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. 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. 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. & Barrett, 76. SLAVERY IN THE NORTHWEST. 3 first, that it would be approved.1 He moved the adoption of the article and it was agreed to without opposition. The proviso for the rendition of fugitive slaves was added at the suggestion of Rufus King, who had first suggested it in 1785. On the thirteenth of July, when the ordinance passed Congress, in New York, the Federal Convention was engaged, in Philadelphia in determining the basis of representation, and whether or not it should include slaves.2 It was probably not without some mutual understanding that Congress and the Convention were turning their thoughts to the same great question about the same time, for several members of the Convention were members of Congress and were informed of its proceedings. A motive for excluding slavery from the Northwest Territory was not hard to find. The Ohio river nearly equally divided the western country. The land cessions from the States gave Congress at least collateral security for its credit and removed much anxiety respecting the ultimate payment of the public debt. The climate north of the Ohio was known to be unfavorable to the extensive production of southern staples, indigo and tobacco; it was believed that these could be profitably produced only by slave labor; and therefore if this was forbidden in the new region, the southern States would have, practically, a monopoly of these two industries. Then, too, migration into the Northwest would strengthen the national defenses on the frontier and tend to secure the control of the navigation of the Mississippi for the United States. Whatever hostility to anti-slavery provisions might have been entertained by southern members of Congress at this time, it was practically quieted by the conviction of the absolute gains to the country which an early and vigorous settle 1 Dane to Rufus King, July 16, 1787; Barrett, 76. 2 Elliot, V, 308. |