No less enlightened were the views of Jefferson. He may be said in truth to be the father of the northwest. When a member of the legislature of Virginia, he had promoted the expedition under George Rogers Clark, which resulted in the conquest of the northwest, and its subsequent cession to the United States under the treaty of 1783. As governor of Virginia he had taken part in its cession to the general government on March first, 1784. "On that same day," says Bancroft, "before the deed could be recorded and enrolled among the acts of the United States, Jefferson, as chairman of a committee, presented a plan for the temporary government of the western territory from the southern boundary of the United States in the latitude of thirty-one degrees to the Lake of the Woods. It is still preserved in the national archives in his own handwriting, and is as completely his own work as the Declaration of Independence." As the profoundest advocate of human rights of his day or time, freeing himself from the narrow spirit of sectionalism, and despising human slavery and its contamination of the institutions of a free people, he proposed the ultimate establishment of ten new states in the territory northwest of the Ohio, a republican form of government for each of them, and no property qualification for either the electors or the elected. "Following an impulse of his own mind," he proposed the everlasting dedication of the northwest to free men and free labor, by providing that after the year 1800 there should be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any of them. While Jefferson's plan for the exclusion of slavery was stricken from the ordinance, his noble ideas of freedom were afterwards fully and completely incorporated in the final Ordinance of 1787, whereby "neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted," should ever be permitted. This ordinance, through the predominating influence of Virginia and her statesmen, was passed by the vote of Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, New Jersey, New York and Massachusetts, and afterwards ratified by the legislature of Virginia who had to consent thereto to give it full force.