The relations of the two men were intimate and cordial. Each seems to have entertained the most thorough respect for the other. Yet they were as dissimilar as two men well could be. One was thoroughly educated, cultured, accomplished; the other a strong, rugged man, almost entirely lacking in knowledge, save by the kind acquired little by little in the experience of life, but full of wisdom, possessing the genius of uncommon common sense, great strength of purpose and vast executive ability. Either of these men would undoubtedly have made a failure in the position of the other. But in the places which they did occupy no men could have been more efficient.
As General Putnam had requested there was no public event commemorating his life, only a funeral service at the Congregational Church, where a large crowd attended. He was buried at the old Mound Cemetery, where a plain but substantial marble tombstone was erected. He was survived by three daughters and two sons, thirty grandchildren, and twenty-one great-grandchildren.
In his last will and testament, he gave 348 acres of land to three grandsons and left money for the “education of poor children in Marietta . . . and for the support of missionaries to preach the Gospel in places destitute of a settled minister or among the Indian tribes.”
The modest inventory of items he owned at his death included:
One old black horse
One musket
One axe
One broad axe
One surveyor’s chain
One hoe
One pitch fork
One plough
Six cider barrels
One grindstone
Two old scythes
One hand saw
The contents of his library of more than seventy books included:
One Bible
Two volumes of The Lewis and Clark Journals
A copy of the History of the First Settlement
Two psalm books and two singing books
One copy of the Constitution of the United States
One French grammar
Milton’s Paradise Lost
One copy of The Art of War, a treatise on fortifications and a military dictionary
Two volumes of The Letters of George Washington
The summer following Rufus Putnam’s death, the Marquis de Lafayette arrived at Long Island, New York, to begin a nationwide tour of the United States like nothing ever before or since. The symbol of a heroic past he was to be celebrated at age sixty-seven, wherever he went one stop after another.
Nearly a year later, on the morning of May 23, 1825, a small steamboat, the Herald, was heading upstream on the Ohio carrying Lafayette on the last leg of the tour. Until then it was generally understood that Marietta was not to be part of the itinerary and no preparations had been made.
Two or three miles below town a gun was fired on the Herald, which was supposed to signal that Lafayette was on board, and as the boat approached the landing a sign could be seen across the bow, “General Lafayette,” that put aside all doubt.
More cannon were fired as Lafayette came ashore, bells rang as virtually the whole town flocked to greet him, “all eager,” as said, “to seize his hand and welcome him to the soil he so nobly defended.” The crowd arranged itself in two lines, down which and back Lafayette passed to shake hands with each and all. Grasping the hands of the few veterans of the Revolution there to pay their respects, he seemed unwilling to let go.
A list of nearly fifty military officers who had been among the pioneers who settled Marietta was read to him, including most prominently General Rufus Putnam. “I knew them well,” Lafayette said. “They were the bravest of the brave.”
At the conclusion of this, saying he could stay no longer, Lafayette departed on the Herald and, as it was reported, “practically the whole population of Marietta cheered on the shore.”
Of the many residents of Marietta and the surrounding towns and farms and cabins in the woods for whom Samuel Hildreth served as the family physician, the Joseph Barkers counted high among his favorites. He and Barker had discovered quickly how much they had in common, and particularly in their love of books and history.
Hildreth convinced Barker that he was a natural writer and must put down on paper his story and in his own way. Hildreth had also been extremely grateful during the recent epidemics to have had Barker’s daughter, Catherine, come stay with the Hildreth family in Marietta and help serve as a nurse. The doctor was then working sixteen to eighteen hours a day, attending more than 600 patients.
Also, like so many others, Hildreth was a great admirer of Barker’s talents as architect and builder. And so to Barker he turned to design and build a new Hildreth residence for an enlarged family, now counting five children, as well as a new doctor’s office.
In the years since his work on the Blennerhassett mansion and boats for Aaron Burr, Barker had been extremely busy designing and building more houses, as well as a second courthouse on Putnam Street, the old courthouse having become too small for the growing town.
The Hildreth project was a major undertaking, one of the largest houses in Marietta and located beside the new courthouse. The cost would be covered in large part by labor donated by patients of Hildreth’s unable to pay for the care he had provided during the epidemic. Work began the summer of 1824 and became the subject of considerable attention. The house was to have much the look of Barker’s other houses, built of brick and in the Federal style, with large recessed windows, a front door with fluted columns, a fanlight over the door and the windows above. It was three stories with a two-story wing to the rear. Grander in scale than any of his previous in town houses, it more than qualified as a mansion. Once finished, in 1826, it counted as one of the town’s showpieces.
One young lady from New England, a teacher new to the town, who was invited by the Hildreths for an afternoon visit, would write at length about the pleasure of sitting in their spacious garden.
“We passed nearly an hour,” she wrote.
It is filled with peach, quince, pear and apple trees loaded with fruit, a great profusion of grapes of ten different kinds, flowers of indigenous and exotic origin, comprising a variety of 200, and under the shade of the grapevines, a number of beehives. Loaded with flowers and invitations to come again . . . we bade them good night, very much pleased with our call.
As time went on the house was also to become known as a center of medical and scientific collections and innovative ideas, the production center of countless medical and scientific articles by the doctor, as well as works of history, not to say a professional medical office. But primarily it was a home and there Hildreth was to live for almost forty more years.
III.
In the fall of 1823, at the age of fifty-six, Ephraim Cutler had been reelected to the state legislature, only this time to the Senate, and by a resounding margin. He arrived back in Columbus that December and in a letter to Sally reported that while he was as yet little acquainted with the new members, he thought favorably of them.
“So far as I am able to form a judgment, there is as much talent, harmony, and industry as is usually assembled in the legislature.” His main purpose was to achieve as much as possible in the cause of education, in a state public school system and the university. “I have a strong hope we shall accomplish something.”
Two weeks later he could report that never in his life had he been placed in a situation so arduous and difficult as he had faced this whole session. He had first wanted to attain Senate backing for increased financial support for the university and found himself “put constantly on the defensive and had to parry, answer, and sometimes retort attacks.” But he succeeded. The vote was a decisive 23-to-10 in favor of an appropriation of $3,000.
He was also serving on the school committee and as chairman of the revenue committee, two of the most important roles of that session, and had already finished one report on the subject and had another nearly ready, and he was exhausted.
Two others on the committee he found he greatly liked, both fel
low New Englanders who felt as he did about the critical need for public schools. Caleb Atwater, the chairman of the committee, had been born in North Adams, Massachusetts, and graduated from Williams College. He had come to Ohio in 1811 and settled in Circleville, about twenty-three miles to the north of Chillicothe, where he practiced law and served as postmaster. Nathan Guilford, senator from Hamilton County and a resident of Cincinnati, had grown up in Spencer, Massachusetts, and Ephraim thought highly of him, “a fine man” and “most efficient supporter.”
As the three of them were quite aware, the reality of education in Ohio was far from the ideal expressed in the Northwest Ordinance, that “schools and education shall forever be encouraged.” The gap between the dream and the reality was immense. Ohio was in fact without a school system, except for a few “enterprising” towns like Marietta, as well as Cincinnati and Cleveland, where schools were local creations. In the northeastern corner of the state on Lake Erie, Cleveland had a population of little more than 1,000 but also one of the best harbors on the lake and was growing rapidly.
That the master of the academy in Marietta, David Putnam, the grandson of General Israel Putnam, and a graduate of Yale, taught classes ranging from penmanship to astronomy and grammar in English, Greek, and Latin, was hardly representative of Ohio teachers in general. Good teachers were hard to find. A great many were just ordinary or less, someone of little or no training or prior experience, and who made an agreement “to keep school.” Those who sent their children to attend usually paid a fee of one to three dollars a year.
In towns and villages classes were taught in private homes or over places of business, in basements and churches. In the countryside vacant cabins and abandoned barns often served the purpose. The usual school building or schoolhouse was no more than a one-room log cabin, “extremely simple and uncomfortable,” measuring about 15 x 28 feet, with a dirt floor.
The furniture consisted principally of rude benches without backs made of splitting logs lengthwise into halves and mounting them, flat side up, on four legs or pins driven into the ground. Desks similarly though less clumsily made were sometimes furnished to the “big boys and girls.” The room, or at least one end of it, was heated with an immense fireplace. There was no blackboard, no apparatus of even the rudest description to assist the teacher in expounding the lessons.
The curriculum consisted of reading, spelling, writing, and arithmetic, and in some districts a rule in force prohibited the teaching of anything more. Reading and spelling were the great tests of learning. To master arithmetic as well was to have “acquired an education.”
Settlers who had been educated in the east often saw their children growing up illiterate. But great, too, were the number of settlers who had no wish to see their taxes raised. Among the German immigrants were many who disliked the very idea of their children learning to read English.
For Ephraim, as it had been for his father, the cause of education, like that of excluding slavery from Ohio, was a cause never to be abandoned. But also, as with Rufus Putnam and Joseph Barker, it was because he himself had had such a “scanty” education and well knew the barriers that could present.
That there was nothing limited about his vocabulary is evident throughout; words like “discretion,” “mitigate,” and “inestimable” appear frequently and naturally. But then he read constantly and had built his own substantial library. Spelling, however, remained a continuous problem as he knew. He wrote of “the hollow compliments or blarney which I sometimes meat with hear,” or “times of difficulty.” The word “get” invariably appears as “git” or “gitt.” (In years to come, in a book prepared largely from his letters and journals by his daughter Julia, misspelling and syntax were all touched up.)
In what had been his first love letter to Sally, written seventeen years before, Ephraim had told her that the heart when full to overflowing seeks a vent and that nothing relieved it so effectively “as to pour out our thoughts to one we love.” Now he was pouring them out to her full force in letter after letter.
He was laboring “incessantly,” allowing himself no more than four hours sleep a night for three weeks. Friends told him he looked sick, but his bodily health was fine, he assured her, “Not only my reputation, but the good of my country is at stake, and much depends upon how I am able to discharge my duty.”
Two nights later, at the end of another exhausting day, he wrote again. He was still struggling with the tax laws.
You know when my mind is intensely engaged, I can neither eat nor sleep. One cup of coffee in the morning, one of tea at supper, with little else, and an equally light dinner. . . . I regret that I undertook this immense labor. I despair of effecting the passage of these laws this session, but some good may, hereafter, grow out of bringing the subject fairly and fully before the public.
Still, again, two days after that, he was declaring himself “entirely insufficient” to sustain the load he carried. If he had more sensibility, he would undoubtedly sink under it.
For one person, alone, to attempt to change the whole revenue system of a great and powerful state, almost without a hint from another, and to have the temerity to think that his crude and, perhaps, badly digested notions can be made to succeed, may well be considered by a sober, reflecting mind to border on madness.
But he felt himself on a mission of high purpose and he would not give up.
Your husband has undertaken this unpromising thing, and that he feels the pressure of such a “mountain” you may well imagine. I am encouraged by believing that the cause is one of the highest importance to my country, and that from its success great benefits will result, in relieving the poor from their burdens, by providing an equitable way to call forth the revenue of the state, and thus provide for the support of schools and seminaries of learning; and for making roads, canals, etc.
She worried intensely about him. As she would write, “To say that I am concerned about your health would be but a faint expression of my uneasiness on that account.
I regret that it is not in my power to attend on you, and administer those little offices of kindness which is so necessary in your situation and which delicacy forbids you to ask of another. It seems as if Providence has designed we should not live much together, to this I must quietly submit, although it is, and ever has been a source of regret and uneasiness.
Though he knew how his absence from home compounded the difficulties Sally had to contend with herself, as she confided in her correspondence, he often failed to respond as quickly or sympathetically as he could have, so preoccupied, so totally distracted could he become with his situation of the moment.
It was a side of him memorably illustrated by an incident that took place during a stay at Athens when he had gone there to take part in a transaction of important business for the future of the university. One morning he was seen by others at the house where he was staying sitting down by himself after breakfast for the perusal of the Bible. According to one account, he continued to read “in an absorbed silence hour after hour until late in the forenoon, when it occurred to his friends that he might be regarding the day as the Sabbath.” Following dinner, he seated himself once more with his Bible, but before night, he was told directly it was Friday not Sunday. He had, he said, been a little troubled in his mind that the church bells did not ring.
In a letter written February 12, 1824, as the legislative session was about to end, Ephraim could report to Sally only that his expectations regarding appropriations for Ohio University had been “dashed to the ground” by the House of Representatives. “These matters,” he said, “will be themes of discussion between us, if Providence kindly permits me to return to my home once more.”
The next session of the legislature convened at Columbus on December 6, 1824, and Senator Ephraim Cutler was full ready to get back to work.
A canal bill and a new system of taxation were now the absorbing subjects. The prospect of building a canal from the Ohio River to Lake Erie, a massive a
nd extremely costly project, had great appeal to many. The need for an equal system of taxation was for Ephraim the “favorite wish of my heart,” along with, no less than ever, statewide, state-financed public education.
Caleb Atwater, who knew as well as anyone what he had been through, sent him a heartfelt note of praise of the kind one never forgets:
Dear Sir—You are doing nobly; press forward with your equal taxation, the school system, and the canals, and immortalize this legislature. What must be your sensations on the prospect you now have of carrying into effect the three greatest objects ever presented to our legislature! Press forward, I say, in your career of doing good. Posterity will call you blessed.
Now, in return for their vote on the canal bill, the representatives from Marietta, led by Ephraim Cutler, demanded a new tax to support statewide public education. And unpopular as a school tax was, a bargain was struck.
“I have little doubt the revenue law will be made to my mind, and also a free school system,” Ephraim wrote to Sally on January 23, 1825, adding, “The canal bill will, of course, pass, which is also important.”
All three bills—on equal taxation, on the canal, and on the school tax—passed in both houses.
On the day the school bill finally passed in the house, Ephraim, deeply anxious over the fate of the bill, was present to witness the moment. Standing beside him, equally interested, was Nathan Guilford, the senator from Cincinnati. When the result was announced, Ephraim turned and raising his hand said, “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word; for mine eyes have seen thy salvation.”
Through all this, meanwhile, Ephraim had been giving additional attention and effort to furthering the cause of higher education. At a meeting with other trustees of the university held in Columbus in 1824, he had taken part in the selection of a first president of the university, the Reverend Robert G. Wilson, a Presbyterian pastor from Chillicothe. When the inaugural ceremonies took place at Athens, it was he who presented the keys and the university charter to Dr. Wilson, then delivered the welcoming address, citing the university as a fulfillment of the high hopes of the original pioneers for “the blessings of an enlightened education.”
The Pioneers Page 22