USA > Ohio > Wayne County > History of Wayne County, Ohio, Volume I > Part 15
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WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO.
bus in the South; they gazed with imperturbable interest on the Pilgrim Fathers! The tides of the Atlantic, and Pacific, the raging overflow of the great rivers, invaded their wigwams in every part of North America; and it is a favorite impression of the writer that they had a system of govern- ment. To the nationalities that the Romans found in Gaul, several centuries before the Christian era, the aborigines of America bear resemblance. Formed of families were tribes, and of these the nation, and of the masses of the tribes and of the chieftains the general assembly was formed. Of self-govern- ment the Indian system was conspicuous. Recognizing the inter-Indian obliga- tions, but without permanent confederation, the Indian nations stood, solitary and alone, without international relations, in military dictatorship without the laws of war, and confronted by modern systems of civilization which they re- jected in time of peace. To the world they were mere Arabs in an American wilderness. But they had a local government. The chiefs of the tribes were selected by the tribes, and of the nations by the tribes, and, as of all other nations, the most celebrated for their courage, endurance and intelli- gence were elevated to the position of leaders, and they were as absolute military dictators as are known in every regular army. Divided into dif- ferent nations, war was common among them and with the different European powers 'who contested territorial rights in the colonial period, and with the United States. Treaties and alliances among themselves and with the French, the British and Americans were frequent in the various contests of inter- national policy, and in our Northwest, in the battle of Tippecanoe, their great leader, Tecumseh, illustrated the union of Indian nations with the British. To have no permanent federal center, or capital, was incident to the Indian claims of vast possessions, and to the tribal excursions to the distant limits of their territory, apparently to maintain their possessory right to their hereditary domains. In all their negotiations for the sale of their lands, the terms and conditions, and their policy, were first considered and voted on by the Indian nations, and their leaders were selected and in- structed as plenipotentiaries in national form, to the meetings with American national commissioners. To call the attention of the government to a vio- lation of treaties, frequent embassies of the dignified denizens of the forest appeared at Washington, and their accomplishments excited the wonder of our national authorities.
The strict observance of the marriage vow among the Indians was a family virtue. Their religion was a direct relation to the Great Spirit whom they worshipped. They believed in the future life. Their medicine man was their priest, and he invoked the divine healing power to cure disease.
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The antiquity of this belief, and the Indian idea of the inferiority of the female, give probability to the supposition of his descent from some ancient race of people ; as do also the agricultural department of Indian life, which, together with the common drudgery of the family, was conducted by the female. The disinclination of the Indian to any labor except hunting and fishing and war, his frequent change of location, his habits of cruelty, classed him as a relic of barbarism. With much like the ceremony of knighthood, in the Middle ages, the youthful Indian was equipped as a warrior. De- based by ignoble passions, yet in bravery, in resenting a supposed wrong, in his slow retreat before superior forces, the Indian was possessed of the ele- ment of chivalry, and stands as a proud, self-governing, revengeful bar- barian; and as 'we see him pictured, he is the most skillful, graceful and splendid horseman upon the American prairies. In vanity of ornament of himself and horse, he might well have been ranked as a knight of the Cru- sades, or that composite being of horse and man that surprised the Mexican on the invasion of Cortez !
Indolent in time of peace; painting the body, wearing the skins of animals, expert in the movements of infantry and cavalry in time of war, with the warwhoop to encourage the attack; with weird songs and crude poetry, their only records ; these the editors of Tacitus continually compare with the early Gaul. The tomahawk was a Gaulish weapon. Marius, in his great battles with the Cimbri, fought the same race that were destroyed by Harrison and Wayne in this great Northwest. Government of the Indian respected right of property and person, punished crimes, and promoted peace if not attacked in person or property. The high physical development of the Indian, his Roman nose and high cheek bones were Gaulish, and in the Persian, the Indian may trace his ancestry. The vast territory of the Northwest was claimed by the Indian as his heritage, and the international law of title by discovery and prescription was as ably reasoned by the Indian orators as by the supposed more civilized usurpers of Europe. Before our fathers, some Indian tribes had been settled for fifty years in what is now the state of Ohio; and, with a remarkable humanity, the Congress of the United States provided in the ordinance of 1787 that "the utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians ; their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent." The United States ob- tained possession of their lands on the Muskingum river as early as 1795, and between 1784 and 1805 some five treaties were made between the United States and various tribes of Indians, quieting their title to certain lands in
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the Northwest, which the government afterwards purchased, and in 1842 the last possession of the Indians terminated in Ohio.
The most dramatic and picturesque scenes ever witnessed were the oc- casions of the meeting of the commissioners of the United States and the Indian chiefs, to define boundaries and purchase Indian lands. Treaties at Fort Stanwix in 1784; at Fort McIntosh in 1785; at Fort Finney in 1786; at Fort Harmar in 1789; at Greenville in 1795; at Fort Industry in 1805, with many able representatives of the government, including -General St. Clair and General Wayne, and with the chiefs of eleven of the most power- ful tribes of Indians of the Northwest, were as brilliantly conducted as the modern meetings of the peace congress, amidst the splendid architecture and display of the capital of the Netherlands !
The more magnificent palaces of the stately oaks, the rivers sparkling, nature's parks of wild animals gathering about in the shadows; the con- certs of the birds, the native dignity of the Indian chiefs, with that silent gravity that told of the approaching migration to distant lands; their splendid dress of doe skin, its fringes musical with the claws of the bear and with the teeth of the wolf, and above that sombre and silent face, that had been bronzed in yellow by the Master Hand of untold centuries, were waving plumes, that proclaimed the majesty of nature and native art, the exalted denizen, whose warwhoop answered the victorious scream of the eagle, whose feathers adorned him,-the tall, ornamented and thoughtful negotiator!
To intensify these great occasions was the presence of the government of the United States, in the continental dress of one of the heroes of the Revolution and but lately conqueror of the Indians at the battle of Fort Defiance, the immortal Major-Gen. Anthony Wayne, and this great man gazed calmly into the eyes of Corn Planter, and Red Jacket, and Little Turtle, and they yielded to inevitable destiny; and at the treaty of Greenville, ac- complished by General Wayne, peace was established and the lands of the Northwest obtained for the population of the new states.
For negotiating treaties, for intellectual acumen, for embellished oratory, the Indian representatives ranked among the classical speakers of antiquity ; but in his fine and majestic appearance there was a decadent chivalry, and an undertone that we hear in the plaintive cry of the whippoorwill. How- ever, he was wise in selling cheaply a doubtful title, and in reserving, as it appeared to him, his still independent and proud seclusion among the ma- jestic scenery of another west.
Coursing through Wayne county were many trails of this nervous and uneasy race, traveling to and fro from east to west, and west to east. in
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fragmentary weakness; with a village for a period near the junction of Buck- eye and Madison streets, they were in amity with the early settlers, and dis- appeared in the progressive pressure of irresistible immigration. Their path- way was marked by the spasmodic desolation of revenge, largely incited by a British administration and emulated by a British soldiery. To their natural passions, inflamed by the desperation of inferior resistance, were added the European and Asiatic methods of extermination, of which history grows atrocious in the civil wars across the oceans. Of notice of danger to the pioneers from Indian attack, there were many magnanimous examples of Indian friendship. At that day the atmosphere of political life was burdened with the sighs of the Spanish inquisition, or the slavery, mutilation and murder of prisoners of war. Massacres of Wyoming, or of St. Clair's de- feat, scarcely equalled the bloody dignity of the slaughter in the Nether- lands, or in the civil wars of England. Now but a reminiscence, many of the principles of Indian justice and equity insensibly became an element in the common law of our great Northwest.
The philosophy of the Indian sensibilities developed a rare exhibition on the great stage of nature; the love of home, of territorial supremacy, of the picturesque hills, of the perspective valleys, and of their amphitheatres of forest and flower, of color and odor, of wild animal and ambuscade, gave to the Indian the highest action of the sensibilities, and the imminency of their loss, by the inevitable approach of the immigrant, aroused a passion that clothed many of the beautiful scenes of the West with the skeletons of the Indian and of the victims of Indian atrocity. His existence, and national life, and primitive government, are but a tragic romance in civil and political life: an unique curiosity in the history of nations.
One of the greatest novelties in all history is the Indian in America! And among the early settlers of Wayne county! Of his characteristics, his insatiate cruelty ranked him with the early and bloody struggles of the human race ; his cruelties in the Revolution have no sanction in the laws of modern warfare, and his evil passions had the fixed habit of inhuman and merciless revenge. Against the inyader he was a monster, with a high development of intellectual power. Of George III, of Lord North, and of the British Parliament, the Indian was the bloody instrument; associated, too, with the Hessian, whose rivalry in cruelty, and its British instigation, confound the thought of several centuries of moral progress. Of the disordered sensi- bilities of several thousand years, the savagery of the Indian is an evolution. The humanity with which he was considered in the ordinance of 1787, and in his association with the pioneers, is a pleasant reflection; and in our love
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of free government the history of ideas might find some political assimila- tion in two hundred years of colonial and Indian association; our love of liberty may insensibly be the partial reflection of that proud and life-sacri- ficing passion of independence that accompanied this native American into the shadows of the setting sun!
ORGANIZED GOVERNMENT IN WAYNE COUNTY.
Divided by the ordinance of 1787 into three great territorial divisions, Hamilton, Washington and Wayne, the great dominion of the latter em- braced northern and northwestern Ohio, including the territory of which was formed the states of Michigan and Indiana and parts of Illinois and Wis- consin; and, but for the crack of the rifle of a few daring white men, and the warwhoop of the Indian, it was an empire of silence. Aboriginal government, the tribe and its chief, alone disturbed the solitude. The eagle's feather was the only emblem of sovereignty; conscience the only lawgiver of the pioneer, and it was the spirit of the great ordinance. It was then true, as Aristotle said over two thousand years ago, that "It is better for a city to be governed by a good man, than by good laws." The peaceable acquisition of ter- ritory, founded upon the recognition of Indian nationality and the equity of possession,-an acquisition that disclaimed the old world doctrine of title by discovery or conquest,-established the new political organism upon the foundations of righteousness, and a government of good men began to appear in the wilderness.
I. The government of a territorial Council in 1788.
2. The government of a territorial Legislature in 1799.
3. The government of the state in 1802.
As a policy of necessity from sparseness of population, until 1799 the elective franchise was held in abeyance.
THE TERRITORIAL COUNCIL.
With the government of a Territorial Council in 1788, composed of Arthur St. Clair as governor, Winthrop Sargent as secretary, and Samuel H. Parsons, Mitchell Varnum and Return Jonathan Meigs as judges. all prominent men of the Revolution, meeting at Marietta, organized political energy began a memorable career. Laws were to be adopted by the gov- ernor and judges. To reside in the district and be possessed of one thousand acres of land were the qualifications of the governor. To have five hundred
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acres of land was required of the judges. They were to have common law jurisdiction. All county and township officers were to be appointed by the governor. Freedom of religious worship, and the encouragement of schools, and good faith toward the Indians were guaranteed by the great ordinance. Habeas corpus, trial by jury, representation, to give bail, judicial proceed- ings according to the common law, were cardinal doctrines of the congres- sional charter. Confined to the laws of the original states, the council at its first session adopted laws establishing a militia, courts, sheriffs, a court of probate, defining crimes, regulating; marriages, creating the office of cor- oner, and acts of limitation. After ten years, with changes of judges, and many additional laws, now of common knowledge, the period arrived in 1798 when the territory contained five thousand free male inhabitants, and a territorial Legislature was to be elected by the people.
THE TERRITORIAL LEGISLATURE.
The Governor issued his proclamaion for the election of a General As- sembly to meet at Cincinnati, in February, 1799. The General Assembly consisted of a House of Representatives, and a Legislative Council of five members, to be appointed by the President, out of ten names selected by the House, and met in Cincinnati in September, 1799. Not organized by the territorial government until 1796, Wayne county did not participate in the organic advantages of the council; but in 1798 was represented in the General Assembly by Charles F. Chobert De Joncaire, Solomon Sibley and Jacob Viscar, all of Detroit; and this Legislature elected William Henry Har- rison the delegate to Congress and adjourned to meet at Chillicothe in 1800 and again adjourned to 1801-2, and again adjourned until November, 1802, but never meeting, as in April, 1802, Congress authorized certain portions of the Northwest to form a state government.
THE EARLY LAWS.
Commencing in 1788 to legislate, the early councils and territorial legislatures found the necessary legal examples in the states of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Virginia, the homes from which in the main they had made the great exodus into the wilderness of the Northwest. From these ample sources a comprehensive body of laws were adopted, such as regulating the militia, establishing courts, for the appointment of sheriffs, respecting crimes, marriages, the office of coroner, limitation of times for civil and
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criminal actions, as to the sale of liquor to Indians and soldiers, suppressing gambling, for dividing the counties into townships, and for the appointment of constables, overseers of the poor and township clerks, to create the office of clerk of the Legislature, making the records of the courts of the United States evidence, as to enclosures of ground, granting licenses to merchants, traders and tavern keepers, creating the office of treasurer-general and county treasurers, and as to the manner of raising money, as to highways, public buildings, prisons, strays, admission of attorneys, guardians, procedure in civil cases, and as to fees of public officers.
To the common law of Great Britain was added legislation defining the jurisdiction of the courts and officers to execute process, providing for tax- ation and a treasurer-general, and county treasurer; organizing the militia ; providing for marriage and divorce; defining crime and criminal and civil procedure ; providing for highways, for the poor, for the creation of town- ships and counties, and such other legislation as was in the older states; for conveyance of real estate; for the settlement of estates, and other probate jurisdiction ; for public buildings, and protection of the right of property and persons, until, when the constitution of 1802 was adopted, there existed a body of laws of which the present voluminous statutes are the evolution and amplification of the exigencies of a growing commonwealth. Of consummate wisdom and foresight, the structure of the new states was a magnificent ex- ception in all the history of government !
That the early legislators were industriously establishing a government of the people, the acts of the council and territorial Legislature above are noted as evidences of the popular sovereignty of the times. More con- clusive evidence of the sovereignty of the people arose between the Legis- lature and Governor St. Clair in 1800 in the denial of his right to exercise the veto power, and to lay out and change the boundaries of counties, under the ordinance of 1787. The contest grew more and more determined and much legislation was rendered useless. The Governor was afterwards condemned by Congress, and the people were confirmed in their resistance to the un- constitutional attempt of the Governor to interfere with the popular right.
Of this disagreement the memory may have remained, and it may ac- count for the absence of the veto power in the constitutions of 1802 and 1851.
THE CONSTITUTION OF 1802.
Reducing the great county of Wayne in the year 1800, the territory constituting the state of Indiana was organized with a separate territorial government. The territorial Legislature not having met in 1802. owing to
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the act of Congress authorizing the eastern section of the Northwest to form a state, in October, 1802, an election was held for members of the constitutional convention, which met at Chillicothe in November, 1802, and adopted a state constitution, and the state of Ohio was recognized by Con- gress as a state of the Union, in February, 1803. Its first General Assembly met in March, 1803. A supplementary act of Congress of March, 1803, made a munificent provision of tracts of land, for the use of schools and for making roads within the state, limited to certain territory of the three divisions, by general bearings. Wayne county was diminished by so much of the original limits as embraced any portion of Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan, and was not approximately bounded until the year 1808, and controversies arising as to the western and northwestern boundaries of the new state, Congress ordered a survey of these boundaries by act of May 20, 1812, and in the same year Wayne county was organized under the state government, with Wooster as the county seat. To the delays incident to the uncertain boundaries and surveys, Wayne county was not represented in the constitutional convention of 1802, nor in the state Legislature until 1815. In the constitutional convention of 1851 the county was represented by John Larwill, Leander Firestone and E. Wilson; and in that of 1872 by John K. McBride.
Our fathers were the careful architects of the first new state of the Union. Slavery existed in all the thirteen states, except in the states of Massachusetts and Maine, and was, as the ordinance of 1787 would indicate, in the course of ultimate extinction; the descent of estates was especially provided for in the great charters of 1787, adverse to the English system, and the ordinance especially restricted all laws to be made for the North- west territory to the policy of the laws of the older states, and carefully pre- served the right of suffrage and self-government, the veto of the governor, freedom of religious sentiment and worship, the encouragement of schools and means of education, and a republican form of government.
THE ELECTIVE FRANCHISE OF THE CONSTITUTION OF 1802.
The elective franchise was an important question, both in the territorial condition of the government of the Northwest and in framing the consti- tution of 1802. The restrictions on the right to vote were varied in the different states, but our first constitution provided: To have been in the state one year, and to have labored on the roads, and to be a white male person above the age of twenty-one years, were the qualifications of a voter
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The right of suffrage to the negro and his descendants was decided ad- versely, as well as his right to hold office. And while the right of suffrage was broad, by a strange perversity of principle, the exercise of it was lim- ited. It was a political phenomenon. While this first constitution of the state provided for the election of senators and representatives to the General Assembly of the state, for governor, for sheriff and for coroner, and for all town and township officers; the secretary of state, state treasurer and state auditor, the judges of the court of common pleas, consisting of a president and associate judges, with probate jurisdiction, and the judges of the supreme court. were to be appointed by the joint ballot of the General Assembly ; and the clerks of the court were to be appointed by the respective courts. No constitutional provision being made for county recorder, auditor, treasurer, . prosecuting attorney, or commissioners, or surveyor, they were afterward elected by provision of the Legislature as authorized by the constitution. The resolution to submit the adoption of the constitution of 1802 to the people was defeated by an almost unanimous vote (twenty-seven to seven) and the constitution was put into operation by the delegates to the convention; and it was provided that after the year 1806 another constitutional convention might be held. As delegates to this convention, were many leading men both then and in after years ; they were patriots. Of the reasons that operated to adopt the appointive system as to some of the state and county officers, we can, perhaps, only surmise that impressions prevailed, especially as to the courts, that created the judiciary system of the general government. On the frontier, harassed by Indians in the depredations incident to the war of 1812, and the war itself, busy to live, our pioneers held no convention after the year 1806, but the survivors of them, and the generation younger than them, conscious of the blot of the appointive system on the principle of self- government, in the constitution of 1851 restored a complete elect- ive system to the state. Illustrating the popular prudence in changing the fundamental law, the people refused the constitution of 1872. and for a period of one hundred and six years, since 1802, excepting some amendments changing the time and method of voting, and creating the circuit court, and enlarging the supreme court, have adhered to the first consti- tution for fifty years, and to the second for sixty.
Exercising a distinguished influence on this and similar great ques- tions, the names of many of the ablest men of Ohio, and of Wayne county, could be given to ornament these pages.
In the practical application of the great principles of government, it is not extravagant to say that our fathers outranked all the legislators of the (10)
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world. They were educated and heroic; lovers of liberty. They were stu- dents of government, fearless, grand and incorruptible. Wayne county soon became pre-eminent among the counties of the new state.
Republican government of the state can only be expressed in the legal terms of county organization, and the county organization in the legal terms of city, town and township government, and these in the primary legal terms of the power of the people. The state and county are but ministerial agencies ; the General Assembly, the supreme and inferior courts are constituent pow- ers delegated by the people. That the federal and state governments ascend from the people, and no power descends from the federal and state govern- ments, both the federal and state constitutions expressly declare. But the system is inviolable as an organism, and is absolute law. Not only in pass- ing laws, but in judicial proceedings, the Athenian populace voted by up- lifted hand; and in the wards of the city of Rome the people voted by white and black beans. The senate of Rome were often rebuked by the popular will. By the usurpation by the emperors of the popular power, Rome fell, and Athens before the combinations of Philip.
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