Northwest Ordinance

The Northwest Ordinance (1787) was an act of the U.S. Congress, which provided an outline for how the “Old Northwest” territory would achieve statehood. Prior to the 1787 Ordinance, the Land Ordinance of 1784 established that the area would be divided into states, and the Land Ordinance of 1785 provided that the territory, and future states, would be divided into townships. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 superseded the 1784 Land Ordinance, while supplementing the Land Ordinance of 1785. In effect, the Northwest Ordinance sustained the previous federal policy of supporting public education in the form of land grants in the territories of the Old Northwest.

The Old Northwest was composed of the current U.S. states of Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Federal land in this area was sold to the privately held Ohio Company, led by Connecticut-resident Manasseh Cutler, on the [Page 671]condition that the land company would develop the area according to the guidelines set forth in the 1785 and 1787 ordinances. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 established that once the population reached 60,000 inhabitants, the territory could draft a constitution and apply for statehood. This ordinance resembled portions of the U.S. Bill of Rights and guaranteed freedom of religion, habeas corpus, and trial by jury; prohibited slavery; and guaranteed Native American property rights.

The policy for the settlement of the Old Northwest, laid out in the Ordinance of 1785, was modeled on New England's Township form of government. Unlike the Land Ordinance of 1785, which specified that a one-square-mile section of each township be dedicated to the support and establishment of public schools, the 1787 Ordinance simply encouraged the establishment of schools. The absence of an actual mechanism for establishing and supporting public schools in the 1787 Northwest Ordinance was an apparent endorsement of the plan established by the Land Ordinance of 1785. Another educational precedent in the Land Ordinance of 1785 was the provision that two townships in each state be set aside for the establishment of universities. In the following years, all of the states of the Old Northwest accepted a state responsibility toward free, public education in their state constitutions and built public institutions of higher learning.

The mechanism by which this land was to be converted to support education was by land rentals. The practice of renting land to support education was an English practice, carried to the New England colonies. Recent scholarship has established that although the spirit of the Northwest Ordinance aimed to support free public schooling through land grants, often the grants did not translate into significant revenue for schools. Because there was an abundance of available land, the school lands often sat vacant, producing no financial support. Another shortcoming of the land-grant policy was that land was often sold immediately for pennies on the dollar or was leased on permanent leases, thus insulating the renters from paying market rates in future years. In A History of American Education, Joseph Watras argues that the money generated from the sale or rental of these lands was often used for noneducational purposes, as a result of little to no oversight by the Continental Congress. As a result, abuses were present in the system and the land grants produced much less support for public schools than was originally thought.

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