c. Established land ordinances.
These were the land ordinances of 1784, 1785, and 1787 enacted by the Congress' Confederation with the purpose of resolving disputes over the political division of the Northwest Territory of the U.S. (Now the American Midwest) that had been surrendered by Great Britain after the American Revolutionary War.
The most important and long-lasting of the ordinances was the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which established a division of the Northwest Territory into not less than three and nor more than five States, and that each state was to be governed by a governor, secretary, and three judges appointed by Congress until it attained a population of 5,000 adult free males, at which time it would become a territory and could form its own representative legislature.