CHAPTER XVII.

NEW ENGLAND IN THE WEST.

The settlers of Ohio during the early period were chiefly from New England. Commencing later and with previous careful organization, which was immediately placed under the protection of a Territorial Government supported by United States troops, traveling over a route that had long formed a military road, and confining themselves, at first, to compact settlements near the Ohio, they were able to surround themselves with many of their accustomed comforts and conveniences, and to continue, in the depths of the continent, very much the same manner of life they had led in New England. A fort, comfortable cottages, accommodations for schools and religious services, were already prepared when the first families arrived. Twelve years had passed since the Declaration of Independence had been issued, and republican ideas had taken definite form, in the previous year, in the " Ordinance " and in the Constitution of the United States. A large population had already firmly established civilization south of the Ohio, the Indians were, in a few years, to be pushed out of their immediate neighborhood and awed into tolerable quiet by a final defeat.

The conditions, therefore, for the Ohio settlements, were very different from those that attended the early growth of Kentucky and Tennessee. While the discipline of these earliest pioneers had tended to the development of a courageous temper a bold, confident and outspoken independence of feeling the later New England settlers were able to devote themselves, in comparative security and comfort, to the working out of the new ideas of the time. It was a different stock and had here a different discipline. At first it was New Eng

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land transferred, with all its habits and peculiar institutions, to the woods, carefully upheld and nourished by previous organization and constant military protection; but the boundless space about it, the freedom of the woods, and the rudeness of frontier life, dissipated much of the strength and controlling force of organization, threw the individual upon himself, and left the fundamental quality of the New England mind to a free development. The German and Quaker elements of Pennsylvania mingled with it somewhat and enlarged its mental horizon by intimate contact with new ideas and habits. Whatever, therefore, of strictness and narrowness might attach to the descendant of the Pilgrim Fathers, in Massachusetts and Connecticut, was modified and partially removed here by new suggestions and both mental and social freedom from restraint, even of public opinion.

After the first six or seven years of danger from Indian attack, during which military organization was kept up, and adventurous scouts and sentinels became skillful in the wild warfare of the woods, and communicated to the new settlers in general a little of the boldness and confidence of Kentuckians, they settled down to the individual toil and struggle unavoidable in laying the first foundations of a great commonwealth in a vast region wholly new. During this period the real fundamental character of these people developed freely. The New Englander adapted himself to the changed conditions and was better prepared to organize a new State than if wholly fresh from an eastern community. In twelve years from the day the first house was built in Marietta, the Northwest Territory had forty-five thousand inhabitants; and when the war of 1812 broke out there were two hundred and fifty thousand souls breathing the free healthy air of the woods of Ohio. All these soon caught the spirit and tendency of the first settlers, were subjected to the rough discipline of pioneer life, and built up a newer, fresher and more naturai New England in the West.

New England society and institutions had been formed on English models before the liberal and expansive ideas of a later time had taken form. Their reconstruction here, completed their return to nature. The Revolutionary era had passed and a new departure had been taken. Laborious and simple habits and warm sympathy between all classes, begotten by the community of poverty and struggle of pioneer life, freed them from prejudice. Consequently the First Principles of political and social science, enunciated in the Declaration of Independence, were more fully incorporated into the thought, habits and institutions of the Northwest Territory, and grew with lusty vigor in the healthy industry and quiet of the woods and prairies. Thorough republican principles had a certain degree of resistance to meet and overcome in the East from other forms of thought, and habits inherited from England, before they could be perfectly embodied. In the West the people were, at first, widely scattered and society was very much broken up by the extensive spread of pioneersettlement. Mind and habit were left free, for a time, to expand under the influence of the new ideas, and the people were then reassembled to form a new body politic, and remodel institutions under the freest and most natural forms.

Of all Anglo-Saxons the people of New England were the most orderly, the most logical in thought, and the most persistent in applying their mental conclusions to practical life. The mental capacity was shared by the Virginians—who stand as representatives of the Southern colonies as the people of Massachusetts do of the Northern. In fact, the Virginians possessed the quickness and vividness of conception to be seen in the French, and had the high honor to give the first and fullest expression to the thought and aspiration of all the colonies in the Declaration of Independence, as well as to furnish the most typical patriots and statesmen of the Republic in Washington and Jefferson; but they had not the practical tenacity and logical consistency of the New Englander.

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They tolerated slavery and retained many English forms and habits not in harmony with the new growth. They had the misfortune to introduce forced labor into Kentucky and Tennessee, and the noble and simple-hearted freemen there wanted the mental clearness and decision to divest themselves of it when first acting constitutionally. The New Englander in the West acquired a more liberal logic, but it did not cease to be just and practical. He laid the foundations of the great Northwest the most prosperous, free, and powerful region in the world.

New Englanders have always highly esteemed their own special institutions and peculiarities—which is very natural. With their usual forethought they proposed to organize their settlements so carefully that the savor and the vigor of New England life and customs should be transferred to the West.. Marietta and its companion settlements were, therefore, arranged in the East, with orderly precision. The township officers were provided; the territorial organization began to operate simultaneously, and the East seemed transferred in all its completeness and peculiarities to the West. This attempt, however, was a failure, for the settlements as a whole, because they could not be kept compact.

Association lost its force for the time, the community became resolved into its individual components, who spread far and wide through the wilderness, relying on themselves almost entirely for a new start in life. The old German instinct of individualism reasserted itself with a greater emphasis than it had ever displayed in England or on the Atlantic coast. Society resolved itself into its original elements in the early and middle periods of settlement in the Valley more thoroughly than this race had known before since it emerged from the primitive barbarism where the individual was nearly everything and social force almost nothing.

But, in this scattering of the settlers, they carried all the elements of civilization with them, and reorganization at once

commenced on a base more favorable to free action. The individual made more room around himself, so to speak, and the social and political structures resulting no longer hampered him at any point. He could put forth his whole strength, and, as he was as fully penetrated with a sense of the advantages of association and order as any European, or citizen of the Atlantic States, he inclined to reconstruct with all necessary thoroughness and solidity. Thus the institutions of the Valley proved, in the end, to be more liberal as to the individual, and equally vigorous and decisive in action. The ideal of freedom and strength in union was more nearly approached in the West than in the East. As settlement extended and these tendencies revealed themselves, the various restrictions to popular suffrage that had obtained in the Atlantic States were abandoned in the Valley. Their example proved contagious and extended back to the East. So, in a thousand ways, the Valley proved to be a liberalizing force in the country.

The careful attention of the intelligent leaders of settlement in the Northwest Territory was at once given to education; but adequate provision for it was attainable, at first, only in the towns and more populous settlements. The people spread over a vast region, the larger part of them were farmers, and more attention was paid to securing the best land, after danger from the Indians ceased, than to any other point. We see two hundred and fifty thousand people thinly sprinkled over much of the State of Ohio in the first twenty-five years following the commencement of settlement. Then the prairie sections of the West were opened, the northern parts of the State were safe, and there was much migration to those regions. The solitude of the woods and thinly settled prairies had become attractive to some; the desire for change and to secure the best lands of new regions inspired others; so that, sometimes, by repeated removals, families were formed and passed into the second or third generation in want of all the opportunities of education and social culture.