The Frontier Republic

Ideology and Politics in The Ohio Country, 1780-1825

Andrew R. L Cayton

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781612770062
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Conflict invariably characterizes the period following any revolution, and post-revolutionary America was no exception. After the unity inspired by opposition to a common enemy dissipates, revolutionary movements generally splinter into different groups that compete with each other for the right to shape the values and structures of the new society.

The Frontier Republic examines the form these conflicts took in the settlement of the Ohio Country, as thousands of Americans streamed onto the lands west of the Appalachians. These settlers had experienced revolution and migration: now the process of creating new communities and a new state in the Northwest Territory forced them to deliberate on, and define, what these upheavals had accomplished. At issue was the very nature of human society and the role of government in it. Jeffersonian Republican ideals of individual liberty and local sovereignty were at odds with the Federalist vision of a well-ordered society and political control on the national level. Disagreements arose over such topics as rights of squatters, establishment of authority of the national government, the statehood movement, and the location of the new state's capital. The effects of the Panic of 1819 and the need for internal improvements changed the early focus on individualism to an understanding of Ohio's place in an interdependent society. Although this first generation of settlers failed to resolve their disputes completely, they ensured that the ideological foundation of nineteenth-century Ohio would be a synthesis of their conflicting revolutionary visions of the future of the United States.

1

Congress v. Squatters

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From the point in western Pennsylvania where the Allegheny and the Monongahela rivers meet in muddy union to give it birth, the Ohio River flows almost a thousand miles to the south and west. Its course is rarely straight. On a map the river appears like a collapsing staircase, falling haphazardly toward its junction with the Mississippi. Along the way it collects the contributions of a number of lesser streams. From the south come the Kanawha, the Licking, the Cumberland, the Kentucky, and the Tennessee; from the north flow the Muskingum, the Scioto, the Miami, and the Wabash. The drainage area of these rivers, combined with those of the hundreds of creeks and streams that give them strength, makes the effective valley of the Ohio River a large one. Its domain extends at least a hundred miles on either side of its channel. Even today, at regular intervals tamed by dams and crossed by bridges, the river still dominates its valley.

Geographically, there are two parts to the domain of the Ohio—the upper and lower valleys. For the first several hundred miles the river flows through the foothills of the Appalachians, surrounded by small mountains that slide sharply down to the river bed. The rough terrain in what is now West Virginia and eastern Ohio makes farming an unrewarding task. Except for the bottomland beside the river and its tributaries, this region had little to attract anyone besides hunters and semi-subsistence farmers until the Industrial Revolution made the coal and other minerals within its hills valuable.

After the Ohio River passes Cincinnati, however, and traverses a big bend to the south, the land along its northern bank begins to flatten. Away from the river, this development begins some fifty miles to the east. West of the Scioto River, the foothills give away abruptly to great acreage of fertile plains that gradually approach the Ohio as it continues along its course.

In the late eighteenth century, the lands north of the Ohio River attracted the interest of a wide variety of Americans. While all of them had great expectations about exploiting the Ohio Country’s natural resources, they found it difficult to forge a consensus about the future of the region. In particular, they could not agree on whether local or national interests should take precedence in the development of the territory. And until they could resolve their differences (as well as those with the Native Americans already living on the lands the Americans coveted), the Ohio Country would remain a frontier, an area without stable economic and social structures or a widely accepted source of political authority.

To many prominent Americans in the 1780s, including George Washington and members of the Confederation Congress, the lands north of the Ohio River were of critical financial and strategic value. The American Revolution had left the national government saddled with a huge debt and few viable means of financing it. Lacking the power to tax under the Articles of Confederation, congressmen saw the sale of public lands as a certain source of revenue, what David Howell of Rhode Island called “a sufficient fund to secure the final payment of the national debt.”¹ Just as important, the future Northwest Territory was a potential buffer against the British in Canada and the Spanish west of the Mississippi River. The Ohio Country was one of the most promising bulwarks of the young American republic.

Virginia’s March 1784 cession of its claim to the territory north of the Ohio River (in return for a tract of land east of the Scioto River reserved for its revolutionary war veterans) seemed to clear the way for development of the region under congressional control. British claims had ostensibly been extinguished by the Treaty of Paris, negotiations were underway with Indians that would climax in the January 1785 Treaty of Fort McIntosh establishing a boundary at the Cuyahoga River, and Congress had voided all land company claims as part of its agreement with Virginia. Still, some congressmen feared, as James Tilton put it in February 1784, that the territory might “slip out of our hands if not speedily attended to.”²

Accordingly, in April 1784, Congress passed an ordinance designed to guide the development of the Northwest Territory, as the region would eventually be called. The Ordinance of 1784 provided for the establishment of seven territories with temporary governments that conformed to the laws of the original thirteen states. When Congress was satisfied that an individual territory had twenty thousand free people, it would grant permission to form a permanent government. In the meantime, Congress would govern the region in order to preserve “peace and good order among the settlers.” The territories could become states when their population equalled that of the smallest of the original thirteen states and two-thirds of the states agreed to their admission to the Union. As potentially democratic as the Ordinance of 1784 was, it was not an invitation to local self-government. Rather, Congress was trying to protect its western investments by insuring that the evolution of government and society would be guided by its paternal hands.³

The national government acted quickly to assert its authority because frontiersmen were threatening to develop the Ohio Country on their own. The land across the Ohio River had attracted residents of western Pennsylvania and Virginia for years. During the American Revolution, many of them began to build temporary settlements along the northern bank of the Ohio and its tributaries. These settlers had no legal right to occupy the land; technically, they were squatters. But their conception of property ownership depended more upon actual possession than legal titles. Further, they had little respect for a distant national authority and felt no obligation to sacrifice their individual interests so that the national debt could be reduced. Their concern was with local custom and individual rights, not the aggrandizement of Congress.

As early as November 1779, Colonel Daniel Brodhead, the American commander at Fort Pitt, reported that people had settled all along the Ohio River and “thirty miles up some of its branches.” Two years later, Brodhead’s successor at Fort Pitt, General William Irvine, confronted the same problem. Despite the obvious dangers of Indian attacks, Irvine noted “sundry meetings of people at different places for the purpose of concerting plans to migrate into the Indian country, there to establish a government for themselves.” In April 1782, advertisements posted on trees announced a meeting at Wheeling “for all who wish to become members of a new state on the Muskingum.”⁴

Exactly how many people illegally claimed land in the Ohio Country before 1787 cannot be precisely determined, but army reports clearly establish the number in the thousands. The squatters tended to settle in close units along the Ohio River and in the valleys of its major tributaries. They grew corn, hunted, and lived in crude cabins. While their settlements were not towns, the danger of Indian attack and the necessity of mutual aid kept families close together.

Ordinary settlers hoped to obtain more than land by moving across the Ohio. They also wanted the distribution of land and the organization of society to take place in a competition governed by local rules and customs rather than directed by the national government. Before the end of the American Revolution, several hundred residents of Kentucky asked Congress for permission to move their families across the Ohio, protesting that their land and improvements had been “Engrossed into the hands of a few Interested men.” A 1779 Virginia land act had so favored speculators at the expense of ordinary settlers, they claimed, that to remain in Kentucky was to become “Slaves to those Engrossers of Lands and to the Court of Virginia.”⁵

Such attitudes led the squatters explicitly to reject any notion that the settlements in the Ohio Country should be directed by Congress. They wanted the process kept as close to the actual participants as possible. Several dozen potential settlers, for example, objected to the Ordinance of 1784 because they erroneously believed that it required that “no man can take out a warrant for less than Eight hundred and fifty acres,” an amount “more than many of the people on our frontiers are able to purchase who would be glad to become Adventurers.” The petitioners told Congress that they expected “every Indulgence in particular that of Locating of Lands and time allowed us for the payment of the monies for Said Lands.” Above all, they wanted the Ohio Country settled without prearrangement or prescription. Let each adventurer, they urged Congress, take out warrants “according to his abilities” and locate the same “in what manner they shall see fit.”⁶

For ordinary immigrants into the Northwest Territory, land was more than a commodity to be bought or sold, or a place to be leased from some distant landlord. It was the foundation of a family’s independence, status, and future. To own land was to be free of all forms of slavery, whether in the form of semifeudal obligations to landlords or more impersonal debts or taxes.

The protection of the family was crucial to immigrants because it was the one thing that gave order and predictability to their lives. In the highly mobile society of the frontier, most traditional institutions were weak, if they existed at all. Neither governments nor churches exerted the influence that they did in more settled areas. There was nothing besides the family around which to build a sense of community, a sense of belonging to a group. It was thus no accident that “massive westward migration” enabled Americans “to preserve” and “to extend … an agricultural society composed primarily of yeoman freeholding families.” Even two centuries later in many parts of Appalachia the family remains the basic social, economic, and political unit. The squatters settled in the Ohio Country because, as a group of them informed Congress, most of them had “no property in Lands.” West of the Ohio River they hoped to improve the circumstances of their families by settling the “Vacant Lands” there.⁷

If the family survived migration pretty much intact, other institutions did not. And in the vacuum that resulted power tended to concentrate in the hands of the assertive leaders of larger families. The society of the squatters was by no means egalitarian. Men by the names of John Amberson, William Hogland, Charles Norris, and others dominated the rude settlements. In the highly personal world of the Ohio Country, locations simply took the name of the most important settler. Thus places such as Hogland’s Town, Amberson’s Bottom, and Norris Town appeared wherever a particular man had earned the respect of his neighbors.

The career of Joseph Ross probably epitomizes the general nature of frontier leadership. Born in New York around 1730, Ross had been captured and raised by Indians. He eventually escaped, only to spend the rest of his life on the fringe of settlement in a kind of perpetual restlessness. Still, if Ross was a rootless man, he had acquired the skills necessary to survive on the frontier; he was an accomplished hunter and Indian fighter who was used to taking care of himself. In 1784, Ross moved his family and some neighbors, who were sometimes referred to as tenants, across the Ohio to an area called Mingo Bottom. There the group erected rudimentary cabins and cleared enough land to grow a few acres of corn. Ross made his claim to the land by cutting the bark of the trees located at the corners with a tomahawk. The middle-aged frontiersman’s experience, initiative, and skills made him the natural leader of the small settlement.⁸

Frontier leaders like Ross were too rude, too lacking in visible cultural and financial attributes to be mistaken for gentlemen in the East. They could never have been dominant on the levels of state or national society. But in their local communities they were powerful men. They were mostly older men (in their fifties) who belonged, judging by petition signatures, to large families; their age and experience gave them authority within the family unit, the strongest social institution on the frontier. Such men had often accumulated some capital either in the form of land or slaves. While money mattered little in the Ohio Country in the 1780s, men such as Isaac Williams gained importance by running small, makeshift general stores; there they bartered guns, powder, salt, and other items for land, corn, or furs. By dominating the primitive local economy, they reinforced their position as local leaders. Finally, luck, determination, and personal strength were crucial in securing prominence on the frontier.⁹

Ross, Hogland, and others like them comprised a kind of natural frontier aristocracy. They were not wealthy men; they did not have extensive connections with leading citizens in the East. Society in the Ohio Country in the 1780s was rudimentary. Its leaders were men who had succeeded in defending and advancing their own interests. Because the lines of authority were still being sorted out and because the society was so unstructured, almost everything came down to a personal defense of personal interest. Disagreements were often resolved by personal combats that amounted to little more than a primitive kind of duelling. Men like Ross and Hogland had earned their positions. Congressmen and other prominent Americans, however, perceived the squatters’ primitive lifestyle and their contention that they were capable of settling across the Ohio on their own as anarchic. Unless some direction was given to the distribution of western land and to the development of western society by America’s enlightened and established leaders, members of Congress and other men of prominence feared that the Ohio Country would be ruined by selfish individualism and social chaos.

West of the Monongahela, magistrate and leading landowner Dorsey Pentecost told the prominent lawyer James Wilson that “Numbers of the more Considerate and Orderly People” were complaining of the infatuation of “the Indigent and Ignorant” for engrossing land in the Ohio Country. “Orderly People,” to be sure, did not object to land speculation, just the chaotic manner in which it was being practiced across the Ohio. The squatters believed that Congress would grant them preemption rights, Pentecost reported. But he ardently hoped that they were mistaken. Certainly Congress would not sell the land or grant preemption without discrimination. Pentecost advised Wilson to get Congress to pass “the most Positive Law against any Person taken Possession of One foot of Land without a Legal Title or permit in his hand.” Meanwhile, he wanted an immediate proclamation forbidding settlement in the Ohio Country. If such an action was not taken and rigidly enforced, “the people will run into the Country, and one Example will produce another until the Combination will grow so strong that it will become not only Troublesom but impossible to dissolve it, the end of which will be Anarchy and Confusion, and Consequently the destruction of the People.”¹⁰

In 1784, while on a tour of the West to secure his lands, George Washington found a “rage for speculating in, and forestalling of Lands on the North West side of the Ohio.” “Scarce a valuable spot, within any tolerable distance” of the Ohio River “is left without a claimant. Men in these times talk with as much facility of fifty, a hundred, or even 500,000 Acres as a Gentleman formerly would do of 1,000 acres.” Hundreds of ordinary men had converted what Washington and Pentecost thought of as orderly speculation by gentlemen like themselves into a wild, anarchic land rush. People roam “over the Country on the Indian side of the Ohio,” observed the disdainfully jealous Washington, “mark out Lands, Survey, and even settle them.”¹¹

What was happening on the Ohio frontier was part of the larger revolution in American life in the late eighteenth century. Washington was upset by more than the fact that people were taking up land without legal titles. More ominous for gentlemen with traditional notions of how a society ought to function, the frontiersmen were behaving in ways that struck at the very heart of traditional social relationships. The squatters did not demand political democracy, in the strict sense, but they did begin to take control of their lives, to argue that as human beings they were ultimately as important as gentlemen, and to blur the age-old line between gentle and simple folk.

However the squatter’s behavior is defined, it clearly frightened Washington. “To suffer a wide-extended country to be overrun with land-jobbers, speculators, and monopolizers, or even scattered settlers,” he asserted in 1783, “is inconsistent with that wisdom and policy which our true interest dictates, or which an enlightened people ought to a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Congress v. Squatters, 1780–1786
• 2. Planning the Republic: The Federalists and the Ohio Country, 1786–1788
• 3. Establishing the Authority of the National Government, 1788–1798
• 4. An Alliance of Local Interests, 1790–1798
• 5. “The Only Proper Judges of Their Own Interests,” 1798–1803
• 6. Catalines and Contentiousness, 1803–1807
• 7. Matters of Opinion, 1807–1812
• 8. The Climax of a Liberal Society, 1812–1819
• 9. Conflict and Consensus, 1819–1824
• Conclusion: “Ohio Has Behaved Nobly at Last”
• Notes
• Essay on Sources
• Index