FOOTNOTES:
[1] Washington's diary of this journey is printed in full in Hulbert, "Washington and the West," 27-105.
[2] Hulbert, "Washington and the West," 195-6.
CHAPTER III
After Examination Henderson is licensed to practise Law. —Defeat of the Shawnees by the Virginians who claimed the Land south of the Ohio.—The Attention of Settlers directed to the Land beyond the Alleghanies.—Henderson resolves to form a Transylvania Company and colonize Ken-ta-kee.—Buys from the Cherokees twenty million Acres for ten thousand Pounds Sterling, March, 1775.—Bands of Earlier Kentucky Settlers, fleeing from the Indians, meet Henderson's Colonists.—His Advance, led by Daniel Boone, attacked by Indians.—Henderson appeals in vain to the Fugitives to return with him.—Arrival of the Colonists at the Site of Boonesborough.—Henderson's Anxiety regarding Virginia's Attitude toward his Purchase.—The Governor of Virginia sends a Force which overthrows the Colony.—Actual Settlers on the Purchase permitted to remain in Title.—Grants of Land made to the Company by Virginia and North Carolina in Return for their Outlay.—The Moral Effect of this Proof that the West could be successfully colonized.
RICHARD HENDERSON: THE FOUNDER OF TRANSYLVANIA
In early days in North Carolina, the young man who desired to practise law was compelled to get a certificate from the Chief Justice of the colony and to present this to the Governor; the latter examined the candidate, and, becoming satisfied as to his attainments, granted him a license. Almost a century and a half ago a youth presented himself to the Governor of that colony with the proper credentials and asked that he be examined for admission to the bar. His name, he affirmed, was Richard Henderson. His father, Samuel Henderson, had moved from Virginia in 1745, Richard's tenth year, and was now Sheriff of Granville County. Richard had assisted his father "in the business of the sherifftry," and, with a few books, had picked up his knowledge of law.
All this the Governor of North Carolina learned with indifference, we can imagine, as he looked the broad-shouldered lad up and down. It may be that North Carolina had now a surplus of pettifoggers; at any rate the Governor was not granting licenses with a free hand to-day. The youth was not voluble, though his firm square jaw denoted both sturdiness and determination; perhaps he was somewhat abashed, as he well may have been, in the presence of the chief executive of the colony.
"How long have you read law?" asked the Governor.
"A twelve-month," answered the lad.
"And what books have you read?" We can fancy there was the tinge of a sneer in these words. Henderson named his books. If the sneer was hidden until now, it instantly appeared as the young applicant was bluntly told that it was nonsense for him to appear for an examination after such a short period of study of such a limited number of books.
The firm jaws were clinched and the gray eyes snapped as the rebuke was administered. Despite his homely exterior and unpolished address the boy was already enough of a jurist to love justice and fair play; if silent under many circumstances, he could speak when the time demanded speech.
"Sir," he replied,—and it can be believed there was a ring to the words,—"I am an applicant for examination: it is your duty to examine me; if I am found worthy, I should be granted a license, and if not, I should be refused one, not before."
We can be sure that the Governor bristled up at hearing his duty outlined to him from the lips of a country boy; and it is no less probable that as he began an examination it was wholly with the intention of demoralizing utterly the spirit of the youth who had spoken so boldly. The answers did not come so rapidly, probably, as the questions were asked, nor were they formulated with equal nicety; but the substance was there, of sufficient quantity and sturdy quality, and in short order the Governor, who was a gentleman, found himself admiring the cool, discerning lad who had the confidence of his convictions. The license was granted and with it a bountiful degree of honest praise.
Young Henderson immediately began the practice of law and was increasingly successful; before the outbreak of the Revolution he was judge on the bench of the Superior Court of North Carolina. As early as 1774 North Carolina was convulsed in the Revolutionary contest, and in that year the Colonial government was abolished there.
The student will search in vain to find the earliest motive which led Judge Henderson to turn his eyes to the westward at this juncture. Yet since he had come of age he had witnessed important events: the French and Indian War had been fought and won; Pontiac's rebellion had been put down; the famous treaty of Fort Stanwix, which gave Virginia all the territory between the Ohio and Tennessee rivers, had been signed; and now in 1774, when North Carolina was in the throes of revolution, Governor Dunmore of Virginia and General Andrew Lewis defeated the savage Shawnees who had attempted to challenge Virginia's right to the land south of the Ohio. The stories of the first explorers of the hinterland beyond the Alleghanies—Walker, Gist, Washington, and Boone—were now attracting more attention as people began to believe that the Indians could, after all, be made to keep their treaty pledges. As the Revolutionary fires raged in North Carolina, many turned their eyes to the fresh green lands beyond the mountains of which the "Long Hunters" and Boone had told. Were those dreams true? Was there a pleasant land beyond dark Powell's Valley and darker Cumberland Gap where the British would cease from troubling, and honest men, as well as criminals and debtors, would be at rest? The hope in one man's breast became a conviction, and the conviction a firm purpose. Judge Henderson resolved to form a Transylvania Company, secure a large tract of land, and lead a colony into the sweet meadows of Ken-ta-kee.
It is not known when or how Judge Henderson learned that the Cherokees would sell a portion of their Western hunting grounds. It may have been only a borderland rumor; perhaps it came directly from the wigwams of the Indians at the mouth of a "Long Hunter," possibly a Boone or a Harrod. Somehow it did come, and Henderson resolved immediately to make a stupendous purchase and follow it up with a remarkable emigration. It will be proper to add at once that there is as little probability that the Cherokees had a legal right to sell as that Henderson had to buy; but neither party stood on technicalities. Virginia's sweeping claims, made good by daring politics at the treaty of Fort Stanwix, covered all the territory between the Ohio and the Tennessee. A Virginian law forbade the private purchase of land from the Indians, though Virginia herself had acquired it by flagrantly evading the plain meaning of the King's proclamation of 1763 in making such a purchase from the Six Nations. And the claim of the Six Nations to possession of the Old Southwest was less substantial than that of the Cherokees who still hunted there.
Passing, then, these technicalities as lightly as Virginia and Henderson did (a common failing in the rough old days when this region was but a moaning forest), let us look quickly to the West. Henderson's plan was admirably laid. He at once took into his service the cool and trusty Daniel Boone. The latter was posted off to that most distant of borderland communities, the Watauga Settlement, to arrange a meeting between the officers of the Transylvania Company and the chiefs of the Cherokees. And here, at the famed Sycamore Shoals on this Watauga tributary of the Tennessee, on the 17th of March, 1775, Richard Henderson signed the treaty of Fort Watauga. His business associates were Judge John Williams, Leonard Henley Bullock, James Hogg, Nathaniel Thomas, David Hart, John Luttrell, and William Johnstone. But even the well-informed Boone could not make all things move smoothly, and there were delays ere the vast tract of twenty million acres lying south of the Kentucky River was satisfactorily secured. The Cherokee chieftain, Oconostota, opposed the treaty, and the stipulation named, ten thousand pounds sterling in goods; he made, it is said, one of the "most eloquent orations that ever fell from red man's lips," against Boone and Henderson. At the close the quiet promoter, who "could be silent in English and two Indian languages," met the Indian orator apart and alone. No one ever knew what passed between them, but the treaty of Fort Watauga was duly signed. All was ready now for the advance movement, and Henderson immediately employed Daniel Boone to move forward to mark the path to the Kentucky River, where the settlement was to be made. Felix Walker was one of the band of woodsmen assembled by Boone to assist in this task of marking out for white men the Indian path through Cumberland Gap. "Colonel Boone ... was to be our pilot," Walker records, "through the wilderness, to the promised land."
Kentucky was a promised land; it was promised by the Cherokees, and none knew better than the savage Shawnees that Cherokee promises were worth no more than their own. In 1773 and 1774 numbers of the half-civilized pioneers had been pressing into Kentucky, and in the latter year cabins had been raised in many quarters. Whether or not there was any sign of genuine permanency in these beginnings, Dunmore's War, which broke out in 1774, put everything at hazard; the Kentucky movement was seemingly destroyed for the time being. For this reason it is that the Henderson purchase at Fort Watauga in March, 1775, was of as precious moment and providential timeliness as perhaps any other single private enterprise in our early history. As will be seen, the Ohio Company played a most important role in the history of the West in 1787, by making possible the famous Ordinance; but the filling of Kentucky in 1775 was more important at that hour than any other social movement at any other hour in Western history.
For Henderson "meant business": this was not a get-rich-quick scheme that he was foisting upon others. He came to Watauga in the expectation of proceeding onward to the farlying land he would buy—a man willing to make great personal as well as financial risk in a venture more chimerical in its day than the incorporation of an airship freight line would be to-day. And by the twentieth of March, Henderson was ready to push westward, along that winding line of wounded trees, up hill and down valley, to the Gap and beyond into the wilderness which lay between the Cumberland Mountains and the meadow lands of Kentucky.
Leaving Fort Watauga March 20, the party, chief of which were Henderson, Hart, and Luttrell, reached Captain Joseph Martin's station in Powell's Valley on the thirtieth. Of the experiences of these men, recounted so interestingly in Henderson's little yellow diary, nothing is so significant as the parties of pioneers which they soon began to meet retreating from Kentucky. The first of these hurrying bands of fugitives was encountered as early as April 7, and between that date and April 19 at least seventy-six fugitives from the "dark and bloody ground" met and passed Henderson's little colony of forty. Lewis's victory of the Summer before had embittered the savages beyond all words; and now, as the Spring of 1775 dawned in the lonely mountain valleys, these first adventurers into Kentucky were hurrying eastward. And this dread of Indian hostility was not a chimera; even as Boone's party was hacking its route to the Kentucky River, it was ambushed in camp by an Indian horde, which assailed it when night was darkest, just before dawn; one man was killed and two were wounded, one of them fatally.
Now it was that Boone sent Henderson those thrilling words which can be understood only when we realize that the Indian marauders were driving out of Kentucky the entire van which came there and began settling in 1774. "My advice to you, Sir," wrote Boone from that bloody battleground on the trail, "is to come or send as soon as possible. Your company is desired greatly, for the people are very uneasy, but are willing to stay and venture their lives with you, and now is the time to frustrate the intentions of the Indians, and keep the country whilst we are in it. If we give way to them now, it will ever be the case."
There is, unfortunately, no portrait of Richard Henderson in existence; if one picture by some magic art could be secured, those who are proudest of his memory could surely prefer no scene to this: a man a little above average height, broad of shoulders but not fleshy, clad in the rough garb of the typical pioneer, standing in Boone's trail on a ragged spur of the gray-grained Cumberlands, pleading with a pale-faced, disheartened Kentucky pioneer, to turn about, join his company, and return to the Kentucky River. For this was the mission of his life—to give heart to that precious movement into Kentucky at this critical first hour of her history. A beginning had been made, but it was on the point of being swept from its feet. The Transylvania Company, led with courage and confidence by Boone and Henderson, ignored the fears of fugitives and triumphed splendidly in the face of every known and many unknown fears.
At noon of Saturday, April 8, Henderson and his followers were toiling up the ascent into Cumberland Gap. On this day a returning party as large as Henderson's was encountered. "Met about 40 persons returning from the Cantuckey," wrote Henderson in his diary. "On Acct. of the Late Murder by the Indians, could prevail one [on] one only to return. Memo. Several Virginians who were with us returned." On the twelfth another company of fugitives was met on Richmond Creek; William Calk, one of Henderson's party, jotted this down in his journal: "There we met another Company going back [to Virginia]; they tell such News Abram and Drake is afraid to go aney further." This "Abram " was Abraham Hanks, uncle of Nancy Hanks, the mother of Abraham Lincoln. But pushing bravely on, Henderson and his daring associates reached the site of the new Boonesborough (Fort Boone, Henderson called it) on the twentieth of April.
From this it is well to date the founding of a genuine settlement in Kentucky, one day after the rattle of that running fire of muskets at Lexington and Concord which rang around the world. In an indefinite sense, there were settlements in Kentucky before this; but no promoter-friend of Kentucky ever coaxed back over the Cumberland Mountains any of the founders of Boonesborough! True, Boonesborough itself did not exist permanently; but not because the land was deserted. Boonesborough was not on the direct line from Cumberland Gap to the "Falls of the Ohio" (Louisville), and did not play the part in later Kentucky history that Harrodsburg and Crab Orchard did. It was, however, the first important fortified Kentucky station, and its builders, chief of whom was Richard Henderson, received their heroic inspiration from no persons or parties in existence in Kentucky when they came thither. Henderson's determination to hold the ground gained is seen in the following letter written in July, 1775, to Captain Martin, in Powell's Valley, who had just given the Indians a bloody check: "... Your spirited conduct gives me great pleasure. Keep your men in heart if possible; now is your time, the Indians must not drive us." A touch of the loneliness of Judge Henderson's situation is sensed in another letter to Martin: "I long much to hear from you," he writes from the banks of the far-away Kentucky, "pray write me at large, how the matter goes with you in the valley, as well as what passes in Virginia."
Little wonder he was anxious concerning Virginia's attitude toward his purchase and the bold advance of his party of colonizers, from which several Virginians had deserted. There could be no doubt of Virginia's opinion of these North Carolinians who had taught that colony what could be done in the West by brave, determined men. Henderson's purchase was annulled, and Henderson and his compatriots were described as vagabond interlopers, in a governor's anathema. Before this was known, Henderson issued a regular call for a meeting of the colonists to take the initial steps of forming a State government. But all that Henderson planned is not to our purpose here. A rush of Virginians through the doorway in Cumberland Gap, which Boone and Henderson had opened, swept the inchoate state of Transylvania from record and almost from memory. The Transylvania Company never survived the Virginia governor's proclamation, North Carolina joining Virginia in repudiating the private purchase. Actual settlers on Henderson's purchase, however, were permitted to remain in title; and, in return for the money expended by Henderson and his associates, Virginia granted his company two hundred thousand acres of land in the vicinity of Henderson, Kentucky; and North Carolina granted an equal amount in Carter's Valley near the Cumberland Mountains. In each case the actual acreage was about double that mentioned in the grant.
But this appropriation of nearly a million acres to the Henderson Company cannot be viewed at this day as other than a payment for great value received. From any standpoint Richard Henderson's brave advance into Kentucky, in April, 1775, must be considered one of the most heroic displays of that typical American spirit of comprehensive aggrandizement of which so much is heard to-day. Its great value may be guessed from the moral effect of the founding of Fort Boone at the critical hour when the Revolutionary flames, so long burning in secret, burst forth to enlighten the world. It meant much to the East that Henderson and Boone should prove that a settlement on the lower Ohio Basin could be made and maintained; it meant everything to the infant West that Kentucky should so soon begin to fill with men, women, and children. The debt of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois to Kentucky can never be paid and probably never will be appropriately recognized. The lands north of the Ohio were freed from savage dominion largely by the raiding Kentuckians. It is certain that the most spectacular campaign in Western history, Clark's conquest of Illinois, would never have taken place in 1778 if Henderson and Boone had not placed the possibility of successful Kentucky immigration beyond a reasonable doubt in 1775.
Judge Henderson returned to North Carolina upon the failure of the Transylvania Company, no doubt depressed and disappointed. The later allotment of land to the Transylvania Company by Virginia and North Carolina in part annulled the severe early defamatory charges of the Virginia governor. He lived to a peaceful old age, and lies buried near his old colonial mansion near Williamstown, North Carolina.
Boonesborough is well remembered as Boone's Fort; but it is unjust to forget that Boone was acting in the employ of Richard Henderson, the founder of Transylvania.
CHAPTER IV
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.
Rufus Putnam
Leader of the Founders of Marietta, Ohio
The hero of the movement, General Rufus Putnam, was one of those plain, sturdy, noble men whom it is a delight to honor. He was born at Sutton, Massachusetts, April 9, 1738, and was thus six years younger than Washington, who always honored him. With little education, save that gained from a few books bought with pennies earned by blacking boots and running errands for guests at his illiterate stepfather's inn, he became a self-made man of the best type,—the man who seizes every advantage from book and friend to reach a high plane and scan a wider horizon. The Old French War was the training school for the Revolutionary conflict; and here, with Gates and Mercer and Washington and St. Clair and Wayne and Gladwin and Gibson, Rufus Putnam learned to love his country as only those can who have been willing to risk and wreck their all in her behalf.
Then came the Revolution. In the first act of the glorious yet pitiful drama Rufus Putnam stands out conspicuously; for "we take no leaf from the pure chaplet of Washington's fame," affirmed Senator Hoar, of Massachusetts, "when we say that the success of the first great military operation of the Revolution was due to Rufus Putnam." The story is of intrinsic interest. On a winter's evening in 1776, Rufus Putnam was invited to dine at the headquarters of the Commander-in-chief in the camp before Boston. After the dinner party had broken up, Washington detained him with questions concerning the proper policy to be pursued with reference to the future plan of campaign. As is well known, Washington favored an entrenchment on Dorchester Heights which would bring on a second Bunker Hill with a fair chance of victory, rather than the alternative of marching upon the city across the ice-bound waters. But the frozen state of the ground was a serious handicap in any entrenchment plan at that moment. Putnam was asked in short how the equivalent of entrenchments could be erected; the solving of the question meant the deliverance of Massachusetts from the burden of British occupation. This son of the State was equal to the moment, and his own simple account of the means adopted is exceptionally interesting:
"I left headquarters in company with another gentleman, and on our way came by General Heath's. I had no thoughts of calling until I came against his door, and then I said, 'Let us call on General Heath,' to which he agreed. I had no other motive but to pay my respects to the general. While there, I cast my eye on a book which lay on the table, lettered on the back 'Müller's Field Engineer.' I immediately requested the general to lend it to me. He denied me. I repeated my request. He again refused, and told me he never lent his books. I then told him that he must recollect that he was one who, at Roxbury, in a measure compelled me to undertake a business which, at the time, I confessed I never had read a word about, and that he must let me have the book. After some more excuses on his part and close pressing on mine I obtained the loan of it."
"In looking at the table of contents," writes Senator Hoar, "his eye was caught by the word 'chandelier,' a new word to him. He read carefully the description and soon had his plan ready. The chandeliers were made of stout timbers, ten feet long, into which were framed posts, five feet high and five feet apart, placed on the ground in parallel lines and the open spaces filled in with bundles of fascines, strongly picketed together, thus forming a movable parapet of wood instead of earth, as heretofore done. The men were immediately set to work in the adjacent apple orchard and woodlands, cutting and bundling up the fascines and carrying them with the chandeliers on to the ground selected for the work. They were put in their place in a single night.
"When the sun went down on Boston on the 4th of March, Washington was at Cambridge, and Dorchester Heights were as nature or the husbandman had left them in the autumn. When Sir William Howe rubbed his eyes on the morning of the 5th, he saw through the heavy mists, the entrenchments, on which, he said, the rebels had done more work in a night than his whole army would have done in a month. He wrote to Lord Dartmouth that it must have been the employment of at least twelve thousand men. His own effective force, including seamen, was but about eleven thousand. Washington had but fourteen thousand fit for duty. 'Some of our officers,' said the 'Annual Register,'—I suppose Edmund Burke was the writer,—'acknowledged that the expedition with which these works were thrown up, with their sudden and unexpected appearance, recalled to their minds the wonderful stories of enchantment and invisible agency which are so frequent in the Eastern Romances.' Howe was a man of spirit. He took the prompt resolution to attempt to dislodge the Americans the next night before their works were made impregnable. Earl Percy, who had learned something of Yankee quality at Bunker Hill and Lexington, was to command the assault. But the Power that dispersed the Armada, baffled all the plans of the British general. There came 'a dreadful storm at night,' which made it impossible to cross the bay until the American works were perfected. The Americans, under Israel Putnam, marched into Boston, drums beating and colors flying. The veteran British army, aided by a strong naval force, soldier and sailor, Englishman and Tory, sick and well, bag and baggage, got out of Boston before the strategy of Washington, the engineering of Putnam, and the courage of the despised and untried yeomen, from whose leaders they withheld the usual titles of military respect. 'It resembled,' said Burke, 'more the emigration of a nation than the breaking up of a camp.'"
His later solid achievements during the war made him, in Washington's estimation, the best engineer in the army, whether French or American, and "to be a great engineer with only such advantages of education as Rufus Putnam enjoyed, is to be a man of consummate genius." A sober, brave man of genius was required to lead to a successful issue the great work to which Rufus Putnam was now providentially called.
The vast territory between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi came into the possession of the United States at the close of the Revolution. Then it was made possible for Congress to grant the bounty-lands promised to soldiers at the beginning of the war, and likewise to redeem its worthless script in Western lands. This a grateful government was willing to do, but the question was vast and difficult. If occupied, the territory must be governed. Few more serious problems faced the young Republic.
The question was practically solved by two men, Rufus Putnam and that noble clergyman, Manasseh Cutler, pastor of the Congregational church at Ipswich, Massachusetts. Through Putnam, a large body of officers and men had petitioned Congress urgently for Western land: "Ten years ago you promised bounties in lands," was Putnam's appeal now to Congress through General Washington; "we have faithfully performed our duty, as history will record. We come to you now and ask that, in redemption of your promise, you give us homes in that Western wilderness. We will hew down the forests, and therein erect temples to the living God, raise and educate our children to serve and love and honor the nation for which their fathers fought, cultivate farms, build towns and cities, and make that wilderness the pride and glory of the nation." The Ohio Company of Associates was organized at the Bunch of Grapes Tavern, in Boston, March 1, 1786, by the election of Rufus Putnam, chairman, and Winthrop Sargent, secretary. As the agent of this organization, Dr. Cutler hastened to New York, while the famous Ordinance of 1787 was pending. This instrument had been before Congress for three years, but was passed within twelve days after this hero-preacher and skilled diplomat came to New York. The Ordinance organized, from lands ceded to the general government by the several States, the magnificent tract known as the Territory Northwest of the River Ohio. The delay had been caused by the hazard of erecting a great Territory, to be protected at heavy expense, without having it occupied by a considerable number of worthy citizens. The Ohio Company of Associates had offered to take a million and a half acres. This was unsatisfactory to the delegates in Congress. It was a mere clearing in all that vast tract stretching from the Alleghany to the Wisconsin. Dr. Cutler hastened to New York to reconcile the parties interested.
Rev. Manasseh Cutler
Ohio Pioneer
The situation was prophetically unique. The Northwest Territory could not be organized safely without the very band of colonizers which Cutler represented and of which Putnam was the leader. On the other hand, the Ohio Company could not secure Western land without being assured that it was to be an integral part of the country for which they had fought. Putnam's appeal read: "All we ask is that it shall be consecrated to us and our children forever, with the blessing of that Declaration which, proclaimed to the world and sustained by our arms, established as self-evident that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that to secure these ends, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just power from the consent of the governed." Thus the famed Ordinance and the Ohio Company's purchase went hand in hand; each was impossible without the other. In order to realize the hope of his clients on the one hand, and satisfy the demands of the delegates in Congress on the other, Dr. Cutler added to the grant of the Ohio Company an additional one of three and a half million acres for a Scioto Company. Thus, by a stupendous speculation (so unhappy in its result, though compromising in no way the Ohio Company or its agents), and by shrewdly, though without dissimulation, making known his determination to buy land privately from one of the individual States if Congress would not now come to terms, Dr. Cutler won a signal victory. The Ordinance of 1787 was passed, corrected to the very letter of his own amendments, and the United States entered into the largest private contract it had ever made.
With the passing of the Ordinance and the signing of the indented agreement for the Ohio Company by Cutler and Sargent on the 27th of October of that most memorable year in our documentary annals, a new era of Western history dawned. Up to that moment, there had been only illegal settlements between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes—Zeisberger's Moravians on the Tuscarawas. On numerous occasions troops had been sent from Pittsburg (Fort Pitt) to drive away from the northern side of the Ohio settlers who had squatted on the Seven Ranges, which Congress had caused to be surveyed westward from the Pennsylvania line. It being difficult to reach these squatters from Pittsburg, Fort Harmar was erected at the mouth of the Muskingum, in 1785, where troops were kept to drive off intruders, protect the surveyors, and keep the Indians in awe. The Ohio Company's purchase extended from the seventh through the seventeenth range, running northward far enough to include the necessary amount of territory. It was natural, then, that the capital of the new colony should be located at the mouth of the Muskingum, under the guns of the fort.
The New Englanders who formed the Ohio Company were not less determined in their venture than were the North Carolinians who formed the Transylvania Company thirteen years before; and, though the founders of Marietta, Ohio, ran no such risk (it has been said) as did the founders of Boonesborough, Kentucky, we of to-day can have no just appreciation of the toil and the wearing years which these founders of the Old Northwest now faced. Yet danger and fear were no novelty to them. How fitting it was that these men, who first entered the portals of the Northwest, bearing in their hands the precious Ordinance and guided by the very star of empire, should have been in part the heroes of the two wars which saved this land from its enemies. One cannot look unmoved upon that body of travellers who met at daybreak, December 6, 1787, before Dr. Cutler's home at Ipswich, to receive his blessing before starting. Theirs was no idle ambition. No Moravian, no Jesuit with beads and rosary, ever faced the Western wilderness with a fairer purpose. In Kentucky, the Virginians had gained, and were holding with powerful grasp, the fair lands of Ken-ta-kee; elsewhere the Black Forest loomed dark and foreboding. Could the New Englanders do equally well?
Their earnestness was a prophecy of their great success. In December the first party of carpenters and boat-builders, under Major Hatfield White, started on the westward journey, and in January 1788 the remainder of the brave vanguard, under Colonel Ebenezer Sproat and General Rufus Putnam, followed. These were the forty-eight "Founders of Ohio." The rigors of a northern winter made the long journey over Forbes's, or the Pennsylvania Road, a most exhaustive experience. This road through Lancaster, Carlisle, Shippensburg, and Bedford was from this time forward a connecting link between New England and Ohio. It was a rough gorge of a road ploughed deep by the heavy wheels of many an army wagon. Near Bedford, Pennsylvania, the road forked; the northern fork ran on to Pittsburg; the southern, struck off southwestwardly to the Youghiogheny River and the lower Ohio. This branch the New England caravan followed to Sumrill's Ferry on the Youghiogheny, the present West Newton, Pennsylvania. Here Putnam planned to build a rude flotilla and descend the Youghiogheny, Monongahela, and Ohio to Fort Harmar. The severe winter prevented immediate building of this fleet, but by April all was in readiness. The main boat was a covered galley, forty-five feet long, which was most appropriately named the "Adventure Galley." The heavy baggage was carried on a flat boat and a large canoe.
Of the men who formed Putnam's company what more can be said—or what less—than what Senator Hoar has left in his eloquent centennial oration at Marietta in 1888?
"The stately figures of illustrious warriors and statesmen, the forms of sweet and comely matrons, living and real as if you had seen them yesterday, rise before you now. Varnum, than whom a courtlier figure never entered the presence of a queen,—soldier, statesman, scholar, orator,—whom Thomas Paine, no mean judge, who had heard the greatest English orators in the greatest days of English eloquence, declared the most eloquent man he had ever heard speak; Whipple, gallant seaman as ever trod a deck,—a man whom Farragut or Nelson would have loved as a brother, first of the glorious procession of American naval heroes, first to fire an American gun at the flag of England on the sea, first to unfurl the flag of his own country on the Thames, first pioneer of the river commerce of the Ohio to the Gulf; Meigs, hero of Sagg Harbor, of the march to Quebec, of the storming of Stony Point, the Christian gentleman and soldier, whom the Cherokees named the White Path, in token of the unfailing kindness and inflexible faith which had conveyed to their darkened minds some not inadequate conception of the spirit of Him who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life; Parsons, soldier, scholar, judge, one of the strongest arms on which Washington leaned, who first suggested the Continental Congress, from the story of whose life could almost be written the history of the Northern War; the chivalric and ingenious Devol, said by his biographer to be 'the most perfect figure of a man to be seen amongst a thousand'; the noble presence of a Sproat; the sons of Israel Putnam and Manasseh Cutler; Fearing, and Greene, and Goodale, and the Gilmans; Tupper, leader in Church and State, the veteran of a hundred exploits, who seems, in the qualities of intellect and heart, like a twin brother of Rufus Putnam; the brave and patriotic, but unfortunate St. Clair, first Governor of the Northwest, President of the Continental Congress;—the mighty shades of these heroes and their companions pass before our eyes, beneath the primeval forest, as the shades of the Homeric heroes before Ulysses in the Land of Asphodel."
It did not argue that the New Englanders on the Ohio could hold their ground simply because the Kentucky movement had been for over a decade such a marvellous success. Its very success was the chief menace of the Kentucky problem. The eyes of five thousand Indians were fastened there, for from Kentucky had come army after army, driving the savages northward out of the valleys of the Muskingum, Scioto, and Miami Rivers, until now they hovered about the western extremity of Lake Erie. By a treaty signed at Fort McIntosh in 1786, the Indians had sold to the United States practically all of eastern and southern Ohio. And so the settlement at the mouth of the Muskingum at this critical moment was in every sense a test settlement. There was a chance that the savages would forget the Kentuckians who had driven them back to the Lakes and made possible the Ohio Company settlement and turn upon the New Englanders themselves who now landed at the mouth of the Muskingum on the 7th of April, 1788, and began their home-building on the opposite bank of the Muskingum from Fort Harmar.
Here sprang up the rude pioneer settlement which was to be, for more than a year, the capital of the great new Territory—forever the historic portal of the Old Northwest. These Revolutionary soldiers under Putnam combined the two names Marie Antoinette, and named their capital Marietta in memory of the faithfulness of Frenchmen and France to the patriot cause. Here arose the stately forest-castle, the Campus Martius, and near it was built the office of the Ohio Company, where General Putnam carried on, in behalf of the Ohio Company, the important business of the settlement. In July, 1788, Governor St. Clair arrived, and with imposing ceremony the great Territory was formally established and its governor inaugurated.
Putnam's brave dream had come true. The best blood and brain of New England were now on the Ohio to shape forever the Old Northwest and the great States to be made from it. The soldiers were receiving the promised bounties, and an almost worthless half-a-million dollars had been redeemed in lands worth many millions. The scheme of colonization, which was but a moment before a thing of words and paper, became a living, moving influence of immense power. Another New England on the Ohio arose full-armed from the specifications of the great Ordinance and the daring confidence of Rufus Putnam and his colony. South of the Ohio, the miserable Virginia system of land ownership by tomahawk-claim was in force from the Monongahela to the Tennessee; north of the Ohio, the New England township system prevailed. South of the Ohio, slavery was permitted and encouraged; to the northward, throughout the wide empire included within the Ordinance, slavery was forever excluded. Two more fundamental differences could not have existed. And to these might be added the encouragement given by the Ordinance to religion and education. The coming of the Ohio Company to Marietta meant many things to many men, but the one great fundamental fact is of most importance. The founding of Marietta by Rufus Putnam in reality made possible the Ordinance of 1787—of which Daniel Webster said, "I doubt whether one single law of any lawgiver, ancient or modern, has produced effects of more distinct, marked, and lasting character."
The heroic movement which has justly given Rufus Putnam the title "Father of Ohio" has been one of the marvellous successes of the first century of our national expansion. Three other settlements were made on the Ohio in 1788 near Cincinnati by sons of New Jersey. Within ten years, Connecticut sent a brave squad of men through the wilderness of New York to found Cleveland; Virginia sent of her brain and blood to found one of the most important settlements in Ohio in the fair Scioto valley. These four settlements, before 1800, in the Black Forest of Ohio were typically cosmopolitan and had a significant mission in forming, so far west as Lake Erie and so far south as the lower Ohio, the cosmopolitan American State par excellence.
But of all these early prompters—Symmes, Cleaveland, Massie, and Putnam—the last is the most lovable, and the movement he led is the most significant and interesting. Our subject is so large in all its leading features, that the personality of Putnam can only be touched upon. As manager for the Ohio Company, a thousand affairs of both great and trifling moment were a part of his tiresome routine. Yet the heart of the colony's leader was warm to the lowliest servant. Many a poor tired voyager descending the Ohio had cause to know that the founder of Marietta was as good as a whole nation knew he was brave. In matters concerning the founding of the "Old Two-Horn," the first church in the Old Northwest,—and in the organizing of the little academy in the block-house of the fort, to which Marietta College proudly traces her founding, the private formative influence of Putnam is seen to clear advantage. Noble in a great crisis, he was noble still in the lesser wearing duties of that pioneer colony of which he was the hope and mainstay. Now called upon by Washington to make the long journey, in the dark days of 1792 after St. Clair's terrible defeat, to represent the United States in a treaty with the Illinois Indians on the Wabash; again, with sweet earnestness settling a difficulty arising between a tippling clergyman and his church; now, with absolute fairness and generosity, criticising his brave but high-strung governor for actions which he regarded as too arbitrary, the character of Rufus Putnam appeals more and more as a remarkable example of that splendid simplicity which is the proof and crown of greatness.
A yellow manuscript in Washington's handwriting is preserved in the New York State Library, which contains his private opinion of the Revolutionary officers. It is such a paper as Washington would not have left for the public to read, as it expresses an inside view. Relatives of a number of these Revolutionary heroes would not read its simple sentences with pleasure, but the descendants of Rufus Putnam may remember it with pride: Putnam had not been accused of securing certificates from his soldiers by improper means; he was not, like Wayne, "open to flattery—vain"; the odor of a whiskey flask was not suggested by his name; on the contrary, "he possesses a strong mind and is a discreet man." Considering the nature and purpose of this high encomium, it is not less than a hearty "Well done" to a good and faithful servant.
CHAPTER V
The Grave of David Zeisberger, Moravian Missionary to the Indians.—The Great Length of his Service.—His Flight from Moravia to Saxony.—Arrival at Bethlehem, Pa.—He studies the Mohawk Language.—Visits the Land of the Iroquois and is captured as a French Spy.—Imprisoned by Governor Clinton and freed by Parliament.—The Iroquois place in his Mission-house the Archives of their Nation.—He converts Many Delawares in Western Pennsylvania.—His Work interrupted by Pontiac's Rebellion.—The Delawares invite him to the Black Forest of Ohio.—He takes with him Two Whole Villages of Christian Indians.—Their Unfortunate Location between Fort Pitt and Fort Detroit in the Revolutionary War.—They are removed by the British to Sandusky.—One Hundred of them, being permitted to return, are murdered by the Americans.—The Remnant, after Many Hardships, rest for Six Years in Canada, and return to Ohio.—Zeisberger's Death.
DAVID ZEISBERGER: HERO OF "THE MEADOW OF LIGHT"
In the centre of the old Black Forest of America, near New Philadelphia, Ohio, a half-forgotten Indian graveyard lies beside the dusty country road. You may count here several score of graves by the slight mounds of earth that were raised above them a century or so ago.
At one extremity of this plot of ground an iron railing incloses another grave, marked by a plain, marble slab, where rest the mortal remains of a hero, the latchets of whose shoes few men of his race have been worthy to unloose. And those of us who hold duty a sacred trust, and likeness unto the Nazarene the first and chiefest duty, will do well to make the acquaintance of this daring and faithful hero, whose very memory throws over the darkest period of our history the light that never was on sea or land.
The grave is that of David Zeisberger, the Moravian missionary to the Indians in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and Canada for fifty active years, who was buried at this spot at his dying request, that he might await the Resurrection among his faithful Indians. His record is perhaps unequalled in point of length of service, by the record of any missionary of any church or sect in any land at any time. Among stories of promotion and daring in early America, this one is most unique and most uplifting.
On a July night in 1726 a man and his wife fled from their home in Austrian Moravia toward the mountains on the border of Saxony for conscience' sake. They took with them nothing save their five-year-old boy, who ran stumbling between them, holding to their hands. The family of three remained in Saxony ten years. Then the parents emigrated to America, leaving the son of fifteen years in Saxony to continue his education. But within a year he took passage for America and joined his parents in Georgia, just previous to their removal to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
The lad soon became interested in the study of the Delaware Indian language among the natives of that tribe living along the Susquehanna, and at once showed great proficiency. Appreciating his talent, the fathers of the Moravian Church determined to send the young man to Europe, that in the best universities he might secure the finest training. He went as far as New York. There, just as his ship was to sail, he pleaded with tears and on his knees to be allowed to return to the woods of Pennsylvania and the school of the red men there. The words of the wise were overcome by those of the youth, and an earnest soul, as brave as it was earnest, was saved to a life of unparalleled sacrifice and devotion.
On returning to Bethlehem Zeisberger joined a class that was studying the Mohawk tongue, the language of that most powerful tribe of the Iroquois nation which practically controlled, by tomahawk and threat, all the territory between the colonies and the Mississippi. Soon the looked-for opportunity of visiting the Iroquois land came, and the young student was told off to accompany the heroic Frederick Christian Post. This was in the dark year 1744, only a few months previous to the outbreak of the Old French War. The lad was now in his twenty-third year.
In February of the next year, after these two men entered the shadow of New York, the report was circulated in New York City that two spies had been captured among the Iroquois, who were guilty of attempting to win that nation over to the French. Such a charge at this time was the most serious imaginable, for the contest for the friendship of the Iroquois between the French on the St. Lawrence and the English on the Atlantic was now of great importance. Upon that friendship, and the support it guaranteed, seemed to hang the destiny of the continent. The report created endless consternation, and the spies were hurried on to Governor Clinton, who demanded that the younger be brought before him instantly.
"Why do you go among the Indians?" asked Clinton, savagely. It was David Zeisberger to whom he spoke, a youth not daunted by arrogance and bluster.
"To learn their language," he replied, calmly.
"And what use will you make of their language?"
"We hope," replied the lad, "to get the liberty to preach among the Indians the Gospel of our crucified Saviour, and to declare to them what we have personally experienced of His grace in our hearts."
The Governor was taken aback. This was a strange answer to have come from a spy's lips. Yet he drove on rough-shod, taking it for granted that the lad was lying, and that there was an ulterior motive for the dangerous journey at such a time. Remembering the fort the English had built near the present site of Rome, New York, and by which they hoped to command the Mohawk Valley and the portage path to Wood Creek and Lake Oneida, he continued:
"You observed how many cannon were in Fort William, and how many soldiers and Indians in the castle?"
"I was not so much as in the fort, nor did I count the soldiers or Indians."
Balked and angry, as well as nonplussed, Governor Clinton insisted:
"Our laws require that all travellers in this government of New York shall swear allegiance to the King of England and have a license from the Governor."
Governor Clinton's name would certainly not adorn a license for these men. Whether or not the youth saw the trap, he was as frank as his interrogator:
"I never before heard of such a law in any country or kingdom in the world," replied Zeisberger.
"Will you not take the oath?" roared Governor Clinton, amazed.
"I will not," said the prisoner, and he was straightway cast into a prison, where he and his companion lay for six weeks, until freed by an ordinance passed by Parliament exempting the missionaries of the Moravian Church from taking oath to the British crown.
Back into the Iroquois land journeyed the liberated prisoner, and for ten doubtful years, until 1755, Zeisberger was engaged in learning the languages of the various tribes of the Six Nations, and in active missionary service. His success was very great. Perhaps in all the history of these famous Indians there was no other man, with the exception of Sir William Johnson, whom they trusted as much as they trusted David Zeisberger. Cheated on the one hand by the Dutch of New York, and robbed on the other by agents of the French and the English, the Iroquois became suspicious of all men; and it is vastly more than a friendly compliment to record that in his mission-house at Onondaga they placed the entire archives of their nation, comprising the most valuable collection of treaties and letters from colonial governors ever made by an Indian nation on this continent. But war now drove the missionary away, as throughout his life war was ever to dash his fondest dreams and ever to drive him back.
At the close of the Old French War, the missionaries of the Moravian Church were out again upon the Indian trails that led to the North and West. The first to start was Zeisberger, now in the prime of life, forty-two years old. But he did not turn northward. A call that he could not ignore had come to him from the friends of his boyhood days, the Delawares, who lived now in Western Pennsylvania. With a single companion he pushed outward to them. Taking up his residence in what is now Bradford County, Pennsylvania, he soon began to repeat the successes he had achieved in the Iroquois land, many being converted, and the whole nation learning to love and trust the earnest preacher. Then came Pontiac's terrible rebellion. Compelled to hurry back to the settlements again, Zeisberger awaited the end of that bloody storm, which swept away every fort in the West save only Fort Pitt and Fort Detroit.
At last the way was again open, and Zeisberger soon faced the wilderness. The Church fathers now came to the conclusion that it was best to extend missionary labor farther than ever before. The entire West had been saved to England, and the future was bright. It was Zeisberger to whom they looked, and not for a moment did the veteran flinch.
"Whither is the white man going?" asked an old Seneca chieftain of Zeisberger.
"To the Alleghany River," was the reply.
"Why does the paleface travel such unknown roads? This is no road for white people, and no white man has come this trail before."
"Seneca," said the pale man, "the business I am on is different from that of other white men, and the roads I travel are different too. I am come to bring the Indian great and good words."
The work now begun in Potter County, and later extended to Lawrence County, on the Beaver River, in the province of Pennsylvania, was not less successful than Zeisberger's work in New York. "You are right," said the bravest Indian of the nation to his Indian chieftain; "I have joined the Moravians. Where they go I will go; where they lodge I will lodge; their God shall be my God." His faith was soon tested, as was that of all Zeisberger's converts.
For there was yet a farther West. Beyond the Beaver, the Delaware nation had spread throughout the Black Forest that covered what is now Ohio to the dots of prairie land on the edge of what is Indiana. Somewhere here the prairie fires had ceased their devastation. Between the Wabash and the crest of the Alleghanies lay the heaviest forest of the old New World. Of its eastern half the Delawares were now masters, with their capital at Goschgoschunk on the Muskingum, the present Coshocton, Ohio. The fame of Zeisberger had come even here, and the grand council of the Delawares sent him a call to bring his great and good words into the Black Forest. It was an irresistible appeal. Yet the Moravian Church could not allow Zeisberger to leave the congregations in Pennsylvania, for no one could take his place. The brave man gave his answer quickly: "I will take them with me."
He kept his word, and in the Spring of 1772 the heroic man could have been seen floating down the Beaver and Ohio rivers with two whole villages of Christian Indians, seeking a new home in the Black Forest on the Upper Muskingum. Here they founded three settlements in all, Schönbrunn (Beautiful Spring), Lichtenau (Meadow of Light), Gnadenhütten (Tents of Grace), where the fabled wanderer is made by the poet to extend his search for Evangeline. Here the Moravian missionaries, Zeisberger and his noble assistant, Heckewelder, spent five marvellously successful years, in what is known as the first settlements of whites in the present State of Ohio, excepting such French as had lived in the Lake region. The settlements were governed by a complete set of published laws, and in many respects the experiment was an ideality fully achieved. The good influence of the orderly and devout colony spread throughout the Central West at a time when every influence was bad and growing rapidly worse. For five or six years Zeisberger here saw the richest fruit of his life; here also he was doomed to see what was undoubtedly the most disgraceful and dastardly crime ever committed in the name of freedom on this continent.
John Heckewelder
Missionary to the Indians
The Revolutionary War now broke out, as if to despoil wantonly this aged hero's last and happiest triumph. The Moravians determined upon the impossible role of neutrality, with their settlements just beside the hard, wide war-path which ran between Fort Pitt and Fort Detroit; these were the strongholds, respectively, of the Americans and the British, who were quarrelling bitterly for the allegiance of the savages in the Black Forest between them. The policy was wholly disastrous. For some time the Christian Indians, because the influence of the past few years had been so uplifting, escaped unharmed. But as the conflict grew, bitter suspicion arose among both the Americans in Western Pennsylvania and the British at Sandusky and Detroit.
The British first took action. In 1781 three hundred Indians under a British officer appeared and ordered the inhabitants of the three villages to leave the valley they loved and go to Sandusky, where a stricter watch might be kept over them. Like sheep they were driven northward, the aged Zeisberger toiling at the head of the broken-hearted company. As Winter came down from the north, there being very little food, a company of one hundred Christian Indians obtained permission to return to their former homes to harvest corn which had been left standing in the fields. It was an unfortunate moment for the return, and the borderers on the ravaged Pennsylvania frontier looked upon the movement with suspicion. It is said that a party of British Indians, returning from a Pennsylvania raid, left here a sign of their bloody triumph. Be that as it may, a posse of Americans suddenly appeared on the scene. The entire company of Moravian sufferers was surrounded and taken captive. The question was raised, "Shall we take our prisoners to Pittsburg, or kill them?" The answer of the majority was, "Kill." The men were hurried into one building and the women into another, and the murderers went to work.
"My arm fails me," said one desperado, as he knocked his fourteenth bound victim on the head. "I think I have done pretty well. Go on in the same way." And that night, as the moon arose above the Tuscarawas, the wolves and panthers fought in the moonlight for the bodies of ninety Christian Indians most foully murdered.
Had each been his own child, the great grief of the aged Zeisberger could not have been more heartrending. After the storm had swept over him and a shadow of the old peace came back to his stricken heart, Zeisberger called his children about him and offered a most patient prayer.
The record of Zeisberger's resolute faithfulness to the remnant of his church from this time onward is almost incredible. Like a Moses he led them always, and first to a temporary home in Macomb County, Michigan. From there they were in four years driven by the Chippewas. The forlorn pilgrims now set sail in two sloops on Lake Erie; they took refuge from a terrible storm in the mouth of the Cuyahoga River. For a time they rested at a temporary home in Independence Township, Cuyahoga County. Famine drove them in turn from here. Setting out on foot, Zeisberger led them next along the shore of Lake Erie westward to the present site of Milan, Erie County, Ohio. Here they resided until the outbreak of the savage Indian War of 1791. To escape from this, Zeisberger secured from the British government a tract of land twelve miles long and six miles wide for the Moravian Indians along the Grand River in Canada. Here the pilgrims remained six years. But with the close of the Indian War, it was possible for them to return to their beloved home in the Tuscarawas Valley. The United States had given to the Moravian Church two tracts of land here, embracing the sites of the three towns formerly built, containing in all twelve thousand acres.
Back to the old home the patriarch Zeisberger brought his little company in the year 1798. His first duty in the gloomy Gnadenhütten was not forgotten. With a bowed head and heavy heart the old man and one assistant gathered from beneath the dense mass of bush and vine, whither the wild beasts had carried them, the bones of the ninety and more sacrificed Christians, and over their present resting-place one of the proudest of monuments now rises. For full ten years more this hero labored in the shadow of the forests where his happiest days had been spent, and only as the Winter of 1808 came down upon the valley from the lakes did his great heart cease beating and his spirit pass through the heavenly gates.
The dust of this true hero lies, as he requested, surrounded by the remains of those "brown brethren" whom he led and loved so long, when all the world reviled them and persecuted them and said all manner of evil against them falsely. In 1908 the memory of this man will have blessed us for a full century. Shall not a more appropriate token of our esteem replace the little slab that now marks that hallowed grave? And yet no monument can be raised to the memory of David Zeisberger so valuable or so significant as the little pile of his own manuscripts collected by Edward Everett and deposited by him under lock and key, in a special case in the library of Harvard University. Here are fourteen manuscripts, including a Delaware Indian dictionary, a hymn book, a harmony of the Gospels, a volume of litanies and liturgies, and a volume of sermons to children.
CHAPTER VI
Clark's Birth and Parentage.—Wholesomeness of the Family's Home Life.—Achievements of George and his Five Brothers.—George's Lack of Book-learning.—How he became a Surveyor.—Great Opportunities enjoyed by Surveyors in his Day.—His Introduction to the West.—Learns of George Washington's Great Acquisitions of Land.—How Clark acquired his Craving for Liquor.—His Acquaintance with the Rev. David Jones, Missionary to the Shawnees.—Their Encampment near the Site of Wheeling, W. Va.—A Trip to Pittsburg.—His Claim for a Piece of Land on the Ohio.—Takes Service in Dunmore's War.—His Work as a Surveyor in Kentucky.—Becomes a Leader of Pioneers into Kentucky.—The Conflict between Clark and the Transylvania Company.—He becomes the Leader of the Kentucky Movement.—His Brilliant Military Leadership in the Conquest of Illinois.—The Founding of Louisville.—Clark draws a Plan of the Future City.—His Efforts to induce Immigration to the Lower Ohio.—He is discarded by the State of Virginia.
GEORGE ROGERS CLARK: FOUNDER OF LOUISVILLE
About two miles east of Charlottesville, Virginia, and more than a mile south of Thomas Jefferson's famous homestead, Monticello, on a sunny knoll by the little Rivianna River, stood the humble farmer's home in which George Rogers Clark was born, November 19, 1752.
The baby's father and mother, John Clark and Ann Rogers Clark, had moved into Albemarle County two years before from King-and-Queen County, Virginia, where they had been married in 1749. Their first child was born August 1, 1750, and was given his grandfather's name, Jonathan; this second son was given the name George Rogers, from one of his mother's brothers—as though his parents had looked with prophetic vision through the long years to a time when the baby should become the idol and savior of Kentucky, and had named him from a Kentucky pioneer.
It was a busy farmer's home to which the young child came and in which he received the first hard lessons of life. His parents were sturdy, hard-working people, like their ancestors as far back as the records went, even to the first John Clark, who came from England to Virginia about the same time that the Puritans came to Plymouth Rock, or to Giles Rogers, on his mother's side, who also came from England at very nearly the same time. Giles Rogers's son John married Mary Byrd of the well-known Virginian Byrd family, and George Rogers Clark's mother was the second daughter of that union.
Who the boy's playmates may have been we cannot know; his brother Jonathan was two years his elder, and the two were probably comrades together on the nursery floor and on the green lawn before the farmhouse. When George was three years of age his sister Ann was born; and two years after that, in 1757, his brother John was born. It has been said that George Clark may have had Thomas Jefferson as a playmate by the Rivianna, but there is some doubt as to this, though the friendship of the two in later life was undoubtedly warmer because of the proximity of their boyhood homes. George's father's land ran down and adjoined that of Randolph Jefferson—Thomas Jefferson's father. If the two boys who were to become so famous met and played together it was probably at the Jefferson Mill, where, it is said, George Clark used to be sent with grist. As the Clark family moved away from this neighborhood in 1757, when George was only five years old, it does not seem likely that he was sent to mill with grist very often.
Soon after John Clark, Jr., was born, George's father and mother determined upon removing from the Rivianna farm to land patented and surveyed by Mrs. Clark's father in Caroline County, Virginia, on the headwaters of York River and just south of the upper Rappahannock. So, late in the year 1757, we find the father and mother and the four children, with all their worldly possessions, on their eastward journey to their new home. The Rivianna farm had been sold for fifteen hundred dollars, and the family can probably be said to have been in comfortable circumstances for those days. None of the four children were of an age to share in the hardships of this removal, but for the two eldest it must have been an epoch-making event. Jonathan and George were old enough to enjoy the novelty of the long journey,—-the scenes along the busy roads, the taverns where all was bustle and confusion, the villages with their shops and stores, the cities where the children must have felt swallowed up in noise. But at last the new home was reached, and the family was busily at work preparing for the next year's crops.
Of the Caroline County home of the Clarks we know little save the happy record of births of children; yet this in itself gives us a large picture of the merry household, its great joys, and the host of little troubles which intensified the gladness and hallowed it. Within three years Richard Clark was born; Edmund was born September 25, 1762; Lucy, September 15, 1765; Elizabeth, February 11, 1768; William, August 1, 1770, his brother Jonathan's twentieth birthday; and Frances, January 20, 1773. Jonathan and George were soon old enough to be little fathers to the younger children, and Ann must have been able to help her mother to mend the clothes for her rollicking brothers at a comparatively early age; and I do not doubt for a moment that there was a good deal of mending to be done for these boys, for in later life we know they loved adventure, and they must have had many a boyish contest of strength and speed with little thought of how many stitches it would take to make things whole again. This was a fine farmer's family to look in at of a summer's morning or a winter's night—just such a family as old Virginia was to depend upon in the hard days of the Revolution now drawing on apace. And though you looked the Colonies through from Northern Maine to Southern Georgia, you could not have found by another fireside six boys in one family who were to gain so much fame in their country's service as these six. Jonathan was one of the first men to enter the American army, and he became a lieutenant-colonel with a splendid record before the war was ended. His brothers John and Edmund, and perhaps Richard, were in the Revolutionary armies; all four were recipients of Virginia bounty lands at the close of the war. George Rogers Clark in the meantime became the hero of the most famous military expedition in Western history,—the capture of Vincennes and its British fort and Governor; and William, the next to the youngest in that merry crowd of ten children, was to write his name high on the pillar of fame as joint leader of the memorable Lewis and Clark Expedition through the Louisiana Territory to the Pacific Ocean in 1804.
It was surely no accident that these lads grew into daring, able men, for good blood will tell; and Virginia in that day was giving the world her richest treasures lavishly on the altar of liberty. I know of no picture of the father of these six boys; but the pictures of George and William are remarkably similar, showing a strong mark which must have come directly from one of the grandfathers, either on the Clark or Rogers side of the family. We may be sure Farmer Clark and his wife exerted, a strong, wise influence on their children, and Jonathan and George were called upon at an early age to assist in the management of the children, to settle disputes, to tie up injured fingers, to reprimand, and to praise. And in the school of the home and the family circle these boys received the best and about the only education they ever had; and it would be well if many a boy nowadays would learn more in the home of patient, wise parents and a little less from books.
The Clark boys, at least George Clark, would have been benefited by a little more schooling in books, especially a speller. It is quite sure that George did not take full advantage of even the few school privileges that he did have; but while all his letters of later life are poorly spelled, that may have been his principal weakness, and in other branches he may have succeeded much better; we know he did in one. For nine months he was under the instruction of Donald Robertson, under whom James Madison, afterwards President of the United States, studied at about the same time. Strangely enough this boy, who would not learn to be careful with letters, became proficient in the matter of figures and did well in that most difficult of studies, mathematics.
In Clark's day a boy proficient in mathematics did not have to look far for a profession which was considered both honorable and lucrative, and that was the surveyor's profession. It was doubly enticing to a youth of brains and daring; the call for surveyors to go out into the rich empire beyond the Alleghanies was loud and continuous, and had been since Lord Fairfax sent that young Virginia surveyor into the singing forests of the Upper Potomac before the outbreak of the Old French War; and from George Washington down, you may count many boys who went into the West as surveyors and became the first men of the land. The surveyor had many, if not all, the experiences of the soldier; and every boy in Virginia envied the soldier of the French War. The surveyor found the good lands, and here and there surveyed a tract for himself; this, in time, would become of great value. The surveyor knew the Indians and their trails; he knew where the best hunting-grounds and salt-licks were located; he knew where the swamps lay, and the fever-fogs that clung to them; he knew the rivers, their best fishing-pools, and how far up and down they were navigable; he was acquainted with everything a man would wish to know, and he knew of things which every man wished to escape,—floods, famines, skulking redskins, fevers. For these reasons the surveyors became the men needed by generals to guide the armies, by the great land-companies to point out right fields for speculation, by transportation companies and quartermasters and traders to designate the best paths to follow through the black forests. The tried, experienced surveyor was in an admirable position to secure a comfortable fortune for his labor. While Washington (the largest landholder in America in Clark's day—and half his lands in the West) selected in person much of his own land, yet, as we have seen, the time came when he employed William Crawford to find new lands for him.
Perhaps young Clark came but slowly to a realization that he could enter the fine profession of a surveyor; but when the time came to decide he seized upon the opportunity and the opening with utmost enthusiasm and energy. Both of his grandfathers had been surveyors to a greater or less extent; possibly their old instruments were in his father's possession. If so, these were taken out and dusted, and the boy was set to work surveying, probably, his father's farm. Its dimensions were well known, and the boy could be sure of the accuracy or inaccuracy of his experiments. In time George probably was called upon to do odd pieces of surveying in the neighborhood in which he lived; thus the days and the years went by, each one fitting the lad for his splendid part on the world's stage of action. The first act in the drama was Clark's introduction to the West—the land of which he had so often dreamed, and which he now in his twentieth year went to see.
We cannot be sure just when young Clark set out from his home, but we find him in the little town of Pittsburg early in the summer of 1772, and we can well suppose he made the long trip over Braddock's Road from Virginia with some friends or neighbors from Caroline County, with whom he joined himself for the purpose of looking at the land of which he had heard so much, and possibly picking out a little tract of land in the Ohio Valley for himself. As a surveyor of some experience he was in a position to offer his services to any one desiring them, and thus turn an honest penny in the meantime.
Of the wars and bloody skirmishes fought around this town every Virginia boy had heard; through all of George Rogers Clark's youth great questions were being debated here in these sunny Alleghany meadows or in the shadowy forests—and the arguments were of iron and lead. The French had come down the rivers from the Great Lakes to seize the Ohio Valley; the colonists had pushed slowly across the Alleghanies to occupy the same splendid land. Nothing but war could have settled such a bitter quarrel; and, as the Clark boy now looked for the first time upon the relics of those small but savage battles, his heart no doubt warmed to his Virginian patriots who had saved the West to America. How little did the lad know that there was another savage war to be fought for this Ohio Valley, and that he himself was to be its hero!
All along the route to Pittsburg the boy and his comrades, whoever they may have been, kept their eyes open for good farm sites; perhaps they were surprised to find that all the land beside and adjacent to Braddock's Road was already "taken up." Washington himself had acquired that two-hundred-and-thirty-two-acre tract in Great Meadows where Fort Necessity stood; not far from Stewart's Crossing (Connellsville, Pa.) Washington had the other piece of land with the mill on it. Everywhere Clark went in the West he found land which had been taken up by the shrewd Mount Vernon farmer or his agents. I do not believe Clark begrudged Washington a single acre, but was, on the other hand, pleased to know that the Colonel was to receive some good return for all his hard campaigning in the West in addition to his paltry pay as an officer.
Clark passed as a young gentleman among the strange, rough populace of infant Pittsburg, where fighting, drinking, and quarrelling were going on in every public place; I can see the boy as he went about the rude town and listened to the talk of the traders and the loungers who filled the taverns and stores. It might have been at this time that the boy first began to satisfy an honest thirst with dishonest liquids, which would in time become his worst enemy and sadly dull the lustre of as bright a name as any man could win. Of course we must remember that at that day it was highly polite and gentlemanly to take an "eye-opener" every morning and a "night-cap" every night, and drink the health of friends often between times; yet no young man but was injured by this awakening of an unknown craving, and, in the case of our hero, it was to prove a craving that would cost him almost all the great honors that he should win.
The lad looked with wide-open eyes, no doubt, at the remains of old Fort Duquesne, where many brave Virginians had lost their lives; for many had been fiendishly put to death by savages driven to bitter hatred by French taunts and made inhuman by French brandy. He must have been greatly interested in little Fort Pitt, which had withstood the wild attacks of Pontiac's most desperate hell-hounds of war, the Shawnees. Here, if anywhere on the continent, men had been brave; here, if anywhere, men had dropped into deathless graves. He was greatly interested in the future, though the ringing notes of the past must have stirred his heart deeply; and I can see the lad with bended head listening to catch every word of a speaker who would talk of the present feeling of the dreaded Shawnees, who refused to acknowledge that the Six Nations had any right to sell to white men their fine hunting-grounds between the Ohio and the Tennessee.
Rev. David Jones
Companion of George Rogers Clark
When we hear directly of Clark in Pittsburg he was in admirably good company and well spoken of; he had fallen in with the Rev. David Jones, the enterprising Baptist missionary from New Jersey, who had come into the West on a joint mission concerning both the possibilities of missionary service among the Shawnees on the Scioto, and Franklin's proposed settlement on the eastern bank of the Ohio River. He was, therefore, a prospector for land and for missionary openings—a good man for the lad Clark to know. Mr. Jones was thirty-six years of age, enthusiastic and brave, or he would not have been on the Ohio in 1772. He was old enough to remember well the story of the Old French War, as well as Pontiac's Rebellion, and the story of the West from that day down. Of this, no doubt, the two talked freely. Mr. Jones kept a diary, and his record for Tuesday, June 9, reads: "... Left Fort Pitt in company with Mr. George Rogers Clark, and several others, who were disposed to make a tour through this new world." Gliding on down the Ohio, the canoe and its adventurous pilgrims were glad to get safely by the Mingo town near Steubenville, Ohio, whose Indian inhabitants (remnants of the Iroquois Indians, in the West known as Mingoes) were desperate savages, canoe plundering being the least harm that might be expected from them. Farther down, at the mouth of Grave Creek, near where Wheeling, West Virginia, now stands, the party camped; here Mr. Jones's interpreter, David Owens, joined them, having come across country from the Monongahela River. This spot was to become an important point on the Upper Ohio; it was to become well known to the young adventurer, who now looked upon it for the first time; it was soon to become his first home in the West. But for the present he went on with Mr. Jones. The party proceeded as far down as the mouth of the Little Kanawha River, where Parkersburg, West Virginia, now stands. Returning up the river June 24, they reached Grave Creek within two weeks; the party, including at least Higgins and the interpreter Owens together with Jones and Clark, started on an overland trip to the Monongahela. Jones records:
"... Therefore moved up to Grave Creek, leaving there our canoes; crossed the desert (wilderness) to Ten Mile Creek, which empties into [the] Monongahela.... The season was very warm; all except myself had loads to carry, so that on the 2d day of July, with much fatigue we arrived to the inhabitants [at the settlements], faint, weak, weary, and hungry—especially Mr. Clark and myself."
The size of the settlement can be judged from the fact that on the second Sunday of Mr. Jones's stay on George's Creek he preached to a congregation of about two hundred.
On July 14 the four travellers set out again overland for Fort Pitt. They reached the fort on Wednesday, July 22, and the Virginia boy was probably glad to leave the forests and the river for a while and rest quietly in the little village of Pittsburg. For one thing, he had some letters to write, and we can imagine how anxious the friends at home were to hear from him. Would he like the country? Would he wish to stay in the West? Would he want the other members of the family to emigrate there too? These were some of the questions his parents and brothers and sisters were asking in the old home in Caroline County as the summer days went by. We are certain that Clark was immensely pleased with all he had seen; whether it was pushing a canoe down the rivers, or sleeping on a river's shore with the water babbling beside him, or carrying a pack over the "blind" trails of the old Southwest, he loved the land, its freshness, the freedom of its forests, the air of hope and adventure which pervaded everything and everybody. All this appealed to him and fascinated him.
After a good rest he hurried on home in the wake of his glowing letters, to enforce them, and if possible to induce the home people to come quickly to obtain the good lands before they were all taken. Before he went it is probable that he entered his claim for a piece of land on the Ohio near the mouth of Fish Creek, some thirty miles below the present site of Wheeling. How interesting must have been that home-coming! What a fine picture that would be, if we could see the young lad, who was to be the hero of the West, sitting before his father's doorstep, describing to a silent audience of relatives and neighbors the grandeur and greatness of the West, the crowds of immigrants, the growing villages, the conflicts between the white and the red men! Perhaps he drew a rough map of the Ohio in the sand at the foot of the front doorsteps, showing where his claim was located, and where Washington's rich tracts were located. Then he told of the Ohio, its islands and its fierce eddies, of the Indian trails that wound along on the "hog-backs" from settlement to settlement, of the great mounds which the ancient giants (as people once thought the mound-building Indians were) built beside the Ohio. And then at last he told of his purpose to return and live in that country and grow up with it.
The records of the next few years were very much confused. Young Clark visited various portions of the West, perhaps remaining longest at a claim he took up near the mouth of Grave Creek, on the present site of Moundsville, West Virginia, from which point he addressed letters to his brother Jonathan, January 9, 1773. In the Spring of the next year he formed one of Captain Cressap's party assembled at Wheeling in readiness for service in Dunmore's War. In this war Clark saw considerable service, following Dunmore's wing of the army, but not participating in the battle at Point Pleasant, which was fought by General Lewis. In the Spring of the year following, 1775, we find Clark returning again to his original mission in the West,—that of surveying land and securing tracts for himself. "I have engaged," he wrote his brother Jonathan from Stewart's Crossing, "as a deputy surveyor under Cap'n Hancock Lee, for to lay out lands on ye Kentuck, for ye Ohio company, at ye rate of 80£ pr. year, and ye privilege of taking what land I want." Midsummer found him at Leestown, a mile below Frankfort, seventy miles up the Kentucky River, where he said fifty families would be living by Christmas time. The public, however, needed the service of the young man, and it is plain that his experience in the war had been serviceable, for he was made commander of the scattered militia of Kentucky. During the next Winter, however, we find him again in Virginia; it is probable that his constant moving about had brought advantages, though his private affairs may have suffered more or less from neglect. The Spring of the next year he was back in Kentucky, and soon, in no uncertain way, the leader of the busy swarms of pioneers. "He was brave, energetic, bold," writes William H. English, "prepossessing in appearance, of pleasing manners, and in fact with all the qualities calculated to win from a frontier people. The unorganized and chaotic condition of the company needed such a man, and the man had come."
It is interesting to notice the conflict which was precipitated between Clark as leader of the pioneers and Richard Henderson's Transylvania Company, and a pleasure to note that Clark never seemed to speak or act in a vindictive way with reference to Henderson's questionable purchase; in fact he wrote to his brother in 1775:
"Colonel Henderson is here and claims all ye country below Kentucke. If his claim should be good, land may be got reasonable enough, and as good as any in ye world. My father talked of seeing this land in August. I shall not advise him whether to come or not; but I am convinced that if he once sees ye country he will never rest until he gets on it to live. I am ingrossing all ye land I possibly can, expecting him."
It is plain from this quotation that Richard Henderson was the friend of the Kentucky pioneer. But there was a very important question to be settled immediately; did Kentucky belong to Virginia or was it independent? What was its political status? It was decided to get at the facts of the case, and Clark was instrumental before all others in calling a mass meeting of Kentucky pioneers at Harrodstown, June 6, 1776, where he expected that two or more "agents" would be selected by the people with general power to consult Virginia as to the legal status of "Transylvania." Clark arrived late at this meeting, and on arrival found that he himself, and John Gabriel Jones, had been selected, not as agents, but as actual "members of the Virginia Legislature," to represent a County of Kentucky. The Transylvania Company had performed its important mission, and Richard Henderson was reimbursed for any losses incurred. George Rogers Clark now steps into the position occupied by Henderson as the leader and sustainer of the Kentucky movement.
The brilliancy of Clark's military leadership during the next few years, while he was effecting a conquest of Illinois, has entirely put into shade the genuine influence and merit of his service previously rendered. No herald of empire in the Middle West who was especially prominent in military affairs did more to accelerate and assure the victory of the army of axe-bearing pioneers than did George Rogers Clark in these critical years, 1775, 1776, and 1777. He fell heir, though a mere boy, to a day's responsibility and taxing toils relinquished by Richard Henderson; and it would not be too much to say, perhaps, that were we to omit the humble, less spectacular services that were performed in these three years, or the renowned service heroically performed in 1778 and 1779, the nation could more easily spare those of the later period. But as Clark now went eastward as a delegate to the Virginia Legislature, he appreciated more and more that the danger of Kentucky lay in the two British forts at Kaskaskia and Vincennes; not because of the proximity of the troops there located, but because of the baneful influence exerted upon all the neighboring Indian tribes by English officers and American renegades who occupied them. The campaign in Illinois, prosecuted with so much brilliancy and renown, had for its vital motive not the conquest of thousands of forest-strewn miles of wilderness, but rather the salvation of the pioneer settlers in Ken-ta-kee. Any other view of the matter would be a serious error.
The proud city of Louisville dates its founding from Clark's famous Illinois campaign, for while descending the Ohio River he left some twenty families on Corn Island, May 27, 1778, who were the first of their race to make a permanent home within the sound of the chattering waters of the historic Falls of Ohio, first visited by La Salle over a hundred years before. In less than a year the settlement was moved to the Kentucky shore, and a fort was built at the foot of what is now Twelfth Street, in what was then the town of Falls of Ohio, the present Louisville. General Clark may be justly called the founder of that city, as it was his decision that made "The Falls" the rendezvous and metropolis of the Lower Ohio. "This action," writes Mr. English, "and the security given by the forts he caused to be built there, attracted the first settlers and fixed the future destiny of Louisville, Jeffersonville, and New Albany.... Clark undoubtedly gave the matter much thought, and looked far into the future in making this selection. He expected two great cities to arise some day at the Falls; first Louisville, to be followed later, as the country became populous, by one on the other side of the river, which he hoped would bear his name. But, until Virginia made the grant for Clarksville, the plan of what he expected would be a great city at Louisville absorbed his attention." One of his first acts was to draw a map of the future city, marking the public and private divisions of land as he would have had them located; in this plan he left a number of vacant spaces for public parks, and it is one of the vain regrets of the citizens of the present city that the plan of General Clark in this respect could not have been remembered.
It is important to notice that Clark believed that the best way to maintain the conquest of Illinois was by inducing immigration to the Lower Ohio and the building up of a strong pioneer colony, not in Illinois, but along the river. "Our only chance at present," he wrote to Colonel John Todd, the Governor of Illinois County, "to save that country is by encouraging the families; but I am sensible nothing but land will do it. I should be exceedingly cautious in doing anything that would displease the Government [Virginia], but their present interest, in many respects obvious to us here, calls so loudly for it, that I think, sir, that you might even venture to give a deed for forty or fifty thousand acres of land at said place at the price that Government may demand for it."
The place referred to here is not Louisville, but near the mouth of the Ohio River. In fact it is very plain from many sources that Clark was the prime mover in the settlement of the Lower Ohio up to the year 1783, when he was wantonly and ignominiously turned adrift by the State of Virginia, which then owed him thirty thousand dollars, with only four shillings in its treasury. The latter portion of Clark's life is not one which we are proud to remember, but he never sank so low that the nation has been able to forget his brilliant and persistent courage. There was ground for his bitter cry: "I have given the United States half the territory they possess, and for them to suffer me to remain in poverty, in consequence of it, will not redound much to their honor." It is little comfort that nearly thirteen years after his death the sum justly owed to the man was paid to his heirs. The memory of Clark's leadership of the army that bore the sword is a precious inheritance; the facts respecting his equally important enthusiasm and earnestness in leading the scattered cohorts of the army bearing the broadaxe should likewise have a place in history.
CHAPTER VII
Importance of the Cumberland Road.—Expected to be a Bond of Union between East and West.—Roads of Former Days only Indian Trails.—The Cumberland Road made between 1806 and 1840.—Promoted by Gallatin and Clay.—Undertaken by Congress, 1802.—The Road a Necessity for the Stream of Immigration after the Revolution.—Open for Traffic to the Ohio, 1818.—Other Internal Improvements now undertaken.—The first Macadamized Roads earlier than this Cumberland Road.—The Great Cost of Macadamizing this Road.—Disputes as to the Government's Constitutional Right to build it.—Ohio demands that the Road be continued, according to the Act admitting her to Statehood.—The Road's Progress to Vandalia.—Unanimity of Western Members in Favor of the Road.—Toll-gates are erected.—Lively Scenes on the Road in Old Times.—Sums appropriated for it by Congress.—Why Henry Clay championed the Undertaking.
HENRY CLAY: PROMOTER OF THE FIRST AMERICAN HIGHWAY
It may be said without fear of contradiction that the subject of the Panama and Nicaragua canals has not received more popular attention in this day and generation than our first and greatest national highway—legally known as the Cumberland Road, from its starting point—received in the first generation of the nineteenth century.
For it was clear to the blindest that the great empire west of the Alleghanies, of which Washington dreamed and planned, where Zeisberger labored and built the first home, and to which brave Henderson and Putnam led their colonies of patriots, must soon be bound to the Union by something stronger than Indian trails. France and England had owned this West and lost it; could the little Republic born in the fierce fires of 1775 hold what they—proud kingdoms—had lost? Could it mock the European doctrine that, in time, mountains inevitably become boundaries of empires? Those little States of which Berkeley sang, placed by the hand of God as rebukes to lustful and universal dominion—were they needed in the destinies of America? Such questions were asked freely in those hard days which succeeded the Revolution. Then the whole world looked upon the East and the West as realms as distinct as Italy and France, and for the same geographical reason. England and Spain had their vast "spheres of influence" marked out as plainly in America then as Germany and France and Russia have theirs marked in the China of to-day. Kentucky became a hotbed of foreign emissaries, and the whirl of politics in that pivotal region a decade after the Revolution will daunt even the student of modern Kentucky politics. So patriotic and so faithful is that eastern West to-day that it is difficult to believe by what a fragile thread it hung to the trembling Republic on the Atlantic slope—"one nation to-day, thirteen to-morrow"—in those black days when Wilkinson and Burr and even George Rogers Clark "played fast and loose with conspiracy."
The Indian trails were the threads which first bound the East and the West. Soon a large number of these threads were twisted, so to speak, into a few cords—hard, rough pioneer roadways which wound in and out among the great trees and morasses in the forest shades. Then came a few great, well-built (for their day) roadways which meant as much commercially and politically, in their age, as the steel hawsers which in our time have bound and welded a great people so closely together.
The greatest of these old-time highways was that wide avenue opened from Cumberland, Maryland, through Pennsylvania, the "Panhandle," and on across Ohio, between 1806 and 1840. It is popularly known as the Old National Road; its legal name was the Cumberland Road. It was the logical result of Washington's cherished plan of binding the trans-Alleghany region firmly to the East. It was largely promoted by Albert Gallatin, who in 1806 made a report, as Secretary of the Treasury, strongly urging such works of internal improvement. But its best friend and stanchest champion was Henry Clay; and beside it stands to-day a monument to his memory near the little hamlet which bears his name—Claysville, Pennsylvania.
Henry Clay
Statesman and Abolitionist
This great road was born in the Act of Congress of 1802, which enabled the State of Ohio to enter the Union. Section VII of that act decreed that the money received from the sale of one-twentieth of the public lands in Ohio should be applied to building roads from the navigable waters of Atlantic streams to and within the new State "under the authority of Congress." The matter was put in charge of the War Department, and soon commissioners appointed by the President of the United States were surveying a route for a national road from East to West. The first government appropriation was dated 1806, and was thirty thousand dollars.
Words cannot describe the intense wave of enthusiasm which swept over the West when it was known that this mighty new power in Western life was actually to come into existence. Our government never carried out a more timely or popular measure, for it was as timely as it was popular. When the Revolutionary War was over, a great stream of immigration poured into the West, but the Indian War of 1790-95 severely checked it. With the treaty of Greenville the great social movement again began, and the War of 1812, in turn, again interfered to postpone the genuine settlement of the old Northwest. This national road was begun at Cumberland, Maryland, in 1811, and, even in the dark days of the war, was slowly pushed along over the Alleghanies by way of Uniontown and Washington, Pennsylvania, toward Wheeling on the Ohio River. When the war was over it was nearing its destination, and in 1818 was open for traffic to the Ohio.
If studied closely, the last three years of the second decade of the nineteenth century are fascinating years to a student of our national expansion. The beginning of successful steam navigation on the Ohio and its tributaries, and the completion of the Cumberland National Road to the Ohio, were largely responsible for this. Such impressive material advances, coming at the time when both Great Britain and the Indians had been effectually disposed of (so far as national growth was concerned), gave enthusiasm to the eager spirit of the time. Great deeds were proposed; great economic questions began to be faced and fought out as never before. The many-sided question of internal improvements, the beginning of the Erie Canal, the opening of the Lehigh coal fields, the problem of applying the power of steam to vehicles as well as vessels, the difficult problem solved later by the Missouri Compromise, and the one involved in Birkbeck's English Prairie settlement in Illinois, the problem of steam navigation on the Great Lakes,—all these and many more like them were the topics of the hour when this Cumberland Road, the first of all our great feats of improvement, reached and then threw itself across the Ohio River. Measured by the hopes it inspired and not by miles, judged by the power it was expected to exert in national life and not by the ruins that now mark its ancient track, this road from the Potomac to the Mississippi must be considered a most significant monument to those wild but splendid years when as a people we were first facing some of the most fundamental questions of existence. There comes in every boy's life a period when he shoots suddenly out and up to the stature of a man. Young America sprang up like that in those momentous years.
Nearly a score of years before the Cumberland Road was built, the first macadamized road in the United States, the Lancaster Turnpike, was constructed by a private company between Philadelphia and Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania had macadamized portions of her highway across the mountains by way of Chambersburg and Bedford to Pittsburg. But on no highway was the principle of macadamization carried so far as on the Cumberland Road. The cost was found to be prodigious. Between Cumberland, Maryland, and Uniontown, Pennsylvania, it was $9745 per mile instead of $6000, which the commissioners estimated, without bridging. Between Uniontown and Wheeling the cost ran up to the startling average of about $13,000 per mile—within $800 of the estimated cost per mile of the Erie Canal. Too liberal contracts accounted, in part, at least, for this extravagance. The stones used were reduced to four ounces each and spread in three layers, traffic being permitted for a time over each layer in succession. No covering was laid until these layers had become comparatively solid. Catch-water drains, with a gradual curvature, were located at proper distances.
Several of the officers in charge of the work stand high in the estimation of their countrymen. There was McKee, who fell at Buena Vista, and Williams, who gave his life to his country at Monterey; there were Gratiot, Delafield, Bliss, Bartlett, Hartzell, Colquit, Cass, Vance, Pickell; and there was Mansfield, who, as major-general, fell at Antietam. Among the names in one of the surveying corps is recorded that of Joseph E. Johnston.
This national road rested legally upon an interpretation of the Constitution held by those who favored internal improvement as a means of investing the Government's surplus. A great plan had been outlined in 1806 by Albert Gallatin, then Secretary of the Treasury. The Constitution gives the Government the right to regulate post-roads and the mails. This implied the right, the promoters of internal improvement argued, to build roads, with the sanction of the States through which such roads passed. There were those who opposed the theory, and even from the very beginning there was strong opposition by strict constructionists to the road appropriations. The very first vote on the first appropriation was 66 to 50, showing that at the start there was almost an even division on the legality of the question. The opposition increased as greater and still greater sums were asked of the Treasury each year. Three hundred thousand dollars was asked in 1816, and more in 1818. In the next year the tremendous amount of $535,000 was asked for and voted. It is little wonder that Congress was staggered by the amount of money absorbed by this one road. What if other national roads proposed—through the South and northward from Washington to Buffalo—should demand equally large sums? It was easily to be seen that the entire revenue of the Government could readily be spent in filling up the bog-holes of American roads with limestone.
Albert Gallatin
Promoter of the Cumberland Road
Yet the policy of internal improvements was a popular one, advocated by politicians and applauded by the people; and every year, despite the same Constitutional arguments advanced, and though at times the opposing forces had their way, the Cumberland Road bills came back for reconsideration, and were at last passed.
But it finally appeared that the matter of getting the road repaired when once it was built was a more serious question than the mere building problem. Members of Congress who had been persuaded to give their vote for the initial expense bolted outright on voting money each year to extend the road farther westward and also repair the portions already built. The matter was precipitated in 1822, when a bill was presented to the House and Senate providing that toll-gates be erected and that the Government should charge travellers for the use of the road. The bill passed both branches of Congress, but it was vetoed immediately by President Monroe on the ground that the national Government could not collect toll unless, as sovereign, it owned the ground that the road occupied. This was an interesting question, and one of great importance, bringing as it did upon Congress an earnest discussion bordering on the intricate problem of States Rights. Mr. Clay urged that if the Government had a right to build the road it had the right to preserve it from falling into decay. Of course there was now, as always, a strong opposition to the road on the general ground of Constitutionality; but those who were aware that their objections to the road would be overruled by the majority, in any event, took the consistent ground that if they could not prevent the enactments of laws they could, by passing laws creating toll-gates, relieve the Government at least from the expense of repairing the road.
As President Monroe, however, did not agree with or believe in the original right to build the road, he was compelled to deny the Government's right to charge toll on roads in the various States. He outlined his conclusions and returned the bill vetoed.
A cry which shook the country went up from the West. In the act which admitted Ohio to the Union, five per cent of money received from the sale of lands was, as before noted, to be applied by the Government to the building of roads to and in the West. Of this five per cent, three was to be devoted to building roads within the State of Ohio, and two per cent toward the expense of building a road from Atlantic tide-water to Ohio, according to a supplementary law passed March 3, 1803. By allowing the Cumberland Road to stop at Ohio's eastern boundary, the Government was "breaking faith" with the West. This must not be, and therefore in 1824 President Monroe found an excuse to sign another Cumberland Road bill. The technicality honestly raised by Monroe was against the spirit of the times and the genius of the age. Legal technicalities were put aside, and the great road swept on westward; it was ordered to be projected through the capitals of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois to Jefferson, Missouri. It reached Columbus in 1833, and Indianapolis about 1840. It was graded to Vandalia, then the capital of Illinois, and marked out to Jefferson, Missouri, but was never completed under national auspices.
It is to be observed that the Cumberland Road went forward largely because of the compact between the State of Ohio and the national Government. Knowing, as we now do, that the road was one of the most important material items in our national growth, it must seem fortunate from any point of view that the Ohio compact was made when and as it was. By its terms the Government was to build a road with the money accruing from a certain source. The originators of the compact seemed to have no real knowledge of the questions at issue, either concerning the amount of money needed for the purpose of building the road from tide-water to the Ohio River, or of the amount that was likely to accrue from the source indicated. What if the fund produced from the sales of land was not sufficient to build the road? For some time the appropriations were made on the theory that the money would eventually come back into the treasury from the land sales; but it soon became plain that there was not a hope left that even fifty per cent of the amount expended would return from the expected source.
When this fact became patent, the friends of the road were put to their utmost to maintain its cause; some interesting points were raised that could not but weigh heavily with men of generous good sense, such as this: surveys had been made outlining the course of the road far in advance of the portion that was being actually built, and some of the States were planning all their roads with reference to this great Appian Way that was to be the main highway across the continent. Large preparations had been made here and there along the proposed route by those owning property, in the way of building taverns and road houses, not to speak of villages that sprang up in a night at points where it seemed certain the road would meet important branch roads. Throughout the years when the Cumberland Road bills were under discussion it is of particular interest to note how men were influenced by the greater, more fundamental human arguments, rather than by mere technical or legal points. Of course the Western members were without a dissenting voice in favor of the road. And when Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri were successively admitted to the Union, a similar provision concerning the sale of public lands and road-building was inserted as in the case of Ohio; and though it is not clear that any one believed the source of income was equal to the object to be benefited, yet the magnanimous legislation went on without a pause through the twenties and into the thirties. In the Senate, for instance, the opposition to the road bills could usually depend on two solid votes from North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, and New York; and one vote, ordinarily, from Maine, Connecticut, New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Alabama. On minor points other votes could be temporarily secured, but on the main question there was always a safe majority in favor of the enterprise. However, it is plain the opposition to the road was sectional only in the sense that it came from the States not to be directly benefited. Though two or more New England votes could be depended upon in the Senate to be thrown against a Cumberland Road bill, yet such a man as Edward Everett said in an address at Lexington, Kentucky, in 1829: "The State of which I am a citizen [Massachusetts] has already paid between one and two thousand dollars toward the construction and repair of that road; and I doubt not she is prepared to contribute her proportion toward its extension to the place of its destination." But, it must be remembered, Everett was one who caught as few others did the spirit of our genius for expansion, the man who in 1835 uttered the marvellous words: "Intercourse between the mighty interior West and the seacoast is the great principle of our commercial prosperity."
If there is one practical lesson in all the peculiar history of the one national road that America built (for the others proposed were never constructed), it is with reference to the repairing of the road. At first it seemed that the great question was merely to obtain funds for the first cost of making the road. But it soon appeared that the far greater question was to operate and repair the road; it was well enough that the Government build the road, seemingly, but it was early realized that a local power must control the road and see to its repairs, or an enormous waste of public money would result. The experience of those years brought home the lesson that the problem of maintenance and operation is far more serious than the problem of original cost.
The objection raised to the Government's erecting toll-gates and collecting tolls, as implying sovereignty over the land occupied by the road, was at last silenced by allowing each State through which the road passed to accept it from the Government as fast as it was completed, and to take charge of its operation and control. Maryland, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Ohio accepted completed portions between 1831 and 1834. Toll-gates were immediately erected by State authorities, and tolls collected. From her twelve toll-gates Pennsylvania received over $37,000 in the twenty months following May 1, 1843. In the most prosperous year in Ohio, 1839, the treasurer of that State received $62,496.10 from the National Road tolls. What per cent received by toll-gate keepers was actually turned in cannot be discussed, as those were the "good old days." Each toll-gate keeper, it must be observed, retained two hundred dollars per annum as salary, and five per cent of all receipts above one thousand dollars at this time. This fast and loose system was the means of discovering some great rascals. Between 1831 and 1877 Ohio received $1,139,795.30 from the Cumberland Road in tolls.
These sober statistics give only a hint of those gay, picturesque days when this highway was a teeming thoroughfare, lined with towns of national importance that are now forgotten, and with thousands of taverns and road-houses, even the foundation-stones of which have vanished from the old-time sites. Great stagecoach lines operated here, known as widely in their day as the railways are now, their proprietors boasting over rival lines in points of speed, safety, and appointments. The largest company on the Cumberland Road was the National Road Stage Company, with headquarters at Uniontown, Pennsylvania. The Ohio National Stage Company was the most important west of the Ohio River. There were the "Good Intent" line, and the "Landlords," "Pioneer," "June Bug," and "Pilot" lines. Fine coaches bore names as aristocratic as our Pullman cars do to-day. There were "trusts" and "combinations," quarrels and lawsuits, worthy of the pen of any sensational magazine-writer or novelist.
The advertisement of an "opposition" stagecoach line of 1837 is of interest on several accounts:
OPPOSITION!
Defiance Fast Line Coaches
DAILY
From Wheeling, Va., to Cincinnati, O., via Zanesville, Columbus, Springfield, and intermediate points.
Through in less time than any other line.
"By opposition the people are well served."
The Defiance Fast Line connects at Wheeling, Va., with Reside & Co.'s Two Superior daily lines to Baltimore, McNair and Co.'s Mail Coach line, via Bedford, Chambersburg, and the Columbia and Harrisburg Rail Roads to Philadelphia being the only direct line from Wheeling—: also with the only coach line from
Wheeling to Pittsburg, via Washington, Pa., and with numerous cross lines in Ohio.
The proprietors having been released on the 1st inst. from burthen of carrying the great mail (which will retard any line), are now enabled to run through in a shorter time than any other line on the road. They will use every exertion to accommodate the travelling public. With stock infinitely superior to any on the road, they flatter themselves they will be able to give general satisfaction; and believe the public are aware, from past experience, that a liberal patronage to the above line will prevent impositions in high rates of fare by any stage monopoly.
The proprietors of the Defiance Fast Line are making the necessary arrangements to stock the Sandusky and Cleveland Routes also from Springfield to Dayton—which will be done during the month of July.
All baggage and parcels only received at the risk of the owners thereof.
Jno. W. Weaver & Co.,
Geo. W. Manypenny,
Jno. Yontz,
From Wheeling to Columbus, Ohio.
James H. Bacon,
William Rianhard,
F. M. Wright,
William H. Fife,
From Columbus to Cincinnati.
The Cumberland Road became instantly a great mail-route to Cincinnati and St. Louis; from these points mails were forwarded by packets to Louisville, Huntsville, Alabama, Nashville, Tennessee, and all Mississippi points. Mails from Washington reached the West in 1837 as follows:
| Washington to Wheeling | 30 hours |
| Washington to Columbus | 45½ hours |
| Washington to Indianapolis | 65½ hours |
| Washington to Vandalia | 85½ hours |
| Washington to St. Louis | 94 hours |
Nashville was reached from Louisville by packet in twenty-one hours, Mobile in eighty hours, and New Orleans in one hundred and sixty-five hours.
Some of the larger appropriations for the Cumberland Road were:
| 1813 | $140,000 |
| 1816 | 300,000 |
| 1819 | 535,000 |
| 1830 | 215,000 |
| 1833 | 459,000 |
| 1834 | 750,000 |
| 1835 | 646,186 |
| 1836 | 600,000 |
| 1838 | 459,000 |
The total of thirty-four appropriations from March 29, 1806, to June 17, 1844, was $6,824,919.33.
The old road was well built; nothing proves this so well as the following advertisement for bids for repairing it in Ohio in 1838:
"Sealed proposals will be received at Toll-gate No. 4, until the 6th day of March next, for repairing that part of the road lying between the beginning of the 23rd and end of the 42nd mile, and if suitable bids are obtained, and not otherwise, contracts will be made at Bradshaw's hotel in Fairview, on the 8th. Those who desire contracts are expected to attend in person, in order to sign their bonds.
"On this part of the Road three hundred rods or upwards (82½ cubic feet each) will be required on each mile, of the best quality of limestone, broken evenly into blocks not exceeding four ounces in weight each; and specimens of the material proposed must be furnished, in quantity not less than six cubic inches, broken and neatly put up in a box, and accompanying each bid; which will be returned and taken as the standard, both as it regards the quality of the material and the preparation of it at the time of measurement and inspection.
"The following conditions will be mutually understood as entering into, and forming a part of the contract, namely: The 23, 24, and 25 miles to be ready for measurement and inspection on the 25th of July; the 26, 27, and 28 miles on the 1st of August; the 29, 30, and 31 miles on the 15th of August; the 32, 33, and 34 miles on the 1st of September; the 35, 36, 37 miles on the 15th of September; the 38, 39, and 40 miles on the 1st of October; and the 41 and 42 miles, if let, will be examined at the same time.
"Any failure to be ready for inspection at the time above specified, will incur a penalty of five per cent for every two days' delay, until the whole penalty shall amount to 25 per cent on the contract paid. All the piles must be neatly put up for measurement and no pile will be measured on this part of the work containing less than five rods. Whenever a pile is placed upon deceptive ground, whether discovered at the time of measurement or afterward, half its contents shall in every case be forfeited for the use of the road.
"Proposals will also be received at the American Hotel in Columbus, on the 15th of March, for hauling broken materials from the penitentiary east of Columbus. Bids are solicited on the 1, 2, and 3 miles counting from a point near the Toll-gate towards the city. Bids will also be received at the same time and place, for collecting and breaking all the old stone that lies along the roadside, between Columbus and Kirkersville, neatly put in piles of not less than two rods, and placed on the outside of the ditches."
General Arthur St. Clair
Appointed Governor of Ohio by Congress
The dawning of the era of slackwater navigation and of the locomotive brought the public to the realization, however, that a macadamized road was not in 1838 all the wonder that it was thought to be in 1806. But in its day the Cumberland Road was a tremendous power in opening a new country, in giving hope to a brave but secluded people who had won and held the West for the Union. This was why Henry Clay championed the movement, and why he should be remembered therefor. As a Kentuckian he knew the Western problem, and with the swiftness of genius he caught the true intent and deeper meaning of a great national work such as the building of such a material bond of union. Nothing has done so much for civilization, after the alphabet and the printing press, Macaulay has said, as the inventions which have abridged distance. In those years, quick with hopes and vast with possibility at the opening of the nineteenth century, the Cumberland Road, stretching its yellow coils out across the Alleghanies and into the prairies, advanced civilization as no other material object did or could have done. "If there is any kind of advancement going on," wrote Bushnell, "if new ideas are abroad and new hopes rising, then you will see it by the roads that are building." This old road, worn out and almost forgotten, its milestones tottering, its thousand taverns silent where once all was life and merriment, is a great monument of days when advancement was a new word, when great hopes were rising and great ideas were abroad. As such it shall be remembered and honored as one of the greatest and most timely acts of promotion our young Government executed.
CHAPTER VIII
Gouverneur Morris's Day-dream of the Coming Blessings of Liberty.—He predicts Artificial Channels from the Lakes to the Hudson.—The Sight of the Caledonian Canal enables him to foresee Wealth for the Interior of America.—Seeing Ships on Lake Erie, he predicts that Ocean Vessels will soon sail on the Lakes.—Inland Navigation a Great Factor in this Country's Development.—Many Rivers not made Navigable for Lack of Engineering Skill.—President Jefferson recommends that the Surplus in the Treasury be used for Internal Improvements.—Jesse Hawley writes Articles in Behalf of an Erie Canal.—A Bill in the New York Legislature for the Same Object.—Hindrances to the Execution of the Project.—Names of Some Notable Friends of the Undertaking.—Erie Canal Bill passed by the New York Legislature, 1817.—Lack of Good Roads necessitates Transportation of Materials for the Canal in Winter only.—Other Difficulties.—Clearing away the Timber and laying out the Track from Albany to Buffalo.—Imported Machinery used for uprooting Trees and Stumps.—Neighboring States urged to Contribute.—Cost and Profits both Greater than Estimated.—Rejoicings at the Opening of the Canal.—The Success of this Canal leads to other Enterprises.
MORRIS AND CLINTON: FATHERS OF THE ERIE CANAL
As we survey the early period of the nation's history, there appear a number of famous conventions of notables which will ever live in the memory of thoughtful Americans. There are, however, a number of such gatherings that are not familiar to many, and it is at one of these that any story of the far-famed Erie Canal must begin.
In the year 1777 General Schuyler's army was at Fort Edward, New York, during its slow and sullen retreat before Burgoyne's advancing redcoats. Gouverneur Morris was sent to the army at Fort Edward, and on a certain evening, amid a company of army officers, that brilliant man told a day-dream before the flickering camp-fire. The dream concerned the future of America when once the foreign yoke should be thrown off. In language consonant with the fascinating nature of his theme the speaker described in some detail what would be the result on the minds and hearts of men when liberty for all had been secured, and the inspiring advance in arts and letters, in agriculture and commerce, that would come. He was a dreamer, but his dream became a realization and the wonder of young America. A comrade that night heard his words.
"He announced," wrote that person, Governor Morgan Lewis, then Quartermaster-General, "in language highly poetic, and to which I cannot do justice, that at no very distant day the waters of the great Western inland seas would, by the aid of man, break through their barriers and mingle with those of the Hudson. I recollect asking him how they were to break through these barriers. To which he replied, that numerous streams passed them through natural channels, and that artificial ones might be conducted by the same routes."
A number of eminent authorities, such as James Geddes, Simeon de Witt, and Elkanah Watson, all leave evidence that the idea of a canal from Lake Erie to the Hudson was first brought to men's attention by the man who told his vision to those sleepy Revolutionary officers at Fort Edward.
In his diary of a journey in Scotland in 1795 Morris thus exclaims at the sight of the Caledonian Canal, "When I see this, my mind opens to a view of wealth for the interior of America, which hitherto I had rather conjectured than seen." Six years later he wrote to a friend, after seeing ships on Lake Erie: "Hundreds of large ships will, at no distant period, bound on the billows of these inland seas.... Shall I lead your astonishment up to the verge of incredulity? I will. Know then that one-tenth of the expense borne by Great Britain in the last campaign would enable ships to sail from London through Hudson's River into Lake Erie." Simeon de Witt said in 1822: "The merit of first starting the idea of a direct communication by water between Lake Erie and Hudson's River unquestionably belongs to Mr. Gouverneur Morris. The first suggestion I had of it was from him. In 1803 I accidentally met with him at Schenectady. We put up for the night at the same inn and passed the evening together. He then mentioned the project of 'tapping Lake Erie,' as he expressed it himself, and leading its water in an artificial river, directly across the country to Hudson's River." James Geddes first heard of the early canal idea from Mr. Morris in 1804. "The idea," he said, "of saving so much lockage by not descending to Lake Ontario made a very lively impression on my mind."
Gouverneur Morris
Promoter of the Erie Canal
Looking back over the colonial history of America it is very interesting to note the part that was played in our country's development by inland navigation. Practically all the commerce of the colonies was moved in canoes, sloops, and schooners; the large number of Atlantic seaboard rivers were the roads of the colonies, and there were no other roads. In Pennsylvania and Georgia a few highways were in existence; in the province of New York there were only twelve miles of land carriage. Villages, churches, and courthouses in Maryland and Virginia were almost always placed on the shore of the rivers, for it was only by boat that the people could easily go to meeting or to court. Indeed the capital of the country, Washington, was located upon the Potomac River, partly for the reason that its founders believed that the Potomac was to be the great commercial highway of the eastern half of the continent.
As roads were the arteries of trade and travel it was natural for our forefathers to hold the opinion that to increase the commerce of the country it was necessary only to increase the number of navigable miles of the rivers. The story of the struggle to improve the navigation of the two rivers, Mohawk and Hudson, upon which the attention of our earliest engineers centred, occupies other pages of this volume; and it is for us to note here the fact merely in passing that, beginning with 1786, strenuous efforts were made to render these waterways, and a large number of less important rivers, navigable. The efforts failed of success, the reason being that engineering skill was not of a grade high enough to master the problem. And consequently, when the nineteenth century dawned, we may say with fair regard to truth that the campaigns that had been waging in a number of the States for the betterment of America's navigation by means of improved rivers had failed and were discarded.
Then it was that public attention was turned to the subject of making artificial water channels, or canals. Generations before this, the great Forth and Clyde Canal in Scotland had been completed by Smeaton; the Royal Canal in Ireland was finished in 1792; the Schuylkill and Susquehanna Canal in Pennsylvania had been surveyed in 1762, and a few miles of it had been dug in 1794; the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, though surveyed as early as 1764, was not begun until 1804.
It was natural, therefore, that the idea of a canal between the Hudson and Lake Erie should have presented itself forcibly to New Yorkers at this time, and all the latent possibilities were aroused to activity in 1807 by the recommendation made by President Jefferson in his message to Congress in October, that the surplus money in the Treasury of the United States be used for undertaking a large number of internal improvements. Whether or not Jefferson's recommendation or some other preliminary proposal of this kind may have inspired it, a New Yorker named Jesse Hawley was now preparing a series of articles advocating a canal between the Hudson and the Lakes. Before these articles, to which the name of "Hercules" was signed, were ready to appear in print, Mr. Hawley changed his place of residence to Pittsburg, and, oddly enough, it was in "The Commonwealth," a Pittsburg paper, that the first published broadside in behalf of an Erie canal appeared; this was on the fourteenth day of January, 1807. This series of articles, as a whole, appeared in "The Genesee Messenger," of Canandaigua, weekly from October, 1807, to March, 1808. The author had studied the problem with great earnestness, though the Mohawk River was to be used as a part of the system. In February of the following year the idea gained added impetus and circulation by a bill offered in the New York Legislature; its author was Joshua Forman, a member from Onondaga County, and it read as follows:
"Whereas the President of the United States by his message to Congress, delivered at their meeting in October last, did recommend that the surplus money in the treasury, over and above such sums as could be applied to the extinguishment of the national debt, be appropriated to the great national objects of opening canals and making turnpike roads; And whereas the State of New York, holding the first commercial rank in the United States, possesses within herself the best route of communication between the Atlantic and Western waters, by means of a canal between the tide-waters of the Hudson River and Lake Erie, through which the wealth and trade of that large portion of the United States bordering on the upper lakes would for ever flow to our great commercial emporium; And whereas the Legislatures of several of our sister States have made great exertions to secure to their own States the trade of that wide-extended country west of the Alleghanies to those of this State; And whereas it is highly important that these advantages should as speedily as possible be improved, both to preserve and increase the commerce and national importance of this State: Resolved (if the honourable the Senate concur herein), that a joint committee be appointed to take into consideration the propriety of exploring, and causing an accurate survey to be made of, the most eligible and direct route for a canal to open a communication between the tide-waters of the Hudson River and Lake Erie; to the end that Congress may be enabled to appropriate such sums as may be necessary to the accomplishment of that great national object."
For a number of years the great project was held in abeyance by a series of unforeseen events. First among these was the War of 1812, during which the State of New York was the frontier and saw a number of the most important campaigns. Then, too, the inherent difficulties of the project—the vast amount of ground necessarily to be covered, the low plane of engineering science at that day, the immeasurable difficulties of gaining access to the interior of a heavily wooded country, the low ebb of the financial condition of the State—all combined to strengthen the opposition to the canal. But its friends grew in number and steadily grew in power. First among them was Governor Clinton, who was so closely allied with the great undertaking that its enemies frequently called it "Clinton's Ditch"; Gouverneur Morris, Fulton, and Livingston (who were just now succeeding in their steamboat enterprise), Simeon de Witt, Thomas Eddy, General Philip Schuyler, Chancellor Kent, and Judges Yates and Platt are remembered as the most influential promoters of America's first great work of internal improvement.
Strangely enough, one of the most serious hindrances to the beginning of the work proved in the end to be the great argument in its favor, and that was the War of 1812. The act which gave birth to the canal was passed by the New York Legislature April 15, 1817, and then went before the Council of Revision. "The ordeal this bill met with in the Council of Revision," writes M. S. Hawley in his valuable pamphlet, [3] "came near being fatal to it; it could not have received a two-thirds vote after a veto. The Council was composed of Lieutenant-Governor John Taylor,—acting Governor, as President of the Council,—Chief Justice Thompson, Chancellor Kent, and Judges Yates and Platt. Acting Governor Taylor was openly opposed to the whole scheme. The Chief Justice was also opposed to this bill. Chancellor Kent was in favor of the canal, but feared it was too early for the State to undertake this gigantic work. Judges Yates and Platt were in favor of the bill; but it was likely to be lost by the casting vote of the acting Governor. Vice-President Tompkins (recently the Governor) entered the room at this stage of the proceedings, and, in an informal way, joined in conversation upon the subject before the Council, and in opposition to this bill. He said: 'The late peace with Great Britain was a mere truce, and we will undoubtedly soon have a renewed war with that country; and instead of wasting the credit and resources of the State in this chimerical project, we ought to employ all our revenue and credit in preparing for war.'
"'Do you think so, sir?' said Chancellor Kent.
"'Yes, sir,' replied the Vice-President; 'England will never forgive us for our victories, and, my word for it, we shall have another war with her within two years.'
"The Chancellor, then rising from his seat, with great animation declared,
"'If we must have war ... I am in favor of the canal, and I vote for the bill.'
"With that vote the bill became a law."
It is difficult for us to-day to realize what a tremendous undertaking it was to try to throw this great "Ditch" of Clinton's across those hundreds of miles of forest and swamp which, for so many generations, had been known as the "Long House of the Iroquois." As you fly through that beautiful territory watered by the Mohawk, Seneca, and Onondaga rivers to-day, it is hardly possible to re-create, with any measure of truth, the old-time appearance of the land. It was well into the nineteenth century before a good road was ever built in Central New York; indeed, during the years while the Erie Canal was being built, the necessary materials for the building, and provisions for the builders, were transported thither in the winter season because at that time only was it accessible by any known means of transportation. Think what it meant, then, to dig a great trench through the heavily wooded region where even the road-builders had not had the temerity to go. It was the forest growth that held back the road-maker; the tangled forest, the heavily wooded overgrowth that bound the heavy trees inextricably together. The canal-builder had all that the road-maker found to combat with above the ground,—the tangled mesh of bush, vine, and tree,—but he had also what was far more difficult to attack and conquer, namely, the tremendous labyrinth of roots that lay beneath the ground. Thus, his task was double that of the road-maker; and look as far as you will through our early history, you will not find an enterprise launched on this continent by any man or any set of men that will compare in daring with the promotion of this great work of interior improvement to which New York now set herself.
For there was no hesitating. Within a very few days of the passing of the act creating the Erie Canal you could have seen surveyors and chainmen pushing out into the shadowy forest-land, driving five lines of stakes across New York toward the setting sun. These men, like those who sent them, were ridiculed everywhere they went by some of the people; but still the ringing blows grew fainter and fainter as those five lines of stakes crept on up the Mohawk, along the Seneca, through poisonous swamps, on the banks of running rivers, around the shores of the still-lying lakes. Those who ridiculed prophesied that next we would be building a bridge across the Atlantic, and then a tunnel to China beneath the Pacific; but the sneers and ridicule of that portion of the people that will be fools all the time could not stop those earnest stake-drivers or the small army of men, mostly Americans, who came in and worked with pick, shovel, and wheelbarrow.
The two outer lines of stakes were sixty feet apart; this indicated the space from which the forest was to be cleared. Two lines of stakes within these, measuring forty feet apart, represented the exact width of the proposed canal; and the remaining single line of stakes located its mathematical centre. The whole distance of the canal from Albany to Buffalo was divided into three sections, and these sections were subdivided into very small portions, which were let to contractors. The first contract was signed June 27, 1817, and work was begun at historic Rome, New York, on the following Fourth of July, with appropriate ceremony. After a short address by one of the commissioners, Samuel Young, and amid a burst of artillery, Judge Richardson, the first contractor, threw out the first spadeful of earth.
To present-day readers acquainted with so many wonderful feats of engineering of modern days, the history of the building of this canal must seem commonplace; the marvellous thing about it, after all, was its conception and the campaign of education which brought about its realization. One of the romantic phases of the story, that will forever be of interest to those of us who can never know a primeval forest, was the experience of the engineering corps crashing their way through the New York forests, where the surveyors' stakes could hardly be seen in the dense gloom. Machinery unknown in America at the time was called upon to perform this arduous labor of grubbing and clearing this sixty-foot aisle. One machine, working on the principle of an endless screw connected with a cable, a wheel, and a crank, enabled a single man to haul down a tree of the largest size without any cutting. The machine being located at a distance of one hundred feet from the foot of the tree, the cable was attached to the trunk fifty or sixty feet from the ground, a crank was turned, the screw revolved, and the tree was soon prostrated, as the force which could be exerted by this principle was irresistible.
A machine for hauling out stumps was constructed and operated as follows:
"Two strong wheels, sixteen feet in diameter, are made and connected together by a round axle-tree, twenty inches thick and thirty feet long; between these wheels, and with its spokes inseparably framed into their axle-tree, another wheel is placed, fourteen feet in diameter, round the rim of which a rope is several times passed, with one end fastened through the rim, and with the other end loose, but in such a condition as to produce a revolution of the wheel whenever it is pulled. This apparatus is so moved as to have the stump, on which it is intended to operate, midway between the largest wheels, and nearly under the axle-tree; and these wheels are so braced as to remain steady. A very strong chain is hooked, one end to the body of the stump, or its principal root, and the other to the axle-tree. The power of horses or oxen is then applied to the loose end of the rope above mentioned, and as they draw, rotary motion is communicated, through the smallest wheel, to the axle-tree, on which, as the chain hooked to the stump winds up, the stump itself is gradually disengaged from the earth in which it grew. After this disengagement is complete, the braces are taken from the large wheels, which then afford the means of removing that stump out of the way, as well as of transporting the apparatus where it may be made to bear on another."
An implement devised for the underground work demanded on the Erie Canal was a peculiar plough having a very heavy blade by which the roots of the trees were cut; two yoke of oxen could draw this plough through any mesh of roots none of which exceeded two inches in diameter.
The middle section of the canal, from Rome to Lockport, was completed in 1819, twenty-seven miles being navigable in that year. By 1823 the canal was opened from Rochester to Schenectady. Water was admitted into the canal between Schenectady and Albany in October of that year; and by September, 1824, the line was completed from Lockport to Black Rock Harbor on Lake Erie.
In evidence of what the promoters of the Erie Canal expected that highway would be to the Central West we find this interesting fact: Ohio, and even Kentucky, were called upon officially to aid in raising the funds for its building. Indeed, the commissioners in 1817 went so far as to utter a threat against the States lying on each side of New York in case they should not be willing to contribute to the building of this commercial route, which was to be for their common benefit; this consisted in a threat to charge high duties on articles transported to and from those States and the Territories of the United States. It would seem as though New York never expected to be compelled to finance, unassisted, the great work of improvement which she began in 1817. Agents went canvassing for her both in Vermont on the east and in Ohio on the west for the purpose of raising contributions to the canal fund. Agents also were sent to the national Government at Washington, and it was believed that national aid could perhaps be secured from the sale of the public lands in Michigan, very much in the same way as the old National Road was paid for in part by the sale of lands in Ohio a decade before. Though assurances of interest and sympathy were forthcoming from the Government and from all the interested States, there is no evidence at hand to show that New York was aided to the extent of a single penny from any extraneous source. To this fact, we shall see in another chapter, may be charged the opposition of New York delegates in Congress to many government-aid propositions that came up in the era of internal improvements.
As is usually the case, the expense of this great work exceeded all the scheduled estimates; but, as has seldom if ever been the case with works of this character, the receipts from the tolls on the Erie Canal also exceeded all estimates. In only eight years following the completion of the canal the receipts from it exceeded all estimates by nearly two and one-quarter millions of dollars, whereas the total cost of the canal, including the amount required for completion and payment of all claims at the close of the year 1824, was only $7,700,000. Indeed, the success of the canal was so great that it was hardly completed before plans for an enlargement were necessary.
Yet on its completion a great celebration was held, which probably was the most picturesque pageant ever seen on this continent to that time. For many days previous to the completion of the work, committees in all the cities and villages throughout the route of the canal were preparing to do honor to Governor Clinton as he should make a triumphal tour from end to end in the first boat that made the journey. Looking back through the years, the scene presented of the Governor of that State sailing in a little flotilla of canal boats from Buffalo to Albany, the violent rejoicing of political friends along the route, the demonstrations and orations by the score, the transparencies, illuminations, and jollifications, stand without a parallel in the early history of our country. At the moment when Clinton's boats weighed anchor at Buffalo, a burst of artillery sent the message eastward; cannon located along the route took up the message, and in comparatively few moments it was passed across the State to the metropolis. When Clinton reached New York, the canal boats having been towed down the Hudson, a spectacular ceremony was performed off Sandy Hook, where a keg of Lake Erie water was poured into the sea in commemoration of the wedding of the ocean and the lakes. The procession in New York City was the greatest, it is said, that had ever formed in America up to that time. The illuminations were in harmony with the whole scale of the celebration, as was true of the grand ball in Lafayette Amphitheatre in Laurens Street; here, in order to secure necessary floor space, a circus building on one side and a riding-school on the other were temporarily united to make the largest ballroom in America.
De Witt Clinton
Friend of the Erie Canal Project
The Erie Canal was of tremendous national importance in more ways than it is possible to trace. The hopes and dreams of its promoters were based on such sound principles, and the work they planned was so well executed, that the success of their adventure gave inspiration to hundreds of other enterprises throughout the length and breadth of the country. That was the Erie Canal's great mission. It is hardly necessary to say that the State of New York reaped a great benefit from the successful prosecution of the work. But it was not New York alone that benefited; for the Erie Canal was the one great early school of civil engineers in the United States, and in all parts of the country, from the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad at Baltimore to the Portland Canal at far-away Louisville, Kentucky, the men who engineered New York's great canal found valuable work to do.
It is most remarkable that now, at the beginning of another century, the people of New York should be planning a new Erie Canal; and perhaps the most significant fact in connection with the one-thousand-ton barge canal now projected is the fact that wherever rivers are available, as for instance the Mohawk, these are to be taken advantage of, showing that modern engineering science approves the early theory entertained by Washington and Morris of the canalization of rivers. The old Erie Canal cost upwards of eight millions, which was deemed an immense sum at that day. It is difficult always to measure by any monetary standard the great changes that the passing years have brought; but the new canal now to be built is to cost one hundred and one millions, which is in our time a comparatively moderate sum. The influence of the building of the old canal spread throughout the nation, and scores of canals were projected in the different States; it seems now that the influence of the promotion of the new Erie Canal will likewise be felt throughout the country. New York again leads the way.