modern needs and means are different from those of former days, but our
schools are still the royal roads, the people’s roads, to and from the
world of letters and arts. Ohio is now second to no other state in her
public school system: and well-nigh three-quarters of a century ago,
when General Lafayette visited Cincinnati in his tour of the Republic
which he had helped to found, nothing surprised and charmed him more
than the greeting which the children of her public schools gave him. It
spoke to him of a refined and graceful life, such as he could never have
imagined in the young city so lately carven out the forests; and such
proofs of the general culture must have done more than all the signs of
material prosperity, all the objects of industry so proudly shown him,
to make him regard Ohio (to use his own words) as the eighth wonder of
the world. Six hundred boys and girls from the public schools met him at
sunrise, on the morning of his arrival, and scattered flowers under his
feet and made the air ring with their shouts of “Welcome to Lafayette!”
As for the Indians, who fought so long and so hard here for the graves
of their fathers and the homes of their children, they had to find their
ways out too. But it would not be easy to say what became of them all,
for they went such various ways out of Ohio and out of the world. Some
remained in the country which they had lost, and in a few cases they
tried to take on the likeness of civilized men. But oftener they only
took on the vices of civilization; they were the drunkards and the
vagrants of their neighborhoods, living by a little work and by the
contemptuous charity of the settlers. In them the proud spirit of their
race was broken; they suffered insult and outrage from their conquerors
without resisting; a small white Titian might knock a stalwart Indian
down with his fist, and the Indian would not attempt to revenge himself.
For a while, the settlers feared the lingering red men, but they soon
learned to despise them, and it was seldom that they troubled the whites
by theft or violence.
A good many of the tribesmen followed the British into Canada, after the
War of 1812, where it must be owned to our shame as Americans that they
had wiser, kinder, and juster treatment than we gave those who remained
with us, and who followed westward from their old hunting grounds in
Ohio the buffalo, the elk, the beaver, and the deer. Several nations,
or parts of nations, were gathered on reservations in Seneca, Lucas,
and Wyandot counties, where they were given land and taught farming and
other trades. Missionaries came to dwell among them and try to make them
Christians, and many were converted. The Quakers seem to have done the
best work in this way, for the Indians always trusted and loved the men
of peace.
But although their friends could teach the Indians to plow and sow,
to build houses and barns, to make tools and mend them, to sing and to
pray, and to wear clothes and to lead decent and sober lives, they could
not uproot all their old customs and superstitions. The superstition
that seemed to last longest was the belief in witchcraft, which was
indeed very common among their white neighbors. Nearly all forms of
sickness were treated as the effect of witchcraft by the Indians, and
the afflicted were carried into the woods and left alone with none near
them except the medicine man whose business it was to expel the witch.
A suspected witch or wizard might be safely killed by any kinsman of
the sufferer; and it is said that Indians were known to walk all the
way from the Mississippi to the Ohio reservations in order to shoot down
persons accused of witchcraft, and then return unmolested. In 1828,
the Mingo chief Seneca John was put to death by two of his tribesmen as
ruthlessly as Leatherlips in 1812. He was accused of having bewitched
the chief Comstock, and though he protested, “I loved my brother
Comstock better than the green earth. I stand upon; I would shed my
blood, drop by drop, to bring him back to life,” yet he was sentenced
to die, and Comstock’s brothers, Coonstick and Steel, carried out the
sentence.
In 1831 the Senecas ceded their lands, forty thousand acres on the
Sandusky, to the United States, and were removed to the southwest of the
Missouri. Each of the other reservations was given up in turn for lands
in the Far West, and in the early forties I myself, when a boy living in
Hamilton, saw the last of the Ohio Indians passing through the town on
the three canal boats which carried the small remnant of their nation
southward and westward out of the hind that was to know them no more
forever.
[Illustration: Indian evacuation by River 223L]
It was quite time. I cannot say how far they had been civilized, and for
all I know they may have been tame farmers and mechanics, but in their
moccasins and blankets, with their bows and arrows, they looked like
wild hunters; and Ohio was no longer a good hunting ground. All the
larger game had long been killed off or driven away, and the smaller
game was fast vanishing before the rifle and the shotgun. As if its
destruction by gunners singly was not rapid enough it was the custom in
somewhat earlier days for whole neighborhoods to meet together for the
wholesale slaughter of the sylvan creatures which still abounded. One of
these great hunts took place in Medina County, in 1818, when the region
was as yet very sparsely settled. The drive, as it was called, was fixed
for the 24th of December, and at sunrise, six hundred men and boys drew
up their far-spreading lines. They were armed with rifles, shotguns,
old muskets, pistols, knives, axes, hatchets, bayonets fastened to long
poles, and whatever other weapons they could lay hands on, to shoot,
strike, or stab with, and they began to draw their vast circle together
with a hideous uproar of horn, conchshells, and voices. The deer fled
inward from all sides; bear and wolf left their coverts in terror; foxes
and raccoons joined the panic rout, and the air was full of the flight
of wild turkeys. Then the slaughter began, and before it ended three
hundred deer, twenty-one bears, and seventeen wolves were killed; of the
turkeys and the smaller game no tale was kept.
Later these drives were common in the years whenever game was abundant
in any neighborhood. They were called squirrel-hunts, because the
squirrel was the unit, and larger or smaller game counted so many
squirrels, or went to make up the value of a squirrel. I knew of one
of these hunts during the late fifties in Northern Ohio, when the wild
pigeons were still in such multitude that their flight darkened the sky,
where now one of them is rarely seen.
XXI. THE FIGHT WITH SLAVERY.
Almost from the beginning Ohio was called the Yankee state by her
Southern neighbors. Burr had found her people too plodding for him, as
he said, and it would not have been strange if the older slave-holding
communities on her southern and eastern border had seen with distrust
and dislike the advance of the young free state, and had given her that
nickname partly out of envy and partly out of contempt. Their citizens
were high-spirited and generous, but they had not the public spirit
which New England had imparted to Ohio, for public spirit comes from
equality and from the feeling for others’ rights, and the very supremacy
which the slaveholders enjoyed was fatal to this feeling. Virginia and
Kentucky were rich in independent character, but public spirit is
better than this, for it cares for the independence of all through the
self-sacrifice of each. That was the secret which Ohio early learned
from New England, and which kept her safe from slavery when it pressed
so hard upon her in the friendship as well as the enmity of her
neighbors.
We know that the Northwestern Territory was devoted to freedom by the
law that created it, but we have seen that slavery was kept out of Ohio
by one vote only when her first constitution was adopted; and for a
very long time there was a very large party favorable to slavery in our
state. It will seem strange to many of my readers that Ohio people of
color were once not only not allowed to vote, but were not allowed to
give testimony in the courts of law. They were treated in this like the
Southern slaves, and in fact there was really a sort of slaveholding
in Ohio, in spite of the law. In the river counties many farmers
hired slaves from their masters in Virginia and Kentucky; and when the
Southerners traveled through Ohio, they brought their slaves into the
state with them, and took them out again. But when the conscience of the
Northern people began to stir against slavery, the Ohio abolitionists
coaxed away the slaves of these Southern travelers and sojourners,
and this, with the constant escape of runaway slaves by their help,
infuriated the friends of slavery inside as well as outside of the
state. The abolitionists had what they called the Underground Railroad,
with stations at their houses in town and country, and they sped the
fugitives from one to another till they reached Canada. Their enemies
accused them of tempting slaves across the Ohio, in order to give them
their freedom, and in a little while the rage against them broke out in
mobs and riots.
It would not be easy to trace here the course of events which led to
these outbreaks. It is no doubt true that the abolitionists were often
rash, if not reckless, and that when they were maddened by the coldness
or the hostility of the people to the cause of human freedom they did
not stop at some acts which, though they were righteous enough, were
unlawful. It was unlawful to harbor runaway slaves, but they did it
gladly, and they appealed to the passions as well as the consciences of
men in their hate of the sum of all villainies, as John Wesley called
slavery. They not only met their foes half way, they carried the war
into the hearts and homes of the enemy. From time to time wicked and
sorrowful things happened to fret their fanaticism and keep it at a
white heat. Peaceable negroes were attacked in their homes by ruffianly
whites, their cattle killed, their fields wasted; and sometimes they
made a bloody resistance. They were not always harmless, and they were
not always pleasant neighbors. Slavery was a bad school, for the slaves
as well as the masters; and the negroes, when not vicious and dishonest,
were degraded and ignorant, for the public schools were shut against
them, and they could not read, any more than they could vote or bear
witness. So it is not strange that they should have been hunted and
harried everywhere in Southern Ohio.
In Pike County a whole neighborhood was invaded, and several lives were
lost before one of these foolish and wicked persecutions ended. This
incident, which was one of many more or less violent, occurred in 1830,
and two years later something still more tragical happened. A negro
calling himself Thomas Marshall, who had lived several years at Dayton,
was caught up in the streets of that town by some men who, when his
cries brought the citizens to his help, declared that he was a runaway
slave. They took him before a magistrate, and proved their charge; but
one of the slavecatchers held out the hope that his master would sell
him. The poor slave gave fifty dollars himself toward his freedom, and
his ransom was well made up when word came from his owner in Kentucky
that he would not part with him for any sum. His captors then took
Marshall to Cincinnati, where he was lodged for safe keeping over night
in the fourth story of a hotel. When his guards fell asleep, the slave
rose and threw himself out of the window to the ground fifty feet below.
He was taken up fatally hurt, and he died at dawn.
The anti-slavery meetings were often broken in upon by mobs and
sometimes broken up. One of these riots took place in 1834 at Granville,
in Licking County, where the Ohio Anti-slavery Convention held its
anniversary in a barn on the outskirts. The members were returning to
the village in a procession when the mob met them, and at sight of the
ladies among them shouted, “Egg the squaws!” and began to pelt them with
eggs and other missiles, while some ran and tried to trip them up.
Many of the men were beaten and egged, and the manes and tails of their
horses were shaved. This was a favorite argument with the friends of
slavery, and if shaving horses’ manes and tails could have availed,
their party would easily have won.
Some of the anti-slavery speakers and lecturers came on missions from
the Eastern States, but several of the fiercest and bravest were
like the Rev. John Rankin, of Clermont County, who had emigrated
from Tennessee to Ohio, because he would not live in a slaveholding
community. He used to preach against slavery at frequent peril of his
life, and his son tells how a mob leader once mounted to his pulpit,
and threatened him with his club. “Stop speaking, or I will burst your
head,” he shouted, but Rankin went quietly on as if nothing had been
said, and one of his friends dragged the ruffian from his side. Of
course, he was always coming home with his horse’s mane and tail shaved,
and of course his house was a station on the underground railroad to
freedom.
One of the boldest of the abolitionists was James G. Birney, who like
Rankin had come to Ohio from the South. He started a newspaper called
_The Philanthropist_ in Cincinnati, and for three months attacked
slavery unsparingly in it. Then, on the 23d of July, 1836, the mob rose,
broke into the printing office, threw the types into the street,
tore down the press, and cast the fragments into the river. Then they
assailed the black people living in one of the alleys, and shots were
exchanged but no lives were lost. A few years later, however, in 1841,
a general assault was made upon the negroes by the mob; several on
both sides were killed and many wounded, and the office of _The
Philanthropist_ was again destroyed. Of course these things did not stop
the fight against slavery, and it did not help slavery at all when
the authorities of Lane Theological Seminary at Cincinnati forbade the
students to write or to talk about it. That was foolish and useless; it
only hurt the seminary, and drove many students from it to the college
at Oberlin, then newly founded in the woods of Lorain County. There they
could not only discuss slavery, but they could learn about it at
first hand from the negro students. The founders of Oberlin were not
abolitionists, but it is related that when they took Christ for their
guide, they found that they could not shut out the friendless people
whom the law kept from the schools, the polls, and the courts.
These few scattered facts will give some notion of the bitter feeling
that prevailed during the first ten or twelve years of the fight against
slavery in Ohio. Afterwards it became less intense, as slavery became a
political question between the two great parties of that day, the Whigs
and the Democrats. Neither party expected to abolish slavery, but the
Whigs hoped to keep it out of the territories and all the new states.
Both parties split upon this question at last, and in 1856 the
anti-slavery Whigs and anti-slavery Democrats joined in forming the
Republican party, which in 1860 elected Abraham Lincoln upon its promise
to shut slavery up to the states where it already existed.
But it must not be supposed, because the first bitter feeling had passed
away, that the facts were changed or that the tragedies and outrages had
ceased. After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, there was
a new hunt for runaways all over the state, and business on the
underground railroad was never so brisk. The hatred of slavery was
revived in all its intensity by such cases as that of Margaret Gorden
in 1856. This unhappy mother had escaped from Kentucky with her four
children to the house of a free colored man below Mill Creek in Hamilton
County, where they remained concealed with thirteen other fugitives. One
night the place was suddenly attacked by the slavehunters under the lead
of the United States officers. A fight followed, and several on both
sides were wounded, but at last the slaves were overpowered. While the
officers were dragging the others from the house, Margaret seized a
knife from the table, and killed her little daughter rather than see
it taken back to slavery, and then turned the bloody weapon against
herself, but failed in the attempt on her own life. She was taken to
Cincinnati and tried, not for murder, but for escaping from slavery,
together with the other fugitives, who said they would “go singing to
the gallows,” if only they need not go back to the South. They were all
found guilty of seeking to be free, and were returned to their owners.
On her way down the river it is said that Margaret jumped from the
boat with one of her remaining little ones in her arms. The child was
drowned, but Margaret was saved for the fate which she dreaded, and
which she had twice risked her own and her children’s life to shun. What
became of her at last was never known; it is only known that she was
carried back to her owner. She had two deep scars on her black face.
At her trial she was asked what made them, and she answered “White man
struck me.”
In Champaign County, a fugitive slave named Ad White resisted the
attempt of the slavehunters to take him, in 1857, and fired upon one of
the United States marshals, whose life was saved by the negro’s bullet
striking against the marshal’s gunbarrel. The people and their officers
took the slave’s side, and the case was fought in and out of court.
The sheriff of the county was brutally beaten with a slungshot by the
marshal who had so narrowly escaped death himself, and never take a
thousand dollars for him; the money was promptly raised and paid over,
and White lived on unmolested.
[Illustration: Slavery issue 232]
As late as the summer of 1860 a fugitive slave was arrested near Iberia,
in Morrow County. A party of young men caught one of the marshals
and shaved his head, while others beat his comrades. Rev. Mr. Gordon,
President of Ohio Central College, stood by trying to prevent the
punishment, but he alone was arrested. He was sentenced to prison,
where he lay till Lincoln pardoned him. The pardon did not recognize his
innocence, and he would not leave his cell until his friends forced him
to do so. By this time the damp jail air had infected him, and he died,
shortly after, of consumption.
One would think that such things as these would have cured the Ohio
people of all sentiment for slavery, for they had no real interest in
it. But even in the second year of the Civil War, which the love of
slavery had stirred up against the Union, the famous anti-slavery
orator, Wendell Phillips, was stoned and egged while trying to lecture
in Cincinnati. Before this time, however, events had gone so far that
there was no staying them. One of the earliest and chiefest of these
events was the attempt of John Brown to free the slaves in Virginia. He
had already fought slavery in Kansas, where it was trying to invade free
soil, and in 1859 he thought that the time had come to carry the war
into the enemy’s country. He did this by placing himself with a small
force of daring young men, several of his own sons among the rest, in
the mountains near Harper’s Ferry. He hoped that when he had seized
the United States Arsenal at that point, and given them arms the slaves
would join him, and help to fight their way to the free states under his
lead. But when they were attacked in the Arsenal, Brown and his men
were easily overpowered by a detachment of Marines sent from Washington;
several of his followers were killed; a few escaped; the rest suffered
death with their leader on the gallows at Charlestown.
Some think that Brown was mad, some that he was inspired, some that he
was right, some that he was wrong; but whatever men think of him, there
are none who doubt that he was a hero, ready to shed his blood for
the cause he held just. His name can never die, so long as the name of
America lives, and it is part of the fame of Ohio that he dwelt many
years in our state. For many years of his younger manhood Brown had
lived at Hudson, in Summit County; for months before his attempt in
Virginia he and his men were coming and going at different points in the
Western Reserve, and in Ashtabula County where one of his sons then had
a farm, he kept hidden the pikes with which he hoped to arm the slaves.
One of the young men who died with him on the scaffold at Charlestown
was the Quaker lad, Edwin Coppock, of Columbiana County, who wrote, two
days before he suffered, a touching letter of farewell to his friends.
“I had fondly hoped to live to see the principles of the Declaration
of Independence fully realized; I had hoped to see the dark stain of
slavery blotted from our land.... But two more short days remain to me
to fulfill my earthly destiny. At the expiration of those days I shall
stand upon the scaffold to take my last look of earthly scenes. But that
scaffold has but little dread for me, for I honestly believe that I am
innocent of any crime justifying such a punishment. But by the taking of
my life and the lives of my comrades, Virginia is but hastening on the
day when the slave will rejoice in his freedom.”
[Illustration: John Brown making pikes for Slaves 234R]
XXII. THE CIVIL WAR IN OHIO
Though the Ohio people were too plodding for Aaron Burr, and though they
were taunted almost from the first as the Yankee state of the West, they
seem to have had war in their blood, which may have been their heritage
from the long struggle with the Indians. But after the peace with Great
Britain in 1815 there was no war cloud in the Ohio sky until Morgan
swept across our horizon with his hard-riders, except at one time in
1835. There had then arisen between our state authorities and those
of Michigan a dispute concerning the border line between the two
commonwealths, and matters went so far that the governors of both States
called out their militia. The Michigan troops actually invaded Ohio,
and overran the watermelon patches near Toledo, ate the chickens of
the neighborhood, destroyed an ice house, and carried off one Ohioan
prisoner. But the mere terror of the Ohio name sufficed to send them
flying home again when they heard that our riflemen were waiting for
them in Toledo, and many deserters from their ranks took to the woods
on their way back. This vindicated the glory of our state; we cheerfully
submitted when the arbitrators chosen to settle the dispute decided it
mainly in favor of Michigan, and we have ever since lived at peace with
that commonwealth.
All this seems now like a huge joke, and so it has ever since been
regarded, but a war was coming which was serious enough. It might be
said that the great Civil War began with “John Brown’s invasion of
Virginia,” in 1859, but it might just as well be said that it began with
the fighting for and against freedom in Kansas in 1856. In fact it might
be said that it began with the mobbing of anti-slavery speakers and the
rescue of runaway slaves all over the North, from 1830 onwards. Yet this
would be fantastic, even if it were true, and we had better accept the
dates which history gives. In 1860 Abraham Lincoln was elected President
by the men opposed to the spread of slavery, and in 1861 the slave
states, feeling that their mastery of the Union was gone, left it one
after another, and the first fighting took place through the effort of
the United States government to hold its forts in the South.
In this war, Ohio played so great a part, that it is hard for Ohio
people to keep from claiming that she played the first part. Remembering
that General Grant, General Sherman, General Sheridan, the three
greatest soldiers of the war, were all Ohio men, we might be tempted to
claim that without these the war would not have been won for the Union,
but it is safer to claim nothing more than that Ohio gave the nation the
generals who won the war. Our three greatest soldiers were only chief
among many others under whose lead Ohio sent to the war some three
hundred and twenty thousand men, during the four years of fighting, a
force almost as great as that of whole nations in other times.
[Illustration: John Morgan invades Ohio in 1863 237]