The Pioneers Page 4

  To Manasseh Cutler the establishment of a university was of utmost importance as was plain to everyone concerned. It was “a first object,” as he later told his oldest son, Ephraim, “and lay with great weight on my mind.”

  “Wisdom is the principal thing,” read the ancient directive in Proverbs; “therefore get wisdom; and with all thy getting get understanding.”

  Importantly, the same Article III of the ordinance stated that the “utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians; their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent . . . they shall never be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful wars authorized by Congress.”

  But it was Article VI that set forth a tenet such as never before stated in any American constitution. “There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory.” And, as was well understood, this had been agreed to when slavery existed in every one of the thirteen states. It was almost unimaginable that throughout a new territory as large as all of the thirteen states, there was to be no slavery.

  Nothing written at the time indicated who had been most responsible for Article VI. In his journal Cutler said nothing on the subject. Nathan Dane of Massachusetts would later claim credit for that part of the ordinance. But this seems unlikely. While he may have drafted certain parts, he was not the writer Manasseh Cutler was. As his own biographer would say, Dane had “no graces of style, either native or borrowed, neither did he ever seek for any.”

  Overall Manasseh Cutler had played the most important role by far. Years later he would tell Ephraim he had indeed prepared that part of the ordinance banning slavery and, as Ephraim also recorded, the reason for this, as well as the recognition of religion, morality, and knowledge as foundations of civil government, arose from the fact that his father was “acting for associates, friends, and neighbors, who would not embark in the enterprise, unless these principles were unalterably fixed.”

  In the opinion of the two grandchildren, William Parker Cutler and Julia Perkins Cutler, who would later edit and publish Manasseh Cutler’s journals and correspondence, his way with the southern members of Congress had been the deciding factor.

  In any event, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 would prove to be one of the most far-reaching acts of Congress in the history of the country.

  As one widely respected, later-day historian, Albert Bushnell Hart of Harvard University, would write, “Never was there a more ingenious, systematic and successful piece of lobbying than that of the Reverend Manasseh Cutler” and the great Northwest Ordinance of 1787 stands alongside the Magna Carta and the Declaration of Independence as a bold assertion of the rights of the individual.

  Eager to be heading home, Cutler hurriedly packed, made a number of parting calls, took up the reins of his horse, and was on his way north, though, as he said, with some reluctance. The “attention and generous treatment” he had been shown in New York were “totally different from what I had ever before met with.” He loved the city, loved its business, the grand buildings from four to six stories high, the straight, well-kept streets, the way people dressed, and the way they treated strangers. It was a city with a great future, he felt certain.

  Not until past midnight Saturday, August 4, did he finally reach home. As he dutifully recorded he had traveled 885 miles. “Thus I completed one of the most interesting and agreeable journeys I ever made in my life . . . and may probably have reason to consider it as one of the most happy events of my life.”

  IV.

  Through the rest of that summer and on into the fall there was much for the good pastor to attend to with his family, his parishioners, his boarding school, and, in addition, the hundreds of people now coming to his door to talk about the Ohio country and issues large and small to be settled as soon as possible in preparation for a first expedition to the distant wilderness. “Determined to send men this fall,” he wrote in his journal at the end of August.

  September 10–15

  House full of Ohio people all the week

  Sept. 21, 22

  Ohio people here . . .

  Sept. 24–29

  Much engaged in the Ohio matters

  Great care had to be taken to choose those who would be valuable in the community once it was established. By September 29, more than 150 had applied, and out of those, thirty-seven had been signed on.

  In October, even though he had not seen the Ohio territory, the Reverend Cutler published a pamphlet on it, a work of considerable substance and effort in which he described the natural resources, soils, climate, the earlier enthusiastic judgments of an English engineer, and predicted that because of the great Ohio River and plentitude of fine timber at hand, shipbuilding would thrive there.

  Further, he made his strongest statement yet on the subject of education and the important part it was to play. The field of science “may be greatly enlarged,” he wrote, “and the acquisition of useful knowledge placed upon a more respectable footing here than in any other part of the world.

  Besides the opportunity of opening a new and unexplored region for the range of natural history, botany, and medical science, there will be one advantage which no other part of the earth can boast, and which probably will never again occur; that, in order to begin right, there will be . . . no inveterate systems to overturn.

  And it was never too soon to get started on so worthy an aspiration. Even now, he wrote, “Could the necessary apparatus be procured, and funds immediately established for the founding of a university on a liberal plan, the professors could get started in their work.”

  For his father, this was “a season of the most arduous labor,” son Ephraim would recall. It was his father’s particular character that, after he had fully considered a matter and settled his mind to effect a purpose, nothing could discourage him; his energy and perseverance overcame all difficulties.

  General Putnam . . . [was] to take charge of the pioneer party; still, the men and means were to be sought for and provided, and in this he bore his full share. I well remember the extreme anxiety and toil it occasioned him. I was then only about twenty years of age, but I enlisted some of the first adventurers; many, however, of the most effective men were induced to come forward through my father’s influence.

  The thought that he, too, might go on to Ohio, had been on Manasseh Cutler’s mind for some time, but with so much still to attend to there at home, he knew he must stay where he was. But if he could not go, his son Jervis, an adventurer by nature, was eager to take his place. At age nineteen he was to be one of the youngest men on the expedition.

  The first pioneers—forty-eight men including surveyors, carpenters, boat builders, common laborers, and a blacksmith—were to go in two parties. One, numbering twenty and headed by a veteran officer, Major Haffield White, was to depart first from Ipswich Hamlet. The second, led by General Rufus Putnam, the overall head, or “superintendent,” of the expedition, would leave soon after from Hartford, Connecticut.

  Their tools, one ax and one hoe per man, as well as thirty pounds of baggage, were to be carried in the company wagon. In addition, each man was to furnish himself with one good musket, a bayonet, six flints, powder horn and pouch, priming wire and brush, half a pound of powder, one pound of musket balls, and a pound of buckshot. Wages were $4 a month.

  By the time all was ready, December had arrived, hardly the best time of year to be setting off for the far wilderness. They would be traveling on foot the entire way until reaching the headwaters of the Ohio, so even under ideal conditions they would be moving at a speed of little more than one mile an hour, or about ten miles a day on an overland journey of some 700 miles that included the mountains of western Pennsylvania.

  But spirits were high and the importance of getting there with the least delay possible was very much in mind. Once at the Ohio, time would be needed to build boats for the journey downriver—all to arrive in early spring, soon enough to get in a first planting of gardens and corn sufficien
t for survival.

  Before sunrise the morning of Monday, December 3, 1787, a band of pioneers had gathered in front of the rectory, where they were to take an early breakfast. At dawn, they paraded in front of the house, and after a short address delivered by the Reverend Cutler, “full of good advice and hearty wishes,” the men fired a three-volley salute, and marched off down the road, young Jervis among them, cheered by the bystanders and following a large covered wagon pulled by oxen.

  The wagon had been a gift from Manasseh Cutler and he himself had painted the white inscription on the black canvas sides, “For the Ohio.”

   CHAPTER TWO

  Forth to the Wilderness

  December 31, 1787—Monday—Set out from my own house, in Rutland, in the state of Massachusetts, in the service of the Ohio Company, for the mouth of the Muskingum River.

  —RUFUS PUTNAM

  I.

  Like so many born and raised on a New England farm in the eighteenth century and who served in the Revolutionary War, Rufus Putnam had known hard work and hardships, great sorrow and seemingly insurmountable obstacles most of his life. It was what was to be expected, just as one was expected to measure up.

  His father, a good and “very useful” man, had, in the long family tradition, “pursued the occupation of a tiller of the earth” in central Massachusetts. But his father died when Rufus was only seven and when his mother remarried, it was to an illiterate tavern keeper who despised books and learning and, worse, ridiculed the boy for his ambition to learn. Because of this, Rufus was not sent to school. “After I was nine years old, I went to school in all only three weeks,” he later wrote. To learn mathematics and spelling he had to earn his own money to buy the schoolbooks needed.

  Mathematics he could handle, but spelling and grammar would remain lifelong mysteries. As he once wrote in a letter to a friend:

  Had I been as much engaged in learning to write, with spelling and grammar, I might have been much better qualified to fulfill the duties of the succeeding scenes of life. . . . Having neglected spelling and grammar when I was young, I have suffered much through life on that account.

  As would be said, the “hardships of his early life were schoolmasters to fit him” for the life in store. He had joined the army at nineteen, spent three years serving in the French and Indian War. In 1761, at twenty-three, he was happily married to Elizabeth Ayres of Brookfield, Massachusetts, but she died in less than a year and only months later their infant son also died.

  In 1765 he married again, this time to Persis Rice of Westborough and they were to have nine children.

  His interest in, his need for the books he was denied as a boy never left him, and one book in particular played a key part in his service during the Revolution and in the course of the war itself. This concerned General Washington’s decision to try to draw the British to attack the Americans on Dorchester Heights.

  In the winter of 1776, Washington had put Putnam in charge of the defenses at Dorchester Heights overlooking Boston Harbor, where the ground was frozen so hard that ordinary breastworks could not be constructed.

  Washington directed him to consider how this might best be accomplished, and to make a report to him immediately. What followed, Putnam would describe as one of “those singular circumstances which I call Providence.”

  Coming out of the meeting, he stopped to see another of Washington’s command, General William Heath, and noticed a book lying on a table, lettered on the spine, Muller’s The Field Engineer. He asked the general to let him borrow it. “He denied me,” Putnam remembered. “I repeated my request; he again refused and told me he never lent his books.” Putnam reminded him that it was he, General Heath, who had encouraged Putnam to undertake the role of military engineer, a role which, at the time, he had never read anything about, and that the general must let him have the book. “After some more excuses on his part and close pressing on mine, I obtained the loan of it,” Putnam wrote.

  Looking through the book the next morning, he saw the word “chandelier,” something he had never heard of before. He read what it meant and almost immediately came up with the plan that would bring American success at Dorchester Heights and the withdrawal of the British from Boston—all from one word in a book.

  Putnam created his own “chandeliers,” heavy wooden-framed fortifications filled with facines (bundles of sticks) that could be moved about when necessary. Washington thought so highly of him that he became the chief engineer of the army. It was Putnam who marked out most of the fortifications in Brooklyn. Later still, he rebuilt the fortifications at West Point.

  Since the end of the Revolution, he and his family had been living on a 155-acre farm in Rutland, at almost the precise geographical center of the Bay State. Their home, a large, white-frame, hip-roof house built by a wealthy loyalist, had been confiscated at the close of the war and so Putnam, who had by then achieved considerable success as a surveyor, was able to buy it on favorable terms.

  There he did much of the thinking, planning, and correspondence needed for the Ohio venture, there he drew up the first plan for the town to be built on the chosen spot at the confluence of the Muskingum and Ohio Rivers. And it was there at the Putnam home on the last day of the year 1787 that, at age forty-nine, he said goodbye to his wife and family and started for the west.

  To what extent he foresaw the difficulties and danger that lay ahead for him and those he was to lead is hard to estimate. Most likely it was considerable.

  Because he felt obliged to settle certain matters in New York concerning the Ohio Company and Indian treaties, Putnam did not catch up with his unit of westward-bound pioneers until January 24, 1788, halfway across Pennsylvania at Hummelstown, on Swatara Creek, just short of Harrisburg.

  As they moved on the weather turned worse. The wind-blown snow was eight inches deep, the traveling “excessive bad.” In the days that followed, the going grew more difficult still. “So great a quantity of snow fell that day and the following night as to quite block up the road. . . . Our only resource now was to build sleds and harness our horses one before the other, and in this manner, with four sleds and the men in front to break the track, we set forward.”

  The “road,” as he called it, was the Forbes Road, an old Indian trail that had been widened by the British General John Forbes for his expedition to the forks of the Ohio during the French and Indian War and was no easy pathway even under the best weather conditions.

  There were twenty-two in the party. Among them were two in particular, both Rhode Islanders, whom Putnam knew he could count on to serve in ways the others were incapable of. Most conspicuous was Ebenezer Sproat, a surveyor who at six feet, four inches loomed over the rest like a giant. A highly respected officer in the war, he had afterward tried his hand at the importing trade, only to fail miserably, using all his own and his wife’s resources. But by then Congress had ordered the first surveys of the Ohio territory under the direction of Thomas Hutchins. Sproat had been appointed the surveyor for the state of Rhode Island, and that fall joined in the operations. Though progress was limited because of Indian hostilities, he had nonetheless seen enough of the territory firsthand to know more about it than any of the others slogging west now under the command of Rufus Putnam. In effect, Ebenezer Sproat was second in command.

  The other from Rhode Island, Captain Jonathan Devol, was a man of medium height whose reddish hair and strikingly clear blue eyes set him off as did his trade. As would be said, “Among that body of sterling men who were bold and hardy enough to make the first settlement in the wilderness where Ohio now stands, there was no more remarkable or useful man than Captain Jonathan Devol.” Having learned the skills of ship carpentry at an early age, he had become widely noted for constructing “boats of a beautiful model, and famed for rapid sailing.” It was understood by all that building boats in the wilderness would be essential to the success of the expedition under way, as well as the success of a settlement on the Ohio River. And that would depend greatl
y on those relative few who knew how to do it.

  Others were mechanics, carpenters, and surveyors. The oldest of the party, William Moulton, a goldsmith from New Hampshire, was sixty-seven, while two others beside Jervis Cutler were still in their teens, Amos Porter from Danvers and Samuel Cushing from Hingham, Massachusetts.

  Between them and the promised land of Ohio now were the Allegheny Mountains, a formidable barrier.

  They crossed the Blue Mountain, Tuscarora Mountain, all on foot, the sleds loaded down with tools, baggage, and provisions. “Traveling both these days very bad. Men and horses much fatigued,” wrote Putnam. The temperature kept dropping. “[The] cold last night and this day may be the coldest this winter,” he recorded on February 5. At night they slept around huge, blazing fires. To what extent whiskey served to lessen their discomforts, he did not mention, though to judge from what would be recorded on the subject in days to come, it could have been considerable.

  By the time they reached the westernmost of the Alleghenies—Laurel Mountain and the Chestnut Ridge—a thaw set in. Heavy rains fell and for a full day they could not proceed.

  In the days following, progress improved. Finally, on February 14, they reached Sumerill’s Ferry on the Youghiogheny River, thirty miles southeast of Pittsburgh, where Haffield White and his party were encamped. The journey for Putnam and his party over the mountains had taken nearly a month.