Chapter 6:
The Colonial System of the United States,
January 1786-July 1787

BEFORE the federal convention had referred its resolutions to a committee of detail, an interlude in congress was shaping the character and destiny of the United States of America. Sublime and humane and eventful in the history of mankind as was the result, it will take not many words to tell how it was brought about. For a time wisdom and peace and justice dwelt among men, and the great ordinance, which could alone give continuance to the union, came in serenity and stillness. Every man that had a share in it seemed to be led by an invisible hand to do just what was wanted of him; all that was wrongfully undertaken fell to the ground to wither by the wayside; whatever was needed for the happy completion of the mighty work arrived opportunely, and just at the right moment moved into its place.

By the order of congress a treaty was to be held, in January 1786, with the Shawnees, at the month of the Great Miami. Monroe, who had been present as a spectator at the meeting of the United States commissioners with the representatives of the Six Nations at Fort Stanwix, in 1784, desired to attend this meeting with a remoter tribe. He reached Fort Pitt, and with some of the American party began the descent of the Ohio; but, from the low state of the water, he abandoned the expedition at Limestone, and made his way to Richmond through Kentucky and the wilderness. As the result of his inquiries on the journey, he took with him to congress the opinion that a great part of the western territory, especially that near Lakes Michigan and Erie, was miserably poor; that the land on the Mississippi and the Illinois consisted of extensive plains which had not a single bush on them, and would not have for ages; that the western settlers, in many of the most important objects of a federal government, would be either opposed to the interests of the old states or but little connected with them. He would form the territory into no more than five states; but he adhered to the principle of Jefferson, that they ought as soon as possible to take part in governing themselves, and at an early day share "the sovereignty, freedom, and independence" of the other states.

In the course of the winter the subject of the division of the western territory into states was, on the motion of Monroe, referred to a grand committee. Its report, which was presented on the twenty-fourth of March, traced the division of the territory into ten states to the resolution of congress of September 1750, by which no one was to contain less territory than one hundred nor more than one hundred and fifty miles square. This resolution had controlled the ordinance of April 1784; and, as the first step toward a reform, every part of that ordinance which conflicted with the power of congress to divide the territory into states according to its own discretion was to be repealed.

Virginia had imbodied the resolve of congress of September 1780 in its cession of its claims to the land north-west of the Ohio. A further report proposed that Virginia should be asked to revise its act of cession.

At this stage of the proceedings Dane made a successful motion to raise a committee for considering and reporting the form of a temporary government for the western states. Its chairman was Monroe, with Johnson and King of New England, John Kean and Charles Pinckney of South Carolina, as his associates. On the tenth of May this committee read their report. It asked the consent of Virginia to a division of the territory into not less than two nor more than five states; presented a plan for their temporary colonial government; and promised them admission into the confederacy on the principle of the ordinance of Jefferson. Not one word was said of a restriction on slavery. No man liked better than Monroe to lean for Support on the minds and thoughts of others. He loved to spread his sails to a favoring breeze, but in threatening weather preferred quiet under the shelter of his friends. When Jefferson, in 1784, moved a restriction on slavery in the western country from Florida to the Lake of the Woods, Monroe was ill enough to be out of the way at the division. When King in the following year revived the question, he was again absent at the vote; now, when the same subject challenged his attention, he was silent.

At first Monroe flattered himself that his report was generally approved; but no step was taken toward its adoption. All that was done lastingly for the West by this congress was the fruit of independent movements. On the twelfth of May, at the motion of Grayson seconded by King, the navigable waters leading into the Mississippi and the St. Lawrence, and the carrying places between them, were declared to be common highways, forever free to all citizens of the United States, without any tax, impost, or duty.

The assembly of Connecticut, which in the same month held a session, was resolved on opening a land office for the sale of six millions of acres west of the Pennsylvania line which their state had reserved in its cession of all further claims by charter to western lands. The reservation was not excessive in extent; the right of Connecticut under its charter had been taken away by an act of the British parliament of which America had always denied the validity. The federal constitution had provided no mode of settling a strife between a state and the United States; a war would cost more than the land was worth. Grayson ceased his opposition; and on the fourteenth of the following September congress accepted the deed of cession by which Connecticut was confirmed in the possession of what was called her "western reserve." The compact establishment of the culture of New England in that district had the most beneficent effect on the character of Ohio and the development of the union.

For diminishing the number of the states to be formed out of the western territory, Monroe might hope for a favorable hearing. At his instance the subject was referred to a grand committee, which on the seventh of July reported in favor of obtaining the assent of Virginia to the division of the territory north-west of the Ohio into not less than two nor more than five states.

With singular liberality Grayson proposed to divide the country at once into not less than five states. He would run a line east and west so as to touch the most southern part of Lake Michigan, and from that line draw one meridian line to the western side of the mouth of the Wabash, and another to the western side of the mouth of the Great Miami, making three states between the Mississippi and the western lines of Virginia and Pennsylvania. The peninsula of Michigan was to form a fourth state; the fifth would absorb the country between Lake Michigan, Lake Superior, and the line of water to the northern boundary in the Lake of the Woods on the one side and the Mississippi on the other. This division, so unfavorable to southern influence, was voted for by Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia, South Carolina being divided; the North did not give one state in its favor; and the motion was lost. It was then agreed that the district should ultimately be divided at least into three states, the states and individuals being unanimous, except that Grayson adhered to his preference of five.

The cause which arrested the progress of the ordinance of Monroe was a jealousy of the political power of the western states, and a prevailing desire to impede their admission into the union. To Jefferson he explained with accurate foresight the policy toward which congress was drifting.

When the inhabitants of the Kaskaskias presented a petition for the organization of a government over their district, Monroe took part in, the answer, that congress had under consideration the plan of a temporary government for their district in which it would manifest a due regard to their interest. This is the last act of congress relating to the West in which Monroe participated. With the first Monday of the coming November the rule of rotation would exclude him from congress.

During the summer Kean was absent from congress, and his place on the committee was taken by Melancthon Smith of New York. In September, Monroe and King went on a mission from Congress to the legislature of Pennsylvania, and their places were filled by Henry of Maryland and Dane. The committee with its new members represented the ruling sentiment of the house; and its report, which was made on the nineteenth of September, required of a western state before its admission into the union a population equal to one thirteenth part of the citizens of the thirteen original states according to the last preceding enumeration. Had this report been adopted, and had the decennial census of the population of territories and states alone furnished the rule, Ohio must have waited twenty years longer for admission into the union; Indiana would have been received only after 1850; Illinois only after 1860; Michigan could not have asked admittance fill after the census of 1880; and after that census Wisconsin must still have remained a colonial dependency.

The last day of September 1786 was given to the consideration of the report; but before anything was decided the seventh congress expired.

The new congress, to which Madison and Richard Henry Lee, as well as Grayson and Edward Carrington, were sent by Virginia, had no quorum till February 1787, and then was occupied with preparations for the federal convention and with the late insurrection in Massachusetts. But the necessity of providing for a territorial government was urgent; and near the end of April the committee of the late congress revived its project of the preceding September. On the ninth of May it was read a second time; the clause which would have indefinitely delayed the admission of a western state was cancelled; a new draft of the bill as amended was directed to be transcribed, and its third reading was made the order of the next day, when of a sudden the further progress of the ordinance was arrested.

Rufus Putnam, of Worcester county, Massachusetts, who had drawn to himself the friendly esteem of the commander-in-chief, and before the breaking up of the army received the commission of brigadier-general, was foremost in promoting a petition to congress of officers and soldiers of the revolution for leave to plant a colony of the veterans of the army between Lake Erie and the Ohio, in townships of six miles square, with large reservations "for the ministry and schools." For himself and his associates he entreated Washington to represent to congress the strength of the grounds on which their petition rested. Their unpaid services in the war had saved the independence and the unity of the land; their settlement would protect the frontiers of the old states against alarms of the savages; their power would give safety along the boundary line on the north; under their shelter the endless procession of emigrants would take up its march to fill the country from Lake Erie to the Ohio.

With congress while it was at Princeton, and again after its adjournment to Annapolis, Washington exerted every power of which he was master to bring about a speedy decision. The members with whom he conversed acquiesced in the reasonableness of the petition and approved its policy, but they excused their inertness by the want of a cession of the north-western lands.

When, in March 1784, the lands were ceded by Virginia, Rufus Putnam again appeals to Washington: "You are sensible of the necessity as well as the possibility of both officers and soldiers fixing themselves in business somewhere as soon as possible; many of them are unable to lie long on their oars;" but congress did not mind the Spur. In the next year, under the land ordinance of Grayson, Rufus Putnam was elected a surveyor of land in the western territory for Massachusetts; and as he could not at once enter on the service, another brigadier-general, Benjamin Tupper of Chesterfield, in the Same state, was appointed for the time in his stead. Tupper repaired to the West to superintend the work confided to him; but disorderly Indians prevented the survey; without having advanced farther west than Pittsburgh, he returned home and, like almost every one who caught glimpses of the West, he returned with a mind filled with the brightness of its promise.

Toward the end of 1785, Samuel Holden Parsons, the son of a clergyman in Lyme, Connecticut, a graduate of Harvard, an early and a wise and resolute patriot, in the war a brigadier-general of the regular army, travelled to the West on public business, descended the Ohio as far as its falls, and, full of the idea of a settlement in that western country, wrote, before the year went out, that on his way he had seen no place which pleased him so much for a settlement as the country on the Muskingum.

In the treaty at Fort Stanwix, in 1784, the Six Nations renounced to the United States all claims to the country west of the Ohio. A treaty of January 1785, with the Wyandotte, Delaware, Chippewa, and Ottawa nations, released the country east of the Cuyahoga, and all the lands on the Ohio, south of the line of portages from that river to the Great Miami and the Maumee. On the last day of January 1786, George Rogers Clark, the conqueror of the North-west, Richard Butler, late a colonel in the army, and Samuel Holden Parsons, acting under commissions from the United States, met the Shawnees at the mouth of the Great Miami, and concluded with them a treaty by which they acknowledged the sovereignty of the United States over all their territory as described in the treaty of peace with Great Britain, and for themselves renounced all claim to property in any land east of the main branch of the Great Miami. In this way the Indian title to southern Ohio, and all Ohio to the east of the Cuyahoga, was quieted.

Six days before the signature of the treaty with the Shawnees, Rufus Putnam and Benjamin Tupper, after a careful consultation at the house of Putnam, in Rutland, published in the newspapers of Massachusetts an invitation to form "the Ohio Company" for purchasing and colonizing a large tract of land between the Ohio and Lake Erie. The men chiefly engaged in this enterprise were husbandmen of New England, nurtured in its schools and churches, laborious and methodical, patriots who had been further trained in a seven years’ war for freedom. Have these men the creative power to plant a commonwealth? And is a republic the government under which political organization for great ends is the most easy and the most perfect?

To bring the Ohio company into formal existence, all persons in Massachusetts who wished to promote the scheme were invited to meet in their respective counties on Wednesday, the fifteenth day of the next February, and choose delegates to meet in Boston on Wednesday, the first day of March 1786, at ten of the clock, then and there to consider and determine on a general plan of association for the company. On the appointed day and hour, representatives of eight counties of Massachusetts came together; among others, from Worcester county, Rufus Putnam; from Suffolk, Winthrop Sargent; from Essex, Manasseh Cutler, lately a chaplain in the army, then minister at Ipswich; from Middlesex, John Brooks; from Hampshire, Benjamin Tupper. Rufus Putnam was chosen chairman of the meeting, Winthrop Sargent its secretary. On the third of March, Putnam, Cutler, Brooks, Sargent, and Cushing, its regularly appointed committee, reported an association of a thousand shares, each of one thousand dollars in continental certificates, which were then the equivalent of one hundred and twenty-five dollars in gold, with a further liability to pay ten dollars in specie to meet the expenses of the agencies. Men might join together and subscribe for one share.

A year was allowed for subscription. At its end, on the eighth of March 1787, a meeting of the subscribers was held at Boston, and Samuel Holden Parsons, Rufus Putnam, and Manasseh Cutler were chosen directors to make application to congress for a purchase of lands adequate to the purposes of the company.

The basis for the acquisition of a vast domain was settled by the directors, and Parsons repaired to New York to bring the subject before congress. On the ninth of May 1787, the same day on which the act for the government of the North-west was ordered to a third reading on the morrow, the memorial of Samuel Holden Parsons, agent of the associators of the Ohio company, bearing date only of the preceding day, was presented. It interested every one. 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. On the instant the memorial was referred to a committee consisting of Edward Carrington, Rufus King, Nathan Dane, Madison, and Egbert Benson—a great committee: its older members of congress having worthy associates in Carrington and Benson, of whom nothing was spoken but in praise of their faultless integrity and rightness of intention.

On the fourth day of July 1787, for the first time since the eleventh of May, congress had a quorum. There were present from the North, Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey; from the South, Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia, soon to be joined by Delaware. The South had all in its own way. The president of congress being absent, William Grayson of Virginia was elected the temporary president.

On Friday, the fifth, there was no quorum. In the evening arrived Manasseh Cutler, one of the three agents of the Ohio company, sent to complete the negotiations for western lands. On his way to New York, Cutler had visited Parsons, his fellow-director, and now acted in full concert with him. Carrington gave the new envoy a cordial welcome, introduced him to members on the floor of congress, devoted immediate attention to his proposals, and already, on the tenth of July, his report granting to the Ohio company all that they desired was read in congress.

This report, which is entirely in the handwriting of Edward Carrington, assigns as gifts a lot for the maintenance of public schools in every township; another lot for the purpose of religion; and four complete townships, "which shall be good land, and near the centre," for the purpose of a university. The land, apart from the gifts, might be paid for in loan office certificates reduced to specie value or certificates of liquidated debts of the United States. For bad land, expenses of surveying, and incidental circumstances, the whole allowance was not to exceed one third of a dollar an acre. The price, therefore, was about sixty-six cents and two thirds for every acre, in United States certificates of debt. But as these were then worth only twelve cents on the dollar, the price of land in specie was between eight and nine cents an acre.

On the ninth of July, Richard Henry Lee took his seat in congress. His presence formed an era. On that same day the report for framing a western government, which was to have had its third reading on the tenth of May, was referred to a new committee of seven, composed of Edward Carrington and Dane, Richard Henry Lee, Kean of South Carolina, and Melancthon Smith of New York. There were then in congress five southern states to three of the North; on the committee two northern men to three from the South, of whom the two ablest were Virginians.

The committee, animated by the presence of Lee, went to its work in good earnest. Dane, who had been actively employed on the colonial government for more than a year, and for about ten months had served on the committee which had the subject in charge, acted the part of scribe. Like Smith and Lee, he had opposed a federal convention for the reform of the constitution. The three agreed very well together though Dane secretly harbored the wish of finding in the West an ally for "eastern politics." They were pressed for time, and found it necessary finally to adopt the best system they could get. At first they took up the plan reported by Monroe; but new ideas were started; and they worked with so much industry that on the eleventh of July their report of an ordinance for the government of the territory of the United States north-west of the river Ohio was read for its first time in congress.

The ordinance imbodied the best parts of the work of their predecessors. For the beginning they made the whole northwestern territory one district, of which all the officers appointed by congress were to take an oath of fidelity as well as of office. Jefferson, in his ordinance for the sale of lands, had taken care for the equal descent of real estate, as well as other property, to children of both sexes. This was adopted and expressed in the forms of the laws of Massachusetts. The rule of Jefferson was followed in requiring no property qualification for an elector; but was not extended, as Jefferson had done, to the officers to be elected.

The committee then proceeded to establish articles of compact, not to be repealed except by the consent of the original states and the people and states in the territory. Among these, as in Massachusetts and Virginia, were freedom of religions worship and of religions thought; and various articles from the usual bills of rights of the states.

The next clause bears in every word the impress of the mind of Richard Henry Lee. "No law ought ever to be made in said territory that shall in any manner whatever interfere with or conflict with private contracts or engagements, bonafide and without fraud previously formed." This regulation related particularly to the abuse of paper money.

The third article recognised, like the constitution of Massachusetts, and like the letter of Rufus Putnam of 1783, that religion, morality, and knowledge are necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, and declared that schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.

The utmost good faith was enjoined toward the Indians; their lands and property, their rights and liberty, were ordered to be protected by laws founded in justice and humanity; so that peace and friendship with them might ever be preserved.

The new states, by compact which neither party alone could change, became, and were forever to remain, a part of the United States of America. The waters leading into the Mississippi and St. Lawrence, and the carrying places between them, according to the successful motion of Grayson and King, a were made common highways and forever free. The whole territory was divided into three states only, the population required for the admission of any one of them to the union was fixed at sixty thousand; but both these clauses were subject to the future judgment of congress. The prayer of the Ohio company had been but this: "The settlers shall be under the immediate government of congress in such mode and for such time as congress shall judge proper;" the ordinance contained no allusion to slavery; and in that form it received its first reading and was ordered to be printed.

Grayson, then the presiding officer of congress, had always opposed slavery. Two years before he had wished success to the attempt of King for its restriction; and everything points to him as the immediate cause of the tranquil spirit of disinterested statesmanship which took possession of every southern man in the assembly. Of the members of Virginia, Richard Henry Lee had stood against Jefferson on this very question; but now he acted with Grayson, and from the states of which no man had yielded before, every one chose the part which was to bring on their memory the benedictions of all coming ages. Obeying an intimation from the South, Nathan Dane copied from Jefferson the prohibition of involuntary servitude in the territory, and quieted alarm by adding from the report of King a clause for the delivering up of the fugitive slave. This at the second reading of the ordinance he moved as a sixth article of compact, and, on the thirteenth day of July 1787, the great statute forbidding slavery to cross the river Ohio was passed by the vote of Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts, all the states that were then present in congress. Pennsylvania and three states of New England were absent Maryland only of the South. Of the eighteen members of congress who answered to their names, every one said "aye" excepting Abraham Yates the younger of New York, who insisted on leaving to all future ages a record of his want of good judgment, right feeling, and common sense.

Thomas Jefferson first summoned congress to prohibit slavery in all the territory of the United States; Rufus King lifted up the measure when it lay almost lifeless on the ground, and suggested the immediate instead of the prospective prohibition; a congress composed of five southern states to one from New England, and two from the middle states, headed by William Grayson, supported by Richard Henry Lee, and using Nathan Dane as scribe, carried the measure to the goal in the amended form in which King had caused it to be referred to a committee; and, as Jefferson had proposed, placed it under the sanction of an irrevocable compact.

The ordinance being passed, the terms of a sale between the United States and Manasseh Cutler and Winthrop Sargent, as agents of the Ohio company, were rapidly brought to a close, substantially on the basis of the report of Carrington.

The occupation of the purchased lands began immediately, and proceeded with the order, courage, and regularity of men accustomed to the discipline of soldiers. "No colony in America," said Washington in his joy, "was ever settled under such favorable auspices as that which has just commenced at the Muskingum. Information, property, and strength will be its characteristics. I know many of the settlers personally, and there never were men better calculated to promote the welfare of such a community." Before a year had passed by, free labor kept its sleepless watch on the Ohio.

But this was not enough. Virginia had retained the right to a very large tract north-west of the Ohio; and should she consent that her own sons should be forbidden to cross the river with their slaves to her own lands?

It was necessary for her to give her consent before the ordinance could be secure; and Grayson earnestly entreated Monroe to gain that consent before the year should go out. But Monroe was not equal to the task, and nothing was accomplished.

At the next election of the assembly of Virginia, Grayson, who was not a candidate in the preceding or the following year, was chosen a delegate; and then a powerful committee, on which were Carrington, Monroe, Edmund Randolph, and Grayson, successfully brought forward the bill by which Virginia confirmed the ordinance for the colonization of all the territory then in the possession of the United States by freemen alone.

The white men of that day everywhere held themselves bound to respect and protect the black men in their liberty and property. The suffrage was not as yet regarded as a right incident to manhood, and could be extended only according to the judgment of those who were found in possession of it. When in 1785 an act providing for the gradual abolition of slavery within the state of New York, while it placed the children born of slaves in the rank of citizens, deprived them of the privileges of electors, the council of revision, Clinton and Sloss Hobart being present, and adopting the report of Chancellor Livingston, negatived the act, because, "in violation of the rules of justice and against the letter and spirit of the constitution," it disfranchised the black, mulatto, and mustee citizens who had heretofore been entitled to a vote. The veto prevailed; and in the state of New York the colored man retained his impartial right of suffrage till the constitution of 1821. Virginia, which continued to recognise free negroes as citizens, in the session in which it sanctioned the north-western ordinance, enacted that any person who should be convicted of stealing or selling any free person for a slave shall suffer death without benefit of clergy. This was the protection which Virginia, when the constitution was forming, extended to the black man.