Ohio the history of a people

 Ohio: The History of a People

Andrew R. L. Cayton

As the state of Ohio prepares to celebrate its bicentennial in 2003, Andrew R. L. Cayton offers an account of ways in which diverse citizens have woven its history. Ohio: The History of a People, centers around the many stories Ohioans have told about life in their state. The founders of Ohio in 1803 believed that its success would depend on the development of a public culture that emphasized what its citizens had in common with each other. But for two centuries the remarkably diverse inhabitants of Ohio have repeatedly asserted their own ideas about how they and their children should lead their lives. The state's public culture has consisted of many voices, sometimes in conflict with each other. Using memoirs, diaries, letters, novels, and paintings, Cayton writes Ohio's history as a collective biography of its citizens. Ohio, he argues, lies at the intersection of the stories of James Rhodes and Toni Morrison, Charles Ruthenberg and Lucy Webb Hayes, Carl Stokes and Alice Cary, Sherwood Anderson and Pete Rose. It lies in the tales of German Jews in Cincinnati, Italian and Polish immigrants in Cleveland, Southern blacks and white Appalachians in Youngstown. Ohio is the mingled voices of farm families, steelworkers, ministers, writers, schoolteachers, reformers, and football coaches. Ohio, in short, is whatever its citizens have imagined it to be.

Contents

Preface

Prologue: Citizens

1 Strangers in Canaan

2 Improving Ohio

3 Considering Ohio

4 Defining Ohio

5 Alternative Ohios

6 Contesting Ohio

7 Reforming Ohio

8 The End of the Beginning

9 Ohio in Black and White

10 Labor and Liberty

11 The Good Life

12 The Future Is Past

Epilogue: "Champions of Their Lives"

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

Index

Preface

THIS BOOK is a history of the state of Ohio from its creation in 1803 through the beginning of the twenty-first century. It recounts important  political events as well as major economic and social develop- ments. But Ohio: The History of a People is above all a narrative driven by the stories people have told about life in an American state.

I have drawn on the fiction, art, music, architecture, jokes, petitions, letters, diaries, parades, speeches, organizations, sports, and strikes of a variety of Ohioans in an effort to weave together a larger tale of grand expectations, intense conflicts, and serious disappoint- ments. Despite Ohio's reputation in contemporary American popular culture as a bland, uninteresting place, its citizens have thought a good deal about what it has been and what it might be. Indeed, a significant part of public culture has been about asserting and defending differing interpretations of the state's past and its future.

Taken together, the narratives Ohioans have constructed to make sense of their world trace the rise of a culture of respectability, the resistance it provoked, and its ultimate transformation into a culture of consumerism. In the 1800s, a considerable number of mostly Protes- tant, middle-class Ohioans came to believe that material and moral glory would grace their state if they devoted themselves to the great cause of human progress. To be respectable was to behave in ways that stressed self-discipline and commitment. Changing the world was not the work of a handful of great men acting decisively on battlefields or in legislative chambers. Only the collective power of multitudes of ordinary people would improve the human condition as a whole. "[T]he growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric

acts, " explained the English novelist George Eliot in the concluding lines of Middlemarch, "and that things are not no so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." Not everyone appreciated the nobility of such efforts. Indeed, the champions of respectability, who thought they were liberating human beings from centuries of barbarism and servitude, alienated as many people as they inspired. Their critics thought them arrogant, hypocritical, and dangerous prigs who squeezed the joy out of life. Worse, they threatened to restrict the freedom of American citizens to live their lives as they chose. These charges were as powerful as the resistance they engendered, especially in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Ultimately, however, the self-proclaimed respectable citizens of Ohio adapted their vision to changing circumstances. In the twentieth cen- tury, the descendants of the apostles of reform became the guardians of the status quo their ancestors had established. As they and their fel- low citizens stressed the importance of economic rather than moral progress, they redefined life in Ohio as the pursuit of material comfort and personal satisfaction.

Ohio: The History of a People, then, is a chronicle of tales of Amer- ican life whose common denominator is their location in the cultureally contested landscape we call Ohio. Its major theme is the transformation of a radical imperative to do good into a conservative desire to live well.

Prologue Citizens

"I... NOW CONSIDER myself a Citizen of Ohio," Gideon Granger, postmaster-general of the United States, informed his friend Samuel Huntington in 1804. This simple declaration was an extraordinary statement. Granger had never been to Ohio, nor would he ever set foot within the borders of the new state. He called himself a "citizen" solely because he had decided to "fix [his] residence in the County of Trumbull." Granger's assertion reminds us that Ohio was a state be- fore it was a place, a government before it was a community, an idea before it was a reality. Created primarily for political reasons, it was an awkward construction with arbitrary borders.

The members of the 1802 Constitutional Convention who gathered in Chillicothe to devise a state government described themselves as the representatives of "the people" living in "the eastern division of the  territory of the United States northwest of the river Ohio" who had mutu- ally agreed "to form [them]selves into a free and independent State, by the name of the STATE OF OHIO." These men had only slightly more emotional attachment to Ohio than Granger. Most had lived north and west of the Ohio River for a few years at best. As important, they thought they were very different from each other. Few understood, let alone respected, the Wyandot, Miami, Shawnee, and other Indians who lived along the southwestern shores of Lake Erie. Like the North- west Territory from which it was carved, Ohio was, in the words of a group of Marietta residents, a "mixed mass of people, scattered over an immense wilderness, with scarcely a connecting principle."2

Still, if the founders of Ohio knew little about their state's past or present, they cared deeply about its future. They imagined Ohio as a place of limitless possibilities. Ignoring the presence of Indians and despite the risk to their lives and prospects they saw their new state as a blank canvass on which they could paint a magnificent future of prosperity and harmony. The creation of Ohio was one of the great Bets of the American Enlightenment. Its founders did not consider the sture distinctive or romanticize its landscapes and its peoples. Such political community things did not matter to them because they were not trying to create something unique. Rather, they were making a designed to exemplify a larger experiment in universal brotherhood.

True sons of the eighteenth century, Ohio's founders believed in progress, the importance of the triumph of civilization over barbarism, limited democracy, and a vague commitment to social equal- ity for respectable white males. Yet they also took a rather dim view of human nature. People, after all, were at heart passionate beasts who would normally pursue their own interests at the expense of their neighbors. Properly structured, a public culture built around govern- ments, churches, schools, and newspapers could educate people about the importance of overcoming their natural instincts. It could tame human beings by inculcating civility and industry. Ohio was an opportunity to fashion a world that would bring out the best in people.

The political experiment that was Ohio would work only if its residents could be persuaded to behave like citizens. Unlike subjects, who lived at the mercy of their superiors-be they kings, queens, emperors, or aristocrats citizens actively participated in their govern- ment. In a monarchy, power flowed from the top down. The most important political connections were vertical ones; the most important source of loyalty was to the Crown; and, at least in theory, a country was the domain of the its ruler. Eighteenth-century revolutions had overturned this conception of politics. In the United States, as in France, subjects became citizens. Endowed with natural rights and equality before the law, they became "the people." Their primary loyalty was to each other, not to their superiors. Liberty was now a universal right, not an exclusive privilege.

In the minds of its founders, Ohio's success depended above all else on the participation of its citizens, not just through suffrage, juries, or military service, but in the public realm as a whole. Citizens had responsibilities as well as rights, obligations as well as freedoms.

Ohioans had to talk to each other. They had to gather information from newspapers, books, and pamphlets, elevate their sensibilities through exposure to events and peoples throughout the world, and participate in a larger community of free, independent men. Public culture was all about public conversation. It was a ceaseless process of engaging the world and caring about more than local or selfish interests.

Breaking with centuries of European tradition, the founders of Ohio, like the founders of the United States, created no standing armies, no established churches, no entrenched aristocracy to ensure stability. Rather, they imagined that the thousands of ordinary white men who were populating the state would create their own institutions and rely on each other for support and protection. Together, they would demonstrate the capacity of human beings to overcome their fears and prejudices and develop a place of unprecedented mate- rial and moral progress. Constitutions could make states, and laws could create borders. But a community was something formed by its members in conversation with each other about common interests. In the end, Ohio could be nothing more or less than what its citizens thought it should be.

Creating a State

In the late eighteenth century, the United States claimed the area that became Ohio as part of the Northwest Territory. Organized by Con- gress in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, the territory was made up of federal land to which the states, particularly Virginia, had ceded their claims. It was one of the few places over which the U.S. govern- ment had direct authority. Initially governed by a nationally ap- pointed governor and three judges, the territory acquired a weak two-house assembly as it grew, although there were property restrictions on voting and serving. Meanwhile, the powers of the territorial governor remained high: they included the right to veto all legislation and to call and dismiss the assembly at will. The undemocratic char- acter of this government was intentional. The United States Congress wanted to ensure that its officials and friends had established a proper environment before the residents of the Northwest Territory assumed the American citizenship. e rights of the young and ambitious settlers of the Ohio Country in

Many 790s and early 1800s objected to what they saw as an auto thele territorial government. They had the agence with congres cratic plans for the slow development of the region. Demanding sional phemselves, they increasingly focused their ire on territorial governor Arthur St. Clair. Scottish-born, the pompous and indiscreet St. Clair was a prominent local landowner in western Pennsylvania before he embarked on an undistinguished career as a military officer during the American War for Independence. St. Clair's frontier expe. rience and his dogged support of a strong national government won him appointment as territorial governor in 1788, a post he held until he was dismissed by President Thomas Jefferson in early 1803. St. Clair alienated many people with his incompetence, his lengthy absences, his alleged drunkenness, and his arrogance. The governor had little interest in participating in the public culture of the Northwest Territory. He ignored the opinions of the overwhelming majority of the people he governed, dismissing those citizens as "a multitude of indigent and ignorant people" who were "ill qualified to form a constitution and a government for themselves." No one could take seri- ously St. Clair's commitment to shaping good citizens when he seemed to have so little concern for them as human beings.

The underlying opposition to St. Clair coalesced with the meet- ings of the territorial assembly in 1798 and 1799. Immigrants from Virginia and Connecticut found common cause in seeking to bring down the tyrant. By the early 1800s, a coterie of Virginians in the Scioto Valley in alliance with some ambitious merchants in Cincinnati and recently arrived New Englanders in the northeast had emerged as the leaders of the opposition. Principal among them was the earnest Thomas Worthington, a Virginia-born planter who had settled in the Scioto Valley in 1797 and who was in the process of building an estate he called Adena. (Rather, Worthington's African- American "servants" were building it, his Quaker-based opposition to slavery as an institution notwithstanding.) By 1813, Worthington owned over 18,000 acres and lived in a fine Georgian mansion designed by Benjamin Latrobe. Thirty years old in 1803, Worthington was a prickly and reserved man who communicared with others through correspondence arid a local newspaper. Worthington suffered in comparison with his popular brother-in-

law. The English-born Virginian Edward Tiffin was a doctor and Methodist lay preacher who would become Ohio's first governor in 1803. Tiffin's easy manner gained him friends throughour the Scioto Valley. As ardent as Worthington was cautious, deeply religious and unashamedly personal, Tiffin relied on his sincerity to win "the affections of the people." Invoking a language of love, he envisioned Ohio as the home of people whose strongest connection was affection for each other. According to Tiffin, even partisan political organizations offered opportunities to join with "good democratic republican[s]" (that is, Christian "fathers, brothers, and friends") in order "to connect in the indissoluble bonds of patriotic friendship citizens of known attachment to the political rights of human nature, and the liberties of the country." More than a political act, the creation of an American state would facilitate the flourishing of a society based on choice and affection rather than command and force.

In 1802, the campaign for statehood climaxed in a widespread. public discussion. Hundreds of letters, handbills, and public toasts spoke of the need to rid the region of St. Clair and create a more democratic government. Corresponding societies rallied voters. Nothing was more important in this crusade than newspapers. Territorial resi- dents exchanged ideas in long letters to their editors. Widely circulated newspapers made no pretense of objectivity. St. Clair's critics appealed directly to "public opinion," asking citizens to listen, read, discuss, and participate. And they succeeded in dramatically increasing voter turnout.

Overwhelmed, St. Clair and his friends lost everything. By 1802, the area that would become Ohio had more than the sixty thousand residents required to apply for admission to the Union. More important, the new administration of President Thomas Jefferson was eager to dispose of obstructionist Federalist officeholders such as St. Clair. In 1802, a Congress dominated by Jeffersonian Republicans authorized the calling of a Constitutional Convention and then approved both the constitution and the admission of Ohio to equal member- ship in the United States on February 19, 1803.