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 8
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Connecticut Triumphant in Ohio
of the Erie Canal gave another powerful im- petus to immigration, but, even better than that, it suggested the Ohio Canal, which eventually connected the lake with "La belle rivière," and even when completed, in the late twenties, as far as Akron, became not only of immense influence in the improve- ment of the country, but a potent stimulus to the commercial prosperity of its future metropolis, the city of Cleveland.
Returning now to the time of the pioneers, say to 1800, it must be noted that in some respects their experience was peculiar. It is rather to moral conditions than to backwoods adventure that one must look for the charac- teristics of early-day life in the Reserve. Only the very earliest of the settlers-the actual vanguard-encountered the perils, or even the worst hardships, that we are accus- tomed to associate with the pioneering life. There never existed here anything like that incessant, ever-lurking deadly danger from Indian hostility which those earlier Connecti- cut adventurers had experienced in Pennsyl- vania. There was, to be sure, an indefinite sense of danger, a vague apprehension, but it
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Ohio and Her Western Reserve
soon wore away, for the few isolated cases of violence were only such as might occur from sporadic lawlessness in older communities, and the general impression which the Reserve re- ceived of the red man's character was a favor- able one. Even the wild animals of the great unknown forest (though sometimes a cause of fear and trembling to the women and chil- dren in their lonely log cabins, especially when the prolonged and dismal howling of the wolves was to be heard at night) were regarded upon the whole as a providential blessing rather than an evil, for from the va- rieties most numerous the family larder was provided with much of its meat. Governor Huntington, it must be admitted, was attacked by wolves and well-nigh dragged from his horse (and, too, right where is now the most sophisticated and elegant part of famous Euclid Avenue) ; but such occurrences were rare, and the annals of the Reserve are rather painfully lacking in stirring story.
Pioneer life in this part of Ohio was peaceful, and almost from the first held out not only the promise but the substance of prosperity. Still, it contained those elements
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Connecticut Triumphant in Ohio
of rude but idyllic rusticity, that romance of the remote and isolate, which came with long looking into the solemn solitudes of the vast forest, which all people of the olden time have endeavored, and usually in vain, to de- fine.
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CHAPTER VI
THE RESERVE A CONSERVATION OF CONNECTICUT
GRADUALLY the wilderness got the insti- tutions of civilization. These were generally of the Connecticut brand, and bore its strong characteristics until modifying influences ac- complished their work. Thus the early relig- ion of the Reserve was Congregationalism slightly relaxed from the coldness and auster- ity of Connecticut's. Such bookish culture as there was-and it was far more conspicuous here than in most frontier communities-bore the odor of Yale. Up to 1800 the Reserve had neither church nor school, but it was very soon to possess both and in abundance. The pioneer preacher was the Rev. Joseph Badger, a native of Massachusetts, who was not located over any special flock, for the very good rea- son that when he arrived there were not enough people in any one settlement to form a church organization ; but he belonged to the whole Re-
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A Conservation of Connecticut
serve, and went about on horseback, visiting all in turn-a typically stalwart and zealous but more than usually learned backwoods missionary. He made his advent and began his large labors in 1800, and in 1801 we find him a pioneer of education as well as of religion.
It is a remarkable fact, and one illustra- tive of the distinguishing tendency of the Connecticut colony, that only five years after the first settlers entered the unbroken forest they should be seeking to plant there not merely a primitive district school, but an in- stitution of advanced learning-an academy. It is more significant than any other isolated circumstance we can chronicle that, in 1801, when the population of the entire Reserve did not number over 1,500, a petition prepared by Minister Badger was presented to the Territorial Legislature praying for a college charter. It was not granted, but when the State had been organized and the first Legis- lature assembled, it passed an act incorpo- rating, where but eight years before the Indians roamed without ever seeing a pale face, "The Erie Literary Society." The Rev. Joseph
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Ohio and Her Western Reserve
Badger was one of the incorporators, and David Hudson was another, and the school they with their fellow pioneers established was the germ from which grew up at the town of Hudson, Western Reserve College- "the Yale of the West"-of which more anon. The Erie Literary Society established the first school of the kind in the New Con- necticut, located, it should be mentioned, at Burton, where such families as the Hitchcocks and Fords-who were both to become promi- nent in Ohio history-were the pioneers.
The New Connecticut had now representa- tives of almost every element of population to be found in any part of the country at the opening of the nineteenth century. There were farmers, here as well as in the old Con- necticut constituting the truly "respectable " class, and of course the majority of the peo- ple ; but there were also merchants, mechan- ics, land speculators, surveyors, the repre- sentatives of the law and of medicine, and, as we have seen, of the Church. Yet the people were probably a more homogeneous and truly democratic one than was to be found then or since anywhere on the frontier. A fair edu-
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A Conservation of Connecticut
cation was almost universal. Culture was not uncommon. There were a considerable number of college graduates, mostly from Yale; and not alone among these but among the common people it is probable that there existed more knowledge of literature and that more books were to be found than in the midst of any people who had ever journeyed as far as they into the wilds, and by as prim- itive means. These books were, of course, not numerous save in a relative sense. Be- yond the Bible and the New England Primer, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and Baxter's Saints' Everlasting Rest, Butler's Analogy, Watts on the Mind, and Watts's Hymns seem to have been the mental food of the men of those early days in the west- ern woods. Occasionally the classics or the English poets of the descriptive and didactic schools were to be met with. In nearly every house some books were to be found, and every- body read more or less.
Even the local "character" of the New Connecticut was not an illiterate. Even poor, kindly, wit-wandering Jonathan Chapman, or "Johnny Appleseed," as he was known to all
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Ohio and Her Western Reserve
the early residents of the Reserve, not only read, but, it is traditionally affirmed, read Rousseau ! A passing tribute must be paid to him who was incidentally the Reserve's first colporteur, but who got his nickname from the perhaps more practical occupation of planting apple-seeds in the wilderness. Surely if he who makes two blades of grass to grow where but one grew before is worthy of praise, much more so was mild-mannered, melancholy, unfortunate "Johnny Apple- seed," for he made a million apple-trees to grow where not one was before, and the first orchards of northern Ohio were of trees raised in the several little nurseries that he cleared the ground for and patiently tended without recompense year after year. It was the com- mon belief that this harmless, hapless, weird, but practically altruistic eccentric had lost his reason through a misadventure in love ; but, alas ! historical investigation ruthlessly calls a check upon imagination, dispels ro- mance, and reveals the hard fact that it was to the less poetic but equally potential cause, the kick of a mule, that poor Johnny's mind was deflected from the normal course. How-
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A Conservation of Connecticut
ever it came to him, "Johnny Appleseed's " misfortune was the provocation of frequent discussion among the pioneers of the enigma of good and evil, of predestination, and the doctrines of Calvinistic theology in general. But one result became clear in all the mys- tery that enveloped his " call." A thousand backwoods farms would have remained long years fruitless but for the strange mania that made him famous.
For the most part the conditions and cus- toms which prevailed during the pioneer times were those which forecast the future, but there were at least two tendencies of the pe- riod which fortunately did not become per- manent characteristics. These were a marked prevalence and malevolence in the midst of the generally religious community of an as- sertive, scoffing infidelity, and an enormous consumption of whisky. Both eventually
passed without leaving much trace. The first was a part of the license which accompanied the propulsion of the huge wave of liberty from the then recent French Revolution, greatly to the scandal of the godly.
The inordinate use of spirits was more in
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Ohio and Her Western Reserve
accordance with the times and conditions of a new country, but it was excessive even for such, and the especial cause is to be found in the fact that poor transportation facilities left the farmers no alternative but to turn their surplus cereals into whisky, which was easily turned elsewhere. The day came when the whole Reserve underwent a revulsion and had to make the mighty effort of the reform- ing toper. Whisky came into universal use, socially and in private, everywhere, at all times, by all classes-including preachers ; was employed in the mechanic arts-such as barn raisings; became the standard of value and medium of exchange, and was employed in almost all transactions. There is, perhaps, no record of a preacher receiving his pay in whisky, but it is well attested that school- teachers' accounts were thus liquidated, for two young Yankee Puritans (elder brothers of Ohio's great Senator, "Ben " Wade) are mentioned in the records of 1821 as teaching for a few months in the towns of Madison and Monroe and receiving in recompense therefor one six and the other five barrels of whisky.
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A Conservation of Connecticut
As the settlements each year dotted the wilderness a little more numerously, the very names written upon its geography were suffi- cient to denote the nativity of its inhabitants. Not all were Connecticut names, but the ma- jority spoke unerringly of New England ori- gin. The Reserve soon had its Plymouth and its Hartford, its Wyndham and Windsor, its Concord, Amherst, and Andover.
But Connecticut names came to the fore in profusion when the "Sufferers " or " Fire Lands " were surveyed. This region-half a million acres of the extreme western end of the Reserve (now included in the counties of Huron and Erie)-was peopled a little later than the eastern part, but when it did become settled it fairly bristled with historic Connect- icut appellations. It was as if the immigrants had combined to emphasize Connecticut here, that there might be no mistake as to where they came from. The Connecticut towns burned by the British in the Revolution- those whose inhabitants were the "Sufferers " here recompensed pound for pound, pence for pence, even to the minutest loss-were New Haven, East Haven, New London, Nor-
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Ohio and Her Western Reserve
walk, Greenwich, Fairfield, Danbury, Ridge- field, and Groton. All of these sprang into being in the development of the land scheme, which provided for awards to the fire suffer- ers, and among them Norwalk became one of the largest towns of "the Fire Lands," as well as one of the most notable in the Reserve for its thrift and beauty-a brilliant Ohio Phœ- nix arisen from Connecticut ashes.
It is worthy of note that in these "Fire Lands," which perpetuated Connecticut names (and in the greater part of the Reserve), the very manner of survey or subdivision for local government here, as throughout the Reserve, helped to the transplanting of a famous New England institution. The lands were divided into "towns," as they were called in New England, or more properly townships, five miles square, except where the irregular line of the lake shore made " gores " and fractional townships. This regularity and convenience of size was of consequence to the Connecticut people, wonted as they were to the "town meeting," and enabled them to perfect the system and make the "town " a unit of gov- ernment to a degree which to-day prevails
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A Conservation of Connecticut
nowhere else as it does in northern Ohio, save in those States which were the original home of the idea.
As the survey progressed it was found that the entire Reserve of Connecticut, includ- ing "the Fire Lands " (500,000 acres), "the Salt Spring Tract " of General Parsons (25,450 acres), Kelley's and the several Bass Islands, lying in the lake off the western end of the
82
81º
ERIE
LAKE
ASHTABULA
LUCA
OTTAWA
GEAUGA
CUYAHOGA
SANDUSKY
ERIL LORAIN
TRUMBULL
PORTAGE
MU RIOEN
SENECA
DIEDI NA
MAHONING
41º
-41º
-
CRAWFORD
RICHLAND
ASHLAND
WAYNE
STARK
COLUMBIANA
P
7
CARROLL
MARION
HOLMES
-
KNOX
80º
! TUSCAR-7 AWAS
JEFFER- SON
86
COSHOCTON
81
Map showing (by shading) the Western Reserve of Connecticut.
reservation (5,924 acres), contained a total of 3,366,921 acres-an excess over the area of the mother State of 173,921 acres.
167
PENNSYLVANIA
WYANDOT
-
SUMMIT
Ohio
River
MARROW
Ohio and Her Western Reserve
It may be remarked here that the Reserve includes ten whole counties and fractions of four others, two of which have the bulk of their area in the Reserve. The ten entire counties are Ashtabula, Lake, Geauga, Cuya- hoga, Lorain, Huron, Erie, Medina, Portage, and Trumbull. Two-thirds of Mahoning and all but two townships of Summit are in the Reserve, while of two other counties it has small fractions only-three and two town- ships, respectively, of Ottawa and Ashland.
Enough has been said to show that the New Connecticut reproduced the old. In its zeal for the Church, the school, the college, its people were exhibiting the cherished fond- nesses of Connecticut and of New England. They imported the "town meeting," the man- ners and morals of the mother State. Even in the nomenclature they impressed upon the soil they reared monuments to the memory of their old homes.
The local color of Connecticut prevailed through all of the formative period of the col- ony's existence. It was patriotic, Presbyterian (or Congregational), Puritanic, yet all of these with a difference, as we shall see presently.
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A Conservation of Connecticut
That Connecticut should have been re-created here was only natural from the primal cause that the pioneers were predominantly from Connect- icut (though with an intermingling from her sister States). Even in much later years, when a majority of the immigrants came from New York, they were none the less of the same people-the Empire State, in the direct path- way to the West, being but a sojourning-place upon the way, in which an individual might remain a few years or a family for a genera- tion. Scarcely a man among those who early became prominent in the Reserve in states- manship, literature, the learned professions, or as captains of commerce or industry, but who was native to New England or born of Yankee parents. It was a distinct and ho- mogeneous colony, as direct a progeny of the Puritans as New England itself, and even down to the present, notwithstanding the admixture of a cosmopolitan population, consequent to large growth, it preserves the outward and material characteristics of its original in a more marked manner than does any other community in the whole country.
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Ohio and Her Western Reserve
The community owes this circumstance, and the unquestionably great power exerted by its comparatively small population, to two conditions generally recognized by stu- dents of sociology, but here perhaps exhibited more unmistakably than elsewhere. In the first place, the pioneers of the New Connect- icut, like pretty nearly all pioneers, were the hardiest, the most resolute, and most enter- prising of their race; and, secondly, the first born of the pioneers had the benefits, so to speak, of being reared upon a virgin soil, and so adding a new force to old tendencies. It is from this, says Lowell, alluding to the be- ginnings of States, that men, “ like some agri- cultural products," are produced " better than cultivation can make them afterward. Wheth- er it is in the vigor and freshness which at- tend the youth of a State, like the youth of a life, or whether such emergencies bring to the surface and into conspicuity a higher order of men-whatever the reason may be, the fact remains, the fathers are larger than the chil- dren."
Ancestry and environment, the world-old powerful pair of formative causes, were at
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A Conservation of Connecticut
work. The descendants of patriots and Puri- tans, of preachers, scholars, capable men of affairs, coming early to the new land or born within it, environed by obstacles, but by ob- stacles which it was possible to overcome through the putting forth of power, and with a broad outlook upon the boundless poten- tialities that lay in the pure, pristine wilder- ness to fire their imagination and serve them with incentive, the rugged first comers and first born of the Western Reserve could not fail to perpetuate the principles that had pre- vailed in the home of their fathers, nor to give them a greater vigor in their own, which was to become the heritage of their sons. The colonists were a peculiarly persistent people, and as they were not called upon here, as at Wyoming, to expend their strength in ceaseless contention, it flowed naturally into the perpetuation of types and the conserva- tion of cherished principles.
Puritanism, Presbyterianism, patriotism formed the triad of the Connecticut settlers' mental equipment of traits and tendencies. But, as has been intimated, these qualities and the general character of the Yankee in
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Ohio and Her Western Reserve
the West had undergone considerable of a differentiation from the parent stock.
Curiously, even paradoxically, the com- munity which was the most conservative in the whole western region became also the most progressive, and in fact radical one, in the country. There was perhaps a more bracing breeziness in the moral atmosphere of the south shore of the Lake than on the north shore of the Sound, and this, with the virgin forces of the new country working their mysterious but mighty influences-all brought to bear upon the most vigorous spir- its of their race-created a new energy which must have new and enlarged outlets of action.
Puritanism was far too deeply ingrained in these men to fall into disuse as a directing force, but it became a progressive Puritanism -vigorous, virile, with the strength of the Young West, to put forth in new-found and multivarious avenues its old-time influence. Here, as of old, Puritanism meant preemi- nently conscience, and the courage to assert conscience-to act upon it. And here it in- spired men, as of old, with unchanged prin-
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A Conservation of Connecticut
ciple, but impelled them with irresistible force along absolutely new lines, in new issues.
The church religion of the Connecticut pioneers underwent a similar change, and, while there was no abatement of the piety of the old-time Connecticut Congregationalism, the ancient congealing coldness of Calvinism, as gracefully as it could, yielded to a general softening process, which in part was evident within the denomination, and in some measure went toward the forming of new sects which had been rigorously restrained in the old in- flexible social order of the mother State. But while dogma was degraded to something like its proper relative position, and a liberalism prevailed which was looked upon with undis- guised horror in Connecticut, and regarded as rank heresy from which naught but evil could ensue, in time those who had abhorred the apostasy of the young western child of the Puritan Yankee were forced to the admission that moral fiber had been wonderfully stif- fened even while doctrine had been relaxed. There was thus a revived sectarian religion as well as a new political and social Puritan- ism, and the practical application of aggressive
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Christian ethics to newly propounded or newly recognized problems was the inevitable net result.
It was thus that it came about that the Western Reserve was, as early as 1830, a hot- bed for the propagation of antislavery senti- ment. Charles Backus Storrs, the true pio- neer here of advanced learning, as President of Western Reserve College, was inculcating this doctrine of the new conscience as early as 1832, and when he died, two years later, Whittier testified to the esteem in which he was held by the New England abolitionists, in his touching elegy beginning :
Thou hast fallen in thy armor, Thou martyr of the Lord !
Oberlin College, with its new theology, carried on the propaganda of which the la- mented Storrs was the pioneer, and Joshua R. Giddings began its battles in Congress when he had no coworker there but John Quincy Adams. The whole Reserve practi- cally became an integral part of the little army which began the battle for freedom and car- ried it on, with augmented numbers, to its finish. But it was for a long time a curiously
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A Conservation of Connecticut
isolated integral of the antislavery army, oc- cupying a position that was advanced (phys- ically and morally) perilously near the frontier of the enemy's country, and performing pio- neer duty that demanded the utmost courage. It is not too much to say that the region was the most conspicuous and detested piece of abolition territory in the United States, and that in zeal and accomplishment the Puritans of northern Ohio equaled, if they did not sur- pass, the Puritans of New England and the Quakers of Pennsylvania. The Reserve un- questionably maintained more stations of the secret "Underground Railroad " than any equal district in the country.
Another exemplification of the new pro- gressivism which had taken hold upon the people was afforded when Oberlin set forth the first exhibit in the world of collegiate co- education, which she pushed very quickly from tentative experiment to successful expo- sition, in due time indorsed by the imitation of at least two-thirds of the colleges and uni- versities of the old Northwest, which founded its educational institutions, to a great degree, upon the initiative afforded by the Reserve.
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Ohio and Her Western Reserve
But that, with all of their progressiveness, and even radicalism, the Yankee colonists ad- hered pretty closely to the fundamental prin- ciples of the old Puritanism or to a certain broad ethical orthodoxy, must be admitted by the fair-minded observer. For the more ultra " isms " of other " doxies," from first to last, they had little sympathy, and were apt to speedily consign them to that condition in which they were ready for the doxology. Witness, for instance, the short shrift they accorded to Mormonism, transplanted to their soil, flourishing for a time and rearing upon it a costly temple, and yet cast out completely in half a dozen years.
The savor of conscience and courage and of sound morals was in most of the measures which enlisted their sympathies. Seriously speaking, the colonists, like the older Puri- e a serious people. They had " co victions." And with them convictions amount- ed almost to organic things. They performed functions in the moral life of these people and were forces in all their greater private and public achievements.
To the older Puritanism the Connecticut
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Ohioans added something of humor without abating its earnestness one jot or tittle ; but more important than that as a factor in the differentiation was their spirit of spontaneity ; and far above all other additions was that shrewd Yankee practicality that they brought to bear in the propagation of their ideals. It was through the exercise of this faculty, cou- pled with a stern sense of duty and an inher- ited inability to ignore its dictates, that they entered upon a political fight instead of ease- fully remaining mere theorists and dreamers, and assisted in the ascendency of a great po- litico-moral idea.
Puritanism mingled with pure patriotism may be said to have constituted the unwritten but inexorable code of moral aggression on which the great political battles of the mid- century were fought, and they nowhere had fuller sway than here. The old-time Puritan- ical sense of justice and regard for freedom had come by a marvelous stride in human understanding to include justice and freedom for the man who was black as well as for the man who was white; and from the day that idea dawned on men until the end had been
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