The standard for statehood
was fixed definitely in the later ordinance at sixty thousand free
inhabitants.
Jefferson, notwithstanding the supposedly aristocratic training of a
Virginia environment, placed no qualification for suffrage or office
in his ordinance. The Ordinance of 1787, presumably drafted under
democratic New England ideas, placed a qualification of ownership of
two hundred acres of land upon a representative in the territorial
legislature and of fifty acres upon an elector for a representative.
Here was an illustration of that revertive tendency in the sections
which has maintained the national equilibrium. Accumulated wealth in
the North was beginning to overcome the levelling creed of the Puritan,
while the economic loss resulting from slave labour in the South was
reducing the colonial Cavalier class in the planter States. The
exceedingly profitable cotton culture had not yet developed in the
Gulf States to create the ante-bellum aristocracy of the lower South,
nor had the stream of European immigration set in to the Northern
States to restore the levelling tendency there.
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