Communication 19.2 from Dwight Vicente re Resident Population

Home

t 442 rut OLD NORTHWEST IN THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION Northrm Illinois University, Fresno State College, the University of Connecticut,and the University of Oklahoma.After the publication of the The First and Second United States Empires, 1784-1912 (1968),he turned his scholarly endeavors to historical demography. Since 1974 he has been a member of the Sociology Drpartment and the Population Resenrch Center,University of Chicago. TH E MONTH of July,1787,was one of the most momentous in American history. In that month the Philadelphia Conven- tion and the Confederation Congress simultaneously resolved fundamental problems of government leading to the formal organization of the first United States empire.The Philadelphia Convention hammered out the basic provisions for a new constitution to establish a stronger central government. In hatching its plan to replace the Articles of Confederation,the Convention also worked out the ideas and mechanics of feder- alism between the states, and formulated the concept of a federal empire.Controversy over the exact form of the empire was to result in the unanimous adoption,in August,of Gouver- neur Morris' vague proposal, which simply granted the new Congress imperial powers without deliniating or delimiting them,rather than James Madison's more detailed plan. In the meantime,the Confederation Congress,sitting in New York City, had been moving along a parallel line. On July 18, 1787, after more than a year of sporadic debate, it enacted a relatively precise plan of colonial government for the public domain north of the Ohio River. One of the most significant laws in American history,the Northwest Ordinance prescribed the philosophical and structural framework for a United States colonial system bawd on that of the old British Empire. The Ordinance defined rrpublicanism and specified it tobe the only acceptable form of.government for the colonies and future states.its basic ideas were to be applied more or less successfully Erom lark F.Eblen,"Origin of the United Statee Colonial System:The Ordinance of 1787;'in the Wi—rtot Magazine of nizhny,LI:294-314(Sommer,19681:reprinted wit hnm foomoira with of the wiuensin Mattuine of Ilift". i ORICIN5 Or Ttif AMERICAN COLONIAI.sysTEM 44 i in the United States possessions for over 175 years and its provisions were to lay the foundation for the governments of the thirty-one public lands states and Hawaii. In short, the Ordinance led to the imposition of a uniform system of politics throughout the American empire. Together, then, the Phila- delphia Convention and the Confederation Congress in Ju15, 1787, adopted co-ordinate parts of a system for a federal republican empire that was to shape the course of I Tnited Stales history. Contrary to standard interpretations,the Ordinance or 1787 was not an adjunct of the Ohio Company's land scheme,de- signed to promote settlement in the Northwest. Nor did the Confederation Congress enact it precipitously under pressure from the Reverend Manasseh Cutler,the Company's lobbyist. Cutler had little if any influence over the final form or content of the Ordinance. Instead, the Northwest Ordinance had dis- tinct pre-Revolutionary colonial origins and evolved in stages. This evolution was the work of the three men--l-homas Jef- ferson, James Monroe, and Nathan Dane—who successively dominated the congressional committees charged with devising a frame of government for the public domain between early 1784 and July of 1787. Jefferson was probably the first man to formulate the basic principles for a United States colonial policy. In 1776 Virginia made extravagant claims of ownership to most of the land west of the Appalachian Mountains.By generously interpreting the "west and northwest" sea-to-sea boundary provisions of the 1609 colonial charter, Virginia claimed title not only to Ken- tucky but also to all of the land west of Pennsylvania north of the Ohio River—that is, the entire Northwest Territory. But Jef- ferson believed in the classical idea that republican states are inevitably small and did not think democratic republican insti- tutions could flourish in so large a state.Since he was unable or unwilling at this time to reconcile classical republicanism with imperialism, he feared that unless its size was drastically re- duced an undemocratic imperial government would develop as the populated area of Virginia increased. Early in 1776, when drafting a constitution for Virginia, Jefferson acted to insure the permanence of repuhlicanism in his state.He tried to raise to the sanctity of cnnsthntional law his