great states are made of; but the New Englanders at Marietta were, and
so were the New Jerseymen at Cincinnati, who followed next after them
in time. These had even a harder struggle in their beginnings than the
people at Marietta, for there the emigrants made their settlement under
the guns of Fort Harmar, in a region loosely held by the milder Delaware
tribe of the Algonquin nation; but the lands between the Great Miami and
Little Miami were claimed and held by the fierce Miamis and Shawnees,
and they had been so long the battle ground of the Indians and the
Kentuckians that the region was called the Shawnee Slaughter House. The
great warpath of the tribes ran through it from the Ohio River to
Lake Erie, and the first white settlers had to build stations with
blockhouses and stockades before they could begin to till the ancient
fields, where from time to time immemorial the Indians had planted and
gathered their harvests of corn. The first settlers arrived from New
Jersey in December, 1788, some eight months after the settlement
at Marietta, and in a little more than a year a fort was built at
Cincinnati and garrisoned with United States troops; but in 1791 a band
of five hundred Indians, led by Simon Girty, attacked Dunlap’s Station
at Colerain. They were beaten off only after a stubborn fight, though
the Americans were armed with the cannon which the savages so much
dreaded; and before they raised the siege they burned a white prisoner
near the station.
[Illustration: Marrieta, Ohio 186]
This was a surveyor, and one of those New Jersey men of education and
substance who were the earliest settlers in the Symmes Purchase, as the
tract between the two Miamis was called. John Cleves Symmes, a prominent
citizen of Trenton, had bought the land of the government, and he came
himself with his friends to make the place his home. The events of this
emigration were not so poetic as those of the New Englanders who settled
on the Muskingum, but they resulted in the foundation of our greatest
city; and if the first school in Ohio was at Marietta, the first church
was built at Cincinnati. The hamlet opposite the mouth of the Licking
was first known as Losantiville, a name made up of Greek and Latin words
describing its situation, but this was soon changed to Cincinnati. The
fort was built in 1790, and called Fort Washington; it was the strongest
fort in the Northwest Territory, and to its strength Cincinnati owed her
freedom from attacks by the Indians; it was of hewn timber, and was
eighty feet square. At Cincinnati, Harmar and St. Clair began their
march to defeat; here too the recruits for Wayne’s army gathered and
encamped before they began their march to victory.
The past of the place is not so rich in legend as that of much humbler
localities, but there is at least one Indian story which will bear
telling over again. It concerns Jacob Wetzel, the brother of the famous
Lewis Wetzel, who was one day returning from a hunt well within the
bounds of the present city, and had sat down on a log to rest, when a
growl from his dog warned him of danger. He instantly _treed_, or jumped
behind a tree, and then saw an Indian treed behind a neighboring oak.
They both fired; the Indian missed, but Wetzel’s bullet had broken the
savage’s arm. They rushed at each other with their drawn hunting knives,
and fell in a fearful struggle. Wetzel unhurt was no match for the
wounded Indian, who sat astride of him with his knife lifted when
Wetzel’s dog sprung at his throat. Wetzel now flung him off, and while
the dog held him helpless, easily dispatched him. Another story is of
the usual ghastliness relieved by a touch of the comic. Colonel Robert
Elliott was shot by the Indians near the northern line of Hamilton
County. One of them sprang upon him to scalp him, but at a touch the
poor man’s wig came off in his hand. He lifted it and was heard to say
with an oath, “Lie!” while he stared at his trophy in bewilderment.
One of the later captives of the Indians was a boy of eleven named O.
M. Spencer, who was seized near Cincinnati in 1792, and carried to a
Shawnee village on the Maumee, where he was taken into a family. His
case is peculiarly interesting because Washington himself asked his
release through the British governor of Canada; and he was at last
returned to his friends by canoe to Detroit, by sailing vessel to
Erie, by land to Albany, by water to New York, and by land through
Pennsylvania to Cincinnati. He was two years in getting back to his
friends. .
The next settlement in Ohio, and the first within the Virginia Military
District, was at Massie’s Station, now Manchester, where Colonel
Nathaniel Massie, with thirty families, arrived in 1790. They at once
made themselves safe in an inclosure of strong pickets, fortified with
blockhouses, and as the woods and rivers abounded in game and fish, they
began to lead a life of as much comfort as people could enjoy who were
surrounded by a wilderness, with the lurking danger of captivity and
death on every hand.
Six years later, Colonel Massie laid out the town of Chillicothe,
which became the first capital of Ohio, and in the same year, 1796,
the earliest settlers from Connecticut landed at Conneaut in Ashtabula
County. They were led by Moses Cleaveland, a lawyer of Canterbury,
Connecticut, a man of substance and ability, and they had come from
Buffalo, some by land and some by water, but they arrived within a few
hours of one another. It was the Fourth of July, and Cleaveland wrote
in his journal: “We gave three cheers and christened the place Fort
Independence; and, after many difficulties, perplexities, and hardships
were surmounted, and we were on the good and promised land, felt that a
just tribute of respect to the day ought to be paid. There were in all,
including women and children, fifty in number. The men, under Captain
Tinker, ranged themselves on the beach and fired a federal salute of
fifteen rounds, and then the sixteenth in honor of New Connecticut.
Drank several toasts.... Closed with three cheers. Drank several pails
of grog. Supped and retired in good order.”
This was the order of the four lawful settlements in the Ohio country:
first that of the Massachusetts men at Marietta in July, 1788; next,
that of the New Jersey men at Cincinnati in December, 1788; then that of
the Virginia men at Manchester in 1790; and then that of the Connecticut
men at Conneaut in 1796.
XVIII. THE STATE OF OHIO IN THE WAR OF 1812.
We may now begin to speak of the State of Ohio, for with the opening of
the present century her borders were defined. The rest of the Northwest
Territory was called Indiana Territory, and by 1804, Ohio found herself
a state of the Union. There has never since been any doubt of her being
there, and if it had not been for the great Ohio generals there might
now be no Union for any of the states to be in. But it is nevertheless
true that Ohio was never admitted to the Union by act of Congress,
and her life as a state dates only from the adoption of her final
constitution, or from the meeting of her first legislature at
Chillicothe, on the 1st of March, 1803.
The most memorable fact concerning the adoption of this constitution was
the great danger there was that it might allow some form of slavery
in the new state. Slavery had been forbidden from the beginning in the
Northwest Territory, but many of the settlers of the Ohio country were
from the slave states of New Jersey, Virginia, Maryland, and Kentucky,
and there was a strong feeling in favor of allowing women to be held as
slaves till they were thirty-five and men till they were twenty-eight
years old. But in the end, thanks to one of the Massachusetts men of
Marietta, Judge Ephraim Cutler, the friends of slavery were beaten, and
it was forbidden in Ohio in the same words which had forbidden it in the
Northwest Territory.
It had been a long fight and a narrow chance, and the clause that gave
the future to freedom was carried by one vote only. Edward Tiffin was
chosen governor, and the new state entered upon a career of peace and
comfort if not of great prosperity or rapid progress. The Indians if
not crushed were quelled, and the settlers at last lived without fear
of them, until Tecumseh began his intrigues. In the mean time there was
plenty to eat, and enough to wear for all; there was the shelter of the
log cabin, and the fire of its generous hearth. The towns grew, if
they did not grow very rapidly; new towns were founded, and the country
gradually filled up with settlers, or at least the land was claimed.
Immense crops were raised on the fertile soil, and these were mainly fed
to hogs and cattle, which more rapidly found a way to market than the
grain: they could be driven over the bad roads, and the grain had to be
carried. The very richness of the soil when turned to mud forbade good
roads in the new country; and the most thriving settlements were on the
rivers, which, as in the days of the Mound Builders, formed the natural
highways. Many streams were navigable then, which the clearing of the
woods from their banks has since turned to shallow pools in the time of
drouth and to raging torrents in the time of rain; and one of the most
hopeful industries was ship building. The trees turned to masts where
they grew, and many a stately vessel slid into the waters that had
washed its living fibers and glided down the Ohio into the Mississippi
to the sea.
The Ohio people toiled and waited for the inventions of the future to
open ways out into the world for them with the great riches to which
they were shut up in their own borders; but it must have been with a
growing uneasiness. Great Britain, as we know, had long held the forts
in the West which she had agreed to give up to the United States, and
after she surrendered them, her agents and subjects in Canada abetted
the Indians in their rising against the Americans under Tecumseh and
the Prophet. The trouble with the Indians would probably have ended at
Tippecanoe, if it had not been for the outbreak of war between the two
countries; yet this outbreak must have been a kind of relief to the Ohio
people. The English insisted upon the right of searching our vessels
on the high seas, and pressing into their navy any sailors whom they
decided to be British subjects, and though the Ohio people could not
feel the injury of this, as it was felt in the seaboard states whose
citizens were forced into the English service by thousands, they could
feel the insult. They were used to fighting, and they welcomed the war
which at least unmasked their enemies. Their ardor was chilled, however,
by one of its first events, which was the surrender of Detroit by
General Hull. This threw the state open to invasion by the British and
Indians, and the danger was felt in every part of it. The militia were
called out, troops poured in from Kentucky, and General Harrison marched
into the northwest to recapture Detroit. A detachment of his army was
beaten in the first action, which took place beyond the Ohio limits,
and after yielding to the British was butchered in cold blood by their
Indian allies. The next spring Harrison built Fort Meigs on the Maumee;
from this point he hoped to strike a severe blow at the enemy in Canada,
but he was himself attacked here by General Proctor, who marched down
from Maiden with a large force of British regulars, Canadian militia,
and Indians led by Tecumseh.
Proctor planted batteries on the shore of the river, and Tecumseh’s
Indians climbed trees and poured down a galling fire on the besieged.
The British commander then summoned the fort to surrender, but Harrison
answered his messenger, “As General Proctor did not send me a summons on
his first arrival, I had supposed that he believed me determined to do
my duty,” and he dismissed the envoy with the assurance that if the post
fell into Proctor’s hands it would be in a manner to do him more honor
than any surrender could do. The fight then continued until the British
general found his fickle savage friends deserting him, and on the 12th
day raised the siege.
It is probable that the Indians were following their old custom of
leaving off fighting to enjoy a sense of victory when they had won it.
A large body of Kentucky horse had by Harrison’s orders attacked one of
the British positions, and carried it. After spiking the enemy’s guns
they pursued the flying British, and suddenly fell into an ambush of
Indians. Out of eight hundred only one hundred escaped, and the work
of murdering the prisoners at once began. It was on this occasion that
Tecumseh tried to save the lives of the helpless Americans, appealing
to the British general to support him, and even tomahawking with his own
hatchet a disobedient chief who would not give up the work of death.
The allies made a second attempt on Fort Meigs, but they were foiled in
this too, and then they turned their attention to Fort Sandusky, where
the town of Fremont now stands. General Harrison held a council of war,
and it was decided that Fort Sandusky could not resist an attack and
must be abandoned. But when the order to retire reached the gallant
young officer in command it was too late, for the Indians were already
in force around the post. Major Croghan therefore wrote a reply which he
thought might fall into the enemy’s hands, and which he worded for their
eyes rather than his general’s. “Sir, I have just received yours of
yesterday, 10 o’clock p.m., ordering me to destroy this place and
make good my retreat, which was received too late to be carried into
execution. _We have determined to maintain this place, and by heavens we
can!_”
This answer got safely through to General Harrison, who promptly
resented what he thought its presumption and sent to remove Major
Croghan from his command. Croghan went to explain in person and was
allowed to return to his post. The British and Indians appeared in force
the next day, July 31st, and on the 2d of August made their first and
last assault. Colonel Short of the British regulars led a force of 350
men against the fort, and set them the example of leaping into the ditch
before it. When the ditch was full, Croghan opened upon them from a
masked porthole with a six pounder, and raked them from the distance
of thirty-feet. Colonel Short, who had ordered his men to give the
Americans no quarter, fell mortally wounded; he tied his handkerchief to
his sword and waved it in prayer for mercy, and not in vain. Croghan
did all in his power to relieve his disabled foes; he passed buckets of
water to them over the pickets, he opened a space under the pickets that
those who could might creep through into the fort out of their comrades’
fire.
That night the whole force of the enemy retreated in such haste that
they left many stores and munitions behind them. They were commanded by
General Proctor, who had already failed at Fort Meigs against Harrison,
and who now dreaded an attack from him. None was made, but Harrison
had the pleasure of writing in his report of the victory won by Major
Croghan at Fort Stephenson: “It will not be among the least of General
Proctor’s mortifications that he has been baffled by a youth who had
just passed his twenty-first year.”
A little more than a month after this repulse the British were defeated
in the battle of Lake Erie by Commodore Perry, at Put-in-Bay. The action
itself is by no means the most impressive part of the wonderful story
of that great victory. Perry had not only to cope with the British in
waters where they had been undisputed masters, but he had to create
the means of doing so. He brought ship builders, naval stores, guns and
ammunition, as well as sailors for his fleet, four hundred miles through
the wilderness of New York to the wilderness at Erie, Pennsylvania, and
there he hewed out of the forest the stuff which he wrought almost alive
into his ships. On the 1st of August he was ready to sail with two large
vessels of twenty guns each, and seven smaller craft carrying fourteen
guns in all. With these, he met the enemy’s force of six vessels
carrying sixty-four guns, and on the beautiful sunny morning of the 10th
of September the famous fight took place. The Americans at first had
the worst of it; the British guns were of longer range, and Perry’s
flag-ship, the _Lawrence_, was so badly disabled that he had to abandon
it for the _Niagara_, The _Lawrence_ was in fact an unmanageable wreck;
her decks were streaming with blood, but nothing broke the awful order
of the carnage. The men fell at their guns; if wounded, they were
carried below; if killed, they were left where they dropped, while
others took their places.
[Illustration: Admiral Perry on Lake Erie 196]
Perry hauled down his colors with his own hand, and with his flag under
his arm was rowed to the Niagara through a storm of musketry. Once on
board this vessel, he began to change defeat into victory, and after
a fight lasting more than three hours in all, he could send to General
Harrison his memorable dispatch, “We have met the enemy and they are
ours.”
The next day the mournful sequel to this tragedy followed, when the
crews of both fleets, victors and vanquished, joined in burying their
dead on the shore of the bay. The sailors slain in the battle had been
already sunken in the lake, but now to the sound of the minute guns from
the ships, with the sad music of funeral marches, the measured dip of
oars, and the flutter of half-masted flags, the last sad rites were paid
to the fallen officers. Perhaps the Indians under Tecumseh who had seen
with stupid dismay the great battle of the rival squadrons, witnessed
this pathetic spectacle too, before they sullenly withdrew into Canada
after Proctor’s army. There Harrison pursued them, and in his victory
on the banks of the Thames, their mighty chieftain fell, and their cause
perished with him.
XIX. A FOOLISH MAN, A PHILOSOPHER, AND A FANATIC.
“Who is Blennerhassett?” asked William Wirt, at the trial of Aaron Burr
for treason, and many a schoolboy since has echoed the question, as many
a schoolboy will hereafter, while impassioned oratory is music to the
ear and witchery to the breast. The eloquent lawyer went on to answer
himself, and painted in glowing colors a character which history sees
in a colder light. But though Blennerhassett was not the ideal that
Wirt imagined, he was the generous victim of a cold and selfish man’s
ambition, and the ruin of his happy home and gentle hope is none the
less pathetic because his own folly was partly to blame for it.
We must go back of the events which we have been following to an
earlier date, if we wish to find Harman Blennerhassett dwelling with his
beautiful wife on their fairy island in the Ohio. Their earthly paradise
lay in the larger stream at the mouth of the Kanawha, not far from the
present town of Belpre, and there in the first year of the century,
Blennerhassett built a mansion which became the wonder of the West. The
West was not then very well able to judge of the magnificence which it
celebrated, but there seems no reason to doubt that Blennerhassett’s
mansion was fine, and of a grandeur unexampled in that new country where
most men lived in log cabins, and where any framed house was a marvel.
He was of English birth, but of Irish parentage, and to the ardor of
his race he added the refinement of an educated taste. He was a Trinity
College man, and one of his classmates at Dublin was the Irish patriot,
Emmet, who afterwards suffered death for his country. But it does not
appear that Blennerhassett came to America for political reasons, and
he seems to have made his home in the West from the impulse of a poetic
nature, with the wealth and the leisure to realize the fancies of
his dream. “A shrubbery that Shenstone might have envied,” says Wirt,
“blooms around him. Music that might have charmed Calypso and her
nymphs, is his. An extensive library spreads its treasures before him.
A philosophical apparatus offers him all the secrets and mysteries of
nature. Peace, tranquillity, and innocence shed their mingled delights
around him. And to crown the enchantment of the scene, a wife, who
is said to be lovely even beyond her sex, and graced with every
accomplishment that can render it irresistible, had blessed him with her
love.”
Whatever may be the facts concerning the home of the Blennerhassetts,
the memories of those who knew its mistress bear witness to the truth
of these glowing words. They testify that she was not only brilliant,
accomplished, exquisite in manner, but good to every one, kind to the
poor, and devoted to her husband and children. She was a faultless
housewife, as well as a fearless horsewoman, and she was strong in body
as she was active in mind. “She could leap a five-rail fence, walk ten
miles at a stretch, and ride with the boldest dragoon. Robed in scarlet
broadcloth, with a white beaver hat, on a spirited horse, she might be
seen dashing through the dark woods, reminding one of the flight and gay
plumage of a tropical bird.”
To this home and its inmates came Aaron Burr, as bad, brave, and
brilliant a man as ever figured in our public life. He had been a
gallant officer in the Revolution, he had been Vice President of the
United States, he had come within a vote of being President. But he had
killed Alexander Hamilton in the duel which he forced upon him, and all
his knowledge of the world and men had taught him to worship power and
despise virtue. It has not yet been clearly shown what Burr meant or
hoped to do, and possibly he could not have very well said himself; but
it is certain that in a general way he was trying to separate the West
from the East, and to commit the warlike people of the backwoods to a
fine scheme for conquering Mexico from Spain, and setting up an imperial
throne there for him to sit upon. He was always willing to sell out his
fine scheme to France, to England, to any power that would buy, even
to Spain herself; and in the mean time he came and went in the West and
Southwest and built up a party in his favor, which fell to pieces at the
first touch of real adversity. General Wilkinson, of the United States
army, who had been plotting and scheming with Burr, arrested him; he was
tried for treason, and those who had cast their fortunes with him were
carried down in his fall. The most picturesque of the sufferers was
Blennerhassett, who was one of the most innocent. Burr had found other
Ohio people too plodding, as he said, but the Blennerhassetts took him
seriously, and when Burr in his repeated visits tempted the husband, and
flattered the wife, who was ambitious only for her husband, he easily
beguiled them into a belief in his glorious destiny.
[Illustration: Aarun Burr and Blennerhassett 200]
Blennerhassett put all his fortune into the venture. He ordered
fifteen large boats built for transporting five hundred men down the
Mississippi, he contracted for provisioning them, and pledged himself
for the payments of all kinds of debts. His friends tried to reason with
his folly in vain. Governor Tiffin called out a company of militia to
prevent his boats from leaving the Muskingum; Blennerhassett heard
that he was to be arrested, and fled; a troop of Virginians seized
his island, pillaged his house and ruined his grounds; and Mrs.
Blennerhassett with her children embarked amid the ice-floes of the Ohio
on a small flatboat and made her way to her husband in Louisiana. Here
he was taken, but discharged after a few weeks’ imprisonment. They came
back to their island, but they never lived there again, and in 1811 the
house was burned. They wandered from place to place, and grew poorer
and poorer; in 1831 he died at the house of his sister in the island of
Guernsey, and seven years later his wife ended her days in a New York
tenement house.
[Illustration: Johnny Appleseed 202]
Another picturesque figure of our early times was one who never meant
and never imagined harm to any living creature, man or beast, but
gave his simple, humble life to doing good, with no thought of his own
advantage. Perhaps as the world grows more truly civilized the name of
Johnny Apple-seed will be honored above that of some heroes of the Ohio
country. Like so many of our distinguished men, he was not born in our
state, but he came here in his young manhood from his birthplace in
Massachusetts, and began at once to plant the apple seeds which gave him
his nickname.