The Northwest Ordinance

The Northwest Ordinance

The Northwest Ordinance (formally An Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States, North-West of the River Ohio, and also known as the Freedom Ordinance or The Ordinance of 1787) was an act of the Congress of the Confederation of the United States (the Confederation Congress), passed July 13, 1787. The ordinance created the Northwest Territory, the first organized territory of the United States, from lands beyond the Appalachian Mountains, between British Canada and the Great Lakes to the north and the Ohio River to the south. The upper Mississippi River formed the Territory's western boundary.

On August 7, 1789, first President George Washington signed a replacement, the Northwest Ordinance of 1789, in which the new U.S. Congress reaffirmed the Ordinance with slight modifications under the newly effective Constitution of the United States. The Ordinance purported to be not merely legislation that could later be amended by the Congress, but rather "the following articles shall be considered as Articles of compact between the original States and the people and states in the said territory, and forever remain unalterable, unless by common consent.

The U.S. Supreme Court recognized the authority of the Northwest Ordinance of 1789 within the applicable Northwest Territory as constitutional in Strader v. Graham, 51 U.S. 82, 96, 97 (1851), but did not extend the Ordinance to cover the respective states once they were admitted to the Union.[3]

The prohibition of slavery in the territory had the practical effect of establishing the Ohio River as the boundary between free and slave territory in the region between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River. This division helped set the stage for national competition over admitting free and slave states, the basis of a critical question in American politics in the 19th century until the Civil War.

An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery

An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery, passed by the Pennsylvania legislature on 1 March 1780, was one of the first attempts by a government in the Western Hemisphere to begin an abolition of slavery.

The Act prohibited further importation of slaves into the state, required Pennsylvania slaveholders to annually register their slaves (with forfeiture for noncompliance, and manumission for the enslaved), and established that all children born in Pennsylvania were free persons regardless of the condition or race of their parents.

Those enslaved in Pennsylvania before the 1780 law went into effect remained enslaved for life. Another act of the Pennsylvania legislature freed them in 1847.

Pennsylvania's "gradual abolition" — rather than Massachusetts's 1783 "instant abolition" — became a model for freeing slaves in other Northern states.

Quock Walker

Quock Walker, also known as Kwaku or Quok Walker (b. 1753 - d. unknown), was an Americanslave who sued for and won his freedom in June 1781 in a case citing language in the new Massachusetts Constitution (1780) that declared all men to be born free and equal. The case is credited with helping abolish slavery in Massachusetts, although the 1780 constitution was never amended to explicitly prohibit the practice. Massachusetts was the first state of the union to effectively and fully abolish slavery. By the 1790 federal census, no slaves were recorded in the state.

Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves

The Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves of 1807 (2Stat.426, enacted March 2, 1807) is a United States federal law that stated that no new slaves were permitted to be imported into the United States. It took effect in 1808, the earliest date permitted by the United States Constitution.

This legislation was part of the general trend toward abolishing the slave trade, which individual U.S. states had restricted during the American Revolution, and the national Congress first regulated against in the Slave Trade Act of 1794. The 1807 Act ended the legality of all international slave trade with the U.S. However, it was not always well enforced. The institution of slavery continued in the United States until the end of the Civil War and the adoption of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. The domestic trade was so extensive that more than one million slaves were forcibly transported from the Upper South to the Deep South in the antebellum years; some were transported by ship in the coastwise trade; others by steamboat on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers, and others had to walk in coffles overland.