What did the Northwest Ordinance decree in its six articles: 1) freedom of religious worship; 2) the rights of the English common law, the right to associate (marriage, schools, business, churches, education, etc.) with one another without political interference, and the absolute natural right to property; 3) respect for American Indians; 4) equality among the states, thus preventing a citizen of one of the original thirteen states claiming superiority over an American from a future state; and 5) the abolition of slavery. These laws applied to what is now Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Wisconsin, and a small part of Minnesota.

They also created the spirit of what western expansion for the republic SHOULD BE.

Two years later, the French Revolutionaries in their insidious Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen proclaimed that

the principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. No body nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation.

Under the Northwest Articles, Americans argued just the opposite--real sovereignty resides in the individual human person in association.

To state the obvious, we're not the French.