efit, and promised that they should be
"settled and formed into distinct republican states, which shall become
members of the federal union, and have the same rights of sovereignty,
freedom; and independence as the other states."

Finally, in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 there was mapped out a
scheme of government admirably adapted to the liberty-loving, yet
law-abiding, populations of the frontier. It was based on the broad
principles of democracy, and it was sufficiently flexible to permit
necessary changes as the scattered settlements developed into organized
Territories and then into States. Geographical conditions, as well as
racial inheritances, foreordained that the United States should be
an expanding, colonizing nation; and it was of vital importance that
wholesome precedents of territorial control should be established in the
beginning. Louisiana, Florida, the Mexican accessions, Alaska, and even
the newer tropical dependencies, owe much to the decisions that were
reached in the organizing of the Northwest a century and a quarter ago.

The Northwest Ordinance was remarkable in that it was framed for a
territory that had practically no white population and which, in a
sense, did not belong to the United States at all. Back in 1768 Sir
William Johnson's Treaty of Fort Stanwix had made the Ohio River the
boundary between the white and red races of the West. Nobody at the
close of the Revolution supposed that this division would be adhered to;
the Northwest had not been won for purposes of an Indian reserve.
None the less, the arrangements of 1768 were inherited, and the nation
considered them binding except in so far as they were modified from
time to time by new agreements. The first such agreement affecting the
Northwest was concluded in 1785, through George Rogers Clark and two
other commissioners, with the Wyandots, Delawares, Chippewas, and
Ottawas. By it the United States acquired title to the southeastern half
of the present State of Ohio, with a view to surveying the lands and
raising revenue by selling them. Successive treaties during the next
thirty years gradually transferred the whole of the Northwest from
Indian hands to the new nation.

Officially, the United States recognized the validity of the Indian
claims; but the pioneer homeseeker was not so certain to do so. From
about 1775 the country south of the Ohio filled rapidly with settlers
from Virginia and the Carolinas, so that by 1788 the wh