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

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.

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.

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.