USA > Massachusetts > Worcester County > Worcester county; a narrative history, Volume I > Part 31
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Cutler was master of the situation. When some of his other conditions were rejected he "paid his respects to all the members of Congress in the city, and informed them of his intentions to depart that day, and, if his terms were not acceded to, to turn his attention to some other part of the country." They urged him "to tarry till the next day and they would put by all other business to complete the contract." Then, he told his diary: "Congress came to the terms stated in our letter without the least variation." The terms which Putnam and Cutler framed at their Boston conference became the Ordinance of 1787.
Congress was rid of various anxieties. The ordinance provided for vet- erans of war, extinguished a considerable portion of the public debt, largely increased the value of the rest of the public domain, placed a shield of veteran soldiers between the frontiers of New York, Pennsylvania and Virginia and some of the most dangerous and powerful Indian tribes of the continent; and "secured to American occupation a territory on which England, France and Spain were still gazing with eager and longing eyes; in which England, in violation of treaty obligations, still maintained her military posts, hoping that the feeble band of our Union would break to pieces." In return the men of the Ohio Company received an immense area of some of the finest land in all the world.
The Settlement of Ohio-The first division of the pioneer settlers left Danvers December 1, 1787. The second division left Hartford, Connecticut, January I following. General Putnam went by way of New York City and
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joined the division January 24 at Swatara Creek, Pennsylvania. There fell a deep snow that night which so blocked the roads with drifts that they were compelled to abandon their wagons at Cooper's Tavern, now Strawsburg, at the foot of the Tuscarawas Mountains. So they built four stout sledges to which they harnessed their horses in single file. Men afoot broke trail ahead. It required two weeks of exhausting labor to get across the mountain ranges, and they did not reach Simrel's Ferry on the Youghiogheny River, headwater of navigation, until February 14, where they found the Danvers division which had been there since January 23. They had to build boats in which to make the voyage down the river, and these were completed April I. Taking aboard their stores of provisions they embarked, and on April 7 reached the Muskingum, and pitched their camp in the forest. The next day the survey of the house lots was begun, and a few days later were laid out the city lots and streets of Marietta, which was to be General Putnam's home until his death in 1824 in his 87th year.
The general returned to Rutland several times. Already some of his fellow-townsmen and others from Worcester County had followed him into this promised land. Finally, in September, 1790, he was ready to move his family to their new home on the Ohio. The story of the exodus of the Put- nam family and their friends from Rutland as told by Benjamin Franklin Stone of Chillicothe, Ohio, in his autobiography, was published in the New England Magazine of April, 1897. Benjamin was a little boy then, living in the family of General Putnam's daughter, Mrs. Burlingame. He wrote: "I remember the morning of our starting for Ohio. Mr. Burlingame's family (and I was one of them) went to General Putnam's the evening before. The next morning after family prayer and breakfast, they began to tackle up the teams, and Sardine (his eldest brother), with my mother's wagon, and the family and Grandmother Barrett came along. Here my grandmother took leave of us all and returned.
"General Putnam's family consisted of himself and wife, two sons and five single daughters, viz., Elizabeth, Persis, Abegail, Patty, and Katherine. The sons were William Rufus and Edward. General Putnam had two hired men, his teamsters, William Brauning and Samuel Porter, both natives of Rutland. Burlingame, whose wife was the daughter of General Putnam, had two children at that time. My mother's family that were there were Sardine, Matilda, Lydia, Israel, Augustus, myself, Christopher, Columbus, and Polly Buckley. Samuel Bridge, a single man of Rutland, and Charles Mills, were also of the party-twenty-six in all.
"It seemed even to the old folks a vast enterprise to go eight hundred miles into a savage country, as it was then called. There were three ox-wagons, with two yokes of oxen to each, and General Putnam's two-horse
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carriage and one saddle horse. My mother had one cow, and General Put- nam has three or four neat cattles, including a bull of choice breed."
They were eight weeks on the journey, through Pennsylvania and over the mountains to the Simrel's Ferry, where they were joined by Burlingame who had been doing pioneer work in connection with the Ohio settlement. It was a well organized expedition, as would be expected of the army engineer. On previous passings over the ground he had marked down each house where they might spend the night. Each morning he fixed the day's destina- tion, and himself rode on ahead to make the necessary arrangement. They went aboard boats which had been contracted for by their leader and pres- ently in a time of low water they were making a difficult way down the Youghiogheny and Monongahela to Pittsburgh and on down the Ohio to the Marrietta Settlement. There they found Colonel Silas Bent of Rutland wait- ing to welcome them, and other neighbors who were rejoiced to see familiar faces of home folk.
One incident of the journey which today seems almost trifling, but then was semi-tragic, is worth relating as picturing a phase of frontier conditions of the day. "Among other preparations for the journey," wrote Stone, "my mother and sister Lydia had laid up a large quantity of socks and stockings. These were packed in a bag, and that bag was used by the boys who lodged in the wagons, for a bolster. They were lost or stolen. Next morning Sar- dine went back the whole distance of the previous day's journey, and inquired and advertised for it without success. I do not remember how many pairs of stockings were in it, but from the size of the bag I judge that there were at least one hundred.
"One pair to each of the family were saved, besides those we had on, being laid aside in another place to wash. It was a severe loss. My mother had foreseen that we would have no sheep for some time in Ohio, and had labored hard to provide this most necessary article of clothing for her family, and so it was. We had no sheep for six years after that time."
The Forty-Eight Marietta Pioneers-The forty-eight original pio- neers of the Marietta Settlement were a remarkable group of men. They had all been officers of the Revolution. "No Colony in America," said Washing- ton, "was ever settled under such favorable auspices as that which has just commenced at Muskingun. Information, property and strength will be its characteristics. I know many of the settlers personally, and there never were men better calculated to promote the welfare of a community."
"I knew them all," cried Lafayette, when the list of nearly fifty military officers who were among the pioneers was read to him in Marietta, in 1825. "I saw them at Brandywine, Yorktown, and Rhode Island. They were the bravest of the brave."
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Senator Hoar in his oration delivered at the celebration of the centennial of the Founding of the Northwest, at Marietta, April 7, 1888, said of them : "There are many names that rise to the lips today. Varnum, than whom a courtlier figure never entered the presence of a Queen-soldier, statesman, scholar, orator-whom Thomas Paine, no mean judge, who had heard the greatest English orators in the greatest days of English eloquence, declared the most eloquent man he had ever heard speak; Whipple, gallant seaman as ever trod a deck- a man whom Farragut or Nelson would have loved as a brother ; first of the glorious procession of American naval heroes; first to fire an American gun at the flag of England on the sea; first to unfurl the flag of his own country on the Thames ; first pioneer of the river commerce of the Ohio to the Gulf ; Meigs, hero of Sag Harbor, of the March to Quebec, of the storming of Stony Point-the Christian gentleman and soldier, whom the Cherokees named the White Path in token of the unfailing kindness and inflexible faith which had conveyed to their darkened minds some not inade- quate conception of the spirit of Him who is the Way, the Truth and the Life; Parsons, soldier, scholar, judge; one of the strongest arms on which Washington leaned; who first suggested the Continental Congress; from the story of whose life could almost be written the story of the Northern war; the chivalric and ingenious Devol, said by his biographer to be the most per- fect figure of a man to be seen among a thousand; the noble presence of Sprout ; the sons of Israel Putnam and Manasseh Cutler; Fearing, and Greene, and Goodale, and the Gilmans; Tupper, leader in church and state- the veteran of a hundred exploits, who seems, in the qualities of intellect and heart, like a twin brother of Rufus Putnam; the brave and patriotic, but unfortunate St. Clair, first Governor of the Northwest, president of the Con- tinental Congress.
"But what shall be said which shall be adequate to the worth of him who was the originator, inspirer, leader, and guide of the Ohio settlement from the time when he first conceived it in the closing days of the Revolution until Ohio took her place in the Union as a free state, in the summer of 1803? Every one of that honorable company would have felt it as a personal wrong had he been told that the foremost honors of this occasion would not be given to Rufus Putnam. Lossing calls him 'the Father of Ohio.' Burnett says 'he was regarded as their principal chief and leader.' He was chosen the superintendent at the meeting of the Ohio Company in Boston, November 2Ist, 1787, 'to be obeyed and respected accordingly.' The agents of the com- pany voted in 1789 that the 7th of April, the day in which, as they say, 'Gen. Putnam commenced the settlement of this country,' be forever observed as a day of public festival !"
CHAPTER XXV.
Our Critical Quarter Century --- 1787-1812
The first quarter of a century of the United States, embracing the years from the close of the Revolution to the close of the war of 1812, was an acutely critical period. Its beginning was most unpropitious. Financial and business affairs were at sixes and sevens, largely because of the debased paper money. For lack of a central government there was no possible way of restoring the currency to a sound basis. The minds of men were bitter. Many of them had lost their homes and their estates. Some were prisoners for debt, and, with almost rare exceptions, all were poor. The congress, holding office under the loosely drawn Articles of Confederation, possessed no real power ; it could not impose its will either on the individual or on the states, even for the collection of taxes with which to defray the cost of gov- ernment. The Congress was weak in its membership. As George Washing- ton wrote to Benjamin Harrison in December, 1778, narrating the result of his observations of these men:
"If I was to be called upon to draw a picture of the times and of Men, from what I have seen, and heard, and in part know, I should in one word say that idleness, dissipation and extravagance seem to have laid fast hold on most of them. That speculation, peculation, and an insatiable thirst for riches seem to have got the better of every other consideration. That party disputes and personal quarrels are the great business of the day, whilst the momentous concerns of an empire are but secondary considerations, and are postponed from day to day, from week to week."
A centralized government as established under the Federal Constitution met with powerful resistance, which nowhere was in greater evidence than in Worcester County. In fact the votes of the county delegates in the State Constitutional Convention all but defeated ratification by Massachusetts. The majority of our home people believed the power of government should remain largely with the states.
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Hardly had the Constitution gone into effect, and the first national election held; George Washington inaugurated as President, and the thirteen states settled down to adjust themselves to radically and unprecedented new condi- tions of government, when troubles from without the Republic arose. From the very outset, England's attitude toward her lost colonies was arrogant and bullying. Many of her statesmen refused to abandon the belief that a Republic composed of states of widely differing and even strongly antag- onistic interests must fall to pieces, and eventually return to British dominion. In this opinion, which at times, no doubt, was a motive for action, the Mother Country was abetted by Americans whose Tory sympathies had never changed ; and some of these lived in our county. France, too, under the gov- ernment which followed its own revolution, and later under Napoleon, com- mitted countless outrages on American shipping, which, in the time of the Directory, led to open warfare. The life of the young nation was punctuated with vicissitudes which more than once combined to threaten its very exist- ence, but which were staunchly met one after another and overcome.
The lot of Worcester County was that common to the whole country-up to a certain point. Beyond that, various events and circumstances had their distinctly local consequences. Some of them endure even to this day, notably those influences which converted an almost exclusively agricultural region into one where husbandry occupies second place to manufacturing.
The county shared to the full in the chaos of public opinion which pre- vailed all through this quarter century. The men who peopled the shire in those stirring times were of strong and fearless minds and outright speech. Their training had been in the trying, self-denying days of the Revolution and the feverish years which preceded it. Their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers before them had lived under conditions where only the sturdy of mind as well as the sturdy of body could survive and thrive. Gen- erations of independence of thought and action had placed their mark upon these men who were to share in shaping the destiny of the still nebulous republic.
The mass of the people of the inland country of Massachusetts were the yeomanry, and most of them were farmers, untraveled, unread in the larger affairs of the world. They were unfamiliar even with all but a closely restricted area of the New World in which they lived. They knew very little about the sister colonies, excepting as they touched the borders of their own. The soldiers of the county had fought side by side with the men of Virginia and the Carolinas, but associations formed in war yielded little knowledge of the manner of living and human side and business interests of people geographically almost, if not quite, as distant as those of Europe. News contacts between them were infrequent and long-delayed. We of today
. . A.Branding af Worcester Mass for WORCESTER . ART . MUSEUM Willian.T.And Arddect.
---
WORCESTER ART MUSEUM As it will look when great frontal addition is completed
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are compelled to pause in getting an adequate picture of their isolation one from another.
Our men took to politics as ducks to water. There was nothing half- hearted about their beliefs. William Lincoln, writing his history in 1835, said of them: "During the political controversies which for nearly thirty years divided public opinion in the United States, a decided majority of the inhabitants of Worcester (in common with the rest of the county) were of the democratic party, when the name meant well-defined distinction of prin- ciples. The leading men of the time were ardent politicians, and there were periods of excitement when diversity of sentiment impaired the harmony of social intercourse, separated those closely allied by the ties of kindred, and dissolved the bonds of ancient friendship. When the feuds of the past have subsided, it excites surprise that the surface, now so tranquil, should ever have been agitated by commotions as angry as were those which once dis- turbed its repose." Conventions of the opposing parties constantly assem- bled, and embodied in resolutions, Yankee fashion, the feelings of the times.
Even in the year of Lincoln's History, nearly half a century after the Federal Government was established, the historian declined to discuss in detail the local controversies, lest the feelings of a new generation be wounded by the story of their fathers' political quarrels. Explaining his reticence he wrote: "In the progress of the narrative, we have arrived to that period, when the events of the past are so closely connected with the feelings of the present, as to impose painful restraint on the course of minute recital. The faithful review of the incidents of local history from the adoption of the Federal Constitution, embracing the struggles of the great parties dividing the community, executed in the spirit of independence and impartiality, would be alike useful and interesting. But the time has not yet come when the details of the contest agitating every village of the country, and kindling strife in the relations of social life, can be recorded with freedom and frank- ness.
"The embers of political controversy, long covered over, have not yet been so extinguished, that the annalist may tread with safety over the spot where they once glowed. The sons may not hope to render unbiassed judg- ment of the measures of the sires, in scenes of intense excitement. When another generation shall have passed away, and the passions and irritations of the actors shall exist in memory alone, the story may be told faithfully, without fear that inherited partiality or prejudice may lend undue color to the pictured delineated."
In no other period of the history of the United States have there been so many issues over which to quarrel. The fight for and against the adoption
Wor .- 19
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of the Constitution resulted in the formation of two political parties, the Federalists, whe believed in a centralized national government, and the anti- Federalists who stood for State Rights, and who, under the leadership of Thomas Jefferson, became first the Republican party, then the Democratic- Republican, and finally the Democratic party. As Lincoln said, in Worcester County the majority of voters, especially among the farmers, were anti- Federalists. Most of the merchants and other men of affairs were Federalists and strong supporters of the policies of Alexander Hamilton, that brilliant member of Washington's Cabinet, whose ability as a financier led the Nation out of its currency troubles, raised the money for paying both national and State debts, and established once and for all the good credit of the United States. But to the anti-Federalists his name was anathema. And so the men of the shire lined themselves for controversy which was always keen and often bitter and sometimes ugly. But it must not be forgotten that, regard- less of party prejudice, George Washington stood apart in the estimation of men as one to be trusted and revered.
Worcester County Strongly Opposes the Federal Constitution-When it came to electing delegates to the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention, which was to act upon the Constitution as drafted by the National Constitu- tional Convention, a very large majority of the freeholders were unyield- ingly opposed to it. As has been said, the people were unhappy and restless. While some of the evils which had culminated in Shays' Rebellion had been removed, conditions had changed very little for the better. Many men held radical opinions. They could not see the mischievous effects of a fiat paper currency ; and in this they have many prototypes even in the twentieth cen- tury. The opinion was vigorously expressed that all debts should be can- celled, both public and private. The majority was in no humor to endorse a centralized control and the sacrifice of State Rights.
They were distrustful of everything with which they were unfamiliar. The world contained no government such as that which the Constitution proposed for them. The only centralized authority with which they were acquainted was that of George III and his Ministers and Parliament, from whom they had suffered grievous wrongs, and against whose authority they had fought for eight long years before they acquired their liberty. This free- dom they treasured as a religion. They pictured the new republic evolving into a monarchy under whose rule they would be no better off than they had been under the sovereignty of Britain. Their outlook was narrow. It could not have been otherwise, and, looking backward, we cannot blame them. What had they upon which to base the principle of a government of the people, by the people, for the people ?
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Such was the state of mind of the people of Worcester County when they met in town meeting to elect convention delegates. They sent to Boston fifty delegates from forty-four towns. Only seven of them cast their vote for the adoption of the Constitution. One of the greatest of human documents received the endorsement of Massachusetts, three hundred and fifty-five dele- gates voting, by the bare majority of nineteen. Had its opponents prevailed, our present Constitution might never have been adopted.
The Federal Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia with delegates from the thirteen original colonies and with Washington as the presiding officer. It has been said that it contained "the greatest collection of superior men assembled in one group since the golden age of Athens." They prepared in four months the draft of a constitution for the proposed United States, "a charter of government, whatever its few very minor mistakes, admittedly without an equal." The convention finished its labors in the early fall of 1787. The Constitution had then to be ratified by the states. Five states had ratified when the issue was presented to Massachusetts, which called its con- vention on January 9, 1788. It met in the old State House at Boston, but the building was too small, and the place was changed to the old church which stood on "Long Lane," the name of which was changed to Federal Street to commemorate the occasion.
The authors and proponents of the Constitution were anxious about Mas- sachusetts. It was a pivotal point in the whole proceedings, a critical state, if there was to be any United States at all. James Madison wrote to George Washington, January 20, while the Massachusetts Convention was in prog- ress : "The intelligence from Massachusetts begins to be very ominous to the Constitution-there is great reason to fear that the voice of that state would be in the negative. The decision of Massachusetts either way will involve the result in New York state."
Again Madison wrote to Washington: "There are, unhappily, parties opposed to it. First, all men who are in favor of paper money. Those are more or less in every part of the state. Second, all the late insurgents and their abettors. We have in the convention eighteen or twenty who actually served in Shays' army." Worcester County men were among them.
Washington himself, on February 5, the day before the final vote in Massachusetts, wrote to Madison: "I am sorry to find by yours, and other accounts from Massachusetts, that the decision of its convention remains problematical. A rejection of the new form by that state would invigorate the opposition, not only in New York, but in all those which are to follow ; at the same time it would afford material for the minority, in such states as have actually agreed to it, to blow the trumpet of discord more loudly. The
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acceptance by a bare majority, though preferable to a rejection, is also to be deprecated." The favorable vote of Massachusetts was vitally important.
The delegates elected by the towns are listed in Isaiah Thomas' New England Magazine, which for a short period carried on the functions of his Massachusetts Spy. It is not clear why some of the towns had more than one delegate. Perhaps each town cast a single ballot. But the list contains an even fifty names, representing forty-four towns, as follows : Ashburnham, John Willard ; Athol, Josiah Goddard; Auburn (then Ward), Joseph Stone ; Barre, Captain John Black; Bolton, S. Baker; Boylston, James Temple; Brookfield, James Nichols, Daniel Forbes and N. Jenks; Charlton, Caleb Curtiss and Ezra M'Intire ; Douglas, Dr. John Taylor; Dudley, Jonathan Day; Fitchburg, Daniel Putnam; Grafton, Dr. Joseph Wood; Hardwick, Major M. Kinsley ; Harvard, Josiah Whitney ; Holden, Rev. Joseph Davis ; Hubbardston, Captain John Woods; Lancaster, J. Sprague; Leicester, Col- onel Samuel Denny; Leominster, Captain David Wilder; Lunenburg, Cap- tain John Fuller; Mendon, Edward Thompson; Milford, David Stearns; New Braintree, Captain Benjamin Joslyn; Northboro, Artemus Brigham; Northbridge, Captain Josiah Wood; Oakham, Captain Jonathan Bullard ; Paxton, Abraham Smith; Petersham, Jonathan Grout and Samuel Peckham ; Princeton, Timothy Fuller ; Royalston, John Frye; Rutland, A. Sherman ; Shrewsbury, Captain Isaac Harrington; Southboro, Captain Seth Newton; Spencer, James Hathaway; Sturbridge, Captain Timothy Parker; Sutton, David Harwood and Amos Singletary; Templeton, Captain Joel Fletcher ; Upton, Captain Thomas M. Baker ; Uxbridge, Dr. Samuel Willard ; Warren (then Western), Matthew Patrick; Westboro, Stephen Maynard; West- minster, S. Holden; Winchendon, Moses Hale; Worcester, David Bigelow and Samuel Curtis.
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