National land policy from the late eighteenth century up to the Civil War played
a crucial, yet largely unappreciated, role in shaping America’s federal democracy. It
would produce a profound political consequence; antebellum land policy generated a
widely perceived grievance in the new states that was central to the rise of Western
sectionalism.
While the Constitution anticipates the incorporation of new states into the union,
the mechanism for entry was actually first laid out in the Ordinance of 1784 and further
detailed in the Northwest Ordinance, passed by the Continental Congress in New York in
July 1787, two months prior to the completion of the drafting of the Constitution in
Philadelphia. Although the Northwest Ordinance declares that new states were to be
admitted “on an equal footing with the original states in all respects whatever,”
the
document, in fact, failed to establish a system for the incorporation of new states which
duplicated the intergovernmental relations that the original thirteen states enjoyed with
the federal government.
The Northwest Ordinance, in conjunction with other land ordinances of the
period, created what would become, in effect, a second class of states with a
fundamentally different relationship to Washington. The actual legal status of states
varied significantly according to whether or not they were classified as “public land
states.” The national government had greater legitimacy and capacity to act in public
land states. The original states, plus six states created by sui generis acts of Congress,
retained ownership of their public lands.
The remaining twenty-six states that entered
1
The Northwest Ordinance, in Documents of American History, edited by Henry Steele Commager (New
York, 1949): 131.
2
The six legislatively-created states and the date each joined the union are as follows: Vermont (1791),
Kentucky (1792), Tennessee (1796), Maine (1820), Texas (1845), and West Virginia (1863). This study is
concerned with the 45 states that entered the union prior to 1900. Of the five remaining states, three were
admitted as public land states: Oklahoma (1907), New Mexico (1912) and Arizona (1912). The two
remaining states, Alaska and Hawaii, were admitted by sui generis acts of Congress in 1959. Although not
a “public land state” in the sense that it did not enter the union under the terms of the Northwest Ordinance,
2
Convention