Founders' Library · Founding era (1779–1787)
An Ordinance for the Government of the Territory of the United States North-West of the River Ohio — Article III
What this is
The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 was adopted by the Confederation Congress on July 13, 1787 — two months before the Constitutional Convention completed its work in Philadelphia — to set the terms on which the territory north and west of the Ohio River would be governed and admitted to statehood. It is one of the foundational federal enactments of the American republic, predating the Constitution itself, and was re-enacted by the First Congress under the new constitutional structure by the Act of August 7, 1789 (1 Stat. 50). Article III contains the most-quoted sentence on the federal commitment to education in American public law — the textual root of the proposition that the federal government, in setting up the rule of admission for new states, made the support of schools a perpetual condition of statehood. The Library carries the operative Article III text as block quotation rather than paraphrase, because the wording is itself the doctrinal hinge.
The operative text
Article III of the Northwest Ordinance, in full:
Religion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged. The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians; their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and, in their property, rights, and liberty, they shall never be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful wars authorized by Congress; but laws founded in justice and humanity, shall, from time to time, be made for preventing wrongs being done to them, and for preserving peace and friendship with them.
The framing of the six articles as compact, from the same enactment:
It is hereby ordained and declared by the authority aforesaid, That the following articles shall be considered as articles of compact between the original States and the people and States in the said territory, and forever remain unalterable, unless by common consent, to wit … .
Historical context
The Confederation Congress sat in New York in the spring and summer of 1787 while the Constitutional Convention was meeting in Philadelphia. The Ordinance was the work of Nathan Dane (the operative drafter) and Manasseh Cutler (the lobbyist for the Ohio Company who pushed the bill to a vote), and it passed on July 13, 1787. The Articles of Compact that comprise the second half of the Ordinance — six in number, of which Article III is the educational and Indian-relations article — were declared by the text itself to be “forever unalterable, unless by common consent.” When new states were later admitted from the Northwest Territory and beyond, the compact framework traveled with the territory: each state’s enabling act treated the school commitment as a binding term of admission, not as a unilateral grant the state could later legislate around. The First Congress, sitting under the new Constitution, re-enacted the Ordinance on August 7, 1789 (1 Stat. 50) — direct evidence that the Founders themselves treated the compact as continuing federal law rather than as a Confederation-era artifact left behind.
How it connects to the Library’s argument
Article III supplies the educational-purpose half of the federal school-trust architecture; the Land Ordinance of 1785 supplies the corpus half (Section 16 of every surveyed township). Read together, they form a complete instruction: this land (1785), for these purposes (1787), forever. The word that does the constitutional work is “forever” — schools and the means of education are to be encouraged not subject to legislative reconsideration, not until convenient, not for so long as the new states should think it wise, but forever. The temporal commitment is what later courts read as the durational mandate of the trust. The Supreme Court in Trustees of Vincennes University v. Indiana (1852), in Cooper v. Roberts (1855), and in Andrus v. Utah (1980) all treat the federal school-grant framework as a bilateral compact whose terms a state cannot unilaterally alter. The textual source of that compact framing is the Ordinance’s own self-classification of the articles as “forever unalterable, unless by common consent.”
Where to find it
- Avalon Project, Yale Law School (canonical online text): https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/nworder.asp
- National Archives, milestone document: https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/northwest-ordinance
- Library of Congress (broadside scans): https://www.loc.gov/resource/bdsdcc.22501/
- Source compilations: Journals of the Continental Congress, vol. 32, pp. 334–343 (1936); Charles C. Tansill, Documents Illustrative of the Formation of the Union of the American States (1927).
- Submit a correction or annotation: /contribute/
Curated by
Library editorial team, 2026-05-24. This editorial summary is the Library’s contribution and is open to community revision.
