effort for the admission of our citizens into their ports on an equal footing with those of other countries; to a continuance of the occlusion of the West Indian markets against the produce of these states; loses a crisis of favourable disposition in the European powers in general to enter into connections of amity and commerce with us; endangers the loss of a proffered treaty from the Emperor of Morocco who has made us friendly advances whose honour will be touched and resentment kindled by our declining to meet them; and whose power & connections may, in our present unarmed state, shut to us the ports of the Mediterranean, oblige us to send our commodities to them in foreign bottoms, or to seek them in our own at the risk of consigning our citizens to perpetual slavery & chains.

3. Because the federal constitution does not require that treaties, before their conclusion, should be communicated to the thirteen legislatures, and should receive all their several approbations, and such a delay in the present instance would be unseasonable & injurious to them; would protract the negotiations to a length indefinite both in time & expence; would leave our citizens in the mean time exposed to all the evils before stated; would be more distressing to these states, whose channels of commerce are yet to be opened, than to the nations constituting the other parties, who may in the mean time pursue their antient & long established trade; and might suffer opportunities finally to pass by which might never be recalled.

REPORT OF GOVERNMENT FOR THE WESTERN TERRITORY.'

C.C.

[March 22, 1784.]

The Committee to whom was recommitted the report of a plan for a temporary government of the Western territory have agreed to the following resolutions.

Resolved, that so much of the territory ceded or to be ceded

Endorsed "Report on Western Territory. Delivered 22 March, 1784. Read. Wednesday 24 assigned for consideration."

The original report of a temporary ordinance (see ante, p. 407) not satisfying Congress, it was recommitted to the original committee for amendment, and the

by individual states to the United States as is already purchased or shall be purchased of the Indian inhabitants & offered for sale by Congress, shall be divided into distinct states, in the following manner, as nearly as such cessions will admit; that is to say, by parallels of latitude, so that each state shall comprehend from South to North two degrees of latitude beginning to count from above was by them reported to Congress. It was considered on April 19, 21, and 23, 1784, when, after amendment, it was adopted, by the vote of every state but one. The report was at once printed as :

The Committee to whom was recommitted the Report of a / Plan for a temporary Government of the Western Ter- /ritory having agreed to the following resolutions. Folio. Broadside.

The ordinance as adopted was printed with the title of :

By the United States in Con- /gress assembled. / April 23, 1784. / Folio. 2 leaves.

Next to the Declaration of Independence (if indeed standing second to that), this document ranks in historical importance of all those drawn by Jefferson; and, but for its being superseded by the "Ordinance of 1787," would rank among all American state papers immediately after the National Constitution. Its importance has already been commented upon in the introduction. That it contains practically every provision which has made the later ordinance famous, has been carefully overlooked by those who have desired to give the credit of them to Northerners. Still more have these special pleaders suppressed the fact that Jefferson proposed to interdict slavery in all the western territory and not merely in the northwest territory as the Ordinance of 1787 did. Had it been adopted as Jefferson reported it, slavery would have died a natural death, and secession would have been impossible.

There is another reason, however, for the little reputation this paper has brought to Jefferson, aside from the studious suppression of its importance by the special pleaders of New England. This plan, with its limitation of slavery, though failing by only one vote of adoption in 1784, was unpopular at the South and increasingly so as slavery became more and more profitable and more and more a Southern institution. As early as 1790 Jefferson's partizans were already his apologists for this document, and from that time Jefferson carefully avoided any public utterance on slavery. This change of attitude is alone sufficient explanation why Southerners acquiesced with the Northerners in the suppression of this paper, and of Jefferson's drafting of it. In Jefferson's memoranda of the services which he took pride in having rendered his country, written in 1800, he carefully omitted all mention, as also in his autobiography, written in 1821. And thus it has been left to the Massachusetts orators to glorify King, Dane, and Cutler for clauses in the Ordinance of 1787, which the latter had in truth but taken from the Ordinance of 1784, and which they made sectional, where Jefferson had made them national.

the completion of thirty-one degrees North of the Equator; and by meridians of longitude, one of which shall pass thro' the lowest point of the rapids of Ohio, and the other through the Western Cape of the mouth of the Great Kanhaway, but the territory Eastward of this last meridian, between the Ohio, Lake Erie, & Pennsylvania shall be one state, whatsoever may be its comprehension of latitude. That which may lie beyond the completion of the 45th degree between the sd. meridians shall make part of the state adjoining it on the South, and that part of the Ohio which is between the same meridians coinciding nearly with the parallel of 39°shall be substituted so far in lieu of that parallel as a boundary line.

That the settlers on any territory so purchased & offered for sale shall, either on their own petition, or on the order of Congress, receive authority from them with appointments of time & place for their free males of full age, within the limits of their state to meet together for the purpose of establishing a temporary government, to adopt the constitution and laws of any one of the original states, so that such laws nevertheless shall be subject to alteration by their ordinary legislature; & to erect, subject to a like alteration, counties or townships for the election of members for their legislature.

That such temporary government shall only continue in force in any state until it shall have acquired 20,000 free inhabitants, when giving due proof thereof to Congress, they shall receive from them authority with appointment of time & place to call a convention of representatives to establish a permanent Constitution & Government for themselves. Provided that both the temporary & permanent governments be established on these principles as their basis. 1. That they shall forever remain a part of this confederacy of the United States of America. 2. That in their persons, property & territory they shall be subject to the Government of the United States in Congress assembled, & to the articles of Confederation in all those cases in which the original states shall be so subject. 3. That they shall be subject to pay a part of the federal debts contracted or to be contracted, to be apportioned on them by Congress, according to the same common rule & measure, by which apportionments