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of 1787 also animates the Northwest Ordinance.
Both the Constitution and the Ordinance were drafted to cope with the crisis of the union. The constitution gave the government of the United States the power it needed if the union of the states were not to disintergrate. And the Ordinance fortified national authority in a very down-to-earth way. By giving government to the Northwest Territory, the Ordinance made the land within the Territory marketable - and hence a source of revenue for the empty federal treasury.
Moreover, both the Constitution and the Ordinance were concerned with the preservation and improvement of republican government - what might be called representative democracy, directed at securing liberty through law. By 1787 it seemed to the most sober of Americans that unjust majorities in state legislatures were perverting republicanism and thereby provoking an anti-republican reaction. They sought in the Constitution (In Madison’s words) “a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to
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