USA > Ohio > Ross County > Chillicothe > Ohio centennial anniversary celebration at Chillicothe, May 20-21, 1903 : under the auspices of the Ohio State Archaelogical and Historical Society : complete proceedings > Part 5
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Dr. Tiffin, as he was generally called, was a man of vigor and versatility, alert to know the "what" and the "how" of the world about him. He was active in mind and body, quick of step and gesture and full of enthusiastic impulses. In mind, body and spiritual nature he was at all times a thoroughly wide-awake man. Whatever he did was with impetuous ardor which over- came obstacles. Before his "conversion" he was a gay young man of the world; the "glass of fashion"; full of wit and re- source, of grateful and persuasive address, fond of so- ciety and was the animating spirit of all social gatherings. Afterward these qualities, turned into another channel, made his religion attractive, and while it was not in his nature
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to lose relish for brightness, grace and joyousness, neither could he refrain from ardently preaching the "glad tidings of the great joy" which had filled his own soul. His lively temper did not allow him ever to escape the censure of the more sober minded while no criticism could cool his religious ardor. He did not so tower above others as to disable him from viewing men and things from the standpoint of those about him although he ex- amined them with keener insight and more profound reflection. He was a practical man who took hold of the world's affairs with lively interest in current events and active efforts to shape them to desired ends. His interest in men and their concerns was so apparent as to draw them to him. Men instinctively sought his aid, relied upon him and put him to the front, not so much for his greatness or from unquestioning concurrence in his views as because they loved him and believed in him. His methods and motives were governed by a strong grasp on moral and religious truth. He loved liberty and righteousness. These affections were the strong passions of his nature.
It is quite possible to seek good ends and be unpopular ; to love liberty and retard it; to be pious and make religion unat- tractive. It was not so with Tiffin. Hence it came about that within a few months after he reached the new town on the west bank of the Scioto River he was made clerk of the Territorial court and the next year when the Territorial Legislature came into existence he was not only a member of that body, but also clerk of the Supreme and inferior courts and so continued until the era of statehood in 1803. The Legislature first met in Cincinnati and Dr. Tiffin was unanimously chosen speaker of the House. That body whose members came from widely scattered regions of the vast wilderness stretching from the Ohio River to the great lakes and from the Pennsylvania border to the Mississippi River, be- came at odds with Governor St. Clair. Its second session was held in Chillicothe because in the meantime, through the efforts of William Henry Harrison, the territorial delegate in Congress, (afterwards president of the United States), the territory had been divided much against St. Clair's will. That portion lying west of the Great Miami River became the Indiana Territory with Harrison for its governor. The portion east of that river re-
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tained the name and organization of the Northwest Territory, with St. Clair as its governor and Chillicothe designated as its capital. The controversy between the governor and Legislature became more acrimonious. When an election was held within the new boundaries for the succeeding Legislature, the governor's friends secured a majority and yet Tiffin, who along with Na- thaniel Massie and Thomas Worthington and others, was active and influential in opposition to St. Clair's views and purposes, was so popular and was regarded as so fair a man that he was again unanimously chosen speaker.
When, under the new administration of Thomas Jefferson, Congress authorized the people of the territory to elect delegates to a convention which was to decide whether a state government was desired and if so was to adopt a state constitution, Tiffin was elected a member of that convention and then unanimously selected as its presiding officer. This convention met in the fall of 1802 in the court house which had been erected the pre- vious year. Tiffin had great influence in this body. The consti- tution being adopted an election for governor and state officers was soon held and Tiffin was elected governor. After serving two terms he was chosen by the Legislature to represent the state in the Senate of the United States; and after his resignation of that office he consented to become a member of the State Legis- lature, which office he held two successive terms, until President Madison did him the unsolicited honor to ask him to become the head and organizer of the newly-created Land Office, which was the germ of the present Interior Department. When with great labor and ability he had fully established this department he exchanged that office at his own request for that of surveyor- general of the Northwest, which enabled him to remain at home with his office in Chillicothe. This position he retained until the eve of his death.
No man whose aspirations for liberty and religion were so strong and persistent and who was so ready at all times to battle for his convictions against all comers, ever retained throughout life the respect and attachment of his constituents and of public men in a more conspicuous and remarkable degree than did Ed- ward Tiffin.
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His love of liberty manifested itself strongly in the tenacity with which he clung to his anti-slavery views on all occasions. It was evidenced by his prompt opposition to the efforts of cer- tain southern gentlemen, owning land in the Virginia Military District, to secure permission to move upon their lands with their slaves. The Ordinance of 1787 forbade this, but Judge Burnet, who was a member of the governor's council and party, declared that "such was the feeling and temper of the delegates in regard to the system of human slavery, that if there had been no such provision in the Ordinance, the request would have been refused, as it was, by a unanimous vote." When he was a candidate for membership in the constitutional convention of 1802, he pub- lished in the Chillicothe Gazette the statement that if the Or- dinance did not prohibit it, he would regard its introduction as being the greatest injury that could be inflicted on posterity.
In 1807, when the Indiana Territorial Legislature wished to allow slavery temporarily and memorialized Congress to suspend the operation of the anti-slavery clause of the territorial ordi- nance, Tiffin, then a member of the United States Senate, to whose committee this application was referred, reported and voted against it.
His biographer relates that an English traveler who found in this country scarcely anything or anybody to commend, spoke of Tiffin, the then governor, as a plain, honest, well-informed, very religious man, and said that he had learned that "the governor was very much opposed to the system of human slavery and was most efficient in excluding it from Ohio."
The ordinance for the government of the Northwest Terri- tory provided : "There shall neither be slavery, nor involuntary servitude in the said territory, otherwise than in the punishment of crimes." The insertion of an anti-slavery clause was at the instance of Jefferson. The state constitution framed by Tiffin and his Jeffersonian co-workers, emphasized the prohibition.
In Edward Tiffin's view, the contest with St. Clair was one for popular liberty, and on his part there was no other motive. It was commenced by wrongful assertion of the prerogative on the part of the governor, when he vetoed the acts of the Assem-
o. c .- 3
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bly establishing new counties and fixing county seats. In the subsequent battle for and against statehood St. Clair maintained that "a multitude of indigent and ignorant people are but ill- qualified to form a constitution and government for themselves." Tiffin in turn published an address to the people in which he said : "A territorial government is ill adapted to the feelings and genius of free Americans," and that "it is only necessary to direct at- tention to the ordinance of Congress for the government of the territory to convince one of the utter impossibility of a govern- ment conducive to national happiness in this enlightened day being administered under it unless by persons more than mortal. It was formulated at a time when civil liberty was not fully under- stood as it is now, and contemplated only a government of the few over the many."
The contest between the governor and the popular Assembly of the Northwest Territory was like those between the colonial legislatures on the one hand and their governors and councils appointed by the crown upon the other, which were so frequent in pre-Revolutionary annals and so significant of coming events, culminating in a war for independence.
The causes of quarrel were the same: the assertion of prerogative on the one hand and of popular needs and rights on the other; the authority of the crown's representative exer- cised in the interest of policies and parties in the distant govern- ment, opposed to those who aimed to protect home interests and local self-government. . They who controlled the policy of the mother country had regarded the people of the colonies as Gov- ernor St. Clair did the territorial inhabitants, as "too ignorant and indigent" for self-government. If St. Clair had succeeded - and he might have done so, had Jefferson been defeated - he would have kept the territory under subjection for many years, and ultimately created Ohio with the Scioto River as her western boundary, with Marietta for her capital - for such was the de- sign- in order that she might be securely dominated by the party of which Alexander Hamilton, that brilliant genius who had no faith in popular government, was the chief; and have a governor, who, like St. Clair and his party in Congress, believed that a ruler appointed by a power from without, and with an ab-
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solute veto on anything the people approved, was on the whole best calculated to promote the welfare and happiness of the com- mon people. 367348
Tiffin did not leave Virginia with any partisan ideas, nor did the differences with the governor grow out of any on the part of himself and friends. He came here as the young friend of General Washington, with his letter of high eulogy. He revered that great and good man then and always. Washington was in- deed conservative. He belonged to a generation of wealthy, slave-holding Virginians, a landed aristocracy, and held much to the traditions and ideas of the class and period to which he be- longed. He was fond of the brilliant Hamilton, who had been his military aid and afterward founder of the treasury system, and undoubtedly that great intellect had much influence with him in public matters. Washington, too, had the greatness of mind that dwells in regions of thought remote from those of the subtle schemer, and was not able to fully comprehend the ideas and motives of those who gained his confidence. He stood at the threshold of the old and new, and having performed his own great part, left the management of political plans to younger men. Jefferson's ideas were those of the far-seeing philosophic states- man, who perceived the opportunity for a great advance and for realizing, in large part, at least, the vision of a government of the people, for the people, and by the people, such as the Federalists had not contemplated, and indeed, dreaded. They believed in a government of the people and thought that government and plenty of it was good for them. They believed in government for the people, and thought themselves quite competent to furnish it, as St. Clair thought he could for the people of the Northwest Territory. But they did not look with complacency on a govern- ment by the people themselves, and their constant struggle when the constitution was being framed was to keep the government as far away from any direct management by the people as pos- sible; and not succeeding in this as fully as they hoped, they aimed by liberal construction, by implication, to supply what they considered its deficiencies. The Jeffersonians believed that the only way to prevent a substantial return to old-world govern- mental ideas and conditions lay in a strict construction of the
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powers granted by the Federal government, and a constant re- minder of the great fact that all powers of government resided primarily in each state; that by the adoption of the United States constitution, each state had granted a portion, and only a portion of its own powers to the common government; that all other powers remained with each state government and ultimate au- thority with the people; that the powers of government which did not belong to the United States were more numerous and quite as important as those which did belong to it; that as the United States government was supreme in the limit of the powers granted to it, so each state was sovereign within the limits of the powers which it had reserved to itself ; and that, as to new states, they were to be formed out of the common territory and come in on an equal footing with the original states. Now, Edward Tiffin, as I have said, was an ardent lover of liberty, and that being so, he could not, with his intensely ardent disposition, avoid becoming warmed up on the Jeffersonian side during the great political struggle going on in the states in the year 1800; es- pecially as then, and for some time before, he and his friends were struggling against the methods and purposes of one who, in his own person, fairly embodied the principles and characteristics, and the autocratic spirit which marked the leaders of his party.
General St. Clair was also the friend of Washington. He had served with credit to his state and the common cause in the struggle against the mother country. He had represented Penn- sylvania in the Continental Congress with ability and had pre- sided over its deliberations. He had been appointed governor of a great territory of which the future Ohio constituted a small part. His abode in it was merely the headquarters of his official- ism. His authority was from without. His home was the state of Pennsylvania from whence he came and to which he returned. His military career in the territory was a disastrous failure. His army was ignominiously defeated and cut to pieces in battle with the Indians. His civil administration was unfortunately turbulent and ineffectual, and after a protracted dispute with the people's representatives and leading men of the territory con- cerning the limits of his prerogatives - in which he was clearly
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in the wrong - and concerning the fitness of the people to have a government of their own, it ended in discomfiture.
He was in no sense identified with Ohio except that he must be remembered as one who spent himself in trying to prevent her birth and failing in that, in seeking, for party purposes, to bring her into this world maimed and deformed. He was a Federalist of the strictest sect and an acrimonious partisan. The odious Alien and Sedition laws which had startled a people fresh from revolution "like a fire bell in the night," rang the doom of his party but they were congenial to his spirit and he published a pamphlet in their defence. He could not realize that "night's candles were burnt out." The sun-burst of untried popular gov- ernment dazzled and pained his failing vision. The new-born Spirit of Liberty was too bold and strident for his conventional notions. His party belongs only to history. It is a thing of our remote past. It ruffled bravely for a time but it had little vitality. No modern party acknowledges kinship with it. Each of our great parties claims descent from the followers of Jeffer- .son.
Until slavery, having grown immensely profitable where cot- ton was king, controlled a large section of the Democratic organi- zation and forced it to insist (in true Federalistic fashion, and in the name of "vested rights" and "property interests," those shib- boleths of Despotism in its contest with freedom and progress in every age and country) on the exercise by the United States of arbitrary authority to force slavery on unwilling territories and to make slave-catchers of free states and people, the ideas of Jefferson prevailed.
Until the same power drove Southern states, in despite of reason, to break up the Union and sought to escape consequences under cover of an alleged constitutional right of a state to with- draw, reason or no reason - until that fatal hour there was no question that the Jeffersonian doctrine I have outlined, known as the "state rights" creed, was throughout its history the Demo- cratic party's principle of cohesion, and that all its cardinal posi- tions were the real or supposed corollaries of that doctrine.
Certain liberal and anti-slavery elements of the Whig party sloughed off the aristocratic and slavery supporting as well as
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the slave-holding elements, and united with rebellious and anti- slavery Democrats to form the Republican party; whose early leaders always insisted that they were the revivalists of genuine Jeffersonian ideas.
It is now as well recognized a fact that Jefferson's victory in 1800 staid a reactionary movement towards monarchial types of administration and, in truth, saved the Republic as that, the ' Northern armies in the great civil conflict of later years, main- tained the territorial integrity of the Union, and, incidentally, brought to block the state-sheltered institution of slavery. Of this great battle for liberty the contest with St. Clair was at first a preliminary skirmish and at last a part.
The warfare led by Jefferson against arbitrary exercise of power by the Federalists in the administration of the national government, led to such comparisons and inferences as tended to enlist very strongly the interest of Tiffin and his co-workers in the territory. The subsequent prompt aid which they received from Jefferson and his party in Congress soon after his in- auguration in establishing their own liberty and opportunities for civic progress, bound them "with hooks of steel" to the sup- port of those who had already saved the nation. Happily they were destined to direct its affairs for many years, to establish the idea and practice of popular government, and to give hope that even the strong tendencies toward Federalism-inseparable from periods of great material prosperity of the sort which concen- trates the control of great wealth and power - may never do more than create a passing alarm or awaken the people once again to the resolute application of such corrective measures as will suffice to perpetuate free institutions.
It is well known that Jefferson feared the effect of a national judiciary selected without reference to the people, with a perma- nent tenure which the people could not disturb; and he was strengthened in that view by the fact that strong Federal par- tisans had become intrenched in those courts; and that while popular disapproval had changed the complexion of every branch of the national government, it could not reach them. Tiffin, too, believed this feature of the government to be inimical to liberty ; and five days after he took his seat in the United States Senate
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he proposed an amendment to the constitution providing for the removal of supreme and district court judges upon the request of two-thirds of both houses of Congress.
Love of liberty manifested itself again in the action of the constitutional convention, over which Tiffin presided and in the shaping of which he was influential, in refusing to allow the state governor a negative of any sort, either absolute or qualified, upon legislation. St. Clair had exercised an absolute veto. No act could pass by a two-thirds or any other vote without his consent. He was, in effect, the third House. Many have thought that his antagonists went, in framing the Ohio consti- tution, to the opposite extreme. Tiffin was then, doubtless, a prospective governor, but he favored this strict separation of the legislative and executive departments of government. Worth- ington was subsequently governor, but he sought no greater au- thority. They and the rest of those who graced the gubernatorial position, whose wisdom and virtue gave them merited influence with their party friends, and in matters nonpartisan with others as well, have not needed the veto power to make their wisdom properly effectual to restrain and to encourage. The average sense is in the long run better than the individual sense of the greatest and best - if peradventure it remains usual to make governors of states out of the greatest and best material. And if - which Heaven forbid! - it should ever happen that governors become incidents of the operation of a political engine and re- sponsive to the engineer's direction, our fathers would indeed be vindicated in their belief that every veto power injured liberty. No words can picture the wonderful strides in every sort of desirable progress made by Ohio during the period between the making of the first and second constitutions of the state. Yet the constitution of 1851 did not extend the governor's veto power. In that respect the first instrument seemed, in the opin- ion of the very able men constituting the second convention, to have vindicated itself.
This feature is conceded by great thinkers the world over to have constituted an epoch-making event and to constitute, at any rate, a firm and advance step in popular government.
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Governor Tiffin and Governor Worthington and their suc- cessors under the first constitution were men of like civic creeds, but all of them were great friends of public improvements and all exerted themselves to open up the roads and waterways and to increase the facilities of the people. All were friends of popular education and labored assiduously to advance these great in- terests, and they accomplished quite as much in all these direc- tions as they could have done by the exercise of any greater pre- rogative. And probably Hon. D. J. Ryan, in his work on Ohio, does not overstate Governor Tiffin's share in these great labors when he says: "No man who has ever filled the gubernatorial chair of Ohio possessed greater genius for the administration of public affairs than Edward Tiffin. His work in advancing and developing the state has not been equaled by that of any other man in its history."
If it could be said that the Legislature, in course of time, came to be of a different political complexion and that progress came accordingly, then it was surely well that the veto power did not come between it and its work.
It is the truth of history, however, that Federalists, whether so in name or in fact, had little to do with developing Ohio. The Federalists of Ohio were found among the New England settlers, and Rufus King has pointed out that the New England immi- gration to Ohio, contrary to popular supposition, was small; that class had substantially nothing to do with the formation of the Ohio constitution or the organization of the state. When the governor and state officers were to be elected under it, the Fed- eralists refused to vote, they were so much put out with the situ- ation, and Tiffin was elected governor with scarcely a dissenting vote. The northern part of the state was then an Indian reserva- tion and the northwest portion of the state so remained until fifteen years later and for a long period after that was substan- tially uninhabited. The northeast portion, including the Western Reserve, remained but slightly developed until the canals were constructed, and the main lines were not completed until 1833, and the whole system was not completed until considerably later, and there was very little worth while to speak of in that region until after the state had been builded, its institutions and char-
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acter well settled and the lines and principle of its growth and greatness fully marked on the basis defined by the Ordinance of 1787, and the constitution of the state, under the auspices of Governor Tiffin and the men of his creed and party or affiliation who continued for so long to hold the offices, establish the policy and make the laws of the commonwealth. The central belt of the state was settled principally by Germans and Scotch-Irish ; the Miami country by people of New Jersey and the Middle States; the Virginian district, whose center was Chillicothe, by Virginians both from the Valley and Tidewater, and the Ohio River, with its tributaries, the Miami, Scioto and Muskingum, were the chief channels of the state's commerce. The bulk of the population was in the southwestern part of the state and Cincinnati and Chillicothe the most important towns. Before the northern part of the state had taken on any considerable movement and while its population was quite scanty, the great canal improvement which gave such a tremendous impetus to the state and particularly to the northern portion, was projected, provided for by appropriate legislation, and then constructed by the state under the auspices to which I have referred.
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