subject-matter. It was more than a law or statute. It was a constitution for the Territory Northwest of the River Ohio. More than this, it was a model for later legislation relating to the National Territories; and some of its provisions, particularly the prohibition of slavery, stand among the greatest precedents of our history. The sixth compact was the old-time platform of the Republican Party previous to 1861.

The record of the vote on the Ordinance shows eighteen delegates present in Congress. As we look over the list, we are surprised to see how few of them have any place in history.

Massachusetts, Holten and Dane; New York, Smith, Harring, and Yates; New Jersey, Clark and Scheurman; Delaware, Kearny and Mitchell; Virginia, Grayson, Lee, and Carrington; North Carolina, Blount and Hawkins; South Carolina, Kean and Huger; Georgia, Few and Pierce. We must remember, however, that the Old Congress was not now what once it had been; also that the Federal Convention was sitting at Philadelphia, and that Franklin, Sherman, King, Hamilton, the Morrises, Madison, Rutledge, the Pinckneys, Randolph, Wilson, and Washington were in attendance there. The ease with which the Ohio Company carried its proposition through Congress has been the subject of surprise for a hundred years. No doubt the explanation consists largely in the fact that the new colony was proposed by a body of men fully able to make it successful. Contrasting it with earlier propositions, Mr. Bancroft says:

"For vague hopes of colonization, here stood a body of hardy pioneers, ready to lead the way to the rapid absorption of the domestic debt of the United States; selected from the choicest regiments of the army; capable of self-defence; the protectors of all who should follow them; men skilled in the labors of the field and of artisans; enterprising and laborious; trained in the severe morality and strict orthodoxy of the New England villages of that day. All was changed. There was the same difference as between sending out recruiting officers

and giving marching orders to a regular corps present with music and arms and banners."1

But, after all, one cannot help thinking that the silence and celerity with which the Ordinance was enacted was partly due to the fact that the Federal Convention was in

session. Men's eyes were fixed upon the statesmen who were discussing in secret the National Constitution; and Grayson and Lee and Carrington and Dane, assisted by Manasseh Cutler, were left with fourteen men, all but one of whom were willing to follow them, to enact in serenity and stillness an ordinance of government that might not have been secured if New York and not Philadelphia had been the focus of public attention. The year 1787 is thus doubly memorable; it gave us the Ordinance for the Territory Northwest of the River Ohio, and the Constitution of the United States.

"Peace hath her victories
No less renowned than war;"

and History may yet adjudge that year the greatest in our annals.2

1 History, VI., 285.

2 The literature relating to the Ordinance of 1787 is voluminous. For the part that Dr. Cutler bore in the matter, see his Life, Journals, and Correspondence, Cincinnati, 1888; Life of Ephraim Cutler, Cincinnati, 1890; Dr. W. F. Poole, Dr. Cutler, and the Ordinance of 1787, The North American Review, No. 251. The "private speculation” mentioned by Dr. Cutler in his Journal was the Scioto Company. See Cutler's Life, Journals, and Correspondence, chap. xii.; The Archæological and Historical Publications of Ohio, Columbus. Vols. III., IV. C. B. Todd, Life and Letters of Joel Barlow, N. Y., 1886, and Winsor, The Westward Movement, Boston, 1897.

XVI.

THE TERRITORY OF THE

UNITED STATES

NORTHWEST OF THE RIVER OHIO.

1

THE region beyond the Ohio that the Virginia troops and the American Commissioners at Paris wrested from England, that the four States ceded to the Nation, and that Congress constituted a district for the purposes of government in 1787, of itself is a noble physical base for an empire. It contains 265,878 square miles of land to Austria-Hungary's 240,943, Germany's 212,091, France's 209,091, Great Britain and Ireland's 120,874, and Italy's 114,296. Triangular in form, its sides are washed by about three thousand miles of navigable waters. The Great Lakes, one of which reaches its very centre, contain nearly one-half the fresh water of the globe. The volume of the waters of the Mississippi is equal to that of three Ganges, of nine Rhones, of twenty-seven Seines, or eighty Tibers, or of all the rivers of Europe, exclusive of the Volga. The Ohio, one thousand miles in length, is one of

1 The territory northwest of the River Ohio contained an area of 265,878 square miles, and from it were formed and now lie in its original territory—

"Minnesota, east of the Mississippi River and international

boundary of 1783, estimated to contain..

"Erie Purchase (in Pennsylvania) about

55,414

56,451

53,924

26,000

316

Grand Total, 170, 161,867 acres. -Donaldson: The Public Domain, 161. ? Carnegie: Triumphant Democracy, 301.

the largest affluents of the Mississippi. The rivers flowing to these three water-ways render every part of the interior of the Northwest easily accessible; and some of them, as the Wabash, the Illinois, and the Wisconsin, are small streams only because they appear in such noble company. The surface is exceedingly favorable to the construction of canals and railroads; and such are the geographical relations of the region to the remaining parts of the country that it gathers in its grasp nearly all the great lines of transportation and travel uniting the Mississippi River and the Atlantic Ocean. With a very large proportion of arable land unsurpassed in fertility and adapted to a wide range of productions; rich in forests of hard and soft woods; the waters abounding in fish; abundant in coal, iron, and lead, copper, oil, gas, and salt, it is the fit home of the great people who are making its history.

On July 13, 1787, this great domain was an unbroken wilderness. By far the larger number of the few inhabitants were savages, who were resolved that the wilderness should remain unbroken. Passing by the roving hunters and traders, the few Americans then making a small beginning at New Design on the Mississippi, and the occasional Moravian missionaries, the French colonists, not five thousand in number, were the only civilized population. As Michigan was in the hands of the British, the habitants of the Illinois and the Wabash, who had practically been without government since 1784, were the only people on the ground calling for a government. However, the Territory was not established for the resident population. A new colonial period was opening, promising grander results than the old one. The Ordinance of 1787 and the Powers to the Board of Treasury take rank with the colonial charters of one hundred and fifty years before. The magnificent territory that the Indian had for centuries put to uses but little superior to those of the buffalo, the bear, and the wolf; that the Frenchman had used for purposes but little higher than those of the Indian; and that the Englishman had refused to use at all, was now to be devoted

to the greatest of human objects-was now to become the home of a progressive people excelling in all the arts of civilized life.

The apex of the Northwestern triangle points to the east; two of its sides face the Atlantic slope; but causes now to be pointed out made the Ohio River the seat of the earliest settlements.

The census-takers of 1790 found in the United States a population of 3,929,214 souls, and the number was not much less in 1788. All of this population, save about five per cent., was distributed along the seaboard from Maine to Georgia, presenting an average depth of settlement, in a direction at right angles to the coast, of two hundred and fifty-five miles. This was the population that the Northwest was first to draw upon; for the days of European emigration had not then dawned.

General Walker, the superintendent of the tenth census, has pointed out that, in the early census-years, population moved westward along four main lines: (1) Through Central New York, following the valley of the Mohawk River; (2) across Southern Pennsylvania, Western Maryland, and Northern Virginia, parallel to and along the course of the Upper Potomac; (3) southward down the Valley of Virginia, and through the mountain-gaps into Tennessee and Kentucky; (4) around the southern end of the mountains, through Georgia and Alabama.' These movements were along the original lines of communication, surveyed by Nature ages before man appeared on the continent. The Great Lakes lie in the first of these directions, and they afterward became a main thoroughfare of emigration; but, at the time of which we write, no road had been cut through the wilderness of Western New York to Lake Erie, and as late as 1796 the surveyors of the Connecticut Land Company reached that lake by the Wood Creek portage, Lake Ontario, and the Niagara portage.

1 Statistics of the Population of the United States at the Tenth Census, June 30, 1880, xiii.