The inter­view didn’t answer all my ques­tions but taught me things I didn’t know. I doubt that many Amer­i­can school­child­ren know them either. Nev­er­the­less, the North­west Ordi­nance deserves broad­er familiarity.

Dr. Arnn’s remarks need lit­tle elab­o­ra­tion here. But among the points he empha­sizes are these.

1) There were actu­al­ly two vast land acts, the oth­er 1785.

2) That both acts passed under the Arti­cles of Con­fed­er­a­tion. The North­west Ordi­nance passed in New York in July 1787, while the Con­sti­tu­tion was being debat­ed in Philadel­phia.  This con­tra­dicts my school­boy impres­sions that noth­ing of impor­tance hap­pened between the end of the Amer­i­can Rev­o­lu­tion (1783) and adop­tion of the Constitution.

3) On acts of nation­al import, the Arti­cles of Con­fed­er­a­tion required una­nim­i­ty, includ­ing the South. This was why, in many cas­es, they were inad­e­quate for deal­ing with mat­ters apply­ing to the states as a whole.

4) That the acts were nec­es­sary to pay for the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War. The Arti­cles of Con­fed­er­a­tion did not con­vey the right to levy nation­wide tax­a­tion, and the Con­gress that had fought the war was deeply in debt.

5) The North­west Ordi­nance cre­at­ed the town­ships that are still basic com­po­nents of Amer­i­can local gov­ern­ment today. They were formed in the shape of blocks for ease of assign­ment, retaining one space in the mid­dle of each. Its pur­pose was not gov­ern­ment, as you might expect. It was edu­ca­tion, which the founders con­sid­ered the most essen­tial of pub­lic services.

6) Such con­cepts marked marked a dra­mat­ic depar­ture from Euro­pean and feu­dal norms. In Eng­land, for exam­ple, gen­er­a­tions farmed or worked on land belong­ing to oth­ers. Now, the Ordi­nance was say­ing, that any Amer­i­can cit­i­zen could buy and own his own land.

9) And those states—Ohio, Indi­ana, Illi­nois, Michi­gan, Wis­con­sin and Minnesota—would in time pro­vide the sur­feit of troops who would win the Civ­il War, pre­serv­ing the union and end­ing slav­ery where it still existed.

…had ever before declared such pre­cepts: that all are equal, enti­tled to nat­ur­al rights and rule of law, how­ev­er imper­fect­ly it served those truths in the begin­ning. Here Dr. Arnn’s point is pow­er­ful. Much of the “title-deeds” were writ­ten by Thomas Jef­fer­son, so often por­trayed as a hyp­ocrite slave own­er. Yet Jef­fer­son nev­er spoke about slav­ery except to con­demn it. We can argue that he insuf­fi­cient­ly opposed it, Dr. Arnn says. But then we have to con­sid­er what was pos­si­ble in the state of things. How­ev­er, no one can argue that he saw it as any­thing but a moral wrong that had to go.

Years before the Rev­o­lu­tion, Ben­jamin Franklin was liv­ing main­ly in Lon­don, where he rep­re­sent­ed the inter­ests of sev­er­al colonies includ­ing Geor­gia, Mass­a­chu­setts and New Jer­sey. On sev­er­al occa­sions, Dr. Arnn notes, Franklin had tried to explain the new ideas about nat­ur­al rights flour­ish­ing in the Amer­i­can colonies, all the while insist­ing that they remained loy­al to the Crown. The Eng­lish ridiculed him and shout­ed him down. Even­tu­al­ly Franklin report­ed home to brace for war. In France, where sim­i­lar ideas were per­co­lat­ing, Franklin found broad­er wel­come, although those ideas wouldn’t work out quite as neat­ly there as they would in North America.