Beschreibung:

Laws of the Territory of the United States North-West of the Ohio: Adopted and made by the Governour and Judges, in their Legislative capacity, at a Session begun on Friday, the xxix day of May, one thousand, seven hundred and ninety-five, and ending on Tuesday the twenty-fifth day of August following: With an Appendix of Resolutions and the Ordnance for the Government of the Territory. By Authority Cincinnati: Printed by W. Maxwell. M,DCC,XCVI. Page size 7 x 6.9", printed on laid paper, with chain lines one inch apart. With original brown stiff paper boards, inked manuscript inscription on cover upper right, Laws of the (illegible) Territory, and about the midpoint of the cover, (illegible) Jefferson County, State of Ohio. Inscribed on the inside of the front cover Robert McCleary, Esq., with the additional names of Peter M. Wilson on the title page above “Laws”; and across the right edge of the title page Francis Douglas’ Book May 16 ‘98. With the bookplate of former owner Robert Aitchison of Wichita, Kansas, pasted down on the rear inside cover. Collation: p(1), title page; (2), blank; (iii) to xiii, Ordnance of 1787; (xiv), blank; (15) to 221, text; 222-223, appendix; 224 to 225, Table of Laws. The Laws of the Territory of the United States North-West of the Ohio Perhaps the most storied book of the first American “West,” the Maxwell Code was printed in the Ohio River settlement of Cincinnati, in 1796, at a time when the village was little more than a collection of rude log buildings serving as shelter for 200 inhabitants surrounding the government outpost of Fort Washington. With the Treaty of Greenville in 1795 marking the end of the Indian Wars, the government permitted, and actually encouraged, settlement of the Territory. As settler began to make their way into the Territory, the need for a printing of civil and criminal laws required for regulating behavior soon became apparent. While the ordinance establishing the Northwest Territory of what is now Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois and parts of Wisconsin and Minnesota had been established in 1787, when Arthur St. Clair was appointed the Governor, there was no body of written law that could be called upon in the event of legal disputes. During the late spring and summer of 1795, St. Clair met in Cincinnati with judges John Cleves Symmes and George Turner to formulate such a body of law. Congress had directed them to codify the law for the new Territory by utilizing statutes already passed by the legislative bodies of the thirteen original colonies. The resulting 37 laws which they adopted represented the first civil and criminal code for the new American frontier, or the "West," as it then existed. St. Clair and his colleagues turned to the printer William Maxwell to produce a volume containing the new laws. Born in either New York or New Jersey, Maxwell had emigrated to Cincinnati in 1793 after a failed attempt to establish himself in Lexington, Kentucky, some 80 miles south across the Ohio River. His newspaper, The Centinel of the North-Western Territory, began its run in November of that same year. By the summer of 1796 his shop was run by himself, an assistant and his wife. Whether historically accurate, or merely an apocryphal tale, Maxwell’s wife, Nancy Robbins Maxwell, has always been given credit for hand-sewing the signatures of the Code. The exact number of copies printed is unknown. Announcing his proposal for the publication of the new laws, he used the The Centinel as his trumpet: W. Maxwell being appointed by the legislature to print for them 200 copies of their laws, he thinks it would be greatly conducive towards the instruction and common benefit of all citizens to extend the impression to 1000 copies…The price in boards, to subscribers, will be at the rate of nineteen cents for every 50 pages, and to non-subscribers, thirty cents. Rather than adopting its lengthy title, the legal practitioners who used the new volume coined a vernacular name that ho