education, in the same class with Longfellow, at Brunswick, which is in
the same county with Portland, but it is not so generally known that
during his teens his home was at Raymond, on the shore of Sebago Lake,
and in the same county. Part of each year he spent in school at Salem;
but his mother’s home was in the little hamlet in the picturesque
wilderness a few miles from Portland, and here he spent the happiest
months of his youth, as he has testified in many letters. His
biographers have generally failed to take account of this, and, indeed,
have asserted that he was at Raymond only a part of one year. A little
volume recently published, entitled _Hawthorne’s First Diary_, brings
out the facts in this neglected but important episode in the career of
this great master in our literature. While fitting for college,
Hawthorne became, for a single term, the pupil of the Reverend Caleb
Bradley, of Stroudwater, a suburb of Portland. The building in which he
studied is still to be seen at Stroudwater. The house of his mother at
Raymond is converted into a church, but as to exterior remains very much
as when his boy life was spent in it. It was in this same county of
Cumberland that Mrs. Stowe wrote the whole of _Uncle Toms Cabin_, while
her husband was a professor in Bowdoin College. Thus, three of the
greatest names in American literature are linked to Portland and its
immediate vicinity.
Portland can count to her credit many jurists, lawyers, and orators of
national repute, among them Theophilus Parsons, Simon Greenleaf, Ashur
Ware, Sargent S. Prentiss, Nathan Clifford, and George Evans. William
Pitt Fessenden lived and died in the house on State Street now occupied
by Judge W. L. Putnam. Like Fessenden eminent as Senator and Secretary
of the Treasury, Lot M. Morrill spent the last years of his life in
Portland. Still another great Senator and Secretary of the Treasury, who
was also Chief-Justice, honored this city by bearing its name--Salmon
Portland Chase. He was actually named for
[Illustration: Signature]
the town, his uncle, Salmon Chase, being a Portland lawyer, and his
parents were determined that there should be no mistake as to the person
for whom he was named!
At an early period in his career, James G. Blaine edited the _Portland
Daily Advertiser_. Among writers of celebrity, we may name N. P. Willis
and his sister, “Fanny Fern”; John Neal, poet and novelist; Henry W. and
Samuel Longfellow; J. H. Ingraham, whose many novels had a great sale
fifty or sixty years ago; Elijah Kellogg; Mrs. Ann S. Stephens; Seba
Smith, author of the _Jack Downing Letters_, and his more famous wife,
Elizabeth Oakes Smith; Thomas Hill, for a time President of Harvard
University; and the divines, Edward Payson and Cyrus Bartol. The home of
Charles Farrar Brown, “Artemus Ward,” was in an adjoining county, but
like the Chief-Justice just mentioned, he came to Portland for his
baptismal name, his uncle, Charles Farrar, being a Portland physician.
Two sculptors of national fame have gone out from Portland--Paul Akers
and Franklin Simmons, and some of the best works of both these artists
adorn public places in the city. The _Dead Pearl Diver_, by Akers, may
be found in the reading-room of the Public Library; and Simmons has two
bronze statues in the city, one a seated figure of Longfellow, at the
head of State Street, overlooking “Deering’s Woods,” and the other a
noble statue of America, in Monument Square, commemorating the sons of
Portland who died for the Union; no finer soldiers’ monument than this
has ever been erected. Of other artists who have attained distinction,
we may name H. B. Brown, now residing in London, whose landscapes and
marine views have given him a recognized position among the best
American artists; Charles O. Cole, portrait painter; and Charles Codman,
J. R. Tilton, and J. B. Hudson, landscape painters.
Immense sums are being expended on the defences of the city by the
United States government, as it is realized that in case of war with
Great Britain this would be the point of attack, because Portland is the
natural seaport of the Canadas, and Maine is thrust, in a provoking way,
between the Maritime Provinces and the Province of Quebec. Portland can
indulge in no dream of great commercial importance so long as the
country which its position especially dominates is under a foreign
flag; but if ever Maine should be annexed to Canada, or the annexation
takes the alternative form, a great future is assured for a town so
favorably located. In the meantime, the beautiful city must be content
to be the centre of distribution for the pleasure travel of the summer,
and for the other half of the year, by means of its capacious harbor, it
can continue to furnish an outlet for that part of the business of the
Great Lakes which in summer is handled at Montreal.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
OLD RUTLAND, MASSACHUSETTS
THE CRADLE OF OHIO
BY EDWIN D. MEAD
The Old South Historical Society in Boston inaugurated in 1896 the
custom of annual historical pilgrimages. It had learned from Parkman and
Motley and Irving how vital and vivid history is made by visits to the
scenes of history. Its pilgrimages must be short to places near home;
but the good places to visit in New England are many. Great numbers of
people, young and old, join in the pilgrimages. Six hundred went to the
beautiful Whittier places beside the Merrimac, the second year; and as
many the third year to the King Philip country, on Narragansett Bay.
The first year’s pilgrimage was to old Rutland, Massachusetts, “the
cradle of Ohio.” A hundred of the young people went on the train from
Boston, on that bright July day; and when they had climbed to the little
village on the hill, and swept their eyes over the great expanse of
country round about Wachusett and away to Monadnock, and strolled down
to the old Rufus Putnam house, by whose fireside the settlement of
Marietta was planned, a hundred more people had come from the
surrounding villages; and a memorable little celebration was that under
the maples after the luncheon, with the dozen energetic speeches from
the young men and the older ones. It was a fine inauguration of the Old
South pilgrimages, and woke many people to the great possibilities of
the historical pilgrimage as an educational factor.[63]
Ten years before, there was hardly a man in Massachusetts who ever
thought of Rutland as a historical town. The people of Princeton and
Paxton and Hubbardston and Oakham looked across to the little village on
the hill from their villages on the hills, and they did not think of it;
the people of Worcester drove up of a Sunday to get a dinner at the old
village tavern, and they did not think of it; the Amherst College boys
and the Smith College
[Illustration: DR. CUTLER’S CHURCH AND PARSONAGE AT IPSWICH HAMLET,
1787. THE PLACE FROM WHICH THE FIRST COMPANY STARTED FOR THE OHIO,
DECEMBER 3, 1787.]
girls rode past on the Central Massachusetts road, at the foot of the
hill, on their way to Boston, and heard “Rutland!” called, but they
thought nothing of history; and in Boston the last place to which people
would have thought of arranging a historical pilgrimage was this same
Rutland.
Yet when the Old South young people went there on their first
pilgrimage, Rutland had already become a name almost as familiar in our
homes as Salem or Sudbury or Deerfield. The Old South young people
themselves had been led to think very much about it. In 1893, the year
of the World’s Fair at Chicago, the great capital of the great West, a
place undreamed of a hundred years before, when Rutland was witnessing
its one world-historical event, the Old South lectures were devoted to
“The Opening of the West.” Two of the eight lectures were upon “The
Northwest Territory and the Ordinance of 1787” and “Marietta and the
Western Reserve”; two of the leaflets issued in connection were Manasseh
Cutler’s _Description of Ohio in 1787_ and Garfield’s address on _The
Northwest Territory and the Western Reserve_; and one of the subjects
set for the Old South essays
[Illustration: VIEW OF RUTLAND STREET.]
was “The Part Taken by Massachusetts Men in Connection with the
Ordinance of 1787.” These studies first kindled the imaginations of
hundreds of young people and first roused them to the consciousness that
_westward expansion_ had been the great fact in our history from the
time of the Revolution to the time of the Civil War; that New England
had had a controlling part in this great movement, which, by successive
waves, has reached Ohio, Illinois, Kansas, Colorado, Oregon, so that
there is more good New England blood to-day west of the Hudson than
there is east of it; and that this movement, which has transformed the
United States from the little strip along the Atlantic coast which
fought for independence to the great nation which stretches now from sea
to sea, began at the old town of Rutland, Massachusetts. This Rutland on
the hill is the cradle of Ohio, the cradle of the West.
It was not, by any means, these Boston lectures on “The Opening of the
West” which reawakened Massachusetts and the country to the forgotten
historical significance of old Rutland. That awakening was done by
Senator Hoar, in his great oration at the Marietta centennial, in 1888.
Senator Hoar’s oration did not indeed awaken Massachusetts to the great
part taken by Massachusetts men in connection with the Ordinance of
1787, or the part of New England in the settlement and shaping of the
West. No awakening to these things was necessary. There is no New
England household which has not kindred households in the West, ever in
close communication with the old home; and the momentous significance of
the Ordinance of 1787, and the decisive part taken by Massachusetts
statesmen in securing it, the Massachusetts historian and orator were
never likely to let the people forget.
“At the foundation of the constitution of these new Northwestern
States,” said Daniel Webster in his great reply to Hayne, “lies the
celebrated Ordinance of 1787. We are accustomed to praise the
lawgivers of antiquity; we help to perpetuate the fame of Solon and
Lycurgus; but I doubt whether one single law of any lawgiver,
ancient or modern, has produced effects of more distinct, marked
and lasting character than the Ordinance of 1787. That instrument
was drawn by Nathan Dane, a citizen of Massachusetts; and certainly
it has happened to few men to be the authors of a political measure
of more large and enduring consequence. It fixed forever the
character of the population in the vast regions northwest of the
Ohio, by excluding from them involuntary servitude. It impressed on
the soil itself, while it was yet a wilderness, an incapacity to
sustain any other than free men. It laid the interdict against
personal servitude, in original compact, not only deeper than all
local law, but deeper also than all local constitutions. We see its
consequences at this moment, and we shall never cease to see them,
perhaps, while the Ohio shall flow.”
Mr. Hoar spoke as strongly of the Ordinance, in his Marietta oration.
“The Ordinance of 1787 belongs with the Declaration of Independence and
the Constitution; it is one of the three title-deeds of American
constitutional liberty.” But the chief merit of his oration was not the
new emphasis with which he said what Webster had said, but the
picturesqueness and the power with which he brought the men and the
events of that great period of the opening of the West home to the
imagination. The oration was especially memorable for the manner in
which it set Rufus Putnam, the man of action, the head of the Ohio
Company, the leader of the Marietta colony, in the centre of the story,
and made us see old Rutland as the cradle of the movement.
Complete religious liberty, the public support of schools, and the
prohibition forever of slavery,--these were what the Ordinance of 1787
secured for the Northwest. “When older States or nations,” said Mr.
Hoar, “where the chains of human bondage have been broken, shall utter
the proud boast, ‘With a great sum obtained I this freedom,’ each sister
of this imperial group--Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois,
Wisconsin--may lift her queenly head with the yet prouder answer, ‘But I
was free-born.’” The moment of this antislavery article of the
Ordinance, in view of the course of our national history during the
century that has followed, it would not be possible to overstate. When
the great test of civil war came, to settle of what sort this republic
should be, who dare contemplate the result had these five States been
slave States and not free!
Massachusetts makes no false or exclusive claims of credit for the
Ordinance of 1787. She does not forget the services of William Grayson,
nor those of Richard Henry Lee. She does not forget Thomas
Jefferson.[64]
The names of Nathan Dane, Rufus Putnam, Rufus King, Timothy Pickering
and Manasseh Cutler are names of the greatest moment in the history of
the West. No other group of men did so much as these Massachusetts men
to determine what the great West should be, by securing the right
organization and institutions for the Northwest Territory and by
securing at the beginning the right kind of settlers for Ohio.
It was really Manasseh Cutler who did most at the final decisive moment
to secure the adoption
[Illustration: MANASSEH CUTLER.]
[Illustration: NATHAN DANE]
of the clause in the great Ordinance which forever dedicated the
Northwest to freedom. Of all these Massachusetts men he was by far the
most interesting personality; and of all revelations of the inner
character of that critical period, none is more interesting or valuable
than that given by his _Life and Letters_. It is to be remembered too
that the first company of men for Marietta--Cutler urged _Adelphia_ as
the right name for the town--started from Manasseh Cutler’s own home in
Ipswich, joining others at Danvers, December 3, 1787, almost a month
before the Rutland farmers left to join Putnam at Hartford. For the
shrine of Manasseh Cutler is not at Rutland, but at Hamilton, which was
a part of Ipswich. The home of Nathan Dane was Beverly.
“It happened,” said Edward Everett Hale, at the Marietta
centennial, “that it was Manasseh Cutler who was to be the one who
should call upon that Continental Congress to do the duty which
they had pushed aside for five or six years. It happened that this
diplomatist succeeded in doing in four days what had not been done
in four years before. What was the weight which Manasseh Cutler
threw into the scale? It was not wealth; it was not the armor of
the old time; it was simply the fact, known to all men, that the
men of New England would not emigrate into any region where labor
and its honest recompense is dishonorable. The New England men will
not go where it is not honorable to do an honest day’s work, and
for that honest day’s work to claim an honest recompense. They
never have done it, and they never will do it; and it was that
potent fact, known to all men, that Manasseh Cutler had to urge in
his private conversation and in his diplomatic work. When he said,
‘I am going away from New York, and my constituents are not going
to do this thing,’ he meant exactly what he said. They were not
going to any place where labor was dishonorable, and where workmen
were not recognized as freemen. If they had not taken his promises,
they would not have come here; they would have gone to the Holland
Company’s lands in New York, or where Massachusetts was begging
them to go--into the valley of the Penobscot or the Kennebec.”
Senator Hoar, in his oration, said of Manasseh Cutler:
“He was probably the fittest man on the continent, except Franklin,
for a mission of delicate diplomacy. It was said just now that
Putnam was a man after Washington’s pattern and after Washington’s
own heart. Cutler was a man after Franklin’s pattern and after
Franklin’s own heart. He was the most learned naturalist in
America, as Franklin was the greatest master in physical science.
He was a man of consummate prudence in speech and conduct; of
courtly manners; a favorite in the drawing-room and in the camp;
with a wide circle of friends and correspondents among the most
famous men of his time. During his brief service in Congress, he
made a speech on the judicial system, in 1803, which shows his
profound mastery of constitutional principles. It now fell to his
lot to conduct a negotiation second only in importance to that
which Franklin conducted with France in 1778. Never was ambassador
crowned with success more rapid or more complete.”
But here, in old Rutland, it is not with Manasseh Cutler that we are
concerned, but with Rufus Putnam. Rufus Putnam was the head of the Ohio
Company, and the leader in the actual settlement of the new Territory.
It was with Putnam that Manasseh Cutler chiefly conferred concerning the
proposed Ohio colony. He left Boston for New York, on his important
mission, on the evening of June 25, 1787, and on that day he records in
his diary: “I conversed with General Putnam, and settled the principles
on which I am to contract with Congress for lands on account of the Ohio
Company.” Of Rufus Putnam, Senator Hoar said in his oration, after his
tributes to Varnum, Meigs, Parsons, Tupper and the rest:
[Illustration: Rufus Putnam]
“But what can be said which shall be adequate to the worth of him
who was the originator, inspirer, leader, and guide of the Ohio
settlement from the time when he first conceived it, in the closing
days of the Revolution, until Ohio took her place in the Union as a
free State in the summer of 1803? Every one of that honorable body
would have felt it as a personal wrong had he been told that the
foremost honors of this occasion would not be given to Rufus
Putnam. Lossing calls him ‘the father of Ohio.’ Burnet says, ‘He
was regarded as their principal chief and leader.’ He was chosen
the superintendent at the meeting of the Ohio Company in Boston,
November 21, 1787, ‘to be obeyed and respected accordingly.’ The
agents of the company, when they voted in 1789 ‘that the 7th of
April be forever observed as a public festival,’ speak of it as
‘the day when General Putnam commenced the settlement in this
country.’ Harris dedicates the documents collected in his appendix
to Rufus Putnam, ‘the founder and father of the State.’ He was a
man after Washington’s own pattern and after Washington’s own
heart; of the blood and near kindred of Israel Putnam, the man who
‘dared to lead where any man dared to follow.’”
Mr. Hoar recounts the great services of Putnam during the Revolution,
beginning with his brilliant success in the fortification of Dorchester
Heights:
“We take no leaf from the pure chaplet of Washington’s fame when we
say that the success of the first great military operation of the
Revolution was due to Rufus Putnam.”
But it was not Senator Hoar’s task to narrate the military services of
General Putnam.[65]
“We have to do,” he said, “only with the entrenchments constructed
under the command of this great engineer for the constitutional
fortress of American liberty. Putnam removed his family to Rutland,
Worcester County, Mass., early in 1780. His house is yet standing,
about ten miles from the birthplace of the grandfather of President
Garfield. He himself returned to Rutland when the war was over. He
had the noble public spirit of his day, to which no duty seemed
trifling or obscure. For five years he tilled his farm and accepted
and performed the public offices to which his neighbors called him.
He was representative to the General Court, selectman, constable,
tax collector and committee to lay out school lots for the town;
State surveyor, commissioner to treat with the Penobscot Indians
and volunteer in putting down Shays’s Rebellion. He was one of the
founders and first trustees of Leicester Academy, and, with his
family of eight children, gave from his modest means a hundred
pounds toward its endowment. But he had larger plans in mind. The
town constable of Rutland was planning an empire.”
Putnam’s chief counsellor in his design at the first was Washington,
whose part altogether in the opening of the West was so noteworthy. Mr.
Hoar tells of the correspondence between Putnam and Washington, and
follows the interesting history to the organization of the Ohio Company,
at the Bunch of Grapes Tavern in Boston, in 1786, and the departure of
the Massachusetts emigrants at the end of the next year.
“Putnam went out from his simple house in Rutland to dwell no more
in his native Massachusetts. It is a plain, wooden dwelling,
perhaps a little better than the average of the farmers’ houses of
New England of that day; yet about which of Europe’s palaces do
holier memories cling! Honor and fame, and freedom and empire, and
the faith of America went with him as he crossed the threshold.”
To Rutland, as one who loved the old town and its history has well said,
“belongs the honor of having carried into action the Ordinance of 1787.
Standing on Rutland hill, and looking around the immense basin of which
it forms the centre, it is with conscious pride that one looks upon the
old landmarks and calls up to the imagination the strong and brave and
true men whose traditions have permeated the soil and left their marks
in the civilization which has been the type for the development of the
whole of the great Northwest.” For this old town on the hilltop was
veritably “the cradle of Ohio.” Here was first effectually heard that
potent invitation and command, so significant in the history of this
country in these hundred years, “Go West!” This town incarnates and
represents as no other the spirit of the mighty movement which during
the century has extended New England all through the great West.
As early as 1783, about the time of the breaking up of the army at
Newburgh on the Hudson, General Putnam and nearly three hundred army
officers had proposed to form a new State beyond the Ohio, and
Washington warmly endorsed their memorial to Congress asking for a grant
of land; but the plan miscarried. As soon as the Ordinance was passed,
the Ohio Company, of which Putnam was the president, bought from the
government five or six million acres, and the first great movement of
emigration west of the Ohio at once began. Within a year following the
organization of the territory, twenty thousand people became settlers
upon the banks of the Ohio. But the Pilgrim Fathers of the thousands and
the millions, the pioneers to whom belongs the praise, were the forty or
fifty farmers who from old Rutland pushed on with Putnam through the
snows of Connecticut and Pennsylvania, coming to Pittsburgh just as the
spring of 1788 came, and dropping down the river to Marietta in the
little boat which they had named, by a beautiful fatality, the
_Mayflower_. “Forever honored be Marietta as another Plymouth!”
The men who first settled the Northwest Territory,--as President Hayes,
following Mr. Hoar at Marietta, well called it, “the most fortunate
colonization that ever occurred on earth,”--and who set the seal of
their character and institutions upon it, were of the best blood of New
England.
“Look for a moment,” said Mr. Hoar, “at the forty-eight men who
came here a hundred years ago to found the first American civil
government whose jurisdiction did not touch tide-water. See what
manner of men they were; in what school they had been trained; what
traditions they had inherited. I think that you must agree
[Illustration: SITE OF MARIETTA AND HARMAR, 1788.]
that of all the men who ever lived on earth fit to perform ‘that
ancient, primitive and heroical work,’ the founding of a State,
they were the fittest.”
Here we remember too the words of Washington.
“No colony in America,” said Washington, the warm friend of Putnam,
who was deeply concerned that the development of the West should
begin in the right way, in the hands of the right men, “was ever
settled under such favorable auspices as that which has just
commenced at the Muskingum. Information, property and strength will
be its characteristics. I know many of the settlers personally, and
there never were men better calculated to promote the welfare of
such a community.”
We honor old Rutland not only because she sent men to open the West, but
because she sent her best, because she pitched the tone for the great
West high.
But Rutland is not only “the cradle of Ohio,” pre-eminent as that
distinction is in her history. She also--like the other towns on the
hills round about her, and like every good old New England town--has her
long line of simple local annals, well worthy the attention of the
summer visitor from Boston or Chicago. Happy are you if you hear them
all from the lips of one or another of the local antiquarians, as you
ride with him through the fields to Muschopauge Pond, or along the
Princeton road to Wachusett, or over Paxton way to see the lot which
Senator Hoar has bought on the top of Asnebumskit Hill,--perhaps finding
the Senator himself on the hill, as we did, where he could see Worcester
in one direction, and in the other, Rutland.
[Illustration: THE “CENTRAL TREE.”]