Government: Territories

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Government: Territories

Contention surrounding the ownership, organization, and administration of the territories west of the Appalachian Mountains plagued the United States from its very inception. Relying upon ill-defined colonial charters granting title to lands extending to the "western sea," many of the Atlantic seaboard states lay claim to vast tracts of western land; claims (many of which overlapped) that they sought to preserve in the nation's first instrument of government—the Articles of Confederation—drafted in 1777. A handful of eastern states, lacking western claims, argued that trans-Appalachian lands should be pooled into a national domain and placed under the direct control of the Congress. This disagreement, among others, delayed ratification of the Articles until 1781, at which time the states with western land claims, Virginia foremost among them, proposed to cede their claims to the Confederation Congress. The Treaty of Paris (1783), which brought the Revolutionary War to a close, firmly established the American claim to the western territory when Britain ceded all of the land between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, north from Spanish Florida and Louisiana to the Great Lakes.

In order to pave the way for the sale of the land and its distribution to Revolutionary War veterans, the United States entered into negotiations with the six Iroquois nations regarding their claims in the West. The resulting Treaty of Fort Stanwix (1784) surrendered lands in western Pennsylvania and Ohio. Similar negotiations with western tribes led to more cessions in the region through the Treaty of Fort McIntosh (1785). Many Ohio country tribes, however, rejected the treaties and resisted the tide of settlers that soon flooded the region. The military suppression of the northwestern tribes would drag on until the end of the War of 1812.

northwest territory

In 1784 Virginia formally ceded its lands to the north and west of the Ohio River to the national government, retaining its claim to lands south of the river. The Confederation Congress quickly moved to bring order to the region, passing a series of ordinances in 1784, 1785, and 1787. The Ordinance of 1785 established an orderly and systematic pattern of land survey (based on rectilinear units) and sale that served as the foundation for American public land policy until the Homestead Act of 1862. Of equal consequence was the Ordinance of 1787, which created the nation's first organized territory, the Northwest Territory, encompassing more than 260,000 square miles of land west of Pennsylvania (which was given control over the headwaters of the Ohio River) and north and northwest of the Ohio River.

Among the ordinance's most important features were its guarantees of civil rights and basic freedoms for the region's settlers, its prohibition against slavery and involuntary servitude, and its encouragement of public education. The ordinance further provided that no fewer than three, or more than five, states would be carved out of the territory and that the states would be admitted "to a share in the federal councils on an equal footing with the original states." Additionally, it created a framework for territorial governance and outlined the necessary steps for statehood. In their initial stage, the territories were to be administered by a governor (assisted by a number of other officials) and judges (who concomitantly served as a legislative body) appointed by Congress. Once a population of five thousand inhabitants was reached, the settlers would elect a territorial legislature and be entitled to one nonvoting representative in Congress. After the population grew to sixty thousand inhabitants, the legislature was empowered to submit a constitution to Congress for its approval.

The Northwest Territory elected its first territorial legislature in 1798. Two years later, the territory was divided and the Indiana Territory was created, thereby shrinking the Northwest Territory to the present-day state of Ohio. In 1803 the territory ceased to exist when Ohio was admitted to the union. The remainder of the Old Northwest followed a similar path to statehood. Congress truncated the Indiana Territory in 1805, creating the Michigan Territory, which included the Lower Peninsula of Michigan and the eastern end of the Upper Peninsula. In 1809 the Indiana Territory was again divided and the Illinois Territory was created, encompassing present-day Illinois, Wisconsin, parts of Minnesota, and the western Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Indiana became a state in 1816 and Illinois in 1818. The remainder of the Illinois Territory then transferred to Michigan. Michigan would not achieve statehood until 1837, followed by Wisconsin in 1848 and Minnesota in 1858.

the old southwest

This blueprint for territorial organization and governance also served, with some notable modifications—most notably, the absence of a ban on slavery—as the basis for administering and admitting new states in the Old Southwest. In 1790 Congress, operating under the new federal Constitution, created the Territory South of the River Ohio (the Southwest Territory) out of lands ceded by North Carolina. The territory encompassed what became the state of Tennessee but did not include Kentucky, which remained a part of Virginia until 1792, when it entered the union as a state. Tennessee did not linger in the territorial stage for long, gaining statehood in 1796. Two years later, Congress established the Mississippi Territory out of lands previously claimed by South Carolina. The territory was expanded in 1804 to include lands surrendered by Georgia, and again in 1812, extending its boundaries from the Gulf of Mexico to Tennessee and from the western boundary of Georgia to the Mississippi River. In 1817, as the western portion of the territory prepared for state-hood, the eastern section, only recently cleared of Indian title through the Treaty of Fort Jackson (1814), was established as the Alabama Territory. As cotton planters flooded onto Alabama's fertile lands, the territory quickly met the requirements for statehood as it entered the Union in 1819.

The acquisition of additional lands by the United States (Louisiana in 1803 and Florida in 1821) added vast new regions to the national domain. Relying upon the precedent for territorial organization already in place, the federal government moved quickly to establish administrative control over its new possessions. Louisiana was organized into two territories, the Territory of Orleans south of the thirty-third parallel and the Territory of Louisiana to the north. When the southern portion achieved state-hood in 1812, assuming the name Louisiana, the northern territory was renamed Missouri. In 1819, in anticipation of Missouri's entrance into the Union two years later, the territory was again divided and the Arkansas Territory established. Florida's territorial stage lasted from 1822 until 1845.