Yet despite the assurance of the Ordinance of 1787 conditions were such that one could not determine exactly whether the Northwest Territory would be slave or free.[7] What then was the situation in this partly unoccupied territory?
Slavery existed in what is now the Northwest Territory from the time of the early exploration and settlement of that region by the French.

The first slaves of white men were Indians.

Though it is true that the red men usually chose death rather than slavery, there were some of them that bowed to the yoke.

So many Pawnee Indians became bondsmen that the word _Pani_ became synonymous with slave in the West.[8] Western Indians themselves, following the custom of white men, enslaved their captives in war rather than choose the alternative of putting them to death.

In this way they were known to hold a number of blacks and whites.
The enslavement of the black man by the whites in this section dates from the early part of the eighteenth century.