Stories Of Ohio Part 4

Six years later, Colonel Ma.s.sie laid out the town of Chillicothe, which became the first capital of Ohio, and in the same year, 1796, the earliest settlers from Connecticut landed at Conneaut in Ashtabula County. They were led by Moses Cleaveland, a lawyer of Canterbury, Connecticut, a man of substance and ability, and they had come from Buffalo, some by land and some by water, but they arrived within a few hours of one another. It was the Fourth of July, and Cleaveland wrote in his journal: "We gave three cheers and christened the place Fort Independence; and, after many difficulties, perplexities, and hards.h.i.+ps were surmounted, and we were on the good and promised land, felt that a just tribute of respect to the day ought to be paid. There were in all, including women and children, fifty in number. The men, under Captain Tinker, ranged themselves on the beach and fired a federal salute of fifteen rounds, and then the sixteenth in honor of New Connecticut. Drank several toasts.... Closed with three cheers. Drank several pails of grog. Supped and retired in good order."

This was the order of the four lawful settlements in the Ohio country: first that of the Ma.s.sachusetts men at Marietta in July, 1788; next, that of the New Jersey men at Cincinnati in December, 1788; then that of the Virginia men at Manchester in 1790; and then that of the Connecticut men at Conneaut in 1796.

XVIII. THE STATE OF OHIO IN THE WAR OF 1812.

We may now begin to speak of the State of Ohio, for with the opening of the present century her borders were defined. The rest of the Northwest Territory was called Indiana Territory, and by 1804, Ohio found herself a state of the Union. There has never since been any doubt of her being there, and if it had not been for the great Ohio generals there might now be no Union for any of the states to be in. But it is nevertheless true that Ohio was never admitted to the Union by act of Congress, and her life as a state dates only from the adoption of her final const.i.tution, or from the meeting of her first legislature at Chillicothe, on the 1st of March, 1803.

The most memorable fact concerning the adoption of this const.i.tution was the great danger there was that it might allow some form of slavery in the new state. Slavery had been forbidden from the beginning in the Northwest Territory, but many of the settlers of the Ohio country were from the slave states of New Jersey, Virginia, Maryland, and Kentucky, and there was a strong feeling in favor of allowing women to be held as slaves till they were thirty-five and men till they were twenty-eight years old. But in the end, thanks to one of the Ma.s.sachusetts men of Marietta, Judge Ephraim Cutler, the friends of slavery were beaten, and it was forbidden in Ohio in the same words which had forbidden it in the Northwest Territory.

It had been a long fight and a narrow chance, and the clause that gave the future to freedom was carried by one vote only. Edward Tiffin was chosen governor, and the new state entered upon a career of peace and comfort if not of great prosperity or rapid progress. The Indians if not crushed were quelled, and the settlers at last lived without fear of them, until Tec.u.mseh began his intrigues. In the mean time there was plenty to eat, and enough to wear for all; there was the shelter of the log cabin, and the fire of its generous hearth. The towns grew, if they did not grow very rapidly; new towns were founded, and the country gradually filled up with settlers, or at least the land was claimed. Immense crops were raised on the fertile soil, and these were mainly fed to hogs and cattle, which more rapidly found a way to market than the grain: they could be driven over the bad roads, and the grain had to be carried. The very richness of the soil when turned to mud forbade good roads in the new country; and the most thriving settlements were on the rivers, which, as in the days of the Mound Builders, formed the natural highways. Many streams were navigable then, which the clearing of the woods from their banks has since turned to shallow pools in the time of drouth and to raging torrents in the time of rain; and one of the most hopeful industries was s.h.i.+p building. The trees turned to masts where they grew, and many a stately vessel slid into the waters that had washed its living fibers and glided down the Ohio into the Mississippi to the sea.

The Ohio people toiled and waited for the inventions of the future to open ways out into the world for them with the great riches to which they were shut up in their own borders; but it must have been with a growing uneasiness. Great Britain, as we know, had long held the forts in the West which she had agreed to give up to the United States, and after she surrendered them, her agents and subjects in Canada abetted the Indians in their rising against the Americans under Tec.u.mseh and the Prophet. The trouble with the Indians would probably have ended at Tippecanoe, if it had not been for the outbreak of war between the two countries; yet this outbreak must have been a kind of relief to the Ohio people. The English insisted upon the right of searching our vessels on the high seas, and pressing into their navy any sailors whom they decided to be British subjects, and though the Ohio people could not feel the injury of this, as it was felt in the seaboard states whose citizens were forced into the English service by thousands, they could feel the insult. They were used to fighting, and they welcomed the war which at least unmasked their enemies. Their ardor was chilled, however, by one of its first events, which was the surrender of Detroit by General Hull. This threw the state open to invasion by the British and Indians, and the danger was felt in every part of it. The militia were called out, troops poured in from Kentucky, and General Harrison marched into the northwest to recapture Detroit. A detachment of his army was beaten in the first action, which took place beyond the Ohio limits, and after yielding to the British was butchered in cold blood by their Indian allies. The next spring Harrison built Fort Meigs on the Maumee; from this point he hoped to strike a severe blow at the enemy in Canada, but he was himself attacked here by General Proctor, who marched down from Maiden with a large force of British regulars, Canadian militia, and Indians led by Tec.u.mseh.

Proctor planted batteries on the sh.o.r.e of the river, and Tec.u.mseh's Indians climbed trees and poured down a galling fire on the besieged. The British commander then summoned the fort to surrender, but Harrison answered his messenger, "As General Proctor did not send me a summons on his first arrival, I had supposed that he believed me determined to do my duty," and he dismissed the envoy with the a.s.surance that if the post fell into Proctor's hands it would be in a manner to do him more honor than any surrender could do. The fight then continued until the British general found his fickle savage friends deserting him, and on the 12th day raised the siege.

It is probable that the Indians were following their old custom of leaving off fighting to enjoy a sense of victory when they had won it. A large body of Kentucky horse had by Harrison's orders attacked one of the British positions, and carried it. After spiking the enemy's guns they pursued the flying British, and suddenly fell into an ambush of Indians. Out of eight hundred only one hundred escaped, and the work of murdering the prisoners at once began. It was on this occasion that Tec.u.mseh tried to save the lives of the helpless Americans, appealing to the British general to support him, and even tomahawking with his own hatchet a disobedient chief who would not give up the work of death.

The allies made a second attempt on Fort Meigs, but they were foiled in this too, and then they turned their attention to Fort Sandusky, where the town of Fremont now stands. General Harrison held a council of war, and it was decided that Fort Sandusky could not resist an attack and must be abandoned. But when the order to retire reached the gallant young officer in command it was too late, for the Indians were already in force around the post. Major Croghan therefore wrote a reply which he thought might fall into the enemy's hands, and which he worded for their eyes rather than his general's. "Sir, I have just received yours of yesterday, 10 o'clock p.m., ordering me to destroy this place and make good my retreat, which was received too late to be carried into execution. We have determined to maintain this place, and by heavens we can!"

This answer got safely through to General Harrison, who promptly resented what he thought its presumption and sent to remove Major Croghan from his command. Croghan went to explain in person and was allowed to return to his post. The British and Indians appeared in force the next day, July 31st, and on the 2d of August made their first and last a.s.sault. Colonel Short of the British regulars led a force of 350 men against the fort, and set them the example of leaping into the ditch before it. When the ditch was full, Croghan opened upon them from a masked porthole with a six pounder, and raked them from the distance of thirty-feet. Colonel Short, who had ordered his men to give the Americans no quarter, fell mortally wounded; he tied his handkerchief to his sword and waved it in prayer for mercy, and not in vain. Croghan did all in his power to relieve his disabled foes; he pa.s.sed buckets of water to them over the pickets, he opened a s.p.a.ce under the pickets that those who could might creep through into the fort out of their comrades' fire.

That night the whole force of the enemy retreated in such haste that they left many stores and munitions behind them. They were commanded by General Proctor, who had already failed at Fort Meigs against Harrison, and who now dreaded an attack from him. None was made, but Harrison had the pleasure of writing in his report of the victory won by Major Croghan at Fort Stephenson: "It will not be among the least of General Proctor's mortifications that he has been baffled by a youth who had just pa.s.sed his twenty-first year."

A little more than a month after this repulse the British were defeated in the battle of Lake Erie by Commodore Perry, at Put-in-Bay. The action itself is by no means the most impressive part of the wonderful story of that great victory. Perry had not only to cope with the British in waters where they had been undisputed masters, but he had to create the means of doing so. He brought s.h.i.+p builders, naval stores, guns and ammunition, as well as sailors for his fleet, four hundred miles through the wilderness of New York to the wilderness at Erie, Pennsylvania, and there he hewed out of the forest the stuff which he wrought almost alive into his s.h.i.+ps. On the 1st of August he was ready to sail with two large vessels of twenty guns each, and seven smaller craft carrying fourteen guns in all. With these, he met the enemy's force of six vessels carrying sixty-four guns, and on the beautiful sunny morning of the 10th of September the famous fight took place. The Americans at first had the worst of it; the British guns were of longer range, and Perry's flag-s.h.i.+p, the Lawrence, was so badly disabled that he had to abandon it for the Niagara, The Lawrence was in fact an unmanageable wreck; her decks were streaming with blood, but nothing broke the awful order of the carnage. The men fell at their guns; if wounded, they were carried below; if killed, they were left where they dropped, while others took their places.

Perry hauled down his colors with his own hand, and with his flag under his arm was rowed to the Niagara through a storm of musketry. Once on board this vessel, he began to change defeat into victory, and after a fight lasting more than three hours in all, he could send to General Harrison his memorable dispatch, "We have met the enemy and they are ours."

The next day the mournful sequel to this tragedy followed, when the crews of both fleets, victors and vanquished, joined in burying their dead on the sh.o.r.e of the bay. The sailors slain in the battle had been already sunken in the lake, but now to the sound of the minute guns from the s.h.i.+ps, with the sad music of funeral marches, the measured dip of oars, and the flutter of half-masted flags, the last sad rites were paid to the fallen officers. Perhaps the Indians under Tec.u.mseh who had seen with stupid dismay the great battle of the rival squadrons, witnessed this pathetic spectacle too, before they sullenly withdrew into Canada after Proctor's army. There Harrison pursued them, and in his victory on the banks of the Thames, their mighty chieftain fell, and their cause perished with him.

XIX. A FOOLISH MAN, A PHILOSOPHER, AND A FANATIC.

"Who is Blennerha.s.sett?" asked William Wirt, at the trial of Aaron Burr for treason, and many a schoolboy since has echoed the question, as many a schoolboy will hereafter, while impa.s.sioned oratory is music to the ear and witchery to the breast. The eloquent lawyer went on to answer himself, and painted in glowing colors a character which history sees in a colder light. But though Blennerha.s.sett was not the ideal that Wirt imagined, he was the generous victim of a cold and selfish man's ambition, and the ruin of his happy home and gentle hope is none the less pathetic because his own folly was partly to blame for it.

We must go back of the events which we have been following to an earlier date, if we wish to find Harman Blennerha.s.sett dwelling with his beautiful wife on their fairy island in the Ohio. Their earthly paradise lay in the larger stream at the mouth of the Kanawha, not far from the present town of Belpre, and there in the first year of the century, Blennerha.s.sett built a mansion which became the wonder of the West. The West was not then very well able to judge of the magnificence which it celebrated, but there seems no reason to doubt that Blennerha.s.sett's mansion was fine, and of a grandeur unexampled in that new country where most men lived in log cabins, and where any framed house was a marvel. He was of English birth, but of Irish parentage, and to the ardor of his race he added the refinement of an educated taste. He was a Trinity College man, and one of his cla.s.smates at Dublin was the Irish patriot, Emmet, who afterwards suffered death for his country. But it does not appear that Blennerha.s.sett came to America for political reasons, and he seems to have made his home in the West from the impulse of a poetic nature, with the wealth and the leisure to realize the fancies of his dream. "A shrubbery that Shenstone might have envied," says Wirt, "blooms around him. Music that might have charmed Calypso and her nymphs, is his. An extensive library spreads its treasures before him. A philosophical apparatus offers him all the secrets and mysteries of nature. Peace, tranquillity, and innocence shed their mingled delights around him. And to crown the enchantment of the scene, a wife, who is said to be lovely even beyond her s.e.x, and graced with every accomplishment that can render it irresistible, had blessed him with her love."

Whatever may be the facts concerning the home of the Blennerha.s.setts, the memories of those who knew its mistress bear witness to the truth of these glowing words. They testify that she was not only brilliant, accomplished, exquisite in manner, but good to every one, kind to the poor, and devoted to her husband and children. She was a faultless housewife, as well as a fearless horsewoman, and she was strong in body as she was active in mind. "She could leap a five-rail fence, walk ten miles at a stretch, and ride with the boldest dragoon. Robed in scarlet broadcloth, with a white beaver hat, on a spirited horse, she might be seen das.h.i.+ng through the dark woods, reminding one of the flight and gay plumage of a tropical bird."

To this home and its inmates came Aaron Burr, as bad, brave, and brilliant a man as ever figured in our public life. He had been a gallant officer in the Revolution, he had been Vice President of the United States, he had come within a vote of being President. But he had killed Alexander Hamilton in the duel which he forced upon him, and all his knowledge of the world and men had taught him to wors.h.i.+p power and despise virtue. It has not yet been clearly shown what Burr meant or hoped to do, and possibly he could not have very well said himself; but it is certain that in a general way he was trying to separate the West from the East, and to commit the warlike people of the backwoods to a fine scheme for conquering Mexico from Spain, and setting up an imperial throne there for him to sit upon. He was always willing to sell out his fine scheme to France, to England, to any power that would buy, even to Spain herself; and in the mean time he came and went in the West and Southwest and built up a party in his favor, which fell to pieces at the first touch of real adversity. General Wilkinson, of the United States army, who had been plotting and scheming with Burr, arrested him; he was tried for treason, and those who had cast their fortunes with him were carried down in his fall. The most picturesque of the sufferers was Blennerha.s.sett, who was one of the most innocent. Burr had found other Ohio people too plodding, as he said, but the Blennerha.s.setts took him seriously, and when Burr in his repeated visits tempted the husband, and flattered the wife, who was ambitious only for her husband, he easily beguiled them into a belief in his glorious destiny.

Blennerha.s.sett put all his fortune into the venture. He ordered fifteen large boats built for transporting five hundred men down the Mississippi, he contracted for provisioning them, and pledged himself for the payments of all kinds of debts. His friends tried to reason with his folly in vain. Governor Tiffin called out a company of militia to prevent his boats from leaving the Muskingum; Blennerha.s.sett heard that he was to be arrested, and fled; a troop of Virginians seized his island, pillaged his house and ruined his grounds; and Mrs. Blennerha.s.sett with her children embarked amid the ice-floes of the Ohio on a small flatboat and made her way to her husband in Louisiana. Here he was taken, but discharged after a few weeks' imprisonment. They came back to their island, but they never lived there again, and in 1811 the house was burned. They wandered from place to place, and grew poorer and poorer; in 1831 he died at the house of his sister in the island of Guernsey, and seven years later his wife ended her days in a New York tenement house.

Another picturesque figure of our early times was one who never meant and never imagined harm to any living creature, man or beast, but gave his simple, humble life to doing good, with no thought of his own advantage. Perhaps as the world grows more truly civilized the name of Johnny Apple-seed will be honored above that of some heroes of the Ohio country. Like so many of our distinguished men, he was not born in our state, but he came here in his young manhood from his birthplace in Ma.s.sachusetts, and began at once to plant the apple seeds which gave him his nickname.

Few knew that his real name was John Chapman, but it did not matter; and Johnny Appleseed became his right name if men are rightly named from their works. Wherever he went he carried a store of apple seeds with him, and when he came to a good clear spot on the bank of a stream, he planted his seeds, fenced the place in, and left them to sprout and grow into trees for the orchards of the neighborhood. He soon had hundreds of these little nurseries throughout Ohio, which he returned year after year to watch and tend, and which no one molested. When the trees were large enough he sold them to the farmers for a trifle, an old coat or an old s.h.i.+rt, and when he needed nothing he gave them for nothing. He went barefoot in the warm weather, and in winter he wore cast-off shoes; when he could get none and the ways were very rough he protected his feet with rude sandals of his own making. His hats were of his own making too, and were usually of pasteboard with a broad brim in front to s.h.i.+eld his eyes from the sun; but otherwise he dressed in the second-hand clothing of others, for he thought it wrong to spend upon the vanities of dress. He dwelt close to the heart of nature, whose dumb children he would not wound or kill, even poisonous snakes or noxious insects. The Indians knew him and loved him for the goodness of his life, and they honored him for the courage with which he bore the pain he never would inflict. He could drive pins into his flesh without wincing; if he got hurt he burned the place, and then treated it as a burn; he bore himself in all things, to their thinking, far above other white men.

It was believed that he had come into the backwoods to forget a disappointment in love, but there is no proof that he had ever suffered this. What is certain is that he was a man of beautiful qualities of heart and mind, who could at times be divinely eloquent about the work he had chosen to do in this world. He was a believer in the philosophy of Emanuel Swedenborg; he carried books of that doctrine in his bosom, and constantly read them, or shared them with those who cared to know it, even to tearing a volume in two. If his belief was true and we are in this world surrounded by spirits, evil or good, which our evil or good behavior invites to be of our company, then this harmless, loving, uncouth, half-crazy man walked daily with the angels of G.o.d.

In those early days when the people were poor and ignorant, and had little hope of bettering themselves in this world, their thoughts turned much to the other world. The country was often swept by storms of religious excitement; at the camp-meetings the devout fell in fits and trances or were convulsed with strange throes called the jerks, and all sorts of superst.i.tions grew up easily among them. The wildest of these perhaps was that of the Leatherwood G.o.d which flourished in Guernsey County, about the year 1828. The name of this fanatic or impostor, who was indeed both one and the other, was Joseph C. Dylks, and his t.i.tle was given him because of his claim to be the Supreme Being, and because he first appeared to his wors.h.i.+pers on Leather-wood Creek at the town of Salesville. The leatherwood tree which gave this creek its name had a soft and pliable bark, which could be easily tied into knots, and was used as cordage by the pioneers; and the dwellers on Leatherwood Creek had a faith of much the same easy texture. Yet they were of rather more than the average intelligence, and they were so far from bigoted or intolerant that all sects among them wors.h.i.+ped in one sanctuary, a large cabin which they had built in common, and which they called the Temple. Here on a certain night, while they sat listening to one of their preachers, they were thrilled by a loud cry of "Salvation!" followed by a fierce snort, like that of a startled horse, and they discovered in their midst a stranger of a grave and impressive aspect, who had come no one knew whence or how. When he rose he stood nearly six feet high, and showed himself of a perfect figure, with flas.h.i.+ng black eyes, a low broad forehead and a fine arched nose; his hair, black and thick, fell in a ma.s.s behind his ears over his shoulders; he wore a suit of black broadcloth, a white neckcloth, and a yellow beaver hat. His weird snort and his striking presence seem to have been his sole equipment for swaying the faith of the people; though some of the earliest believers saw a heavenly radiance streaming from his countenance at times, and when he rode, they beheld above his head a ring of light which hung in the air over the saddle if he dismounted. But he soon began to make converts, and he had quickly enough, of the best among those good men and women, to gain the sole use of the Temple. At first he claimed merely to be the Lord Jesus Christ, but he presently announced himself G.o.d Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth; and his followers readily believed him, though he failed in the simple miracle of making a seamless garment out of a bolt of linsey-woolsey cloth, and kept none of his promises to them. He probably found it sufficient to be the Deity, and his wors.h.i.+pers, among whom were two ministers, were certainly content; but the unbelievers felt the scandal to be too great. They had Dylks arrested, and brought before two justices of the peace, who one after the other decided that there was no law of Ohio which forbade a man to declare himself the Almighty.

The wretched creature was acquitted, but he was thoroughly frightened. He made his escape from his guards, and took to the woods, where he was some time in hiding. When he came back to the believers, he had bated nothing of his claim to divinity, but he was no longer so bold. He now told them that the New Jerusalem would not come down at Leatherwood Creek, but in the city of Philadelphia, and he departed to the scene of his glory. Three of the believers followed him over the rugged mountains and through the pathless woods, finding food and shelter by hardly less than a miracle; but they did not find the New Jerusalem at their journey's end. Dylks had told them that where they should see the heavenly light the brightest, there they should behold the beginning of the New Jerusalem; but they nowhere saw this light, though they walked the streets of the earthly city night and day. Two of them were substantial farmers, and when they had lost all hope, and had lost even Dylks himself (for he soon vanished), they pledged their tobacco crops and so got money enough to come home, where they lived and died in the full faith that Joseph C. Dylks was G.o.d Almighty, though he never did anything to prove it but snort like a startled horse, wear long hair on foot and a halo on horseback, and fail in everything else he attempted. The third of this company of his followers, a young minister of the United Brethren, did not return for some years; then he came, well dressed and looking fat and sleek, and preached to the people on Leatherwood Creek the faith in which he had not faltered. He accounted for the disappearance of Dylks from the eyes of his other wors.h.i.+pers in Philadelphia very simply: he had seen him taken up into heaven.

But the people had merely his word for the fact; Dylks never descended to earth again as his apostle promised, and the belief in his divinity died out with those who first accepted him.

XX. WAYS OUT.

In 1893 Jacob S. c.o.xey, a respectable citizen of Ma.s.sillon, started a movement in favor of good roads which took the form of a pilgrimage to Was.h.i.+ngton to pet.i.tion Congress for its object. Several armies, as they were called, from different parts of the country, met in Ma.s.sillon, and under Mr. c.o.xey's leaders.h.i.+p, set out on a long and toilsome march over the Alleghanies to the capital, living by charity on the way. Many of the soldiers of these armies might well have been idle and worthless persons; there were doubtless others who were sincere and sane in their hope that the representatives of the people might be persuaded to do something for bettering the highways; but the affair was so managed as to meet with nothing but ridicule, and in trying to force a hearing from Congress Mr. c.o.xey and some of his followers were arrested for trespa.s.sing on the Capitol grounds, and were sentenced to several weeks in jail. This ended the latest crusade for good roads from Ohio; but there is no Ohio idea more fixed than that we ought to have good roads, and this was by no means the first time that Ohio men had asked the nation to lend a hand in making them. The first time they succeeded as signally as they failed the last time; but that was very long ago, and it may surprise some of my readers to know that we have a National Road crossing our whole state, which is still the best road in it.

Almost as soon as the Western people had broken into the backwoods it became their necessity to break out again, to find and to make roads between them and the civilization they had left. The ways of the different emigrations in reaching Ohio were: for the New Engenders, through New York state to Lake Erie, and westwardly along the sh.o.r.e of that water; for the Pennsylvanians, through their own state to the headwaters of the Ohio, and then down the river and inwardly from it; for the Virginians, Marylanders, and Carolinians, the valley of the Shenandoah and the mountain gaps to Kentucky, and so into Southwestern Ohio. At first the white men came by the streets, as the pioneers called the trails that the buffalo and deer had made; but they soon cut traces through the woods, and later these traces became wagon roads. Of course they used the rivers wherever they could and traveled by canoe, by flatboat, by keelboat, and by ark; and there grew up on the rivers a wild life which had its adventures and heroes like the Indian warfare. The most famous of the boatmen was Mike Fink, who drank hard and fought hard, and was a miraculous shot with his rifle. He was captain of a keelboat, which was the craft mostly used in ascending the river. The flatboats were broken up and sold as lumber when they had drifted down to their points of destination on the lower rivers, but the keelboat could make a return trip by dint of pus.h.i.+ng with a long pole on the sh.o.r.e side and rowing on the other; sometimes even sails were used, and then the keelboat sped up stream at the rate of fifty miles instead of twelve miles a day.

But these means of traffic and travel soon ceased to suffice. Then the Ohio people felt the need of getting out with their increasing crops, their multiplying flocks and herds, and they made their need known to the nation, to which they were everywhere akin, and the nation answered through Congress by beginning, in 1806, the National Road, which was finished by 1838, from Baltimore as far as Indiana. This road first opened the East to Ohio; then in 1811 a steamboat made its appearance on the Beautiful River, and after that steam commanded all the Southern and Southwestern waters for us, as well as those of the inland seas on the North. Then, that all these waters might be united, the state began in 1825 to build a system of ca.n.a.ls, from Cleveland to Portsmouth and from Toledo to Cincinnati. When these ca.n.a.ls were completed, with their branches, they gave the people some nine hundred miles of navigable waters within their own borders. The main lines were built, not by companies for private profit as the railroads have since been built, but by the people for the people, and it may be said that the great prosperity of Ohio began with them. Wherever they ran they drained the swamps and made the land not only habitable but beautiful. They were dug by Ohio people, and the sixteen millions of dollars that they cost came back into the hands of the men who gladly taxed themselves for the outlay. The towns along their course grew, and new towns rose out of the forests and prairies.

The Ohio people had the impulse to this great work from the New York people, who had built the Erie Ca.n.a.l from Albany to Buffalo, and whose governor, De Witt Clinton, had urged forward that work. Now, when our whole state was ablaze with joy at the action of the legislature in providing for the work, Governor Clinton was invited to come and first strike the spade into the earth in digging the new ca.n.a.ls. He arrived by steamboat at Cleveland, where the people received him and his train of distinguished New Yorkers with rejoicings worthy of the great event. He took stage for Newark, and on the 4th of July, 1825, when our state had just come of age, in the presence of all the Ohio magnates and dignitaries, and a mighty throng of citizens, he lifted a spadeful from the ground on the Licking Summit. Governor Morrow of Ohio lifted the second spadeful, and then followed a struggle among the distinguished men as to which should lift the third. New Yorkers and Ohioans vied in filling a wheelbarrow with successive spadefuls, and a happy citizen of Chillicothe had the honor of wheeling it away and dumping it over a bank. He was the captain of a company of militia, and the crowd was so great that a squadron of cavalry had to keep a s.p.a.ce for the speakers in the midst of their hollow square. Thomas Ewing delivered the oration, and men all round him wept for joy.

There were like scenes when the ca.n.a.ls were completed. Mult.i.tudes gathered to see the water let into the channels which to their impatience had been so long in digging, and they took hopefully the disappointment of having it sink into the gravelly beds, before it could slowly fill the banks, instead of rus.h.i.+ng like a flood to their brims. At Dayton, 1829, when the first fleet of three ca.n.a.l boats arrived from Cincinnati, it was greeted with the firing of cannon and the shouts of an immense crowd lining the ca.n.a.l banks. This was as it should be, and will be wherever a great work is done for the common good; and it ought never to be forgotten that the ca.n.a.ls of Ohio were dug by Ohio men that all Ohio men might freely prosper more and more, and not that a few rich men might get richer.

After the National Road, which was our first way out, came the steam navigation of the lake and the river, and after that came the railroad, which will be our main reliance for getting back and forth over the state and to and from it, till some of the many schemes of travel through the air are realized. We cannot tell how far off the event may be; but in the mean time it is curious, if not very flattering to our Ohio pride, to learn that the first railroad enterprise within our borders was fostered by Michigan. The legislature of that state granted the charter of the Erie and Kalamazoo Railroad, which opened in 1836. The line ran from Toledo to Adrian, thirty-three miles, but when it was projected the matter was so far from serious with the legislature which authorized it, that it was granted because it was "merely a fanciful scheme that could do no harm, and would greatly please" certain citizens of Toledo; just as now a balloon line might be laughingly authorized. It was entirely successful, however, as far as the running was concerned, though the road was so hampered by the cost of fighting enemies and the expenses of building that it was seized for debt seven years later.

This has been the history of many railroads since in Ohio, and if we could read between the lines that now cobweb the map of the state, we should come to know many tales of broken fortunes and of broken hopes. The railroads are no different in this from other business enterprises, but they are different from the ca.n.a.ls. These, as we have seen, were the work of the state for the advantage of the whole people, while the railroads were from the beginning private schemes for making money. Each kind of highway came in its time, and each in its way served the purpose of Ohio. At the time the companies began to build their railroads, the state system of ca.n.a.ls was in its highest usefulness, and it is no wonder that the people should have regarded the railroads as fanciful schemes. No one could then have dreamed how rapidly they would increase and multiply, and that in less than fifty years they should so far surpa.s.s the ca.n.a.ls in service to the public that some of these would be abandoned by the state, and become gra.s.s-grown ditches hardly distinguishable in their look of ancient ruin from the works of the Mound Builders. At the most there were once nine hundred miles of ca.n.a.ls in Ohio, and now there are twelve or fourteen thousand miles of railroads. Yet the ca.n.a.ls were a greater achievement for Ohio in 1837 than the railroads are in 1897.

The children of this day can hardly imagine what rude and simple affairs the earliest railroads were. Instead of the long smooth steel rails which now carry the great trains, with their luxurious cars, in their never-ceasing flight, day in and day out the whole year round, flat bands of iron, spiked to wooden rails, formed the path of the small carriages drawn by a locomotive of the size and shape of a thres.h.i.+ng-machine engine. These amazed by a speed of ten or twelve miles an hour the gaping spectator whose grandchildren do not turn their heads to look at the express as it makes its sixty miles in sixty minutes. In the very beginning, indeed, the carriages were drawn by horses, and it was several years before steam was used.

Little by little the railroads began to be built on the easy levels of the state, and before a great while a line was projected from Cincinnati to Columbus along the course of the Little Miami River. This was completed piecemeal, from point to point, and at last carried through. In the mean time other lines were laid out, and then all at once the railroad era was at hand. It was a time of great excitement and expectation, if not of that public rejoicing which had welcomed the ca.n.a.ls.

In a few years the magnificent fleets of the river began to feel the fatal rivalry of the trains that swept along its borders. Travel deserted them, and traffic sought the surer and swifter transportation of the sh.o.r.e. The great packets that had carried swarms of pa.s.sengers to and from Pittsburg and Cincinnati and all the points between, disappeared or were converted into freight-boats, and then these began to fail for want of traffic, and the Beautiful River was almost abandoned to the stern-wheeler pus.h.i.+ng a flotilla of coal-barges. A like change took place upon the lake; steamers which formed the means of communication between the towns and cities from Cleveland to Buffalo, and from Cleveland to Detroit, ceased to touch at the smaller ports, and became the pleasure-craft of the summer tourists, or the carriers of heavy freight, and the ports which did not become the feeders of the railroads dwindled to insignificance. But the railroads could not affect the navigation of the lake quite so disastrously as that of the river; the lake in such a rivalry had some such advantage as that of the sea from its mere vastness, and from the expanses where the railroads could not follow the steamer in the mere nature of things. The iron horse had his way with the ca.n.a.ls, though, and these monuments of a former period of enterprise grow more and more like its sepulcher, where he drank them dry. or where he left their slow currents to stagnate unstirred by the keels of the leisurely craft once so jubilantly welcomed to them.

Except for the occasional breaking of an embankment, the history of the ca.n.a.ls could hardly be marked by any incidents of exciting interest. It was not so with steamboating and railroading, which has each its long tale of disasters such as give times of peace almost as dark a record as those of war. The most tragical of these events took place at the opposite extremities of the state, in Cincinnati and in Ashtabula, and they occurred at the beginning and the end of an interval of nearly forty years.

The rise of steamboating on the Western rivers was perhaps all the more rapid because of the daring and reckless spirit of the Western people, who took almost any risk in order to carry a point in their rivalries or to gain an end of their ambition. It is certain at any rate that the builders and the crews of the popular boats joined in contriving and urging them to a speed that should leave all compet.i.tors behind. There was frequent racing between the packets on the Ohio and Mississippi, and the frightful calamities from bursting boilers continued for a long time before public opinion quelled the boyish love of victory which tempted not only the steamboatmen but their pa.s.sengers too. These joined with the captain in forcing the boat to the top of its speed, at the risk of a swift or agonizing death to all on board; and it was no doubt with their full approval that the master of the beautiful new steamer Moselle took the chance that resulted in the loss of more than two hundred lives on the 26th of April, 1838. She had just left her moorings at Cincinnati for her trip to Louisville, and had run up to take on a family from a raft a little way above the city. In order that she might show her speed before the crowd on the landing, and pa.s.s a rival boat in sight of all as she returned, the captain held to the full head of steam with which he had started. Her wheels had scarcely turned, after she parted from the raft, when her boilers burst with a roar like thunder. The air was instantly filled with the flying fragments of the wreck, and with the bodies and the heads and limbs of men, women, and children. These fell, strewing the sh.o.r.e and dropping into the river, where what was left of the Moselle sank within fifteen minutes. Cries of anguish, groans and shrieks from the sufferers, followed the awful sound of the explosion. Many of the victims whom the accident had spared were drowned before boats could reach them. The mangled body of the captain was hurled into the street; the pilot was thrown a hundred feet into the air and fell back into the stream.

In 1876, on the evening of December 29, an express train of the Lake Sh.o.r.e Railroad, broke through the bridge at Ashtabula, and plunged seventy-five feet down into the bed of the creek below. The train was of eleven cars with a hundred and fifty-six pa.s.sengers on board, and the bridge was further strained by the weight of the two ma.s.sive locomotives which drew it. The night was extremely cold, and a blinding snow storm was raging, while the freezing wind blew a gale. The wreck at once took fire, and with the cries of the wounded were now mingled the agonized prayers of those who saw themselves doomed to death in the blazing ruins which imprisoned them. Nearly every one on the train was hurt more or less severely; eighty persons perished in the fall or the fire, and five died after they were rescued.

There were other paths which the Ohio people had to open before they could reach a yet wider world than any that lay to the east of them, or the south of them. Their course to civilization lay not only through the woods and down the rivers and over the mountains, but it ran also through the great realm of books, and every log schoolhouse was a station or a junction on it; or rather, as they had things in these days, a milestone or a finger-post.

The great glory and strength of the Ohio people, as I have hinted before, came from their varied origin.

They have shown themselves among the first of the Americans, not because they were born in Ohio, but because they were born of the Ma.s.sachusetts and Connecticut men, the New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians, the New Jerseymen and Marylanders, the Virginians and Carolinians and Kentuckians who made Ohio what it was to be by the mixture of their characteristics and qualities here. It is of no use to pretend, however, that it was their virtues alone which got into the Ohio people; their foibles got in too, and their prejudices and their vices. A traveler in our state, just after it had become a state, believed that we were destined to be more like the people of the North and East than the people of the South, whom he then found, in Kentucky at least, much livelier in mind and manner than the Pennsylvanians, fond of public life and society, very hospitable and courteous, but dissipated, restless, and reckless. Our public spirit did not come from our Southern ancestry, but from our New England ancestry. The South gave Ohio perhaps her foremost place in war and politics, but her enlightenment in other things was from the North. It was the aristocratic indifference of the South to public schools that for twenty-four years after Ohio became a state kept her from profiting by the magnificent provision of school lands made for her by the whole nation through Congress. It was not until almost a generation after Ohio became a state that she began to have schools partly free, and it was still a generation later before the men of New England blood framed the present school law, and got it enacted by the legislature. This was in 1853, but in 1825 the first great effort for public schools was made. There was then a party in favor of ca.n.a.ls in the legislature, and another party in favor of schools, and these two parties fought each other a long time. At last they united, and together gave the people ca.n.a.ls and schools, the two ways out of the wilderness.

Our ca.n.a.ls are no longer the great avenues of commerce, because the modern needs and means are different from those of former days, but our schools are still the royal roads, the people's roads, to and from the world of letters and arts. Ohio is now second to no other state in her public school system: and well-nigh three-quarters of a century ago, when General Lafayette visited Cincinnati in his tour of the Republic which he had helped to found, nothing surprised and charmed him more than the greeting which the children of her public schools gave him. It spoke to him of a refined and graceful life, such as he could never have imagined in the young city so lately carven out the forests; and such proofs of the general culture must have done more than all the signs of material prosperity, all the objects of industry so proudly shown him, to make him regard Ohio (to use his own words) as the eighth wonder of the world. Six hundred boys and girls from the public schools met him at sunrise, on the morning of his arrival, and scattered flowers under his feet and made the air ring with their shouts of "Welcome to Lafayette!"

As for the Indians, who fought so long and so hard here for the graves of their fathers and the homes of their children, they had to find their ways out too. But it would not be easy to say what became of them all, for they went such various ways out of Ohio and out of the world. Some remained in the country which they had lost, and in a few cases they tried to take on the likeness of civilized men. But oftener they only took on the vices of civilization; they were the drunkards and the vagrants of their neighborhoods, living by a little work and by the contemptuous charity of the settlers. In them the proud spirit of their race was broken; they suffered insult and outrage from their conquerors without resisting; a small white t.i.tian might knock a stalwart Indian down with his fist, and the Indian would not attempt to revenge himself. For a while, the settlers feared the lingering red men, but they soon learned to despise them, and it was seldom that they troubled the whites by theft or violence.

A good many of the tribesmen followed the British into Canada, after the War of 1812, where it must be owned to our shame as Americans that they had wiser, kinder, and juster treatment than we gave those who remained with us, and who followed westward from their old hunting grounds in Ohio the buffalo, the elk, the beaver, and the deer. Several nations, or parts of nations, were gathered on reservations in Seneca, Lucas, and Wyandot counties, where they were given land and taught farming and other trades. Missionaries came to dwell among them and try to make them Christians, and many were converted. The Quakers seem to have done the best work in this way, for the Indians always trusted and loved the men of peace.

But although their friends could teach the Indians to plow and sow, to build houses and barns, to make tools and mend them, to sing and to pray, and to wear clothes and to lead decent and sober lives, they could not uproot all their old customs and superst.i.tions. The superst.i.tion that seemed to last longest was the belief in witchcraft, which was indeed very common among their white neighbors. Nearly all forms of sickness were treated as the effect of witchcraft by the Indians, and the afflicted were carried into the woods and left alone with none near them except the medicine man whose business it was to expel the witch.

A suspected witch or wizard might be safely killed by any kinsman of the sufferer; and it is said that Indians were known to walk all the way from the Mississippi to the Ohio reservations in order to shoot down persons accused of witchcraft, and then return unmolested. In 1828, the Mingo chief Seneca John was put to death by two of his tribesmen as ruthlessly as Leatherlips in 1812. He was accused of having bewitched the chief Comstock, and though he protested, "I loved my brother Comstock better than the green earth. I stand upon; I would shed my blood, drop by drop, to bring him back to life," yet he was sentenced to die, and Comstock's brothers, c.o.o.nstick and Steel, carried out the sentence.

In 1831 the Senecas ceded their lands, forty thousand acres on the Sandusky, to the United States, and were removed to the southwest of the Missouri. Each of the other reservations was given up in turn for lands in the Far West, and in the early forties I myself, when a boy living in Hamilton, saw the last of the Ohio Indians pa.s.sing through the town on the three ca.n.a.l boats which carried the small remnant of their nation southward and westward out of the hind that was to know them no more forever.

It was quite time. I cannot say how far they had been civilized, and for all I know they may have been tame farmers and mechanics, but in their moccasins and blankets, with their bows and arrows, they looked like wild hunters; and Ohio was no longer a good hunting ground. All the larger game had long been killed off or driven away, and the smaller game was fast vanis.h.i.+ng before the rifle and the shotgun. As if its destruction by gunners singly was not rapid enough it was the custom in somewhat earlier days for whole neighborhoods to meet together for the wholesale slaughter of the sylvan creatures which still abounded. One of these great hunts took place in Medina County, in 1818, when the region was as yet very spa.r.s.ely settled. The drive, as it was called, was fixed for the 24th of December, and at sunrise, six hundred men and boys drew up their far-spreading lines. They were armed with rifles, shotguns, old muskets, pistols, knives, axes, hatchets, bayonets fastened to long poles, and whatever other weapons they could lay hands on, to shoot, strike, or stab with, and they began to draw their vast circle together with a hideous uproar of horn, conchsh.e.l.ls, and voices. The deer fled inward from all sides; bear and wolf left their coverts in terror; foxes and racc.o.o.ns joined the panic rout, and the air was full of the flight of wild turkeys. Then the slaughter began, and before it ended three hundred deer, twenty-one bears, and seventeen wolves were killed; of the turkeys and the smaller game no tale was kept.

Later these drives were common in the years whenever game was abundant in any neighborhood. They were called squirrel-hunts, because the squirrel was the unit, and larger or smaller game counted so many squirrels, or went to make up the value of a squirrel. I knew of one of these hunts during the late fifties in Northern Ohio, when the wild pigeons were still in such mult.i.tude that their flight darkened the sky, where now one of them is rarely seen.

XXI. THE FIGHT WITH SLAVERY.

Almost from the beginning Ohio was called the Yankee state by her Southern neighbors. Burr had found her people too plodding for him, as he said, and it would not have been strange if the older slave-holding communities on her southern and eastern border had seen with distrust and dislike the advance of the young free state, and had given her that nickname partly out of envy and partly out of contempt. Their citizens were high-spirited and generous, but they had not the public spirit which New England had imparted to Ohio, for public spirit comes from equality and from the feeling for others' rights, and the very supremacy which the slaveholders enjoyed was fatal to this feeling. Virginia and Kentucky were rich in independent character, but public spirit is better than this, for it cares for the independence of all through the self-sacrifice of each. That was the secret which Ohio early learned from New England, and which kept her safe from slavery when it pressed so hard upon her in the friends.h.i.+p as well as the enmity of her neighbors.

We know that the Northwestern Territory was devoted to freedom by the law that created it, but we have seen that slavery was kept out of Ohio by one vote only when her first const.i.tution was adopted; and for a very long time there was a very large party favorable to slavery in our state. It will seem strange to many of my readers that Ohio people of color were once not only not allowed to vote, but were not allowed to give testimony in the courts of law. They were treated in this like the Southern slaves, and in fact there was really a sort of slaveholding in Ohio, in spite of the law. In the river counties many farmers hired slaves from their masters in Virginia and Kentucky; and when the Southerners traveled through Ohio, they brought their slaves into the state with them, and took them out again. But when the conscience of the Northern people began to stir against slavery, the Ohio abolitionists coaxed away the slaves of these Southern travelers and sojourners, and this, with the constant escape of runaway slaves by their help, infuriated the friends of slavery inside as well as outside of the state. The abolitionists had what they called the Underground Railroad, with stations at their houses in town and country, and they sped the fugitives from one to another till they reached Canada. Their enemies accused them of tempting slaves across the Ohio, in order to give them their freedom, and in a little while the rage against them broke out in mobs and riots.

It would not be easy to trace here the course of events which led to these outbreaks. It is no doubt true that the abolitionists were often rash, if not reckless, and that when they were maddened by the coldness or the hostility of the people to the cause of human freedom they did not stop at some acts which, though they were righteous enough, were unlawful. It was unlawful to harbor runaway slaves, but they did it gladly, and they appealed to the pa.s.sions as well as the consciences of men in their hate of the sum of all villainies, as John Wesley called slavery. They not only met their foes half way, they carried the war into the hearts and homes of the enemy. From time to time wicked and sorrowful things happened to fret their fanaticism and keep it at a white heat. Peaceable negroes were attacked in their homes by ruffianly whites, their cattle killed, their fields wasted; and sometimes they made a b.l.o.o.d.y resistance. They were not always harmless, and they were not always pleasant neighbors. Slavery was a bad school, for the slaves as well as the masters; and the negroes, when not vicious and dishonest, were degraded and ignorant, for the public schools were shut against them, and they could not read, any more than they could vote or bear witness. So it is not strange that they should have been hunted and harried everywhere in Southern Ohio.

In Pike County a whole neighborhood was invaded, and several lives were lost before one of these foolish and wicked persecutions ended. This incident, which was one of many more or less violent, occurred in 1830, and two years later something still more tragical happened. A negro calling himself Thomas Marshall, who had lived several years at Dayton, was caught up in the streets of that town by some men who, when his cries brought the citizens to his help, declared that he was a runaway slave. They took him before a magistrate, and proved their charge; but one of the slavecatchers held out the hope that his master would sell him. The poor slave gave fifty dollars himself toward his freedom, and his ransom was well made up when word came from his owner in Kentucky that he would not part with him for any sum. His captors then took Marshall to Cincinnati, where he was lodged for safe keeping over night in the fourth story of a hotel. When his guards fell asleep, the slave rose and threw himself out of the window to the ground fifty feet below. He was taken up fatally hurt, and he died at dawn.

The anti-slavery meetings were often broken in upon by mobs and sometimes broken up. One of these riots took place in 1834 at Granville, in Licking County, where the Ohio Anti-slavery Convention held its anniversary in a barn on the outskirts. The members were returning to the village in a procession when the mob met them, and at sight of the ladies among them shouted, "Egg the squaws!" and began to pelt them with eggs and other missiles, while some ran and tried to trip them up. Many of the men were beaten and egged, and the manes and tails of their horses were shaved. This was a favorite argument with the friends of slavery, and if shaving horses' manes and tails could have availed, their party would easily have won.

Some of the anti-slavery speakers and lecturers came on missions from the Eastern States, but several of the fiercest and bravest were like the Rev. John Rankin, of Clermont County, who had emigrated from Tennessee to Ohio, because he would not live in a slaveholding community. He used to preach against slavery at frequent peril of his life, and his son tells how a mob leader once mounted to his pulpit, and threatened him with his club. "Stop speaking, or I will burst your head," he shouted, but Rankin went quietly on as if nothing had been said, and one of his friends dragged the ruffian from his side. Of course, he was always coming home with his horse's mane and tail shaved, and of course his house was a station on the underground railroad to freedom.

One of the boldest of the abolitionists was James G. Birney, who like Rankin had come to Ohio from the South. He started a newspaper called The Philanthropist in Cincinnati, and for three months attacked slavery unsparingly in it. Then, on the 23d of July, 1836, the mob rose, broke into the printing office, threw the types into the street, tore down the press, and cast the fragments into the river. Then they a.s.sailed the black people living in one of the alleys, and shots were exchanged but no lives were lost. A few years later, however, in 1841, a general a.s.sault was made upon the negroes by the mob; several on both sides were killed and many wounded, and the office of The Philanthropist was again destroyed. Of course these things did not stop the fight against slavery, and it did not help slavery at all when the authorities of Lane Theological Seminary at Cincinnati forbade the students to write or to talk about it. That was foolish and useless; it only hurt the seminary, and drove many students from it to the college at Oberlin, then newly founded in the woods of Lorain County. There they could not only discuss slavery, but they could learn about it at first hand from the negro students. The founders of Oberlin were not abolitionists, but it is related that when they took Christ for their guide, they found that they could not shut out the friendless people whom the law kept from the schools, the polls, and the courts.

These few scattered facts will give some notion of the bitter feeling that prevailed during the first ten or twelve years of the fight against slavery in Ohio. Afterwards it became less intense, as slavery became a political question between the two great parties of that day, the Whigs and the Democrats. Neither party expected to abolish slavery, but the Whigs hoped to keep it out of the territories and all the new states. Both parties split upon this question at last, and in 1856 the anti-slavery Whigs and anti-slavery Democrats joined in forming the Republican party, which in 1860 elected Abraham Lincoln upon its promise to shut slavery up to the states where it already existed.

But it must not be supposed, because the first bitter feeling had pa.s.sed away, that the facts were changed or that the tragedies and outrages had ceased. After the pa.s.sage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, there was a new hunt for runaways all over the state, and business on the underground railroad was never so brisk. The hatred of slavery was revived in all its intensity by such cases as that of Margaret Gorden in 1856. This unhappy mother had escaped from Kentucky with her four children to the house of a free colored man below Mill Creek in Hamilton County, where they remained concealed with thirteen other fugitives. One night the place was suddenly attacked by the slavehunters under the lead of the United States officers. A fight followed, and several on both sides were wounded, but at last the slaves were overpowered. While the officers were dragging the others from the house, Margaret seized a knife from the table, and killed her little daughter rather than see it taken back to slavery, and then turned the b.l.o.o.d.y weapon against herself, but failed in the attempt on her own life. She was taken to Cincinnati and tried, not for murder, but for escaping from slavery, together with the other fugitives, who said they would "go singing to the gallows," if only they need not go back to the South. They were all found guilty of seeking to be free, and were returned to their owners. On her way down the river it is said that Margaret jumped from the boat with one of her remaining little ones in her arms. The child was drowned, but Margaret was saved for the fate which she dreaded, and which she had twice risked her own and her children's life to shun. What became of her at last was never known; it is only known that she was carried back to her owner. She had two deep scars on her black face. At her trial she was asked what made them, and she answered "White man struck me."

In Champaign County, a fugitive slave named Ad White resisted the attempt of the slavehunters to take him, in 1857, and fired upon one of the United States marshals, whose life was saved by the negro's bullet striking against the marshal's gunbarrel. The people and their officers took the slave's side, and the case was fought in and out of court. The sheriff of the county was brutally beaten with a slungshot by the marshal who had so narrowly escaped death himself, and never take a thousand dollars for him; the money was promptly raised and paid over, and White lived on unmolested.

As late as the summer of 1860 a fugitive slave was arrested near Iberia, in Morrow County. A party of young men caught one of the marshals and shaved his head, while others beat his comrades. Rev. Mr. Gordon, President of Ohio Central College, stood by trying to prevent the punishment, but he alone was arrested. He was sentenced to prison, where he lay till Lincoln pardoned him. The pardon did not recognize his innocence, and he would not leave his cell until his friends forced him to do so. By this time the damp jail air had infected him, and he died, shortly after, of consumption.

One would think that such things as these would have cured the Ohio people of all sentiment for slavery, for they had no real interest in it. But even in the second year of the Civil War, which the love of slavery had stirred up against the Union, the famous anti-slavery orator, Wendell Phillips, was stoned and egged while trying to lecture in Cincinnati. Before this time, however, events had gone so far that there was no staying them. One of the earliest and chiefest of these events was the attempt of John Brown to free the slaves in Virginia. He had already fought slavery in Kansas, where it was trying to invade free soil, and in 1859 he thought that the time had come to carry the war into the enemy's country. He did this by placing himself with a small force of daring young men, several of his own sons among the rest, in the mountains near Harper's Ferry. He hoped that when he had seized the United States a.r.s.enal at that point, and given them arms the slaves would join him, and help to fight their way to the free states under his lead. But when they were attacked in the a.r.s.enal, Brown and his men were easily overpowered by a detachment of Marines sent from Was.h.i.+ngton; several of his followers were killed; a few escaped; the rest suffered death with their leader on the gallows at Charlestown.

Some think that Brown was mad, some that he was inspired, some that he was right, some that he was wrong; but whatever men think of him, there are none who doubt that he was a hero, ready to shed his blood for the cause he held just. His name can never die, so long as the name of America lives, and it is part of the fame of Ohio that he dwelt many years in our state. For many years of his younger manhood Brown had lived at Hudson, in Summit County; for months before his attempt in Virginia he and his men were coming and going at differ