Territory

The U.S. Constitution sets out two distinct types of territory and methods of governance: states and U.S. territories. The territory of the United States itself was constituted from the thirteen independent states that were first joined under the Articles of Confederation (1781). The states are named in Article I, section 2, which sets out the apportionment of members for the new House of Representatives (see Reapportionment), pending the first official census. Article VII declares that ratification by just nine of the thirteen states would be “sufficient for the Establishment of this Constitution between the States so ratifying the Same.” In the end, by 1790 all thirteen states had ratified the document. Today the territory of the Union comprises the fifty states of the United States, but additional territories that are not a part of any state also come under the nation’s jurisdiction.

At the time the Constitution went into effect, additional territories were claimed by some states, mostly to the north and west of the original thirteen. The process of dealing with these lands had begun in 1780, before the adoption of the Articles of Confederation, when the Continental Congress approved the policy that lands ceded to the confederation would “be settled and formed into distinct republican states, which would become members of the Federal Union.” A Territorial Ordinance was drafted by Thomas Jefferson and adopted in 1784. And then in July 1787, while the Constitutional Convention of 1787 was in progress in Philadelphia, the Congress adopted the [Page 541] Northwest Ordinance. Probably the most important act of the preconstitutional Congress, this law established the basic principles that would be used to convert territories of the United States into states on an equal footing with the other existing states.

...