USA > Ohio > The biographical cyclopaedia and portrait gallery with an historical sketch of the state of Ohio. Volume I > Part 12
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The first battle-ground for freedom was Kansas. On the enactment into a law of the bill of Senator Douglas, President Pierce appointed Andrew H. Reeder, of Pennsylvania, Governor of the Territory. Then the race began toward that Territory between free and slave State emigrants. Combinations of South- ern emigrants under various names, startled by the organization of the Emigrant Aid Society of Massa- chusetts, which had been formed immediately on the passage of the Squatter Sovereignty Bill of Senator Douglas, had gone into Missouri, and there increased their numbers with resident Missourians, who pledged themselves by oath to remove by force from Kansas those who should be sent there by the
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Emigrant Aid Society. Governor Reeder arrived in the Autumn of 1854, and immediately issued his proclamation for an election of a territorial Legislature; and with that election the contest between free and slave labor began. There were but eight hundred and thirty legal voters in the Territory. But the resident Missourians, who had been pledged to do so, crossed over to the number of five thousand, and elected an entirely pro-slavery Legislature, that met at Shawnee, on the border, and at once voted the Territory a Slave State. Governor Reeder vetoed the act, and made himself so obnoxious to the pro-slavery party that he was recalled by President Pierce, and Wilson Shannon, who had been Governor of Ohio, was appointed in his place. Shannon, an avowed defender of slavery, signed all the laws en- acted by the Shawnee Legislature, whose members had removed to and organized at Atchison, on the Missouri River, a few miles below St. Joseph, Missouri, and the legal voters thus outraged assembled at Topeka, and there framed, by delegates whom they had regularly elected, a free State constitution, under which they applied for admission into the Union. But, true to his affiliation with the slave power, President Pierce, in a message sent to Congress in January, 1856, declared this action of the legal voters to be open rebellion against the United States Government.
With the close of Pierce's term was born the Republican party. In 1855 an organization called the Know-nothing party, secret and native American (with thus the seeds of its dissolution born in its con- stitution), and intended to take the place of the Whig party, that became extinct by the death of Web- ster and Clay, lived but one year, and the Republican party, like Minerva from the brain of Jove, sprang armed to match the machinations of the slave power. This was composed mainly of the Free-soil party, formerly known as Abolitionists, and all who resisted the aggressions of the slave power, whether Dem- ocrats or Whigs. In the South the Whigs generally became Democrats ; and the two great parties were henceforth Republicans, who opposed the extension of slavery, but did not insist on emancipation, and Democrats who favored slavery, and resisted emancipation both immediate and prospective. Unable the first year to elect its presidential ticket, the Republican party became the great opponent thenceforth, in and out of Congress, of that power. Bowing to its dictates, as those of his electors, James Buchanan, President of the United States, appointed as his cabinet a set of men, all of whom save one, being a much later appointment, were disloyal to the United States as a nation, and, true to their preconceived- plan, used their opportunity of his term to dismantle all the free State forts and arsenals, and, under the most transparent excuses, remove the arms and ammunition to the forts in slaveholding States. The heresy of Calhoun had fully ripened its seed, and the rights of States were cultivated as the true, in opposition to the rights of the United States as the false. The latter came to be regarded as a confed- eration, no more coherent than a rope of sand, and the respective States of each member of Buchanan's Southern State cabinet the country, above all others, to which their allegiance was due. That war, civil war, should follow such a condition could not be doubted. An irrepressible conflict had been inaugu- rated, and the election by the Republican party, in 1860, of Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States was the spark that fired that gun whose shot was heard around the world.
At this time Ohio was, in population and wealth, the third State of the Union. In 1830 her pop- ulation numbered 937,903. In 1850, having more than doubled, it was 1, 980, 329. In 1860 the increase had been such, notwithstanding the thousands of her sons who, in those ten years, had peopled the far West to California and Oregon, that, by the census of that year, the population numbered 2,343, 739. She had 13,051,945 acres of cultivated lands and 12, 210, 154 acres uncultivated. Thus more than half of her entire area was under cultivation, and more than half of her adult males were agriculturists, horti- culturists, and stock-breeders. Of this class, 277,000 owned their own farms, and so well was this most important body of Ohio's producers aided by her temperate climate and the natural fertility of her soil, that they had furnished each year, for several years, more than double the amount of food, animal and vegetable, required for the support of the whole population of the State. In 1860 they exported nearly 2,000,000 barrels of flour, and more than 2,500,000 bushels of wheat, together with 3,000, 000 bushels of other grains, and 500,000 barrels of pork; while the cattle and stock markets of the Eastern cities were, to a very considerable extent, supported by Ohio. The value of the exports in 1860 from this State amounted to $56, 500, 000 ..
Nor were the manufacturers of the State less busy and prosperous. In 1860 the value of their products was more than $122,000,000, being nearly double the value of the same in 1850. The city of
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Cincinnati alone manufactured, in 1860, $16,000,000 worth of clothing, being a larger quantity than in that year was produced in the metropolis of the nation. The assessed value of Ohio's taxable prop erty, real and personal, gradually increased yearly, without a break in that increase, from $64,675,578 in 1830 to $112, 326, 156 in 1840, and from $839, 876, 340 in 1850 to $888, 302,601 in 1860; while, by the estimate of her Commissioner of Statistics, the entire indebtedness of every county and the govern- ment of the State would not amount to twenty per centum of the last property valuation.
This prosperous condition was attended by a free gift of the means of education to every child in the State; while the means of general intelligence at comparatively trifling cost comprised publications of all sorts, -twenty-four daily newspapers, two hundred and sixty-five weekly newspapers, and fifty-four monthly periodicals, issuing, in the aggregate, seventy-two millions of copies in 1860; and the means of religious instruction and intelligence afforded by church edifices was sufficient to accommodate the entire population. This was the condition of Ohio when Abraham Lincoln, of Illinois, was, in 1860, elected President of the United States by the great Republican party.
In front of four hundred and forty miles of her territory lay slave States. From these, as has been mentioned, many of her best pioneer settlers had come, while many more of her people traced, with Ken- tuckians and Western Virginians, their common lineage back to the eastern slope of the Old Dominion. In the earlier wars the most generous support had come to her, as has been also mentioned, from the land of those the Indians had designated the "Long Knives;" and, in the long peace that followed the war of 1812-15, hearty friendships and social attachments of the tenderest character had knitted, as members of the same families, peoples of either side of "the beautiful river." Not finding in their Bibles that authority for the institution of human slavery which, at this late period of civilization, they deemed sufficient, and which was so readily found by their transfluvial neighbors, they at least could read therein that the powers that be are ordained of God, and, consequently, exercised generally a degree of forbearance toward those who believed in the righteousness of slavery. Both sides agreed that the Constitution protected slavery, but gave the slaveholder no rights outside of his own State, except the reclamation by legal process of fugitives from labor. There were many citizens in the South, as well as in the North, who favored colonization of the colored race; but the general sentiment of the North was averse to the spread of slavery. Many believed that it was a sin; most acknowledged it to be evil. In the South it was defended not only as a necessary condition of society, but as a wholesome and just institution, established by God for good and wise ends. The " Abolitionists" were denounced as fighters against God; and to affix that name to a chance visitor from the North was a certain pass- port to the court of "Judge Lynch " in nearly all of the Southern States. So bitter became the feeling between the two sections that Churches were rended, Northern papers were stopped in the mails, and even letters were searched for "incendiary " matter. The few privileges which had been given to the people of color, both free and enslaved, were taken away. Assemblies of negroes, even for religious purposes, were in some places forbidden, and in the cities none could be out at night without danger of arrest and imprisonment, to be followed by corporal punishment. The discussion of the great question in Congress, and especially the repeal of the Missouri Compromise, brought about a general interest in the subject. Heretofore it had been confined mainly to those more intimately connected with public politics; now the people who had been indifferent began to see that the matter concerned them and their personal rights. Their votes were soon to be the demand, as well as the index, of their political convictions. The National Road that for many years had been the dividing line of Ohio politics, sepa- rating those of Puritan from those of Cavalier descent, was, for the time being, overlooked, and although for many years the southern part of the State, by virtue of its larger population, had controlled elections and inspired legislation, in 1860 this condition had become almost extinct.
In 1848 the electoral vote of Ohio was, cast, not for General Taylor, but for Lewis Cass, of Mich- igan ; and in 1852 it was given to Franklin Pierce, of New Hampshire, in the belief that, as a Northern man, he entertained Northern opinions concerning slavery. Almost from the beginning of his career as a lawyer in Cincinnati, Salmon P. Chase, as has been mentioned, boldly espoused the cause of free- dom, and gathered those around him who held his opinions; but the great forces of Church and State, for the reason we have just mentioned, frowned upon his exposition of the national Constitution, in so far as it supported slavery. Single-minded and sincere in the work he had chosen, he continued to
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resist the demands of the slave power, and as a lawyer to protect the friendless and helpless slaves, until he and his associates in the old antislavery party began to diffuse an abolition sentiment among even the hitherto conservative men of the border States, as well as among the influential classes of the principal city of the State, whose prosperity was believed to depend upon relations of intimacy and trade with the people south of her.
Elected Governor as the eventual result of his course in politics, he so swayed the people's im- pulses-they had not become sufficiently braced to be termed principles-that in 1856 Ohio polled her electoral vote for John C. Fremont, and a year later re-elected her abolition leader. He believed that war alone would terminate the irrepressible conflict then established, and he at once began to organize the State militia. He merely anticipated what many others foresaw. For years the annual movements of militia had excited only contempt, until at last men refused to attend the annual musters, and they were given up. The old cannon were used only for 4th July and political celebrations, and the small arms were scattered, rusty, and worthless. In face of this general disrepute, Governor Chase encour- aged the formation of militia companies, similarly armed, uniformed, and equipped, in all the principal towns and cities of the State, with the view of having them ready to be formed into regiments and brigades when occasion required. Before his second term expired he had the satisfaction of reviewing, at Dayton, nearly thirty companies there assembled by his direction from different parts of the State. All of these maintained their organization until formed into the first regiments of the State in 1861, when they participated in the earlier movements of the War of the Rebellion. His successor, Governor William Dennison, in continuing his policy, urged upon the Legislature to pay the militia for their time spent in drill, and enforce and expand the system ; but while comparatively little was accomplished up to the close of 1860, the condition of the militia of Ohio was superior to that of any State westward of her-in fact, all of them combined did not possess so large a militia force as the first Ohio regiment.
We have indicated the sentiments of gradual growth which on the one side led to open armed rebellion against the integrity of this nation and its constitutional organic law; we have now to show on the other side the resolute and efficient means adopted by Oliio to meet and crush that armed rebellion. In those feelings, as has been indicated, Ohio's people were much divided, and, for reasons already mentioned, this division entered into her legislative halls and swayed her leading men up to the hour, when
" That fierce and sudden flash across the rugged blackness broke,
And, with a voice that shook the land, the guns of Sumter spoke."
All wavering then ceased in the councils of the Ohio Legislature .. The white heat of patriotism and fealty to the flag that had been victorious in three wars, and had never met but temporary defeat, then melted all party ties and dissolved all hesitation, and on the 18th of April, 1861, by a unanimous vote of ninety-nine Representatives in its favor, there was passed a bill which appropriated $500,000 to carry into effect the requisition of the President to protect the National Government, of which sum $450,000 was to purchase arms and equipments for the troops required by that requisition as the quota of Ohio, and $50,000 as an extraordinary contingent fund for the Governor. The Commissioners of the State Sinking Fund were authorized by the same bill to borrow this money on the six per cent bonds of the State, and to issue for the same certificates, freeing such bonds from taxation. Then followed other legislation, that declared the property of volunteers free from execution for debt during their terms of service ; that declared any resident of the State who gave aid and comfort to enemies of the Union guilty of treason against the State, to be punished by imprisonment in the penitentiary at hard labor for life ; and, as it had become already evident that thousands of militia beyond Ohio's quota of the President's call would volunteer, the Legislature, adopting the sagacious suggestion of Governor Dennison, resolved that all excess of volunteers should be retained, and paid for service under the direction of the Governor. Thereupon a bill was prepared and passed, authorizing the acceptance of volunteers to form ten regi- ments, and providing $500,000 for their arms and equipment, and $1,500,000 more to be disbursed for troops in case of invasion of the State. Then other legislation was enacted, looking to and providing against the shipment from or through the State of arms or munitions of war to States either assuming to be neutral or in open rebellion ; organizing the whole body of the State militia (every male citizen between the ages of eighteen and forty-five years); providing suitable officers for duty on the staff of the
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Governor ; requiring contracts for subsistence of volunteers to be let to the lowest bidder, and author- izing the appointment of additional general officers.
Before the adjournment of that session of the Legislature, the Speaker of the House had resigned to take command of one of the regiments then about to start for Washington City; two leading sena- tors had been appointed brigadier generals ; and many, in fact nearly all, of the other members of both Houses had, in one capacity or another, entered the military service. It was the first war Legislature ever elected by Ohio, and, under sudden pressure, nobly inet the first shock and enacted the first meas- ures of law for war. Laboring under difficulties inseparable from a condition so unexpected, and in the performance of duties so novel, it may be historically stated that for patriotism, zeal, and ability, the Ohio Legislature of 1861 was the equal of either of its successors, while in that exuberance of patriotic sentiment which obliterated party lines and united all in a common effort to meet the threatened integrity of the United States as a nation, it surpassed them both.
The war was fought, the slave power forever destroyed, and, by additional amendments to her organic law, the United States wiped the stain of human slavery from her escutcheon, and liberated over four million men, women, and children, nineteen-twentieths of whom were natives of her soil .. It not only emancipated the slaves, but it made them citizens. It gave them the right to vote and to hold office, to plead and be impleaded in the courts, to own property and to go when and where they pleased, to acquire an education, and to bear arms. Whatever civil or political privileges were enjoyed by the whites were also given to the colored people; and for the first time in our national history the Declaration of Independence asserted the truth, -- "all men are created equal." In the accomplishment of this result Ohio bore her full share. When Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court-house she had two hundred regiments of all arms in the national service. In the course of the war she had furnished two hundred and thirty regiments, besides twenty-six independent batteries of artillery, five independent companies of cavalry, several companies of sharp-shooters, large parts of five regiments credited to the West Virginia contingent, two regiments credited to the Kentucky contingent, two transferred to the United States colored troops, and a large proportion of the rank and file of the 54th and 65th Massa- chusetts Regiments, also colored men. Of these organizations, twenty-three were infantry regiments furnished on the first call of the President, being an excess of nearly one-half over the State's quota ; one hundred and ninety-one were infantry regiments furnished on subsequent calls of the President-one hundred and seventeen of them for three years, twenty-seven for one year, two for six months, two for three months, and forty-two for one hundred days ; thirteen were cavalry, and three artillery regiments for three years, and of these three years' troops over twenty thousand re-enlisted as veterans, at the end of their long term of service, to fight till the war would end.
As original members of, or as recruits for, these organizations, Ohio furnished to the national service the magnificent army of three hundred and ten thousand, six hundred and fifty four soldiers-actual soldiers-not men who paid commutation money, nor counting veteran enlistments as new troops, nor by enumerating citizens of Ohio who, as soldiers or sailors, enlisted in other States. The count is not made by such representation, but taken from the final report of the United States Provost-marshal- general to the War Department (Vol. I, pp. 160-164). The older, larger, and more populous Common- wealth of Pennsylvania gave not quite twenty-eight thousand more, while Illinois fell forty-eight thou- sand behind, Indiana one hundred and sixteen thousand less, Kentucky two hundred and thirty-five thousand, and Massachusetts one hundred and sixty-four thousand less. Thus Ohio more than main- tained in the national army the rank among her sisters which her population supported. With the honest pride which the facts entitle us to entertain, we add that, from first to last, Ohio furnished more troops than the President ever required of her, and that, at the end of the war, with more than a thou- sand men in the camp of the State who never were mustered into service, she still had a credit on the rolls of the War Department for four thousand three hundred and thirty-two soldiers beyond the aggre- gate of all quotas ever assigned to her; and, besides all these, six thousand four hundred and seventy- nine of her citizens had, in lieu of personal service, paid the commutation; while Indiana, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and New York were all from five thousand to one hundred thousand behind their quotas. So ably, through all those years of trial and death, did she keep the promise of that memorable dis- patch from her first war Governor: "If Kentucky refuses to fill her quota, Ohio will fill it for her."
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Of these troops, eleven thousand two hundred and thirty-seven were killed or mortally wounded in action ; and of these, six thousand five hundred and sixty-three were left dead on the field of battle. They fought on well-nigh every battle-field of the war. Within forty-eight hours after the telegraphic call of the President, in April, 1861, two Ohio regiments were on their way to Washington. An Ohio brigade, in good order, covered the retreat from the first battle of Bull Run. Ohio troops formed the bulk of the army that saved to the Union that territory which became the State of West Virginia; the bulk of the army that kept Kentucky from going out of the Union ; a large part of the army that cap- tured Fort Donelson and Island No. 10; a great part of the army that, from Stone River and Chicka- mauga and Mission Ridge and Atlanta, swept to the sea, and captured Fort McAllister, and north through the Carolinas to Virginia. They fought at Pea Ridge. They charged at Wagner. They helped to redeem North Carolina. They were in the sieges of Vicksburg and Charleston, Richmond and Mobile. At Pittsburg Landing and Antietam, at Gettysburg and Corinth, in the Wilderness and at Five Forks. before Nashville and Appomattox Court-house, "their bones, reposing on the fields they won, are a perpetual pledge that no flag shall ever wave over their graves but the flag they died to maintain." They suffered the horrors of starvation at Andersonville and at Libby Prison, and languished in the hospitals established near every battle-field.
"The real heroes of the war are the great, brave, patient, nameless PEOPLE." The victories were not won through generalship. It is a libel on the word to say that generalship delayed for four years the success of twenty-five millions over ten millions, or required a million men in the closing campaign to defeat one hundred thousand. The integrity of this nation was maintained by the sacrifices, the heroism, the sufferings, the death of the MEN composing the rank and file of the national army. Not alone on each recurring 30th of May shall we, by strewing flowers upon their graves, wherever their graves are known, keep them in remembrance. Their sacrifices, their sufferings, and their heroic death will never cease to be cherished by their grateful countrymen. And as one of the evidences, and an opulent one, there have been established in Ohio, near the city of Dayton, the National Soldiers' Home, and at Xenia the Ohio Soldiers' and Sailors' Orphans' Home, in which there were resident, at the State charge for food, clothing, and education, November 15th, 1881, three hundred and eighty-nine male and two hundred and fourteen female children, and so cared for that but two deaths occurred during the year ending November 15th, 1881. The admissions of that year were ninety-five boys and twenty- seven girls, and of those discharged as able to procure their own living, and provided with positions to do so, sixty-eight were boys and forty-four were girls, leaving six hundred and three remaining in the institution. The whole number of children receiving benefits from the Home during the year 1880-81 is 715-the largest number in any one year in the history of the institution. Of the whole number of children received since the organization of the Home, I, IOI were boys and 633 were girls.
As indicated elsewhere, the subject of education at an early period engaged the minds of the fathers in Ohio, and elicited from them the famous declaration that since "religion, morality, and knowledge are essentially necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of edu- cation shall forever be encouraged." The first general school law was enacted in 1825, and subsequent changes and improvements for the better during the succeeding fifty years, give us in 1874 the following record, as taken from the report for that year of the Schools' Commissioner. The money to meet ex- penses of the public schools of the State is derived from five sources: I. From one mill on each dollar of taxable property shown by the grand duplicate, there were obtained $1, 491, 510: 2. From interest on irreducible school funds and rent of school lands, $225, 523. 3. From local taxation, $5,960, 625. 4. From sales of school bonds, $399,625. 5. From fines, licenses, etc., $223, 310-making a total in- come for 1874 of $8, 300, 594. During the same year the expenditures were : I. Paid teachers of pri- mary schools, $4, 206, 398. 2. Paid teachers of high schools, $408, 101. 3. Paid superintendents, $138, 530. 4. Paid for sites and buildings, $1,474,082. 5. Paid interest on and redemption of bonds, $516,603, 6. Fuel and contingent expenses, $1, 328,452-making a total expenditure for 1874 of $8,072, 167. In that year there was paid from the State common school funds to eighty eight (the whole number of) counties of the State, $1,487, 562, and received from those counties for this fund, $1, 533,734. There were in use 10, 654 primary school-houses, and 10 high-school houses for the township district schools, and for the separate district schools (that is, the schools of cities, towns, and villages), 953 primary 9
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