RARE ASSOCIATION COPY OF THE SOUTHWEST ORDINANCE, 1790, A KEY LAW THAT JOINS THE NORTHWEST ORDINANCE IN FRAMING AMERICAN FRONTIER HISTORY, AND A LANDMARK TEXT IN THE NATIONAL STRUGGLE WITH SLAVERY, FROM THE LIBRARY OF INFLUENTIAL VERMONT SENATOR, STEPHEN ROW BRADLEY

(SOUTHWEST ORDINANCE) (UNITED STATES CONGRESS). An Act for the Government of the Territory of the United States, south of the river Ohio. Congress of the United States: at the Second Session, Begun and held at the City of New-York, on Monday the fourth of January, one thousand seven hundred and ninety. [New York]: Printed by Francis Childs and John Swaine, [1790]. Folio, broadside printed on recto, disbound from a sammelband volume, uncut. Handsomely framed, entire piece measures 19 by 14 inches.

Rare first printing of the Southwest Ordinance, a seminal document in establishing America’s frontier whose crucial exception to the abolition of slavery within its borders broke with the earlier Northwest Ordinance, thereby asserting a powerful interpretation of the Constitution that further denied “all Congressional power to regulate the internal slave trade,” a memorable association copy from the library of the powerful United States senator from Vermont, Stephen Row Bradley.

Yet this law differed from its predecessor in one highly consequential matter—it refused to abolish slavery in its borders. That exception represented a political divide that the Northwest Ordinance, passed in the final days of 1787 Confederation Congress, underlined when it “simultaneously disguised the deep moral division within the Convention and framed the compromise solution in terms that permitted each side to claim victory.” The 1787 decision to remove slavery from within new territorial borders “could plausibly be interpreted as the first step toward a more general exclusion in all incoming states… On the other hand, the Northwest Ordinance could also be read as a tacit endorsement of slavery in the southwestern region (which eventually proved to be the case)” (Ellis, Founding Fathers, 93). When the Southwest Ordinance broke with the Northwest Ordinance, “so far as is otherwise provided in the conditions in an act of Congress of the present session,” it cited a law known as the North Carolina Cession Act—approved by Congress only one month earlier. That law ceded North Carolina’s western lands under the provision “that no regulations made or to be made by Congress, shall tend to emancipate slaves.” The Southwest Ordinance would remain in force until Tennessee became a state in 1796, but its refusal to ban slavery had a far more consequential effect, for this act represents one of the earliest and most compelling affirmations of a congressional Report of the Special Committee, passed in March 1790, in which “Madison and others fostered what has become the traditional interpretation of the first clause of Article I, Section 9, denying all Congressional power to regulate the internal slave trade” (Berns, “The Constitution and the Migration of Slaves,” Yale Law Journal). With passage of that Report and laws such as the Southwest Ordinance, Congress “placed any and all debate over slavery as it existed in the South out of bounds forever” (Ellis, 118). Published by Childs and Swaine, official printers of Acts of Congress, this 1790 broadside is especially notable in that it is not a copy disbound from their first bound edition of Acts Passed at the Second Session. Before printing bound Acts at the end of each session, generally in late August or September, Childs and Swaine would occasionally print a small number of “folio slip laws for the Congress,” intending “to supply one printed copy of each to each Senator and Representative” (Powell, 99, 88). This first official publication of the Southwest Ordinance is likely one of those rare folio slip law printings. NAIP locates three copies; OCLC lists no copies. Evans 22960. Shipton and Mooney 46039. This exceptional association copy is from the library of one of the first United States senators from Vermont, Stephen Row Bradley (1791-4, 1801-13), “the leading Democratic-Republican senator from New England during his day,” who subsequently led the nomination of Madison for president, and is also renowned for framing “the bill which established a national flag of 15 stripes and 15 stars, sometimes known as the Bradley flag, used from 1795-1814” (DAB). With contemporary notations in upper right corner and beneath publisher imprint.

Tiny stapholes along left margin without affecting text, lightest edge-wear. An exceptional, about-fine copy of one of the most important and far-reaching laws of America’s First Congress.