doubt
that there was a direct connection between them and the adoption of the
ordinance of government.

The Ordinance of 1787 was so successful in its working and its renown
became so great that claims of authorship, even for separate articles,
have been filed in the name of almost every person who had the slightest
excuse for being considered. Thousands of pages have been written in
eulogy and in dispute, to the helpful clearing up of some points and to
the obscuring of others. But the authorship of this or of that clause is
of much less importance than the scope of the document as a working plan
of government. As such the Ordinance of 1787 owes much to Jefferson's
Ordinance of 1784. Under the new ordinance a governor and three judges
were to be appointed who, along with their other functions, were to
select such laws as they thought best from the statute books of all the
States. The second stage in self-government would be reached when the
population contained five thousand free men of age; then the people were
to have a representative legislature with the usual privilege of
making their own laws. Provision was made for dividing the whole region
northwest of the Ohio River into three or four or five districts and the
final stage of government was reached when any one of these districts
had sixty thousand free inhabitants, for it might then establish its own
constitution and government and be admitted into the Union on an equal
footing with the original States.

The last-named provision for admission into the Union, being in the
nature of a promise for the future, was not included in the body of
the document providing for the government, but was contained in certain
"articles of compact, between the original States and the people and
States in the said territory, [which should] forever remain unalterable,
unless by common consent." These articles of compact were in general
similar to the bills of rights in State Constitutions; but one of them
found no parallel in any State Constitution. Article VI reads:
"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." This has been hailed as a farsighted,
humanitarian measure, and it is quite true that many of the leading men,
in the South as well as in the North, were looking forward to the time
when slavery would be abolished. But the motives predominating