The Pioneers

David McCullough, “The Pioneers: The Northwest Territory, Simon & Schuster, 2019, 258 pp.

The Pioneers is really the history of one of the five future states that were made from the Northwest Territory: OHIO.  McCullough convincingly captures the toughness required of these pioneers.  We are thoroughly introduced to the Rev. Manasseh Cutler along with General Putnam and their roles in settling Ohio.  A lot of characters of note passed through Ohio during its early phases.  Characters such as Lewis and Clark (headed west), Aaron Burr the year after killing Hamilton and Burrs efforts to separate the western areas from the U.S. with the help of Ohio characters Harman and Margaret Blennerhasett, Anglo-Irish newlyweds.

Cutler and his supporters wanted the Ohio Territory, and eventual state, to be nonslaveholding, free within a nation where slavery was still legal. Their goal followed the tendency of the states in the North to repudiate slavery — at least within their own state borders. Prohibiting slavery in newly formed states extended that revolutionary logic outward. As the Northwest Ordinance (1787) declared (two years before the Constitution), “There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory.” Nor could the eventual states formed out of the Northwest Territory be admitted to the Union as slave states.  These are noble words but still required a fight in the State of Ohio to ensure they were sustained.  (Note: that areas not yet states were entirely under the control of the federal government; however, once an area became a State, they could then decide on their own whether to be slaveholding or not.  It was not until the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments that States became subject to Federal control regarding citizen rights)

And thus a moral border on the nation’s map, a firm resolve that the Ohio River separated two different ways of being American. McCullough notes that Harriet Beecher Stowe, who lived for a time in Cincinnati, shaped testimony about slavery she heard from free blacks in Ohio into “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” He might have added that the semifrozen river the fugitive slave Eliza crosses to freedom in Stowe’s novel is the Ohio River, a geo-ethical line within an increasingly divided nation.

The Northwest Ordinance also stipulated that schools and education would be embedded into the new settlements. Ohio had a school system supported by public taxes and it had Ohio University, founded in 1804. Freedom of religion was also part of the Northwest plan and became law in Ohio two years before it would be enshrined in the Constitution, even as many of the old American states still had established churches, with financial penalties or civic exclusion of people of other faiths. It made a difference. The first Ohio Jewish congregation was formed in 1824 — there wouldn’t be a counterpart in Massachusetts for another decade.  In spite of the Ordinance mandate of no-slavery and public education, each item had to be fought for at the state level.  Also, the Ordinance declaration that “the utmost good faith shall always be observed toward the Indians,” several indigenous nations refused to recognize the treaties that, under United States law, nullified their land rights. A confederation of the Shawnee, Miami, and Lenape (Delaware) — led by their leaders, Waweyapiersenwaw (Blue Jacket), Mishikinaakwa (Little Turtle) and Buckongahelas — resisted the settlers’ advance. After several attacks, American officials dispatched troops, who built a new fort. Their effort resulted in a battle at the Wabash River (Nov. 4, 1791), which came to be known as St. Clair’s Defeat, a rout worse than any suffered in the American Revolution: 623 men and officers lost, plus an estimated 200 civilians. (Indian fatalities were estimated at 21.) But the United States won a significant victory three years later at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, where Gen. Anthony Wayne defeated Blue Jacket’s forces on Aug. 20. The Treaty of Greenville (1795) drew yet another line, one that demanded Indians remove themselves north and west of the Ohio Territory.

My Notes:

Pg. 28f:  The Northwest Ordinance reads much like the Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, the first constitution in the US, written in 1779 by John Adams.  Especially the freedom of religion and education portions stand out.  The Ordinance specified that a section in each township be reserved for common schools and be ‘given perpetually to the use of a university.’  It was Article VI that set forth that ‘There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory.’  This was an agreement made when slavery existed in every one of the thirteen states and in a territory as large as all of the thirteen states then in existence.

Pg. 171:  President Jefferson’s 1807 Embargo Act was a very severe blow to Ohio’s economy.  The Act was put through with the support of Congress in the hope of strangling English commerce at sea, as a way of avoiding all-out war.  American ships were now forbidden to carry exports.  Shipbuilding in Ohio came to an abrupt halt. 

Pg. 184:  In October 1811 the first steamboat departed from Pittsburgh and proceeded down the Ohio River and an astonishing speed of 12 miles per hour.  In fourteen days the boat made it the 2,000 miles to New Orleans. 

Pg. 189:  On August 24, 1814, the British burned the White House.  President Madison and Congress had been forced to flee.  Then in January 1815 news came from New Orleans that General Jackson had won a crushing victory over the British.  (Jackson’s victory actually came after the Treaty of Ghent had already been signed but he did not know of the treaty).

Pg. 227:  Consumption of hard liquor per capita by the 1820s had reached five gallons per year, the highest ever and at that same time the temperance movement had gotten underway.