The Northwest Ordinance and Statehood

The document that shaped Indiana was written in seventeen eighty-seven, twenty-nine years before Indiana became a state. The Northwest Ordinance, passed by the Continental Congress, created the legal framework for the entire territory north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi, the land that would become Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. It was, in some respects, the most consequential piece of legislation the Continental Congress ever produced.

The Ordinance established that new states would enter the union as equals, not as subordinate colonies. It guaranteed freedom of religion, trial by jury, and public education. And it contained a provision that drew thousands of settlers north across the Ohio: slavery was prohibited in the Northwest Territory.

The prohibition was not perfectly enforced, and a form of indentured servitude persisted in early Indiana, but the legal foundation for a free state was laid before Indiana had a single American town. Indiana Territory was separated from the larger Northwest Territory in eighteen hundred, with Vincennes on the lower Wabash as its capital. William Henry Harrison became governor.

The territorial period was brief and contentious, marked by land cession treaties that dispossessed the Miami, Potawatomi, and Lenape in rapid succession. By eighteen sixteen, enough settlers had arrived to apply for statehood. Indiana entered the union on December eleventh, eighteen sixteen, as the nineteenth state, a free state, shaped by that ordinance passed in a New York summer nearly three decades before.

The state capital moved from Corydon to Indianapolis in eighteen twenty-five, a new city platted on the White River by a surveyor named Alexander Ralston, who had worked on the plan for Washington, D.C.