USA > Ohio > Wayne County > History of Wayne County, Ohio, Volume I > Part 16
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That the civil and political history of Wayne county may be truly ob- served, we must look to the city, the townships and towns in which original and initial force always has prevailed.
THE CITY OF WOOSTER.
The first election for city officers after incorporation was in March, 1818, consisting of a president and five trustees, and the board appointed a marshal, treasurer and collector. By-laws were drafted for the govern- ment of the board, and ordinances passed for the government of the city. Wooster, as early as 1814, was called the Athens of northern Ohio. It is believed by the writer that Wayne county, and Wooster, the county seat, and the territory known as the backbone of Ohio, had more able and educated men at that early day than any locality of the Northwest. Beall, Sloane, Spink, William, Joseph H. and John Larwill, Henry, Bever, the Joneses, the Robinsons, Stibses, Quinbys, McConahays, Cox, Avery, Sprague, Christmas, Howards, Clingen, Dean. Lakes, Bissells, Tottens, and a much larger list of equally large men are remembered. Mather, a graduate of Yale, was the first teacher. Surveyors, physicians, lawyers, farmers, educated builders of state, and mothers, wives, daughters, bright as the stars themselves, were the heralds of the splendors of the future city and county and the founders of free institutions. Of the first action of the city officers as far back as
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1812, having occasion to examine the records, I find their meetings conducted in full compliance with Jefferson's manual, and the legal form and character of ordinances would be approved by any court. For more than eighty years many of the ordinances for the government of the city have been in force. Acquainted with the city for many years, and especially the last twenty, my observation of its order, and respect for law, has impressed me that no other city in these respects is its superior. With extensive improvements conducted by the public service for several years, the city is-seldom in the courts. The successful management of its finances, its administration of justice, and preservation of peace and good order, are evidence of the best administrative ability. It is a city of law.
The cultivation of taste is a legal sequence in self-government to the masses of the people. Peace and order, the refining processes of individual worth, dwell in the temple of the republican heart in a popular system of government. Splendor is bred in the conceptions and shines in external life. Houses of lords, patrician caste and private egotism have mistaken a birth or a fortune for this spiritual dignity. Fine dwellings and ornamental houses, public improvements, higher education and universal taste; personal beauty, the magnificent buildings of a university, and its high purposes, the exceptional opportunities of the city schools; a state agricultural experiment station, and the manifold forms of its scientific development ; manufactures, merchandizing, have grown into a city of several thousands.
Mental culture is a legal result of a people's government ; long and occult analysis is born in the primary efforts of political philosophy. The news- paper, the orator of the pulpit, the teacher, the physician, are metaphysicians ; the lawyer has struggled in the deceptive meshes of occult legal ideas in all the history of Wayne county, until a species of brilliancy, a sort of traditional electric light, illumines the city, from Avery to John McSweeney, whose unrivaled powers have ranked him among the orators,
"That thundered over Greece,
From Macedon to Artaxerxes' throne."
TOWNSHIP AND TOWN GOVERNMENT.
The republican system existed in the individual father and mother. A great nation in chaotic conception was brooding in the genius of the people. The home, the township, the county, the state, the nation, were the ascending series in the development of government, and the surveyor as early as 1807 was defining the sections of land to be the future legal home of the framers
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of government of the Northwest, and between that date and 1825 all the townships of Wayne county were formed and organized into political bodies. The forty-six families of the county in 1810, numbering three hundred and thirty-two, had grown in 1825 to perhaps over two thousand; in 1850 to thirty-two thousand; in 1870 to thirty-five thousand. Anterior to the very early period of 1810, the three hundred and thirty-two population of Wayne county was governed by benevolence and brotherly kindness. Knowing the laws of the older states, their voluntary righteousness was the common law of the early rights of property and person; but in the organizing periods of the townships under the constitution of 1802, the observance of the early laws of the state became the necessary and paramount obligation. As the larger responsibilities of representation in the Legislature of the state, in state officers, in Congress, in the associate judgeships, and in the county offices, were to be met by the early settlers, the township governments supplied enlarged intellectual forces. These distinguished forces in township ad- ministration were the moral and spiritual foundation of a great republic. They were to observe the public roads, to care for the public schools, for trials by jury, for a local court, for a religious home, for individual liberty, for economy, for industry, for self-government; these are in divine harmony with the highest purpose that ever sanctified a state. The township is the primary organ of sentiment. Its legal environment the only free system ever formulated for the defense of human rights! And it but gives clear- ness to the view of township government when we consider that the then and present county treasurer, auditor and recorder are county agencies ; that the entire judicial system and its officers is but corrective; that the com- missioners of the county in that early period, who exercised local adminis- tration, had but small means and could do but little for the people of the townships. These early people stood alone amidst the tall oaks of the forests, the swollen streams, the bridle-paths of the surveys, savage animals, and the dangers of Indian marauding. But they built roads and bridges; as overseers, they assisted the poor, they established and maintained justice's courts and juries; they punished breaches of the peace, and violations of the rights of persons and property; observed inviolate the rights of suffrage, and required the strictest accountability of their public officers; they con- tributed to the public expense by taxation, and required the strictest economy in public expenditures. Mindful of the constitutional recitals that "religion, morality and knowledge" are necessary to good government, they early erected churches and established religious worship; they erected school houses, and maintained schools by private subscriptions, and had the peculiar advantage
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of that great class of teachers that accompanied the immigration of the early settlers from the eastern states; and they laid the foundation for that school system created by the legislation of the state in 1853, formulated by the senate committee, composed of Harvey Rice, George Rex, of Wayne county, and Alonzo Cushing. They observed with patriotic care all the provisions of the bill of rights of the constitution of 1802. Industry pervaded the townships, and in but a little while Wayne county began its career of beautiful farms and magnificent productiveness. For a eulogy on the intelli- gence, dignity and versatility of the early settlers, we find them associate judges in the court of common pleas, when at an early period the writer admired the wisdom and integrity of their public services, and which judicial system continued until the system of the constitution of 1851 was substituted in its place. Out of the number of these early statesmen, the county officers were largely chosen, and so great was the influence of the township leaders and the special domestic importance of township policy and control of the county treasury, that the commissioners of the county have almost wholly been selected from the people of the townships; and one is impressed that the selection, at an early day, of many of the members of both houses of the state Legislature, members of Congress, and constitutional conventions, from the townships, was somewhat precautional for the promotion of the original principles of our republican system.
An intentional study of the development of township life shows the early formation of villages, the facilities for exchange of valuable ideas; the early advantages for education; in many instances, the establishment of the newspaper; the discussion of the legislative policy, and the fitness of men for public office ; the best methods of agriculture, and the supplementary knowledge of the press of the county seat and of the older states; and I am led forward from the early struggles of high purpose and republican gov- ernment to that magnificent present, to the conventions of county and state exhibitions of agricultural wonders; to the comprehensive systems of edu- cation ; the high qualification of teachers, and to the personal taste and at- tainments of the young women and men, that rival all productions of learn- ing at the county seat. As an inevitable evolution, villages, towns and cities have modified monarchy. France, England, Germany, nearly the whole world, have yielded to representation. A financial question has become the menace to arbitrary power.
Public convenience was a natural organizing incentive to the formation of villages and towns. The blacksmith, the tailor. the shoemaker. the wagon-
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maker, the carpenter, the merchant, the watch-repairer, the miller, the post- master, and useful trades and employments required a center as a market ; defined lots, streets, the correction of illegal conduct, and law and its ad- ministration was necessary, and self-government found its original center in the village and township. And in the village marshal, trustees and super- visor of the village; of the justice of the peace; the constable, the township trustees, we find the beginnings of self-government.
Guizot, in his History of Civilization, and Hallam in his History of the Middle Ages, the one of France, the other of England, describe with ad- mirable fidelity the disorders of independent chieftains, barons, earls, defiant estates, rendering government a continual revolution. Silently, popular life was developing ; villages, towns, cities, for domestic convenience, for foreign trade at the ports, and local exchange, grew, governed themselves, became the champions of order, aided the government to obtain the mastery over the fortified robber and lawless bandit of the large realms in which violence enslaved the people and debased the state. The foundation of all European government was force, power usurped by the sword, but the people have grown into the governing capacity of most of the governments of the world, and largely within the century just elapsed.
The logic of our splendid system of elective peace, and that the state is the logical conclusion of the premises of individual freedom, and that the federal government is the logical conclusion of the premises of state and popular organizations,-all known as the constitutional system of the United States,-has pervaded the world. Of this self-governing principle, the col- onies had no completed practice or publication, and the settlement of the Northwest, the growth of government from the individual to the state, had their birth in this Northwest territory, and necessarily, the new counties, the new state, have generated other states, and the world is in the embrace of the two American oceans. The grandest endowments of the age are our personal freedom and our all-pervading American liberty!
The Christian religion was uttering its voice in the early township, village and city churches, or even, anterior to these, in the log cabins of the pioneer. And here are the two sublimities of republican theory,-political and religious freedom; not voiced by the constitutions of our country solely to avoid the ignorance and cruelty of the sectarian persecutions of the Middle ages, the thousand years of blood from the fourth to the fourteenth century, but that the genius of the people might illumine their pathway in their ascent to happiness, and inspire them with the wisdom of brotherhood; and that the
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ever present spirit might endow them with the genius of national life! With- out these conditions, the civil and political history of Wayne county would be a tinkling cymbal. Wayne county owes its greatness to being an en- lightened and Christian county !
THE EARLY METHOD OF ENFORCING THE LAW.
It may be observed with justice that a patriotic care governed our early people in the execution of fundamental law. To our early agencies of govern- ment we owe a debt of gratitude. The ordinance of 1787 restricted legis- lation in the Northwest territory to the policy and laws of the older states, and when the council had violated this provision the laws were instantly vetoed or repealed. In the execution of the laws passed by the early legislatures, con- stitutions were strictly construed, and power was exercised by officers from the highest to the lowest in a respectful manner to avoid infraction of the rights of person or property. It was the exercise of logic in discrimination of republican ideas, and these ideas were paramount in legislation primarily necessary in forming government. They continually prevailed in the ampli- fication of laws, so that the growth of legislation was of an endogenous char- acter, covering by broader provisions similar greater necessities. Provisions for the poor, school systems, roads and highways, taxes, always remained the same in principle, so that in the constitutions of 1802 and of 1851, while the larger population and progressive necessities demanded a broader and more perfect application of principles, the principles were identical, and not inimical to the spirit of the government. Enlightenment and conscience, pa- triotism, directed the execution of law. There was something signally broth- erly in the motives of the early agencies of the people, and these were a tremendous force in promoting civil and political government.
PROFESSIONAL INFLUENCES.
Of the wise and tenacious men of the profession in asserting republican principles in the early days, were the early physicians and lawyers, of the press and the churches.
Of the physicians, James Townsend was the first in 1811, remaining thirty years at Wooster ; John Cunningham, at Jeromeville in 1830, and from 1848 in Wooster; Daniel McPhail, in Wooster, in 1818; Edward Thompson, in 1820, afterward a bishop in the Methodist Episcopal church; Stephen F. Day, at Wooster in 1827, and remained for thirty-four years; Hezekiah
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Bissell and Samuel N. Bissell, at an early day; Moses Shaffer, first at Mt. Eaton, and about 1831 removed to Wooster, where he practiced for fifty years; Leander Firestone, first at Congress in 1841 and removed to Wooster in 1856; James D. Robinson, resident in Wooster.
Of lawyers who were in Wayne county at an early period was Levi Cox, in 1815; Edward Avery, in 1817; Ezra Dean, in 1824; Samuel Hemp- hill, about 1838; John P. Jeffries, in 1836; C. C. Parsons, in 1841; George Rex, in 1843; John McSweeney, in 1845; Ohio F. Jones, in 1846; and the influence of these representatives and judicial officers and professional men was incalculably valuable in formulating the methods and carrying out and preserving the principles of the new government. The republican system was favorable to the development of plain and democratic methods in the administration of justice as contrasted with the woolsack and the wig; physicians became patriots, and great lawyers were allowed the cultivation of eloquence and political philosophy ; the courts and the legislators were, for the first time, free to modify the common law to accord with the self- government of the people and the plainer legal rules of action. Having in- creased in population to thirty-two thousand in 1851, very eminent results were apparent in the county, in finer buildings, in the facilities of farming, in conveniences of travel, in education and religious worship, and in the professions of medicine and law. In the added half century, incalculable beauty marks the country and the numerous towns and county seat ; a county infirmary ; a children's home ; public buildings suggest expensive philanthropy ; great schools, musical devices, fashion, taste, refinement, beauty, dignity, in- dependence, dwell in palatial homes; the county seat has become the most desirable dwelling place; and in railroads, newspapers, social integrity, and prosperity, Wayne county stands the meritorious rival of any county in Ohio.
Of the most eminent forces in asserting the inviolability of the principles of popular right were the early newspapers, that, after many transformations of name, yet remain the medium of patriotic influence. From 1817 to the present time the newspapers of Wooster and Wayne county, in the broader field of fundamental principles of free government, voiced the patriotism of the pioneers and their descendants, and informed, encouraged and supported the intellectual and moral struggle for the great institutions of the North- west, and for the systems of federal and state constitutions.
For the republican system, the religion of the people of Wayne county was a powerful influence. Whether in the log cabin, or in God's first temples
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among the umbrageous shadows of the forest, the Divine Presence was solacing the pioneer with hope, giving rest to the heavy laden and assurance of the dignity of his belief in the freedom of man. Churches were being erected as early as 1812, and church influence has been a magnificent con- clusion of the righteousness of self-government. In the East they gave in- spiration to the struggle for independence, in the Northwest they were the champions of liberty and gave sanctity to the cause of the people.
THE CONSTITUTION OF 1851.
Presumably the constitution of 1851 embraced the best thought of re- publican government. Rufus P. Ranney, as a leader, is believed to have been the ablest man in the convention; from Wayne county Leander Fire- stone and John Larwill and Ezra Wilson were, as non-professionals in legal study, among the ablest of their class. The convention was thoroughly im- bued with democratic ideas. Correcting the appointive system of the constitution of 1802, every office was made elective; much of the constitution of 1802 was adopted, enlarged upon, and more clearly expressed; additional offices were created, as lieutenant-governor and attorney-general, a com- mission of five members to assist the supreme court, state school commis- sioner, board of public works, sinking fund commissioners, probate court and comptroller of the treasury. To change the time of holding elections, and the time of electing officers, amendments were adopted since 1851.
That the federal form of executive, legislative and judicial, is also the state form of governor, legislature and the supreme court, is worthy of ob- servation, being closely related to the principles of individual interests, and in the counties may be observed the legal checks on the closely related county agencies and the people. As a contrast to the refusal to submit the con- stitution of 1802 to the vote of the people, the constitution of 1851 was ratified at the state election in 1851, and the latter constitution provided that all amendments shall be voted on by the people. With enlargements of the public agencies, and labors incident to the growth of population, the consti- tution and laws since 1851 have been a remarkable system of popular en- couragement ; education alone stands pre-eminent in practical example. The refinement, the appropriation of invention, the dignity of social life, are splendidly manifest among the masses of Wayne county. Not the least among the acquirements of the people of Wayne county was an education in politics, not only in the law, but in the policy of administration.
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THE INFLUENCE OF PARTY ORGANIZATION AMONG THE PEOPLE.
As to the interpretation of constitutional expression, the conformity of legislation to fundamental principles, and as to the practical effects of the exercise of executive power, political parties represent the divergence of pub- lic thought. They imply intellectual activity in the concerns of government.
That portion of the farewell address of Washington as to parties had rather a reference to the future than the then present. Much confusion ex- isted in the public thought at that day as to the effect of constitutional pro- visions on the rights of the states, much enhanced by Hamilton's doctrine of "implied power." French emissaries formed Jacobin clubs, in antagonism to the policy of Washington in not forming entangling alliances in the French and British war. The federalist and republican of that day were not only in disorganization as to any definite party plans, but their beliefs were a mosaic of individual and local contradictions. Not until 1828, when a portion of the people nominated Andrew Jackson for President, and other portions supported his opponent, were there party organizations, and it is difficult to find any difference of political views in that contest, except it be on the immense uncertainty of the meaning of a strict construction of the constitution! The possibility is hardly historical that the people of the Northwest were largely influenced by the party questions at Washington, until the population in the new state of Ohio was augmented to twenty thou- sand or thirty thousand. That at the county seats politics played some part in the intellectual and moral action of men of leisure and of the professions, during and after Jackson's administration, the existence of the county news- paper, the somewhat advanced methods of communication among the people, a partial relief from the burdens of clearing the forests, would indicate. The Missouri Compromise in 1820, the national strife as to the re-chartering of the Bank of the United States in Jackson's administration; in 1832, the so-called nullification attempt of South Carolina, the presidential election of 1840, the Mexican war of 1845, aroused the intellectual action of the people, but not that state of friction of a later period. Relegated to the states of Southern slavery, the question of the balance of power, of the free and slave states, grew into discordant controversy all along the highway of national events. Arrogance threatened dissolution of the Union; the demand of con- gressional action in favor of slavery marked the statesmanship of the South- ern states, and a great moral question involved in the question of slavery itself inspired in 1854 the creation of the Republican party. The great
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political forces of the Democratic party of the Northern states dissevered their relation to the unconstitutional claims of slavery, and two of the leading men of Ohio, Henry B. Payne and George E. Pugh, in the Democratic national convention at Charleston in 1860, repudiated, in the name of the state of Ohio, the southern claim of constitutional protection to slavery. Now traversing the whole history of the federal union, public thought was aroused and became invincible in the Civil war. Wayne county was not the least in thought and action in this great contest to finally settle the great constitutional principle of final union. Upon great questions of administration of the fed- eral government, of state legislation, of county and township interests, the two great parties have expended thought and action; and intervening with apparent weakness for many years, a Prohibition party has beheld a popular conquest of the principle of temperance. In debate, in public oratory, in newspaper rhetoric, in conscientious thoughtfulness and patriotism, the people of Wayne county have grown great reasoners in the philosophy of govern- ment. Critical in the alertness of intellect, party politics has become a popular science, and in Wayne county the politician has become as gentle and courteous as ever Plato and his disciples were in the gardens of the Academy.
THE HEREDITY OF GOVERNING CAPACITY.
One of the valuable thoughts of the occasion is that great governmental faculties are continued in mental suggestion and heredity. Public force is propagated by example and emulation; and in the succeeding inflexible ad- herence to principle, we see the acumen, the high integrity, and unsullied good breeding of the descendants, or successors, of the early fathers; we hear in the later orators the eloquence and logic of the early republicans, and our love of the distinguishing features of a republic is commingled with the love we bear to the great founders.
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