This act of Congress, passed to give full effect to this ordinance by adapting its working to the new Federal Constitution, was among the earliest acts of the Federal Congress, being number eight in the list of acts passed at the first session of the first Congress; and classes with the acts necessary to the working of the new government. As such it was modified; and as such preserved and applied to successive Territories, as governments for them were given. That ordinance is, in fact, the basis of all the Territorial governments, and is extended to each of them by name, with such modifications as each one required; and its benefits secured in their deeds of territorial cession by Georgia and North Carolina. Thus, the fifth clause in the first article of the Georgia deed of cession, dated April 24th, 1802, stipulates: "That the Territory thus ceded shall form a State, and be admitted as such into the Union, as soon as it shall contain 60,000 free inhabitants, or at an earlier period, if Congress shall think it expedient, on the same conditions and restrictions, with the same privileges, and in the same manner, as is provided in the ordinance of Congress of the 13th day of July, 1787, for the government of the Western Territory of the United States; which ordinance shall, in all its parts, extend to the Mississippi Territory contained in the present act of cession, that article only excepted which forbids slavery." The deed of cession from North Carolina, for the Territory since forming the State of Tennessee, and dated December ----, 1789, is equally express in claiming the benefits of this ordinance; so that, made before the constitution, it has been equally sanctioned by Congress and by States since. Virginia sanctioned it immediately after its enactment, and before the commencement of the present Federal Government, to wit, on the 30th day of December, 1788. The ordinance being thus anterior to the constitution, was not formed under it, but under the authority of owners--sovereign owners--exercising the right of taking care of their own property, subject only to the conditions and limitations which accompanied its acquisition. And thus the Territories have been constantly governed independently of the constitution, and incompatibly with it, and by a statute made before it, and merely extended as a pre-existing law to each Territory as it came into existence. [3] The 6th, being the Anti-slavery article.