History of the Ordinance of 1787 and the Old Northwest Territory
A Supplemental Text for School Use
Various Authors
9781465642936
102 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
While much of the history of the American colonies has been ably presented in other school history texts, and it is not the province of this book to rehearse it, there is reason for a brief summary which will place in the mind of the reader the background for the events of which this book treats. It is not easy to value or even to understand the forces which were at work in America unless we consider what types of people were involved. While most of the colonies were settled by Englishmen, this did not mean that they were always congenial. The Puritans of New England, radical in their beliefs and zealous in their doctrines, had little in common, even while they were in England, with their fellow countrymen who settled Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. In between these discordant groups were the Dutch of New York, the Swedes of Delaware, the Catholics of Maryland, and the Quakers and Germans of Pennsylvania. Beyond these national and social differences were the trends brought about by their environments in this new land. The rocky and discouraging soils of the northern colonies, even the climate itself, tended to widen the gulf between these people and the pleasure-loving folk of the South, with its broad fertile acres and mild climate. It was inevitable that the New Englanders should turn to manufacture and trade, while the South should remain agrarian, and equally inevitable that this should result in jealousy and rivalry. But a still more vital force was at work to encourage distrust and dislike. People of that day took their religious beliefs very seriously. Even those who fled from a state church could not escape the idea of state and religion being inexorably related. Although the Puritans of Massachusetts had fled England to gain “religious freedom,” they might better have said to gain freedom for their own sort of religion, for they were as intolerant of other religious beliefs as had been the Church of England of theirs. Indeed, Connecticut and Rhode Island were split off from the Massachusetts colony because of religious disputes. The southern colonies, still clinging to the state church of the mother country, were anathema to New England and New England to them. With the Quakers in Pennsylvania, and the Catholics in Maryland—and all zealous for their own religious contentions—the tendencywas even further from, rather than toward, the building of a common nation. And so, with diverse nationalities, religious and economic and moral distinctions; with widely varying charters from the king and jealousies between rival groups of European “owners,” we may well wonder that the colonies got along together at all. For a century and a half the population increased, and with it the discordant feeling between at least many of the colonies. They had only one thing in common—an increasing distrust of and rebellious spirit toward the mother country and the king. This could result in the joining of forces against a common and more powerful enemy. And so it did finally. But in all this there had been no proposal for a new nation, or, more particularly, for a new theory and plan of government. True enough, there had been a convention called at Albany in 1754 for united effort against the Indians, but the colonies were not strongly in favor of it, and the king would not tolerate the union. As lands along the coast became more occupied and therefore higher priced, and the political uncertainties more acute, the more adventurous colonists, perhaps irked by the restraint of individual freedom which any government imposes, struck out for the wilderness westward.
