The Governor shall, as soon as may be, proceed to lay out the District into counties and townships, subject, however, to such alterations as may thereafter be made by the Legislature, so soon as there shall be five thousand free male inhabitants, of full age, within the said District. Upon giving due proof thereof to the Governor, they shall receive authority, with time and place, to elect representatives from their counties and townships as aforesaid, to represent them in General Assembly: provided, that for every five hundred free male inhabitants, there shall be one representative, and so on progressively with the number of free male inhabitants shall the right of representation increase, until the number of representatives amount to twenty-five; after which the number and proportion of representatives shall be regulated by the Legislature: provided, that no person shall be eligible or qualified to act as a representative, unless he be a citizen of one of the United States, or have resided within such District three years, and shall likewise hold, in his own right, in fee simple, two hundred acres of land within the same: provided also, that a freehold or life estate in fifty acres of land in the said District, if a citizen of any of the United States, and two years' residence if a foreigner, in addition, shall be necessary to qualify a man as elector for the said representative.

The representatives thus elected shall serve for the term of two years, and in case of the death of a representative, or removal from office, the Governor shall issue a writ to the county or township for which he was a member, to elect another in his stead, to serve for the residue of the time.

The General Assembly shall consist of the Governor, a Legislative Council, to consist of five members, to be appointed by the United States in Congress assembled, to continue in office during pleasure, any three of whom to be a quorum; and a House of Representatives, who shall have a legislative authority complete in all cases for the good government of the said District: provided, that no act of the said General Assembly shall be construed to affect any lands the property of the United States; and provided, further, that the lands of the non-resident proprietors shall in no instance be taxed higher than the lands of residents.

All bills shall originate indifferently either in the Council or House of Representatives, and, having been passed by a majority in both Houses, shall be referred to the Governor for his assent, after obtaining which they shall be complete and valid; but no bill or legislative act whatever shall be valid, or of any force without his assent. The Governor shall have power to convene, prorogue, and dissolve the General Assembly when in his opinion it shall be expedient.

The said inhabitants or settlers shall be subject to pay a part of the Federal debts, contracted or to be contracted, and to bear a proportional part of the burdens of the Government, to be apportioned on them by Congress, according to the same common rule and measure by which apportionments thereof shall be made on the other States.

The Governor, Judges, Legislative Council, Secretary, and such other officers as Congress shall at any time think proper to appoint in such District, shall take an oath or affirmation of fidelity; the Governor before the President of Congress, and all other officers before the Governor, prescribed on the 17th day of January, 1785, to the Secretary of War, mutatis mutandis.

Whensoever any of the said States shall have of free inhabitants as many as are equal in number to the one-thirteenth part of the citizens of the original States, to be computed from the last enumeration, such State shall be admitted by its delegates into the Congress of the United States, on an equal footing with the said original States: provided the consent of so many States in Congress is first obtained as may at that time be competent to such admission.

Resolved, That the resolutions of the 23d of April, 1784, be and the same are hereby annulled and repealed. (Western Law Jour. V. 534.)

The impression which this draft made upon Mr. Force's mind he expressed as follows: "Such was the Ordinance for the government of the Western Territory when it was ordered to a third reading on the 10th of May, 1787. It had then made no further progress in the development of those great principles for which it has been distinguished as one of the greatest monuments of civil jurisprudence. It made no provisions for the equal distribution of estates. It said nothing of extending the fundamental principles of civil and religious liberty, — nothing of the rights of conscience, knowledge, or education. It did not contain the articles of compact which were to remain unaltered forever unless by common consent.'

We now come to the time when these great principles were for the first time brought forward. On the 9th of July a new committee was appointed, consisting of Mr. Carrington of Virginia, Mr. Dane of Massachusetts, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, Mr. Kean of South Carolina, and Mr. Smith of New York. The new members, Carrington, Lee, and Kean, were a majority, and all Southerners. Two days later this committee

reported the great bill of rights known as the Ordinance of 1787.

Mr. Force, who accepted Mr. Webster's statement that Mr. Dane was the author of the Ordinance, was puzzled by the fact that Mr. Carrington, a new member from Virginia, was placed at the head of the committee, to the exclusion of Mr. Dane and Mr. Smith, both of whom had served on a previous committee, and he asked the reason why. Several other questions, quite as difficult of solution, must have suggested themselves to his mind. Why were three Southern members, all new men, and constituting a majority of the committee, put in charge of drafting an antislavery ordinance for a Northern territory, which had been defeated by the entire vote of the South three years before? If antislavery principles were so popular with Southern members, why did not Mr. Dane insert an antislavery clause in the ordinance which was to have taken its third reading on the 10th of May? As Mr. Johnson of Connecticut was the chairman of that committee, and three out of five of its members were Northern men, why did not the committee make it an antislavery ordinance? Whence did so much light dawn so suddenly upon the mind of Mr. Dane, when associated with a majority of Southern members on another committee? What is the explanation of the entire unanimity of feeling and action on the slavery question, then exhibited for the first and last time, in the whole history of our national legislation ?

If Mr. Force had analyzed the vote by which the Ordinance passed four days after the committee was appointed, he would have been still further puzzled. New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Maryland were not then represented by delegates in Congress, all of them Northern and Middle States, except the last. Of the eight States represented, and all voting for the Ordinance, only three

Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey - were Northern and Middle States. The Ordinance was really carried by the votes of Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. The only individual who voted nay was Mr. Yates from New York. Mr. Dane subsequently explained this vote by saying, in his letter to Rufus King: "Yates apVOL. CXXIII. NO. 251.

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peared in this case, as in most others, not to understand the subject at all." As there were three delegates present from New York, the vote of Mr. Yates was neutralized.

Any satisfactory history of the Ordinance of 1787 must explain the enigmas we have suggested, and it must be a full and complete explanation. When the astronomer discovers irregular movements in a planet which cannot be explained by known causes, he infers that they arise from some outside and hitherto unknown body, and he sets himself to find it. The nature of the perturbations gives him an indication of the volume and locality of the occult influence. It is evident, from the investigation we have followed, that some sudden and potent influence was brought to bear upon Congress in the early days of July, 1787, which changed the whole current of action respecting the organic law for the government of the Northwestern Territory, which inspired new ideas, and suddenly crystallized in the matchless specimen of legislation which we are considering. What was that influence? To this inquiry we will now direct our attention.

On the afternoon of July 5, a dusty traveller, in the garb of a New England clergyman, arrived in New York City, and drove up, in his one-horse sulky, to the "Plow and the Harrow," a tavern in the Bowery; and sent his horse for entertainment to the Bowery barns. Twelve days before he had left his home in the town of Ipswich, in the eastern part of Massachusetts, and had made the journey in his private carriage, there being no public conveyances at that time. His business in New York was to buy of Congress, there in session, a million and a half acres of land in the Northwest Territory for a settlement under the auspices of the "Ohio Company of Associates." His name was DR. MANASSEH CUTLER. He remained in New York and the vicinity about three weeks, bought his million and a half acres for the Ohio Company, and about four million acres for other parties. In April of the following year, the Ohio Company made the first English settlement of the Northwest Territory at Marietta, Ohio, at the mouth of the Muskingum, on the land which Dr. Cutler had bought on this occasion. General Washington, writing from Mount Vernon, two months later, said: "No colony in Amer

ica was ever settled under such favorable auspices as that which has just commenced at the Muskingum. Information, property, and strength will be its characteristics. I know many of the settlers personally, and there never were men better calculated to promote the welfare of such a community. If I were a young man, just preparing to begin the world, or, if advanced in life, and had a family to make a provision for, I know of no country where I should rather fix my habitation than in some part of that region."* While the good Doctor was in New York transacting this business, the Ordinance of 1787 was drafted and passed. The writer has in his possession the manuscript journal Dr. Cutler kept during this period, and only extracts from it have ever been printed. This journal supplements the material which Mr. Force discovered, and shedding light upon those few days in July, enables us to see why, how, and by whom, that sudden action of Congress was inspired.

A word of explanation is needed as to the Ohio Company, and some account of Dr. Cutler, who was its agent. The close of the Revolutionary war was marked by a period of the deepest financial distress. The country was exhausted. The officers and soldiers of the army had been paid off in government certificates bearing interest, which had depreciated to one sixth of their nominal value; business was stagnant, the country was flooded with these certificates, and the government had little available income and no credit on which it could borrow money. A scheme was devised by leading officers of the late army in the eastern part of Massachusetts, to form a company, the capital of which should be these depreciated certificates, for the purchase of land from the government for actual settlement. A meeting of officers for this purpose was held at the Bunch-of-Grapes Tavern in Boston, on the 1st of March, 1786. Such a company was formed, and subscription books were opened. On the 8th of March, 1787, the subscribers to the shares met again at Brackett's Tavern in Boston, and the committee on subscriptions made so favorable a report that Dr. Cutler, one of the directors and a chaplain in the late Revolutionary army, was instructed to proceed to New York and negotiate for the purchase of the land from Congress.

* Sparks's edition of Washington's Writings, Vol. IX. p. 385.