But it was not Senator Hoar’s task to narrate the military services of General Putnam.[65]
“We have to do,” he said, “only with the entrenchments constructed under the command of this great engineer for the constitutional fortress of American liberty. Putnam removed his family to Rutland, Worcester County, Mass., early in 1780. His house is yet standing, about ten miles from the birthplace of the grandfather of President Garfield. He himself returned to Rutland when the war was over. He had the noble public spirit of his day, to which no duty seemed trifling or obscure. For five years he tilled his farm and accepted and performed the public offices to which his neighbors called him. He was representative to the General Court, selectman, constable, tax collector and committee to lay out school lots for the town; State surveyor, commissioner to treat with the Penobscot Indians and volunteer in putting down Shays’s Rebellion. He was one of the founders and first trustees of Leicester Academy, and, with his family of eight children, gave from his modest means a hundred pounds toward its endowment. But he had larger plans in mind. The town constable of Rutland was planning an empire.”
Putnam’s chief counsellor in his design at the first was Washington, whose part altogether in the opening of the West was so noteworthy. Mr. Hoar tells of the correspondence between Putnam and Washington, and follows the interesting history to the organization of the Ohio Company, at the Bunch of Grapes Tavern in Boston, in 1786, and the departure of the Massachusetts emigrants at the end of the next year.
“Putnam went out from his simple house in Rutland to dwell no more in his native Massachusetts. It is a plain, wooden dwelling, perhaps a little better than the average of the farmers’ houses of New England of that day; yet about which of Europe’s palaces do holier memories cling! Honor and fame, and freedom and empire, and the faith of America went with him as he crossed the threshold.”
To Rutland, as one who loved the old town and its history has well said, “belongs the honor of having carried into action the Ordinance of 1787. Standing on Rutland hill, and looking around the immense basin of which it forms the centre, it is with conscious pride that one looks upon the old landmarks and calls up to the imagination the strong and brave and true men whose traditions have permeated the soil and left their marks in the civilization which has been the type for the development of the whole of the great Northwest.” For this old town on the hilltop was veritably “the cradle of Ohio.” Here was first effectually heard that potent invitation and command, so significant in the history of this country in these hundred years, “Go West!” This town incarnates and represents as no other the spirit of the mighty movement which during the century has extended New England all through the great West.
As early as 1783, about the time of the breaking up of the army at Newburgh on the Hudson, General Putnam and nearly three hundred army officers had proposed to form a new State beyond the Ohio, and Washington warmly endorsed their memorial to Congress asking for a grant of land; but the plan miscarried. As soon as the Ordinance was passed, the Ohio Company, of which Putnam was the president, bought from the government five or six million acres, and the first great movement of emigration west of the Ohio at once began. Within a year following the organization of the territory, twenty thousand people became settlers upon the banks of the Ohio. But the Pilgrim Fathers of the thousands and the millions, the pioneers to whom belongs the praise, were the forty or fifty farmers who from old Rutland pushed on with Putnam through the snows of Connecticut and Pennsylvania, coming to Pittsburgh just as the spring of 1788 came, and dropping down the river to Marietta in the little boat which they had named, by a beautiful fatality, the Mayflower. “Forever honored be Marietta as another Plymouth!”
The men who first settled the Northwest Territory,—as President Hayes, following Mr. Hoar at Marietta, well called it, “the most fortunate colonization that ever occurred on earth,”—and who set the seal of their character and institutions upon it, were of the best blood of New England.
“Look for a moment,” said Mr. Hoar, “at the forty-eight men who came here a hundred years ago to found the first American civil government whose jurisdiction did not touch tide-water. See what manner of men they were; in what school they had been trained; what traditions they had inherited. I think that you must agree
