers insisted, was that the liberties of citizens and rights of states would constitute fundamental limitations on the government of the union. In practical political terms, however, the very existence of an American government over American provinces was indeed something new, an unprecedented concentration of power made legitimate by the votes of ratifying citizens. The United States was, as David Hendrickson convincingly argues, a peace pact designed to preempt war among the fragments of the old empire by disarming them: a fundamental limitation on state sovereignty.²³ The federal government also had the authority to mobilize—and pay for—the combined force of the nation as a whole. It was, proclaimed Jefferson (the supposed champion of limited government), the strongest government on earth.²⁴

The United States exercised sovereign authority over relations with foreign powers, indigenous peoples, and American settlements organized according to the provisions of the Northwest Ordinance. Settlers secured land titles and property rights through federal land offices and territorial courts but waited (not always impatiently) to enjoy the full benefits of self-government after they had achieved statehood and incorporation in the union.²⁵ In mythologizing retrospect, the process began to seem predestined, driven by the inexorable force of settlement itself. Northwesterners could imagine that the Ordinance’s farsighted authors had written the script for new state creation. In shedding the incubus of territorial tyranny, citizens who drafted new state constitutions replicated the American Revolutionary experience. Dazzled by their own genius for self-government, regional patriots could no longer see how the United States had made states and so made an empire. In celebrating themselves, they anticipated Frederick Jackson Turner’s great discovery that the Northwestern frontier was the crucible of American democracy.²⁶

As a blueprint for empire, the Northwest Ordinance countered the centrifugal tendencies that expansion unleashed by making territorial subjects into American citizens and enabling them to participate in the full benefits of further colonization. The frequently revised and ignored text loomed ever larger in the regional imaginary as it achieved the iconic status of a higher law. At the Buckeye Celebration in 1841, orator N. C. Read explained how the ordinance of 1787 threw over Ohio "the splendor of freedom, and consecrated her forever as the home of the free. Thus, with the principles of the Revolution mingled with her very soil by the ordinance of 87 . . . she came into the Union as a State."²⁷ For Read, the American union was Ohio writ large. But the imperial vision embraced by Northwesterners was simultaneously inclusive and sectionally distinctive. It was, after all, a blueprint for the development of a particular borderland region that was increasingly defined against the slave societies on the other side of the Ohio River. Article VI of the Ordinance made Ohio and the other new northwestern states more American, Northwesterners came to think, precisely because constitution-writers in their states had not been free to legalize slavery. In their dedication to free soil, free labor, and the integrity of an expanding union, Northwesterners saw themselves fulfilling the new nation’s imperial promise.²⁸ Animated by the principles and promises of the Northwest Ordinance, Northwesterners kept the sacred fire burning. Even as southern states seceded and the union verged on collapse, they celebrated the Ordinance as the living constitution of the region and nation, an empire of liberty.

Notes to the Preface

1. Thomas Jefferson’s Original Rough Draft of the Declaration of Independence, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition (hereafter PTJDE), ed. James P. McClure and J. Jefferson Looney (University of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2009–2018), available at the canonic URL: http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/TSJN-01-01-02-0176-0004.

2. Berkeley, On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America, available at http://www.bartleby.com/360/8/49.html.

3. On the development of British policy—and efforts by reformers to rationalize imperial administration—see Eliga Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); S. Max Edelson, The New Map of Empire: How Britain Imagined America before Independence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); Patrick Griffin, The Townshend Moment: The Making of Empire and Revolution in the Eighteenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017).

4. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967).

5. Jack P. Greene, The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

6. Robert G. Parkinson, The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2016).

7. Jonathan Gienapp, The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018).

8. Larry D. Kramer, The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

9. Peter S. Onuf, Democracy, Empire, and the 1816 Indiana Constitution, Indiana Magazine of History III (2015): 5–29.

10. On Bolingbroke’s Idea of a Patriot King (1738), see Isaac Kramnick, Bolingbroke and His Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), and Ralph Ketcham, Presidents Above Party: The First American Presidency, 1789–1829 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987). Jack Ericson Eblen anticipated the imperial turn in scholarship on the American territorial system in his The First and Second United States Empires: Governors and Territorial Government, 1784–1912 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1968). On the relationship between empire, dispossession of Indians, and democracy, see Adam Dahl, Empire of the People: Settler Colonialism and the Foundations of Modern Democratic Thought (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2018).

11. On the legal history of colonization, see Christopher L. Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); on settler constitutionalism, see Craig Yirush, Settlers, Liberty, and Empire: The Roots of Early American Political Theory, 1675–1775 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

12. Thomas Perkins Abernethy, Western Lands and the American Revolution (New York: D. Appleton-Century, 1937); Peter S. Onuf, The Origins of the Federal Republic: Jurisdictional Controversies in the United States, 1775–1787 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983).

13. Michael A. Blaakman, Speculation Nation: Land Mania in the Revolutionary American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming).

14. Max M. Edling, A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

15. George Washington to Henry Lee, Jr., Sept. 22, 1788, The Papers of George Washington Digital Edition (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2008–2018), available at the canonic URL: http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/GEWN-04-06-02-0469.

16. Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson and the Virginians: Democracy, Constitutions, and Empire (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2018), chap. 4.

17. On the geopolitical context of the American founding and imperial project, see Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth.

18. David C. Hendrickson, Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003), and Union, Nation, or Empire: The American Debate over International Relations, 1789–1941 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009); Elizabeth R. Varon, Disunion!: The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

19. Patrick Griffin, American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), and America’s Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).

20. Edling, Revolution in Favor of Government; Brian Balogh, A Government out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). See also the essays collected in Peter Thompson and Peter Onuf, eds., State and Citizen: British America and the Early United States (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013).

21. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Leonard Sadosky, Revolutionary Negotiations: Indians, Empires, and Diplomats in the Founding of America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009); Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels, and Indian Allies (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010); Bethel Saler, The Settlers’ Empire: Colonialism and State Formation in America’s Old Northwest (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); Lawrence B. A. Hatter, Citizens of Convenience: The Imperial Origins of American Nationhood on the U.S.-Canadian Border (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017).

22. Jefferson to Joseph Priestley, March 21, 1801, PTJDE, available at the canonic URL: http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/TSJN-01-33-02-0336.

23. Hendrickson, Peace Pact.

24. Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801, PTJDE, available at the canonic URL: http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/founders/TSJN-01-33-02-0116-0004.

25. Gregory Ablavsky, Federal Ground: Sovereignty, Property, and Law in the U.S. Territories, 1783–1802 (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

26. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History (1893), American Historical Association, available at https://www.historians.org/about-aha-and-membership/aha-history-and-archives/historical-archives/the-significance-of-the-frontier-in-american-history.

27. N. C. Read, The Anniversary Oration of the Buckeye Celebration (Cincinnati, 1841), cited and discussed in chapter 7 below.

28. Nicholas Onuf and Peter Onuf, Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American Civil War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006); Gary W. Gallagher, The Union War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

INTRODUCTION

On July 13, 1787, the Continental Congress, then meeting in New York, enacted An Ordinance for the Government of the territory of the United States North West of the river Ohio. The Northwest Ordinance is one of the most important documents of the American founding period. Through the Ordinance Congress established a colonial government on the Ohio frontier to protect its property interests, at the same time promising settlers they would recover all the rights of self-governing citizens when new states were created and admitted to the union. But the Ordinance is more than a blueprint for continental expansion. Drafted at a time of sectional division and constitutional crisis, it