Movement in the Early Republic

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for how the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 set the legal framework that organized westward settlement and the admission of new states.
• Describe the principal migration streams of the early Republic, including New Englanders into upstate New York and the Western Reserve, Pennsylvania Germans south through the Shenandoah Valley, and Virginians and Carolinians into Kentucky and Tennessee.
• Account for the conflict between settlers and the confederated American Indian nations of the Ohio Country, from St. Clair's defeat in 1791 to the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794 and the Treaty of Greenville in 1795.
• Describe the forced movement of enslaved people through the internal slave trade and the displacement of American Indian nations west of the federal boundary line.
• Use evidence from the first two federal censuses to compare population growth and regional distribution between 1790 and 1800.

The Treaty of Paris of 1783 doubled the territory of the United States overnight, granting the new nation everything east of the Mississippi River and south of the Great Lakes. Almost no part of that territory was unoccupied. American Indian nations, French traders, British garrisons that had not yet evacuated their posts, and a thin scatter of colonial settlers were already on the ground. The early Republic spent the next seventeen years trying to settle the question of who would actually possess the land that the treaty had given the new federal government on paper.

The Confederation Congress wrote the legal framework first. The Land Ordinance of 1785 imposed a rectangular survey system on the territory north of the Ohio River. It divided the land into six-mile-square townships, each subdivided into thirty-six one-mile-square sections of 640 acres, with one section in every township reserved for the support of public schools. The system was simple, sellable, and abstract. It treated the land as a grid that existed independently of any of the people, plants, or earlier histories that already inhabited it (KC-3.3.I.C).

Two years later, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 turned that grid into a political project. The ordinance organized the lands north of the Ohio River as the Northwest Territory and laid out a three-stage path from territorial status to statehood. A territory with five thousand free adult males could elect a legislature; a territory with sixty thousand free inhabitants could draft a constitution and apply for admission to the union on equal footing with the original thirteen states. The ordinance also guaranteed jury trials, religious freedom, and public education to settlers, and it prohibited slavery within the entire territory. It is often called the most important law passed under the Articles of Confederation, and it set the template that would eventually carry the United States to the Pacific (KC-3.3.I.C).

The migration streams that filled the Northwest Territory and the trans-Appalachian South were not random. New Englanders, organized through land companies such as the Connecticut Land Company, moved west into upstate New York and into the Western Reserve of northeastern Ohio, carrying their town-meeting habits, their Congregational churches, and their stone-walled fields with them. Pennsylvania German farmers and Scots-Irish settlers moved south down the Great Wagon Road through the Shenandoah Valley into the Carolina backcountry. Virginians and North Carolinians crossed the Cumberland Gap into Kentucky and Tennessee, where Daniel Boone's Wilderness Road had already cut a path. Free African Americans, freed in increasing numbers by the gradual-emancipation laws that the northern states passed in the 1780s and 1790s, migrated north out of the upper South toward Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, where free Black communities were building churches and mutual-aid societies.

None of this movement happened on empty land. The confederated American Indian nations of the Ohio Country, including the Shawnee, Miami, Lenape (Delaware), Wyandot, and Ottawa, refused to recognize the boundary lines that the federal government had drawn through their territory in the 1780s. In November 1791, a confederated force led by the Miami chief Little Turtle and the Shawnee chief Blue Jacket destroyed an army of roughly 1,400 men under Major General Arthur St. Clair near the Wabash River. St. Clair's defeat remains the largest battlefield loss the United States Army has ever suffered to American Indian forces, and it forced the Washington administration to take the Northwest Indian War seriously (KC-3.3.I.A).

Three years later, a reorganized federal force under General Anthony Wayne won the Battle of Fallen Timbers on August 20, 1794, at a stretch of the Maumee River where a tornado had recently flattened a stand of trees. The British garrison at nearby Fort Miamis declined to shelter the retreating American Indian fighters, and the confederation collapsed. The Treaty of Greenville, signed in August 1795, ceded most of present-day Ohio and a slice of Indiana to the federal government and pushed the boundary of American Indian sovereignty to a line running from the Cuyahoga River south and west to the mouth of the Kentucky River. The treaty opened the eastern Northwest Territory to large-scale settlement and turned Ohio, admitted in 1803, into the first state carved out of the new system (KC-3.3.I.A).

The forced movement of enslaved people followed a different logic. With the closing of new African slave imports approaching in 1808, planters in the Chesapeake region, where soil exhaustion was driving a shift from tobacco to wheat, increasingly sold enslaved laborers south and west into Kentucky, Tennessee, and the new Mississippi Territory organized in 1798. The internal slave trade moved people in coffles down dirt roads and on flatboats; it would expand massively in Period 4 but its earliest patterns took shape in the 1790s. The same federal government that banned slavery north of the Ohio River by ordinance also wrote the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793, which obligated officials in free states to return enslaved people who had escaped from slave states.

Three new states tested the federal framework. Vermont, admitted in 1791, settled a long-standing dispute over the New Hampshire grants and became the fourteenth state. Kentucky followed in 1792, carved out of western Virginia and growing past 220,000 residents by the 1800 census. Tennessee, admitted in 1796 from the territory south of the Ohio River, was the first state created from a federal territory under the Northwest Ordinance pattern. Vermont and Kentucky were free states from the start; Tennessee permitted slavery from its constitution forward. The pattern of admitting one free and one slave state in rough succession, which would dominate the politics of Period 4, was already taking shape.

Coastal cities grew at the same time. Philadelphia, the federal capital from 1790 to 1800, passed 60,000 residents and became the publishing, financial, and political center of the Republic. New York overtook it in the 1790s, helped by a deep Atlantic harbor and the lower Hudson trade. Boston, Baltimore, and Charleston rounded out the seaboard commercial network. Improved turnpikes (the Lancaster Turnpike of 1794 was the first major chartered toll road) and an expanding federal post road network, organized by the Post Office Act of 1792, connected the seaboard cities to one another and, slowly, to the trans-Appalachian settlements. The infrastructure was thin by twenty-first-century standards, but the political work of keeping a federal Republic together at a continental scale began here (KC-3.3.I.B).

By 1800, the demographic shape of the new nation had shifted. The first federal census in 1790 had counted 3.9 million people; the second census in 1800 counted 5.3 million, a gain of nearly 36 percent in a single decade. The trans-Appalachian states held more than 600,000 of those new residents. The free Black population had grown from roughly 60,000 to more than 100,000, concentrated in the northern states and the upper South. The enslaved population had grown from 700,000 to nearly 900,000, concentrated more tightly than ever in the South. The early Republic was not only larger than it had been at the moment of independence; it was distributed differently, and the regional differences that the next sixty years of American politics would struggle to manage were already legible on the census tables.

Five sources sample the legal framework, the violent contest over land, the patterns of settlement, and the demographic record of the early Republic.

1. (Causation) Account for the conditions that allowed the Northwest Ordinance to ban slavery within the Northwest Territory in 1787, when no comparable ban was politically possible at the Constitutional Convention that same summer. What made the territorial setting different from the federal one?
2. (Comparison) Compare the federal government's posture toward American Indian nations in 1783 (Treaty of Paris) with its posture in 1795 (Treaty of Greenville). What had changed about the federal approach to American Indian sovereignty, and what had stayed the same?
3. (Continuity and Change) Examine the migration patterns of free Black Americans, enslaved Black Americans, and white settlers between 1783 and 1800. In what ways did movement open new possibilities for each group, and in what ways did it impose new constraints?
4. (Causation) The rectangular survey system imposed by the Land Ordinance of 1785 is sometimes described as the most consequential law most Americans have never heard of. Account for that claim. What did the survey grid make possible, and what did it foreclose?
5. (Comparison) Compare urban growth on the seaboard (Philadelphia, New York, Boston) with rural growth in the trans-Appalachian states (Kentucky, Tennessee). Which kind of growth had a greater effect on the political life of the early Republic, and why?

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.