Ten years after that the old States had ceded their western lands to the General Government, and the Congress of the United States had passed the ordinance of 1785 for the survey of the public territory, and in 1787 the celebrated ordinance which organized the Northwestern Territory, and dedicated it to freedom and intelligence. Fifteen years after that, and more than a quarter of a cen tury after the Declaration of Independence, the State of Ohio was admitted into the Union, being the seventeenth which accepted the Constitution of the United States.