The Northwest Ordinance
There are two main reasons why the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 is important. First, it created a mechanism
for the expansion of the United States of America through the addition of states that would be on equal footing
with the original thirteen states. According to the Northwest Ordinance, once settlers began moving into a
territory Congress could appoint a territorial government and territorial judges. The next step was when the
population of the territory reached 5,000 adult males, at which point settlers could draw up a temporary
territorial constitution and elect a territorial legislature, giving the settlers a degree of self-government. The
final step could be taken once the population of the territory reached 60,000 settlers. At that point, the settlers
could draw up a state constitution and submit it to Congress for approval. If Congress approved the state
constitution, that territory would be admitted into the union as a state. Coupled with the Land Ordinance of
1785, the Northwest Ordinance set out a method for the orderly westward expansion of the United States. As
important, the mechanism for expansion laid out in the Northwest Ordinance was based upon converting new
territories into states, rather than keeping them as territories or colonies. To better understand the significance
of this decision, consider this fact: at the end of the Revolutionary War, several of the thirteen original states
claimed vast tracts of land in the interior of the continent:
The fear was that these inland areas might become essentially colonies of the original thirteen states. …And we
had just fought a war over the contentious relationship between a mother country and its colonies. The
Founding Fathers wanted to make sure that we did not stumble right back into the kind of mess that had led to
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the Revolutionary War. To this end, they wanted to make sure that the interior lands could become states fully
equal to the original thirteen states. Doing so required convincing some of the original thirteen states to give up
their claims on land in the interior. The Northwest Ordinance, as its name suggests, originally applied to the
Northwest Territories, but it became the template for American expansion until the late 1800s: up until the late
1800s the United States grew by adding states, not colonies.1
The second reason why the Northwest Ordinance is important involves its ban on slavery in the
Northwest Territories. As we move into the 1800s, you will learn that the federal (aka national) government
adopted a policy of allowing each state to decide whether or not to allow slavery. That is, there was no federal
prohibition on slavery. Especially from the 1820s, Southern states aggressively fought any perceived attempt
by Northerners or the federal government to set limits on where slavery could and could not exist in the United
States. White Southerners even denied that the federal government had the power to thus limit slavery. Well…
a precedent had already been set with the Northwest Ordinance! In 1787 Southerners had not cared too much
about the Northwest Ordinance because very few slave owners had settled in the Northwest Territories and the
geography of the Northwest Territories was not suitable for the kind of cash crops that were produced through
slave labor. But because the Northwest Ordinance had been approved by Congress, its passage was an implicit
acknowledgment that Congress did have the power to set limits on where slavery could and could not exist in
the United States.
1
That situation changed in the late 1800s, as the United States embarked on a period of imperialism. We annexed Alaska, Hawaii, the
Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico with little intention that they would one day become states. Instead they became US territories,
ruled as colonies. (Alaska and Hawaii are exceptions that prove the rule: they only attainted statehood in 1959, long after they had
been annexed by the United States. The US annexed Hawaii in 1898 and bought Alaska from the Russians in 1867.)
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