While pioneers from Virginia and North Carolina were moving into
Kentucky and Tennessee, emigrants from the Northern States were moving
into western New York, or were crossing the Alleghanies and settling
the upper valleys of the Ohio. The settlement of western Pennsylvania
began even before the Revolution. In 1770 Washington revisited the
scenes of his early youth and found Pittsburgh a village of twenty
houses. Fourteen years later he would have found it a town of two
hundred houses and a thousand inhabitants. Western Pennsylvania filled
rapidly with settlers, and soon pioneers began to float down the
Ohio in flatboats and build their homes on the soil of the Northwest
Territory. In a few years so many white people were living in this
Western domain that it became necessary for them to have some form of
government. So Congress (in 1787) passed the law known as the Ordinance
of 1787, the most important law ever passed by a lawmaking body in
America.
[Illustration: Emigrants descending the Tennessee River.]
The great law of 1787 provided that, as the Northwest Territory filled
up with people, it should be divided into States--not fewer than three
and not more than five. Each State was to be governed according to the
will of its voters; there was to be no slavery; religious liberty was
guaranteed; education was to be encouraged; Indians were to be justly
treated. When a community came to have as many as 60,000 inhabitants it
was to be admitted into the Union as a State, with all the rights of
the older States; during the time in which a community was too small
for statehood it was to be governed as a Territory.
Such were the provisions of the Ordinance of 1787. The law breathed the
spirit of freedom, and showed plainly that Western settlers could look
forward to fair treatment at the hands of the national government. The
Western communities were not to be dependent colonies; they were to be
self-governing States.