The Pioneers

by David McCullough

  As was well known, Representative Adams had for years been battling against the so-called Gag Rule used by members of Congress to suppress debate on slavery, and though the struggle had taken its toll on his strength he had not given up.

  All along the Ohio River, slavery was a growing cause of contention and particularly in and about Marietta, which had become one of the main escape routes for runaway slaves in what had become known as the Underground Railroad.

  Notices appeared constantly in the Marietta paper offering rewards for black runaways from Virginia for as much as $300 to $500 or as little as $12.50. The $300 reward was for the return to Parkersburg of three slaves named Jack, Rose, and John:

  Jack is a very handsome Negro, about 5 feet 10 inches high, a black complexion, erect in his appearance, and about 26 years of age—had on, when he absconded, a deep blue bearskin coat, etc.

  Rose, the wife of Jack, is a likely woman of her age, about 5 feet 6 inches high, black complexion, hair tolerably long and tied at the top, has holes in her ears but seldom wears [ear] rings, and about 36 years of age—had on, when she absconded, a blue riding dress with white glass buttons.

  John is about 5 feet, 7 inches high, very black complexion, thick and well-set—had on linen pantaloons, etc.

  For two others named Martin and Sam a full $500 was the offer for their return to Clarksburg. Martin, at age twenty, was the youngest, about five feet, eight inches and “very handsome.” Sam, “very black,” and “free and easy” to talk to.

  For the return of a black man named Joseph, who claimed to be a doctor and was fond of playing the fiddle, the reward was all of $20, and there were more and more steadily crossing the river to escape.

  Many in Marietta were helping the fugitives escape, but to make known their part would have been putting themselves and their families at considerable risk. One notable exception was David Putnam, Jr., the great-grandson of General Israel Putnam and a leading merchant whose large frame house at the head of Maple Street, across the Muskingum in Harmar, became a famous first stop for fleeing slaves. One cold November night a mob of anti-abolitionists gathered outside the house shouting that an escaped slave was hiding inside. Several leading citizens appeared on the scene, including Caleb Emerson, and urged everyone to calm down and go home, which was what happened.

  Others, too, perhaps as many as fifty in Washington County, served as “conductors” along the line of escape. The rest of the escape route ran north to Oberlin, Ohio, then across Lake Erie to Canada. To what degree Ephraim Cutler took part is difficult to know, but one particular incident suggests he may have been quite involved.

  Years later one of his grandsons, Rufus Dawes, the son of Cutler’s daughter Sarah, would tell how, as a boy visiting his grandfather’s Old Stone House by the Ohio, he was awakened in the night by what he took to be the hoot of an owl, this followed by a similar, more distant answering cry from the Virginia shore. Then came the splash of a boat leaving the Cutler riverbank.

  The boy climbed out of bed and went to the window. In the heavy darkness he could make out the silhouettes of two boats filled with silent people approaching shore in front of the house. When he went to his mother’s room, he found her down on her knees before her window praying.

  After a “magnificent reception” on arrival at Pittsburgh, Adams bid farewell to his Marietta escorts and started for Washington while they headed back down the river.

  Few there were who had traveled more of the world than John Quincy Adams, from the time when, as a ten-year-old boy, he had sailed for France with his father in the midst of the Revolutionary War. This, his journey to Ohio, was the last of his courageous travels.

  On reaching his home on F Street, Adams collapsed. “My strength is prostrated beyond anything that I ever experienced before.” But he was to keep on serving in Congress, battling slavery for five more years, until the late winter of 1848, when he collapsed at his desk. He was carried to the speaker’s office just off the hall and there, two days later, he died.

  In Marietta a town eulogy for John Quincy Adams was given at the Methodist Church on Putnam Street.

  II.

  It would be said of Ephraim Cutler that along with so many of his strengths, virtues, and worthy accomplishments, his place as the most notable of Ohio’s surviving pioneers, he was also blessed in his family. “We have never seen a family that were united by stronger bonds of affection,” it was said, and while he took great pleasure and pride in all his children, William, the youngest son, still in his thirties, had stepped in to carry on with his father’s public roles and in admirable fashion.

  William had little of his father’s physical vitality and was of “retiring disposition.” But in 1842 he had begun making speeches in an effort to be elected as a Whig in the state legislature, and though defeated, he ran again in 1844 and won by a handsome majority. Before the close of the session he was recognized as a leader on the floor.

  Such achievement pleased his father no end and helped provide Ephraim a much needed lift of spirit when in June of that year, his ever loving brother Jervis died in Evansville, Indiana, at age seventy-five.

  Writing to William early in the new year of 1846, sister Julia could report that “Pa’s health has been better this winter, than it was last. He has fewer cares and appears to enjoy life better.” It was their mother she worried about.

  “Her limbs are very painfully affected with rheumatism. She cannot dress herself without assistance, and is unable to do anything, even reading seems to fatigue her. She sits up most of the day, and certainly bears her afflictions with a great deal of patience.”

  That fall, William was again nominated and again elected to the state legislature, and the difficulties of his return to Columbus in December, at least as far as Zanesville, appear to have been no less than in his father’s day, and that his response to adversity had been no less than that of his father.

  As he wrote in a letter to Ephraim, “The stage left Marietta at 11 o’clock Wednesday night, and we had a perilous time getting to Zanesville.

  We found the water over the bridge this side of Lowell so deep that the driver refused to cross. I prevailed upon him to let me have a horse and ride over and back, after which he ventured with the coach. We drove over Big Run bridge with the plank all afloat some eight or ten inches above the sleepers, the fore-wheels in some places pushing the planks up in heaps, and the hind wheels running on the sleepers. At another place we tried to swim, but the horses refused, and turned directly for the river at the mouth of the creek; we were barely saved by striking a high bank, which projected into the stream. At the bridge across Olive Green we found the plank afloat, and the driver and myself waded in and spent half an hour in the water loading the plank down with stones. But we were graciously preserved, and arrived safely at Zanesville Thursday evening, and at Columbus [traveling by rail] Friday night.

  He then added to his father, knowing how it would please him, “The Whigs, with great cordiality and unanimity, have placed me in the speaker’s chair.”

  Later, at the close of the session, a letter appeared in the Cincinnati Signal by another member of the legislature named F. G. Squier that seemed to speak for many and that, to Ephraim, could only have seemed pure gold.

  “Let us glance around the hall of the lower house,” it began, “not to admire its architectural wonders—and see if we can detect the ‘men of mark.’

  Our attention first rests upon the speaker’s chair. Its occupant is a tall . . . perhaps we should say sallow man, dressed with the utmost plainness. . . . He stoops slightly—is it from a sense of being tall and without elegance? No. Although modest and retiring to a fault, he never bestows a thought on outward appearance, nor calculates outward impressions. . . . When . . . Mr. Cutler was called to the capital, he came there with a healthy, well-balanced intellect and nothing but a modesty almost painful in its excess prevented him from at once assuming the lead of his party. Yet, without effort, he soon became invested wit
h an influence second to no other man’s on the floor, and his voice carried with it a predominating weight.

  In Marietta, too, Ephraim, as he reported to William, was hearing in “a lively manner, joy respecting your success.” But he cautioned his son with a fatherly reminder, “You must not let flattery spoil you, but do your best to deserve approbation.”

  On June 30, 1846, Sally Parker Cutler, the wife of Ephraim Cutler for thirty-eight years, and mother of their five children, died amid the family circle at their home on the banks of the Ohio. As William would later write to Julia, “How little did we anticipate . . . that the center of that circle would be taken, leaving to us, but the bright recollection of virtues, unsurpassed and love unequalled.”

  In the early spring of 1849, Ephraim’s oldest son, Charles, announced he was joining the rush to California for gold. “A year ago we had not heard of the gold of California, and even after the papers were filled with descriptions of the immense regions where it is found, and of the multitudes who went to seek it—It never occurred to me that any one dear to us would go there,” wrote Julia. Again, as in her father’s earlier days, the west was the future.

  Two months later came word from California that Charles had died of cholera. The news shook the whole family in a way nothing had—“to think of his dying away from home and friends, buried upon those vast plains where no one knows even the place of his last rest,” Julia wrote. And the blow fell hardest on Ephraim. “He is very much bowed down under the stroke—still he murmurs not, the language of his heart seems to be, ‘I was dumb. I opened not my mouth, because thou God dids’t it.’ Occasionally we hear a suppressed groan as he walks his room with clasped hands.”

  III.

  For all the changes taking place, Marietta remained a small town, its population by 1850 still less than 4,000. But for a considerable majority this remained part of the appeal and for many of those longtime residents who had played major roles in the local ways their commitment to the community, their pride in its appearance and way of life, was no less than ever.

  To the citizenry of Marietta, and particularly the older element, there was considerable pride, too, in the fact that a community established on the precept of freedom of religion had kept faith with that pledge.

  The first efforts to establish a Catholic place of worship in Marietta were made in 1830, in a two-story brick building with a grocery store on the first floor, and what served as a chapel on the second. The first actual Catholic church was built in the 1850s, under the direction of Father Peter Perry, and with the ever-increasing arrival of Irish and German Catholic immigrants, the number of Catholic citizenry kept growing steadily.

  Among the earliest Jewish immigrants to arrive were two German brothers, Charles and Samuel Coblenz, who established a dry goods store on Greene Street in the 1840s. But the Jewish presence was to remain small in Marietta throughout the rest of the nineteenth century.

  Considerable pride was taken in the town’s tree-lined streets. Ironically, here where once not so very long past giant trees had been the enemy, now stood what was acclaimed as “the best shaded town in the state.”

  Samuel Hildreth, despite keen competition from seventeen physicians in Washington County, continued to “monopolize” the medical profession. Further, with the help of Ephraim Cutler and others of the “old timers,” Hildreth, in 1848, published his long-awaited Pioneer History, on the early settlement of the Ohio Valley, a work like no other until then and one of great lasting value. Praise for the book was plentiful, but that which had greatest meaning to Hildreth came from Benjamin Silliman, who wrote to tell him his name would “be ever honorably associated with the early history of the West.” In 1852 Hildreth followed with a second book, Memoirs of the Early Pioneer Settlers of Ohio, taking into account a cast of thirty-nine characters of note.

  Ephraim lived on for seven years after Sally’s death, during which Julia remained a devoted companion and, greatly to her pleasure and her credit, he remained much as he had been in health and outlook. “Pa spent a great deal of his time in his favorite occupation,” she would write, “reading his chosen books and the newspapers, never losing interest in what was happening in the world.” One of the young teachers at Muskingum Academy had observed much the same thing. “If he takes hold of a newspaper or an interesting book, everything else is sure to be neglected.”

  He also enjoyed accompanying Julia on occasional days in Marietta, making calls and “attending” to some shopping. One such day they found time to visit Samuel Hildreth’s fine garden and cabinet of geological specimens. “The doctor’s very excellent and highly cultivated taste is manifested in every part,” Julia recorded.

  Thanksgiving, Ephraim’s favorite day, remained no less a grand family festival. “We did not intend to have any guests but our own family connections and those in the house,” Julia recorded in her diary on Thursday, November 23, 1848. But the number who gathered was considerable all the same.

  Twenty-one sat down to dinner. Pa expressed himself much pleased with the cooking of the turkey, chicken, pie, etc., and praised all the accompaniments—which was sufficient reward for all this labor of preparation, as we always consider this, “Pa’s Festival”—which his Yankee origin has made him prize above all others.

  On his eighty-third birthday, April 13, 1850, he rode by horseback twenty-eight miles through snow and wind from Amesville back home. The farm, too, occupied his interest no less than ever. “My health and strength has thus far sustained me in seeing everyday to the hard work that is going on,” he was glad to report to William in May.

  Be a farmer, his own father had strongly advised, when Ephraim first started for the Ohio country.

  In the early spring of 1850, a shabby woman no more than five feet tall boarded a steamer at Cincinnati, where she had been living for seventeen years, and departed upstream on the Ohio. She was happily heading “home” to New England, to Brunswick, Maine, where her husband had recently joined the faculty of Bowdoin College, and where, in the year ahead, she was to write her first book, titled Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which would have more far-reaching effects than any American novel ever written. She herself, Harriet Beecher Stowe, would also achieve an overnight fame such as no American woman had yet known.

  The book, based largely on stories she had heard from black servants during her years in Cincinnati, was written from the heart and put slavery in terms of human beings and human suffering. Published in 1852, it was an immediate literary and political sensation, selling more than 300,000 copies in America within a year, and in England no less than 1.5 million. It would be said Mrs. Stowe made more converts to antislavery with her book than all the preachers and lecturers combined. For those like Ephraim Cutler, who had labored so long and hard to keep slavery out of Ohio, she was a hero.

  Except for trouble hearing and the loss of some teeth, Ephraim remained remarkably his old self, still making the ride on horseback to his farm in Amesville.

  In the early spring of 1853, however, on a ride to Marietta, his horse stumbled and threw him to the ground. It had been a fall from a horse that long before took the life of his uncle Ephraim and so greatly changed the whole course of his boyhood. Now, still another fall from a horse would mark his own end.

  He died of internal injuries that summer at the Old Stone House, on July 8, 1853. He was eighty-six.

  In an eloquent “funeral discourse,” the Reverend E. B. Andrews, a professor at Marietta College, who also ministered in Ephraim’s church in Warren, declared flatly Ohio had never been blessed with “a truer statesman or more devoted servant,” and gave praise particularly for his part in preventing the admission of slavery.

  We can hardly predict what the consequences would have been, had there not been a few men such as Judge Cutler to resist the insidious aggressions of the monstrous evil of slavery. . . . We owe it to the heroic Puritan firmness of Judge Cutler . . . and to him must ever belong the high honor of drafting that article in the first constitut
ion and fundamental law of the great state of Ohio which makes it the home of the free while the state shall last.

  In a long tribute in the Marietta Intelligencer, he was credited as “the first man in the state to propose anything like a system of common school instruction” and for never in all his years as a trustee of Ohio University missing a meeting of the board.

  “In every sphere and every relation of life, Judge Cutler was A USEFUL MAN.”

  An editorial tribute in the Ohio State Journal would no doubt have pleased him most of all: “Judge Cutler belonged to that class of strictly upright, honest and true men, of whom the pioneers of this state afford so many noble examples.”

  He was put to rest beside his wife, Sally, in the Gravel Bank Cemetery on a hill not far from the family home overlooking the Ohio River.

  By the time Samuel Hildreth lay dying ten years later, the pioneer era he had taken part in and chronicled was long past. The population of Ohio had reached an unimaginable 2,000,000 people and was still growing. Railroads and the telegraph had come of age. And overshadowing everything, the country was engulfed in a horrific civil war.

  In 1860, William Cutler was elected to Congress. In 1862, on April 23, he made a long and powerful speech on the floor of the House denouncing slavery in no uncertain terms as a “public enemy” and so must be destroyed. With notable vigor and courage William had become the third generation of Cutlers to battle slavery.

  In the summer of 1863 when the war’s biggest battle had only just been fought at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on July 1–3, Ohio was suddenly in a state of alarm. A Confederate cavalry unit of more than 2,000 men commanded by Brigadier General John Morgan had crossed the Ohio River into Indiana, then crossed the line into Ohio close to Cincinnati and was advancing eastward, “plundering everybody without fear or favor.”