The American Revolution: A History by Gordon S. Wood
Authors: Gordon S. Wood
Tags: History
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firm league of friendship” among states jealous of their individuality. Not only ratification of the Articles of Confederation, but also any subsequent changes in the document required the consent of all the states.
The local self-interest of the states prolonged the congressional debates over the adoption of the Articles and delayed their unanimous ratification until 1781. The major disputes—over representation, the apportionment of the states’ contribution to the Union, and the disposition of the western lands—involved concrete state interests. Virginia and other populous states argued for proportional representation in the Congress, but these larger states had to give way to the small states’ determination to maintain equal state representation in the unicameral Congress. After much wrangling over the basis for each state’s financial contribution to the general treasury, the Confederation eventually settled on the proportion of people in each state, with slaves counting as three fifths of a person.
The states’ rivalries were most evident in the long, drawn-out controversy over the disposition of the western lands between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. The Articles sent to the states in 1778 for ratification gave the Congress no authority over the unsettled lands of the interior, and this omission delayed their approval. States like Virginia and Massachusetts with ancient charter claims to this western territory wanted to maintain control over the disposal of their land. But states without such claims, such as Maryland and Rhode Island, wanted the land pooled in a common national domain under the authority of Congress. Only in 1781 after Virginia, the state with charter rights to the largest amount of western territory, finally agreed to surrender its claims to the United States was the way prepared for other land cessions and for ratification of the Articles of Confederation by all the states. But the Confederation had to promise, in return for the cession of claims by Virginia and the other states, that the national domain would “be settled and formed into distinct republican states.”
The Congress drew up land ordinances in 1784 and 1785 that provided for the Northwest Territory to be surveyed and formed into neat and orderly townships. In 1787 it adopted the famous Northwest Ordinance that at once acknowledged, as the British in the 1760s had not, the settlers’ destiny in the West. In the succeeding decades the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Ordinance of 1787 remained the basis for the sale and the political evolution of America’s western territories.
Apart from winning the War of Independence, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 was the greatest accomplishment of the Confederation Congress. It created an entirely new notion of empire and at a stroke solved the problem of relating colonial dependencies to the central authority that Great Britain had been unable to solve in the 1760s and ’70s. When the monarchies of early modern Europe claimed new dominions by conquest or colonization, they inevitably considered these new provincial additions as permanently peripheral and inferior to the metropolitan center of the realm. But the Northwest Ordinance, which became the model for the development of much of the Southwest as well, promised an end to such permanent second-class colonies. It guaranteed to the settlers basic legal and political rights and set forth the unprecedented principle that new states settled in the West would enter the union “on an equal footing with the original States, in all respects whatsoever.” Settlers could leave the older states with the assurances that they were not losing their political liberties and that they would be allowed eventually to form new republics as sovereign and independent as the other states of the Union. With such a principle there was presumably no limit to the westward expansion of the empire of the United States.
THE WAR FOR
The local self-interest of the states prolonged the congressional debates over the adoption of the Articles and delayed their unanimous ratification until 1781. The major disputes—over representation, the apportionment of the states’ contribution to the Union, and the disposition of the western lands—involved concrete state interests. Virginia and other populous states argued for proportional representation in the Congress, but these larger states had to give way to the small states’ determination to maintain equal state representation in the unicameral Congress. After much wrangling over the basis for each state’s financial contribution to the general treasury, the Confederation eventually settled on the proportion of people in each state, with slaves counting as three fifths of a person.
The states’ rivalries were most evident in the long, drawn-out controversy over the disposition of the western lands between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. The Articles sent to the states in 1778 for ratification gave the Congress no authority over the unsettled lands of the interior, and this omission delayed their approval. States like Virginia and Massachusetts with ancient charter claims to this western territory wanted to maintain control over the disposal of their land. But states without such claims, such as Maryland and Rhode Island, wanted the land pooled in a common national domain under the authority of Congress. Only in 1781 after Virginia, the state with charter rights to the largest amount of western territory, finally agreed to surrender its claims to the United States was the way prepared for other land cessions and for ratification of the Articles of Confederation by all the states. But the Confederation had to promise, in return for the cession of claims by Virginia and the other states, that the national domain would “be settled and formed into distinct republican states.”
The Congress drew up land ordinances in 1784 and 1785 that provided for the Northwest Territory to be surveyed and formed into neat and orderly townships. In 1787 it adopted the famous Northwest Ordinance that at once acknowledged, as the British in the 1760s had not, the settlers’ destiny in the West. In the succeeding decades the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Ordinance of 1787 remained the basis for the sale and the political evolution of America’s western territories.
Apart from winning the War of Independence, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 was the greatest accomplishment of the Confederation Congress. It created an entirely new notion of empire and at a stroke solved the problem of relating colonial dependencies to the central authority that Great Britain had been unable to solve in the 1760s and ’70s. When the monarchies of early modern Europe claimed new dominions by conquest or colonization, they inevitably considered these new provincial additions as permanently peripheral and inferior to the metropolitan center of the realm. But the Northwest Ordinance, which became the model for the development of much of the Southwest as well, promised an end to such permanent second-class colonies. It guaranteed to the settlers basic legal and political rights and set forth the unprecedented principle that new states settled in the West would enter the union “on an equal footing with the original States, in all respects whatsoever.” Settlers could leave the older states with the assurances that they were not losing their political liberties and that they would be allowed eventually to form new republics as sovereign and independent as the other states of the Union. With such a principle there was presumably no limit to the westward expansion of the empire of the United States.
THE WAR FOR
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