The Northwest Ordinance has played a key role in the growth of the United States economically, geographically, politically and institutionally. Since 1787, the year it passed Congress, many historians have studied the Northwest Ordinance and interpreted many aspects such as the why, how, what, who and significance. Below are a few different interpretations with quotes from a related historian.
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This also reminds us all that one event can have many interpretations.
OUR SERVICES
"A landmark in American economic history."
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-Professors Douglass North and Andrew Rutten 1987
Economic Approach
"Competent form of government was needed before settlers would risk settlement."
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-William Poole 1876
Nationalist Approach
Herbert Baxter Adams, 1850-1901, Conservative Approach
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"Magna Carta of the West"
"The men of the Ohio Company were an unsavory crew - they were particularly shifty and tricky specimens of the genus that throughout the course of American history has sought to reap where it has not been sowed and to extract speculative profit from the man who desires land that he may till it with his own hands."
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-Thomas Calvin Pease, 1938, Economic Determinist Approach
(The was based on economic greed.)
"An unrepresentative and undemocratic system of government for the territory but the six articles were nothing less than a limited bill of rights."
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John D. Barnhart
1895-1967
Constitutional Approach
"Passage of the Ordinance was no mere accident. It was the result of an informal compromise which enabled delegates at the Constitutional Convention to complete their work over the matter of slavery."
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-Staughton Lynd, 1960s
Conservative Approach
Peter S. Onuf,1987
Realist Approach
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"The Ordinance was merely an important state paper."
"The Northwest Ordinance's most direct impact was on policy regarding the political development of the territories."
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-Professors Douglass North and Andrew Rutten 1987
Economic Approach
"Article VI of the Northwest Ordinance became the 'proximate ancestor of the fugitive slave clause of the Constitution."
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William W. Wiecek
1977
Constitutional Approach
