The period of a year-and-a-half that elapsed between the spring of 1786 and the late summer of 1787 was as consequential as any in American history. Near its end, the Northwest Ordinance was enacted by the Confederation Congress in New York City even as the Constitutional Convention was in Philadelphia writing a plan to replace that Congress. Near its beginning, a band of New England land speculators formed the Ohio Company.
It is this March 1786 event that sets the stage for David McCullough’s latest book, for it played nearly as crucial a role in what would become the United States.
Emphasized by McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize-winner and dean of U.S. popular historians, is that the speculators hoping to settle the Ohio Country west of the Alleghenies were from New England rather than Virginia. Puritan values, rather than pro-slavery ones, would guide development of the new land.
He celebrates the difference. And now he’s in trouble.
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