Northwest Ordinance

The Northwest Ordinance, formally An Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States, North-West of the River Ohio, was enacted by the Congress of the Confederation on 13 July 1787, before the United States Constitution itself had even been ratified. Presented to Congress by the Massachusetts delegate Nathan Dane, with the clergyman and lobbyist Manasseh Cutler playing a major role in shaping its terms, the ordinance organized the Northwest Territory, the vast federal land bounded by the Great Lakes, the Ohio River, Pennsylvania and the upper Mississippi River, and it set out the process by which that territory would eventually be divided and admitted into the union as new states on equal footing with the original thirteen, rather than remaining permanent colonies of the existing states. It went on to produce the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin, along with part of Minnesota. The ordinance also protected a set of basic civil liberties and guaranteed support for public education within the territory, and, notably for its time, it prohibited slavery there, a provision that effectively fixed the Ohio River as the emerging line between free and slave territory in the early United States. It stands as one of the most consequential pieces of legislation passed under the Articles of Confederation, establishing the basic constitutional pattern by which the United States would expand westward for more than a century.