THE CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES. CHAPTER I. THE CONSTITUTION BEFORE CONGRESS AND THE COUNTRY: RATIFICATION BY DELAWARE, PENNSYLVANIA, NEW JERSEY, GEORGIA AND CONNECTIcut. While the Convention had been working out the draft of the Constitution, Congress, in session at New York, had passed several acts of which the most important was "the ordinance for the government of the United States northwest of the river Ohio." The act of 1784, providing for a territorial government of the Northwest, was never operative. Its amendment occupied Congress at short periods during the two following years, but not until the ninth of July, 1787, was the plan handed over to a new committee for completion.1 The energy and activity of the recently formed Ohio Company seem to have been the principal cause of reviving the subject. Of the members of the committee none was more sagacious and active than Nathan Dane of Massachusetts. It is impossible to identify the special contribution of its members to the work in hand. It is evident, however, upon comparison of the bill reported with the laws and constitutions already in 1 The committee consisted of Nathan Dane, Melanchton Smith, Edward Carrington, Richard H. Lee and John Kean. See J. A. Barrett's Evolution of the Ordinance of 1787, University of Nebraska, Seminary Papers, April, 1891, 51. This exhaustive monograph cites authorities. 2 ANTI-SLAVERY CLAUSE IN ORDINANCE OF 1787. force, that these were the precedents upon which the greater part of it rested, and particularly of those clauses in the ordinance in the nature of a Bill of Rights.1 Among the most active friends of the bill was Manassah Cutler, a clergyman, who had exerted himself in forwarding the plans of the Ohio Company, had visited New England to help organize it and to stimulate emigration, and had come to New York to win it friends among the members of Congress. It has been claimed that to Doctor Cutler is due the anti-slavery clause finally inserted in the ordinance. On the eleventh of July, the committee submitted its report, but the draft did not contain the provision against slavery. It will be remembered that in the first project for organizing a State in the Ohio country, in 1783, its New England founders had inserted a clause forbidding slavery.2 There is no doubt that anti-slavery opinions were held generally by the men and women of New England who intended to make the Ohio country their home, as soon as Congress would give it a civil organization. If Doctor Cutler had advocated the prohibition of slavery, it would seem that an anti-slavery clause would have been inserted in the committee's draft. His support of slavery, a few years later, when a member of Congress from Massachusetts, hints that he may not have been opposed to it in 1787.3 The evidence of the authorship of the prohibitory clause confirms the claim of Dane that he drew it, almost in the language in which it passed, though with little hope, at 1 The clause from the State constitutions which were precedents are reprinted by Barrett, 57-60-65. They are from the constitutions of Massachusetts, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, North Carolina and Georgia, and especially the laws of Massachusetts. Act of February 6, 1784. 2 Barrett, 6-8. 3 Barrett, 76. |