USA > Mississippi > The westward movement : the colonies and the republic west of the Alleghanies, 1763-1798 with full cartographical illustrations from contemporary sources > Part 25
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278
THE INSECURITY OF THE NORTHWEST.
1, 1786, " that even respectable characters speak of a monar- chical government without horror." "I cannot believe," said Benjamin Lincoln, " that these States ever will or ever can be governed by laws which have a general operation. Were one under an absolute monarch, he might find a remedy, but some other mode of relief must be provided." Lincoln was further of the opinion that the extent of the country along the seaboard, embracing such a variety of climate and production, rendered a uniform government less easy of exercise than if its area stretched westward in an isothermal belt. "Shall we have a king?" asked Jay. "Not, in my opinion, while other expedients remain untried." "No race of kings," said Jefferson in com- menting, " has ever presented above one man of common sense in twenty generations." But John Adams, in his essay on constitutions, had distinctly shown himself, it was thought, friendly to the British Constitution, - a point that at a later day Fauchet made the most of in his dispatches to the French government.
There were certainly great provocations to these dangerous sentiments. Shays's rebellion in Massachusetts had unsettled the national hopes, because, as Hamilton said, that State had thrown her citizens into rebellion by heavier taxes, "for the common good," than were paid in any other American com- munity. To make matters worse, Jefferson in his wild unbal- ance had welcomed the revolt, or proposed to cherish it, as a benignant sign, and based his consolation on what Hamilton called a " miserable sophism."
The reckless financial course of Rhode Island had made dark the future of all. "The turbulent scenes in Massachusetts and the infamous ones in Rhode Island " were the words in men's months. "The bulk of the people," said one observer, "will probably prefer the lesser evil of a partition of the Union into three more practicable and energetic governments," and the advocates of such a partition were a force to be combated by the writers of The Federalist, one of whose salient points was that a dismemberment of the Union would reopen the question of the right to the western lands, lodged in the seaboard States, and expose the territorial disputes among the States to the arbitrament of war.
Whatever the result, whether the call for a king, or disinte-
279
BRITISH DELAYS.
gration, it had become clear to the British leaders that time would work to their advantage. So any dilatory policy which would put off a hostile demonstration on the part of the In- dians, into which the posts might be drawn, was a manifest prudence. Meanwhile, it was true that a good deal of the recur- rent bitterness in reference to the retention of the posts, which the Americans had shown, had gone. Whatever truth there may have been in it, Dorchester was beginning to think that, if they could not recover these military stations, the Americans were content to accept the situation, and seek to rival them in trading-posts by establishing new ones on the lakes. When he learned that a considerable number of Americans were en- camped on the Great Miami, and making their way towards Vincennes, the alternative presented itself to his mind that if they were not aiming to attack the posts, they were intending to afford support in founding these rival stations.
CHAPTER XIV.
THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED.
1786-1790.
DURING 1785, General Benjamin Tupper of Massachusetts, who was one of Hutchins's surveyors, had opportunities of traversing the Ohio country. On his return east, he wrote to Washington that he had been charmed with the aspect of the west. Later, he spent a night in Rutland, Massachusetts, in a house still standing, where with its master, General Rufus Putnam, a project was considered of leading a colony of old soldiers to this attractive region. The midnight talk of these old companions in arms revived the longings shown at New- burgh two years before. It was accordingly agreed between them to issue a call to the disbanded officers and men of the army living in New England, to meet in Boston on March 1, 1786, to consider a new project of westward emigration.
The call met with a good response. Eleven delegates ap- peared from different New England communities, and within two days the Ohio Company was organized. Not only officers of the army were welcome, but those who had served on the sea as well, and among the naval veterans was Commodore Whipple of Rhode Island. There was a good deal of preliminary work to be done, for it was necessary to seek those who held land certificates for service in the war, as these credits were to be accepted in payment for the soil. There being already a tide of settlers turning towards Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine, it was also necessary to set forth by advertisement the greater attractions of this western country. In due time, such business methods were well arranged under Generals Putnam and Par- sons as directors, to whom a third, Manasseh Cutler, skillful with the pen and fertile in counsel, was added.
Rufus Putnam had made a creditable record in the war, though, as is often the case with engineer officers, he had not
281
CUTLER AND DANE.
gained a conspicuous position in the public eye. He was of a Massachusetts stock that had always been well known. Samuel Holden Parsons was a Connecticut man, of good standing, though of late years some disclosures, principally in the secret service books of Sir Henry Clinton, have raised an unfortunate suspicion that he failed at times in loyalty to the revolutionary cause. Friendly efforts have thrown these charges into the category of things not proven, but it still remains a fact that his good faith in relation to the Ohio Company was, in some respeets, questioned by his associates in that undertaking.
But the chief spirit in this colonizing movement was a minis- ter of the gospel in Ipswich, Massachusetts, who gained distinc- tion enough in his pulpit to become a Doctor of Divinity, and he knew scarce less of law and medicine. Manasseh Cutler was a self-reliant man, and had that confidence in his star which characterizes a certain type of New Englander. Moreover, he believed, as that sort of a man often does, in making his neigh- bors and those he knew best his associates in any hazardous undertaking. He was as shrewd and as politic as any among the people he favored, not above telling half the truth and bar- gaining for the rest. He was equal to cajoling when he could not persuade, and by that token not a poor politician. With whatever skill he had in subduing opposition, he was a master in observation, both of man and nature, and naturalists look back to his botanical records to-day as among the earliest in New England of much scientific value. He knew, above all, how to stand up against opposition, whether in man or the devil. Such qualities gave him the leading place among those who were devising plans for a new life, and seeking, under his inspiration, a new career in the distant West.
While these measures were being shaped in Boston, Nathan Dane, an Essex County man, representing Massachusetts in Congress, had opened the way for a committee, of which Monroe was made the chairman, to report an ordinanee for the govern- ment of the northwest, and in considering the matter, Monroe had invited Jay to confer with the committee. It was the purpose of the new movement to supplant Jefferson's ordi- nance of 1784. Its progress was delayed, quorums failed, and a new Congress intervened before, on April 26, 1787, the revised ordinance was reported. There were some features in
282
THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED.
it not in the carlier law, but there was nothing in the nature of a compact to prevent repeal without common consent. The question of preventing slavery had been so squarely met and thrown out in Jefferson's experience that the subject was now ignored.
A fortnight later, on May 9, the bill came up for a second reading. At this time, General Parsons, now in attendance, put in a memorial for a grant of land within the jurisdiction of the proposed ordinance. There was, however, something in the manner of his application that disturbed both Cutler and Putnam when they heard of it, and even excited suspicions of Parsons's honesty. A third reading was in order on the next day, but there was no quorum, and all business was laid over.
A month and more now passed, during which interest was centred in the federal convention, which assembled at Phila- delphia on May 14. In this interval the work of Congress was blocked by the absence of delegates. During these idle days Cutler had appeared in New York, prepared to supersede Parsons in directing the application for land in behalf of the Ohio Company, now representing two hundred and fifty shares at a thousand dollars each. Cutler reached that city on July 5, and found Congress with a quorum, the first it had had since May 11; but its president, Arthur St. Clair, was absent. Hutch- ins had advised that the company ask for its territory near the Muskingum. Cutler now, in presenting the subject anew, showed that he was determined, if land was purchased, that a due recognition should be made in the pending ordinance of those social and political principles which had been formulated of late in the constitution of Massachusetts, and in the laws of the States which the new era had fashioned. Cutler's proposition came before the committee on July 6, and included a payment for the land which he asked for of sixty-six and two thirds cents the acre, in soldiers' certificates, which, reduced to specie value, was equivalent to eight or ten cents.
Congress at this time hardly knew where to turn to meet its financial obligations, and such a proposition was a welcome relief in its distresses. Three days later, on July 9, the ordi- nance was recommitted to see if it could not be modified to suit the demands for which Cutler stood. These conditions and expectations brought a new atmosphere about the deliberations
283
CUTLER AND THE ORDINANCE.
of Congress. The new proposals, it was found, opened the way to pay off about one tenth of the national debt, and in addition, the prospect seemed good of combining into a code of funda- mental principles the numerous social and political ideas which were flying about in the air, and many of which had, in one way or another, from time to time, been brought directly to the observation of Congress. Some of them involved, however, a smothering of cherished antipathies on the part of some of the members, particularly a demand for the extirpation of slavery north of the Ohio. Cutler was in his element in stand- ing as the champion of freedom, and he was politician enough to know how the Virginia opposition could be quieted by show- ing to the representatives of the Southern States the better chance they had of compacting their interests south of the Ohio, if they conceded something on the other side of that river to the principles of the North, since such concessions might strengthen the obligations of the North to protect the products of slave labor in the South, and to stand by that section of the country in an inevitable contest with Spain over the free navi- gation of the Mississippi. This was to be the chief victory of Cutler in paving the way for the later motion of Dane. The other points upon which Cutler insisted were more easily carried. Such were reservations of land for the support of religion and education. The latter object received a double recognition. Five sections in each township were set aside for the benefit of schools, and two whole townships were devoted to the advance- ment of liberal learning.
While in the hands of the new committee, it would seem that the draft of the ordinance was submitted to Cutler for his scrutiny, and under his influence, doubtless, some other of the final social provisions of the instrument found their place in it. With these amendments, it was reported back to Congress on July 11, and went promptly through successive readings. It became a law on the 13th "with great unanimity," the eight States present all voting for it. Rufus King was not present in the final stages of the question, and Dane, after the passage of the ordinance, wrote to him: " We wanted to abolish the old system and get a better one, and we finally found it necessary to adopt the best we could get." All that was desired was not obtained; but it was nevertheless a triumph for Cutler and those
284
THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED.
who sympathized with him. The Virginians had yielded much. There were, in fact, potent reasons other than those already mentioned for them to accede, since it gave them the hope of using the proposed trans-montane community to further their scheme of opening communication with the west through the Virginia rivers. So the tricks of give and take, as politicians understand them, did their part in the work.
It is of little consequence, if not futile, to try to place upon any one the entire credit, such as it was, of this famous ordi- nance of 1787. Cutler's interposition was doubtless opportune. What the Massachusetts country parson was from the outside, very likely the Massachusetts lawyer, Nathan Dane, was from the inside ; and with both combining, with Congress ready to bargain and be complacent, and with the example of Jefferson's earlier ordinance, and the personal influence of King and others according, the instrument took its final shape, as the natural and easy outgrowth of surrounding conditions. It was also, as Rufus King called it, "a compromise of opinions," and he added, in writing to Gerry, " When I tell you the history of this ordinance, you shall acknowledge that I have some merit in the business."
Congress, as we have seen, had caused a large tract of ter- ritory to be surveyed west of the mountains, thinking, by dis- posing of it, to place the finances of the young Republic on a healthy basis ; but there had been few or no sales of the land. Cutler, as a buyer, had now appeared, ready and anxious to make a purchase and give a vital flow to the revenue.
The federal convention, just at this time sitting in Phila- delphia, was seeking to find a way out of a dismal political environment. It needed, in one aspect, the encouragement of just the outcome which a copy of the perfected ordinance, as printed in a Philadelphia newspaper on July 25, afforded it. The bold assumption of Congress to regulate the public domain was a stroke which helped the convention better to understand the relations of the States to the unorganized territory in the west. The enlarged conception which the new ordinance gave of the future problem of western power, and its effect on the original States, clarified the perplexities which had excited in the convention the apprehensions of Gerry and others. The influence which the new outlook had upon the different mem-
285
CHARACTER OF THE ORDINANCE.
bers was naturally in accordance with their individual habits of mind. Morris expressed a fear at granting any new western state privileges like those enjoyed by the seaboard common- wealths. The chief advocate of equal rights was George Mason of Virginia. "If it were possible," he said, " by just means to prevent emigration to the western country, it might be good policy. But go the people will, as they find it for their in- terest ; and the best policy is to treat them with that equality which will make them friends, not enemies." He had, too, a just anticipation of the time " when they might become more numerous and more wealthy than their Atlantic brethren." King, whom Brissot was reporting as " the most eloquent man in the United States," evinced wherein his hope lay : "The eastern State of the three proposed will probably be the first, and more important than the rest ; and will, no doubt, be settled chiefly by eastern people, and there is, I think, full an equal chance of its adopting eastern politics." So with some a hope to bolster the power of the North as against the South was not the least consideration in the movement.
The ordinance shows, in its conglomerate character and some- what awkward combinations, the rapid changes which took place in it during the brief interval while it was upon the anvil of Cutler and the reformers. The company which was to act under it was waiting, and there was no time to spend to weld into symmetry its independent parts. The instrument was peculiarly the outcome of prevalent ideas. Congress by previous legislation had experimented with many of them. The statutes of several of the States, the constitution of Massa- chusetts, and the Bills of Rights largely patterned upon that of Virginia, and which the new fervor of independence and liber- ated humanity had elicited, were but other expressions of cur- rent hopes drawn upon, while devoted hands were moulding the provisions of the ordinance. Thus it was an embodiment of current aspirations, and had not a single new turning-point in human progress; but it was full of points that had already been turned. Let us pass in review its leading features so as to show this.
The ordinance was intended to provide security and politi- cal content in a territory of two hundred and seventy thousand
286 .
THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED.
five hundred and fifty square miles, or thereabouts, which was larger than any known in Europe, except Russia, and twice as large as Great Britain and Ireland combined. This country lay above the Ohio, east of the Mississippi, and was bounded on the north by Lakes Erie, Huron, and Superior. It was to be divided eventually into five States, and the Eastern States had welcomed this provision as a substitute for the smaller commonwealths which Jefferson had proposed.
As this provision was made a part of a compact, it was sup- posed that this territorial distribution was binding. Everybody counted blindly. They did not sufficiently comprehend that any planning for the future of an extensive and little-known territory must necessarily, compact or no compact, depend for its perpetuity on a sustaining public interest. The question of bounds of these five States, as provided in the fifth compact of the ordinance, was peculiarly liable to such vicissitudes. In defining the latitudinal line which was to make the northern boundary of the three lower States, the framers of the ordi- nance had overlooked the more accurate configurations of Hutchins's map of 1778, and had gone back to Mitchell's map of 1755. In this way they accepted a false position for the southern bend of Lake Michigan, which that divisionary line was to touch. The question of sharing in some equitable way the frontage on the lakes, and the plea that an infringement of the compact of the ordinance was necessary to afford such a frontage so as to prevent Illinois casting in her lot with the South, in due time, threw to the winds, as a matter of course, that obligation of the instrument, and a majority vote dissolved the compact, as it did in another question of inherent national interest when the acquisition of Louisiana was confirmed. A similar disregard of the agreement, also, in time abridged the rightful claim of Wisconsin to the region east of the upper Mississippi and south of the Lake of the Woods. In this re- spect any modern map shows how futile the compact was.
The provision of the fourth section of the compact seeking to promote trade in transit, by declaring streams and connecting portages common highways, had already been anticipated, in connection with Virginia's project for opening channels to west- ern trade, by a resolution of Congress on May 12, 1786. Pick- ering had urged it before in a letter to Rufus King : " It seems
287
SLAVERY CLAUSE.
very necessary to secure the freedom of navigating water com- munications to all the inhabitants of all the States. I hope we shall have no Scheldts in that country."
The assurance for a representative government, which the ordinance gave, was accompanied by a provision which allowed, as was permitted in the ordinance of 1784, the adoption of the laws of any of the older States. The provision sometimes proved an onerous one amid environments which rendered mod- ifications of such laws necessary to a healthful condition of public life. It was provided that when a State reached a population of sixty thousand free persons, it could form a con- stitution and be admitted to Congress by delegates allowed to vote, while with a less population such delegates could not vote. A property qualification was rendered necessary in order to be either voter or magistrate, and, if manhood suffrage is an advance, the ordinance made a backward step, for Jefferson's ordinance had given every man the right to vote. The new act nearly mated the provision of the Virginia constitution of 1776, where a vague requirement of "sufficient evidence of per- manent common interest with, and attachment to, the commu- nity" had been considered to mean the possession of a freehold.
The section for the exclusion of slavery, which was intro- duced by Dane on the second reading of the bill, was a matter that had been for a long time bandied about between North and South, and between factions for and against, both in the North and in the South. The phrase, " all men are born free and equal," in some of its forms, used in the Virginia Constitution in 1776, repeated in the Declaration of Independence, and cop- ied in the Bills of Rights of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, was simply a hackneyed expression of political assertion, as John Adams said at the time. It meant what it pleased any- body to say it meant. There was no thought in Virginia that it touched the question of slavery, while in Massachusetts, under the pressure of public opinion, it was seized upon by the Supreme Court of the State, in 1783, to signify the legal abolishment of slavery in that community. With the same language to deal with in the New Hampshire constitution (1783), it was early construed as freeing those only who were born after the enactment. Similar phraseology in the Vermont constitution, in 1777, had not been held to abolish slavery.
288
THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED.
With such "rights and liberties " as Virginians acquired under her constitution, with her interpretation of that phrase, she covenanted with the Union in her deed of cession of March 1, 1784, that they should still pertain to her citizens then in the northwest territory. Notwithstanding this, her representa- tives had voted for Cutler's bill, which he thought in conflict with that covenant. While, then, this professed prohibition of slavery in the northwest was in July, 1787, enacted in New York, George Mason was saying in August, in the federal con- vention in Philadelphia, that " the western people are already calling out for slaves for their new lands, and will fill that country with slaves, if they can be got through South Carolina and Georgia." Mason's reference was of course mainly to the people south of the Ohio; but it is by no means certain that Cutler knew just what this prohibition of the ordinance meant for the north side of the Ohio. There were four or five thou- sand French and half-breeds in the Illinois country, whose rights of property had been guaranteed in the treaties of 1763 and 1782, and human servitude prevailed among them. Did this ordinance provide for its extinction and without compen- sation to the owners of slaves ? Some evidently feared it, for there was some emigration of such over the Mississippi from Kaskaskia. Fortunately, in the awkward dilemma, the faith and justice of Congress, careless of promoting them, were estab- lished for that body by St. Clair when he became governor of the territory. He reported to the President that he had con- strued the ordinance with something of the same freedom that had been used with the glittering words of the Bills of Rights, as intending only to prevent the introduction of slaves, and not aimed at emancipating such as were there and had been introduced " under the laws by which they had formerly been governed." He hoped, he said, that in doing this he had not misunderstood "the intentions of Congress," as by his inter- pretation he had quieted the apprehension of the people and prevented their flying beyond the Mississippi.
Therefore the ordinance failed to abolish slavery, and it was not, moreover, any novelty in its professions of abolishment. When there had been, under Pickering's influenee, a movement in the army, in 1783, to provide homes for the war-stained vet- erans, it had been a condition too emphatie for misinterpreta-
289
RELIGION AND EDUCATION.
tion that the total exelnsion of slavery should be " an essential and irrevocable part of the constitution of the proposed State." Mason and other Virginians had been, as we have seen, advo- cates for the abolition of slavery. Jefferson's preliminary ordinance of 1784 had rooted it out of every part of the trans- Alleghany region, though this section had received only the votes of six States, when seven were required. Cutler had indeed, with Dane's aid, turned the southern adherence to negro bondage so adroitly to his own purpose that he had secured, futile though it was, the expression in the last article of the compact which was intended to extirpate slavery. For this in- tention due credit must be given ; but King and Pickering had been public advocates of abolition before ever Cutler was heard of. The American Anti-Slavery Society had been founded in Philadelphia in 1775. Tom Paine had written the preamble of the Abolition Act of Pennsylvania in 1780. A society for the liberating of slaves had been organized in New York in 1785. Notwithstanding these signs, it is apparent that the provision of the new ordinance for this end was never pro- claimed, for fear of the influence it might have to prevent emi- gration to the territory. There is indeed no evidence that the supposed fact of prohibition was ever used in any advertisement of the Ohio Company to advance settlement. The ordinance can hardly be said to have been instrumental in keeping human bondage out of the northwest in later years. It afforded a rallying cry ever after 1795, when the movement of the slavery faction began in that region to overcome and eradicate the aver- sion of the people to such bondage, but it was the constancy of a later generation, and the leading of such as Governor Coles, and not an ordinance which was never in its entire provisions effective, which had been annulled by the adoption of the con- stitution, and substantially reenacted by the first Congress, that did the work which was really consummated in the constitu- tion of Illinois at a much later day.
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