USA > Ohio > Cuyahoga County > Annals of the Early Settlers Association of Cuyahoga County, number I > Part 38
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It is emphatically an era of retrospection in this older west. The generations which have gone out from us into the farther west are engaged in the sublime work of making government, law, and history on the plains and prairies, the peaks and slopes of the great continental spaces and ranges, in the surging and seething activities of giant in- dustrial forces. We linger here on this peaceful shore, whence they have launched, noting the wave marks of time, picking up shells and pebbles among the wreckage, pointing to the vanishing footprints in the sands.
No better sign of the historical habit and activity is found, than in the fact of the innumerable associations and joint endeavors to garner
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up the materials of our history. You at once prove and honor this universal demand in the organized work of this association.
History, scientifically considered, is governed by the uniform and continuing operation of law. The best developments of this science prove the enduring vitality and tenacity of certain ideas and habits of thought. To trace the fortunes of these more lasting opinions, or mental and moral habits, through many years and almost endless wanderings, changes and modifications, is a task as difficult as it is interest- ing and profitable. The presence and identity of such mental and moral habits must be proved from data always confused and multifarious, often elusive, entangled, and contradictory. It may be said, in fact, that such efforts rise no higher than speculation, because absolute demonstration is impossible. Such hypotheses must rest on moral evidence alone. But in English history there is one countervailing circumstance which tends to render the task less difficult ; this circumstance is the vitality and tenacity of intellectual and moral biases and modes of thought in the Anglo-Saxon mind.
I have ventured on this occasion, presumptuously, and far beyond my competence, to leave the more frequented paths of historical narration, and shall seek to trace that resistless current of ideas which came to the surface in England, and which was the great fact of the 17th century_ Puritanism. To find and to hold to that historic clue-line, recently called by a gifted American orator, "a shred of the most intense and tenacious life of Europe, floating over the sea and clinging to the bleak edge of America-that thin thread of the Old World by which incal- culable destinies of the New World hung."
I shall try briefly to show how this thread of thought and life was carried into this western wilderness ; how, finding lodgement here, it grew, under modifying and meliorating conditions, into permanent so- cial institutions and moral tones of life, which mark and distinguish this community. Finally, I shall ask you to note with me somewhat of the fruitage of Puritanism-baneful and blessed-ripening in our present social life.
It has become quite the fashion to caricature the Puritan by magnify- ing some fantastic accidents of his character, not essential but due largely to the spirit and temper of his time. He stands upon the can-
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vass of criticism a sombre, ungraceful figure, with the hard ungenial face of austerity, and a heart full of the cold zeal of fanaticism. Ir the unfriendly light of modern letters, we see in him only the narrow and arrogant bigot of the 17th century. To modern eyes he stands by the wayside of history a false prophet, lifting up his harsh, censorious voice of warning and denouncing upon the world a woe that never came. He stands as the sign and symbol of all the narrow asceticism of a hardened, petrified faith.
In the religious fanatic we are prone to lose sight of his masterful work and influence in the domain of civil and political liberty. We sometimes forget even the fanatical heroism in which the rhetoric of a Macaulay paints him. Let us recall the vivid portraiture by the emi- nent historian, as it illustrates the strong coloring on the religious side of the Puritan character, prevalent in literature. He says :
"The Puritans were men whose minds had derived a peculiar character from the daily contemplation of superior beings and eternal interests. Not content with acknowledging in general terms an overruling Providence, they habitually ascribed every event to the will of the Great Being, for whose power nothing was too vast, for whose inspection nothing was too minute. To know him, to serve him, to enjoy him, was with them the great end of existence. They rejected with con- tempt the ceremonious homage which other sects substituted for the pure worship of the soul. Instead of catching occasional glimpses of the deity through an obscuring veil, they aspired to gaze full on his intolerable brightness, and commune with him face to face. Hence originated their contempt for all terrestrial distinctions. The differ- ence between the greatest and meanest of mankind seemed to vanish, when compared with the boundless interval which separated the whole race from him on whom their eyes were constantly fixed. They recog- nized no title to superiority but his favor ; and confident of that favor they despised all the accomplishments and all the dignities of the world. If they were unacquainted with the works of philosophers and poets, they were deeply read in the oracles of God. If their names were not found in the registry of heralds, they were recorded in the Book of Life."
It is but the picture of the fierce and rugged prophet of the desert
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and the wilderness. It is not the typical Puritan who ever walked the earth and not above it: whose head was not always among the stars : who was not always prostrate in the ecstasy of devotions The real Puritan did not despise worldly wisdom nor secular knowledge. The leading pilgrims of the Mayflower had taken their degrees at Cambridge. Brewster had sounded all the depths and shoals of diplomacy, and in no Puritan who has left an impress upon the page of history was there lacking the strong sense for affairs-the dominance of practical wisdom.
Puritanism has blessed the world most in the field of politics and gov- ernment. As a political reformer the Puritan has wrought his most en- during work. He was the first reformer who founded all political rights, obligations, and duties, on the enlightened conscience of religion. " Pu- ritanism, " says DeTocqueville, " was not merely a religious doctrine, but it corresponded in many points with the most democratic and republi- can theories."
Again he says, " Anglo-American civilization in its true light is the combined result of two distinct elements, both the product of Puritanism, the spirit of religion, and the spirit of liberty."
Thus we see that the surest muniments of our political liberties, the best institutions of our civil freedom, are gifts of the political Puritan. He was the son of that morning of hope which flushed, in purple dawn, the sky of England at the close of the reign of Elizabeth. He was the best gift of the Renaissance. He was the firstborn of the grandest epoch in human history. Green, the historian, thus gathers up, in sub- lime language, the spirit of the times which gave him birth: " A new ยท social fabric was thus growing up on the wreck of feudal England. New influences were telling on its development. The immense advance of the people as a whole in knowledge and intelligence throughout the reign of Elizabeth was in itself a revolution. The hold of tradition, the un- questioning awe, which formed the main strength of the Tudor throne, had been sapped and weakened by the intellectual activity of the Re- naissance, by its endless questionings, its historic research, its philosophic skepticism. Writers and statesmen were alike discussing the claims of government, and the wisest and most lasting forms of rule. The nation was learning to rely on itself, to believe in its own strength and vigor, to crave for a share in the guidance of its own life. His conflict with the
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two great temporal powers of Christendom had roused in every English- man a sense of supreme manhood which told, however slowly, on his at- titude towards the crown."
It is the majestic march of this conserving moral force in human pro- gress which we note in its western development. True, the march takes us to the dungeon, the fagot, the stake. The rythm of its foot-falls is timed by human groans. It alone of all that is lurid in human passion and superstition, was left to light up the sky of America with the awful fires of persecution. But it has marched past all these. It contained the saving, recuperative energy to shake off the barbarisms of the past ; and to-day modern Puritanism is the one political senti- ment that has filled society with a dignified sense of the individual man, and planted the deepest conviction of the boundless capabilities of the human soul.
The political doctrines of New England are so plastic as to render them useful under diverse and varying conditions. Those which have become our inheritance have been thrice transplanted. We are heirs to a pioneer Puritanism thrice refined-to Plymouth in 1620, from Cape Cod to the Connecticut river in 1630, and to this place two hundred and seventy years later.
We stand remarkably related to the Puritan movement in another sense.
This Connecticut Western Reserve is the last home of colonized Puri- tanism. In individuals and families it has been carried into the Missis- sippi valley and beyond it up the slopes of the Rockies and down the western slopes, but in no other locality of the west does its organizing quality appear, in no other place has its social flavor so permeated, as here upon this Western Reserve. It was actually colonized here. The settlement of northeastern Ohio at the beginning of this century was un- precedented. It was not the straggling immigration of a few families ; it was the veritable exodus of a colony.
We celebrate this day, the twenty-second day of July, in commemora- tion of the landing on its site of the sturdy founder of our city. Perhaps unconsciously we celebrate a mightier event, an event with which the pioneer work of that little band of Connecticut surveyors is wonderfully connected. On the twenty-second day of July, A. D., 1620 -- just two hundred and sixty-five years ago to-day-one hundred exiled
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Englishmen set sail from Holland for America. Let us lift a corner of the veil, woven of the obscuring years, upon that scene. Says an enthusiastic historian: " Morning came, the wind was fair, and the cap- tain was in haste to be gone. They kneeled upon the deck, the minister offering a parting prayer. Their farewells were spoken, the vessel swung from her moorings, the sails caught the breeze and swept them out upon the ocean and across the channel to Southhampton where the Mayflower was waiting."
" They passed the frowning towers of Briel, The hook of Holland's shelf of sand,
And grated soon with lifting keel The sullen shore of fatherland,"
They tarried not long. The most inhospitable shores to them were those of their own England. ---
" No home for them ! too well they knew The mitred king behind the throne, The sails were set, the pennant flew, And westward ho! for worlds unknown,"
The outward features of this farewell scene were simple and pathetic. But this company bore with them, enfolded in spirit, the vital germ, the unseen potential forces, of a mighty civilization, Even that faith in the supernatural-which we often set aside as hard, rigid-and narrow, as it came in that parting hour, in the benediction of their loved pastor was freighted with the free, elastic, progressive spirit of the nineteenth century. In this unseen force this adjustability of doctrine and senti- ment, and, to the development of the later progress, this farewell blessing of the simple Puritian minister, with uplifted hands over the kneeling band upon the deck, stands the picture of all time filled with sublimest promise.
Says an eye witness of Pastor Robinson on that occasion : "The Bible was to him like the universe, a system unchangeable in its great facts and fundamental principles, but ever opening wider and wider upon devout and studious intellects. He knew there would be no change in God's word, no addition to or subtraction from its contents ; but he looked for beautiful and improving changes in men's views-for broader, clearer, and grander conceptions of God's truth." This was
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the pastor's parting injunction : "If God should reveal anything to you by any other instrument of his, be ready to receive it as ever you were to receive any truth of my ministry; for I am very confident the Lord hath more truth and light yet to break forth out of His Holy Word. It is not possible the Christian world should come so lately out of such thick and anti-Christian darkness, and that full perfection of knowledge should break forth at once." Surely in facing with unfaltering trust the future, they had turned their backs upon the dark ages, toward which so much of modern ecclesiasticism now faces. Buckle, the historian, has well said that there is more of fanaticism than superstition in the Puritan mind.
The grand elements of Puritan civilization are Land, Law and Liberty. To these fundamental interests, as they found lodgement in the settle- ment, and development in the growth of the Western Reserve, I now invite your attention.
The first great epoch in modern history was the conjunction of the Roman world and the Teutonic races, opening the way for the spread of Christianity. The most valuable contributions of the Teutonic peo- ple to this common stock were their customs and institutions of owner- ship in land, and the domestic relations. The rise of the communal idea in the distribution and cultivation of land is due in part to the headship of the chieftain or patriarch, and in part to the necessity for mutual defence and protection. The growth of population was neces- sarily in the form of the village community. The Germanic tribes be- came dwellers in villages. The outlying lands so far as arable were distributed for temporary tillage by allotment each year. Thus the "arable mark " was the typical holding of land for cultivation, before feudalism was established in Europe. This jural conception, affecting rights in land, never lost its hold in the Teutonic races, and found its way into the Anglo-Saxon mind ; and thus it found its way into the colonizing economy of the Englishmen in the sixteenth century.
It would be interesting to trace the influence of Teutonic ideas upon the Puritan exiles during their sojourn in the Low Countries. Among them the university men-the leaders-at Leyden, the seat of learning, came under the enlightened sway of Grotius, Episcopius and other leaders of legal and theological thought. We laud the Democratic
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spirit of the Pilgrims, and vauntingly claim that free self-government was born on board the Mayflower. But they were but the " heirs of all the ages." The notion of a legal corporate community was the heritage of the Renaissance. Nothing was more natural than that the idea of corporate independence should spring out of the triumphant struggle against ecclesiastical intolerance.
We forget also that these men sailed out into the unknown, under the obligations of a commercial covenant with the " Merchant Adven- turers " of London. They were bound, therefore, in a common enter- prise. What more natural than the sentiment of community. The colony of Plymouth, therefore, existed before the Mayflower weighed anchor at Southampton.' They were not, however, commercial adven- turers. With true Anglo-Saxon instinct, on landing they turned to the business of tillage.
In the year 1623, at Plymouth, in New England, it was found that longer to continue to labor on the joint stock plan but led to discontent, injustice, and confusion. In no country, and in no considerable period of the world's history, have agricultural instincts remained based upon the communal idea. Individual ownership, by a more or less permanent tenure, has ever been the tendency in landed property. So at Plymouth there sprang into new life in America the Teutonic system of land cultivation. Allotments of land were made to each individual to cultivate on his own account. The persuasion of the time, that a colony in a new country could only exist as the dependency of a corporation, with a community of goods in its pro- ductions, ceased to exist in America. The true pioneers of English set- tlement in the west, at the beginning of this century, were great land cor- porations. The Ohio Company in the southern, and the Connecticut Company in northeastern Ohio, opened the wilderness of the North- west Territory to the advancing armies of civilization. They were not giant monopolies. They placed their lands in market, and became at once the conservators of that mode of land-holding which is ever essen- tial to social and political equality, the right and dignity of individual ownership. No types of civilization are more enduring than those con- nected with real estate. The earliest and best symbols of western growth, are the Gunter's chain, and the woodman's ax. If we would
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follow the most majestic march of peaceful conquest, we must follow the sturdy knights of the sextent and the theodolite; if we would find the lines upon which empires move, and states are builded, we must study their maps and surveys. The little company which landed at the mouth of the Cuyahoga on the afternoon of July 22, 1796, was a band of New England surveyors. They brought with them from the far off Saxon forests, through a line of Puritan colonists, the idea of the "arable mark " and the " village community."
The ancient land-allotment of Cleveland was into two, ten, and one hundred acre lots; the inlots for dwellings, being two acres each, and the first tier of out-lots ten, and the outermost one hundred acre lots. The exceedingly intelligent and cultivated gentleman who so ably addressed you one year ago on the "Corporate Growth of Cleveland," generously praised those surveyors for their sagacity and foresight in pro- viding the beautiful suburban facilities of our city. I beg to divide this praise with their Puritan ancestors, and to suggest that this object in so maping the site of Cleveland was for practical cultivation, rather than for holding and embellishment, by the opulent classes of the future city. Cleveland was a typical New England village, and such a village was a cluster of population closely associated with the historical origin of the village community, and with the peculiar kind of political and social life by which it was characterized.
An eminent scholar, John Fiske, in a learned address upon the subject of the "Town Meeting," delivered before the royal institution of Great Britian recently, pointed to our own "Euclid Avenue," in the following flattering way: "In some of our western cities, founded and settled by people from New England, this spacious style of building has been retained for streets occupied by dwelling houses. In Cleve- land-a city on the southern shore of Lake Erie, with a population about equal to Edinburgh-there is a street some five or six miles in length, and five hundred feet in width, bordered on each side with a double row of arching trees, and with handsome stone houses of suffi- cient variety and freedom in architectural design, standing at intervals of from one to two hundred feet along the entire length of the street. The effect, it is needless to add, is very noble indeed. The vistas remind one of the nave and aisles of a huge cathedral."
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The Western Reserve surveyors were influenced by their Puritanical instincts to establish that primary unit of civil self-government-the New England township. Not all the townships in the Reserve, how- ever, conformed to the exact New England pattern, by having the high- ways converge from the corners of the outer angles to the center of the town, where the meeting house was located. I am informed that Tal- mage, in Summit county, Ohio, is the only township in the state which is so platted .*
On the destiny of civil freedom, and social equality, with us, we can never overestimate the influence of the custom of individual land hold- ing, which was a distinctive achievement and institution of our yeoman Puritan ancestry.
Another survival of Puritan character, leavening our social life to-day, is the dominant influence of the spirit of legalism, which was his con- spicuous characteristic. His excessive affectation of Hebraism has met the condemnation of these later times. His idea of government too closely conformed to the model of the Jewish theocracy. He made too small a distinction between the domain of personal morality and the field of public law and legislation. He denounced penalties, too awful and severe, against personal vices. He sought foolishly to stem the tide of immorality with the barriers of legislation. Such is the tenor of adverse criticism against this rather stern, unlovely side of Puritanism. In the light of better teaching upon the principles of government, it is doubtless true he laid too great stress upon the efficacy of legal sanctions and coercion in moral conduct. But we should remember that with a Democratic people the fountains of law and justice must necessarily be sweetened with its flavor of morality ; that law must be the impulse of the popular conscience as well as the expression of the public will. We should remember that in a popular government law is not only the expression of public opinion, but is a powerful educational stimulant, reacting upon the moral conceptions of the people. The domain of public law and private morality should not be far sundered if we would form safe habits and right ideas in the practice of self-government.
"For this fact, together with much that precedes it here on the survey of Cleveland, I am indebted to the suggestions of Mr. Paul, a very intelligent and cultivated surveyor and engineer of our city.
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The Puritan inculcated a rigorous sense of justice. He drew his legal inspirations from that ancient people whose legal code was graven on tables of stone. He may have been too ready to condemn the ac- cused. And this same bias in the administration of public justice may have left its traces in this community. It is said that one of our lead- ing criminal advocates in Ohio a short time ago was engaged on the de- fence in a noted case of homicide occurring in our midst. When asked the chances for his client, he said that if the trial were progressing else- where, away from the heart of the Western Reserve, he could acquit his client. " But," said he, "the accused is at the hard, unmerciful bar of those Puritans, who have reversed the gracious theory of the common law that every man is presumed to be innocent until proven guilty-and the result is doubtful." But while we laugh at that quaint, fantastic and harsh asceticism which fulminated ponderous statutes against minute and trivial offenses, we should never forget that, to this grand spirit of Hebraism-to that lofty ideal of the Puritan fathers who would fain have made the world a very city of God-we owe the incalculable blessing of that conserving moral force springing from the Bible which finds its way into all the currents of our civil and social life.
I have said that "New Connecticut " or the Western Reserve is the last Puritan colony. No community in the west is so marked by the characteristics of the Puritan. Not simply in the personal traits of character, but in the wider social life and relation. We are enveloped by a peculiar social atmosphere, and it instils a peculiar flavor into our social life. In our habits of intercourse and manners we are uncon- sciously tempered with that seclusive reserve and conservatism which have come down to us from our ancestors, who had gained the spirit of clannish self-reliance from the hard experiences of exile life with strangers or cautious reticence amongst unfriendly countrymen.
Western Puritanism is in no inconsiderable degree the product of the conditions of its environment and surroundings. The French pioneers who entered this ancient wooded wilderness with the flavor of medieval chivalry bearing the sword and the crucifix, was pushed forward by the reviving commercial spirit, and came to trade. He established posts -half military, half commercial-but never became a settler. Even in his temporary contacts with the influences of the forest, he largely
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succumbed and lost his Gaelic identity. Not so with the more stolid, unimpressible nature of the Englishman. He presented more resist- ance, and yielded more slowly to the modifying and moulding forces around him. But they found their way at last to the springs of his life and character, and modified, altered, but never wholly transformed him. It is by no means surprising that we have come to lay much stress on the power of environment in giving tone and bias to a people or com- munity. The life of the pioneer was a continuous struggle of hand, mind and heart, against all-surrounding, relentless nature. How man sinks and perishes before the force, grand and noble though it be, of colossal, unclaimed, trackless nature ! The forests of South America, covering the fairest portions of the globe, and spreading over half the continent, have held the civilization of Spain at bay for more than three hundred years.
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