What I have done, then, is to forge a faux Schubert reception: a German musician in the early 1800s (I remind you that the last states formed out of the old Northwest Territories were admitted to the Union fully twenty years after Schubert died). The "fantastic" connection between Schubert and American history created by the trio infuses the text (that is, D779n13 itself) with new external meanings.
The Ordinance creating the territories gained from Britain at the conclusion of the Revolution was quintessentially American in its interplay of idealistic and pragmatic politics. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787--the great companion document to The United States Constitution and the blueprint for the development of the North American continent--succeeded, quite as well as the Constitution itself, in mediating between federalist and anti-federalist factions. I quote from Article III of the Ordinance, which reads, “Religion, morality and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” The authors of the Ordinance were, in the best tradition of the English Enlightenment, both idealistic and pragmatic, and so they kept in force a general Land Ordinance that dictated one 640-acre section in every township be sold to support schools. Rightly, this has been taken as the founding gesture of the American tradition of public support for education.
Lest anyone think I take a purely sentimental view of the Northwest Ordinance, let me say that its other socially progressive aspect -- the outlawing of slavery in states formed from the original Northwest Territories -- in fact worked against the delicate compromises of the Constitution and eventually exacerbated the regional conflicts that were the root cause of the Civil War. Without slavery, migration from the southern states was discouraged; and it is hardly coincidence then that the anti-slavery Republican party was founded in Michigan, the first Republican president was from Illinois, and by 1860 the most vigorously abolitionist state in the nation, after Massachusetts, was Ohio. Furthermore, although the Ordinance contained language protecting the rights of native Americans, the system of government surveys and land development it established was more than anything (besides smallpox) those peoples’ undoing.
