The Significance of Excluding Slavery from the Old Northwest in 1787

The Significance of Excluding Slavery from the Old Northwest in 1787 David Brion Davis” Fifty-two years before Congress enacted the Northwest Ordi- nance, the British government excluded slaves from the colony of Georgia.’ Although this precedent has been conspicuously ignored in debates over the meaning of Article VI of the Northwest Ordi- nance, the parallels are intriguing. In both cases the prohibition of slavery was adopted as part of a separate legislative act and not incorporated in a founding charter or national Constitution. While the intentions of the Confederation Congress are more obscure than those of James Oglethorpe and the trustees of Georgia, it is clear that neither measure was expected to endanger slavery in adjacent territories or challenge the legitimacy of slaveholding in general. The 1735 prohibition allowed Carolinians to reclaim blacks who escaped into Georgia, just as krticie VI provided for the return of fugitives “to the person claiming his or her labor or service.” The advocates of a free-soil Georgia were anything but aboli- tionists. Oglethorpe was deputy governor of the slave-trading Royal African Company and also owned slaves on a Carolina plantation. The prohibition act provided for the sale of any unclaimed blacks found in the colony. The trustees were to receive the proceeds. In 1787, as far as is known, no southern members of the Congress of the Confederation voiced the slightest disapproval of Article VI, which a committee of five, including a South Carolinian and two Virginians, suddenly added at the last minute to the finished text of the Northwest Ordinance. Staughton Lynd and Paul Finkelman, in their masterly stud- ies of Article VI, have underscored the contrast between the har- * David Brion Davis is Sterling professor of history, Yale University, New Ha- ven, Connecticut. For the citation of primary sources and a brief discussion of excluding slaves from Georgia, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, N.Y., 1966), 144-50. INDIANA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY, LXXXIV (March, 1988). t’1988, Trustees of Indiana University. 76 Indiana Magazine of History monious congressional deliberations and the nearly con- temporaneous debates in the Constitutional Convention.2 From July 9 to July 12, 1787, sectional anger erupted at Philadelphia as the convention argued about the three-fifths rule for apportioning representatives in the House of Representatives. A few northerners objected that allowing representation for slaves would encourage further slave importation from Africa. Delegates from South Car- olina and Georgia demanded constitutional protection for slavery as the price for union. Subsequent conflicts in the convention and in the First Congress under the new Constitution showed how ex- plosive the South would become in the face of any perceived threat to its most valuable form of property. Yet on July 13, the day after the Constitutional Convention provisionally accepted the three-fifths compromise, the Continental Congress, chaired by a southerner, adopted the Northwest Ordinance with its newly added Article VI, which had not appeared in the draft of July 11. A northerner cast the single dissenting vote. When the First Congress reenacted the Ordinance in 1789, the southerners who would soon become so out- raged by cautiously worded antislavery petitions seem not to have sensed an abolitionist Trojan Horse or entering wedge. Parallels between the slavery exclusions of 1735 and 1787 ex- tend beyond slaveholder concurrence. Both the British and Ameri- can governments hoped to attract enterprising white migrants who would rapidly settle a territory that reached toward a Spanish frontier. Some of the planners, at least, sought white settlers from a social class that could not afford to buy slaves-settlers who, as experience had shown, had been deterred from emigrating to the more prosperous plantation regions. Oglethorpe and his philan- thropic supporters were thinking of British debtors and German peasants who could contribute to imperial self-sufficiency by pro- ducing such commodities as silk and wine. The later American de- velopers were thinking of a less debased class of yeoman farmers who would clear the land of Indians and trees, cultivate grains, build roads, towns, churches, and schools, and eventually be capa- ble of self-government. Despite this difference, both blueprints en- visioned a fusion of individual opportunity and national interest that depended on maintaining the dignity of physical labor. One of 2 Paul Finkelman, “Slavery and the Northwest Ordinance: A Study in Ambi- guity,” Journal of the Early Republic, VI (Winter, 1986), 343-70; Staughton Lynd, “The Compromise of 1787,” Political Science Quarterly, LXXXI (June, 1966), 225- 50. See also J. David Griffin, “Historians and the Sixth Article of The Ordinance of 1787,” Ohio History, LXXVIII (Autumn, 1969), 252-60; Peter S. Onuf, Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance (Bloomington, 1987), 85, 109, 109- 32; Donald L. Robinson, Slavery in the Structure of American Politics, 1765-1820 (New York, 1971), 378-83, 403; David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca, N.Y., 19751, 152-59; Edward Coles, History of the Ordinance of 1787 (Philadelphia, 1856). Significance of Excluding Slavery 77 the motives for excluding slavery, at least in the initial period of settlement, was the fear that whites would be demoralized and cor- rupted by the presence of black slave competitors. Far more important, in the case of Georgia, was the need for a secure buffer zone between South Carolina and Spanish Florida. The British were alarmed by the Spaniards’ success in encouraging black resistance in Carolina and offering a refuge for fugitive slaves. This anxiety deepened when Oglethorpe failed to capture St. Au- gustine and when the slave unrest exploded in the Stono Rebellion. The Spanish borderlands had a different but no less significant bearing on the Northwest Ordinance. Robert V. Remini, in his in- augural address to this conference, has graphically described the dangers of the mid-l780s, when southwestern settlers were pre- pared to transfer their allegiance to Spain if Congress refused to recognize their vital need for water transport to the Gulf of Mexico. Most southern leaders put the highest priority on securing from Spain the right to free navigation of the Mississippi River. What- ever tradeoffs led to the acceptance of Article VI, it seems likely that southerners expected the bargain to quiet most northern op- position to rapid westward expansion, including the demand for access to the Mississippi and for the undelayed admission of slaveholding states south of the Ohio River. But as the trustees of Georgia soon discovered, an act prohib- iting slavery is not self-enforcing. In 1735 slavery was universally sanctioned by the law of nations, and black slaves were openly sold and traded in England as well as in every New World colony. Pe- titions from white settlers in Georgia, including illiterates who could not sign their names, predicted that the colony would sink into ruin unless quickly supplied with black slaves. A few antislavery petitioners spoke of the Africans’ natural right to freedom. They also argued that slaves would deprive white laborers and crafts- men of work and endanger the colony with bloody insurrections. But meanwhile, no institutions were effective in preventing Caro- lina planters from crossing the Savannah River with their slaves or even slave ships from landing their cargoes in Savannah. In 1749 the trustees finally capitulated and asked Parliament to repeal the prohibition. Paul Finkelman has recently analyzed the ambiguities of the Northwest Ordinance with respect to slavery and has emphasized the failure of Congress to enact any enforcement legislation. As early as July, 1788, the Franco-American slaveholders residing in the territory petitioned Congress to secure their slave property from the effects of what they considered an “Ex post facto law” that seemed to violate the terms of the Treaty of Paris of 1763 and the Virginia land cession of 1784. Like some of the earlier Georgian petitioners, the French settlers contended that the obnoxious law would depopulate parts of the territory. And, in actuality, some of 78 Indiana Magazine of History the more affluent French slaveholders sought security in the Span- ish territory across the Mississippi. Although Congress never took action to clarify the status of slaves living in the Old Northwest before 1787, Finkelman points out that the report of a three-mem- ber congressional committee that included James Madison “sug- gests how truly uncommitted the Founders were to ending ~lavery.”~ Governor Arthur St. Clair and other officials conveyed the same reassuring message to the inhabitants of the territory; namely, that Article VI pertained to the future introduction of slaves and was not intended to deprive present inhabitants of property they pos- sessed at the time the Ordinance was passed. As Finkelman and other historians have shown, settlers continued to petition Con- gress to repeal or modify Article VI, while the territorial governments of Indiana and Illinois tried to attract slaveholders by giving sanction to various forms of involuntary servitude. Until the well- known electoral struggle of 1823-1824, there was a genuine pos- sibility that Illinois would become a slave state. As in colonial Georgia, the issue turned on local conditions and demography. For- tunately, the Northwest was not adjacent to South Carolina and the Atlantic. From Finkelman’s forceful arguments it might well be concluded that the Northwest Ordinance was no more significant as an antislavery measure than the British law of 1735 “for rendering the Colony of Georgia more Defencible.” But such a verdict wcjuld ignore the extraordinary power of antislavery ideology, which must be distinguished from Garrison- ian immediatism. The principle that slavery should be excluded from the virgin West became the core of an antislavery and Repub- lican party ideology that obscured the economic benefits of coerced labor and transformed the moral meaning of national interest.

Load more