USA > Ohio > History of Ohio, covering the periods of Indian, French and British dominion, the territory Northwest, and the hundred years of statehood > Part 17
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At the head of the purchasers, who were not incorporated, was Oliver Phelps, one of the greatest land speenlators of that time, and his associates ineluded citizens of New York and Massachusetts as well as of Conneetient. On September 5, 1795, the syndicate adopted articles of association, but no formal incorporation was ever made. The stock was divided into four hundred shares of $3,000 each, it was determined to survey the land in townships five miles square," and it was agreed to reserve six townships for the associa-
*This township has 16.000 acres; the United States survey township 23,040.
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tion, divide four townships into four hundred traets of 160 aeres to be distributed to shareholders by lot, and divide the residne in traets equalized in area to correspond with the quality of the land. In the spring of 1796, the Wayne treaty having been ratified by the United States senate in December, and Andrew Ellicott having com- pleted the west line of Pennsylvania, the Connectient associates sent ont a party to survey the land, under the leadership of their general agent, Moses Cleaveland, a lawyer of Canterbury who had served as a captain in the Revolution, and was a brigadier-general of militia. At Buffalo a treaty was made with the Iroquois to extinguish their title in the reserve east of the Cuyahoga for the consideration of £500 worth of goods, two beef cattle and a hundred gallons of whis- key. Part of the surveyors followed the Indian trails westward, and part coasted along Lake Erie in boats, the fifty-two meeting at Con- neant Creek, July 4th, and joining in a hearty celebration of the day. On the 22d of the same month they reached the mouth of the Cuyahoga, where a city was platted as the capital of the domain and named Cleaveland, in honor of the leader .*
At this period, in the Territory Northwest of the River Ohio, there was no fixed seat of government. St. Clair resided at Cincin- nati,? where the offices were, but the governor and two judges pro- mulgated laws wherever they might happen to be assembled. Before the year 1795 no laws were, strictly speaking, adopted from old State laws. Most of them were framed by the governor and judges to answer particular publie ends; while in the enactment of others, inelnding all the laws of 1792, the secretary of the territory dis- charged under the authority of Congress, the functions of the gor- ernor. Parsons, Symmes and George Turner were the judges until the death of Parsons, when Rufus Putnam succeeded him and served until he was made surveyor-general of the territory in 1796, and Joseph Gilman took his place at the elose of that year. Return Jonathan Meigs, Jr., took the place of Turner in February, 1798.
It has been stated that the original judges, by deciding to enact new laws, instead of adopting old laws of the states, assumed abso- lute powers not contemplated by the ordinance. At the elose of 1794, Governor St. Clair, writing to Thomas Jefferson, then seere- tary of state, pointed out in a characteristic manner another peenliar circumstance. "The principal settlements have been made in tracts of land purchased by certain companies or associations of persons, the Ohio company and Miami company. In both these associations the management of the directors and agents are thought to have laid
* The name of the city appears both Cleveland and Cleaveland on the first plats, and was spelled both ways, but officially Cleaveland, until about 1833, when the newspapers dropped the superfluous a.
+ The governor had adopted a territorial seal. with one tree growing, and another felled, and the motto "Meliorem lapsa locavit."
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the foundation of endless disputes. General Putnam has been the active director in the first association, and Mr. Symmes the princi- pal if not the sole agent in the second, and they are both judges of the supreme court. Every land dispute will be traced to some trans- action of the one or the other of these gentlemen, and they are to sit in judgment on them."
In 1795 the governor and judges undertook to revise the terri- torial laws and establish a complete system of statutory jurispru- dence, by adoptions from the laws of the original states, in strict conformity with the provisions of the ordinance of 1787. For this purpose St. Clair, Symmes and Turner met at Cincinnati and organ- ized as a legislature May 29th, and continued in session until the latter part of August. "The judiciary system underwent some changes. The general court was fixed at Cincinnati and Marietta, and a circuit court was established with power to try in the several counties issues in fact depending before the superior tribunal, where alone causes could be finally decided. Orphans' courts were estab- lished, with jurisdiction analogons to, but more extensive than that of a judge of probate. Laws were also adopted to regulate judgments and executions, for the limitation of actions, for the distribu- tion of intestate estates, and for many other general purposes. Fin- ally, as if with a view to create some great reservoir from which whatever principles and powers had been omitted in the particular acts might be drawn according to the exigency of circumstances, the governor and judges adopted a law providing that the common law of England and all general statutes in aid of the common law, prior to the fourth year of James I, should be in full force in the territory. The law thus adopted was an act of the Virginia legislature, passed before the declaration of independence, and at the time of its adop- tion had been repealed so far as it related to the English statutes. The other laws of 1795 were principally derived from the statute book of Pennsylvania. The system thus adopted was not without many imperfections and blemishes ; but it may be doubted whether any colony, at so carly a period after its establishment, ever had one so good."" This body of law, as published, was known as the Maxwell code.
The settlement of the territory was hampered now, as St. Clair wrote in 1797, by the land law that at first encouraged the great com- panies. The people also felt the ordinance of 1787 as oppressive of liberty. The restraints upon an "uninformed and perhaps licentious" people, as Richard Henry Lee imagined the settlers would be, were onerous, at least in the principle involved, and Governor St. Clair, who represented the autocratic government prescribed by the ordi- nance, began to suffer in popular esteem for his zealous attention to
* Salmon P. Chase, in his sketch of the history of Ohio.
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administration. In 1793 the judges of Hamilton county, commis- sioned by Secretary Sargent, in the absence of St. Clair, "during the pleasure of the governor," indignantly refused their commissions. They "would not stoop to holding office, the tenure of which is dur- ing pleasure," though the ordinance fixed no other limit. After the Symmes patent was issued in 1794, providing for one township to be set apart for a seminary, St. Clair was compelled to be dis- agreeably insistent to have such a reservation actually saved. 1 few years later we find Judge Symmes declaring: "We shall never have fair play while Arthur and his 'knights of the round table' sit at the head."
On account of the Virginian settlement Adams county was created July 10, 1797, from Washington and Hamilton, including the French grant, and extending from the Ohio river to the Greenville treaty line, or Wayne county. Nathaniel Massie, appointed colonel of militia and magistrate in this county, attempted to change the county seat from Adamsville to Manchester, leading the governor to rebuke the effort to override his authority. Massie had a strong friend in Worthington, of whom St. Clair complained for high handed conduct regarding the land laws and rights of settlers .* Tiffin was of course enlisted in the cause of Worthington, and there soon resulted a formidable opposition to the governor. Associated in this movement were William Creighton, a Virginian who settled at Chillicothe in 1799, practiced law, and was a social favorite ; Jos- eph Kerr, of Chillicothe, a young man of Irish parentage ; Samuel Finley, of Chillicothe; Joseph Darlinton, one of the pioneers of Adams county; John Smith, who became the Baptist minister at Columbia in 1790, a man of "noble and commanding presence, popu- lar manners and remarkably faseinating address; William Goforth, of Hamilton county; Francis Dunlavy, a Scotch-Irishman of the Shenandoah valley, who had been with Crawford in the Sandusky expedition, and came to the site of Lebanon in 1797 and taught school with John Reily ; Jeremiah Morrow, another pioneer of what is now Warren county, a canny Scotch-Irishman, born in Pennsyl- vania ; Return Jonathan Meigs, Jr., of Marietta, who made a break in the Federal ranks on the Muskingum; and Michael Baldwin, of Chillicothe, of Connecticut descent, a lawyer and powerful leader of the carousing and gambling element.
These leaders were Republicans, as the party of Thomas Jefferson was called, and St. Clair was an earnest Federalist. The partisan Federalist lumped Republicans and Democrats together as "Jaco- bins," friends of the French revolution and French atheism, and enemies of the conservative institutions of the Union; while the partisan Republican called the Federalists friends of Great Britain ;
* Address by William Henry Smith, "Monarchists and Jacobins."
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"aristocrats," who would oppress the country with a regular army and powerful navy, perhaps to establish a monarchy. The Feder- alist dreaded Republiean supremacy as an end to "law and order," and the Republican burned for relief from Federalist "despotism." There has never been more bitter partisanship in the United States than then existed. It was not felt in Ohio when John Adams was elected president. Judge Burnet was able to recollect only four men in his neighborhood who favored Jefferson in opposition to Adams. They were good ones, however-Major Zeigler," William Henry Harrison, William McMillan and John Smith. But party spirit rapidly rose during Adams' administration. The "alien and sedition laws," intended by the Federalists to crush French intrigue, by invading the liberty of the press insured the triumph of the oppos- ing party. As St. Clair wrote a pamphlet defending these obnoxious laws, and was praised therefor by John Adams, the opposition nat- nrally directed toward his gray head their vials of wrath. Aeross the river the Kentnekians asserted the right of nullification. North- west of the Ohio, the Federalists were strongest on the Muskingum, fairly held their own on the Miami, had many friends at Detroit, and were being reinforced by the pioneer settlers of the Western reserve, but on the Seioto the Republicans were supreme, and their strength was not insignificant in all the other settlements, fostered by the organization of Republican elubs, and the general desire for greater politieal rights, for which people looked to statehood and the success of the Republican party, though, in fact, the South, where that party was strongest, had control of Congress when the objec- tionable plan of government was framed in 1787.
It is difficult to determine how much influence the institution of slavery had in this political dissension in the Northwest territory. There were petitions to Congress for the suspension of the prohibi- tion of slavery in 1796, and again in 1799 by Virginia officers who proposed to settle in the Military traet, but St. Clair himself had given the ordinance a liberal construction further west. When the people of the Vincennes and Illinois country, where negro slaves had been introduced by shipment from San Domingo in 1726,; anxiously inquired about their rights under the ordinance of 1787, St. Clair advised them that the sixth article was not retroactive but prospective, and that Congress had not intended to abolish slavery already existing in the territory. Neither was slavery interfered
* Zeigler, a native of Germany, had the reputation of having served under Frederick the Great and Catherine of Russia, was a gallant soldier of the Revolution, and captain in the single regiment of the regular army formed later under Harmar. He served in Harmar's campaign, commanded Fort Harmar and afterward Fort Washington and was the first United States marshal of Ohio.
¿ Governor Reynolds, "My Own Times."
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with at Detroit, where there were so many Pani Indians held in that condition that the word Pani ( Pawnee) came to be a common name for slaves of any color." At Detroit, however, property in slaves was considered to have the protection of the Jay treaty. A few years later St. Clair intimated that the "institution" was somewhat involved in the fight, saying: "Republicans! What is a Repub- lican ? Is there a single man in all this country that is not a repub- liean, both in principle and practice, except perhaps a few people who wish to introduce negro slavery amongst us, and those chiefly residents of Ross county ?"; But when he said this St. Clair was making his last desperate appeal for support.
The creation of new counties meanwhile went on, Jefferson being established July 29, 1797, from the northern part of Washington, ineluding the Western reserve east of the Cuyahoga, with Steuben- ville as the county seat. A year later, June 22, 1798, Hamilton county was extended westward to the Greenville treaty line, and Angust 20, 1798, Ross county, named for James Ross, of Pennsyl- vania, was set off from the northern part of Adams.
From the organization of the Territory in 1788 it had had no rep- resentation in Congress, or any representative government. Such were the restrictions of the ordinance of 1787. Now an effort was made toward self-government, and in 1798 a eensus was taken, which showed more than "five thousand free male inhabitants of full age" in the Northwest territory. The governor accordingly proclaimed an election on the third Monday of December, for the choice of a house of representatives in the general assembly to which the district was entitled at that stage of development. As the framers of the ordinance had provided, such of the five thousand "free males" as owned fifty aeres of land were entitled to vote, and those who owned two hundred acres were eligible to office. Following the plan of the ordinance, the house of representatives met at Cincinnati January 22, 1799, nominated ten persons as candidates for the upper house, or legislative council, and from these ten President John Adams selected five. First was Jacob Burnet, a young, swarthy, black-eyed gentleman, son of the surgeon-general of Washington's army, who had graduated at Princeton, and come to Cineinnati to practice law. He wore his hair in a queue and was a thorough Federalist. The others were James Findlay, of Cincinnati, another young gentleman, twenty-nine years of age, rather austere, like Burnet, and a Federal- ist, seion of a prominent family in Pennsylvania ; Henry Vanderburg, whose history belongs to the Indiana country that he repre- sented: Col. Robert Oliver, of Washington county, an Irish soldier of the Revolution, who succeeded Parsons as a director of the Ohio
* Hinsdale's "Old Northwest."
+ His speech at Cincinnati, 1802.
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company, and David Vance, of Jefferson county. On September 24, 1799, the legislature was organized at Cincinnati, with the executive council so appointed, which elected Vanderburg as its president, and the lower house chosen by the people, with the following members: Hamilton county : William Goforth, William McMillan,* John Smith, John Ludlow, Robert Benham, Aaron Caldwell, Isaac Mar- tin. Ross county: Thomas Worthington, Samuel Finley, Elias Langham, Edward Tiffin. Wayne county [Detroit] : Solomon Sib- ley, Charles F. Chaubert de Joncaire, Jacob Visger. Adams county : Joseph Darlinton, Nathaniel Massie. Jefferson county : James Pritchard. Washington county: Return Jonathan Meigs. Knox county (west of Ohio) : Shadrach Bond.
Edward Tiffin, of Chillicothe, already to be reckoned in opposi- tion of the governor, was elected speaker of the house. Of the council Henry Vanderburg was president and William C. Schenck, secre- tary. The duty of the new legislature in which the greatest inter- est was taken was the election of a delegate to Congress, who, though denied a vote in that body, would be allowed to speak in behalf of his constituents. Two candidates led the field : one, Capt. William Henry Harrison, secretary of the Territory, and son-in-law of Judge Symmes ; the other, Arthur St. Clair, Jr., son of the governor. Har- rison was elected by a majority of one vote.
The relations of the governor and legislature were marked by great courtesy and ceremony. He addressed each house, recom- mending legislation, and received a response from each, to which he replied, and then this first legislature in Ohio went to work, amend- ing or repealing existing laws and providing new ones, the council depending on Jacob Burnet almost entirely to draft the bills originat- ing in that body .; The whole number of acts passed and approved by the governor was thirty-seven. Of these the most important related to the militia, to the administration of justice and to taxa- tion. Justices of the peace were authorized to hear and determine all actions upon the case, except trover, and all actions of debt, except upon bonds for the performance of covenants, without limitation as to the amount in controversy, and a regular system of taxation was established. The tax for territorial purposes was levied upon lands, that for county purposes upon persons, personal property and houses and lots. One of the petitions presented was for authority to make a lottery at Chillicothe to raise $3,000 for the purpose of erecting a Presbyterian church, and it is a memorable lesson in government that this prayer was granted by the council of men sifted out by legislature and president, while the house elected directly by the people rejected it.
* William McMillan, a native of Virginia, was a college bred man, one of the first settlers of the Miami country, and a man of a high order of talent. ¡ Letters of Judge Burnet.
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Notwithstanding the violence of political spirit an address of con- fidence and congratulation was addressed to President Adams, though five members voted in opposition, and there was generally a feeling of attachment to Governor St. Clair, but the latter, by the close of the session, had greatly injured his political strength. Under the ordinance of 1787 he suffered very little dimunition in absolute power by the change to a government more popular in form, for he retained the right to veto any bill passed by the legislature, without that body having any power of overriding his veto. Conse- quently the governor vetoed eleven bills, and it is an index to his want of tact that, resting on the letter of the ordinance, he gave no sign to the legislature of his reasons for disapproval until the end of the session. Though the legislature could not pass a bill over his veto, yet the prompt communication of his objections would have been a courteous recognition of their undoubted power to enaet another bill on the same subjeet. But the governor preferred to stand alone in the maintenance of his peculiar privileges, and some friends he might have held went over to the opposition.
The most important vetoes, those that excited most criticism, were due to the movement, now begun, for the organization of a State. The Seioto valley people led in advocating this for various reasons, not the least of which was the need of another Republican state for the election of a president, and St. Clair and the Federalists opposed it for the same reason, as Ohio had very much the appear- ance of Republican control. For political reasons, the governor opposed any steps toward statehood, and favored division into smaller territories, and enough of them to indefinitely postpone admission of any one, or, if one must be admitted, such a boundary as to make it probably Federalist. Consequently he vetoed a bill for a census of the "eastern division" of the territory, because no such division was vet recognized by Congress. He found authority in the language of the ordinance, also, to retain control of the formation of new coun- ties, a powerful weapon in the hands of the legislature, and vetoed bills to set off a new county from Hamilton and Adams, and create the county of Clark in the Western reserve. These two matters, territorial and county division, became the main subjects of politi- eal dispute throughout the territory. St. Clair wrote letters, unfor- tunately, and even that to Delegate Harrison was given to the public. To Senator James Ross he wrote that "a multitude of indigent and ignorant persons are but ill-qualified to form a constitution and gov- ernment for themselves. They are too far removed from the seat of goverment to be much impressed with the power of the United States. Their connection with any of them is very slender, many of them having left nothing but creditors behind them, whom they would willingly forget entirely. Fixed political principles they have none; though at first they seem attached to the general government
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it is in fact but a passing faney and there are a good many who hold sentiments in direct opposition to its principles.
Their government would most probably be democratie in form and oligarchie in its execution, and more troublesome and more opposed to the measures of the United States than even Kentucky." Hence the governor urged a division of the territory, in order to "keep them in the colonial stage for a good many years to come." Hle had already suggested certain lines of division to Secretary of State Piekering, but on reflection changed his mind, beeanse "the eastern division would be surely Federal," and "the design would be too evident." The line he favored would put Hamilton and Wayne counties in the western territory. The Ross county people urged a division on the Great Miami line. "Their views are natural and innocent enough," said the governor, "they look no further than giv- ing the capital to ('hillieothe;" but St. Clair suggested that such a division would not retard the admission of a state, and that the state thus formed would be "democratie and unfriendly to the United States."
It is to be said in mitigation of St. Clair's apparent disposition to class his political opponents as enemies of the l'nited States, that he meant by "democratic," that party (somewhat distinct from the Jef- fersonian "Republicans") then known as Demoerats because of French sympathy, who were blamed with the rebellion in Pennsyl- vania and the famous "nullification" resolutions of Kentucky, and the discontent that was relied upon by Miro and Carondelet to induce the secession of the West. He was driven by political bias to aceuse the Ohio settlers of sneh tendencies, and Tiffin and Worthington retorted by aeeusing him of yearnings for a monarchy. Such was the polities of that day.
St. Clair, heroie, even to his enemies ; "distant, ignored and for- gotten" by Congress, as he wrote to De Luziere, was doing his best in fighting for his party, then at the verge of destrnetion. But he was not aetnated by petty selfishness, always neglected opportunities for personal gain, and found "an infinity of enjoyment in repressing the vices of society and leading his people to publie happiness by vir- tue." He urged upon Harrison the need of reform in the land laws, and the latter was duly eredited with a new law, permitting the sale of half the publie land in traets as small as 320 aeres on easy terms of payment, and establishing four land offiees, at Cincinnati, Chillicothe, Marietta and Steubenville.
To Harrison the governor addressed himself quite otherwise than to Ross, on the subject of territorial division, in February, 1800, advising a triple partition, on the Seioto and a line north from the month of the Kentucky river, making the capitals, Marietta, Cincin- nati and Vincennes. "Almost any division into two parts would ruin Cincinnati," he shrewdly suggested to the son-in-law of Judge
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Symmes. But Congress wisely decided to carry on the work of par- tition, laving the foundations of new states, after the advice of the always level-headed Washington, in conformity with the natural groupings of population. By the act approved May 7, 1800, the Northwest territory was eut in two by setting off Indiana territory west of the line of Wayne's treaty, running from a point opposite the mouth of Kentucky river to Fort Recovery, and thence due north to the Canada line. The region eastward remained under the title of the territory northwest of the River Ohio, with the provision that when admitted as a state it should be with the same bounds, and the capital was fixed, until the legislature should otherwise order, at Chillicothe. This was a great victory for the Chillicothe party. While it was also a victory for the Republican party, "the design," to quote the words of the governor, was not "too evident." There remained a chance of Federalist control in the eastern territory as long as Wayne county, including what is now eastern Michigan, was part of the domain. Another success of the Chillieothe party was the appointment of Harrison as governor of Indiana territory. To succeed him as secretary under St. Clair, Charles Willing Byrd had been appointed, who proved to be thoroughly devoted to the anti-St. Clair cause. William MeMillan, of Cincinnati, was appointed to Harrison's seat in Congress.
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