The Pioneers

by David McCullough

  Then suddenly, in a matter of days, and greatly to his surprise, all seemed to change. On the evening of December 29, in the privacy of his room at the boardinghouse, he poured out his anger in a long letter to Sally over the “thick-headed mortals” and “knaves” of politics.

  I have just returned from attending a meeting of our committee and all is hushed in slumber in the adjoining rooms. The difficulty in making thick-headed mortals understand plain questions is sometimes vexing, but this evening our committee has had to contend with art and avarice combined. There is nowhere to be found knaves more designing than at a legislature, where designing scoundrels lurk and with specious words and demure looks they calculate to entrap the unwary and like blood-suckers leech and suck the public.

  He was fed up, “truly tired” of it. “My head, hands and even heart are engaged in the labors before me.”

  But by no means did he consider giving up. With his New England background, his devotion to the cause of learning was no less than ever. “I am not without hopes,” he assured her, “of effecting a change in our system of taxation and of getting a law passed for establishing school districts and encouraging schools.”

  On the matter of taxation he had already had to combat, alone, all who spoke out in the House. When it came to the first vote, twenty-two others voted with him and forty against. On the second vote it was clear his side was making progress, twenty-eight for and thirty-two against.

  Among those who spoke out in favor of public schools was Joseph Barker, who had also become a member of the House. As his daughter would one day recall, his speech had been written in the hope that the poor as well as the rich might receive the advantage of education.

  Well into the new year, on January 21, 1820, Ephraim wrote again to his wife to express little hope for the public school bill.

  I am oppressed with the responsible situation which I am in. . . . There is a bill before the House for regulating schools, on which I have spent many painful thoughts and hours of labor. I expect to lose it and dread the day when I must exert all my poor ability to again defend it.

  He went on to say a bill for building a canal from Lake Erie to the Ohio River was before the House and another source of anxiety for him. He opposed it and felt alone in that position. “But I must do the best I can.”

  Sally, too, had much on her mind, much to contend with at home, but wanted him to know she understood the situation he was in and that he had her support.

  “As to the frequent use of your oratorical abilities,” she wrote on January 23, 1820, “I have only to say, if by exercise, they brighten, pray continue to pour forth your eloquence. If not, desist.

  Nor vainly think the merit of your cause, unless ably, and smartly, defended, will have any effect on such opponents, as I fear you have to deal with. Men who will waste their breath, and prostitute their talents to deprive a fellow mortal of that which is their birth-right.

  Three days later, on January 26, she wrote again to say she hoped he would be home soon to transact business at home himself to more advantage. “I can truly say I am tired of it. . . . A constant fear of doing something wrong continually perplexes me.”

  How did the thought of home affect him, she asked. “Your children all love, and long to see their father. As for myself, you know my feelings better than I can describe them.”

  On January 28, Ephraim was writing to her again, this time in an entirely different spirit.

  “The act for regulating schools, which I originated, and that I now feel gratitude to God for sustaining me in carrying through, has passed the house—yeas forty, nays twenty.”

  An editorial in the Cincinnati Inquisitor, one of the most influential newspapers in the state, voiced strong approval of a public system of education, saying that advantages to be gained were too generally known to need comments.

  “We seek no further proof in favor of schools supported by law than the estimation in which they are held by older states of the Union. Wherever they have been admitted they have never been abandoned, but are universally cherished.”

  Ephraim’s active involvement with the creation of Ohio University had also become greater than ever. In 1816 work was proceeding on the first building on the campus, on the high ground of the College Green as it was called.

  On August 27, 1818, writing to Ephraim from Hamilton, his father bemoaned the “total neglect” he had received concerning the part he had played in the founding of the university. He went on about it at some length, reminding Ephraim that the establishment of a university was “a first object and lay with great weight on my mind.”

  Age and failing health were increasing realities for Manasseh. His wife, and Ephraim’s mother, Mary Balch Cutler, had died three years before at seventy-four. “Her death was as surprising to me as if she had been in perfect health,” Manasseh had written to Ephraim, “. . . but have the firm hope that my loss is her infinite gain. I think I can say the will of the Lord be done.”

  “I am just going off the stage,” he now told Ephraim, “and any mark of respect that can be shown to me in this world, I consider of very little consequence to myself, but may be of some to my posterity. . . . Such as the name of some building,” he wrote, reminding Ephraim that this was long the custom in all the colleges in New England.

  The new building, now nearly finished, was a fine, three-story red-brick structure with a tall clock tower referred to only as the College Edifice. What Ephraim may have written to his father in response or how much say Ephraim may have had in the naming of the building is not known.

  The wait for a decision went on and sadly Manasseh Cutler would not live to hear his wish fulfilled. Not until 1914 would the centerpiece of the university officially become Cutler Hall in his honor.

  He had been suffering severely for years from lung disease, asthma, with spasms of difficulty in breathing and excruciating pains in the chest. Yet he maintained his customary cheerfulness and interest in life.

  In his diary on September 11, 1821, he wrote, “This day it is fifty years since I was ordained in this place. My state of health renders it impracticable to take any public notice of the day. How wonderful that my life should be prolonged to this day! How much I have to be thankful for! And much to be humble for!”

  Finally, after fifty-two years at the pulpit, he had to step down. He died on July 28, 1823, at the age of eighty-one.

  An old friend, the Reverend Benjamin Wadsworth, preached his funeral service before a full church. Long obituaries appeared in papers throughout New England, many listing at length the numerous citations and awards conferred on him, the honorary degrees received from Harvard and Yale for work he had done in medicine and the natural sciences. Yet for all that little or nothing was said of the all-important part he had played in the creation and enactment of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and the settlement of Ohio.

  One notable exception would not appear until much later in a national publication, The American Naturalist, calling Manasseh Cutler not only “a pioneer in a new country, not merely a pioneer in science, but a pioneer for truth and civilization in every form” and credited him for the clause in the Northwest Ordinance declaring there would be no slavery.

  Meanwhile, life went on in Marietta. A steady flow of news good and bad filled the pages of the American Friend, a local paper. There seemed no end of weddings, divorces, fires, crimes committed, including murder, and tragic accidents.

  Drowned on Thursday the 30th . . . Mr. Samuel McClintock, a respectable citizen of this town. . . .

  Drowned . . . on Friday last Jane Murry . . . aged between two and three years.

  Drowned, on Sunday the 16th inst, in the Ohio River . . . Mr. John Walsh, a native of Canada.

  Rewards were announced by Sheriff Timothy Buell for a criminal prisoner who broke out of the Marietta jail, one Samuel Berry, described as about five feet, eight inches tall with dark, small eyes, who “like an experienced villain will betray you with a smile.”

 
As for public announcements of marriages, separation, or divorce, the standard form published in the paper would declare, “Whereas my wife Eliza has left my bed and board without any just cause, this is to warn all persons against harboring or trusting her on my account, as I will not pay any debts of her contracting, from the time of her leaving me.”

  Then followed Eliza’s response:

  Reader!!! I WILL STATE that you [are] wrongly informed, for I have neither left bed nor board. My bed I took with me, and board I had none. He neither provided me with victuals or drink more than one half the time since we were married. He came home on Saturday, and Sunday morning he could not think of returning back to work, without expressing some of his kind affection to me; so he whipped me, and kicked me out of doors, without any provocation. He immediately sold his farm, and put the rest of the property out of his hands, and of course I had neither board nor home; therefore, my husband ELIUD has absconded; and I forbid all persons trusting or harboring him on my account, for I will not pay any debts of his contracting. I will give ONE HALF CENT reward for said Eliud Thomas, but neither thanks or charges.

  There were reports of counterfeit five dollar bills making an appearance in town, of course thievery, even a bank robbery and the reward of $1,000 offered, after the cashier of the Muskingum Bank, one David J. Maple, made off with $15,000 to $20,000. (A description was provided of both the culprit and the small sorrel horse he rode away on.)

  Warnings, too, were posted on a habitual “abscounder,” calling himself Seth Lothrop, a cabinetmaker who had taken off leaving his creditors unpaid. “This running away has been so often repeated,” said the announcement, “as to have become a habit, and the good people of Ohio would do well to be upon their guard. It may well be said of him, that he,

  Run so long, and run so fast,

  No wonder he ran out at last,

  He run in debt and then to pay,

  He distanced all and run away.

  The summer of 1820 was distinguished by uncommon heat and lack of rain. The temperature on August 10 was 98 degrees in the shade. The summer of 1821 was no better. By the summer of 1822, the “mighty” Ohio River had become a mere brook, lower than ever known at Marietta. The water, nearly stagnant in some places, produced a “noxious” smell in the air that became a cause of much concern. As Samuel Hildreth was to write, in this “poisonous gas, no doubt, the seeds of fever were contained.”

  Potato bugs were in multitudes such as never seen. Toward autumn the country was overrun with gray squirrels, their “line of march” from north to south. “No obstacles obstructed their course; often passing through, or over the houses of the inhabitants, and swimming the Ohio River in its widest places,” Samuel Hildreth recorded.

  In the later part of June fevers began, typhoid in particular. Then followed a full-scale influenza epidemic, “a terrible visitation of burning fever, wild delirium, and deathly chills.” No family and few individuals escaped. More than 500 people took sick and more than seventy in Marietta died, including many children.

  All business stopped. The town’s newspaper, American Friend, shut down because of illness to the staff except for one boy, which probably explains why there had been no obituary of Manasseh Cutler in the paper. Physicians were overworked. Samuel Hildreth, who had more than 600 patients under his care, refused to take any payment for his services.

  Paul Fearing, the first lawyer among the earliest settlers, and who became a widely respected judge of the Court of Common Pleas, and his wife were both victims of the epidemic. Dr. Jabez True, the first physician, whose friendship had meant so much to Samuel Hildreth, was another who died.

  Ephraim and Sally Cutler and their family were sick and recovered but for one son, twelve-year-old Manasseh, who died that October 1822. The grief in the family was overwhelming, and for Sally most of all. Three months later, in a letter to Ephraim, who was back at Columbus serving in the legislature, she wrote that she could not stop thinking of and longing for “our dear departed son.

  I think I see his animated countenance, his noble mien. The arms of maternal tenderness are extended in vain to embrace the beloved child. The next moment my gloomy thoughts are transported to the silent grave where he sleeps in the dust. The sorrows of a mother are beyond all human consolation.

  The epidemic had proved so dreadful it became widely assumed that, once over, nothing like it would strike again for a long time. Even Samuel Hildreth, when his father expressed a desire to come out to Ohio for a first visit the following spring of 1823, saw no reason for him not to.

  “My father concluded to make a visit to Ohio, not only to see his son in Marietta, but also to view the rich valleys of the west which had for many years excited his curiosity,” Hildreth later wrote.

  His journey out was performed very comfortably in a small covered one-horse wagon. The visit was very pleasant to him, and the time passed rapidly away until the fore part of August, when the country became the seat of a violent epidemic fever. The year before had been very sickly, but this year it was still worse.

  As one resident wrote, “At Marietta the people at last thought no more of seeing a corpse go on the street than seeing a dog run. . . . One house they took out a man’s wife and buried her. When they came home from the funeral and found her husband was dead, the people set to and made a coffin and buried him.”

  The elder Hildreth fell victim to the epidemic and died on August 6, 1823. “His health was generally firm and good,” his son wrote, “and but for this attack he might in all probability have lived a number of years.”

  He was buried in the Mound Cemetery.

  But for Marietta greatest was the loss of the most notable and admired of the first pioneers, General Rufus Putnam, who died, not of epidemic fever, but old age, at eighty-six, on May 4, 1824.

  No one had played so important a role in the creation of the settlement or shown such leadership, perseverance, and strength of character without fail.

  Word of his death moved the community in ways nothing had. His obituary—in effect a full biography—ran in installments for days in the Gazette. So, too, did news of his death and tributes to his life appear in numerous papers in the east. He was hailed as “the fast friend of Washington,” and “the pride of the army.” One particular acclamation that appeared many times said simply, “He did honor to human nature.”

  He was rightly lauded as the originator of the whole idea of a new future in Ohio country beginning with the Newburgh Petition before the end of the Revolution. He it was who led the way from the first meeting at the Bunch of Grapes tavern in Boston that gave rise to the Ohio Company, who drew his own early map of the area, drew up the plan for the “City upon the Hill,” and who led the first of the New England pioneers. Through every variety of adversity and struggle, through every step forward to the ideals of a new start, he had maintained his strong sense of purpose.

  He would widely be remembered for having once issued a directive to deliver to a Delaware woman, the widow of a murdered Indian, “such goods as she shall choose to wipe away her tears to the amount of five dollars.”

  He had designed and built Campus Martius and wanted always to be fair in his dealings with the native tribes, and he provided much needed, sound leadership through the dark time of the Indian Wars.

  He had led the way in establishing Marietta’s first school, its first church, first bank, served in the state legislature as an ardent supporter of the first state university, and with Ephraim Cutler stood firm against the acceptance of slavery in Ohio.

  He would be admired and long remembered, too, for his way of life, how he “surrounded his modest, but commodious dwelling with fruit trees of his own planting” and that “finer, or more loaded orchards than his, no country could offer.

  In the midst of rural plenty, and endeared friends, who had grown up around him—far from the display of wealth, the bustle of ambition and intrigue, the father of the colony, hospitable and kind without ostentation and without eff
ort, he displayed in these remote regions, the grandeur, real and intrinsic, of those immortal men, who achieved our revolution.

  In a book Samuel Hildreth was to write on the pioneers of Marietta, a collection of thirty-eight biographical sketches, the first and longest by far was that of Rufus Putnam, with whom Hildreth had spent many hours in conversation. Along with so much else that was admirable, the general was highly interesting, “possessing a rich fund of anecdote, and valuable facts in the history of men” and that the “impress of his character is strongly marked on the population of Marietta, in their buildings, institutions, and manners.”

  After the death of his wife, Persis Rice Putnam, in 1820, their eldest, an unmarried daughter, Elizabeth, kept house and looked after him in the same family home he had built as part of Campus Martius. Sarah Cutler Dawes, the daughter of Ephraim Cutler, would later recall staying there overnight. The general shook her hand a long time and said, “And are you Ephraim Cutler’s daughter!” and kept shaking her hand. “He was quite deaf . . . feeble with age,” but also “erect in his carriage and dignified in manner.

  He asked a blessing at table, standing himself at the head of the table while we all stood up by the side of our chairs. At night he had family prayers. We all stood up during the service, which was conducted by the General.

  She saw him, too, at church service. “He would walk up the aisle with great dignity, and all the people seemed to pay him deference.”

  On the matter of advancing age, he liked to say, “My sun is far past its meridian.”

  More than half a century later in 1881, historian H. Z. Williams would write in his History of Washington County, Ohio a concise, highly insightful tribute to both Manasseh Cutler and Rufus Putnam:

  Dr. Cutler and General Putnam were from first to last the leading spirits of the Ohio company, the office of the former being principally the management of the difficult and delicate negotiations with the General Government, and that of the latter the superintendency of the internal affairs of the organization.