American Expansion: The Great Land Ordinances

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Colonial Land Claims . While under British rule, the colonies of North America jealously guarded their paper claims to land north and west of the Ohio River. Of course the lands in question were already occupied by various tribes of American Indians, and until the Revolution the charter claims represented little more than the wishful thinking of would-be colonial developers, but the Revolutionary War and the waves of westward settlement launched by land-hungry pioneers forever changed the political economy of the Trans-Appalachian West. One of the new nation’s earliest political battles was over whether the old Western land claims fell under state or federal control.

Virginia Cedes Western Lands . On paper the United States was a huge country. In the Treaty of Paris of 1783, which ended the Revolutionary War, Britain ignored the claims of its Indian allies and ceded all the land from the Atlantic to the Mississippi to the United States. After months of wrangling, Congress was able to persuade states with Western claims to cede them to the United States. Virginia’s decision to cede its Western land claims in 1781 prompted other states to follow suit; this process turned Western lands—which once divided the states—into a force for national unity.

The Land Ordinance of 1785 . Plans for the development of the Western lands were hotly debated by Congress. Some members of the new government favored letting individual settlers stake their own claims (mirroring historical patterns of development in colonies such as Virginia and the Carolinas); others wanted to carve the land into symmetrical townships resembling colonial New England towns. Legislators reached a compromise with the Land Ordinance of 1785. The legislation proposed surveying Western territories into six-mile-square townships before sale. Every other township was then to be further subdivided into 640-acre sections and sold for a minimum price of one dollar an acre. This law favored large land speculation companies over actual settlers since 640-acre farms were both too large and too expensive to be within the grasp of the typical pioneer family. Many politicians favored a national plan to survey, sell, and defend the Western lands from Indian attack. As a final measure, Congress set aside part of each township for schools.

The Northwest Ordinance . Far more significant was the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which outlined how the West would be governed. In 1780 Congress resolved that all lands ceded to the Union should be “formed into distinct republican States,” with the same rights of sovereignty, freedom, and independence as the original thirteen colonies. Congress instructed a committee chaired by Thomas Jefferson to formulate a plan for admitting future states. The result—enacted into law in 1787—provided for the following: first, the area bound by the Ohio, the Mississippi, and the Great Lakes (present-day Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin) would be divided into not less than three but no more than five territories; and second, the territories would immediately be governed by Congressionally appointed judges and a governor until the time when an individual territory’s adult male population reached five thousand. When five thousand men of voting age had moved into one territory, they were authorized to elect a legislature, which had authority over that territory only. Finally, when the population reached sixty thousand the territory could apply to become a full-fledged state, with two restrictions: its government had to be “republican,” and slavery would be prohibited.

A Farsighted Plan . Jefferson’s ordinance was extremely farsighted. It provided a period for settlers to inhabit the new territory and encouraged them to create democratic local governments, and it specified an exact end date for territorial status. The ordinance also allowed Congress to take a stand against the moral evil of slavery, an institution challenged during the Revolution, without threatening the livelihood of Southern slave owners.

Source

Frederick D. Williams, ed., The Northwest Ordinance: Essays on its Formulation (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1989).