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 7
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As the Yankee colony's charter claim ex- tended "westward to the South Seas" (as is shown with other details in Chapter II), it was vast enough surely, but it was vague; and she therefore simply and shrewdly sur- rendered a huge, uncertain claim, impossible of support, attenuated almost to an abstrac- tion, for something concrete, conveniently condensed, specific, positive, and practical. It was as if she had relinquished a few thousand miles of atmosphere, elusive, intangible, for sure title to a tract of solid ground with definite boundaries, as large as the mother
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State (and at this day sustaining almost as great a population). This was certainly a bargain of the proverbial Yankee trader kind raised to its highest power.
Now, why, at a time when the public lands were regarded with an intense jealousy, was Connecticut thus gratuitously granted such a broad and bountiful domain ? Her title, strictly interpreted, was clearly insuffi- cient to secure her in possession. She had already been divested of it in Pennsylvania, where she had brought it to definite issue. But was not the blood of her martyrs, mis- taken as they were, considered in the final account ? And were there not questions of public policy involved which had weight in the consideration ?
The acquiescence of Congress in the terms by which this vast and valuable tract of land was "reserved " by Connecticut only receives full explanation when we glance back to the decision of the Trenton court of 1782, and see that Connecticut was then divested of title and jurisdiction in Pennsylvania, not- withstanding her charter claims, long time possession, and the patient, persistent, blood-
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expending bravery of the men of Wyoming. That the decision, both by intention and in effect, was for the general good is indisput- able, but that the heroism and appalling losses of the Yankee invaders was entirely ignored is inconceivable. Thus the theory that, as an offset for the deprivation then necessarily inflicted upon her, and as a mark of recognition of her struggles at Wyoming, a secret compact was made with Congress that Connecticut should in the future receive a grant from the public domain, affords the only elucidation at once of that court's action and the surprising smallness of congressional opposition to the bestowal of what amounted virtually to a State upon the colony formerly dispossessed. That such an understanding was entered into is argued from the very absence of all record concerning the deliber- ations of the court and its reasons for the handing down of the decision; also by the paucity of report upon the proceedings of Congress in the matter of granting the de- sired lands to Connecticut.
T
In the absence of a solitary scrap of posi- tive information upon the subject of a com-
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pact, it is as probable as any surmise that can be made in history that the compact did exist, and that supposition almost, if not quite, universally entertained by students, not only explains all the existing circumstances, but accords to the court and the Congress of the Confederation that unfortunately rare blending of common sense with broad, un- technical justice and saving shrewdness which constitutes true statesmanship.
One strong piece of presumptive evidence that Connecticut's Pennsylvania experience figured as a factor in her favor when the granting of the Reserve was under considera- tion, lies in the fact that it was definitely stated that the boundaries had been so set as to make the grant equal to the amount of lands of which Connecticut had been di- vested in the Susquehanna country. Then, too, Pennsylvania voted from the first for the ac- ceptance of the cession, which equally meant the allowance of the Reserve. There was some opposition, but all the States save Maryland came to the support of the measure, and it was passed in a fortnight from the time of its introduction. In addition to the
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desire of Congress to render to Connecticut justice which was at once poetic and practi- cal, that patriotic and businesslike body was keenly alive to the desirability of putting the public domain in the market for the purpose of revenue.
Washington was opposed to the allowance of the Reserve. So were the Virginians in Congress, though they ultimately voted for it. It was with something of ill grace that they sought to defeat the measure at any stage of the proceedings, for Virginia herself already had quite as large a reservation in Ohio as that sought by Connecticut. But, as will be duly shown, one great Virginian, John Marshall, afterward rendered important service to the people of Connecticut's Re- serve, and so became connected with its history.
The reasons that finally swayed the Vir- ginia Congressmen to approve the grant, says Mr. Grayson, one of the Old Dominion's dele- gation, writing to Washington, were "that the claim of a powerful State, although un- supported by right, was under the present circumstances a disagreeable thing; that sac-
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rifices must be made for the public tranquil- lity as well as to secure an indisputable right to the residue" of lands ; that Connecticut would settle her reservation "immediately with immigrants who would form a barrier not only against the British but the Indian tribes "; and that the settlement would " en- hance the value of adjacent territory "-all of which was good logic and not very far amiss as prophecy.
The effect was, in general, such as was hoped and predicted. After necessary pre- liminaries, involving the perfection of Indian title and the adjustment of some of its do- mestic affairs by the company, a strong current of Connecticut immigration-long checked at Wyoming, but gathering strength as a stream does to surmount or evade a barrier thrust in its way-flowed onward like a great surging tide into the Ohio country. The
grant to Connecticut helped to foster the sale to the New England Ohio Company, composed mostly of Massachusetts men, that organiza- tion which through its agent secured the pas- > sage of the " Ordinance of Freedom," laid the fundamental law upon the land, and planted
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the first settlement northwest of the Ohio River.
The Indian tribes were threatening, and the same Brant whom the Yankees had suf- ficiently known at Wyoming-though he had no personal share in the work of massacre- the master mind of the whole red race at that time, as he had been in the border wars on the New York frontier, was at their head. But in the summer of 1795 General Anthony Wayne, having the year before most severely chastised the allied hostiles, concluded with them the treaty at Greenville which released, among others, the greater part of the lands in the Reserve-and, happily, was never vio- lated. Thus the last vestige of impediment to immigration being removed, the Yankee State put its lands in the market. Indeed, she had anticipated the outcome, so that the extin- guishment of Indian title and the sale of the lands were practically simultaneous.
Most important of the steps anticipatory of the sale was Connecticut's reservation from the sale of her own Reserve of half a million acres of land constituting the western end of the tract. This she had, in 1792, in response
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to numerous urgent petitions, set apart for bestowal upon her citizens who had suffered by "incursions of the enemy during the late war," and the tract was therefore then called the "Sufferer Lands," but later (because most of the sufferers were losers by fire, in the Con- necticut towns burned by the British) it was given the name it bears to this day-"the Fire Lands "-of which further mention will be made.
The resolution authorizing the sale of the Reserve-excepting the half million acres of Sufferers' Lands-passed the Legislature at a session held in Hartford in May, 1795, and shortly afterward the committee appointed for the negotiation effected a sale in sepa- rate contracts with forty-eight individuals, realizing for the State the sum of $1,200,000. The amounts paid varied from eight or ten up to $168,180, and each grantee became an owner of such a proportion of the entire pur- chase as the amount of his contract bore to the total sum. Thus Pierpont Edwards, who engaged to pay $60,000 toward the purchase, received a deed for sixty thousand twelve- hundred thousandths, or just one-twentieth of
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the Reserve. The forty-eight purchasers, in the autumn of the same year, with a few oth- ers, formed the Connecticut Land Company, the membership of which was ultimately in- creased to several hundred.
Right here a mere glance at the names of the original purchasers and early members of the land company is alone sufficient to reveal the fact that the western movement of Connect- icut, which realized its largest result in Ohio, was, from the start, one of high character and distinguished personnel, and that while it en- listed at the outset the interest of the leading capitalists of Connecticut, they were not merely men of financial force, but represented in vari- ous forms the very van of the varied active ability of the time. Several of them were already noted; others destined soon to be- come so. Moses Cleaveland was a patriot of the Revolution, and he became the founder of the chief city in the Reserve. The names of others, as Coit, Austin, Newbury, Ely, Kelly, were eventually written upon the geography of the Reserve to remain forever. Caleb At- water was one of the leading scientific author- ities of the time; Samuel Mather, who rep-
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resented in the purchase a number of associ- ates in Albany, N. Y., represented in heredity the clerical family of Cotton, Increase and Richard Mather-certainly an appropriate line for the perpetuation of Puritanism in the New Connecticut. Gideon Granger, who had $80,000 worth of stock in the great land pur- chase, was to fill the office of Postmaster-Gen- eral for fourteen years, dating from 1801, and to gain a Junius-like reputation in political writ- ing over the signature of " Algernon Sidney." Oliver Phelps, the nabob of the company, who was interested to the amount of over $200,- 000-$168,000 individually and the balance in a partnership subscription with Gideon Granger-was a great merchant, and heavily interested in New York lands, for the dispo- sition of which he had opened at Canandaigua the first land office established in America. He was the leading land speculator of the time. Pierpont Edwards, though born in Massachusetts, was a son of that stanch Con- necticut metaphysician and theologian Jona- than Edwards, was himself a patriot and an able lawyer, a member of the Congress of the Confederation, and as the founder of the "Tol-
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eration Party" in Connecticut, which had made him extremely unpopular with the Calvinists, might be regarded as a kind of a personal forerunner of the larger liberality with which the original essence of Puritanism came to be diluted, and its asperities in some measure dis- placed by amenities in the New Connecticut. The descendants of Pierpont and of Jonathan Edwards were among the pioneers, and the family-with those of several other of these notable personages among the purchasers- is prominent in the New Connecticut to-day.
Such, in brief, were a few of the fathers of the westward expansion movement of Yan- kee spirit. They practically furthered by money and influence the settlement of the Reserve, while the State, with the $1,200,000 which they paid into her treasury, in those days when a million was yet a mighty sum, thrift- ily turned around and bestowed the bounty upon her schools. Not all of them were among the immigrants, but it is safe to say that the families of nearly all were repre- sented, and the names of most of them figure in the annals of the Reserve and are promi- nent in the affairs of the present day.
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The lands having been purchased, the next thing in order was their survey, and for the accomplishment of this the company sent out an expedition in May, 1796. It consisted of fifty men and two women-five surveyors, a physician, chainmen, axmen, hunters-all able-bodied, energetic, eager for the sight of the promised land, the fame of which had been already industrious- ly spread through the mother State and New England.
The Moses who led these children of Connec- ticut through the wilder- ness was General Moses Cleaveland. In this stur- dy commander of the half hundred surveyors we have the first actual pioneer-one of the most prominent characters of the colony and the founder of its future metropolis. It is notable, too, that like so many others who had a part in the beginnings of the New Connecticut, he was an officer of the Revo- lutionary army. He was a man of culture,
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too, a graduate of Yale, a lawyer by profes- sion. He was born in Canterbury, Windham County, in 1754, and died there in 1806.
The expedition was a formidable under- taking. The party rendezvoused at Schenec- tady, N. Y., whence they ascended the Mo- hawk in four flat-bottomed boats. Their way led by Oswego, Niagara, and Queenston to Buffalo. Besides the toilsomeness of the jour- ney they encountered some opposition from the British at the frontier forts, who had not yet been officially apprised of the passage of Jay's treaty, which made the navigation of the lakes free to American vessels, and they had to resort to a little strategy to get by. Then at Buffalo, where the navigators to their sat- isfaction met the overland contingent of their force which had been entrusted with the bringing on of their horses and cattle, they also met Seneca and Mohawk Indians, with Brant and Red Jacket as their leaders, to whom they made presents. Then the fifty surveyors went on by way of Lake Erie, hug- ging the shore and admiring the bluff, forest- clad banks, until they reached the mouth of a little creek now known as Conneaut, and
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here they landed first on the soil of the Re- serve marking the Plymouth of the western Pilgrims.
This vanguard of the army of occupation made its arrival on July 4th, and from this circumstance they named the place Port In- dependence, and with the spirit of the day, heightened by their generally prosperous pas- sage to the West and the golden prospect held before them by the new land, they proceeded to celebrate. They fired the national salute with half a dozen fowling-pieces, pledged each other in the sparkling liquid from the lake, called down blessings upon the land many of the little company had assisted in wresting from the British grasp, made glowing predic- tions of the future greatness of the new nation and the colony they were about to plant, and sat down with thankfulness to a bountiful dinner in which were many reminders of the old Connecticut, while their imaginings wan- dered forth to the new. It is doubtful, how- ever, if any of them conceived possibilities approaching the actual realization that Time was holding in store for the region stretching as an absolutely virginal wilderness a hundred
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and a score miles westward from their camp- ing-place.
Among the toasts they drank were "The President of the United States," "The Con- necticut Land Company," and "The State of New Connecticut," the last of which would indicate that the spirit of Yankee expansion did not stop short of State-making-an idea which had its inception during the troublous times of Wyoming. But scarcely had they finished feasting when the Indians came upon them again-not, indeed, with tomahawks as in the old days in Pennsylvania, but with questions and demands, as at Buffalo-asking why the white man encroached upon the red man's hunting-ground ?- a question which was not answered, but peaceably parried with some beads and a keg of rum.
Cabins having been built for the survey- ors, General Cleaveland left them to their work, and with a few of his staff coasted westward in an open boat along the south shore of Lake Erie, their objective point being the mouth of the Cuyahoga, which they duly reached, and were greatly gratified by the prospect afforded by the high ground, luxuriantly tim-
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bered, which lay between the river and lake, on the eastern bank of the former, and fronted both with bold bluffs. The leader gave orders that this site, possessing almost all possible nat- ural advantages, should be surveyed into city lots, which was speedily done, and the mem- bers of his party proposing that it should be named in honor of their commander, he ac- cepted the compliment, and the city of Cleve- land was thus founded.
The Moses of this march, if he smote no rock to bring forth water, yet performed an act there in the wilderness in that summer of 1796 the consequences of which have flowed on in an increasing tide of prosperity for more than a century, and in the present me- tropolis of the New Connecticut, with its 400,000 people, has more than realized the fondest hope of its founder-for his extremest prophecy was only that the town would ulti- mately equal Windham, Conn.
Colonel James Kingsbury, with his wife and three children, seeking a home in the West, had joined the surveying party at Buffalo, and theirs was the first family settled upon the site of Conneaut, and consequently the first
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in the Reserve. Another child which came to this family was the first born of the new colony, and its little life succumbed to the rigors of the winter succeeding its birth. Thus in a single round of the calendar the cardinal events of human experience were enacted in the vast lonely wilderness, a few years hence to teem with busy life. The Kingsbury family's experience of one winter alone in the woods was such as to make them yearn for a little human companionship, and as they could expect this at the mouth of the Cuyahoga, they went on there, and in June, 1797, became the first permanent settlers of Cleveland.
The only predecessor of Kingsbury as an actual resident of the Reserve had been that eminent Revolutionary character General Samuel Holden Parsons, of Lyme, Conn., who as the grantee of the "Salt Spring Tract " of 25,000 acres had become, in 1788, the first in- dividual land-owner, but he had lost his life in 1789 upon his property, in what is now Mahoning County.
Lorenzo Carter with his family became the first neighbors of the Kingburys, and the
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total population of the settlement, comprised in two families, amounted to nine persons. A family named Stiles had wintered here, and General Edward Paine, who afterward located farther east, sojourned with them ; but to all intents and purposes the Kingsburys and Car- ters were the pioneers, and became the first permanent residents of Cleveland and of the Reserve.
This same Carter was a character of marked interest in the little community. He may be considered as the founder of Cleve- land's commerce, and as a born trader and the possessor of a peculiar backwoods diplomatic ability, he was invaluable in the management of the Indians who flocked about the settlement- a service in which great native shrewdness was supplemented by the almost invariable em- ployment of whisky distilled upon the spot as early as 1798 by one of the pioneers.
He overshadowed the more highly educated and dignified Colonel Kingsbury, notwith- standing the fact that the latter, in 1800, was made the first Judge of the Court of Common Pleas and Quarter Sessions, and in local influ- ence and usefulness even surpassed Samuel
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Huntington, a learned lawyer of aristocratic bearing, the nephew, namesake, and protégé of that Governor of Connecticut who was a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and who himself became the second Governor of Ohio. But this gifted son of Connecti- cut, with his intense ac- tivity, his elegant man- ners, probably gained in France, the leading rep- resentative, in the re- gion, of the dying but proud Federalist party, probably only prevent- ed by his own untimely death from holding an even more exalted office SAMUEL HUNTINGTON. than that of chief ex- ecutive of the State, was for his time the dominant public character of the New Connecticut. He helped to give the State its earliest impetus of political prestige, though he could not stem the tide of the Jef- fersonian Democracy which here as elsewhere ultimately swept all before it. In the War of 1812, when the fortune of American arms in
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the West seemed irrevocably shattered, he accompanied Lewis Cass to Washington, and he was second only to him in securing funds for the relief of the dissatisfied soldiers and the restoration of military spirit and an invin- cible front in the whole lake region.
The settlements gradually extended. Gen- eral Edward Paine, who had been a sojourner among the pioneers at the mouth of the Cuya- hoga, soon selected a beautiful site thirty miles east of that locality, where John Walworth had already located. He founded the town of Painesville and a family prominent in the varied walks of life which gave to the Union army in the civil war two very able generals. Hither, too, came Samuel Huntington, whom we have seen at Cleveland, and here he ulti- mately made his home, and died in 1817.
Prior to this, probably in 1798, came the first pioneers to the township five miles west of Painesville, perhaps the highest type of the Ohio farming community, Mentor, destined to be made famous as the home of the first President whom the Reserve gave to the na- tion. About the same time John Young, the founder of Youngstown, located in the south-
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eastern part of the Reserve, and tiny improve- ments-little openings in the dense forest where the sun was permitted to reach the rich soil shaded for centuries while it gath- ered strength for the husbandman-began to appear at long intervals in all directions.
An event of importance occurred on the 10th of July, 1800, when the region was given a government. The State of Ohio was still two or three years in the future, but it was characteristic of the Connecticut settlers that they should want and move actively for the establishment of law and order, and hence they secured the erection in one immense county of the whole Reserve, which is now divided into a dozen counties. This was Trumbull County, of the Northwest Terri- tory, named in honor of Jonathan Trumbull, then Governor of Connecticut, and son of the original "Brother Jonathan." Its seat of jus- tice, where court was held the same summer, and also the first election, was Warren, one of the half-dozen principal settlements, and, save Youngstown, the only one far inland.
This civil organization had only now be- come possible through the settlement of a
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curious and troublesome tangle in the matter of jurisdiction over the lands of the Reserve between Connecticut and the United States. The solution of the difficulty (which was em- barrassing the land company by clouding its titles and so retarding sales and settlement) devolved upon John Marshall, of Virginia, who, as chairman of a committee of Congress, exhaustively reviewed Connecticut's claims, and recommended the acceptance of her ces- sion of jurisdiction by Congress, and the re- lease to her by the United States of all right, title, and claim to the soil. This was duly accomplished by the passage of what was called the "Easement Act," and thus it was that John Marshall, of Virginia, who in a few months was made the first Chief Justice of the United States, became entitled to the gratitude of the Connecticut men for the in- stitution of law in the Reserve and the re- moval of the last bar to its development. The stimulus of assured civil order and of cloud- less titles gave a new and powerful impetus to immigration, and during the next decade the population of the Reserve bounded from 1,300 to a little over 16,000 souls.
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In connection with this matter, other causes of growth may be briefly noted. Per- ry's victory off the shore of the Reserve brought a new attention to the region, and when the War of 1812 was ended immi- gration was renewed with a rush, and the epoch of true prosperity was begun in New Con- necticut. It was a piece of wonderful poetic pro- priety and eloquence by which, a few years later, the same guns that had thundered aboard Perry's fleet were employed to 018. Perry proclaim the opening of the Erie Canal. Placed along its lines, about ten miles apart, their resounding boom, one after another in quick succession, carried the news from Buffalo to New York that an all-Ameri- can waterway was open from Lake Erie to the sea. This was a consummation of con- sequence to the Reserve which had thereto- fore only an imperfect outlet for its surplus crops by way of Pittsburg. The completion
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