Jefferson Looking Westward

Thomas Jefferson, serving in the largely ineffectual Continental Congress in 1784, was made the chairman of a committee created to address the issue of the conflicting trans-Appalachian land claims of the original thirteen colonies. In the final, and arguably the most important, legislative work of his career, his committee launched two seminal proposals in the spring of 1784, both written out in Jefferson’s own hand. The first, generally known as the Ordinance of 1784, was intended to provide a blue print for handling the new country’s western territories. It was passed by the Continental Congress but never went into effect, being replaced in its entirety by the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. In the Ordinance of 1784, Jefferson, in his usual precise way, provided for fourteen hypothetical western states. The Ordinance also set forth the principle that new territories would be admitted as states on an equal footing with the existing states, arguably the first time in the history of the world that vassal territory was given this right, so he clearly contemplated that these new states would be co-equal with the original thirteen. In this context the fourteen states proposed to be formed by Jefferson in 1784, which would have included the southern ceded lands as well as the northern, was not that far off from what later occurred, although Jefferson’s precise geometrical boundaries and classically inspired names (like Polypotamia) seem contrived. These debates occurred while the United States was operating under the Articles of Confederation which gave each state a single vote in Congress, so Jefferson’s proposal would have given the Western states more power than the original thirteen. My question is what Jefferson contemplated would happen if those fourteen states had actually been created. Since under the Articles of Confederation each state had a single vote, wouldn’t Jefferson’s scheme have shifted control to these newly conceived western states? Later in that spring of 1784, Jefferson was appointed to a diplomatic post in Paris, where he would remain until 1788, so his proposals had to be worked out and applied by others as the Continental Congress faltered and the Constitution was being negotiated and implemented. The question of the western lands was so vital that when the Continental Congress again took up the question in 1785, it was assigned to a committee with one representative from each of the thirteen colonies. The more practical and nationalistic James Monroe became the moving spirit behind territorial organization after Jefferson left for Paris. He recognized that slavery could not be effectively ended south of the Ohio, and it was he who reduced the ultimate number of Western states that could be formed north of the Ohio by convincing Virginia to alter its act of cession to provide for not less than three nor more than five states to be created there. Jefferson's thinking about western states was undoubtedly affected by negotiations over cession of Virginia's lands north of the Ohio River to the United States, negotiations that were going on that same spring having been drawn out over the prior three years. Joseph Jones (Monroe's uncle and a brilliant lawyer trained in England) was an important moving spirit in these negotiations. I wonder whether all those Virginians were at the time thinking about America more along an east-west axis (rather than the north-south axis we have imposed on them in retrospect) and whether Jefferson himself (in proposing fourteen western states) was actually encouraging a move of the center of gravity westward. Certainly Jefferson himself was fascinated by the West as witnessed by his enthusiasm for the Lewis and Clark expedition. As Prof. Forbes has suggested, it would be interesting to study this issue, and the interaction among these three men, in the Jefferson correspondence and also in the minutes of the House of Delegates.