Ohio’s Northwest Ordinance Exhibit Opens in Columbus

Much of the nation’s attention in 1987 will be focused upon celebrating the two hundredth anniversary of the US Con­stitution. While the citizens of Ohio will participate in a variety of commemora­tive events, they also intend to recall a national triumph achieved under the Articles of Confederation. In July 1787, the Confederation Congress adopted the Northwest Ordinance, a document of which Franklin Roosevelt once said, “On this plan was the United States built,” and one called “statesmanlike” by Richard Morris because of its “repudia­tion of Colonial imperialism.”

For Ohio and the other states of the old Northwest Territory, the Ordinance is pivotal to the subsequent develop­ment of their political, economic, and cultural institutions since it provided for their admission to the union on the basis of equality. Distinctive regional patterns of education, property ownership, and even race relations derive from this re­markable piece of legislation and, in keeping with its pioneering role in the Old Northwest, Ohio will begin its ob­servances of the Ordinance’s 1987 bi­centennial this month.

On Saturday, December 14, a major exhibit on the Northwest Ordinance will be formally inaugurated at the Ohio Historical Museum in Columbus. The event is the culmination of nearly a year of planning and preparation on the part of the exhibit’s cosponsors, the Ohio Historical Society and the Ohio Human­ities Council, a state program of the National Endowment for the Human­ities.

The exhibit itself consists of a dozen large panels, each measuring more than six feet in height and seven feet in breadth. Most of the subject matter dis­played treats the provisions of the Ordi­nance generally while a few are specific to the Ohio experience. Among the topics covered are: territorial settlement patterns, policy toward the indigenous population, the precedents established for statehood, the prohibition of slavery, and the legislation’s guarantees of religious freedom and public education.

It is anticipated that Governor Rich­ard Celeste will be on hand to mark the occasion and to hear scholarly presenta­tions on the Ordinance and its signifi­cance for the region and the nation. Featured on the program will be: Charles Ping, President of Ohio Univer­sity, discussing the Ordinance and the tradition of public education in Ameri­ca; Miami University’s W. Sherman Jackson on the 1787 legislation and the abolitionist movement; and Peter Onuf of Worcester Polytechnic Institute, who will examine the Ordinance from the perspective of the federalist concept of government that engendered it. Histori­an Phillip Shriver, President Emeritus of Miami University, will be moderator of the panel.

While Columbus will host this inaugu­ral event, the exhibit has been designed for mobility. From the inception of the project, it was the intent of the Ohio Humanities Council that the displays and related programming reach as many Ohioans as possible during the bicentennial period. In 1986, the exhibit will travel to ten other Ohio cities and towns and at each locality the exhibit will be accompanied by presentations on the Northwest Ordinance by historians and other scholars from Ohio’s colleges and universities.

Discussions are currently under way to broaden the exhibit’s audience fur­ther still. At a recent meeting of repre­sentatives of state humanities councils from the former Northwest Territory there was agreement to work coopera­tively to modify the Ohio exhibit for programming and exhibition across the several states involved. Specific panels, appropriate to each of the Ordinance states, would be added to the original exhibit and scholars enlisted locally to present the traveling exhibit to the pub­lic.

Such programming is, of course, the essence of the work of the state humanities councils that exist in each of the states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. Created during the last fifteen years by the NEH, the councils were charged with devising programs in which recent scholarship in the humanities could be brought before the public and extensively discussed. The formats employed by the fifty-three councils are as varied and distinctive as the jurisdictions them­selves. Many councils fund research projects that entail a public dimension; more support institutes for teachers; most sustain speakers’ bureaus that bring scholars into dialogue with members of community organizations, and some involve historians in media pro­ductions that reach mass audiences.

Information on the work of any or all of the councils and details on how to reach them may be obtained by writing: The Division of State Programs, Nation­al Endowment for the Humanities, 1100 Pennsylvania Ave. NW, Washing­ton, DC 20506.