Ohio History Journal

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J

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.