The westward movement : the colonies and the republic west of the Alleghanies, 1763-1798 with full cartographical illustrations from contemporary sources, Part 26

Author: Winsor, Justin, 1831-1897. cn
Publication date: 1897
Publisher: Boston ; New York : Houghton, Mifflin and Co.
Number of Pages: 622


USA > Mississippi > The westward movement : the colonies and the republic west of the Alleghanies, 1763-1798 with full cartographical illustrations from contemporary sources > Part 26


Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).


Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34 | Part 35 | Part 36 | Part 37 | Part 38 | Part 39 | Part 40 | Part 41 | Part 42 | Part 43 | Part 44 | Part 45 | Part 46 | Part 47 | Part 48 | Part 49 | Part 50 | Part 51


Congress had for some time played fast and loose with the question of religion and education. George Mason had long been the redoubtable champion of both. In the revision of the Virginia laws in 1777, Jefferson had contended for " religions freedom with the broadest bottom." Though the provision for


290


THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED.


the support of religion had been once lost in Congress, the sus- tenance of education had been a part of Bland's motion in June, 1783, and again in the bill for surveys in 1785, when lot six- teen was set aside in each township. The allowing of all kinds of orderly worship and the furtherance of religious interests, the support of education and the protection of Indian rights, were now secured - as they had been often allowed before in other parts of the country - in the first and third articles of the compact.


The provisions of the second compact for the regulating of social life were all ordinary observations pertaining to common law processes, the writ of habeas corpus, and trial by jury. The conditions developed in Massachusetts by Shays's rebellion had induced Richard Henry Lee and Nathan Dane to become sponsors of the clause which prohibited laws impairing the ob- ligations of private contracts. The absolute ownership of lands, the equal sharing of property, and the prevention of primo- geniture and entail were all in the creeds of Jefferson, Monroe, Johnson, and others, and had before been embodied in the laws of Virginia and other States. Hamilton had pointed to the common observance of an equal inheritance as insuring the country from the evils of a moneyed aristocracy.


So the ordinance of 1787 introduces us to nothing new in human progress. There was doubtless that in it which proved a guiding star for future legislation, as in the struggle over the slavery question in Illinois ; but it may well be questioned if later enactments, without such a beacon, and keeping in sight . the interests of the community as they arose, would not have made of the northwest all that it has become. The provisions of this fundamental law were operative just so far as the public interests demanded, and no farther, and the public interests would have had their legitimate triumph unaided by it. The ordinance simply shared this condition with all laws in commu- nities which are self-respecting and free.


The ordinance disposed of, Congress, on July 23, authorized the Board of the Treasury to sell to the Ohio Company a tract of land lying between the Seven Ranges and the Scioto, and beginning on the east five miles away from the left bank of the Muskingum. The tract was supposed to contain one million


291


THE OHIO COMPANY.


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Devils hole


Great Muss


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Little Miss ...


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Belleville & Kanhavod


Belleville I.


Ponds Cr ,


Findersons I.


Sandy Cr


Point


Pleasant


Mills Cr


allpofis


G. Kanhama


GvJ


THE OHIO COMPANY'S PURCHASE.


[From a General Map of the Course of the Ohio from its Source to its Junction with the Mississippi, in Collot's Atlas. ]


five hundred thousand acres, for which there was to be paid, if the measurement proved correct, a million dollars in soldiers' certificates, one half down and the other half when the land was surveyed. In order to increase the inducement for the govern- ment to sell, - for there had arisen a doubt if Cutler's terms


Uninhabited


eat Horkhetkings


=>


1


292


THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED.


of payment were to be accepted, - and at the same time to play furtively into the hands of Colonel Duer, an ardent specu- lator and "representative of some of the principal characters in the city," this New England parson and trusted agent of the Ohio Company, on the same day, and keeping Duer's partici- pancy in the shade, suddenly increased his proposal for terri- tory. He asked now for five million acres, and offered a payment of $3,500,000. Cutler by this time had discovered that St. Clair, who since the 17th had been in his chair as presiding officer of Congress, was not averse to receiving the governorship of the new territory, and though St. Clair was not Cutler's choice, the latter found it politic to favor the presi- dent's somewhat disguised aspirations so as to advance his own enlarged project. Under this reinforcement, Cutler's lag- ging project had been resuscitated, and the bargain was con- cluded, and the desired area was secured. It was to include country north from the Ohio, ten townships of an eighth range, and to extend west, south of the upper boundary of the tenth township, till seventeen ranges of six miles each had been cov- ered. Hutchins thought that the meridian making the western bounds of the last range would come nearly opposite the mouth of the Kanawha, thus by a considerable stretch falling short of the Scioto. This was indeed a misjudgment, which, with other mishaps, led to some serious complications, as we shall see.


The bargain clinched, Cutler and Winthrop Sargent, the later secretary of the colony, to whom the grant had been made, sold on the same day a half interest to Colonel William Duer, as had been understood, who, on his part, agreed to ad- vance money to help meet the payment on the whole. The other moiety of the purchase remained with Cutler and those associated with him in the subterfuge.


Three months later, after the surveys had been made, the bargain was finally consummated on October 27, 1787. It was then found that the Ohio Company's part of the purchase was but nine hundred and sixty-four thousand two hundred and eighty-five acres, for which only $642,856.66 was to be paid. The transaction had absorbed something less than one half of the two million acres pledged by warrant to the soldiers of the recent war. Congress had, August 8, 1786, made the Ameri- can silver dollar very like the Spanish, and this specie basis


293


FORT HARMAR.


was to govern the value of the warrants, however variable the current paper value of the scrip.


It was fortunate for the new settlement that it was to have, at the mouth of the Muskingum, an assured safety in the neigh- borhood of Fort Harmar, which had been built there in 1785 for the protection of the surveyors and as a refuge for the traf- fickers on the river. This post and Fort McIntosh at the mouth of the Big Beaver were the only stations now held by


FORT HARMAR.


[After a cut in the American Pioneer, vol. i., Cincinnati, 1844. The small house in the left foreground is where St. Clair made the treaty of 1789. Just above this house is the mouth of the Muskingum, and over that the point on which Marietta was built.]


the government north of the Ohio. They commanded the routes to two different portages, both leading to the Cayahoga and Lake Erie. Wharton, in 1770, in addressing Lord Hills- borough, had spoken of the Cayahoga as having a wide and deep mouth large enough to receive great sloops from the lake. " It will hereafter be a place of great importance," he added. It was considered in Virginia that one of the most effective


NOTE. - The map on the two following pages is from Crèvecoeur's Lettres d'un Cultivateur, vol. iii., Paris, 1787, and shows the valleys of the Hockhocking, Muskingum, and Big Beaver, and purports to be based on observations of Bouquet, and on information from the Shawnee chief, White Eyes.


Cette Partie est marécageuses Hestres, Boulemax et Pins


R.deSandusky qui tombe dans le Lac Bru,


ESQUISSE


MUSKINGHUM


Pett L. de Monopakurt


1 C. de Tuskon


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V. Cu & haug kking


Ville de Newcomers


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Grace


C. de Caulag


date du Léchage


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Village de Oldhanting


Million Morave


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Hocklacking R.


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ESQUISSE DES RIVIERES


MUSKINGHUM ET GRAND CASTOR que j'au tirée du Journal du Général Bouquet. des paquets que m'ont confiés My Mu Hutchins et Hooper & des Détails géographiques du èlan vage @ Phawanese, le Capri 1White Gyes Sur une Échelle de 15 Miles par pouse.


C de la Pierre Platte


V de Mehonuigh Lechage Salée Fontaine Salfed


Miffion Morave


296


THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED.


measures to be fostered was the opening of canals where now these portages necessitated a land carriage. The country, irre- spective of its value for transit, was of itself an attractive one, and at this time, as General Harmar tells us, buffalo swarmed along its alluvial bottoms, not to disappear till ten or twelve years later, leaving memories with the settlers of many a savory haunch. Putnam, when he came to know the country, called its climate as "healthy as any on the globe; " and of the land itself he said that it was the " best traet, all circumstances considered, which the United States had or ever will have to dispose of, to such an extent." In respect to its numerous intervales, he held it to be a more advantageous settlement than either the Scioto or Miami regions, which, as we shall see, were at the same time seeking other occupants.


The new movement was as encouraging to the government as it was promising to those embarked in it. Before the sale was consummated, Richard Henry Lee had written (October 11, 1787) to Washington that the lands at the west were becoming " productive very fast," and he was hopeful enough to believe that "the lands yet to be disposed of, if well managed, would sink the whole thirty millions [of debt] that are due."


During the summer of 1787, Harmar with a military force had advaneed to Vincennes to take its French population under protection, while Major Hamtramck was left in command at Fort Harmar to watch the coming immigrations. With the following spring, the tide of settlers flowed actively. The Conestoga wagons, which of late years had superseded the pack- mule in passing the mountains, poured into Red Stone on the Monongahela, bringing some discontents, if current reports are believed, who were eseaping from subjeetion to the new Federal Constitution. Pittsburg, with a population, as Colonel May expressed it, "two dogs to a man," was in itself federal in sympathy ; but the surrounding country afforded all the sym- pathy that was wanted by the flying democrats. This western community was now for the first time kept in some corre- spondence with the seaboard, through a postal service on horses which had just been established, connecting Philadelphia at a


NOTE. - The map on the opposite page is from The Navigator (Pittsburg, 8th ed., 1814), and shows how the navigable channel passes the Muskingum. The islands are : 34, Duvall's ; 35, Muskingum ; 36, Second ; 37, James's ; 38, Blennerhasset's. It is the earliest published river chart.


2


THE NAVIGATOR.


Marietta


4


Muskingum


34


4.35


36


Little Hockhocking


Vienna


Bellepre


37


Big Hockhocking


39


40


Bellville


41


Shade h.


43


Great Sandy Cr. -


Le Tart's Falls


43


45


4


38


Little Kenhawa


298


THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED.


fortnight's interval with the Ohio. The flatboats in which the new-comers descended the Monongahela to the main river were fitted with wagon tops over their after-parts, affording some shelter to the women and children. The men picked off the buffalo and wild turkeys on the banks to keep the company supplied with fresh meat. It was not easy to make an accurate record of the number of boats which were constantly passing into the Ohio at Pittsburg, for many floated by in the night ; but in 1788, up to May 11, at least two hundred boats, averag- ing twenty persons to each, passed that point in the daytime. When land in Pennsylvania in large tracts was selling at half a guinea an acre, there was naturally a large exodus over the mountains.


Not a boat of this moving flotilla was freighted with so much of promise as one long, bullet-proof barge which, in the hazy air, passed unguardedly by the mouth of the Muskingum, till its company was first made aware of their nearing their destina- tion by the walls of Fort Harmar looming through a thick mist. With some aid from the garrison, for which they had signaled, the overjoyed company pushed their boat back against the current, and brought it up against the eastern bank of the Muskingum. The name of this fateful craft was the " May- flower," a reminiscence of that other vessel, which nearly a hundred and sixty-eight years before, and freighted with a still greater promise, cast her anchor under the shelter of Cape Cod. The bleak shores of New England, without a sign of welcome on that November day, 1620, were a strong contrast on this 7th of April, 1788, to the limpid stream reflecting the verdure of spring, and the welcoming flag of the new Republic floating above the fort.


Let us go back a few months. At a meeting of the pro- moters of the Ohio enterprise in Boston on the 21st of the preceding November, it had been determined to found their future city at the mouth of the Muskingum, and two days later Rufus Putnam was chosen the leader of the pioneers. Boat- builders were sent forward, and by the last of January, 1788, they had begun their work on the Youghiogheny. Putnam, with the surveyors and engineers, joined them by the middle of February. Everything was ready, and by the 2d of April the


299


MARIETTA.


"Mayflower " floated out upon the stream, and five days later she reached the Muskingum. "No colony in America," said Washington, " was ever settled under such favorable circum- stances." The position which had been chosen was a striking one. Samuel Wharton, in 1770, had extolled the country. Evans and Hutchins had publicly joined in glowing descriptions of it. The confluence of the Ohio and the Muskingum formed two .attractive peninsulas, with high banks, and a breadth of two hundred and fifty yards of limpid water flowing between them. On the lower point Fort Harmar had been built. On the upper were the scattered mounds of a long-vanished people. Here, amid a growth of trees, some of which, surmounting the earthworks, attested their great age, the labors of the new colony were to begin. Through the late spring and summer the initial work of the pioneers, and of those that soon joined them, was carried on. Ground was cleared for many an allotted home lot, and for their stockade, called the Campus Martius. Some built huts of the planks that had made their boats. Others felled trees and constructed ruder shelters. The few yokes of oxen which they had brought dragged the timber among the stumps, where lately the forest stood. They sank saw-pits, and turned tree-trunks into planks. Some were at- tracted by the comely grain of the black walnut, and saved it against need to make household tables and chests.


They gained acquaintance during these summer months with every subtly changeable quality which the climate could show. There was at one time intense heat and myriads of gnats. The river water, which was their dependence, was sickening in its tepidness. Then there came cloud-bursts, followed by rainbows. Away in the mountains, beyond their observation, there were deluges, and the rivers that skirted their acres became wonder- fully agitated, and they looked on in wonder. They had never before seen rivers rise so rapidly. Again, the torrid air would flee suddenly before an atmosphere which in June seemed like September. All such changes induced a rapid vegetation, which surprised M. Saugrain, the naturalist, who was on the spot during the year. Their gardens leaped from sprout to


NOTE. - The map on the two following pages shows Fort Harmar and the site of Marietta, to- gether with ancient earthworks of the "Mound-builders." It is from Crèvecœur's Voyage dans la haute Pensylvanie, Paris, 1801.


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302


THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED.


bud, and from blossoms to edibles. Fifteen thousand fruit trees were in bearing within a few years. Brissot found the soil " from three to seven feet deep, and of astonishing fertility. It is proper," he adds, "for every kind of culture, and it multi- plies cattle almost without the care of man." These and the game - buffalo, deer, bear, with turkeys, pheasants, geese, and dueks - and the marvelous fish of the streams - carp, stur- geon, and pereh - furnished their tables with a rich abundance. Those who were invited to the mess of the officers in the fort were gladdened with a still greater variety. But their New England bringing-up did not let many of them forget their Sunday " dinner of beans," as one of their diaries shows.


The neighboring Indians, who ventured among the settlers to shake hands and barter, soon perceived that a policy differing from what the savages had known in the whites was governing their new neighbors. The New Englanders were making their settlement much compacter than had been the habit of the squatters upon tomahawk elaims on the other side of the Ohio. Parsons was soon reporting to his friends at the east how the natives were struck by this. That individual irresponsibility which had been found in the long knives of Kentucky was on the very next day after the arrival of the first barge banished from the new colony by the promulgation of a code of laws. These were temporarily devised, pending the arrival of their governor, and made publie by being nailed to a tree. They selected a man of repute among them, Return Jonathan Meigs, to be responsible for their enforcement.


Within a few seasons, something like twenty thousand souls floated down the Ohio to such expectant, law-abiding communi- ties, and it remained to be seen whether these novel conditions of civilized life in the western wilderness would have a benefi- · cent effect upon the five thousand savage warriors who made their homes between the Ohio and the lakes.


The colony's working parties in the field were from the first prudently protected by armed patrols. There were, indeed, occasional alarms, compelling the withdrawal of everybody to the shelter of the stockade, but there was no serious disturbance of their quiet beyond an attack upon an outpost which they soon established up the Muskingum. A few Mingoes and other savage desperadoes wandered on the Seioto, and from a


MUSKIN


Plan of part of Marietta . with the


remains of Antient Marks found there


References ABCD_Longest antient Fort- E.F.G.H. Sinaller Fort Kg.1, 2,3, Clerated Squares


1 4:5 Covert Way 6' smaller .


„ 8,9,10 Lefs perfect walls,


" M Rampart at the end of the plain 1.12, Oblong Elevated Mound. u 13.11:15, 16,17, 18,19,20.21,22,23, . and 24, Raised Mounds


" 25; The Great Mound " 26, Circular ditchround it- "Ard fumoundingwall orbank! " 25, The pays .


OHIO


" 29, Gate waysof wine


>> 90,31.32.8-3Excavation


" Big Indianburying ferrand


MARIETTA. [This cut is from Harris's Journal of a Tour in 1803.]


304


THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED.


high rock on the Virginia bank, nearly opposite its mouth, the Indian lookouts watched for the descending boats, and some- times lured them to destruction ; but above the Muskingum there was little danger, and the bed and blanket linings of the low cabins on the emigrants' boats rarely received in these upper reaches of the Ohio the bullets of the skulking foe. So it was that they who passed beyond, bound for Kentucky, ran the larger hazard ; but the risks did not produce great hesitancy among them. By the end of the summer of 1788, there were less than one hundred and fifty adult males in the Muskingum colony ; while for the previous twelve months, something like five hundred boats, carrying ten thousand emigrants, were known to have passed Fort Harmar, to take the chances of the savage gauntlet and land their passengers for the Kentucky settlements, with which there was now talk of uniting those on the Cumberland.


The New England element on the Ohio became eventually mixed with a large infusion of that Presbyterian Scotch-Irish blood which had been long strengthening the fibre of the Ken- tucky spirit. Those of this blood that passed into the Ohio region came over the mountains from New York and Pennsyl- vania, and have left their descendants in the east and central regions of the present State of Ohio. Those that fled from the uncongenial surroundings of Carolina and its slave code were scattered along the river shelves and back of them, between the Muskingum and the Miamis.


' The spring of 1788 was a busy one for Putnam and his com- panions. There had been the labor of gathering and trans- shipping their supplies at Pittsburg, now a muddy and coal- blackened little village of a few score houses and a thousand people. When Parsons and Sargent reached there on May 12, the former was soon approached by British emissaries, anxious to make commereial connections for the new settlement. Their choice of negotiator has a sinister look, when we remember how Cutler had distrusted Parsons. Nothing came of it. Put- nam, a safer man, was much more interested in what Con- gress was likely to do with Brant. This Mohawk leader was still restless. "The Indians are having a critical time," he said. "The Yankees are taking advantage of them, and the English are getting tired of them." If Congress showed no


305


ARTHUR ST. CLAIR.


disposition to redress the wrongs of his people, would Brant yield to the Indian passion for war? A desolating conflict seemed likely from the lawlessness of the remoter squatters, and was apparently to be forced on the Wabash by the inroads of the Kentuckians, who were unhappily most of the time be- yond the control of the government. " Not a single Indian war," said Jay later in one of his Federalist papers, " has yet been occasioned by the aggressions of the present federal govern- ment, feeble as it is ; but there are several instances of Indian


MARIETTA. [From Collot's Atlas.]


hostilities having been provoked by the improper conduct of individual States, who, either unable or unwilling to restrain or punish offenses, have given occasion to the slaughter of many innocent inhabitants."


Before the arrival of St. Clair as governor, the colony had compacted itself and given to their town, in commemoration of Marie Antoinette, the French queen, the name of Marietta, by running together parts of her double name. As they had recognized in this the aid of France in their revolutionary struggle, they celebrated the fruition of the war in a festival on Independence Day, when venison, bear, and buffalo meat regaled the appetite, and General Varnum, who with others had left Rhode Island to escape the tyranny of her paper-money faction, delivered an acceptable address. Five days later, they received their new executive with a salute of fourteen guns.


This man, Arthur St. Clair, was of Scotch and noble birth, and had been educated at Edinburgh. He had come to Amer- ica thirty years before, and had served under Amherst at Louis- burg and under Wolfe at Quebec. He had been sent later on staff business to Boston, and had there married, in 1760, the


306


THE NORTHWEST OCCUPIED.


daughter of a family of social standing, and secured with her a competence. This he later lost in Pennsylvania, where he had settled in 1764. Joining the patriot side in the war for independence, he had, though much in service, attracted little favorable notice. He perhaps met undue censure for his fail- ure to thwart Burgoyne, at Ticonderoga, in an " unexpected and unaccountable " evacuation of that post, as Hamilton said. He later engaged in the civil service, and was president of Con- gress when Cutler, playing upon his vanity, helped on his own projects by favoring St. Clair's aspirations to be governor of the new territory. It is fair to remember, however, that St. Clair professed this was an honor thrust upon him. He was now a man of fifty-four, and not in his political opinions without some- what advanced views, as appeared in part when he made his inaugural address. Eleven days later, in July, he created, by proclamation, the county of Washington, which embraced the eastern half of the present State of Ohio, and the machinery of government was set in motion. He and the three judges - Samuel H. Parsons, J. M. Varnum, and J. C. Symmes - now fashioned a permanent code of laws which, in its provisions, was very strict and even cruel. Debt and petty offenses were harshly treated, and " in punishment of crime " the statutes insti- tuted a barbaric kind of servitude, compared with which the bondage of the slaves at Vincennes was mild. On September 22, the governor marched in the procession of magistrates which opened on that day the first session of their organized court.


' St. Clair found, however, his most difficult task not in gov- erning his immediate dependents, but in carrying out the wishes of Congress to extinguish the Indian title everywhere south of 41°, and west to the Mississippi. Mated with this was the per- haps greater difficulty of controlling the recklessness of the irresponsible squatter and the wild bushranger's provocation of the Indian.




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