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 3
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Indeed a deep reverence for religion was the prevalent characteristic of the Western settlements of Connecticut, and, combined with the passion for education which every- where reared free schools among the forest homes; with the political vantage inherent in the operation of the "town meeting"; and the federative idea, which was the foun- dation of democracy, constituted Connecticut's best benefaction to the always advancing borderland of civilization, which, in turn, was to grow old and pass its influence onward to the younger West.
Connecticut's contributions to the cause of education, to the material progress of the
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Ohio and Her Western Reserve
country, to invention, and to manufacture, great as they were, we must pass with a word, but in viewing Connecticut's achieve- ment as the outcome of Connecticut charac- ter, we can not fail to dwell upon the wars in which the Yankee Puritan fought for that same freedom, in advanced form, for which he had thought and wrought with patient per- sistence from the dawn of the primitive idea of liberty and its declaration in the constitu- tion of 1639.
Passing over the French and Indian War, in which the men of Connecticut performed a large service and gained fighting experience which served them well in the later and greater struggle, we find, naturally enough, that in the Revolution, more than in any for- mer exigency which Connecticut faced, she exhibited that judicial consideration, com- bined with conscience, which renders people strong in the execution of an enterprise once carefully weighed and undertaken.
Religion was a strong factor in the war achievements of the colony and the State. The righteousness of opposition to the Eng-
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Introductory
lish government was tried by standards of an orthodox, but evolutionary, Puritanism in every pulpit in Connecticut, and most delib- erately and earnestly discussed by the lay- men of every community. It was true, as Macaulay said, that the Puritan " brought to civil and military affairs a coolness of judg- ment and an immutability of purpose which some writers have thought inconsistent with religious zeal, but which were in fact the necessary effects of it." 648232
It was characteristic of the Connecticut Puritan to insist upon being right before he went ahead, and his persistency in all endeav- ors and success in most of them was largely due to his determination to be sure of the sagaciousness, practicability, and the moral legality of an object before bending to its service his really terrible tenacity of purpose. A very curious and interesting item of the secret history of the Revolutionary move- ment in Connecticut may be cited in illustra- tion of this truth. When the contest was drawing on, the governor called a secret session of the legislature, which on assem- bling appointed six of the leading jurists of
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Ohio and Her Western Reserve
the colony-three to argue the cause in favor of the right of Parliament to tax the colo- nies, and three against it. These arguments were continued through long sittings for two or three days, when the conviction became universal among the members that the parliamentary right did not exist, and that the colonies might therefore law- fully resist.
Thereupon the question of right be- ing decided and a ju- LESTrumbull dicial estimate of the prospect of success assuring the people that the cause was no longer Quixotic or chimerical, the Connecticut Puritans having hitherto exercised a prudent self-restraint under every provocation, abandoned them- selves unreservedly to action.
How sagacious, efficient, pertinacious, and heroic that deliberate action was, the lives of Connecticut's most illustrious patriots and
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Introductory
the prosaic but proved statistics of history abundantly tell.
Connecticut had as her first "war gov- ernor " Jonathan Trumbull, one of the lead- ing friends and most valued counselors of the commander-in-chief-the man to whom Washington's familiar mode of address was " Brother Jonathan "-the original of the personified typical American in our vernac- ular. She had her signer of the Declaration, Samuel Huntington, who was also President of the Continental Congress; and she had wise counselors and legislators by scores and hundreds, and in the field such men as Israel Putnam, David Wooster, Joseph Spencer, Ethan Allen, Nathan Hale, Wolcott, Knowl- ton, Grosvenor, Meigs, Huntington, Hum- phreys, Sears, and Douglas-and also, it must candidly be said, Benedict Arnold ! who though a native, Connecticut historians and orators have carefully, on all occasions, shown to have been of Rhode Island descent and commissioned by Massachusetts !
Connecticut was instant in action and unremitting in vigilance and vigor through- out the war, sagaciously aggressive and un-
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To Roger Shera
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Ohio and Her Western Reserve
selfishly patriotic, as an early instance of which we have her effective offensive move- ment against Ticonderoga for the relief of Massachusetts, when she was not herself as- sailed nor in imminent danger. This was planned in Connecticut and supported from her public treasury before the Continental Congress in 1775 had assembled, and " before the blood had grown cold that was shed at Concord and at Lexington."
Although the principal theater of the war was outside the State, Connecticut contrib- uted most magnificently to its prosecution in men and money, and at one time one-half of Washington's army in the operations about, and the defense of New York was composed of her sons. But the totals of troops furnished by the several colonies tells most compactly and convincingly the story of Connecticut's intense patriotism and of her burning passion for political freedom. × She sent into the field 31,959 officers and men, including large detachments from her Wyoming settlements, being second only to Massachusetts (inclusive of Maine), with more than twice her population ; largely ex-
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Introductory
ceeding Pennsylvania, which had nearly twice as many people; still further exceeding the contribution of Virginia, which had more than three times her population, and almost doubling that of the really more numerically powerful New York.
It was peculiarly characteristic of Con- necticut that at first almost wholly, and all through the war to a considerable extent, the measures for or- ganizing and putting the soldiery in the field and for sustain- ing the army were en- acted by the " towns." Almost equally was this condition true Sam "Huntington nearly a hundred years later when that other conflict came on in 1861, in which the descendants of those who had fought to preserve liberty and cre- ate a nation battled with the same valor, though in greatly augmented numbers, to preserve that nation from destruction.
As a State, Connecticut could not at once
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Ohio and Her Western Reserve
furnish the single regiment of militia for which the General Government called. The Commonwealth was met by an emergency unprovided for by law, but the patriotic people were not disturbed in the least, and fell back upon the resources of the "town " system, precisely as they would have done two centuries before, and had done in the Revolution.
Governor William A. Buckingham, one of the galaxy of great "war governors," who was to Connecticut in the war of the rebel- lion very much what Trumbull was during the Revolution, it is true, usurped power in calling for troops, for he was full of faith that the people, through the Assembly, would vin- dicate him, as they did ; but the actual agita- tion for volunteering and the intense activity entered into for the contribution of funds was carried on by the "towns." And they bore-and some still bear, I believe, to this day-the burden of the debts they so readily and resolutely incurred.
That the management of war affairs was thoroughly effective is evidenced by the fact that a population containing in 1861 only
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Introductory
80,000 voters and about 50,000 able-bodied men put into the service of the Union, in all its branches, 54,882 volunteers of all terms of service; or, if the terms are all reduced to a three years' average, over 48,000, exceed- ing the quota by between six and seven thou- sand. If the percentage of volunteers was very high-excelled, indeed, by only one or two States-the character and efficiency of Connecticut's troops were surpassed by those of no other State.
Her rosters were filled by men to an unusual degree typical of the best strains of blood in the State and of those who had helped to make its proud history. Theodore Winthrop, the first of Connecticut's sons to fall upon the field, was descended from Puri- tan John Winthrop, the first governor of Con- necticut. Ellsworth, Ward, and Lyon, those other early martyrs of the war, were all of Connecticut stock.
1
One has only to recall the names of the Connecticut generals and other officials to be reminded of the earlier history of the colony, and to be convinced that the Puritan families, like Puritan principles, were still alive and
5
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Ohio and Her Western Reserve
active. To the navy Connecticut contributed its Secretary Gideon Welles, Rear-admirals Andrew H. Foote and F. H. Gregory, and Commodores John and C. R. P. Rogers and R. B. Hitchcock. In the army her major- generals were Darius N. Couch, Henry W. Benham, John Sedgwick, Alfred H. Terry, J. K. F. Mansfield, Joseph A. Mower, Joseph Hawley, H. W. Birge, Henry L. Abbott, Alexander Shaler, Joseph G. Totten, Henry W. Wessels, A. S. Williams, Horatio G. Wright, and R. O. Tyler ; while among the brigadiers were Nathaniel Lyon, O. S. Ferry, Daniel Tyler, Edward Harland, Luther P. Bradley, Henry B. Carrington, William T. Clark, Henry M. Judah, William S. Ketchum, R. S. Mackenzie, James W. Ripley, Benjamin S. Roberts, Truman Seymour, H. D. Terry, and A. von Steinwehr.
If we look below these illustrious men we shall find many more Connecticut men of capacity and heroism, and the rank and file of her soldiery, largely descendants of the Puritans, and all as invincible as Crom- well's Ironsides. If we look, on the other hand, far above the roster of Connecticut's
42
Introductory
officers we have named, and take into consid- eration not alone the old Connecticut but the New, and the sterling strains of blood which Connecticut pioneers had carried into Penn- sylvania, Ohio, and the farther West-if we let our view comprehend not alone the native- born, but the descend-
ants of Connecticut stock - we shall dis- cover, indeed, a great- er and more glorious galaxy of generals and commanders in our latest war for liberty. And most lustrous of the stars in that ever- shining galaxy we shall Israel Putnam see two men whom we may call grandsons of Connecticut-one near the war's close leading that herculean, historic march from Atlanta to the sea; the other, greatest of all, holding Lee in his inexorable grasp upon the James, and finally receiving magnanimously his surrender at Appomattox.
X
All of this-and more-must have its place in history's sum total of Connecticut
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Ohio and Her Western Reserve
achievement, growing logically out of Con- necticut character.
And yet the people of the Commonwealth, and those descended from them in Wyoming, in New York, and in the Western Reserve, were far from being a people who placed a high estimate upon strictly soldierly glory. Theirs was always the moral rather than the martial idea. They had, in fact, a positive aversion to war. They must first have a cause for which to fight, and know that cause to be founded on immutable justice.
'Tis true, something of soldierly submis- sion to discipline, of soldierly hardihood, and indifference to death when they were once embattled-qualities beaten into some of their ancestors by the iron hand of Cromwell -- may have descended to them; but far more powerful a factor in forming their fighting strength-indeed, almost the supreme influ- ence to which they were susceptible-was that which flowed from devotion to fixed principle, the impassioned love of liberty, and the deep-seated Puritanical conviction that they must follow whithersoever duty led.
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Introductory
As the mind of the honest man studying history goes back of Cromwell's time to the beginning of English Puritanism and the birth of civil liberty, and takes a sweeping view downward through three centuries, he can not conceive of the outcome of Con- necticut achievement as being wrought by any power other than that of its vigor- ously progressive and adaptive Puritanism -an absolutely new, virile religious idea, practically applied to and controlling man's conduct in every - day life, and especially inculcating the doctrine of the right to liberty.
As we glance along the opening years of Connecticut's Puritan history-so poor, so sparse in many of the elements that appeal to and fascinate the superficial and the lover of the merely romantic-we see a figure, plain, prosaic, with a face perchance not comely in the world's way, and we hear a voice, possibly in the despised and ridiculed nasal tone; but the figure rises, looms up- ward, the face lights and glows with the in- spiration of a great idea for the benefit of
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Ohio and Her Western Reserve
humanity, present and to come; and the voice, even if nasal, takes on a triumph- ant, trumpet tone that rings across the cen- turies.
The figure and the face and the voice are those of Thomas Hooker, Puritan preacher of Connecticut, 1638. And the voice pro- claims : " And, lastly, as God hath given us liberty, let us take it"-an utterance more momentous, more pregnant of mighty result, than the mouthings of a host of puppet kings and the deeds of 10,000 melodramatic heroes who may vainly have imagined they were making history. His hearers, exalted, im- passioned, by the plain preacher's exhorta- tions, do indeed take, in their constitution of 1639, just a little of that liberty which he has implored them to seize-so pitifully little, it now seems, though large for the time-and democracy and freedom have their beginning on the American continent.
Almost a century and a half later, the descendants of Thomas Hooker's hearers, and others of their kind, take vastly more of man's heritage of liberty-for the Revolution is truly a Puritan measure in inception, if not
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Introductory
in execution-and now the splendid spirit of freedom is abroad in the land.
Almost another century glides slowly into the immutable past, and now the idea of liberty takes to itself, under the tutelage of a revived and vivified progressive Puritanism, a new and wondrous form. It has long been a blessing to its possessors, and now becomes a boon which it is their imperative duty to extend to an alien race. We hear the ad- vanced doctrine preached by Charles B. Storrs, a Connecticut man of the Western Reserve ; thundered in the nation's Capitol by Wade and Giddings ; and helped on its slow way by the " Proviso " of Wilmot, a Con- necticut man of Pennsylvania ; and after many years there is warfare in which the descend- ants of Thomas Hooker's hearers and their Connecticut brothers, East and West, take up the gage of battle, not for martial glory, but for the cause of freedom and the preservation of an imperiled Union, fought for and founded on the ground of human liberty by their fore- fathers.
Liberty is no longer a little thing for some favored few to enjoy, but, “subdued and
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Ohio and Her Western Reserve
gained out of the fire by hard blows "-even as was the land and sustenance of the Con- necticut Puritan-it has become an ines- timable right to be given to all men and to cover the width of the Western world.
It is the new and legitimate projection of an old idea that the sons of the Connecticut colonists are fighting for, and they are actu- ated, as were their forefathers, by the quick and stern conscience of the Puritan, that knows no flinching when once it has deliber- ately devoted itself to duty. Religious con- viction and patriotism with him, as of old, go hand in hand in the Puritan character, and thus, by dual influence, contribute to the glorious culmination and crown of Connecti- cut achievement.
For the progressive Puritan, whether of the Commonwealth or its colonies, is pro- foundly moved by the solemn spirit and heroic resolution which has been formulated in a strophe of reverent and patriotic poetry by a woman of Puritan ancestry, and he goes sternly forth to battle consecrating himself to liberty, even as did Cromwell's soldiers, while the still, small voice of conscience is sound-
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Introductory
ing in his soul the majestic import, if not the words :
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea, With a glory in his bosom that transfigures you and me ; As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.
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Through a long warfare rude, With patient hardihood, By toil, and strife, and blood, The soil was won. LEWIS J. CIST.
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CHAPTER II WYOMING ; OR, CONNECTICUT MILITANT IN PENNSYLVANIA
IF we attempt to follow in detail the se- quence of events constituting the most marked of Connecticut's achievements in the material line-her prodigious pioneering in the work of the organized colonization of the West- we shall find that it develops a strange, true, thrilling story of three States, and that ulti- mately this story reveals the persistence of the moral idea of civil liberty and human freedom to which, as we have seen, Con- necticut gave the initiative in her constitu- tion of 1639.
It is purposed to relate in this story the really astounding expansion of Connecticut in the eighteenth century, and the most re- markable movement of internal colonization in the whole history of the country. It will
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Ohio and Her Western Reserve
be found the story of Connecticut militant in Pennsylvania, and of Connecticut trium- phant in Ohio; of long warfare at Wyoming, and peaceful conquest in the Western Re- serve. The beginning of Connecticut's bold bodily projection westward, six hundred miles into the wilderness, was Cushutunk, on the Delaware; and its end-so far as it is defi- nitely marked-is Cleveland, on Lake Erie, now become the chief city of Ohio, and the " Reserve " lying round about it, peopled by that expansive movement of Connecticut, as large, as populous, almost as characteristically Connecticut as is the mother State.
Who ever heard of Cushutunk? Who has not heard of Cleveland ? They were the products of one and the same force. Of the half-century of time and the strange warfare in the wilderness that lay between them, and of the final vicarious reward of victory in Ohio, this story tells.
Cushutunk's humble being was begun on a soft day in June, 1757, when the solitude and solemn quiet of the valley of the upper Delaware were rudely broken by the re. sounding strokes of axes sturdily swung-
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Wyoming
always the first signal of the forest conquer- ors' coming-and a cluster of rude log cabins arose in the tiny niche which a band of Con- necticut pioneers had chopped in the wall of fresh foliage on the western bank of the river, far up toward the north line of Penn- sylvania. Penn's province was well settled to the southward, but all west of this hand- ful of adventurers was a wilderness, clear to the setting sun. It was only a minute dot of civilization which these " Yankees " placed in the present county of Wayne, in Penn's dominion, and some five years later, when Wyoming was planted, it had but thirty families; but it involved most momentous issues.
It was the first, the pioneer settlement of the Connecticut people within the boundaries of Penn's province. It represented the first overt act of an intercolonial intrusion; the initial movement of that persistent, general, systematic invasion which resulted in the settlement of Wyoming and the establish- ment of a Connecticut colony and a Connect- icut government on Pennsylvania soil; a de- termined effort to dismember the State and
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Ohio and Her Western Reserve
to create another, to be carved from the ter- ritory of Pennsylvania; and all of the varied acts, the dissension and strife, armed conflict and frequent bloodshed of what have been commonly called the "Pennamite Wars." But beyond these effects, the action of the " Yankee " invaders of a coveted land, to which they believed themselves rightly en- titled, became inextricably interwoven in cause and consequence with that darkest deed of the border warfare of the Revolution, the bloody massacre of Wyoming. This, in turn, had a marked effect in England in creating sympathy for the colonies. The fame of Wyoming went far abroad, but the effects of the movement, of which the massacre was an episode, became immensely important at home. The half-century of contention opened with the Yankee invasion proved almost too much for colonial ability to adjust; and it became an embarrassing legacy to the young Union, which it was feared by many prudent patriots might demonstrate a fatal weakness in its cohesive quality. It was amicably set- tled, however, in a way which not only avoided disaster but helped to cement the
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Wyoming
confederation; and when the long linger- ing clouds of the Pennamite Wars had been finally dispersed, it was found that the prac- tical results of Connecticut's persistent colo- nization project had been the incorporation of a small but beneficial element of Yankee blood in the body politic of Pennsylvania ; and, on the part of Connecticut, the proud possession of what equaled a State-more than ten times as much ground as she had fought for in Pennsylvania-but beyond her borders, in that then No Man's Land, the old Northwest Territory by the shore of Lake Erie, the famous " Western Reserve," in the future State of Ohio. And thus, after long tribulations, ended in triumph the strangest and most strenuous organized movement in the whole history of Western colonization.
So much, in brief, for the Omega of the movement, which had its tangible Alpha at old Cushutunk, on the Delaware.
Cushutunk and Wyoming were established under the auspices of two separate companies organized in Connecticut, and actuated by a common purpose - the colonization of the westward-lying lands covered by Connecti- 6
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Ohio and Her Western Reserve
cut's charter-in other words, northern Penn- sylvania. Wyoming was founded by what was known as the Connecticut Susquehanna Company, and Cushutunk by the Delaware Company. Both had precisely the same basis of claim, and both sought to attain their ends by precisely the same methods, but the Sus- quehanna Company, because the stronger, became prominent in history, while the Dela- ware Company was left in comparative ob- scurity.
All this contention about the possession of a part of the Quaker province with its far-reaching consequences, it will be recalled, had its origin in the ignorance and indiffer- ence of the British monarchs concerning American geography and the confusion that ensued from carelessness in the granting of royal charters to the several colonies. Several of them overlapped, and thus caused conflicts of authority in regard to ownership.
Connecticut's charter, which was granted by Charles II in 1662, confirming and com- bining former charters and deeds, conveyed to that colony all of the territory of the present State, and all of the lands west of
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River
Ohio and Her Western Reserve
it, to the extent of its breadth, from sea to sea, or "to the South Sea." This would have brought Connecticut's western extension nearly or quite down to the 41º of north lati- tude-almost to the Delaware Water Gap, and thus (had the claim been maintained) Pennsyl- vania would have been diminished to the ex- tent of over two-fifths of its present territory.
Connecticut, in her strenuous endeavor to realize her early dreams of territorial expan- sion, was obliged by certain conditions in her charter to pass over the lovely valley of the Hudson and other territory of New York, which must have caused her acquisitive peo- ple a sharp pang of regret; but, curiously enough, she did not let this interruption of her claim bar her from seizure of the lands still farther west. Many of her sons looked with an intense longing to Wyoming, and some may have seen with prophetic vision the rich reward that awaited the meek in the inheritance of that part of the earth in the future State of Ohio which ultimately became the "Connecticut Western Reserve." The promised land was not to be relinquished without a struggle.
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