bought over by the Yazoo speculators and bribed to betray their trust. The only active fields of investment were lands and public bonds, and nearly every man of prominence who had money took chances on the rise and fall of these. So common was this business that one of our recent historians has convinced himself that a corrupt or selfish interest was the chief factor giving stability to the Government of the United States after the adoption of the Constitution and that the real motive in the honorable assumption by the United States of the debt of the revolution was the desire of speculators to enrich themselves. Whatever the interpretation may be, the line of private conduct of public men ran through a shady twilight zone in 1787. The Ohio Associates were not able to get the votes for their act of government or their contract until they agreed to buy enough land to let in with them the Congress members who were jealous of their profits. With this assurance given, as Cutler tells us that it was, their course became smooth. The Ordinance of 1787 included a partition scheme, a plan of government, and a bill of rights. The first provided for the ultimate division of the Northwest into three or five States, as need might dictate. If three, the separating boundaries were to be the Wabash River and the meridian of Vincennes, and a meridian to be drawn through the mouth of the Great Miami River, corresponding with the present boundaries between Indiana and her neighbors. If five States should be admitted, then a line drawn east and west through the southern tip of Lake Michigan should cut off the two peninsulas that were eventually to become Michigan and Wisconsin. This was made an eternal and solemn compact among the States so far as Congress could compass it.

So far as government was concerned the act provided for three progressive stages, the last of which should bring the State into the United States as a full participating member. England, too, at this same time and in the century ensuing was working upon an empire, and used three stages of similar import with one marked exception that to-day distinguishes the British Empire from the American, since the fulfillment of statehood for British colonies has tended to leave them outside the Empire claiming independent rights, whereas the American State has become progressively amalgamated with the nation in whose government it has an organic share.

'Charles A. Beard, Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (1913), and Economie Origins of Jeffersonian Democracy (1915).

In the first stage, a territorial government was to be erected by Congress with governor, secretary, and judges, competent to make the laws and administer them without consulting the wish of any settler. It was an autocratic establishment, to be justified only by its temporary character and the infancy of the social group. In the second stage, to be reached when there should be five thousand adult males in the territory, an elected legislature was provided for, giving to the citizens that control over law-making and the purse that British peoples have so consistently demanded. When the total population reached sixty thousand, the Ordinance provided that it should be competent to hold a constitutional convention, frame its own basic law, and enter the Union. No new State had been added to the thirteen as yet, and the future of the Union was shrouded in the secrecy of the Philadelphia Convention when Congress sketched the future American colonial policy as firmly as though it thought it was legislating with full authority and assurance.

The bill of rights that was incorporated in the document shows resemblance to the similar pronunciamentos that appear in the Declaration of Independence and that are attached to many of the earliest State constitutions. The Ohio Associates doubtless wished to make the new world as attractive as possible to their prospective customers. Some of the guarantees were separated in the text of the Ordinance as "articles of compact," forever "unalterable, unless by common consent." Others are scattered through the miscellaneous provisions. First of the unalterable rights was freedom of religion: "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 territories." After this came the promise of uninterrupted right to the writ of habeas corpus, to jury trial, to compensation for property seized, and to freedom from ex post facto laws. "Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged," ran a sentence pregnant with meaning for the new communities. The abolition of slavery which Jefferson had sought in vain to incorporate in the Ordinance of 1784 was now pledged. Equal distribution of property among brothers and sisters, heirs to the estate of intestates, was guaranteed, reflecting a reform that Jefferson again had fought for in Virginia and that was a protest against the Old World law of primogeniture. The tottering Con

gress provided, moreover, that the "said territory, and the States which may be formed therein, shall forever remain a part of this confederacy of the United States," and insisted that they should be responsible for their share of the common debt, and refrain from questioning the full right of Congress to dispose of the title of the soil within their limits.

The Ordinance of 1787 became a law by the unanimous vote of the eight States present in Congress on July 13, 1787. One individual member voted no, but the delegations were a unit otherwise. Its significance as the basis of the American colonial policy gives importance to the fact that no word in the Articles of Confederation seems to confer upon Congress the explicit power either to accept or dispose of a public estate; and that the method of its passage was irregular, since a mere majority of the thirteen States had no power to do any business under the Articles. On all ordinary matters two-thirds, or nine, were required; on amendments unanimity of the whole thirteen. This was the only great work that the Congress transacted under the Articles, and it was of dubious constitutionality. The Constitutional Convention at Philadelphia was moreover well upon its work of disregarding the Articles, framing a peaceful revolution, and ratifying a new Constitution by less than a unanimous vote.

The requisite agreements had all been made by Cutler and Parsons before the Ordinance was passed. The "wrecking crew" that insisted on being let in with them, William Duer, Andrew Craigie, and the rest of the Scioto Associates, had been satisfied. On July 27 the ordinance of sale was passed authorizing the transfer of nearly seven million acres to the men who wanted them. The price agreed upon for all was the same - one dollar an acre, payable in continental money with a discount of one-third on account of the swampy or otherwise useless lands that might be scattered through the tract. It was arranged that 1,781,760 acres should go to the Ohio Associates, to be paid for with $500,000 in cash and the balance on survey. The Scioto group took option on 4,901,480 acres, payable in six installments and divided the option into thirty shares which they allotted among themselves.

The close interlocking of interests in the transaction is revealed by the fact that Winthrop Sargent, secretary of Congress, was also secretary of the Ohio Associates and acted with Cutler in completing the purchase. Two of the new judges elected to go to the Northwest Territory were Parsons and Varnum, both of whom

were directors of the Associates. And General Arthur St. Clair, president of Congress, and a former western agent of the Penns at Pittsburgh, was not only a stockholder of the Associates but was chosen by his colleagues to be the first governor of the first territory of the United States. Under Governor St. Clair, life and meaning were given to, the political principles laid down in the Northwest Ordinance.

CHAPTER VIII

THE OLD NORTHWEST

THE active mind and the careful erudition of the late B. A. Hinsdale have anticipated much of the work of the historian who proposes to follow up the Ordinance of 1787, and to trace the extension of settlement into the Old Northwest. Between 1787 when the Ohio Associates' contract was closed, and 1795 when "Mad" Anthony Wayne induced the Indians of the Wabash to sign a quittance to the lands along the Ohio River, a new colony was planted in the West. The conditions of frontier life that were already well established between the Ohio River and the Tennessee were extended across the former river to its Indian shore. And the mother country that had in 1783 agreed to the Great Lakes as a boundary between Canada and the United States, was persuaded to keep the promise and withdraw her posts to her own dominions. On the southwest frontier, in the same years, Spain accepted the inevitable fact of American independence and complied in words, at least, with the description of boundary incorporated in the Treaty of Versailles. Kentucky became a State, and Tennessee followed in 1796. The century was to end with what was new frontier in 1763 transformed into happy and prosperous farmlands; and with the pioneers of the earlier date now the grandparents of pioneers who were thrusting their cabins towards Detroit, Mobile, and St. Louis.

The site for the purchase of the Ohio Associates was fixed by elimination at a point on the Ohio River below the western limit of the Seven Ranges. Further upstream, there were no tracts large enough. Further down, the reserved lands of Virginia barred any sales between the Scioto and the Great Miami. Thither General Rufus Putnam was sent in the spring of 1788, as superintendent of the new settlement; and opposite Fort Harmar, which the army had placed in 1786 at the mouth of the Muskingum River, he determined to plant the first new town. He traveled

1 B. A. Hinsdale, The Old Northwest. The Beginnings of our Colonial System (1888); F. L. Paxson, "The Gateways of the Old Northwest," in Michigan Pioneer and Historical Society, Collections, vol. xxxvIII. R. G. Thwaites, "The Boundaries of Wisconsin,” in Wisconsin Historical Collections, vol. XI, contains a complete series of sketch maps showing the progress of political subdivision of the Northwest.