J. DAVID GRIFFIN
Historians and the
Sixth Article of
The Ordinance of 1787
Writing in the North American Review in
1876, William F. Poole concluded that
"in the whole range of topics in
our national history there is none which has been
more obscure, or the subject of more
conflicting and erroneous statements, than
the Ordinance of 1787." When one
makes even cursory examination of a small
sample of the literature that has dealt
with the Ordinance, he is very likely to con-
clude that the statement must still
stand. This paper, however, is not concerned with
the whole Ordinance of 1787; its concern
is the Ordinance's Sixth Article:
There shall be neither slavery nor
involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise
than in the punishment of crimes whereof
the party shall have been duly convicted: Pro-
vided, always, that any person escaping
into the same, from whom labor or service is
lawfully claimed in any one of the
original States, such a fugitive may be lawfully reclaimed
and conveyed to the person claiming his
or her labor or service as aforesaid.
There were eighteen delegates present in
New York City at the Confederation
Congress on July 13, 1787, when the
Ordinance was passed. They were from Geor-
gia, South Carolina, North Carolina,
Virginia, Delaware, New Jersey, New York,
and Massachusetts; only one of the men,
Abraham Yates of New York, voted
against the Ordinance. All of the
Southern states except Maryland were present
for the vote; three of the New England
states and Pennsylvania were absent.1
Time and again, while reading studies on
the slavery prohibition article, this
author was struck not so much by what
the writer said, but by what he failed to
say or explain. On the other hand, when
a historian did the unusual and com-
mitted himself, almost without exception
his explanation seemed inadequate. For
example, James Schouler, when writing of
the Revolutionary era, saw slavery as a
very real issue. Congress, in 1774, he
wrote, had resolved to discontinue the slave
trade, but in 1776, "rather than
irritate men . . . ready to commit the colonies they
represented to Independence," gave
up the project. Schouler's implication was that
the "men" were Southerners.
Then he wrote that "by far the most momentous
achievement of . . . [1787] in the
Continental Congress was the passage of an ordi-
1. The North American Review is quoted in B. A. Hinsdale, The Old Northwest. The
Beginnings of
Our Colonial System (New York, 1899), 264-265; Henry Steele Commager, ed., Documents
of American
History (New York, 1968), 132, George Bancroft, History of
the United States of America, From the
Discovery of the Continent (New York, 1892), VI, 289-290.
Mr. Griffin is professor of history at
West Georgia College, Carrollton.
Ordinance of 1787 253
nance for securing freedom to the
inhabitants of the territory northwest of the
Ohio." In time, he believed, the
Ordinance saved the Union.2 But Schouler did
not point out that the majority in
Congress the day the Ordinance passed was
Southern and that the only negative vote
on the Sixth Article was cast by a New
Yorker. Therefore, is it not legitimate
to ask why the Southerners voted for it?
Richard Hildreth, writing thirty years
before Schouler, gave the Southerners
credit, albeit grudgingly and
suspiciously. He wrote that the Ordinance had "passed
by the unanimous vote of the eight
states present, including Virginia, the Carolinas,
and Georgia, reconciled to it,
doubtless, by the idea, afterward acted upon, of
securing the continuation of slavery in
the territory south of the Ohio. . . ."3
On the other hand, Theodore Roosevelt
gave unstinted credit to the Southerners
for the passage of the article and
claimed that pressure of the Ohio Company and
the prospects of New Englanders' land
purchases caused the passage. His impli-
cation was that New Englanders were so
antislavery that they would not have
bought land where Negro slavery was a
possibility. That they could have been
anti-Negro apparently was beyond his
consideration. Nor did Roosevelt adequately
explain the Southerners' vote, except
possibly by implying they were so anxious
for income from the land that they voted
for the Sixth Article.4
A much more comprehensive statement than
Roosevelt's, yet lacking the authori-
tative qualities that really convince,
was Jay A. Barrett's book on the Ordinance of
1787, published in 1891. According to
Ray Billington, who saw the Sixth Article
as "insignificant" when
compared to other provisions of the Ordinance, the Barrett
book has been inadequate for a very long
time; nevertheless, he says it is the only
one on the subject. Barrett believed the
explanation for the harmonious passage of
the Sixth Article prohibiting slavery
was to be found: "(1) in the constitution of
Congress at the time, (2) in the
peculiar conditions caused by the application of
the Ohio Company for a purchase of
lands, and (3) in the political reasons which
affected the southern members."
Barrett quoted the Virginian, William Grayson,
who explained in a letter to James
Monroe why he and the Southerners voted for
the slavery prohibition: "The
clause respecting slavery was agreed to by southern
members for the purpose of preventing
tobacco and indigo being made on the
north-west side of the Ohio, as well as
for several other political reasons." In
addition, Barrett included other explanations
that had been made through the
years, but he did not comment upon their
merit. For example: The South voted
for the article as a concession to the
Northeast in the hope of bringing about a
more favorable settlement of the
Mississippi River question; if the Northwest were
settled, certainly there would be
increased demand for an open Mississippi River.
Further, with the area north of the Ohio
River settled, the south side would be
less apt to form Spanish connections.5
But in spite of some rather definite state-
ments, the impression made is that
Barrett did not feel that he was on safe ground
when writing of the Sixth Article. He
was confident enough with the "what" of
2. James Schouler, History of the
United States under the Constitution (New York, 1880), I, 5, 41-42,
73, 100.
3. Richard Hildreth, The History of
the United States . . . (New York, 1849), III, 528-529. In an
article published in 1966, Staughton
Lynd concluded that one plausible reason for Southern support of
the Ordinance was that it "may have
been construed as a tacit endorsement of slavery in the South-
west. . . ." Staughton Lynd,
"The Compromise of 1787," Political Science Quarterly, LXXXI
(June
1966), 237.
4. Theodore Roosevelt, The Winning of
the West (New York, 1889), II, 200, 214-221.
254
OHIO HISTORY
things, but he was uncomfortable with
the "why." Barrett's approach seems sim-
ilar to that of Clinton Rossiter's
seventy-five years later. Rossiter wrote: "In the
political and emotional circumstances of
1787 it was possible and therefore proper
for Congress to exclude slavery from the
Northwest Territory; in the same circum-
stances it would have been impossible .
. . for the Convention to have attempted
to outlaw or even control slavery in the
old states."6
Although George Bancroft wrote with more
certainty than Barrett, his explan-
ations were really no better. According
to Bancroft, personalities-in-harmony ex-
plained much. He saw William Grayson,
the Virginian, who presided the day the
Ordinance passed, as being the
"immediate cause of the tranquil spirit of dis-
interested statesmanship which took
possession of every southern man in the assem-
bly." Bancroft pointed out that
Richard Henry Lee, who voted for the prohibition
of slavery in the Ordinance of 1787, had
been against Thomas Jefferson's anti-
slavery clause of the Ordinance of 1784,7
which would have applied to territory
both north and south of the Ohio River
and which contained no provision for the
return of fugitive slaves. But somehow
"disinterested statesmanship" and har-
monious personalities do not seem
adequate to explain the Southern-passed slavery
prohibition of the Northwest Ordinance.
John Bach McMaster did not pursue the
subject in nearly as much detail as
Bancroft. Indeed, McMaster added
nothing, except more confusion. For instance,
he saw the First Congress under the
Federal Constitution displaying a real tenacity
for slavery as an institution; yet, the
First Congress affirmed the entire Northwest
Ordinance--a Congress, McMaster
reported, that had some very strong reactions
to Quaker memorials for the abolition of
slavery.8 Did McMaster misunderstand
the First Congress? Is there an
ambiguous situation? Have presuppositions inter-
fered with accuracy?
In 1899, B. A. Hinsdale wrote that the
opinion North and South that produced
the Sixth Article of the Ordinance of
1787, as well as the slavery provisions of the
Constitution, were compromise-derived.
Men had concluded "that slavery could
not be violently uprooted; that it must
be tolerated and protected for the time;
but that it was an evil the peaceful
death of which every real well-wisher of his
country would be glad to hasten."
But where was any real compromise? In a foot-
note, Hinsdale offered plausible reasons
for Virginia's favorable vote. She was
anxious to have the north side of the
Ohio settled to protect her own interests:
Indians north of the river had given
great trouble in the Kentucky area; Virginia
bounty lands would rise in value. In
other words, Hinsdale saw business concerns
having considerable influence. But since
he listed these matters in a footnote, the
assumption is that he did not have great
faith in them. To repeat, where was a
compromise that produced the Sixth
Article? Apparently, Hinsdale himself could
not find it, for in the face of his own
argument he wrote that there would have
5. Ray Allen Billington, Westward
Expansion. A History of the American Frontier (New York, 1960),
786: Ray Allen Billington, "The
Historians of the Northwest Ordinance," Illinois State Historical
Society, Journal, XL (December
1947), 410; Jay A. Barrett, Evolution of the Ordinance of 1787 with an
Account of the Earlier Plans for the
Government of the Northwest Territory (New
York, 1891), 77-80.
6. Clinton Rossiter, 1787: The Grand
Convention (New York, 1966), 269. Rossiter does not discuss
the Southern majority present on the day
of passage.
7. Bancroft, History of the United
States of America, VI, 117-118, 286-289.
8. John B. McMaster, A History of the
People of the United States, from the Revolution to the
Civil War (New York, 1893), I, 553-554, 578.
Ordinance of 1787 255
been no Ordinance at all but for the
Ohio Company purchase. Further, he con-
tended that if Congress rather than the
Constitutional Convention had been the
focus of public attention, the Ordinance
might still have failed of passage. Finally,
Hinsdale emphasized the basic
conservatism of the Ordinance of 1787 in restrict-
ing the people's right to govern
themselves.9 If conservatism really was the spirit
of the Ordinance, what can we say of
those who saw the Sixth Article as the last
breath of radicalism of the
Revolutionary era?
Andrew McLaughlin wrote that Southern
favor for the Sixth Article did not
mean that the South would apply the same
reasoning to all western land. But
what did the "Southern favor"
mean? McLaughlin cited the same letter of Grayson
to Monroe that Barrett used. In
addition, he claimed that the Southern states
believed they were outstripping the
North in wealth and population; thus, McLaugh-
lin left the impression that rapid
growth of the South would partly account for the
favor of the Sixth Article. In reading
his account of the Philadelphia Convention,
however, one is struck by his insistence
that the significant antagonism was not
large state against small state, but
rather a North-South confrontation.10 What bear-
ing, if any, then would this latter
conclusion of McLaughlin's have on the events
of the Confederation Congress meeting on
July 13 and passing, with a Southern
majority present, the Sixth Article?
In one sense, James Ford Rhodes was in
agreement with McLaughlin, for he
wrote that the adoption of the Northwest
Ordinance with the slavery prohibition
clause "was not considered an
anti-slavery triumph." Rather Rhodes, like Hinsdale,
saw the Ordinance's passage as "a
wise adjustment of opposing interests, and its
practically unanimous adoption was
gained through the operation on individual
minds of various and even conflicting
motives." One would wish very much that
Rhodes had been specific; for we do not
know to which "opposing interests" he
referred, and we do not know what the
"various and conflicting motives" were.
On the page following the one in which
he claimed the Ordinance was not con-
sidered an antislavery triumph, Rhodes
wrote: "In contriving the passage of this
ordinance, the friends of freedom
builded on a more magnificent scale than they
dreamed." Since the Ordinance was
Southern-passed, is one justified in asking
whether or not Southerners were the
"friends of freedom" or, if not, were Southern-
ers duped? Next, Rhodes stressed the
intransigence of North Carolina, South Car-
olina, and Georgia over the issue of the
foreign slave trade. How is this explained
in the light of the passage of the Sixth
Article and the action of the First Congress
in confirming its provisions? Rhodes
also insisted that the Constitutional conces-
sions made to slavery were made to
achieve union, which otherwise would have
been impossible. If this really be true,
what relation did those concessions have to
the work of the Confederation Congress
and the First Congress when considering
9. Hinsdale, The Old Northwest, 262-269,
335-337. Recently, Staughton Lynd did find what he
thinks is a compromise. In fact, he
calls it "The Compromise of 1787." He sees, although not too
clearly, a connection between the
Congress at New York and the Convention at Philadelphia. He
undoubtedly believes a deal was made
between the two groups as regards slavery--and other matters--
but he does not have enough evidence to
proceed far beyond an hypothesis. Staughton Lynd, "The
Compromise of 1787," Political
Science Quarterly, LXXXI (June 1966), 225-250. This article may also
be found in Lynd, Class Conflict,
Slavery and the United States Constitution: Ten Essays (Indianapolis,
1967), 185-213.
10. Andrew C. McLaughlin, The
Confederation and the Constitution, 1783-1789 (New York, 1905),
116-124, 231, 255. Lynd, in his
"The Compromise of 1787," wrote that "Because of the South's
mistaken
assumption about the future of the Northwest, an
anti-slavery clause could be included." p. 250.
256
OHIO HISTORY
their passage of the Sixth Article?
Contributing more to the confusion (and cycle
of contradictions?), Rhodes wrote that
in 1787 the general view was that slavery
would die of its own volition. Does that
make sense in light of what he said about
the Constitutional Convention? It does
not seem so, though perhaps it would make
sense in respect to the passage of the
Sixth Article. Next, Rhodes blamed the cot-
ton gin for perpetuating slavery. This
fits all right with the passage of the Sixth
Article but not with what he wrote
regarding the Philadelphia Convention.11
One is confronted with a problem similar
to that presented by Rhodes in Charles
Beard's statement that Virginia and
Maryland opposed foreign slave trade because
it would devalue slaves of which they
had a surplus.12 If he was correct, would
those states have been willing to close
off a large new area of the country to the
sale of their surplus Negroes?
Writing his American Negro Slavery a
few years after Max Farrand had argued
that slavery was not an important issue
in 1787,13 Ulrich B. Phillips seemed to
suggest that the Sixth Article was
agreed to by Southerners because of briefly
lingering Revolutionary radicalism.
Phillips made the matter more confusing by
agreeing with James Madison that the
real differences at Philadelphia were not
derived from sizes of states but from a
conflict between slaveholding and non-
slaveholding areas.14 If it
be accepted that slavery was a major issue at Philadelphia,
is a conclusion that radicalism was dead
there but still alive in New York valid?
Twenty years after Phillips' book on
slavery, Theodore Pease gave credit for
the slavery prohibition clause of the
Northwest Ordinance to the "humanitarianism
of the great Virginians"; however,
he immediately modified his reasoning by stat-
ing that "smug New England
prejudice went hand in hand with the enlightened
self-interest of southerners who did not
wish slave-grown tobacco from northwest
of the Ohio to compete with the produce
of the Old South." Did he mean by "smug
New England prejudice" that the New
Englanders' motives were more anti-Negro
than antislavery? Indeed, according to
Richard B. Morris, John Adams believed
that resentment of white labor for Negro
slaves had much to do with the abolition
movement in New England.15
In 1939 Arthur Young Lloyd wrote that it
was not strange at all that Southern-
ers voted for the 1787 Ordinance because
"throughout the history of the Conti-
nental Congress Southern representatives
many times denounced slavery and the
slave trade."16 On
the contrary, it seemed most strange that they should favor the
Sixth Article, that is unless geography
was the chief determinant of Southern high
motives. For why indeed did the 1784
Jefferson Ordinance have Southern opposi-
tion strong enough to remove its slavery
prohibition clause if Southerners were
sincere denouncers of slavery and the
slave trade? Further, why did Southerners
in 1787 insist on certain slavery
guarantees in the Federal Constitution?
11. James Ford Rhodes, History of the
United Slates from the Compromise of 1850 to the Final
Restoration of Home Rule at the South
in 1877 (New York, 1910), I, 15-19.
12. Charles A. Beard, An Economic
Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York,
1959), 177.
13. Max Farrand, The Framing of the
Constitution of the United States (New Haven, 1913), 110.
14. Ulrich B. Phillips, American
Negro Slavery (New York, 1933), 126-130.
15. Theodore C. Pease, "The
Ordinance of 1787," The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, XXV
(September 1938), 170; Richard B.
Morris, Government and Labor in Early America (New York,
1946), 183.
16. Arthur Young Lloyd, The Slavery
Controversy, 1831-1860 (Chapel Hill, 1939), 26-27.
Ordinance of 1787 257
Edmund C. Burnett, in his study of the
Continental Congress, cited a letter of
William Grayson to Madison, May 1785,
which predicted opposition to slavery
prohibitions for western lands. Grayson
explained that Rufus King had a resolu-
tion on that subject which he was
holding up until the Land Ordinance passed.
But in spite of the expected opposition,
Grayson told Madison that he believed
there would be seven states
"liberal enough to pass it." Did Grayson mean that
in 1785 he expected most Southern states
to oppose what they actually passed in
1787? Burnett also cited a letter of
Monroe's to Jefferson. At the time (1786),
Monroe was one of the five-man committee
named to draw up a temporary gov-
ernment for the territory until the
ordinance providing for government there could
be made operative. He wrote Jefferson
that he felt "the policy of these men to be
to keep them [the West] out of the
Confederacy altogether." Was there a possibility
that political fear of the West was so
great that slavery was to be prohibited delib-
erately to keep that region out of the
Union? On the other hand, perhaps slavery
was not even a serious question. Indeed,
Burnett did not agree with the view that
Manasseh Cutler and the Ohio Company
made the slavery prohibition a require-
ment before they would purchase.17
Although they mentioned the slavery
prohibition provision of the Ordinance of
1787 in their Growth Of The American
Republic, Samuel Morison and Henry Com-
mager did not discuss it. However, in
writing of the Confederation period, they
claimed that slaves were so numerous in
the South that Southerners could not
free them because emancipation would
present overwhelming economic and social
problems.18 Following that logic, why
did the South oppose the Jefferson Ordinance?
For had slavery been prohibited from
1784 south as well as north of the Ohio and
beyond the mountains, then future slave
problems in those areas might have been
avoided.
Like Morison and Commager, John Alden in
The South In The Revolution, 1763-
1789 concluded that Southerners did not proceed with
abolition as Northerners did
because of the prospect of great social
and economic problems derived from the
numbers of Negroes. Would it be in order
to conclude, therefore, that Southerners
could vote for the Sixth Article since
it presented no social or economic problems
to them? If that were the case--the
question is asked again--what would be the
logical reason for opposing Jefferson's
earlier clause on the subject? Alden saw too
little change in the quarter-century
after 1763 to speak of an internal revolution;
hence, he would not be likely to see the
Sixth Article as a product of the revolu-
tionary spirit of the times. He stated
that "it was said" Southerners agreed to ex-
clude slavery from the Northwest
Territory so that tobacco and indigo would not
be produced there and for other
political reasons. Alden did not appear to accept
with any enthusiasm these explanations.19
John D. Barnhart in his study published
in 1953 may shed more light on the
"other political reasons" of
Grayson's letter. Though not discussed directly, the
impression is left that Southerners
voted for the prohibition of slavery in the North-
west Territory because they felt the
antislavery clause would not apply once states
17. Edmund Cody Burnett, The
Continental Congress (New York, 1941), 632, 651-653, 685.
18. Samuel Eliot Morison and Henry
Steele Commager, The Growth of the American Republic
(New York, 1962), I, 245.
19. John R. Alden, The South in the
Revolution, 1763-1789 (Baton Rouge,
1957), 345-348. In Alden's
Rise of the American Republic, published in 1963, he wrote that the Sixth Article had
support of
Northerners and Southerners; however, he
offered no explanation or interpretation. p. 177.
258
OHIO HISTORY
had been carved from the territory,
because the Article contained a fugitive slave
clause (whereas the 1784 Ordinance had
not), and because the Ordinance in refer-
ence to inheritance exempted "the
French [and Canadians, if citizens of Virginia]
--permitting them to keep their laws and
customs relative to descent and convey-
ance of property. . . ."20 Two
recent authors, Eugene Berwanger and Lorman
Ratner, state that pro-Southern
sympathies were present as the Northwest became
populated. Berwanger said:
"Southern, non-slaveholding yeomen . . . were the
principal settlers of the early Old
Northwest. . . . the majority of these early South-
erners fled across the Ohio River in
order to escape the consequences of the slave
system as it was extended westward from
the tidewater." But he does not say these
settlers were antislavery; they were
anti-aristocratic Jeffersonian Democrats. Ratner
wrote that "because the Old Northwest
was populated in part by Southerners there
is in any study of that region the
complicated factor of an ingrained sympathy for
the slave system. . . ."21
Therefore, can we assume that the Southerners took a
"calculated risk" hoping that
pro-Southern settlers of the new
territory would
ultimately negate the Sixth Article?
Following another theory, writing a
decade earlier than Berwanger and Ratner,
John Hope Franklin, like many before
him, failed to mention that the Sixth Article
was Southern-passed when he concluded,
somewhat as had Ulrich B. Phillips, that
revolutionary sentiment and its
aftermath had much to do with the article's adop-
tion. This type of sentiment, Franklin
wrote, received a setback in the reaction that
produced the Constitution. (What would
be his explanation for the First Congress'
adoption of the entire Ordinance?)
Franklin saw, in his From Slavery To Freedom,
the three-fifths compromise in the
Constitution as evidence of the strength of the
nation's pro-slavery interests. Is it
fair, or sensible, to ask whether or not pro-
slavery strength in the Articles
Congress and in the First Congress was responsible
for prohibiting slavery in the Northwest
Territory? Further, Franklin wrote that
conservatives had no better success in
the Constitutional Convention than in check-
ing the antislavery movement.22 Why,
then, did they not undo the work of the
Confederation Congress when they met in
the First Congress? Is one forced to
conclude that the provisions of the
Sixth Article were unrelated to any antislavery
impulse and derived from something else?
Oscar T. Barck and Hugh T. Lefler in
their Colonial America and Robert A.
Rutland in his work on the
Anti-Federalists, made unequivocal statements on the
subject of the prohibition of slavery in
the Northwest Territory. As though there
were no questions at all regarding the
Sixth Article's passage, they cited the often
repeated story about preventing
"tobacco and indigo from being made on the
northwest side of the Ohio."23
David Hawke, however; wrote that apparently the
slavery article was designed "to
please New England investors in the Ohio Com-
20. John D. Barnhart, Valley of
Democracy. The Frontier Versus the Plantation in the Ohio Valley,
1775-1818 (Bloomington, 1953), 133-135. Barnhart's main
conclusion, however, was that the importance
of the Ordinance has always been
exaggerated. Eugene H. Berwanger, The Frontier Against Slavery.
Western Anti-Negro Prejudice and the
Slavery Extension Controversy (Urbana,
1967), 18. In his North
of Slavery. The Negro in the Free
States, 1790-1860 (Chicago, 1961),
Leon Litwack, although he did not
deal with the Ordinance of 1787,
demonstrated that Negroes were not wanted in the Northwest Terri-
tory. The primary reason was anti-Negro
attitudes rather than antislavery attitudes per se.
21. Lorman Ratner, Powder Keg.
Northern Opposition to the Antislavery Movement, 1831-1840
(New York, 1968), vii.
22. John Hope Franklin, From Slavery
to Freedom (New York, 1956), 139-143.
Ordinance of 1787 259
pany who hoped to attract settlers from
their region."24
On the other hand, as recently as 1968
Jack Eblen in The First And Second
United States Empires concluded that "Contrary to standard
interpretations, the
Ordinance of 1787 was not an adjunct of
the Ohio Company land scheme, designed
to promote settlement in the
Northwest." Regarding the Confederation Congress'
work on matters of population requirements
for a prospective state in the territory,
the number of states eventually to be
created, and slavery prohibition, Eblen stated,
"The coincidence of these
achievements suggests logrolling." Although he is not
explicit, one might very well conclude
that he believes Southerners were so eager
for the development of states in the
Northwest Territory to increase their power
in Congress--Southerners and Northerners
believed the new states "would have a
southern bias"--that they would
agree to slavery prohibition. Yet on the very next
page Eblen seemed to hesitate and wrote,
almost as if it were an afterthought, that
". . . on Friday, the 13th of July,
after adding an amendment prohibiting slavery
in the Northwest, it [Congress] adopted
the Ordinance unanimously." In spite of
what he said about the possibility of
logrolling, there seems to be implicit in his
narrative the belief that the slavery
prohibition provision was a last minute develop-
ment, and at the time relatively
unimportant. To be sure, Eblen did not explain
the Southern-passed Sixth Article except
to say in a footnote--a method prominently
used by historians when the Sixth
Article is involved--that "The question of whether
or not Article 6 of the compact . . .
was part of a North-South compromise over
the statehood article is
unclear."25
Many leading historians, however, have
not even resorted to the footnote, and
in their college textbooks as well as in
specialized studies have "solved" the prob-
lem by avoiding it. Chitwood;
Hofstadter, Miller, and Aaron; Malone and Rauch;
Perkins and Van Deusen: Blum, Catton, et
al.; and John Garraty are cases in
point. Although R. Kent Fielding's
textbook on United States history published in
1964 had for part of its title, "An
Interpretive History," he did not discuss the
slavery question when he dealt with the
ordinances of 1784 and 1787. Henry B.
Parkes did very little more, dismissing
the subject with the statement that the pro-
hibition of slavery was of great
importance.26
Thomas Clark in his Frontier America did
not completely avoid the issue, but
he did little to clear it up. He wrote
that "The slavery section . . . was not sub-
mitted until the other sections had been
voted upon." Clark's tone indicated that
he thought something was "put
over" on somebody; he did not point out that the
Sixth Article was Southern-passed.27
23. Oscar T. Barck, Jr., and Hugh T.
Lefler, Colonial America (New York, 1958), 712; Robert A.
Rutland, The Ordeal of the
Constitution. The Antifederalists and the Ratification Struggle of 1787-1788
(Norman, 1965), 92.
24. David Hawke, The Colonial
Experience (New York, 1966), 659.
25. Jack E. Eblen, The First and
Second United States Empires. Governors and Territorial Govern-
ment, 1784-1912 (Pittsburgh, 1968), 18, 37-40.
26. Oliver Perry Chitwood, A History
of Colonial America (New York, 1961), 613; Richard Hofstadter,
William Miller, and Daniel Aaron, The
American Republic (Englewood Cliffs, 1959), I, 220-222; Dumas
Malone and Basil Rauch, American
Origins to 1789 (New York, 1960), 215; Dexter Perkins and Glyndon
G. Van Deusen, The United States of
America, A History (New York, 1962), I, 184; John M. Blum,
Bruce Catton, et al., The National
Experience (New York, 1968), 129; John A. Garraty, The American
Nation. A History of the United
States (New York, 1966), 135; Henry B.
Parkes, The United States of
America. A History (New York, 1968), 124,
27. Thomas D. Clark, Frontier
America. The Story of the Westward Movement (New York, 1959), 146.
260
OHIO HISTORY
Hicks, Mowry, and Burke were somewhat
more specific in their textbook, writing
that the slavery prohibition article was
"doubtless a lure for New England settlers."
There is, of course, doubt as to the
relative merit of this theory; further, their
implication is that the article resulted
from strong antislavery sentiment. In a more
specialized study, but in a similar
vein, Benjamin Quarles spoke of the prohibition
as "an indication of growing
antipathy to slavery." Williams, Current, and Freidel
did not deal with the slavery article of
the Ordinance of 1787; however, they did
state that the Ordinance itself embodied
"the views of conservative Easterners"--
but passed by Southerners?28
In one of the most recently published
college textbooks on United States history,
Oscar Handlin, who like almost all the
others failed to mention that the Ordinance
was Southern-passed, wrote:
"Slavery was forbidden in order to prevent the spread
to virgin territory of an institution
out of accord with the spirit of the republic."29
The sentiment sounds good, but in light
of the history of the Sixth Article, how
adequate is his statement? Indeed,
Staughton Lynd wrote in 1966 that "Southern-
ers who sought to guarantee slave
property and to make possible a stronger South-
ern voice in Congress saw Northwest
settlement, even without slavery, as a means
to these ends."30
Finally, the editors of the New
American Nation Series, in their introduction to
Francis Philbrick's volume, The Rise
Of The New West, complimented the author
for his "masterly treatment of the
Northwest Territorial Ordinance of 1787." Phil-
brick, however, did not deal with the
problem which has been of concern here.31
It was suggested at the beginning of
this study that only a limited number of
works would be examined. Indeed, only
about forty have been actually cited with
more than one hundred years intervening
between the writing of the earliest and
the publication of the most recent.
Nevertheless, one can conclude that a number
of questions about the Sixth Article of
the Northwest Ordinance have been left
inadequately answered, or not answered
at all, and that some new questions need
to be asked.
28. John D. Hicks, George E. Mowry, and
Robert E. Burke, A History of American Democracy
(Boston, 1966), 100-101; Benjamin
Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 1961),
196; T. Harry Williams, Richard N.
Current, and Frank Freidel, A History of the United States to
1877 (New York, 1964), 175.
29. Oscar Handlin, The History of the
United States (New York, 1967), I, 283.
30. Lynd, "The Compromise of
1787," 250.
31. Francis S. Philbrick, The Rise of
the West, 1754-1830 (New
York, 1965), xii, 130-132.
J. DAVID GRIFFIN
Historians and the
Sixth Article of
The Ordinance of 1787
Writing in the North American Review in
1876, William F. Poole concluded that
"in the whole range of topics in
our national history there is none which has been
more obscure, or the subject of more
conflicting and erroneous statements, than
the Ordinance of 1787." When one
makes even cursory examination of a small
sample of the literature that has dealt
with the Ordinance, he is very likely to con-
clude that the statement must still
stand. This paper, however, is not concerned with
the whole Ordinance of 1787; its concern
is the Ordinance's Sixth Article:
There shall be neither slavery nor
involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise
than in the punishment of crimes whereof
the party shall have been duly convicted: Pro-
vided, always, that any person escaping
into the same, from whom labor or service is
lawfully claimed in any one of the
original States, such a fugitive may be lawfully reclaimed
and conveyed to the person claiming his
or her labor or service as aforesaid.
There were eighteen delegates present in
New York City at the Confederation
Congress on July 13, 1787, when the
Ordinance was passed. They were from Geor-
gia, South Carolina, North Carolina,
Virginia, Delaware, New Jersey, New York,
and Massachusetts; only one of the men,
Abraham Yates of New York, voted
against the Ordinance. All of the
Southern states except Maryland were present
for the vote; three of the New England
states and Pennsylvania were absent.1
Time and again, while reading studies on
the slavery prohibition article, this
author was struck not so much by what
the writer said, but by what he failed to
say or explain. On the other hand, when
a historian did the unusual and com-
mitted himself, almost without exception
his explanation seemed inadequate. For
example, James Schouler, when writing of
the Revolutionary era, saw slavery as a
very real issue. Congress, in 1774, he
wrote, had resolved to discontinue the slave
trade, but in 1776, "rather than
irritate men . . . ready to commit the colonies they
represented to Independence," gave
up the project. Schouler's implication was that
the "men" were Southerners.
Then he wrote that "by far the most momentous
achievement of . . . [1787] in the
Continental Congress was the passage of an ordi-
1. The North American Review is quoted in B. A. Hinsdale, The Old Northwest. The
Beginnings of
Our Colonial System (New York, 1899), 264-265; Henry Steele Commager, ed., Documents
of American
History (New York, 1968), 132, George Bancroft, History of
the United States of America, From the
Discovery of the Continent (New York, 1892), VI, 289-290.
Mr. Griffin is professor of history at
West Georgia College, Carrollton.