USA > Ohio > History of Ohio, covering the periods of Indian, French and British dominion, the territory Northwest, and the hundred years of statehood > Part 18
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The next most exciting politieal event in the early part of 1800 was the creation of the new county of Trumbull. During the early settlement of the Western Reserve, says Col. Charles Whittlesey : "So little was known of the respective powers of the State and of the United States under the constitution of 1787 that many of the set- tlers thought the land company had received political anthority and could found a new state, and like William Penn, be proprietors and governors. It was imagined that the deed of Connecticut conveyed powers of civil government to the company, and at the Conneaut cele- bration, the second toast drank was to 'The State of New Connecti- (ut.'" The same misconception may be observed in the early proceedings of the Ohio company and its settlers. After Jefferson county was established, and the tax collector went up into the reserve from Steubenville, he was laughed at for his pains. The settlers had a notion that their state government was at Hartford, and in the home state the land company asked the Connecticut legislature to give a county government to the Western reserve. But the legisla- ture was doubtful of its authority. This condition of affairs put the land company in alarm regarding the validity of titles, and John Marshall, of Virginia, not yet chief justice of the United States, was called upon for an opinion. He held that "As the purchasers of the land commonly called the Connecticut reserve hold their title under the State of Connecticut they cannot submit to the government estab- lished by the United States in the Northwest territory, without
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endangering their titles, and the jurisdiction of laws could not be extended over them without much inconvenience." Congress took up the matter, and after much animated discussion, threatening to waken all the old and sleeping colonial disputes, a bill was passed authorizing a release of the title of the United States in the reserve, on condition that Connecticut should then in turn relinquish all claims to territory and jurisdiction, not only in the reserve, but in a New York tract where the titles were tied up by litigation. This bill was approved April 25, 1800, and upon the carrying out of its provisions, the Western reserve became subject to the government of the Northwest territory.# Accordingly, on July 10, 1800, Gover- nor St. Clair exercised the privilege that he claimed in opposition to the legislature, and, after corresponding with Marshall, proclaimed a new county, including all the Western reserve east and west of the Cuyahoga, and named it in honor of "Brother Jonathan" Trumbull, fourteen years governor of Connecticut, the famous friend of Wash- ington and a sturdy Federalist. The county seat was located at Warren, where there were then two log cabins ; the county was organ- ized in August ; and in October, by 38 votes out of a total poll of 42, the county elected to the legislature another Federalist, Gen. Edward Paine, a pioneer of the lakeshore settlement that bears his name.
In the same year the United States census was taken, showing a population in Hamilton county of 14,692, in Jefferson of 8,766, in Ross of 8,540, in Adams of 3,432, in Wayne (including Detroit) of 3,206, in Washington of 3,427, and in Trumbull of 1,302. The population was only three-fourths of that required by the ordinance of 1787, "sixty thousand free inhabitants," to be "admitted by its delegates into the congress of the United States on an equal footing with the original states." Nevertheless the movement for state organization was well afoot, and was increased in vigor by the organ- ization of Trumbull county, which the legislature regarded as an usurpation of its functions. Edward Tiffin and others issued a call to voters of the territory to instruct their representatives in the next legislature regarding the propriety of going into a state government, and this had its answer from the Federalists in the resolution adopted at Marietta (January, 1801) : "That designing characters were aiming at self-aggrandizement and would sacrifice the rights and property of citizens at the shrine of private ambition."
The most effective defense of the governor throughout these dis- putes appeared in a series of letters to the Gazette at Chillicothe,
* That part of the reserve west of the Cuyahoga remained in the hands of Askins and the Indians, Askins making a great effort to gain confirmation of his claim from Congress, until July, 1805, when the Fire Lands company. of which the formal title was "the proprietors of the half million acres lying south of Lake Erie called Sufferers' Land," obtained a deed for the country from the Indians, and Askins abandoned his contest.
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written by Charles Hammond (born in Maryland, 1779), a young man then residing at Wheeling. Introduced to Ohio by these elo- «ment letters, he was admitted to the bar at Marietta in 1803, and then made his home at St. Clairsville, beginning a career as one of the ablest lawyers and journalists who have ever lived in the State.
When he addressed the second legislature, which met at Chilli- cothe, November 3, 1800, St. Clair said that "the vilest calum- nies and the greatest falsehoods" were being circulated to defeat his reappointment as governor, but he did not viell an inch in his policy, and took occasion to freely criticise his enemies in Adams county for failure to execute the laws and ordinances. The legislature, with Edward Tiffin as speaker, revealed its independent spirit by ques- tioning the right of Congress to change the territorial capital; asserted its exclusive power to ereet new counties, and asked the governor to return vetoed bills to the house within ten days, with his objections. The governor answered this request with an elaborate argument in support of his policy, and on December 9th he pro- claimed two more new counties: Clermont, adjoining the Symmes purchase, where Philip Gatch of Virginia and John Sargent of Mary- land, who had freed their slaves before coming, were representative citizens and afterward delegates to the constitutional convention ; and Fairfield, in what was known as the United States military lands, east of the Virginia military traet, a region in which Ebenezer Zane had just founded a town on his Limestone road, calling it Lan- caster in honor of a party of Pennsylvania settlers.
There was active opposition to the governor's appointment for a fifth term, which fell in the closing days of John Adams, the plan being to hang up the appointment so that Secretary Byrd would become his successor, but the governor adjourned the legislature, so that the secretary had no authority under the ordinance to act after the expiration of the governor's term. It was a day of bold and revolutionary polities. Finally, on the same day that John Mar- shall became chief justice, St. Clair was renominated as governor.
The national election of 1800 resulted in a tie in the electoral vote, and was thrown into the lower house of Congress, where for a week the states were divided without a decisive majority, between Thomas Jefferson, the great statesman who, with his hair unpowdered and without a queue, his democratie loose trousers, and shoes tied with strings, represented in dress as well as principle the popular spirit of republicanism and democracy ; and Aaron Burr, the brilliant lawyer and founder and representative of the New York style of politics, whom the Federalists were inclined to support in preference to the Virginia slaveholder who opposed slavery, plantation lord who advo- cated the rights of man, and speculative philosopher who hated the restraints of religious systems, By Jefferson's assurances to Adams that he had no intention to repudiate the public debt and overturn
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the constitution, the most daring of the Federalists were held back from extreme measures which would have imperiled the nation, and finally the great political revolution was consummated by the quiet inauguration of Jefferson.
The governor continued to show his disregard of the legislature by proclaiming, September 7, 1801, the new county of Belmont, com- prising the southern part of the Seven ranges, with the county seat at St. Clairsville. In the fall of 1801, when the legislature met at Chillicothe, and Congress at Washington-Paul Fearing," a friend of the governor, representing the territory in the latter body-the agi- tation for statehood by one party and further territorial division by the other, was resumed. Meanwhile there was a famous conversation between Governor St. Clair, and his friends, George Tod and Gen- eral Paine, at the home of Joseph Massie, overheard by Francis Dun- lavy and Jacob White, on the subject of President Jefferson's first message. St. Clair's comments were such that the report got out that he utterly despised militia, Jefferson's substitute for a regular army, and preferred a monarchy to the condition of things into which the country was drifting.
St. Clair's party was in full control of the council, and twelve to eight in the house. It was not difficult to pass a resolution, assenting to a new division of the territory into three parts, the two north and south lines to be the Scioto river and a line north from Clark's grant in Indiana. Practically this was a division of the future state of Ohio on the Seioto, throwing the Western reserve into the eastern district, and would postpone the admission of a state for a long time. To further sustain this policy an aet was passed changing the capital of the territory from Chillicothe to Cincinnati. This was followed by a proposition to burn the governor in effigy, which Colonel Worthing- ton prevented, and on Christmas eve there was a disturbance which approached the character of a riot.
It was bad polities to persist in this policy of division in the face of the success of the Republican party, every day growing stronger both east and west, but such was the tenacity of St. Clair, who would go down, if he must, all his colors flying. The leaders of the oppo- sition, who, according to the governor, were Worthington, Tiffin, Massie, Darlinton and Michael Baldwin, sent Colonel Worthington and Baldwin to Washington to oppose division and obtain authority to organize a state east of the Miami line. While they found it easy to interest the dominant party in their plan, Fearing could not hope to bring any Republicans to his support except those interested in western lands who wished to avoid state taxation. i
* Paul Fearing, born in Massachusetts in 1762, came to Marietta in the first months of settlement, was the first lawyer admitted to practice in Ohio. and was prominent as long as the Federalists were in power. He died of the fatal fevers in 1822.
+ Fearing's letter to St. Clair, January, 1802.
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The Chillicothe "junta," as the governor called it, also made a direct attack upon St. Clair. Massie wrote to James Madison, see- retary of state, asking the governor's removal because he had advised, in the letters to Harrison and Pinckney, division of the territory for political reasons ; had demanded and received oppressive fees; had erected new counties without right ; had made publie utterances (in the conversation with Tod and Paine) favoring monarchieal govern- ment, and because he had attempted to influence justices of the peace in their performance of duty. Colonel Worthington elaborated the charges, also aceusing the governor of attempting to create and attach to himself a political party.
"In ease the old man was to be removed," who should be governor ? wrote Worthington to Massie,# suggesting Massie himself, but that gentleman, never ambitious for office, modestly disclaimed such an honor. "My first and great wish," he wrote, "is to get him from the head of the government, and then I am sure some suitable person might be found." But the charges against St. Clair were so flimsy, and respect for the old general so profound, that Jefferson, though anxious to please his friends, contented himself with advising the defiant governor to yield to the legislature in the matter of new coun- ties and abolish the rather heavy fees he had established for marriage and ferry licenses, suggestions that St. Clair promptly accepted.
Spurred to exertion by this personal attack, St. Clair went to Washington in the spring of 1802 to defend himself and fight the statehood proposition, and four hundred dollars were raised in Cin- cinnati to send MeMillan to assist him. The legislature, meanwhile, in December, 1801, had been prorogued to meet at Cincinnati in the fall of 1802. The governor reached Washington too late to counter- aet the work of Colonel Worthington, if he could have influenced the party in power. Worthington labored so earnestly to "terminate the influence of tyranny," and "ameliorate the circumstances of thou- sands by freeing them from the domination of a despotie ellief,"i and was so effectively aided by John Breekinridge, of Kentucky, and William B. Giles, of Virginia, Jefferson's close friends, that March 4, 1802, a report was made to the house of congress in favor of a state convention in the Eastern division of the Northwest territory. It avoided the restriction of the ordinance concerning population by the hypothesis that since the census of 1800 the increase east of the Miami would produce a population of sixty thousand by the time a state government could be formed.
It is interesting to note, in connection with the study of human
* St. Clair papers.
¿ See his letters to Giles and Finley.
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nature in politics, that the enabling act approved April 30, 1802, though enacted by a Republican congress and approved by Jefferson, maintained without abatement the strong powers of a central govern- ment cherished by the hated Federalists. It was said to be more "despotic" than anything the Federalists had attempted. Mr. Gris- wold, of Connecticut, declared that the bill threatened the consolida- tion and destruction of all the states; that the assuming by Congress of the power to district the Ohio country and apportion the delegates to the convention was arbitrary and unjust ; that the whole enactment was beyond the power of Congress and an invasion of poplar rights, and that the next thing to be expected would be a similar invasion of the rights of the states. Mr. Fearing contended that Congress had the power to waive the requirement of 60,000 population, perhaps, but it could go no further ; but Congress decided that its powers were unlimited in the territories by a vote of 47 to 29 in the house, the middle and castern states dividing almost equally on the question, and the South supplying the decided majority by a vote of 26 to 9. One of the votes in the negative was east by Manasseh Cutler, then a representative from Massachusetts. "This act did not contain a gleam of what is called popular sovereignty," says Professor IIinsdale .; "The territorial legislature was wholly ignored. Neither the legis- lature nor the people themselves were asked to pass on the question of entering into a state government. The sole function of the electors was to vote for members of the convention." But the great majority of the Ohio people were satisfied to have it so.
This was the first of the "enabling acts." Vermont, Kentucky and Tennessee had been admitted after their people had adopted con- stitutions and organized state governments without asking permission from Congress. But the circumstances were different, for those states had not been formed from territory absolutely under the juris- diction of Congress. The apparently despotie features were not so marked in subsequent enabling acts. In the case of Ohio the Fed- eralists said at the time, that it was a matter of partisan politics, the Republicans being ready to invade local rights in order to prevent Federalist control of the apportionment of delegates to the conven- tion. The act authorized the inhabitants of the Eastern division to elect delegates to a convention to determine the expediency of form- ing a constitution and state government, and either proceed to do so or call another convention. Congress prescribed the number of dele- gates, thirty-five, and apportioned them among the counties: Ham- ilton 10, Ross 5, Jefferson 5, Washington 4, Adams 3, Trumbull 2, Fairfield 2, Clermont 2; Wayne being excluded.
* Entitled, " An act to enable the people of the Eastern Division of the Ter- ritory of the United States Northwest of the River Ohio to form a Constitu- tion and State government, and for the admission of such State into the Union on an equal footing with the original States."
+ "The Old Northwest."
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In organizing the state, such name might be adopted as deemed proper, and the state so formed would be admitted to the Union on the same footing as the original states. The boundary on the west should be the meridian of the mouth of the Great Miami, and in pur- suance of the articles of the ordinance of 1757 that permitted divi- sion into five states, the parallel of the southern extremity of Lake Michigan should be the northern boundary of the state west of Lake Erie. This would cut off Detroit and leave the population of the proposed state less than 40,000, whereas the ordinance of 1787 required 60,000. But in this regard the ordinance was ignored, as it has been since then in establishing other state lines, and in forming six states instead of five. Furthermore Congress proposed three conditions of admission: Congress would grant the sixteenth or school sections to the inhabitants of each township, and transfer the Scioto salt springs reservation to the State, and asked that the State exempt from taxes all publie lands thereafter sold by Congress, for five years after such sale, on condition that Congress appropriate five per cent of the receipts from land sales to the building of a highway from navigable water in the east to and through the State. Until the next census the State was to be given one representative in Congress, besides two senators.
Then the campaign was on for the election of delegates to the eon- vention. Detroit had no part in it, and was soon mollified by promise of a new territory of which it should be the capital. St. Clair, re- turning to the territory, began organizing the opposition to state- hood, and had grounds to hope that a great part of Hamilton, all of Washington and a majority of Jefferson county were with him. A meeting at Dayton in September manimously passed resolutions denouncing the enabling act as an usurpation, bearing a "striking resemblance" to the tyrannies of Great Britain, and demanding that the coming convention order a new census and a new convention. A newspaper writer declared statehood was "a scheme to furnish offices for the Chillicothe gentry-the ambitious and wealthy at the expense of the poor." Washington county had already declared against statehood, in delegate convention, and young Return Jonathan Meigs, a friend of Colonel Worthington, wrote to him that "Federalism was raging with intolerant fury." On the other hand General Darlin- ton said the people of Adams county congratulated themselves on the prospect of soon shaking off the "iron fetters of aristocracy" and bringing about the downfall of the "Tory party in the territory." _1 writer in the Scioto Gazette declared that it was practically impos- sible to administer a government condneive to national happiness under the ordinance of 1787. Aside from these considerations the friends of statehood promised "plains covered with herds, and farms with crops to gladden the hearts of the owners, if the tree of liberty
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might be permitted to extend its benign branches over the citizen and protect him from oppression and tyranny."
The main issues, as presented in the calm and temperate statement of Nathaniel Massie, a candidate for delegate to the convention, in the Scioto Gazette, were: Shall a state government be organized as soon as possible? Shall it be republican ? Shall slavery be per- mitted in the State ? These are the only questions he mentions in a publication designed to inform the voters of his position. On the slavery question this Virginian said: "I believe the introduction of slavery would ultimately prove injurious to our country, although it might at present, and for some time hence, contribute to improve it. . I am elearly of the opinion that it ought not to be admitted in any shape whatever." This illustrates the fact that opposition to slavery in Ohio was not confined to the settlements of Eastern or New England people. A mass meeting of citizens at Chillicothe resolved : "We want a constitution that will set the rights of the meanest African and the most abject beggar upon an equal footing with those citizens of the greatest wealth and equipage." There were candidates at the capital who favored the admission of slavery, but the delegates elected from Ross county-Worthington, Tiffin, Massie, Baldwin and Grubb-had all declared themselves in opposition.
At the election of delegates the opposition to St. Clair had its own way generally. When the convention met at Chillicothe, November 1, 1802, Dr. Edward Tiffin was elected president, and it was evident that there would be no delay about claiming admission to the Union as a state. The membership of this historie body, which framed the first constitution of Ohio, was as follows:
Adams county: Joseph Darlinton, Israel Donalson and Thomas Kirker.
Belmont county : James Caldwell and Elijah Woods.
Clermont : Philip Gatch and James Sargent.
Fairfield : Henry Abrams and Emanuel Carpenter.
Hamilton: John W. Browne, Charles Willing Byrd, Francis Dunlavy, William Goforth, John Kitchel, Jeremiah Morrow, John Paul, John Reily, John Smith, and John Wilson.
Jefferson : Rudolph Bair, George Humphrey, John Milligan, Nathan Updegraff, Bazaleel Wells.
Ross: Michael Baldwin, James Grubb, Nathaniel Massie, Edward Tiffin, and Thomas Worthington.
Trumbull : David Abbott and Samuel Huntington.
Washington : Ephraim Cutler, Benjamin Ives Gilman, John MeIntyre and Rufus Putnam.
Upon this body St. Clair had little or no influence. He had gone too far and made himself an obstructionist of the inevitable. Yet he asked leave to address the convention at its opening, and this being denied, accepted permission to appear before the body on November
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3d, as plain "Arthur St. Clair, Esquire." Apparently he hoped to arouse the resentment of the convention against Congress sufficiently to postpone the framing of a constitution. But he made a grave mis- take. The republicans victorious were no longer concerned about technical aggressions of Congress, and it was only Federalists who for some years were seriously unhappy about constitutional rights. As a prelude the governor admitted that his government had not been as popular as it might have been, but he appealed to the people to sus- tain his assertion that "it had been administered with gentleness and with one single view, the good of the whole." He then pro- ceeded with his arraignment of Congress, asserting that the people of the territory did not need an act of Congress to form a constitu- tion, that the act of Congress was "in truth a nullity" and of no more force on that subjeet than "an edict of the first consul of France." The people of Wayne county, he declared, had been "bartered away like sheep in a market," and remitted to a stage of government that had been villified, in Ohio, with "every epithet of opprobrium which the English language affords." He resented the conditions made by Congress about the public lands, declared Congress had attempted to "drive a hard bargain," that the promise of a national road was "a mere illusion," that the saving of newly sold lands from taxation would burden present owners, and that the restriction to one repre- sentative in Congress was an insult. He deplored the launching of a new state at a time when "party rage is stalking with destructive strides over the whole continent. That baleful spirit destroyed also the ancient republics, and the United States seems to be running the same career that ruined them with a rapidity truly alarming." By these arguments St. Clair did not postpone state organization. Ephraim Cutler, of Marietta, cast the only vote that way. But the temper of the governor's address was fatal to himself.
On November 12th, nine days later, James Madison, secretary of state, sent the following letter to be delivered to St. Clair by Seere- tary Byrd, who was directed to assume the duties of governor: "Sir: The president observing, in an address lately delivered by you to the convention held at Chillicothe, an intemperance and indecorum of language toward the legislature of the United States, and a disorgan- izing spirit and tendeney of very evil example and grossly violating the rule of conduet enjoined by your publie state, determines that your commission of governor of the Northwest territory shall eease on the receipt of this notification."
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