USA > Ohio > History of Ohio, covering the periods of Indian, French and British dominion, the territory Northwest, and the hundred years of statehood > Part 28
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Furthermore, out of the proposition that slaves did not become free when they entered Ohio grew the fear that slavery might actually be established in the State, under the protection of the courts and the power of the United States. There was already an actual inva- sion of the State by slave labor through the renting of fam hands, in the river counties, from Virginia and Kentucky. The introduc- tion of slave labor meant the destruction of the civilization of Ohio. The result would be practically the same as would follow the intro- duetion of Chinese coolie labor today.
What the labor system of Ohio was, may be inferred from the observation of an English traveler .* He wrote: "It is a common saying among the farmers of the Western Reserve, 'If a man is good enough to work for me, he is good enough to eat with me' And actu- ally every hired person, male or female, native or foreigner, whom they employ is treated 'as one of the family,' not in the sense that
* D. Griffith, "Two Years' Residence in the New Settlement of Ohio," Lon- don, 1835.
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promise is sometimes fulfilled to apprentices in England, but bona fide: for they eat at the same table and at the same time; all fare alike and all fare well." Such a condition, that made possible and encouraged the rise of hired men to high station in society, has been destroyed in latter years, to a large extent, by the introduction of for- eign white labor. It would have yielded rapidly to the employment of negro labor.
The provision of the great charter of 1787, that fugitive slaves may be "lawfully reclaimed," showed that that early the peril of a free boundary was realized by slaveholders. In 1793 the first United States fugitive slave law was enacted, because of the escape of slaves into Pennsylvania. Later, as the industry of breeding negroes was developed in Virginia and Kentneky, where successful competi- tion with the Georgia and Mississippi cotton fields was impossible, the flight of slaves was greatly increased. Escaping across the Ohio river, they pursued their way into Canada. One of the oldest routes of the runaways was from the Ohio river near North Bend, n, the streams to the upper Anglaize, passing near the Shawance village ( Wapakoneta) and the Indian village on Blanchard's Fork ( Ottawa) to the Manmee rapids at the Ottawa village of Chief Kinjeiro, and thence by a plain trail to Maklen. Along this route many fugitive slaves traveled from abont 1816 to 1835 or 1840, aided by the Indians and some white citizens, conspicuous among them in later years Col. D. W. H. Howard, of Wanseon.# There were men along the line who made their living by intercepting the fugitives, and others, with- ont compensation, put their wits against the kidnappers in piloting bands of negroes to safe retreats.
It is said that a negro crossing the river in 1831 to take the Ripley and Sandusky route for Canada, was closely pursued by his owner, who had him in sight until the Ohio bank was reached, when the fugi- tive mysteriously disappeared without a trace. "The nigger must have gone off on an underground road," the disgusted proprietor is said to have remarked. However true this may be, the "underground road" suggested itself as a good name for a fugitive slave route, and as soon as the new mode of transportation was talked about, it was the "underground railroad." Gradually other well defined rontes, like that of the Maumee valley, were established, along which sym- pathizers with the slaves, from the river to the lake, sent the fugitives on from station to station. Upon the efficiency of this seeret organ- ization the Ironclad fugitive slave law of Ohio, passed in 1823, had little impression. Most active in the work were communities, fre- quently isolated, of Quakers, Covenanters, Wesleyan Methodists and Free Presbyterians. John Brown, of Connectient, who had come
*"The Underground Railroad in Ohio," W. H. Siebert; Archaeological and Historical Publications, Vol. IV.
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to Hudson, in the Western reserve, at the age of five years, in 1525, and after studying for the ministry supported himself and family as a tanner, was one of those who gave shelter to runaway slaves before 1825. There were communities of free negroes in Ohio, notably one established by John Randolph, of Virginia, in Clark county, and wherever there was a negro settlement the fugitives found a hearty welcome. In Ohio there were "certainly not less than twenty-three ports of entry for runaways along the river front. Thirteen of these admitted the slaves from the two hundred and seventy-five miles of Kentucky shore on our southwest, while the other ten received those from the one hundred and fifty miles of Virginia soil on our south- east. From these initial depots the Ohio lines ran in zigzag, trending generally in a northeastern direction, linking station with station in mysterious bond till a place of deportation was reached on Lake Erie. There were five such outlets along Ohio's lake frontage. These were Toledo, Sandusky, Cleveland, Fairport harbor ( near Painesville) and AAshtabula harbor. Toledo and, fifty miles beyond it, Detroit, were the shipping points for perhaps the oldest section of the road in Ohio, though by no means the longest lived,"# the Miami valley route already mentioned.
The most active counties in the underground railroad system were Trumbull, Richland, Huron and Belmont, Ashtabula and Jefferson. Lorain and Mahoning. But little is known of the actual work of the people who maintained these routes, and of the number of slaves whom they helped to freedom. Their work was ontlawed, and though they had the moral support of thousands, their deeds were kept secret. Levi Coffin, a Quaker who lived just across the Ohio line, at Richmond, Ind., and made his home at Cincinnati in 1847, to super- intend the system in the Ohio valley, is said to have forwarded three thousand slaves over the Ohio and Indiana lines. It is told that William Lambert, at Detroit, aided thirty thousand to reach Canada. The estimates of all that passed through Ohio run from forty to eighty thousand.
The efforts of the slave owners to recover their slaves gave rise to a class of individuals in Ohio who were as thoroughly despised as slave auctioneers were by the high class planters of the South, These northern tools of the system not only made themselves spies upon the underground railroad, but were on the lookout to kidnap negroes entitled to freedom.
The doctrine that the sovereignty of the State of Ohio involved the freedom of the slave that was brought to the State by his master, was also a subject of discussion and litigation. Such a case arose in Cin- cinnati in 1837, and young Salmon P. Chase, who had come from the cast to the Worthington settlement with his unele, Bishop Philander
*"The Underground Railroad in Ohio."
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Chase, and afterward had graduated at Dartmouth college and read law under William Wirt, beginning his professional career at C'in- einnati in 1830, volunteered to risk ostracism by defending the lib- erty of a black servant girl.
The census of 1830 showed that the State had well-nigh doubled in population in ten years, which had been prosperous as compared with the previous deeade, though commerce and trade were still burdened with an inefficient and dangerous system of banking and eurreney. The total population was now 937,903. Of these less than 10,000 were colored, a much smaller proportion than in New York and Penn- sylvania. The marvelous faet was now apparent that Ohio, in a third of a century, the average period of a generation, had taken place as the third State in the Union in white population. New York and Pennsylvania were the only states that outranked her, and Ohio was worthy to be considered a prominent member of that great trio, the real Keystone of America, covering the territory from the Hudson to the Maumee. Virginia was still ahead of Ohio in total population, but far behind in free men. Cincinnati now had a population of 25,000, and was unrivalled in the West. People ealled it the "Tyre of the West." ('leveland had not begun its great development, and was the home of not more than a thousand people. Toledo was not on the map, and Columbus had less than four thousand inhabitants.
One of the famous attractions of Cincinnati in 1828-30 was the Bazar, a picturesque business and amusement building erected by Mrs. Frances Trollope, who came from England with her sons, ineluding the afterward famous novelist, Anthony Trollope. She lost thou- sands in the store that she conducted, and the building otherwise did not prove profitable, though it contained a magnificent ballroom that was the center of social life and gavety. Abandoning her contribu- tion to the architecture of the eity, which became known as "Trollope's Folly," she returned to England ; wrote a book on the "Domestie Life of the Americans," and became an author of considerable note. In her Bazar was held in 1838 the first annual fair of the Ohio Mechanies' institute, organized ten years before for the encourage- ment of popular education.
Beef and pork were shipped from Cincinnati to New Orleans as early as 1803, the earliest packing houses in the west being flat boats in the river. In 1818 Elisha Mills founded at Cincinnati the first. establishment representative of the modern packing business in the west, and in 1833, 85,000 hogs were packed at Cincinnati. The eity was naturally the center of the great corn region of Ohio, Indiana and Kentneky. Later, when the eorn land of the western prairies were opened, Cincinnati could not maintain the supremacy it had in early days.
There was yet room in Ohio for vast development. . 1s late as 1834, an Englishinan, traveling through the Ohio forests, described
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them as "tall, magnificent, boundless." He had been told that there was nothing in America to give the sense of antiquity, because there were no ancient works of architecture, sculpture or painting, but he declared that compared with these forests, he had "met with nothing among the most venerable forms of art that impress you so thoroughly with the idea of indefinite distance and endless continuity of antiq- mity, shrouded in all its mystery of solitude, illimitable and eternal."
The election of governor in 1830 was very hotly contested between the Clay party, whom we may now eall Whigs, and the Jackson party, which was the Democrat party up to 1861. The Whigs put forward Gen. Duncan MeArthur, who had been conspicuous in public affairs from the beginning of the State, and the Democrats nominated Robert Lucas, a descendant of William Penn and a native of the Shenandoah valley, who had settled at the mouth of the Scioto in 1802, served efficiently in the war of 1812 as a commander of volunteers, gaining the militia rank of brigadier-general, and later, making his home at Piketon, had been a member of the State senate and speaker of the house.# Mc Arthur, says MeDonald in his sketches. "was a supporter of the internal improvement system, was also in favor of what was called the high tariff, and, what was more odions to the Jackson party, he was in favor of rechartering the United States bank. The Jackson party assailed his character with all the animosity and virulence that party strife engenders. The affair of permitting the deserters to be shot? was again brought forward in a new, extended and frightful edition. The party, in their zeal, depicted General MeArthur as a monster whose delight was in blood ; they had forgotten that their own chief [General Jackson ] was at least equally, if not more obnoxious to censure in this respect. MeArthur's land speculations were depicted in the most horrid colors. From the publications it would appear that he had dispossessed of their homes almost every widow and orphan in his reach. So far from this being a true representa- tion of his land law suits, he generally contended with none but other land speenlators, and this was a war of Greek to Greek."
The result of this fiercely contested election was that Me Arthur received 49,668 votes and Lucas 49,186. Consequently General MeArthur became governor. He was aged and crippled by a serious accident. After he had served one term he retired to private life, and McDonald wrote of him in 1838: "He appears to be almost forgot- ten by all, but more especially by the gay and fashionable who, in the
* Two years later he was president of the national convention that nom- inated President Jackson for a second term. This was the first year national conventions were held in the United States.
+ In 1814 MeArthur, while commander-in-chief in the west, had called a general courtmartial at Chillicothe to try deserters, and twenty-six were con- demned, of whom all were pardoned but four, who had deserted repeatedly, but theretofore escaped punishment through the kindness of General Harri- son. These four were shot.
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days of health and prosperity, fluttered around him like satellites around a brilliant planet. He is now almost a stranger, where, a short time sinee, his word was law." He was the last of the governors of Ohio who had been prominent at the founding of the State. With him ended the predominance of the Chillicothe party which had for so long ruled the young commonwealth. Me Arthur is a hervie fig- ure, like St. Clair, standing at the parting of the ways, and typifying an order of things that was passing away. But, more adaptable than St. Clair, he led in the establishment of a new political party before he retired from publie life. After him, with a transition through Lueas and Vanee, came the prevalence of the second generation of Ohioans.
The term of Jacob Burnet in the United States senate expiring, Thomas Ewing, Mieajah T. Williams and Edward King were con- testants for the place, and Ewing, the Whig candidate, won by one vote on the seventh ballot, though Williams was in the lead at the out- set. This was the beginning of the publie career of Ewing, one of the greatest of Ohioans, described in later years by James G. Blaine as "a grand and massive man, almost without peers." He was a prod- uet of pioneer conditions, reared from infancy in the settlements of the Muskingum and Hocking valleys, and had become famous as a lawyer, under the training at Lancaster of Philemon Beecher and Charles Sherman. In Congress he took a high place, though there was some ridicule of his famous description of the hard times that were said to be due to President Jackson's fight on the United States bank. "Our canals have become a solitude," the senator said, "and the lake a desert of waters."
One of the congressmen elceted in 1830 was William Stanbery, of Lieking county, a brother of Henry Stanbery. He had the temerity to question the motives of some legislation urged by Sam Houston, of Tennessee, and was assaulted by that worthy on the streets of Wash- ington.
The last of the Indian wars that considerably agitated Ohio occurred in 1832. The Sae and Fox tribes conveyed their lands in Illinois to the United States in 1804, but, repenting of the aet, a large part of the tribes joined in the hostilities of 1812-15. After that the treaty was renewed, except by a small party of irreconcilables, led by Black Hawk, a noted warrior, who continned to negotiate with the British at Malden. In 1830, when an effort was made to move the Indians west of the Mississippi, Black Hawk began organizing a war party for resistance, and trouble began in 1831, when troops were sent into the Rock river country. In the spring of 1832 a party of volun- teers attacked a body of Black Hawk's warriors and were badly defeated. There was a general rising of militia in the western states and, with the aid of the regulars on the Mississippi, the Indians were defeated in three considerable engagements in June and July, and
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the trouble was practically over. Meanwhile Gen. Winfield Scott, with a regiment of regnlars, was hastening to the scene of fighting by way of the great lakes. On the way his men were overtaken by a worse foe than red men, the Asiatic cholera, which had obtained a foothold in Canada. The Detroit camp became a hospital and more soldiers died of disease seven times over than fell under the rifles of the red men. The disease spread through the whole west in the fall of 1×32.
In Ohio the cholera was preceded by another calamity. There was excessive snow-fall in the winter of 1831-32, and early in February of 1>32 a sudden thaw caused an immense inundation of the valleys of all the rivers. It was the first great flood in the history of the State, though the Indians had known one like it sixty years before. Many farms were swept elean of houses, barns and livestock. At Marietta, February 11th and 12th, the river was filled with the float- ing ruins of homes and farms. At Cincinnati five hundred families were driven from their homes and property destroyed to the amount of half a million dollars. The Cincinnati American of the 17th said : "A church passed the city with the steeple standing, bound for New Orleans, we presume. A poor market." A considerable number of villages along the Ohio were entirely depopulated, and every town from Steubenville to Cincinnati, except Gallipolis, had its business life and prosperity seriously interrupted. It was undoubtedly the greatest flood disaster in the annals of Ohio.
Upon the heels of this eame a great fire at Cincinnati, and on Sep- tember 30, 1832, the first ease of cholera. The epidemic lasted thir- teen months, the extreme severity being in October, 1832, when forty- one died on one day. Cincinnati was then the chief city of the west, but it was largely depopulated for the time, and presented a woeful spectacle. Other river and lake towns suffered, and gradually the disease penetrated the State along the rontes of travel. At Columbus two hundred died, and out of the population of three thousand, a third fled from their homes. Cincinnati was the greatest sufferer, not only from pestilence, but from flood and fire, and financial string- eney. By bank operations the city had been forced to a cash basis by this time, and nearly all the leading business men were driven to the wall. But the city was not killed. James H. Perkins, who came to the Queen City that year, wrote home that he was amazed by the rapidity of buikling, and told that the masons set to work, in mid- winter, laying a new foundation for a burned block while the smoke was vet rising.
The pestilence did, indeed, serve to prevent the proposed reunion of the old Indian fighters who occupied the site of Cincinnati Novem- ber 4, 1752, so that only Gen. Simon Kenton and a handful gathered, but on December 26, 1833, the anniversary of the settlement of Cin- cinnati, resolutions were adopted that led to a celebration of the
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first settlement of Ohio, April 7, 1835, by native Ohioans at ('in- cinnati. It was a glorious meeting, at which Thomas Worthington read a poem, the eloquent William M. Corry delivered an oration, and Dennis MeHenry sang a song of which this is a sample :
Then send round the mantling wine, Fill up the friendly glasses- Be this our toast : "The Buckeye Tree, And Buckeye lads and lasses."#
Here, rather than in the campaign of 1840, might be put the begin- ning of popular recognition of the Buckeye as the emblem of the State. The title "Buckeye State" needs no other explanation than the abundance of that tree in the forests that the pioneers entered, and the unique beanty of foliage, blossom and fruit that made the tree con- spienous. Ohio was known as the Buckeye State long before the cam- paign of 1×40.
While Cincinnati suffered, the State as a whole began in 1830 a period of financial expansion and speculation that continued for seven years. Scores of new towns and cities were projected, canals were dug, turnpike roads opened, railroads begun, and in every channel there was enterprise and confidence. This was the time when the mulberry was introduced and silk culture begun, and even the culture of sugar beets was tried, by Lucas Sullivant.
In 1828, the Miami canal, with the exception of the part from Main street in Cincinnati to the Ohio river, was completed to Dayton, at a cost of less than $900,000. The inlet of the Ohio canal from Comum- bus, called the feeder, was opened in September, 1831, and the Ohio canal was complete in 1833, except the lower loek to connect it with the Ohio river, at a cost of $4,244,539. In 1828 the first coal was shipped by canal to Cleveland by Henry Newberry, father of the emi- nent Ohio geologist, John S. Newberry. The Hocking valley branch canal opened up that famous coal region, where one of the pioneer mine operators was Thomas Ewing. Ewing and Vinton were part- ners in the mining of salt in that region, sinking the first well in 1831.
In 1830 arrangements were made with Indiana by which Ohio changed the plan of the Miami canal, so as to have a channel down the Manmee valley from the Indiana line to Maumee bay, continuous with the Wabash canal in the sister state, and forming a channel of commeree which was expected to be as important under the new con- ditions as the old river and portage route was in the days of the Freneli traders. With this east and west canal the canal from Cincinnati to Dayton was subsequently extended to conneet near Defiance.
"Ohio has at the present time," wrote Judge Chase in 1>33, "four
*Dr. Drake, in his remarks, referred to an eastern poet sending for "a drawing of the leaf and flower of our emblem, the Buckeye tree."
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hundred miles of navigable eanals, constructed at an expense of rather more than five millions of dollars [for which the State went in debt ]. The gross amount of tolls on both canals for the year 1-32 was $123,791. Measures have been taken to extend the canal northward from Dayton, and efforts are made at the present moment to construct a railroad between that place and the lake. The effect of these improvements upon the prosperity of the State cannot be developed in a few sentences. They have afforded to the farmer of the interior an easy access to market, and have enhanced the value of his farm and his prodnetions. They have facilitated intercourse between different see- tions of the State and have thus tended to make the people more united as well as more prosperons. They have furnished to the peo- ple a common object of generous interest and satisfaction. They have attracted a large accession of population and capital, and they have made the name and character of Ohio well known throughout the civilized world, as a name and character of which her sons may be justly proud."
When completed, the Ohio canal system included the main canal from Portsmouth to Cleveland, 309 miles, with 25 miles of feeders ; the Hocking canal, 56 miles long, and the Walhonding, 25 miles, as well as the Muskingum improvement, Dresden to Marietta, 91 miles, which went under the control and management of the general govern- ment. The Miami & Erie system included the main canal, Cincin- nati to Defiance and Toledo, 250 miles, the canal from the vicinity of Defiance to the State line, 18 miles, forming a link in the Wabash & Erie canal, and the Sidney feeder, 14 miles. Exclusive of the Mari- etta improvement, these aggregate 697 miles of canal. The mainten- ance of the canals involved the creation of great reservoirs also, of which the largest was established in Mereer county, submerging seven- teen thousand acres. The Lewistown reservoir in Logan county cov- ered over seven thousand acres, the Lieking county reservoir thirty-six hundred, and smaller ones were established in other localities, mak- ing a total area devoted to reservoirs of 32,100 acres, or fifty square miles. Including these reservoirs, the cost of the eanals was as fol- lows: Miami & Erie canal, $8,062,880: Ohio canal, $4,695,203; Walhonding canal, $607,26>; Hocking eanal, $975.481; Muskin- gum improvement, $1,627,018. "For thirty years these waterways were the great controlling faetors of increasing commerce, manufae- tures and population. Through their influence villages became eities, towns were built where forests grew, farming developed into a profit- able enterprise, and the trade and resources of the world were opened to Ohio."* The selling prices of farm products were immediately increased, and wealth and prosperity smiled upon the struggling west- ern State. As the canal period drew toward a close, and the railroad
* Daniel J. Ryan, "A History of Ohio."
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age began, the water ways continued to benefit the people by the influ- ence of their cheaper rates upon the tariffs of the new mode of trans- portation. The canals also earned substantial revenues for the State. During the first thirty-five years the receipts exceeded expenditures on aeeount of canals by over seven million dollars. This revenue was merged in the general fund of the State and consequently spent without the people appreciating it, but if it had been set aside in a special fund, as was done in New York, Mr. Ryan estimated in 1888 that there would have been $6,000,000 to the credit of the Ohio canals. He further estimated that taking the figures of 1885, the people of Ohio were saving ten millions a year in railroad freight charges on account of the existence of the eanals. "Every bushel of wheat and corn that moves northward from the Scioto and Miami valleys pays a freight that is regulated by the canals that flow through those valleys ; the rail rate on iron ore from every point on Lake Erie to the Ohio river is a common rate, and it is due entirely to canal influences."
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