This new edition of Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance , originally published in 1987, is an authoritative account of the origins and early history of American policy for territorial government, land distribution, and the admission of new states in the Old Northwest. In a new preface, Peter S. Onuf reviews important new work on the progress of colonization and territorial expansion in the rising American empire. "Peter Onuf brings political and constitutional history together in Statehood and Union and illustrates the importance of the ordinance in shaping the Northwest. His work should be read by all early national historians." ―Jeffrey Brown, Indiana Magazine of History "Onuf writes intellectual history of a high order. His book is a thoughtful and provocative inquiry into a subject that is in need of a full-dress reevaluation." ―Bernard Sheehan, The Journal of American History "Onuf explains why the ordinance came to be incorporated into the trinity of icons, along with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, as 'one of the title-deeds of American constitutional liberty' (from a speech by George F. Hoar). People living in other regions may not understand this, but a Midwesterner will find the resonance clear and unambiguous." ―Carl Ubbelohde, The Annals of Iowa Peter S. Onuf is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor of History, emeritus, at the University of Virginia. He is the author and co-author of fourteen books, including, with Annette Gordon-Reed, " Most Blessed of the Patriarchs": Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination. The success of the American Revolution depended on the creation and expansion of a “more perfect union” of free republican states. In the summer of 1787, as delegates of twelve of the original thirteen states (Rhode Island was not represented) gathered in Philadelphia to draft a new federal Constitution, the Congress of the old Confederation, meeting in New York City, enacted an ambitious plan for the creation of three to five new states in the national domain north and west of the Ohio River. That the Philadelphia framers were able to negotiate a “peace pact” for their quarrelsome, virtually disunited states was, contemporaries agreed, nothing less than a “miracle.” But it was a notoriously ineffectual Confederation Congress that took the boldest leap into futurity, envisioning the spread of white settlement and formation of new governments in a contested borderland far beyond its effective control. Adopted on July 13, 1787, the “Ordinance for the government of the territory of the United States North West of the river Ohio”―or Northwest Ordinance―was the blueprint for a great American empire of continental dimensions. If the framers had failed and the existing union had collapsed, the Ordinance would have been a dead letter. Yet if the establishment of a new national government gave life to the Ordinance, the Ordinance’s vision of national greatness animated the framers’ “new order for the ages.” As they tottered at the abyss of anarchy and disunion, Americans dreamed of empire. Statehood and Union is a book about the new and improved vision of empire that American statesmen envisioned and implemented in the early republic’s formative years. It was the republican alternative to the empire that had failed to fulfill the aspirations of Anglo-American patriots in the years leading up to independence. In a passage that the Continental Congress cut from his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson lamented the demise of Anglo-American union: “We might have been a free & a great people together.” King George III failed to sustain that union, thus squandering the boundless prospects afforded by victory over the French in the Seven Years’ War. “Westward the course of empire,” Bishop George Berkeley exulted in 1726. But it was not to be. Instead of unleashing a westward surge, penny-pinching bureaucrats set a western limit to settlement in the Proclamation of October 7, 1763. The imperial government seemed determined to suppress the colonies’ population and prosperity and transforming them into subject provinces. When Parliament in one of its so-called “Intolerable Acts” of 1774 extended the jurisdiction of the formerly French province of Quebec to include the trans-Ohio region―so abrogating the charter claims of Virginia and other British colonies―the evil intentions of a corrupt ministry could no longer be doubted. Anglo-American patriots wanted to turn the clock back to the Peace of Paris in 1763, when they could still see themselves as agents and beneficiaries of imperial expansion. Without such an empire, the British connection―and allegiance to George III―seemed increasingly problematic, even pointless. Were subjects of the Crown free men or slaves? Revolutionary Americans were imperialists who made war against the British imperial government and finally, with great reluctance, decl