Force undertook to gather from the archives of Congress materials for a complete history of this document, but he found nothing that settled the question of authorship; and although he probably knew more of the original documents pertaining to the Northwest Territory than any other man since its adoption, he died in ignorance of the real author. Hon. R. W. Thompson, in an eloquent address on “Education,” ascribed the ordinance to the wise statesmanship and the unselfish and far-reaching patriotism of Jefferson. Lothrop, in his Ann Arbor address in 1878, on “Education as a Public Duty,” said: “It was a graduate of Harvard, who, in 1787, when framing the Great Charter for the Northwest, had consecrated it irrevocably to Human Freedom, to Religion, Learning, and Free Thought. It was the proud boast of Themistocles, that he knew how to make of a small city a great state. Greater than his was the wisdom and prescience of Nathan Dane, who knew how to take pledges of the future, and to snatch from the wilderness an inviolable Republic of Free Labor and Free Thought.” In 1876, a year in which many buried historical facts were unearthed, William Frederick Poole, in an admirable article published in the _North American Review_, presented the history of the Ordinance in a most scholarly manner. But discarding the absoluteness of the claims heretofore set forth, he presents, as the chief actor in this mysterious drama, Dr. Manasseh Cutler, of Massachusetts. Following, in a general way, the line of argument laid down by Poole, it is interesting to examine the foregoing claims in the light of the known facts. In January, 1781, Thomas Jefferson, then Governor of Virginia, acting under instructions from his state, ceded to the general government Virginia’s claims to that magnificent tract of country known as the Northwest Territory, which had been acquired by Virginia by king’s charter and also as a result of its conquest by George Rogers Clark in 1778-79. The Virginia cession, regarded as the most crucial of the necessary relinquishments of state claims, was not completed in form satisfactory to the United States until 1784. On the first of March of the same year Jefferson, then a member of Congress and chairman of a committee appointed for the purpose, presented an ordinance for the government of all the territory lying westward of the 13 original states to the Mississippi River. There were two notable features in this paper; first, it provided for the exclusion of slavery and involuntary servitude _after the year 1800_; second, it provided for _Articles of Compact_, the non-slavery clause being one of them. By this provision there were five articles that could never be set aside without the consent of both Congress and the people of the territory. The non-slavery article was rejected by Congress, and the rest was adopted with some unimportant modifications, on the twenty-third of April, 1784. Whether even this