USA > Ohio > Cuyahoga County > Annals of the Early Settlers Association of Cuyahoga County, number I > Part 16
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Thomas D. Webb was a lawyer, and in many respects a man of mark. He was the best posted lawyer in the history of the Western Reserve land titles I have been acquainted with. He had the energy of investigation into the minutest details, and a retentive memory that enabled him to profit by them. He was editor of the Trump of Fame, the first paper published on the Western Reserve. At the time of his death he had in his possession all the volumes of the published laws of Ohio from the organization of the State. His frankness was unusual. He was not a great advocate, but he was entrusted with important legal business, when such lawyers as Peter Hitchcock, J. R. Gid- dings, Elisha Whittlesey, Seabury Ford, Benjamin F. Wade, and Eben Newton were practicing lawyers at Warren and throughout the circuit. Mr. Webb was offered and refused the office of president judge of the third circuit made vacant in 1810 by the resignation of Calvin Pease.
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The early settlers of the Western Reserve, for the noble pur- pose of bettering their condition, left old settlements where com- forts were abundant to found new ones where they were comparatively few. Not having a surplus of means they pro- posed to earn them, by setting up for themselves and executing their own plans instead of being the mere executers of the plans of others. This developed in them trne manhood. Clerks and employes they might have been among the kinsfolk and friends they left behind them, but this did not suit their plans of life. The command that "in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread," they did not regard " a mistake of Moses." If intended as a curse, they turned it into a blessing. Hence all useful labor of hand or brain was regarded as equally respectable, and the farmer, the mechanic. the merchant, the artizan, and the pro- fessional man were on terms of social equality. Occupation was not the ground of social ostracism among the early settlers. Their habits and circumstances developed in them an independ- ent personality which dependence tends to destroy. The facil- ities of trade and commerce were quite limited, with little circulating medium as an agency of exchange. They used due bills and notes payable in commodities, raised or manufactured. I found a few years ago among my father's papers one of their mediums of exchange, which is worth more than its face as evi- dence of the manner in which the early settlers transacted business. I will read it: " Four months after date I promise to pay to Samuel Hutchins one dollar and fifty cents; for value, re- ceived, in twelve pounds of good pork. Vienna, September 10, 1812. Jacob Humason." Just seventeen days before the date of this paper I made application to my father's honse for board and lodging. Whether this fact had any connection with my father's desire to add to his supply of pork, I do not know. The maker of this note was a good scholar for those days, as the note indicates. He had been educated in the schools of Connecticut, . and the style of writing is the old style-the George Washington and John Hancock style.
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The early settlers were subject to many privations, and at times to multifarious inconveniences to which we are strangers. They encountered evils with which they had to struggle. They wrestled with intemperance, and some of them were thrown by it. The times are now largely changed, for better or for worse; for better in many respects, and in some for the worse, I fear; but that may depend upon the manner we heed the lessons the early settlers have given us. Cleveland, as well as the whole country, has made rapid advancement in wealth and population. When your honored President came to Cleveland in 1824, to make it his home. it had only a population of about four hundred, and its mechanical, manufacturing and mercantile capital was then quite limited, but probably adequate to the wants of the country. It now contains a population of over two hundred thousand, and its wealth and the means of producing it have prodigiously increased. The increase of wealth and population of a country and city is generally regarded as evidence of their prosperity. That depends largely upon the character of the population and the manner in which wealth is employed. An idle population is likely to be vicious. learned or ignorant, rich or poor, and adds little, if any, to the prosperity of either city or country, and wealth which is employed exclusively or mostly for the selfish aggrandizement of those who possess it, is not a blessing without alloy.
" Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates and men decay ; Princes and lords may flourish or may fade, A breath can make them as a breath has made; But a bold peasantry, their country's pride, " When once destroyed can never be supplied."
General Garfield, in September, 1880, when he was candidate for President of the United States, on the Northern Ohio Fair Grounds made a few remarks from which I make brief quota- .tions:
" All who have thoughtfully considered the reports of the
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National census during the last thirty years have observed the great growth of our cities and the comparatively small growth of population in our agricultural districts. *
Let me ask you to reflect whether this is a good indication. I have time to notice but one feature of this problem. A careful study of the men who have won distinction in every field of ac- tivity, public and private, professional and commercial, will show that a large majority of them were born and bred in the country. * Gentlemen, would you willingly see the present tendency continue until the majority of our people are the inhabitants of great cities? * *
I see at this table lawyers and merchants whose eyes brighten at the remembrance of their country homes. One of the promi- nent lawyers and jurists of this State-an honored citizen of your city-does not regret his pioneer life in the woods of Portage county. I am sure that Judge Ranney does not regret the hard- ships and inspirations which country life gave to his boyhood." More than twenty years ago, Benjamin F. Wade, then a Senator in Congress, in a conversation I had with him, expressed thoughts similar to those I have quoted from General Garfield's remarks.
In connection with this subject it may be well to notice that none of the men who have been elected President of the United States were born and bred in our large cities. Only one of the present judges of our Court of Common Pleas was born and bred in the city of Cleveland, and he was born of parents who were among the prominent early settlers of Cleveland, and who be- lieved with Solomon. " in training up a child in the way he should go."
In our cities the " Fagans," the "Bill and Nancy Sykes" have their hiding places, and intemperance, followed by its ghastly train of evils, and seeking to perpetuate itself by the inherent tendencies of its own demoralization, has its strongest support in our populous cities. Our large cities are the centers of wealth and capital, and in them combinations are liable to be
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formed which tend to interfere with the natural course of trade and commerce, and which seek to regulate, for selfish purposes, the business of the country. Capital, clothed by law with the attributes of succession and perpetuity, may be. and frequently is, employed oppressively and unjustly. No one need be sur- prised at the present day to learn respectable gentlemen had filed with the proper authority an application for a charter to trade in and control the air we breathe.
With the increase of wealth and population the habits and customs of pioneer life will naturally be changed, and in some respects it may be well, but the benefits of a change which dis- penses with the industry and economy of pioneer life, and which stamps with disrespect any useful labor connected with it, may well be questioned. There is a tendency now-a-days among young people to seek occupations and positions which are lighter and esteemed by many as more respectable than the drudgery of work in any of the avocations of life. Clerkships in private establishments and in government offices are much sought after by young men starting in life. These employments may be well enough as means to an end, and as stepping-stones to a higher plane of activity, but for a young man to make those avocations his business and to seek nothing above and beyond them is to dwarf his manhood and to make him dependent upon brains not his own. Among the least desirable of these lighter occupations (I call them lighter because they seldom produce heavy results) is employment in the numerous depart- ments of the government. The labor is responsible and hard, but the chances of promotion to independent positions are small. They tramp and tramp on the same track year after year in the government treadmill. They have some privileges, to be sure, not enjoyed by the convicts in our penitentiaries. They are permitted to go home once a year and vote, but the convicts have privileges not enjoyed by government employes. They are not obliged by " voluntary contributions" to pay a certain percentage of their earnings to keep their places.
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There is a tendency among parents who have the means to do it, to give their children the best opportunities and all the advantages that our schools and colleges afford, without regard, always, to the tastes or capacity of the children; hence many young men and women are forced or dragged through a course of study which they may never use to much advantage to them- selves or others, and which may be the means of spoiling them for the rugged duties of honorable and productive labor, on the farm, in the workshop, or in the counting-room. A farmer in the oil regions of Pennsylvania sold his farm for a sum which made him a millionaire, and he had a dear daughter who had been educated up to the standard of the circle in which she moved, but her kind father was not satisfied with this, as he wanted her to be a bright and shining light in the higher branches of education, and especially in music, but his daughter had little inclination or taste in that direction. The father was not to be baffled in his laudable desire to elevate and re- fine his daughter, so he sent her to a professional teacher of music for instruction. In about three months he visited his daughter to see how she was getting along in her studies. The teacher told him she was not progressing as well as he could wish-she did not seem to have a capacity for music. " Ca- pacity," replied the father, "go and buy her one; I have plenty of money."
A young man or woman who has the will to obtain a thor- ough education, and an ability to use it, will, at this day, find a way to acquire it. Leonard Case. Sr., is said to have ac- quired a good knowledge of arithmetic when making baskets on his father's farm. John Bright, of England, in a speech recently made at Birmingham, referred to a Scotch peasant authoress, Janet Hamilton, who never had any education ex- cept that derived from the reading of the plays of Shakespeare, which she had committed to memory. She was untaught in · the rules of grammar, yet she wrote English according to the best standards. No writer has been able to tell us, when, where,
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or how, Shakespeare obtained his education. Elihu Burritt. the learned blacksmith, acquired the rudiments of his eduea- tion while working at the anvil.
We are indebted to the discipline and statesmanship of the early settlers of Ohio, and especially of the Western Reserve, for our system of common schools, which places within the reach of all children within the State, rich or poor, the means of a good education. The support of common schools in Ohio, by taxation, did not become fully crystallized into a system till after the adoption of the Constitution in 1851. The attention of the people had been repeatedly called to the subject by most of the governors of Ohio, and the Legislature had sparingly made provision for the support of schools by taxation, but their support by taxation met with strennous opposition. Aets were passed in 1821 and in 1825 by the Legislature providing means for the support of schools, and may be said to be initiatory steps to the present system, but the amount raised by them and amendatory laws had not been uniformly assessed and had not been systematically administered. In 1830 and 1831 John W. Willey, one of the early and distinguished settlers of Cleveland, and Harvey Rice, now your President, were elected members of the Legislature-Mr. Willey to the Senate and Mr. Rice to the House-and through their exertions and influence a law was passed authorizing the sale of the lands which had been granted by Congress to the inhabitants of the Western Reserve for school purposes. Mr. Willey drew up the bill, and Mr. Rice was appointed agent to sell the lands. The amount realized from their sale was about $150,000, which was loaned to the State as an irreducible fund, the interest of which is to be an- nually paid to the counties of the Western Reserve according to the enumeration of children of school age in each county. The Constitution of 1851 made it the duty of the General Assembly to " make such provision by taxation or otherwise, as with the income arising from the school trust fund will secure a thorough and efficient system of common schools throughout the State."
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Many, very many of the early settlers were members of the con- vention which framed this constitution. Peter Hitchcock, Ja- cob Perkins, and R. P. Ranney, were members from the counties of Trumbull and Geauga. and Sherlock J. Andrews and Reuben Hitchcock from the county of Cuyahoga. It devolved upon the General Assembly of 1852-3 to make provision by law for the establishment of a system of common schools in obedience to this provision of the constitution I have quoted. Harvey Rice. your President, was elected a Senator from this county in that Legislature, and was appointed chairman of the Senate Commit- tee to which the subject of " common schools and school lands" was committed. On the 29th day of March, 1852, he intro- duced a bill " to provide for the reorganization and maintenance of common schools" and it became a law March 1, 1853. This law has been amended and changed, but the system which it organized has not been changed. Perhaps the modesty of your President may lead him to object to the introduction of his name in referring to our school laws, but he must consider, and I am sure you will agree that the omission of the name of Harvey Rice, when referring to the law of 1853, entitled " an act to pro- vide for the reorganization and maintenance of common schools," would be "the play of Hamlet with the part of Hamlet omitted."
I have referred to some of the tendencies of the times as suggestions for consideration. Evils, to be avoided, must be understood and their location marked, as the dangers of navi- gation are indicated by buoys in our rivers and lakes. When American slavery raised its rebellious arm against the Govern- ment which protected it, its true character was seen, and it was swept away by the angry waves of public opinion; and all the Mrs. Partingtons with their mops and brooms were power- less to prevent it. I am not one of those who believe that our civilization is receding, or that our government is threat- ened with overthrow. If the fountains of the executive, legis- lative, and judicial branches of the government are kept pure,
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we are safe. It is the duty of the people to keep them pure, and I have confidence they will faithfully perform it, and that the government which the industry and wisdom of the early settlers have established will be preserved in the vigor of its youth, and in the strength of its manhood.
A LIFE SKETCH OF THE LATE GOV. WOOD.
BY NOBLE H. MERWIN, ESQ.
MR. PRESIDENT: Descended from English parentage, Reuben Wood, the twenty-second Governor of Ohio, was born in the village of Middletown, Rutland County, Vt., in the year 1792.
He was the eldest son of Nathaniel Wood, a minister, and during the war a chaplain in the revolutionary army. The fam- ily were distinguished for their devotion to the patriot cause. Three of his father's brothers were participants in the battle of Bennington. Maybe from their patriotic example in those stir- ring times were derived the principles, and devotion to demo- eratic, as distinguished from monarchial, institutions, that char- acterized the man during his long life.
Arriving at a suitable age for study, he was sent by his father to a cousin named Fairfield, in Ernestown, Upper Canada, where he studied law with the Hon. Barnabas Bidwell, and at the same time began his classical and other studies with an English eler- gyman, with all the ardor of youth, thus laying the foundation of the education and culture that were to be of benefit to him in his future aspirations. To his dying day his constant compan- ions were well-thumbed editions of the Greek Testament and Cæsar's Commentaries, which he read in the original with facility.
At the commencement of the war in 1812, Reuben Wood, still a student, and while residing in Canada, was drafted into · the Royalist militia, then mustering under General Broek for 3
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the defence of the coast against the American fleet. He was tall, of powerful frame, and was detailed to a company of gren- adiers; but being determined not to bear arms against his na- tive land, he took advantage of a stormy night and the excite- ment incident to a village ball, and in company with Bill John- son, afterwards so notorious as an American spy and the " Hero of the Thousand Isles," made his way to a birch-bark canoe. concealed for the purpose under a barn, and started for the American shore.
The wind blew a gale, the rain fell in torrents, the lake be- came momentarily rougher; finally the adventurous spirits were obliged to seek shelter on an island, where for three days they lay secreted, suffering for food and drink: a bottle, supposed to contain brandy, which they had brought with them in their hur- ried flight, proving to be full of liquid blacking ! At last, nearly famished, they reached Sacketts Harbor, then occupied by the fleet under Com. Chauncey, where they were arrested by the pa- trol boats and imprisoned four days as spies. At the expiration of that time an unele from the neighboring town of Woodville, hearing of the capture, gave satisfactory assurances of their loy- alty, when they were released, Wood going to his mother's at Woodville. New York, for a time, afterwards to Middletown. and Johnson entering the American service as a spy.
At the time of the movement of the English forces by water and by land for the invasion of the Eastern States by way of Lake Champlain, young Wood raised a company of which he was chosen captain, and marched to assist in the defense of his coun- try, but before they reached the American army the battle of Lake Champlain had taken place, resulting in the defeat of the English; the company returned home and disbanded.
· Wood, then at Middletown, entered the office of Gen. Jonas Clark, a distinguished practitioner, where he continued the study of law. In 1816 he married Miss Mary Rice, of the neighboring town of Ira, the next year removed with her to his mother's house in Woodville, and in September, 1818, came to Cleveland,
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in those days farther away than Oregon or Alaska are now, lit- erally to seek his fortune.
It is not for us to tell his aspirations for position, wealth and honors, nor how high his hopes rose or fell as he stepped ashore in the scattering, straggling hamlet of that day. A few houses standing here and there on the river's bank, the clearings scarcely encroaching on the virgin forest that came to the water's edge; only a few years back the aborigines had hunted in those woods, and fished in the waters soon to bear the fleets of an empire.
Although he had been admitted to practice in the Vermont courts, he was compelled for lack of means to go on foot to Ra- venna, where the Supreme Court was in session, to secure the diploma that enabled him to practice in the conrts of the State. He afterwards bronght his wife and infant daughter to Cleve- land, coming from Buffalo on the Walk-in-the-Water, the first steamer ever on Lake Erie. In the absence of piers, and owing to the sand-bars then across the river's mouth, the passengers were landed in small boats. When he thus finally made his res- idence in Ohio, his wife walked at his side; he carried his infant daughter in his arms; he had a silver quarter of a dollar in his pocket ; that was all.
In 1825 he was elected to the State Senate, filling the posi- tion three consecutive terms of two years each. He was after- ward elected President Judge of the Court of Common Pleas of the district of which Cuyahoga was one of the counties. This position he occupied six years, and was then chosen to the bench of the Supreme Court of Ohio, and twice re-appointed-the last three years as Chief Justice. His entire term of judicial service was about twenty years.
The data are not at hand from which to give an analysis of his judicial decisions, it must suffice to say that his influence had a marked effect in shaping the judiciary of the State, some of his opinions being given on important questions of the day and receiving great attention; and that as a judge he was inflex-
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ible in the administration of justice, of grave and dignified de- meanor when upon the bench, highly esteemed by his fellow judges, and held in high regard by the bar and by honest liti- gants. For a number of years he was a prominent lawyer in Cleveland. He had two or three partners at different times, among others, the Hon. Harvey Rice. As a lawyer, he was keen and sharp in getting at the truth, being particularly skillful in criminal cases. He was a man of sound sense, who despised quibbles, seized the strong points, and endeavored to reach jus- tice in a case by the most direct path.
Reuben Wood was a man of deep kindness of heart, of great geniality of disposition, and of tender sympathies. He had a keen wit, and admired wit in others. Possessing an inexhaustible fund of anecdote connected with the early days of Northern Ohio, he was one of the most agreeable of companions, retaining his freshness and vivacity to a good old age. When the country was new, and "traveling the circuit" was part of a lawyer's duty, he was the center of a circle of talented legal gentlemen whose leis- ure hours were devoted to social intercourse, the pleasures of which were greatly enhanced by his overflowing humor and kindness of manner. Many are the stories of the unbending of the Solons, their mad pranks and practical jokes, that linger in the traditions of the early bar of Ohio.
In the various official positions filled by him the breath of suspicion was never lisped against him. In his long career of public life he maintained a character above reproach. Even the heat and injustice of party conflict never left its mark upon his character, and his warm, personal, private friendships never were chilled by the bitterest political excitement. As a candidate for the suffrages of his fellow citizens he was very popular with his party, and his tall, erect form and commanding mien as a leader, had won for him the familiar and expressive title of the "Old Cuyahoga Chief." Thus, when in October, 1850, he was made the candidate for Governor by the Democratic party, al- though the dominant party had been Whig for a number of
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years, he was elected by a majority of 11,000 over Judge John- son, of Hamilton County, his opponent. Although the canvass was a spirited one, not a line of abuse or a blemish on his private character was ever hinted at by a single paper in the State. In- deed, such was his personal popularity throughout the State, ev- ery county of which he had visited either as an advocate or as judge, that many Whigs, personal friends, were found either electioneering or voting for him.
He took his seat as Governor in 1851.
In national politics it was a time when, after the passage of the odious Fugitive Slave law, the country was full of dissension and discussion. Governor Wood was always opposed to the ex- tension of the slave power, and was an anti-slavery man, although he deprecated unlawful or unconstitutional means for the aboli- tion of slavery. In his inangural address he expressed his natu- ral aversion to the institution, and asserted that "the Demo- cratic party has opposed, and ever will oppose, either the diffu- sion or the extension of slavery into any territory of the United States by every legal and constitutional means, and would re- joice if any mode not doing violence to others could be devised to overthrow and eradicate the evil."
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