What territory did the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 create in the early United States?

The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 created the Northwest Territory.

Congress enacted the ordinance on July 13, 1787, to govern lands north and west of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi River. The region had been ceded by Great Britain to the United States in the Treaty of Paris, but the Confederation Congress needed a system for administering it and admitting future states.

The ordinance established a territorial government and set a path toward statehood. It also protected several legal rights and prohibited slavery in the territory, making the Ohio River an important geographic boundary between free and slave regions during the early republic.

The Northwest Territory later supplied land for several states, including Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, plus part of Minnesota. It is not the same as the later Southwest Territory, which was organized south of the Ohio River in 1790.