Northwest ordinance why

Considered one of the most important legislative acts of the Confederation Congress, the Northwest Ordinance also protected civil liberties and outlawed slavery in the new territories.

Search this Guide Search. Northwest Ordinance: Primary Documents in American History Adopted on July 13, , the Northwest Ordinance established a government for the Northwest Territory and outlined a process for admitting new states.

This guide compiles Library of Congress digital materials, external websites, and a print bibliography. The state constitution had to guarantee basic rights to its people, including religious freedom, trial by jury, the right to bail except in capital cases, and several additional rights. The states were to encourage education, but the Northwest Ordinance did not require states to provide public education. Slavery also was outlawed in any of the states created from the Northwest Territory.

It also, with some minor modifications, established the process for admission to the United States for all states since Toggle navigation. Jump to: navigation , search. The map illustrates the first tract of Ohio land to be sold by the Continental Congress. The Ohio Company of Associates, composed of former Revolutionary War officers and soldiers, acquired the land. The company established the first permanent settlement at Marietta in April King Thomas W.

Carter, Clarence Edwin, ed. The Territorial Papers of the United States. Cutler, Julia Perkins. Cincinnati, OH: R. Life, Journals, and Correspondence of Rev. Manasseh Cutler, LL. Athens: Ohio University Press, On July 13, , Congress enacts the Northwest Ordinance, structuring settlement of the Northwest Territory and creating a policy for the addition of new states to the nation. In , Virginia began by ceding its extensive land claims to Congress, a move that made other states more comfortable in doing the same.

In , Thomas Jefferson first proposed a method of incorporating these western territories into the United States. His plan effectively turned the territories into colonies of the existing states. Ten new northwestern territories would select the constitution of an existing state and then wait until its population reached 20, to join the confederation as a full member.

Congress, however, feared that the new states—10 in the Northwest as well as Kentucky , Tennessee and Vermont—would quickly gain enough power to outvote the old ones and never passed the measure. Three years later, the Northwest Ordinance proposed that three to five new states be created from the Northwest Territory.

Instead of adopting the legal constructs of an existing state, each territory would have an appointed governor and council. When the population reached 5,, the residents could elect their own assembly, although the governor would retain absolute veto power. When 60, settlers resided in a territory, they could draft a constitution and petition for full statehood. The ordinance provided for civil liberties and public education within the new territories, but did not allow slavery.

Pro-slavery Southerners were willing to go along with this because they hoped that the new states would be populated by white settlers from the South. They believed that although these Southerners would have no enslaved workers of their own, they would not join the growing abolition movement of the North.