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River of Enterprise
The Commercial Origins of Regional Identity in the Ohio Valley, 1790-1850
By Kim M. Gruenwald Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2002 Kim M. Gruenwald
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-34132-7
CHAPTER 1
Claiming Space
In December of 1788 Dudley Woodbridge, a merchant of Norwich, Connecticut, wrote to his brother-in-law, James Backus, a surveyor in the employ of the Ohio Company, asking for information about the company's purchase. Business is "exceeding dull, & Money grows scarcer," Woodbridge complained. He wanted James to send him a detailed report about "the prospects of business" in the West, including answers to the following questions:
Where can vessels go, and have the least land carriage — Philadelphia, Virginia, or where[?] [A]re vessels suffered to go down & up the Mississippi unmolested, how far can a vessel of a hundred tons get up the Ohio, are materials for shipbuilding plenty and good[?] ... [I]s the navigation down the rivers safe and good[?] [W]hat is the demand for goods and what kinds will best answer, with the prices of liquors etc. there, what is the price per ton for land carriage, from Philadelphia or your nearest seaport, what are the remittances that will be made for goods, cash or produce, if produce, what kind and the price? In short, I should be glad of a particular & minute information with regard to what does now or may relate to the mercantile line.
Apparently Woodbridge was pleased with the young mans response, for he moved to the fledgling town of Marietta the next summer and immediately began speculating in land and seeking out men interested in erecting gristmills and sawmills. Together they poured their energy and capital into the development of the company purchase of land in the interest of connecting East and West and making the area attractive to farmers.
In their quest for opportunity, newly independent Americans such as Dudley Woodbridge and the founders of the Ohio Company went about conquering the Ohio Valley in a very particular way. Rather than slowly pushing their way out from older settlements, entrepreneurs and speculators began planting towns hundreds of miles inland to act as magnets to farmers, promising them access to both goods and markets. Their vision also attracted men who wished to be at the forefront of creating a continental empire. Because they intended to create and control a trade route that penetrated deep into the heart of the continent, merchants played a central role in most plans. War with Ohio Valley Indians erupted within a few years of settlement, but the Euro-Americans won control of the southern portion of the territory north of the river in 1795, and Marietta then became a portal through which settlers came west.
I
Born in Stonington, Connecticut, in 1747, Dudley Woodbridge moved to the port of Norwich in 1770, established himself as a lawyer, married the daughter of a prominent iron manufacturer, and turned to mercantile pursuits soon thereafter. When they married, Dudley Woodbridge was twenty-seven and Lucy Backus was seventeen. Woodbridge discontinued most of his law work and set up shop as a middleman between New York and Boston overseas merchants and Connecticut farmers and traders. Connecticut's exports went almost exclusively to the West Indies and other communities on the Atlantic coast, for the colonists produced nothing that Europeans particularly wanted. Overshadowed by long-established New York, Boston, and Philadelphia merchants, those in smaller ports imported little directly from England. But provisioning the British and the Continental armies during the American Revolution created a sharp increase in the demand for local produce.
During the Revolutionary War, Woodbridge primarily occupied himself with marketing beef, pork, sugar, corn, oats, flax, and wood, while importing whatever he could to run a store, including rum, cloth, wine, and tea. He either traded directly with merchants, or if he could turn a larger profit by doing so, he instructed agents in Boston and New York to sell his produce, and then he paid the importers with cash for goods he retailed in Norwich. An account with Silvester Gilbert of Hebron for any goods and rum that Woodbridge could supply indicates that he supplied country merchants with goods to sell. In addition, Woodbridge made contacts farther afield, sending apples, cheese, walnuts, and cider to Elisha Hinman in Williamsburg, Virginia, in exchange for tobacco in 1782.
Clearly, though, Dudley Woodbridge had greater ambitions. In 1786 he acquired a quarter interest in the schooner Elizabeth and added others thereafter. Owning his own ships brought a whole new host of commercial activities for him to engage in. He had to pay for insurance and the maintenance of the ships, and he had to pay the captain and crew. Woodbridge became busy enough to hire a lawyer to follow up on his debtors instead of taking care of it himself in the late 1780s. But owning schooners brought new headaches. Seamen jumped ship, and new hands had to be hired. A shipment of horses became ill with distemper on the voyage to the Caribbean and could not be sold for a profit. Fog delayed another shipment of horses, keeping it in port and forcing Woodbridge to buy additional feed. Once he dispatched seventeen horses and sixteen oxen to the West Indies only to find that six ships full of stock had arrived ahead of them, glutting the market.
In the years following the Revolution, American merchants like Woodbridge often found their path to the West Indies blocked by the English, and so they decided to find an alternate route to the Atlantic world down the Mississippi through New Orleans. Philadelphia merchants had been busy establishing their own niche at the Ohio's headwaters for some time. As Kentucky's population grew during the 1770s and 1780s, some eastern firms began to launch trading ventures west. A few sent goods by wagon to Fort Pitt, where their agents exchanged them for furs, skins, flour, and tobacco in western Pennsylvania and Virginia, Kentucky, and Illinois before sending the new cargo on to New Orleans to be sold there or shipped to other markets. One pair, the partnership of Reed and Forde, set up a store in both western Virginia and Natchez to facilitate their commercial plans. They also speculated in land, hoping to make their fortunes as settlers poured into the region following the Revolution. One visitor wrote that the "major part of merchants settled at Pittsburgh, or in the environs, are the partners, or else the factors, belonging to the houses at Philadelphia." A Frenchman named Louis Tarascon confirmed this view, reporting that the town housed thirty stores in 1799, but for the most part the men who ran them worked for Philadelphia or Baltimore merchants rather than owning the stores themselves.
Dudley Woodbridge's brother-in-law painted a rosy picture of life in the Western Country downriver from Pittsburgh. James Backus reported that the Indians were friendly, and one family had even stayed in town to help them plant corn. The younger man believed that a treaty with the Ohio tribes was only a few months away. James also reported that settlers were flocking in by the boatload, and he asked his father to send him ten pounds of nails and one hundred pairs of shoes that he could sell for a tidy profit. He sent along the names of four Ohio Company shareholders (three of whom appeared in the Norwich business records of his brother-in-law) and urged his family to buy their shares to sell later for a much higher price. And so Dudley Woodbridge decided that joining the Ohio Company of Associates in their endeavors represented his best chance to forward his mercantile goals.
II
During the Revolutionary War, Congress had used force to evict squatters north of the Ohio in an effort to appease the Delaware Indians. The army burned cabins and ran settlers off the land but failed to deter others determined to cross the Ohio from Kentucky and western Virginia. Because of such attempts to control the banks of the Ohio, the valley was as well known to the military as to the squatters themselves, and army officers knew the lands were rapidly being settled. In September of 1783 a group of Continental officers began to formulate plans of their own for making use of the Ohio Valley — plans that did not include letting it fill up with squatters. Led by the army's chief engineer, Brigadier General Rufus Putnam, they petitioned Congress to grant the land to them in the tradition of military bounty lands. Putnam argued in the petition and elsewhere that by allowing his group to set up a permanent settlement on the Ohio, the new American government would gain a buffer against the British and the Spanish, as well as a line of communication between East and West through the Great Lakes. Putnam emphasized that if settlement was not carried out in an orderly fashion, a European power might gain control of the area. Nearly all the petitioners, as officers and members of the Society of Cincinnati, intended to make their settlement a bulwark of national authority in the West.
When their push for bounty lands met with no success, Rufus Putnam and a group of fellow veterans created the Ohio Company of Associates in 1786. Membership was open to anyone who could purchase a share of stock for one thousand dollars in continental securities or ten dollars in gold, whether they had served in the military or not. This allowed men to turn depreciated securities into something of value — land. They limited the number of shares one person could buy to five to insure that professional speculators could not cash in — thus preserving the speculative advantage for themselves.
The man who lobbied Congress on behalf of the company and negotiated the purchase was the Reverend Manasseh Cutler, a Connecticut-born Yale graduate. In 1787 he published a pamphlet extolling the virtues of the Ohio Country. Hoping to lure settlers with his prose, he wrote of the fertility of western soil, the navigability of western rivers, and the various paths by which produce could be taken to Atlantic markets — north to the Great Lakes and south to New Orleans. To Cutler, the role of the Ohio Company itself was clear:
The first settlement will inbosom many men of the most liberal minds — well versed in the world, in business and every useful science. ... The people in the Kentucky and Illinois countries are rapidly increasing ... on seeing examples of government, science, and regular industry, follow them into the neighbourhood of their own country, they would favour their children with these advantages, and revive the ideas of order, citizenship, and the useful sciences.
Cutler intended for the Ohio Company's settlement to be a shining example of civilization and order in the West, and eastern leaders apparently warmed to his words.
The Confederation Congress sold land to the Ohio Company because they believed that the New Englanders would help impose order in the West. Eastern policy makers wanted the lands west of the Appalachians for the new United States for both strategic and economic reasons, but they distrusted the people who lived there. In their view, western hunters and squatters lived like savages, and easterners often described them in the same terms they used for Native Americans. National leaders intended for East and West to remain united by common interests by promoting commerce and attracting settlers intent on improving the land. Northerners and southerners at the national level found themselves in agreement on many issues. Both saw the need for surveys prior to settlement, the creation of compact communities, and the recruitment of industrious, market-oriented settlers. Friction between the backcountry and the eastern seaboard had been seething for a generation, and the chaos of overlapping land claims in the southern backcountry had taught them a valuable lesson. Sectionalism may have caused more friction if squatters had not already been moving north of the Ohio River, forcing Congress to act quickly or lose control of the region.
The result of their concerns was the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, a document with two faces. In order to attract the right kind of settlers, it promised freedom of religion, due process of law and full civil liberties, support for public education, representative governments, and a process by which territories would eventually become states. Revolutionary principles did have a hand in the formation of these policies, but promising westerners they would be citizens was also seen as an important step in securing their loyalty. Intending to prevent the scattered pattern of settlement that squatters left behind, eastern policy makers granted land in townships to cluster settlers together for defense and sought sites that would give farmers ready access to markets. In this vein, the ordinance can be read as a text that describes careful planning and control. Under the new settlement scheme, settlers would live in close proximity to each other so that they could be properly socialized and educated. They would need to work together, and public schooling would transform savages into educated citizens.
The New Englanders who settled the company's lands made the decision to move west for a variety of reasons. The economy had suffered since the end of the Revolutionary War, and the land could no longer support New England's growing population. As debt rose and the number of foreclosures increased, the volatility that sparked Shays' Rebellion made life all the more uncertain. For over a century and a half, migrating to new lands in search of competency had represented an important strategy among New Englanders who sought to maintain family independence and to ensure the next generation's access to land. In the 1790s farmers from Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island would move once again, but much farther than their colonial counterparts ever had, as many crossed the Appalachian Mountains to settle in the Ohio Valley.
Most of the prominent men who moved west had lost capital during and after the war, and, in some ways, they wanted to recreate the more orderly world they had known before. Joseph Gilman of New Hampshire was one such man. When chaotic currency conditions led to the decline in value of state securities, he lost much of his property in the late 1780s. Gilman had provided clothing and blankets to the troops of his home state during the conflict, but he could not collect on many of these debts after the Peace of Paris, and his economic status collapsed. Joseph Gilman intended to make a new start in the West, away from the eyes of neighbors who had witnessed his ruin.
Neither Rufus Putnam nor his associates planned to create an egalitarian society. They expected ties to the national government to secure their own individual social status, for the ex-army officers longed for the respect they seemed to have lost in the postwar world. As members of the Society of Cincinnati, many received federal appointments in the new territorial government. Rufus Putnam himself sought an increase in status. Putnam was born in 1738, but his father died when Rufus was eight. He apprenticed as a millwright and enlisted three times during the Seven Years' War, rising from private to ensign by war's end. Putnam preferred soldiering but was forced to utilize his other skills to erect sawmills while on campaign. After the war he used his pay to buy land and established himself as both a millwright and surveyor. His reputation as a builder followed him to the next war, and he became an engineer, was promoted, and was eventually made a brigadier general in, and chief engineer of, the Continental Army during the American Revolution. Putnam made the most of his relationship with his fellow Freemason and veteran George Washington, who eventually appointed him surveyor-general of the United States in 1796. As a director of the Ohio Company, Putnam controlled the patronage system in what would become Washington County, Ohio.
Like Gilman, Rufus Putnam wanted to restore a sense of order to his world, but he had bold plans for the future as well. Putnam envisioned an urbanized West "fully integrate[d] ... into the Atlantic cultural and commercial community." Putnam's West would have an interdependent relationship with Atlantic culture and society rather than an independent one, but the Ohio settlements would be no mere colony of the East. Putnam planned to promote manufacturing in his scheme, and churches and schools would stabilize society. The as-yet-unnamed city of Marietta was to be the hub of western commercial and cultural exchange with the East. Putnam and his associates knew that farmers would provide the foundation of the western economy but wanted them to support urban areas of industry and commerce. Rather than an agrarian paradise, Putnam envisioned a complex, economically diverse society.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from River of Enterprise by Kim M. Gruenwald. Copyright © 2002 Kim M. Gruenwald. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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