USA > Ohio > Ohio and her Western Reserve, with a story of three states leading to the latter, from Connecticut, by way of Wyoming, its Indian wars and massacre > Part 10
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Western Reserve became a recruiting ground, and Western Reserve University, especially, a recruiting station, for the faculty of Yale. George Trumbull Ladd, D. D., LL. D., who a score of years ago became identified with Yale, and is now its Professor of Psychology, went from Painesville, where he was born, and though not indeed by way of the uni- versity mentioned, he was probably the pio- neer of the native-born in reverse movement from West to East, and to his success may be attributed Yale's predilection for Ohio professors. He enjoys a world-wide reputa- tion, and has lately been made the recipient of unusual honors in Japan, India, and other far countries. His is perhaps the subtlest mind the Western Reserve has contributed to the educational world and the domain of pure thought.
Even the common schools of the New Connecticut are of uncommon excellence. President Eliot, of Harvard, has commended those of Cleveland as an example worthy the emulation of Boston. Those throughout the Reserve are equally well organized and con- ducted.
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The Rev. I. Jennings was the author of what was known (from the place of his resi- dence) as "the Akron plan," which was ap- plied eventually to the schools of the whole State, and, indeed, of numerous other States ; and Hon. Harvey Rice, of Cleveland, from his zeal in forwarding its adoption by the Legislature, became popularly known as the " Father of the Ohio School System."
But it was to anoth- er resident of the Re- serve, the late Thomas W. Harvey, more than to any other single citi- zen, that the schools of Ohio came to owe the elevation of their stand- HON. THOMAS W. HARVEY. ard and that general effectiveness of system which gave them fame even in Boston ! A New Hampshire Yankee who looked like the ideal German professor and had the poise of a Greek philosopher, nearly the whole of his long life was spent as a superin- tendent of several favored schools of the Re-
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serve until his fitness for the position, long masked by modesty, led to his election as State school superintendent. He was the author, too, of text-books used in half the States of the Union, and altogether the most useful and popular educator which the re- gion ever supplied to the common-school system of the State.
To the literature of the country, it may be briefly said, the Reserve has probably contributed far more than its quota of au- thors, and among them several of first rank. One of the first, in a chronological sense at least, was curiously enough a woman, and one not usually accredited to the Reserve or to the West-Delia Salter Bacon, born at Tallmadge, 1811, the original exponent of the theory of the Baconian authorship of the poems and dramas usually ascribed to one William Shakespeare.
Albert Gallatin Riddle, lawyer and mem- ber of Congress, formed a connecting link between statesmanship and author-craft, and to him must be given the title of the novelist of the Western Reserve, while Howells will, of course, be acclaimed the leading fictionist
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and general man of letters from the same favored region. Riddle's Bart Ridgley and The Portrait will live at least in the land they vividly picture.
William Dean Howells is inseparably as- sociated with the town of Jefferson (where his father, also an author, spent most of his life), and upon the mere mention of his name some suggestion of his easeful grace, his gen- tleness and literary ge- niality, merges with the sterner memories of the rugged statesman who lived there. As if in apprehension of a pos- sibility that some few souls in the whole round world of fiction lovers should not rise to the refined realism of the Reserve's first literary artist, the same county which contributed Howells to the country kindly made it a present of antipo- dal character in Edward S. Ellis, the father of the dime novel and of many better things.
Miss Edith Thomas, most classic of all
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our women singers, comes also from Ash- tabula County. So, too, do Judge Albion W. Tourgee, Thomas Jay Hudson, and Am- brose Bierce.
But other sections of the Reserve have not been without literary light-and lights. The late Prof. Burke A. Hinsdale was as eminent an author as educator, and labored to good effect in controversial, critical, and historical lines of literature. General Jacob Dolson Cox obtained fame as a writer upon the civil war, as well as an actor in it, and Prof. George Trumbull Ladd, of Yale, con- joins authorship with college duties.
James Ford Rhodes, author of that mon- umental work The History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, which, as it has progressed through four large octavo volumes, has revealed rare judicial qualities as well as brilliancy of style, is of Cleveland birth and New England parentage. Sarah C. Woolsey, better known as "Susan Coo- lidge," was born and spent her youth in the same city, and the latter clause is true of Sarah Knowles Bolton. Constance Feni- more Woolson's whole literary life was also
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spent there, as was also most of that of John Hay before literature suffered a loss that diplomacy might derive a gain. George Kennan, of Russian travels fame, was born at Norwalk. G. Frederick Wright, author as well as scientist, and the breezy Alfred Henry Lewis, are among those who claim the Reserve as birthplace.
In the realm of art there are fewer emi- nent names to boast, but they are not totally lacking. James H. and William H. Beard, the famous painters (who made animals the me- dium of subtlest satires of men), were originally of Painesville and the sons of David Beard, of the surveying party of 1796. Among younger artists who call the Re- serve home, probably JAY COOKE. the best known is Ken- yon Cox, born at Warren; and Frederick Opper, the cartoonist, comes from Madison. If we seek to chronicle the names of those
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other men of the Reserve whose lights have shone for the nation or the whole world, our task becomes too great. At most only a few can be mentioned of the many who have fame, but the list must include first of all the veteran financier Jay Cooke-the Robert Morris of the rebellion -born in Sandusky, in 1821, and the latest survivor of all the Ohioans who were of the first rank of use- fulness in the period of the civil war. Mr. Thomas a Edison Cooke then, and ever since, a citizen of Philadelphia, financed the Federal operations to the amount of $2,000, 000,000, raising funds where others failed, and thus making possible the successful pros- ecution of the war. There were also those twin masters of electricity, Thomas A. Edison and Charles F. Brush, born respectively at Milan and Euclid ; Platt R. Spencer, the in- ventor of the Spencerian system of writing ;
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and such scientists as Jared P. Kirtland, John Strong Newberry, Charles Whittlesey, and G. Frederick Wright.
Thus the Western Reserve is shown to have become a community of which the out- goings, rather than the incomings, are now of paramount concern. She gives more than she receives.
Cleveland, her metropolis, which had only seven souls in 1800, had by the middle of the century-largely owing to the location of the Ohio Canal terminus there, through the agency of Alfred Kelley-a population of over 25,000 ; in 1860, 43,838 ; in 1870, 92,829 ; in 1880, 160,146; in 1890, 261,353; and in 1900 reached 381,768.
But not alone in numbers is the accumu- lated strength of this people to be expressed. Men like Henry Chisholm and Joseph Per- kins gave it the initials of impetus which, continued by others, have created a lake com- merce five-sixths as large as the entire coast- wise and foreign commerce of New York, which is 12,000,000 tons per year, and have made it in ship-building (if the construction of war-vessels at Philadelphia be excepted
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from the computation) second only in the whole world to the Clyde. And these same men, and others, as Leonard Case, J. H. Wade, and Amasa Stone, by their munifi- cence have adorned the city with college buildings, libraries, and parks, so that grate- ful evidences of philanthropic expenditure are as conspicuous as the gigantic commercial apparatus for the getting of gain.
Cleveland long ago passed beyond the pos- sibility of being properly compared with the chief city of Connecticut. She is not the New Haven, nor the Hartford, but the Boston of the West-Boston-like in the conservatism of her financial institutions, in her commercial vigor, her character and culture.
But if Cleveland has its prototype in Bos- ton, its environing Western Reserve still pre- sents the moral contour and color of the mother State. Bearing in mind the fact that it is about 175,000 acres, or, say, a couple of thousand farms, larger than Connecticut, and knowing that it has as a whole kept fairly apace with its metropolis in population, one is not surprised to find it only lacking about 9,000 of the 700,000 mark in 1890, and reach-
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ing in 1900 the round number of 884,445, which comes within a few thousands of the population of Connecticut. Thus while only a fraction-scarcely more than a seventh-of the big Buckeye State, the New Connecticut surpasses in people several of the important commonwealths. It has fully four times as many as little Delaware, more than twice as many as Rhode Island or Vermont or New Hampshire, while it handsomely exceeds the great State of Maine and almost equals the population of West Virginia.
It becomes thus apparent that in numbers, commercial importance, geographical extent -in all save mere formal organization-the Connecticut Western Reserve constitutes the equivalent of a State; while in its unity of purpose and power of influence it has unques- tionably exercised in the affairs of the nation and in the broad interests of the people a sway such as few States, large or little, have equaled.
It is in this achievement, in the perpetua- tion of principles and of an individual charac- ter as complete as if bounded by State lines, or lofty mountains and wide rivers, and in the
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unquestioned fact that more than any other similar body of people west of the Alleghe- nies it "has impressed the brain and con- science of the country," that the perseverance of the Connecticut colonists who planted Wy- oming and were for a half century militant in Pennsylvania was finally rewarded and ren- dered triumphant in Ohio. Persistent dream of colonial expansion had never in our his- tory more palpable, if less theatric, realiza- tion in more peaceful conquest.
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" What constitutes a State ?
Not high rais'd battlement or labored mound, Thick wall or moated gate; Not cities proud with spires and turrets crowned; Not bays and broad armed ports,
Where, laughing at the storm, rich navies ride; Not starr'd and spangled courts Where low browed baseness wafts perfumes to pride. No : Men, high-minded men.
.
Men, who their duties know, But know their rights and knowing dare maintain, Prevent the long-aimed blow, And crush the tyrant, while they rend the chain, These constitute a State."
SIR WILLIAM JONES (1746-1794).
States are not great Except as men make them ; Men are not great except they do and dare; But States, like men, Have destinies that take them-
That bear them on, not knowing why or where. EUGENE F. WARE.
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CHAPTER VIII
OHIO AND THE "GREAT ORDINANCE" OF 1787
THAT commonwealth into whose unorgan- ized territory Connecticut, by the most ener- getic and momentous movement of internal expansion that the Western world ever wit- nessed, thrust six hundred miles from her own borders, the largest distinct organized colony to be found in the whole nation, has now rounded a century of statehood. By reason of that fact, because, too, of many conjoining links between them, because both of certain similarities and contrasts in their histories, it becomes appropriate, if not im- perative, to chronicle here some of the essen- tials of her curious origin and great career.
The reader is asked, therefore, to pass from the comparatively simple story of one people in three States to the consideration of the more complicated study of many peoples
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in one State-a State historically the most cosmopolitan in the Union and absolutely unique in the entire aggregation, as to origin, upbuilding, and influence.
Ohio, which leaped from nothingness to third place in the Union in the brief space of forty years, and held that position for half a century, has furnished Chief Executives for the United States for a total period of more than twenty years, and furthermore it has contributed legislators, jurists, soldiers, states- men neither in number, influence, nor general value of public service secondary to those of any State in the sisterhood, while it has been also one of the stanchest bulwarks for the preservation of our political integrity, and one of the strongest agencies for our material prosperity.
A swift survey of the means through which the remarkable ascendency of this State in the affairs of the nation was attained, through the wise and fortuitous laying of her foundations, together with a recounting of some of its important services for the nation, will reveal a plexus of causes for the prestige the State possesses fully as interesting to con-
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X
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FORT HARMAR.
On the Ohio River, at the mouth of the Muskingum, built 1785-'86.
The "Great Ordinance" of 1787
template as is the net result to which they have tended.
Looking backward from the vantage-point of what has been accomplished, it is easy to detect what were the chief formative influ- ences in the projection of the State. As is everywhere apparent in political retrospects, one will readily see that in this instance while many of the means by which the State ar- rived at its peculiar prominence have been what must be called adventitious ones-the inexorable flow of a great group of beneficent results from fixed and favoring causes, unin- fluenced by the wisdom or the action of man- others are traceable to the sagacity of states- men (of the early Union and to some extent of the State) and the general diffusion of a high intelligence among the people at large- the citizens of the State.
To say that the causes of this common- wealth's healthful growth to prosperity and robust usefulness were various, is to repeat one of the veriest commonplaces of history. But the happy conjunction of causes, the con- spiring of diverse influences of man and nature, toward a single end, has rarely had so perfect
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an illustration in the whole field of history as that which Ohio's founding and develop- ment affords. Geographical conditions and the greed of man supplemented the far-seeing and unselfish measures of patriots. If there are "psychological moments " in the lives of nations as well as in those of men, one of those moments or periods must have been seized for the movement which resulted in Ohio. Its settlement projected by patriots under the personal counsel of Washington ; its fundamental law conceived in a spirit which seemed almost superhuman in its far- seeing (though its adoption was accomplished by very human craft); reaching statehood largely through the urgent political necessities of the new Jeffersonian Democracy ; its popu- lation contributed to in the first flush of their independence and new-found strength by the people of the whole nation-every episode of the times favored, and it seemed almost as if the very elements themselves fostered its be- ginnings, and indeed, as if all nature was es- pecially lubricated for the occasion of this ori- gin, as was fitting enough should be the case, for the launching of such a ship of State.
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The Ordinance of Freedom, or the Ordi- nance of 1787, was, of course, the great favor- ing first cause in the destiny of Ohio (as well as of the four other States of the old North- west Territory to which it equally applied).
This, too, was the first and chief of those formative causes operating on Ohio, which involved thought, foresight, purpose, and ulti- mately distinguished Ohio as a State very different from the sporadic growths lying to the southward. Kentucky and Tennessee may be said, like Topsy, to have "just growed." They were resultant simply from the vague, aimless, undirected and lawless individual pioneerings of the Virginian and Carolinian people. But Ohio had parents. It had pro- genitors, projectors. It was the child of pur-
pose. Its career was most kindly conserved and promoted by destiny and by fortuitous circumstance, but it owed much to good birth. The Ordinance of 1787 clothed the soil with law before the footprint of an authorized set- tler fell upon it.
The establishment of freedom forever in the Northwest Territory, through the Ordi- nance of 1787, has employed hundreds of
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able pens, and never ceases to be the favorite theme for eloquent tongues; but another phase of the operation of the great ordinance para- mount to its prohibition of slavery seldom or X never receives its proper meed of praise. And this is a vital one in the consideration of Ohio's foundation and upbuilding. Let the student who seeks to understand Ohio first of all come to a realization of the fact that in the prohibition of slavery from the territory northwest of the Ohio River the ordinance be- X came the agency for the selection of the people who were to ultimately settle that vast land- and earliest of all Ohio. The prohibition of slavery within the territory was, of course, an emphatic exclusion of the slaveholder, but it was an equally emphatic invitation to all those, whether of North or South, who op- posed slavery. And that meant the men of firmest moral stamina in the whole country, especially the South-the men who morally and politically were three-quarters of a cen- tury in advance of their fellows.
This is a topic which will be hereafter re- verted to for the sake of some specific proof and illustration of the effective working of the
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measure in the matter alluded to ; but in this connection it must suffice to say that the man- ner in which through the passing years the Ordinance of Freedom went on its work of sifting from the whole country the primal population of Ohio marks its greatest service to the State. It is as a stupendous moral en- gine, working automatically, silently, with ceaseless strength, through a long period, al- most as perfectly as nature's own inflexible law of evolution, for the formation of a State by selection of the best from all States, that we must view the ordinance in its mighty, mold- ing force upon Ohio, and finally upon the na- tion. A far broader effect, of course, the or- dinance had in its bearings upon the destiny of the country at large. It prepared the way by making the great Northwest free-soil territory for the overthrow of slavery in America, virtually deciding the battle before the birth of the soldiers who fought it. But the fact remains that it was more specifically in the ways here set forth that it affected the State which forms the subject of present con- sideration, and of whose phenomenal plant- ing and rise in the sisterhood of States it
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was the first humanly planned and purposed cause.
The ordinance, which was really the con- stitution of the old Northwest Territory, and marked its legal beginning, was the culmina- tion of a long series of endeavors in the direc- tion of wise and beneficent measures tend- ing toward the nationalization of the West, involving the deepest concern of the leading statesmen of the time, and vying in momentous- ness with the formation of the Union itself. To Maryland is due the credit for the initial movement, or what one searching student of history has called " the pioneer thought," in re- gard to the nationalization of the lands north- west of the Ohio, ultimately accomplished by the cession of State claims. Then came the consideration of providing for and planting government in the domain thus vested in the nation. Four ordinances had been brought before Congress in turn, and finally one had been passed, after the expiration of three years ; but even that was a nullity, and was ultimately repealed by the Ordinance of Free- dom.
This came into force with surprising sud- 222
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denness after the long and tedious delays and the successive failures of the preceding meas- ures. Why ? Because a land company had been formed in New England-the Ohio Land Company-the outgrowth of a conference at the close of the War of Independence, in 1783, between General Jedediah Huntington and General Rufus Putnam ; and the agent of this company was offer- ing to purchase a large body of lands-1,500,000 acres-northwest of the Ohio and plant there a colony, if Congress would enact such legislation for the territory as would be satisfactory to the pro- posing purchasers.
This agent, the Rev. Manasseh Cutler, LL. D., Rev. MANASSEH CUTLER. of Ipswich, Mass., Con- gregational clergyman, got into his gig, and rolling leisurely down to New York, accom- plished in one week what had baffled others for three years. He secured the passage of the immortal ordinance on July 13, 1787.
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As to the authorship of the document, now very generally claimed for him, it was prob- ably a composite labor. He wrote some por- tions of it. So also very likely did Nathan Dane, for whom Webster claimed the au- thorship, and Rufus King; so, too, perhaps Richard Henry Lee and William Grayson. Thomas Jefferson had much to do with it, or rather with a former and in some re- spects similar ordinance, which had con- tained a clause for the ultimate prohibition of slavery, but which had failed of passage.
Whatever the doubts concerning Cutler's authorship of the ordinance, it is incontestable that he was the agent who secured its passage, and that, too, with its clause absolutely, and from the date of enactment, prohibiting slavery, whereas the great influence of Jeffer- son had been insufficient to secure the passage of a far weaker one not long previously. The truth was the Rev. Manasseh Cutler was a prince of diplomats and the pioneer of lobby- ists, and he had a strong cause to plead be- fore a body so favorably disposed toward the acceptance of his general proposition - so keenly alive to the benefits that would accrue
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to the country through its acceptance-that they were willing to make some concessions to insure its carrying out. The company he represented was composed almost entirely of New England officers of the patriot army, 288 in number, all personally known to Washington and generally to the Congress and country. Such a colony as they would plant on the Ohio was precisely what the sagacious among public men had long sought.
Thus far the West was in the most unsat- isfactory condition-a menace to the Union rather than an assurance of safety. Wash- ington had not long before this said : "The Western States stand, as it were, upon a pivot -the touch of a feather would turn them any way "-and he had advised the applying of " the cement of interest to bind all parts of the Union together by indissoluble bonds." The fact that the character of the men pro- posing to plant a colony on the Ohio was be- yond question, and that their ability and dis- position gave double guarantee that they would bind the West to the East "by indis- soluble bonds," constituted the inducement that moved Congress almost unanimously and
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with startling celerity to pass the ordinance. Thus a mere handful of intending settlers of Ohio dictated and secured the fundamental law for the whole Northwest Territory, and made it free soil forever. Seldom in all his- tory has so momentous a result proceeded from so relatively an insignificant cause.
The next year-on April 7, 1788-the pio- neer contingent of the New England Ohio Company -led by General Rufus Put- nam, of Massachu- setts, a distinguished officer of the Revo- lution, and nephew of General Israel Putnam -dropping down the " beautiful river" from Pitts- burg in a rude boat, appropriately Gen. RUFUS PUTNAM. named the May- flower, landed at the
mouth of the Muskingum and founded Mari- etta, the first organized, lawful English set- tlement in a State which, so far from ever
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ATINOSNOW
CAMPUS MARTIUS. First home of the first settlers of Ohio, at Marietta. (From an old woodcut.)
The "Great Ordinance" of 1787
being open to the imputation of standing " upon a pivot," was speedily to become and forever remain one of the firmest buttresses of the Federal Union.
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