The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 Banned Slavery and Promised Schools

History books love to call the Confederation Congress weak, broke and ineffective. All true. It could not tax, could not enforce, and by 1787 often could not even gather a quorum. And yet in July of that year, while the delegates in Philadelphia argued behind closed doors over a new Constitution, this supposedly useless body in New York passed one of the most consequential laws in American history. It is worth a moment of wonder: a government on its deathbed wrote a bill of rights before the Constitution had one, banned slavery from a territory larger than most European nations, and declared that schools "shall forever be encouraged."

That law was the Northwest Ordinance, adopted on July 13, 1787. Let us read it the way it deserves, article by article, with the words it actually used.

The problem it solved

After the Revolution, the United States held a vast region north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi, land that states like Virginia, New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut had claimed and then ceded to the national government. The question was what to do with it. Would it be a colony, governed from the East for the benefit of the original states? Or would it become new states, equal to the old?

Congress answered in stages.

The Land Ordinance of 1785 set up the survey. The land would be divided into townships six miles square, each divided into thirty-six sections of one square mile, or 640 acres. Section 16 of every township was reserved for the maintenance of public schools. Before a single settler arrived, Congress had set aside land for education in every township. That grid is still visible from an airplane over Ohio, Indiana and Illinois.

Jefferson's Ordinance of 1784 had sketched a plan for self-government in the West and proposed to bar slavery from all western territories after 1800. That provision failed by a single vote, because a delegate whose vote would have carried it was absent. Jefferson later lamented that the fate of millions had hung on one man's absence.

The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 replaced the 1784 plan. Its principal drafter is generally identified as Nathan Dane of Massachusetts, and it was pushed forward by the Ohio Company of Associates, whose agent Manasseh Cutler was in New York negotiating to buy land. Settlers wanted law, order and guarantees before they would move their families west. The Ordinance gave them all three.

The frame of government

The first sections of the Ordinance set out a temporary government in stages.

1. The first stage. Congress would appoint a governor, a secretary and three judges. The governor and judges would adopt laws from the original states, subject to Congress's disapproval.
2. The second stage. Once the territory had five thousand free male inhabitants of full age, it could elect a general assembly, with a lower house chosen by the settlers and a legislative council, and send a delegate to Congress with a right to debate but not to vote.
3. Statehood. Article 5 provided that between three and five states would be formed from the territory, and that whenever any of them had sixty thousand free inhabitants, it would be admitted:

on an equal footing with the original States in all respects whatever

Stop on that phrase. "In all respects whatever." The new states would not be colonies. They would not be junior partners. A farmer in a future Michigan would be the political equal of a merchant in Boston. That principle, equal footing, governed the admission of every state that followed. We trace that history in How New States Join the Union, From Vermont in 1791 to Hawaii in 1959.

The heart of the Ordinance, though, is the six "articles of compact, between the original States and the people and States in the said territory," which "shall forever remain unalterable, unless by common consent." Here are the ones that matter most.

Article 1: freedom of worship

No person, demeaning himself in a peaceable and orderly manner, shall ever be molested on account of his mode of worship or religious sentiments, in the said territory.

Two things deserve notice. First, the guarantee came before the First Amendment, which was not proposed until 1789 or ratified until 1791. Second, the limit is behavior, not belief. "Demeaning himself in a peaceable and orderly manner" means conducting himself peaceably. The government may punish disorder. It may not punish worship or conviction. That is the right balance, and it is the same one later found in the Free Exercise Clause.

Article 2: a bill of rights before the Bill of Rights

Article 2 reads like a charter of English liberties carried across the mountains. The inhabitants "shall always be entitled to the benefits of the writ of habeas corpus, and of the trial by jury; of a proportionate representation of the people in the legislature; and of judicial proceedings according to the course of the common law." Bail was guaranteed except for capital offenses where the proof was evident. Fines were to be moderate, and no "cruel or unusual punishments" inflicted. No one was to be deprived of liberty or property "but by the judgment of his peers or the law of the land," the language of Magna Carta. Property taken for public use required full compensation.

Then comes a sentence that anticipates the Constitution's Contract Clause by two months:

And, in the just preservation of rights and property, it is understood and declared, that no law ought ever to be made, or have force in the said territory, that shall, in any manner whatever, interfere with or affect private contracts or engagements, bona fide, and without fraud, previously formed.

The settlers had watched state legislatures in the East pass debtor-relief laws that rewrote contracts after the fact. The Ordinance promised the West would not do that. The Constitution's ban on state laws "impairing the Obligation of Contracts" followed in September. For what later happened to that protection, read The Contract Clause Once Guarded Your Deals Until a Depression Court Bent It, and for the oldest of these liberties, Habeas Corpus Is the Oldest Liberty in the Constitution, and War Tests It.

Article 3: religion, morality and knowledge

This is the sentence most worth memorizing:

Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.

Read it as an argument, because it is one.

1. Premise: good government and human happiness need religion, morality and knowledge.
2. Premise: schools and the means of education produce them.
3. Conclusion: schools shall forever be encouraged.

Notice what the drafters did not say. They did not say the government would run every school, or that education's purpose was workforce training. They said education was necessary because a self-governing people must be a moral and knowledgeable people. That is the same conviction George Washington would express in his Farewell Address, that religion and morality are indispensable supports of political prosperity. We discuss that address in Why Washington's Farewell Address called religion and morality indispensable.

Article 3 continues with a promise too often skipped in classrooms:

The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians; their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent;

The promise was broken repeatedly in the decades that followed. An honest reading of the Ordinance records both the principle and the failure to keep it. The principle was right. The country's failure to honor it is a judgment on those who broke it, not on the words.

Article 4: one country, one set of debts, free rivers

Article 4 is the least quoted and the most practical. It declared that the territory and the states formed from it "shall forever remain a part of this Confederacy," bound by the Articles and by acts of Congress. Settlers would pay their share of the federal debt and expenses, levied by the same rule as the original states. The new legislatures could not interfere with Congress's disposal of the land or tax federal property. And the great rivers and portages were declared "common highways, and forever free," to the inhabitants and to all citizens of the United States, without any tax or duty.

Read that as a statement of national union. The new states would share the burdens of the old, including the war debt, and no one could set up toll gates on the rivers that carried western crops to market. Equal footing came with equal obligations. A people that wants the full rights of membership accepts the full duties of it, which is a lesson some modern federal programs could stand to relearn.

Article 6: no slavery

Now the article that changed American history:

There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes whereof the party shall have been duly convicted:

The article went on to provide that a person escaping into the territory from whom labor was lawfully claimed in one of the original states could be reclaimed. That proviso was the price of the ban, and it should not be hidden. But the ban was real, and it was national law.

Consider what this meant. In 1787 slavery was legal, in some form, in most of the original states. The Confederation Congress, which included delegates from slaveholding states, voted to bar it from the entire Northwest. The vote was nearly unanimous. The region became Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and part of Minnesota, every one of which entered the Union as a free state.

The ban was tested, and it held. Territorial leaders in Indiana petitioned Congress more than once in the early 1800s to suspend Article 6 so that settlers could bring enslaved people with them. Congress refused. In 1824 Illinois voters rejected a proposal to call a state constitutional convention, a vote widely understood as a referendum on legalizing slavery. A line written in 1787 was defended by ordinary voters a generation later.

Notice too the phrase "otherwise than in the punishment of crimes." That exact formula was taken up, nearly word for word, in the 13th Amendment in 1865. The language that freed four million people was drafted in 1787 by the Confederation Congress.

The objection: was this hypocrisy?

The strongest critique, stated fairly, goes like this. The Ordinance banned slavery only north of the Ohio, leaving the Southwest open to it. It included a fugitive clause that sent escaping people back into bondage. Some of the same men who voted for it owned slaves. Calling it an antislavery triumph whitewashes a deal that protected slavery where it already existed.

The facts in that critique are accurate. The conclusion does not follow.

1. The ban moved the line. Before July 1787, nothing in national law barred slavery anywhere. After it, slavery was barred from a territory that would become five and a half states. Measured against what existed, that is not hypocrisy. It is progress against entrenched interest.
2. The language outlived the compromise. The fugitive proviso is gone. The ban's words became the 13th Amendment.
3. The precedent established congressional power. The First Congress re-enacted the Ordinance on August 7, 1789, adjusting it to the new Constitution, and George Washington signed it. In his Cooper Union address of February 1860, Abraham Lincoln pointed to that re-enactment as proof that the founding generation believed Congress could bar slavery from federal territory. The argument Lincoln built on this document helped decide the most important election in American history.
4. The founding is a record of principle advancing against interest. We have argued that more fully in The Constitution Is Not Illegitimate Because Its Framers Held Slaves and Madison Kept the Idea of Property in Men Out of the Constitution's Words.

The verdict: the Northwest Ordinance was an imperfect compromise and an antislavery landmark, and those are not contradictions.

What it means now

The Ordinance is not a museum piece. Ohio and Michigan, the two states that frame this post, carry its imprint. Ohio entered the Union in 1803 and Michigan in 1837, both free states with public school land reserved from the first survey. The same tradition of land for education reached its height in the Morrill Act of 1862, which granted federal land to fund colleges in every state, a story told in Lincoln, Justin Morrill and the Land Grant That Built the State University.

Three lessons carry forward.

1. Rights come first. The settlers demanded guarantees of worship, jury trial and contract before they would move. A free people should demand no less of any government.
2. Equality among states is a principle, not a favor. "In all respects whatever" means what it says.
3. Education exists for self-government. The reason Article 3 gives for schools is moral and civic: good government and the happiness of mankind. Any school board that forgets the reason has forgotten the purpose.

The case in brief

1. The Confederation Congress adopted the Northwest Ordinance on July 13, 1787, while the Convention sat, building on the Land Ordinance of 1785 that reserved section 16 of every township for schools.
2. Its articles of compact guaranteed freedom of worship, habeas corpus, jury trial, the common law and the protection of contracts before the federal Bill of Rights existed.
3. Article 3 declared that religion, morality and knowledge are necessary to good government, so schools "shall forever be encouraged."
4. Article 6 barred slavery from the territory, in words later used in the 13th Amendment, and the First Congress re-enacted the Ordinance in 1789.
5. Every state carved from the Northwest entered as a free state on an equal footing with the original thirteen.

What you can do: read the six articles of compact aloud with your family, then ask your local school board how its curriculum teaches the Northwest Ordinance and the founding documents on the Founders page.