New York July 14th. 1787
My dear brother,
I arrived at this place a week ago almost destroyed with heat and fatigue. Here I found Grayson in the Chair of Congress Locum Tenens for the President who is absent.1 After some difficulty we passed an Ordinance for establishing a temporary Government beyond the Ohio as preparatory to the sale of that Country.2 And now we are considering an offer made to purchase 5 or 6 millions of Acres with pub. Securities. I hope we shall agree with the offer, but realy the difficulty is so great to get anything done, that it is not easy for the plainest propositions to succeed.3 We owe much money, the pressure of Taxes is very great & much complained of - we have now something to sell that will pay the debt & discharge the greatest part of the Taxes, and altho this something is in a fair way of being soon wrested from us by the Sons of Violence, yet we have a thousand little difficulties that prevent us from selling! I found the Convention at Phila. very busy & very secret, it would seem however, from variety of circumstances that we shall hear of a Government not unlike the B. Constitution - that is, an Executive with 2 branches composing a federal Legislature, and possessing adequate Tone. This departure from simple Democracy seems indispensably necessary, if any government at all is to exist in N. America. Indeed the minds of men have been so hurt by the injustice, folly, and wickedness of the State Legislatures; & State Executives that people in general seem ready for any thing. I hope however, that this tendency to extreme will be so controuled as to secure fully and completely the democratic influences acting within just bounds. The Land Speculators continue to urge the Open Missippi immediately against every principle of policy, common good, & common sense. Upon this I shall write you more fully hereafter. The bills of R. Morris have been refused in France, to a very considerable amount it is said. Time must discover how this will work, & what it will produce. The discoveries of fraud among the great officers of State in France proves that private embezzlement of public Money [is] not confined to America. There seems to be much convulsion in France on this occasion at present.
My love, if you please to Mrs. Lee and when you have an opportunity, let me know that you are all well.
Farewell.
Richard Henry Lee
Receiver's copy, Lee Family Papers, University of Virginia Library.
1 For William Grayson's July 4 election as chairman of Congress and Arthur St. Clair's absence until July 17, see JCC, 32:297; and St. Clair to Charles Thomson, May 18. Lee had presented his credentials to Congress on July 9. See JCC, 32:310.
2 The ordinance for establishing governments in the states to be formed from the northwest territory had originally stemmed from consideration of petitions from the distressed inhabitants of the Kaskaskia district in the Illinois country, for which see these Letters, 22:328n.11, 23:246n, 522n.2. An ordinance drawn up in September 1786 by a committee chaired by William Samuel Johnson had been permitted to lie over as unfinished business. It was revived and read for the first time on April 26, 1787. It was read again and amended on May 9 when it was ordered printed. A third reading scheduled for May 10 was postponed and the report languished, due to poor attendance, until July 8 when it was ordered printed again and the following day assigned to a committee, chaired by Edward Carrington, that heavily revised it, eliminating many elements of Thomas Jefferson's plan of 1784 and establishing far more structured conditions of admission to statehood. Chiefly the work of Nathan Dane, the new ordinance was reported on July 11 and read successively through the 13th when it was adopted by eight states with only Abraham Yates of New York in dissent. The ordinance was transmitted to the states this day by Secretary Thomson. See JCC, 32:242, 274 - 75, 281 - 83, 310n.3, 313 - 20, 333 - 43, 33:756 - 57; Evans, Am. Bibliography, nos. 20,777 - 79; and the following entry.
The bicentennial of the Northwest Ordinance generated a spate of interpretive articles and essays on its origins, enactment, and consequences, many of them collected together under a single title. See, for example, Robert M. Taylor, ed., The Northwest Ordinance, 1787: A Bicentennial Handbook (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1987), which includes an annotated text of the ordinance by section and article (pp. 31 - 77); "The Northwest Ordinance: A Special Issue," Indiana Magazine of History 84 (March 1988): 1 - 112; Pathways to the Old Northwest: An Observance of the Bicentennial of the Northwest Ordinance (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1988); and Frederick D. Williams, ed., The Northwest Ordinance: Essays on Its Formulation, Provisions and Legacy (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1989).
3 Part of the urgency in providing government for western settlers lay in the applications that came before Congress at this time for the purchase of large blocks of land, ostensibly for Revolutionary war veterans. On May 8, Gen. Samuel Holden Parsons, agent for the Ohio Company of Associates, presented a memorial to Congress for the purchase of bounty lands northwest of the Ohio River for $500,000 to $1,000,000. Comprised mostly of war veterans from New England, the Associates were led by Gen. Rufus Putnam, Winthrop Sargent, and Benjamin Tupper, aided by their chief lobbyist, ex-army chaplain Manasseh Cutler. The memorial was assigned on May 9 to a committee composed of Edward Carrington, Egbert Benson, Nathan Dane, Rufus King, and James Madison. Meanwhile, Cutler and the Associates, allied with the secretary to the board of treasury, William Duer, and a group of New York speculators, who styled themselves the Scioto Company, began to pursue a joint purchase. In its July 10 report Carrington's committee recommended that the board of treasury authorize a contract for a tract between the Muskingum and Scioto rivers to be determined by geographer Thomas Hutchins. The report was considered during deliberations over the final form of the Northwest Ordinance, and debates on July 14, 17, and 20 focused on the precise boundary of the tract, the actual price, and the terms of payment. The amended report, containing a provision for further purchases within three years, was considered and adopted July 23. On the 26th Cutler and Winthrop Sargent presented Congress with a list of conditions of sale, and the following day Congress passed a resolution exempting 10,000 acres around each of the Christian Indian towns from settlement. The final contracts of sale, which were not let until later in the year, included 1,500,000 acres for the Ohio Company and nearly 5,000,000 acres for Duer's group. Shortly after the Ohio Company made its purchase it issued a pamphlet entitled Articles of an Association, by the Name of the Ohio Company (New York: Samuel & John Loudon, 1787), which included letters of St. Jean de Crèvecoeur describing the Ohio country, the original "Articles of Agreement" entered into by the company's subscribers, the committee report approved July 23, the resolution of July 27, a report of Manasseh Cutler to the Association directors, and the August 30 Association resolutions for the establishment of the town that became Marietta. See JCC, 32:276, 311 - 13, 345 - 46, 350 - 51, 376 - 77, 33:399 - 401, 427 - 30; Carter, Territorial Papers, 2:29, 52 - 54, 61 - 64, 80 - 88; and Evans, Am. Bibliography, no. 20,605. For the organization of the Ohio Company of Associates, its alliance with the Scioto speculators, and Manasseh Cutler's pivotal role in conducting business with Congress, see Archer B. Hulbert, ed., The Records of the Original Proceedings of the Ohio Company, 2 vols. (Marietta, Ohio: Marietta Historical Commission, 1917), 1:xv - xcvi, 1 - 37; and Daniel J. Ryan, "The Scioto Company and Its Purchase," Publications of the Ohio Archaeological and Historical Society 3 (Columbus, 1891): 107 - 36.