_A Movement among the Colonies to seize the Unoccupied Land
Northwest of the Ohio.--Putnam's Hardy Training in Boyhood.--His
Training in the Old French War.--His Achievements in the
Revolutionary War.--He and Many Soldiers petition Congress for
Western Land, as promised at the Beginning of the War.--The
Ohio Company of Associates, by its Agent, Mr. Cutler, persuades
Congress to pass the Ordinance of 1787.--March of the Founders of
Ohio from Ipswich, Mass., to the Site of West Newton, Pa.--Putnam
prepares to descend the Youghiogheny, Monongahela, and Ohio to
Fort Harmar.--Fears of the Travellers that the Indians driven
from Kentucky would attack them.--The Party found Marietta at
the Mouth of the Muskingum.--Inauguration of the Governor of the
Territory.--Contrast between Conditions, North of the Ohio and
South of it.--Other Settlements on the Ohio in the Eighteenth
Century.--Putnam's Beautiful Character.--Washington's Opinion of
him._
RUFUS PUTNAM: THE FATHER OF OHIO
[Illustration]
OVER the beginning of great movements, whether social or political,
there often hangs a cloud of obscurity. No event of equal importance
in our history is more clear than the founding and first settlement of
the territory northwest of the Ohio River, from which the five imperial
commonwealths of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin
sprang. It occurred at that crucial moment when Washington was calling
upon Virginia, and all the colonies, to seize the West and the hope it
offered, when the West was another name for opportunity to the spent
colonies at the close of the Revolutionary struggle.
[Illustration: RUFUS PUTNAM
_Leader of the Founders of Marietta, Ohio_]
The hero of the movement, General Rufus Putnam, was one of those
plain, sturdy, noble men whom it is a delight to honor. He was born at
Sutton, Massachusetts, April 9, 1738, and was thus six years younger
than Washington, who always honored him. With little education, save
that gained from a few books bought with pennies earned by blacking
boots and running errands for guests at his illiterate stepfather's
inn, he became a self-made man of the best type,--the man who seizes
every advantage from book and friend to reach a high plane and scan
a wider horizon. The Old French War was the training school for the
Revolutionary conflict; and here, with Gates and Mercer and Washington
and St. Clair and Wayne and Gladwin and Gibson, Rufus Putnam learned to
love his country as only those can who have been willing to risk and
wreck their all in her behalf.
Then came the Revolution. In the first act of the glorious yet
pitiful drama Rufus Putnam stands out conspicuously; for "we take
no leaf from the pure chaplet of Washington's fame," affirmed
Senator Hoar, of Massachusetts, "when we say that the success of the
first great military operation of the Revolution was due to Rufus
Putnam." The story is of intrinsic interest. On a winter's evening
in 1776, Rufus Putnam was invited to dine at the headquarters of the
Commander-in-chief in the camp before Boston. After the dinner party
had broken up, Washington detained him with questions concerning the
proper policy to be pursued with reference to the future plan of
campaign. As is well known, Washington favored an entrenchment on
Dorchester Heights which would bring on a second Bunker Hill with
a fair chance of victory, rather than the alternative of marching
upon the city across the ice-bound waters. But the frozen state of
the ground was a serious handicap in any entrenchment plan at that
moment. Putnam was asked in short how the equivalent of entrenchments
could be erected; the solving of the question meant the deliverance of
Massachusetts from the burden of British occupation. This son of the
State was equal to the moment, and his own simple account of the means
adopted is exceptionally interesting:
"I left headquarters in company with another gentleman, and on
our way came by General Heath's. I had no thoughts of calling
until I came against his door, and then I said, 'Let us call on
General Heath,' to which he agreed. I had no other motive but to
pay my respects to the general. While there, I cast my eye on a
book which lay on the table, lettered on the back 'Müller's Field
Engineer.' I immediately requested the general to lend it to me.
He denied me. I repeated my request. He again refused, and told me
he never lent his books. I then told him that he must recollect
that he was one who, at Roxbury, in a measure compelled me to
undertake a business which, at the time, I confessed I never
had read a word about, and that he must let me have the book.
After some more excuses on his part and close pressing on mine I
obtained the loan of it."
"In looking at the table of contents," writes Senator Hoar, "his
eye was caught by the word 'chandelier,' a new word to him. He read
carefully the description and soon had his plan ready. The chandeliers
were made of stout timbers, ten feet long, into which were framed
posts, five feet high and five feet apart, placed on the ground in
parallel lines and the open spaces filled in with bundles of fascines,
strongly picketed together, thus forming a movable parapet of wood
instead of earth, as heretofore done. The men were immediately set to
work in the adjacent apple orchard and woodlands, cutting and bundling
up the fascines and carrying them with the chandeliers on to the ground
selected for the work. They were put in their place in a single night.
"When the sun went down on Boston on the 4th of March, Washington
was at Cambridge, and Dorchester Heights were as nature or the
husbandman had left them in the autumn. When Sir William Howe rubbed
his eyes on the morning of the 5th, he saw through the heavy mists,
the entrenchments, on which, he said, the rebels had done more work
in a night than his whole army would have done in a month. He wrote
to Lord Dartmouth that it must have been the employment of at least
twelve thousand men. His own effective force, including seamen, was
but about eleven thousand. Washington had but fourteen thousand fit
for duty. 'Some of our officers,' said the 'Annual Register,'--I
suppose Edmund Burke was the writer,--'acknowledged that the
expedition with which these works were thrown up, with their sudden and
unexpected appearance, recalled to their minds the wonderful stories of
enchantment and invisible agency which are so frequent in the Eastern
Romances.' Howe was a man of spirit. He took the prompt resolution to
attempt to dislodge the Americans the next night before their works
were made impregnable. Earl Percy, who had learned something of Yankee
quality at Bunker Hill and Lexington, was to command the assault. But
the Power that dispersed the Armada, baffled all the plans of the
British general. There came 'a dreadful storm at night,' which made it
impossible to cross the bay until the American works were perfected.
The Americans, under Israel Putnam, marched into Boston, drums beating
and colors flying. The veteran British army, aided by a strong naval
force, soldier and sailor, Englishman and Tory, sick and well, bag
and baggage, got out of Boston before the strategy of Washington, the
engineering of Putnam, and the courage of the despised and untried
yeomen, from whose leaders they withheld the usual titles of military
respect. 'It resembled,' said Burke, 'more the emigration of a nation
than the breaking up of a camp.'"
His later solid achievements during the war made him, in Washington's
estimation, the best engineer in the army, whether French or American,
and "to be a great engineer with only such advantages of education as
Rufus Putnam enjoyed, is to be a man of consummate genius." A sober,
brave man of genius was required to lead to a successful issue the
great work to which Rufus Putnam was now providentially called.
The vast territory between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi
came into the possession of the United States at the close of the
Revolution. Then it was made possible for Congress to grant the
bounty-lands promised to soldiers at the beginning of the war, and
likewise to redeem its worthless script in Western lands. This a
grateful government was willing to do, but the question was vast and
difficult. If occupied, the territory must be governed. Few more
serious problems faced the young Republic.
The question was practically solved by two men, Rufus Putnam and that
noble clergyman, Manasseh Cutler, pastor of the Congregational church
at Ipswich, Massachusetts. Through Putnam, a large body of officers
and men had petitioned Congress urgently for Western land: "Ten years
ago you promised bounties in lands," was Putnam's appeal now to
Congress through General Washington; "we have faithfully performed
our duty, as history will record. We come to you now and ask that,
in redemption of your promise, you give us homes in that Western
wilderness. We will hew down the forests, and therein erect temples
to the living God, raise and educate our children to serve and love
and honor the nation for which their fathers fought, cultivate farms,
build towns and cities, and make that wilderness the pride and glory
of the nation." The Ohio Company of Associates was organized at the
Bunch of Grapes Tavern, in Boston, March 1, 1786, by the election of
Rufus Putnam, chairman, and Winthrop Sargent, secretary. As the agent
of this organization, Dr. Cutler hastened to New York, while the
famous Ordinance of 1787 was pending. This instrument had been before
Congress for three years, but was passed within twelve days after this
hero-preacher and skilled diplomat came to New York. The Ordinance
organized, from lands ceded to the general government by the several
States, the magnificent tract known as the Territory Northwest of the
River Ohio. The delay had been caused by the hazard of erecting a
great Territory, to be protected at heavy expense, without having it
occupied by a considerable number of worthy citizens. The Ohio Company
of Associates had offered to take a million and a half acres. This was
unsatisfactory to the delegates in Congress. It was a mere clearing in
all that vast tract stretching from the Alleghany to the Wisconsin. Dr.
Cutler hastened to New York to reconcile the parties interested.
[Illustration: REV. MANASSEH CUTLER
_Ohio Pioneer_]
The situation was prophetically unique. The Northwest Territory could
not be organized safely without the very band of colonizers which
Cutler represented and of which Putnam was the leader. On the other
hand, the Ohio Company could not secure Western land without being
assured that it was to be an integral part of the country for which
they had fought. Putnam's appeal read: "All we ask is that it shall
be consecrated to us and our children forever, with the blessing of
that Declaration which, proclaimed to the world and sustained by our
arms, established as self-evident that all men are created equal; that
they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights;
that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,
and that to secure these ends, governments are instituted among men,
deriving their just power from the consent of the governed." Thus
the famed Ordinance and the Ohio Company's purchase went hand in
hand; each was impossible without the other. In order to realize the
hope of his clients on the one hand, and satisfy the demands of the
delegates in Congress on the other, Dr. Cutler added to the grant of
the Ohio Company an additional one of three and a half million acres
for a Scioto Company. Thus, by a stupendous speculation (so unhappy
in its result, though compromising in no way the Ohio Company or its
agents), and by shrewdly, though without dissimulation, making known
his determination to buy land privately from one of the individual
States if Congress would not now come to terms, Dr. Cutler won a signal
victory. The Ordinance of 1787 was passed, corrected to the very letter
of his own amendments, and the United States entered into the largest
private contract it had ever made.
With the passing of the Ordinance and the signing of the indented
agreement for the Ohio Company by Cutler and Sargent on the 27th
of October of that most memorable year in our documentary annals,
a new era of Western history dawned. Up to that moment, there had
been only illegal settlements between the Ohio River and the Great
Lakes--Zeisberger's Moravians on the Tuscarawas. On numerous occasions
troops had been sent from Pittsburg (Fort Pitt) to drive away from
the northern side of the Ohio settlers who had squatted on the Seven
Ranges, which Congress had caused to be surveyed westward from the
Pennsylvania line. It being difficult to reach these squatters from
Pittsburg, Fort Harmar was erected at the mouth of the Muskingum,
in 1785, where troops were kept to drive off intruders, protect the
surveyors, and keep the Indians in awe. The Ohio Company's purchase
extended from the seventh through the seventeenth range, running
northward far enough to include the necessary amount of territory. It
was natural, then, that the capital of the new colony should be located
at the mouth of the Muskingum, under the guns of the fort.
The New Englanders who formed the Ohio Company were not less determined
in their venture than were the North Carolinians who formed the
Transylvania Company thirteen years before; and, though the founders
of Marietta, Ohio, ran no such risk (it has been said) as did the
founders of Boonesborough, Kentucky, we of to-day can have no just
appreciation of the toil and the wearing years which these founders of
the Old Northwest now faced. Yet danger and fear were no novelty to
them. How fitting it was that these men, who first entered the portals
of the Northwest, bearing in their hands the precious Ordinance and
guided by the very star of empire, should have been in part the heroes
of the two wars which saved this land from its enemies. One cannot look
unmoved upon that body of travellers who met at daybreak, December 6,
1787, before Dr. Cutler's home at Ipswich, to receive his blessing
before starting. Theirs was no idle ambition. No Moravian, no Jesuit
with beads and rosary, ever faced the Western wilderness with a fairer
purpose. In Kentucky, the Virginians had gained, and were holding with
powerful grasp, the fair lands of _Ken-ta-kee_; elsewhere the Black
Forest loomed dark and foreboding. Could the New Englanders do equally
well?
Their earnestness was a prophecy of their great success. In December
the first party of carpenters and boat-builders, under Major Hatfield
White, started on the westward journey, and in January 1788 the
remainder of the brave vanguard, under Colonel Ebenezer Sproat and
General Rufus Putnam, followed. These were the forty-eight "Founders
of Ohio." The rigors of a northern winter made the long journey over
Forbes's, or the Pennsylvania Road, a most exhaustive experience.
This road through Lancaster, Carlisle, Shippensburg, and Bedford
was from this time forward a connecting link between New England
and Ohio. It was a rough gorge of a road ploughed deep by the heavy
wheels of many an army wagon. Near Bedford, Pennsylvania, the road
forked; the northern fork ran on to Pittsburg; the southern, struck
off southwestwardly to the Youghiogheny River and the lower Ohio.
This branch the New England caravan followed to Sumrill's Ferry on
the Youghiogheny, the present West Newton, Pennsylvania. Here Putnam
planned to build a rude flotilla and descend the Youghiogheny,
Monongahela, and Ohio to Fort Harmar. The severe winter prevented
immediate building of this fleet, but by April all was in readiness.
The main boat was a covered galley, forty-five feet long, which was
most appropriately named the "Adventure Galley." The heavy baggage was
carried on a flat boat and a large canoe.
Of the men who formed Putnam's company what more can be said--or what
less--than what Senator Hoar has left in his eloquent centennial
oration at Marietta in 1888?
"The stately figures of illustrious warriors and statesmen, the
forms of sweet and comely matrons, living and real as if you had
seen them yesterday, rise before you now. Varnum, than whom a
courtlier figure never entered the presence of a queen,--soldier,
statesman, scholar, orator,--whom Thomas Paine, no mean judge,
who had heard the greatest English orators in the greatest days
of English eloquence, declared the most eloquent man he had ever
heard speak; Whipple, gallant seaman as ever trod a deck,--a man
whom Farragut or Nelson would have loved as a brother, first
of the glorious procession of American naval heroes, first to
fire an American gun at the flag of England on the sea, first to
unfurl the flag of his own country on the Thames, first pioneer of
the river commerce of the Ohio to the Gulf; Meigs, hero of Sagg
Harbor, of the march to Quebec, of the storming of Stony Point,
the Christian gentleman and soldier, whom the Cherokees named
the White Path, in token of the unfailing kindness and
inflexible faith which had conveyed to their darkened minds some
not inadequate conception of the spirit of Him who is the Way, the
Truth, and the Life; Parsons, soldier, scholar, judge, one of the
strongest arms on which Washington leaned, who first suggested the
Continental Congress, from the story of whose life could almost
be written the history of the Northern War; the chivalric and
ingenious Devol, said by his biographer to be 'the most perfect
figure of a man to be seen amongst a thousand'; the noble presence
of a Sproat; the sons of Israel Putnam and Manasseh Cutler;
Fearing, and Greene, and Goodale, and the Gilmans; Tupper, leader
in Church and State, the veteran of a hundred exploits, who seems,
in the qualities of intellect and heart, like a twin brother of
Rufus Putnam; the brave and patriotic, but unfortunate St. Clair,
first Governor of the Northwest, President of the Continental
Congress;--the mighty shades of these heroes and their companions
pass before our eyes, beneath the primeval forest, as the shades
of the Homeric heroes before Ulysses in the Land of Asphodel."
It did not argue that the New Englanders on the Ohio could hold their
ground simply because the Kentucky movement had been for over a decade
such a marvellous success. Its very success was the chief menace of
the Kentucky problem. The eyes of five thousand Indians were fastened
there, for from Kentucky had come army after army, driving the savages
northward out of the valleys of the Muskingum, Scioto, and Miami
Rivers, until now they hovered about the western extremity of Lake
Erie. By a treaty signed at Fort McIntosh in 1786, the Indians had sold
to the United States practically all of eastern and southern Ohio.
And so the settlement at the mouth of the Muskingum at this critical
moment was in every sense a test settlement. There was a chance that
the savages would forget the Kentuckians who had driven them back
to the Lakes and made possible the Ohio Company settlement and turn
upon the New Englanders themselves who now landed at the mouth of the
Muskingum on the 7th of April, 1788, and began their home-building on
the opposite bank of the Muskingum from Fort Harmar.
Here sprang up the rude pioneer settlement which was to be, for more
than a year, the capital of the great new Territory--forever the
historic portal of the Old Northwest. These Revolutionary soldiers
under Putnam combined the two names Marie Antoinette, and named their
capital Marietta in memory of the faithfulness of Frenchmen and France
to the patriot cause. Here arose the stately forest-castle, the Campus
Martius, and near it was built the office of the Ohio Company, where
General Putnam carried on, in behalf of the Ohio Company, the important
business of the settlement. In July, 1788, Governor St. Clair arrived,
and with imposing ceremony the great Territory was formally established
and its governor inaugurated.
Putnam's brave dream had come true. The best blood and brain of New
England were now on the Ohio to shape forever the Old Northwest and
the great States to be made from it. The soldiers were receiving the
promised bounties, and an almost worthless half-a-million dollars had
been redeemed in lands worth many millions. The scheme of colonization,
which was but a moment before a thing of words and paper, became a
living, moving influence of immense power. Another New England on the
Ohio arose full-armed from the specifications of the great Ordinance
and the daring confidence of Rufus Putnam and his colony. South of the
Ohio, the miserable Virginia system of land ownership by tomahawk-claim
was in force from the Monongahela to the Tennessee; north of the Ohio,
the New England township system prevailed. South of the Ohio, slavery
was permitted and encouraged; to the northward, throughout the wide
empire included within the Ordinance, slavery was forever excluded.
Two more fundamental differences could not have existed. And to these
might be added the encouragement given by the Ordinance to religion and
education. The coming of the Ohio Company to Marietta meant many things
to many men, but the one great fundamental fact is of most importance.
The founding of Marietta by Rufus Putnam in reality made possible the
Ordinance of 1787--of which Daniel Webster said, "I doubt whether one
single law of any lawgiver, ancient or modern, has produced effects of
more distinct, marked, and lasting character."
The heroic movement which has justly given Rufus Putnam the title
"Father of Ohio" has been one of the marvellous successes of the first
century of our national expansion. Three other settlements were made
on the Ohio in 1788 near Cincinnati by sons of New Jersey. Within ten
years, Connecticut sent a brave squad of men through the wilderness
of New York to found Cleveland; Virginia sent of her brain and blood
to found one of the most important settlements in Ohio in the fair
Scioto valley. These four settlements, before 1800, in the Black Forest
of Ohio were typically cosmopolitan and had a significant mission in
forming, so far west as Lake Erie and so far south as the lower Ohio,
the cosmopolitan American State par excellence.
But of all these early prompters--Symmes, Cleaveland, Massie, and
Putnam--the last is the most lovable, and the movement he led is the
most significant and interesting. Our subject is so large in all its
leading features, that the personality of Putnam can only be touched
upon. As manager for the Ohio Company, a thousand affairs of both great
and trifling moment were a part of his tiresome routine. Yet the heart
of the colony's leader was warm to the lowliest servant. Many a poor
tired voyager descending the Ohio had cause to know that the founder of
Marietta was as good as a whole nation knew he was brave. In matters
concerning the founding of the "Old Two-Horn," the first church in the
Old Northwest,--and in the organizing of the little academy in the
block-house of the fort, to which Marietta College proudly traces her
founding, the private formative influence of Putnam is seen to clear
advantage. Noble in a great crisis, he was noble still in the lesser
wearing duties of that pioneer colony of which he was the hope and
mainstay. Now called upon by Washington to make the long journey, in
the dark days of 1792 after St. Clair's terrible defeat, to represent
the United States in a treaty with the Illinois Indians on the Wabash;
again, with sweet earnestness settling a difficulty arising between
a tippling clergyman and his church; now, with absolute fairness
and generosity, criticising his brave but high-strung governor for
actions which he regarded as too arbitrary, the character of Rufus
Putnam appeals more and more as a remarkable example of that splendid
simplicity which is the proof and crown of greatness.
A yellow manuscript in Washington's handwriting is preserved in the
New York State Library, which contains his private opinion of the
Revolutionary officers. It is such a paper as Washington would not
have left for the public to read, as it expresses an inside view.
Relatives of a number of these Revolutionary heroes would not read its
simple sentences with pleasure, but the descendants of Rufus Putnam
may remember it with pride: Putnam had not been accused of securing
certificates from his soldiers by improper means; he was not, like
Wayne, "open to flattery--vain"; the odor of a whiskey flask was not
suggested by his name; on the contrary, "he possesses a strong mind
and is a discreet man." Considering the nature and purpose of this
high encomium, it is not less than a hearty "Well done" to a good and
faithful servant.