******************** POSTING RULES & NOTES ********************
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
*****************************************************************
NY Times, May 15, 2019
David McCullough’s Idealistic Settlers
By Joyce E. Chaplin
THE PIONEERS
The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West
By David McCullough
Illustrated. 330 pp. Simon & Schuster. $30.
If every generation of Americans gets the visionary colonizer it
deserves, we get Elon Musk, but people in the early Republic got the
Rev. Manasseh Cutler. Musk wants to settle Mars. In the 1780s, Cutler
set his sights on the Ohio Territory, the subject of David McCullough’s
new book, “The Pioneers.” Plans for Martian colonies dwell on technical
feasibility; Ohio’s earlier colonization is a reminder that humans’
treatment of one another matters to such schemes, too.
Ohio has quite a history. The characters who passed through during its
early phases as part of the United States could adorn a novel. Folks on
the famous side include Lewis and Clark (headed west), Aaron Burr
(post-duel and mid-conspiracy against the American government), John
Chapman (a.k.a. Johnny Appleseed, sower of fruit trees) and Charles
Dickens (visitor to Cincinnati). The less famous characters include
Harman and Margaret Blennerhasett, Anglo-Irish newlyweds who lit out for
the territory because they were uncle and niece; the Revolutionary War
veteran Rufus Putnam, whose frontier library tellingly featured Milton’s
“Paradise Lost”; and Cajoe, an enslaved Virginia man who gained his
freedom in Ohio, preached the Gospel and lived past his 100th birthday.
McCullough tells the history of the Ohio Territory as a story of uplift,
of what can happen when the doers of good are let loose upon a place.
This is American history as a vision of our better selves. Lord knows we
need it. And there are several inarguably admirable elements of Manasseh
Cutler’s plan.
Cutler and his supporters wanted the Ohio Territory, and eventual state,
to be nonslaveholding, free within a nation where slavery was still
legal. Their goal followed the tendency of the states in the North to
repudiate slavery — at least within their own borders. Prohibiting
slavery in new states extended that revolutionary logic outward. As the
Northwest Ordinance (1787) declared, “There shall be neither slavery nor
involuntary servitude in the said territory.” Nor could the eventual
states formed out of the Northwest Territory be admitted to the Union as
slave states.
And thus a moral border on the nation’s map, a firm resolve that the
Ohio River separated two different ways of being American. McCullough
notes that Harriet Beecher Stowe, who lived for a time in Cincinnati,
shaped testimony about slavery she heard from free blacks in Ohio into
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” He might have added that the semifrozen river the
fugitive slave Eliza crosses to freedom in Stowe’s novel is the Ohio
River, a geo-ethical line within an increasingly divided nation.
The Northwest Ordinance also stipulated that schools and education would
be embedded into the new settlements. Ohio had a school system supported
by public taxes and it had Ohio University, founded in 1804. Freedom of
religion was also part of the Northwest plan and became law in Ohio two
years before it would be enshrined in the Constitution, even as many of
the old American states still had established churches, with financial
penalties or civic exclusion of people of other faiths. It made a
difference. The first Ohio Jewish congregation was formed in 1824 —
there wouldn’t be a counterpart in Massachusetts for another decade.
McCullough admires the work of the Northwest Ordinance and of Ohio’s
high-minded settlers. There is much to admire. Enough, in fact, that the
story can withstand some criticism.
The idea that antislavery sentiments dominated New England and flowed
inevitably from it is wishful thinking. New Englanders may have flooded
into the free Northwest Territory, but they also streamed into
slaveholding Georgia. Even as Harvard men were founding Ohio University,
Yale men established the University of Georgia. The Connecticut native
Eli Whitney developed his famous cotton gin on the Georgia plantation of
a fellow New Englander, Nathaniel Greene, a Rhode Islander who had
settled in the South and acquired slaves. Ohio and Georgia — antislavery
and slaveholding, respectively — were both parts of the same nation. The
two states were logical American outcomes, dueling creations of people
from the same place.
And whatever praise Manasseh Cutler and his supporters might deserve,
their designated Eden had an original sin: dispossession of the region’s
native inhabitants — paradise lost, indeed. McCullough plays down the
violence that displaced the Indians, including the actual Ohio people.
He adopts settlers’ prejudiced language about “savages” and
“wilderness,” words that denied Indians’ humanity and active use of
their land. He also states that the Ohio Territory was “unsettled.” No,
it had people in it, as he slightly admits in a paragraph on how the
Indians “considered” the land to be theirs. That paragraph begins,
however, with a description of the Northwest Territory as “teeming with
wolves, bears, wild boars, panthers, rattlesnakes and the even more
deadly copperheads,” as if the native people were comparably wild and
venomous, to be hunted down, beaten back, exterminated.
Despite the Northwest Ordinance’s declaration that “the utmost good
faith shall always be observed toward the Indians,” several indigenous
nations refused to recognize the treaties that, under United States law,
nullified their land rights. A confederation of the Shawnee, Miami and
Lenape (Delaware) — led by their leaders, Waweyapiersenwaw (Blue
Jacket), Mishikinaakwa (Little Turtle) and Buckongahelas — resisted the
settlers’ advance. After several attacks, American officials dispatched
troops, who built a new fort. Their effort resulted in a battle at the
Wabash River (Nov. 4, 1791), which came to be known as St. Clair’s
Defeat, a rout worse than any suffered in the American Revolution: 623
men and officers lost, plus an estimated 200 civilians. (Indian
fatalities were estimated at 21.) But the United States won a
significant victory three years later at the Battle of Fallen Timbers,
where Gen. Anthony Wayne defeated Blue Jacket’s forces on Aug. 20. The
Treaty of Greenville (1795) drew yet another line, one that demanded
Indians remove themselves north and west of the Ohio Territory.
McCullough presents this as the end of conflict between settlers and
indigenous groups. It wasn’t, not even in Ohio. He simply omits the
succeeding confrontations there, as well as in the Northwest Territory
and in the greater Midwest, where settlers continued to challenge Indians.
In their desire to remove Indians, Ohio’s settlers uncomfortably
resembled their white counterparts in the slaveholding South. Local
xenophobia re-emerged when freed blacks made their way to the Midwest
after the Civil War, joined by new streams of immigrants: Many white
Ohioans became members and supporters of the Ku Klux Klan. That probably
would have surprised (if not saddened) Cutler. McCullough is quite right
not to have written a glib lament for a falling-off from an originary
moral peak. But his fondness for the sweetly evoked Midwest of the early
to mid-20th century — he admires Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” and Conrad
Richter’s “The Awakening Land” trilogy — betrays an ahistorical vision.
Cutler’s plan had not prevented a violent preference for a
white-dominated society.
Can we do better? Mars has no indigenous inhabitants. Maybe that will
make it easier for Musk — for anyone — to craft a colony that satisfies
basic definitions of justice, with a good answer to the basic question:
Who gets to go? For that to happen, we need clear and critical views of
previous flawed attempts to be pioneers. Otherwise, we boldly go — back
to where many others have gone before.
Joyce E. Chaplin is the James Duncan Phillips professor of early
American history at Harvard University and a current Guggenheim fellow.
_________________________________________________________
Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm
Set your options at:
https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
