nanimously, or
at any rate it passed and became a part of the law of the land. Under
that ordinance we live. First here in Ohio you were a Territory; then an
enabling act was passed, authorizing you to form a constitution and
State Government, provided it was republican and not in conflict with the
Ordinance of '87. When you framed your constitution and presented it for
admission, I think you will find the legislation upon the subject will
show that, whereas you had formed a constitution that was republican, and
not in conflict with the Ordinance of '87, therefore you were admitted
upon equal footing with the original States. The same process in a few
years was gone through with in Indiana, and so with Illinois, and the same
substantially with Michigan and Wisconsin.

Not only did that Ordinance prevail, but it was constantly looked to
whenever a step was taken by a new Territory to become a State. Congress
always turned their attention to it, and in all their movements upon
this subject they traced their course by that Ordinance of '87. When they
admitted new States, they advertised them of this Ordinance, as a part of
the legislation of the country. They did so because they had traced the
Ordinance of '87 throughout the history of this country. Begin with the
men of the Revolution, and go down for sixty entire years, and until the
last scrap of that Territory comes into the Union in the form of the State
of Wisconsin, everything was made to conform with the Ordinance of '87,
excluding slavery from that vast extent of country.

I omitted to mention in the right place that the Constitution of the
United States was in process of being framed when that Ordinance was
made by the Congress of the Confederation; and one of the first Acts of
Congress itself, under the new Constitution itself, was to give force to
that Ordinance by putting power to carry it out in the hands of the new
officers under the Constitution, in the place of the old ones, who had
been legislated out of existence by the change in the Government from the
Confederation to the Constitution. Not only so, but I believe Indiana once
or twice, if not Ohio, petitioned the General Government for the privilege
of suspending that provision and allowing them to have slaves. A report
made by Mr. Randolph, of Virginia, himself a slaveholder, was directly
against it, and the action was to refuse them the privilege of violating
the Ordinance of '87.

This period of hi