The Pioneers

by David McCullough

  The orders for these ships had come through an active young Marietta merchant, Dudley Woodbridge, Jr., the son of Lucy Backus and Dudley Woodbridge, Sr., who had become something of a business partner with Blennerhassett, and had worked with Barker in supplying materials needed for the building of the Blennerhassett mansion.

  In a letter to his father dated March 18, 1802, Ephraim Cutler wrote, “I am . . . fully convinced that this is by far the most eligible place to build [ships] within the United States. At any rate there are ten vessels of from one to three hundred tons burden to be built here this summer.”

  On the evening of May 4, 1803, the brig Mary Avery of 130 tons, built at Marietta, set sail and like other vessels built at Marietta provided a spectacle for the people of the town who saluted with cheers on the shoreline and small cannon fired.

  Serious shipbuilding on the Ohio, a dream long held, had become a reality and the reach of Joseph Barker’s involvement and influence in the community had increased still more, along with his circle of friends, among whom now were the Cutlers. One of the Barker daughters, Catherine, would later write at length of the Cutlers as a family “highly respected for their moral worth and standing,” and of her own particular affection for one of the Cutler daughters, Sarah, who became a “cherished” friend.

  The Barker family, too, had expanded by now to number nine children and Barker had decided it was time for a larger home of his design, work on which was to go on for several years.

  Built on higher ground farther back from the Muskingum, it was to be a large, brick house in the Federal style, with a handsome front door flanked by recessed side windows and an elliptical fanlight overhead. Two large windows to either side of the front door had twenty-four panes (twelve over twelve) each, as did the windows above on the second floor, which were also recessed in brick arches, an architectural touch that was to distinguish most of the buildings designed by Barker. Once completed the whole house was painted white, and soon became, as intended, a “distinguished seat of hospitality.”

  III.

  The year 1800 had been one of unprecedented political turmoil at the national level, with the Federalist president, John Adams, challenged for reelection by the Republican (or Democratic) candidate, Thomas Jefferson, who proved the victor.

  Then, too, in 1800, and to his immense surprise, the Reverend Manasseh Cutler, at age fifty-eight, was elected to Congress as a Federalist. As he explained in a letter to Ephraim, when the previous representative had announced only that November that he no longer wished to serve, the principal leaders of the towns around had held a meeting and decided he should be the nominee.

  “It was so sudden, and to me undesirable, that I wished to decline,” Manasseh confided to his son. “I conceived, myself, that there was no probability I should be elected, but the event proved very different from my expectations.” As he would also report, he won every town by large majorities, but added that he viewed it as “very unpleasant business.”

  Thus Manasseh Cutler—doctor of divinity, doctor of law, doctor of medicine—had become Congressman Cutler and since his town had lately been renamed, he was Congressman Cutler from Hamilton, Massachusetts.

  He departed Hamilton for Washington early the next year, and that same year, 1801, Ephraim, too, entered politics for the first time at thirty-four, elected as a delegate from Washington County to Ohio’s territorial legislature.

  Ames, the settlement Ephraim had started on Federal Creek, could now claim, as he proudly reported to his father, a population of 161 souls. He himself had never been so involved with the community, in addition to his own enterprises.

  He also continued buying and selling land and profitably, all this much to his father’s approval it would seem. Yet the elder Cutler could not help but lodge his fatherly disapproval of certain of his son’s failings, almost as if Ephraim were still a boy.

  In the same letter in which he reported to Ephraim his election to Congress, he concluded as follows:

  I cannot close this letter without suggesting some little inaccuracies in your letters which I wish you to attend to and which you must necessarily correct. I find in almost every one of your letters, you begin . . . on the wrong side of the sheet of paper. Look at my letters, you will find every letter is begun on the side of the sheet with the fold to the left hand. You will observe the same in every letter you receive from any man who knows anything of letter writing. . . . Your spelling is also bad. If you have no English dictionary I wish you, by all means, to receive one. Good composition looks ill if it is badly spelt. By looking your words up in a dictionary as you write you will soon spell right.

  His punctuation was also not what it should be, the father went on. His question marks sometimes appeared where there were no questions. It was as if the eminent master of his rectory school were lecturing one of his slower students.

  In response Ephraim wrote to his father, “I thank you for your advice respecting my pointing [punctuation], writing etc. I will attend to it as much as in my power, but till lately, it was rare that I took a pen in hand to write, except to you, and I write so bad a hand and am so unacquainted with grammar, that I feel so ashamed of my performances in this way, that I almost wish a letter burnt as soon [as] was written.”

  During his time in Washington, Manasseh was to write often to Ephraim and other members of the family, describing what he was seeing and people he was meeting. To his surprise, he found the city far more appealing than expected, the weather “remarkably pleasant,” as he wrote to his daughter Betsy.

  The block in which I live contains six houses, four stories high, and very handsomely furnished. It is situated east of the Capitol, the highest ground in the city. . . . Mr. [Nathan] Read and myself have, I think, the pleasantest room in the house, or in the whole city. It is in the third story, commanding a delightful prospect of the Capitol, of the President’s house, Georgetown, all the houses in the city, a long extent of the river, and the city of Alexandria.

  Only the Capitol was a disappointment. He thought it “a huge pile . . . very heavy in its appearance without, and not very pleasant within.” The president’s house, on the other hand, was both “well proportioned and pleasingly situated.”

  The house in which he lodged was owned by a couple named King, whose “very handsome” seventeen-year-old daughter, Anna, played the piano with “great skill.” Two or three evenings a week, he and the other lodgers would gather to hear her perform. As he wrote to Betsy, “After we have been fatigued with the harangues of the [Congressional] Hall in the day, and conversing on politics, in different circles (for we talk about nothing else), in the evening, an hour of this music is truly delightful.”

  For his fellow lodgers, all members of Congress, he had only praise. Three were from Connecticut and fellow Yale graduates. John Davenport was “a very pleasant, agreeable man”; John Cotton Smith, the son of a clergyman, and a man “of very sprightly and distinguished talents”; and Elias Perkins, “a man of very handsome abilities.” As for Nathan Read, Manasseh’s roommate, a Harvard graduate, who was also from Massachusetts, he could hardly say enough.

  “Were I to have made my choice among all the members of Congress for one to have lived in the same chamber with me, all things considered, I should have chosen Mr. Read.” Like Manasseh, Read, too, had great interest in science.

  Remarkably all these gentlemen were professors of religion and members of churches. “An unbecoming word is never uttered by one of them, and the most perfect harmony and friendliness pervades the family.”

  As usual, Manasseh was to keep an extensive diary in which he recorded the ups and downs of Congress, days of “very little done,” days of “debates long, warm, and acrimonious,” days of “nothing very interesting.”

  Besides, as did few others, he recounted occasional added experiences of particular interest such as a visit to Mount Vernon made with a small delegation of fellow representatives to have breakfast with Martha Washington. She appeared much olde
r than when he had last seen her in Philadelphia, but she “conversed with great ease and familiarity, and appeared as much rejoiced at receiving our visit as if we had been her nearest connections. . . . We were all Federalists, which evidently gave her particular pleasure.”

  She spoke of “the General” with great affection, viewing herself as left alone, her life protracted to the point where she felt a stranger in a strange world. She repeatedly remarked on the blessings bestowed on her. But as Manasseh also recorded, she talked of the election of Jefferson, whom she considered “one of the most detestable of mankind” and “the greatest misfortune our country had ever experienced.”

  To this Cutler added that such unfriendly feelings toward Jefferson were to be expected, given the abuse Jefferson had directed to General Washington, while living and to his memory since, though what exactly Cutler had in mind, he did not say.

  Several weeks later, with a number of others, he was a guest for dinner at the president’s house and afterward recorded only that Jefferson was “social,” then went on to describe all that was served in some detail. Indeed his diary entry would be the only known record of the full menu of one of the many famously sumptuous Jefferson banquets.

  Rice soup, round of beef, turkey, mutton, ham, loin of veal, cutlets of mutton or veal, fried eggs, fried beef, a pie called macaroni, which appeared to be a rich crust with the strillions of onions, or shallots, which I took it to be, tasted very strong, and not agreeable. Mr. [Meriwether] Lewis told me there were none in it; it was an Italian dish, and what appeared like onions was made of flour and butter, with a particularly strong liquor mixed with them. Ice-cream very good, crust wholly dried, crumbled into thin flakes; a dish somewhat like a pudding—inside white as milk or curd, very porous and light, covered with cream sauce—very fine. Many other jimcracks, a great variety of fruit, plenty of wines, and good.

  All was going better for Manasseh than he had expected. “Before I came,” he confided to Ephraim, “I was apprehensive that as I was a clergyman I might meet with some unpleasant things on that account. I viewed myself a speckled bird, because I presumed I should be viewed so by others. But the case has been far otherwise.”

  President Jefferson paid him more particular attention, he believed, than any one Federalist in either the House or Senate. “From members of Congress I have received every civility I could desire, not with our own party only, but I often converse freely with those of the opposite side, and in the most cordial manner.” As for the work itself, he had to say, it was “trying indeed.”

  In early spring of 1802, Ephraim made the long journey from Ohio to Washington to spend some time with his father, though exactly why neither was to say. Their first day they enjoyed a spring stroll together down the shores of the Potomac as far as Alexandria, dined there in a public house, “rambled” a bit around the town, then took a boat back to Washington.

  In the days that followed, Manasseh wrote of the weather, of attending committee meetings, but said nothing of consequence until May 4, but even then he recorded only, “At five o’clock took leave of my son Ephraim, who set off for the western country.” Of their conversations, of issues on their minds, political or personal, he said not a word. Nor would Ephraim. But almost certainly a great deal of what was said was taken up with Ephraim’s new role in Ohio politics now that the new Ohio legislature was under way.

  With Ephraim no longer keeping him company and the daily tedium of so much of the congressional life, Manasseh began writing ever longer letters home to his wife, Mary, urging her to write to him more often, so greatly did he miss her. In another month or two, the evening of the same day he received a letter from her, he writes, “I rejoice to hear you are well.” Then went on again at length about much that he faced in Washington.

  In still another letter he was beside himself in an effort to express his longing for her.

  Your very affectionate letter of the 6th has touched my heart and excited the most tender sensations. The sincerest love has always rendered a long absence from you extremely irksome and painful. . . . Be assured, my dearest love, my kind and affectionate wife, that I now anticipate with anxious expectation, if it may please Heaven, the day when I shall have the pleasure of seeing you again. And then we may converse on subjects which I do not wish to commit to paper.

  IV.

  By order of Congress the town of Chillicothe, about 100 miles west of Marietta on the Scioto River, had become the capital of the Northwest Territory in 1800. Ephraim Cutler, a new member of the legislature, had been appointed to a committee to create a road from Marietta to Chillicothe, and with the help of Rufus Putnam he had spent two weeks plotting a route through the woods.

  At first the new territorial legislature commenced its sessions in a two-story log house that also served as a popular tavern. Two years later, the legislature relocated to what was reputed to be the first public building built of stone in the Northwest Territory. It was there, during an Ohio state constitutional convention convened in November 1802, that the two delegates from Washington County, Rufus Putnam and Ephraim Cutler, both new to politics, stood firm on an issue of utmost importance that they, like others, had thought long since settled—the question of slavery in Ohio.

  In the election selecting Rufus Putnam and Ephraim Cutler as delegates to the convention, a black servant of Colonel Israel Putnam, Christopher Malbone, also known as Kit Putnam, was permitted to cast his ballot in the District of Marietta. It was considered to have been the first vote cast by a free black African in the Northwest Territory.

  The political picture at home in Marietta had greatly changed, just as in so much of the country since Jefferson’s victory over John Adams. The time when Revolutionary War veterans, nearly all staunch Federalists, had control in Marietta had passed. Jefferson Republicans were claiming predominance. The whole makeup and nature of political rivalry had changed, and as Ephraim wrote to his father, and no doubt discussed with him during their time together in Washington, there was cause for serious concern. Political parades and gatherings were filled now, as Ephraim wrote, with “dirty, drunken, newly imported Irishmen,” some quarreling, others singing the praises of their leaders, a scene “worthy of the attention of a Hogarth,” he thought.

  The immediate issue at Chillicothe centered around what was to be Article VIII of a new constitution, and a first preliminary discussion of the matter took place at the home of a Dr. Edward Tiffin, a resident of Chillicothe and a Jeffersonian, who was speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives.

  The subject was the question of whether Ohio permit or exclude slavery. Immediately the chairman of the committee, John W. Browne, proposed a section that would define the issue quite simply: “No person shall be held in slavery, if a male, after he is thirty-five years of age; or a female, after twenty-five years of age.” In other words, the tenet of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 stating in no uncertain terms that there would be no slavery was to be eliminated. Slaves would be permitted in Ohio up to certain ages, which meant Ohio was to be a slave state.

  To Ephraim there was no mystery as to who was behind the move. “The handwriting, I had no doubt, was Mr. Jefferson’s.” Another member of the committee, Thomas Worthington, a Virginian by background, told Ephraim that Jefferson had confided to him that he hoped such an article would be introduced into the Ohio convention, and that he hoped there would be no further effort made for the exclusion of slavery from the state.

  Ephraim at once spoke up to say that those who had elected him to represent them were “very desirous” to have this matter clearly understood, and to avoid any excessive “warmth of feeling,” he moved to have the matter tabled until the next meeting and he hoped very much each member of the committee would prepare a statement clearly expressing his views.

  The following day Ephraim made the case for his position that there must be no slavery as strongly as he could and at some length, and when the issue came to a vote by the committee, “the Jeffersonian version,” as
he called it, “met with fewer friends” than he expected.

  For some time he had not been feeling right, but the day after, the day when the issue was to be voted on by the committee of the whole convention, he had become quite ill. The nature of his ailment is not clear, but he had little or no strength to get out of bed.

  Then Rufus Putnam came to his room and exclaimed, “Cutler, you must get well, be in your place, or you will lose your favorite measure.”

  According to one account, Putnam and another man carried him to the convention on a stretcher, but there is no reliable evidence of this. Cutler himself wrote only, “I went to the convention and moved to strike out the obnoxious matter, and made my objections as forcibly as I was able.”

  It was an act of wholehearted fortitude and the result was never to be forgotten. “It cost me every effort I was capable of making,” he wrote, “and it passed by a majority of one vote only.”

  Fully fifteen years after his father’s success in championing passage of the 1787 Northwest Ordinance abolishing slavery in the territory, he had carried the same banner of abolition and with success.

  It was a landmark moment. As would be written in time to come, “To Ephraim Cutler, more than to any other man, posterity is indebted for shutting and barring the doors against the introduction into Ohio of the monstrous system of African slavery.”

  Nor was Ephraim’s opposition to slavery ever to fade.

  Partly for speculation and partly to encourage settlers to come to Ohio, Ephraim had purchased a “considerable” amount of land from proprietors in New England on credit, and which he sold to new settlers on credit, then waited on them until they could raise cattle to pay him. No fewer than 200 families were thus furnished with farms.

  This had led him into the “droving business,” which meant driving a herd of eighty or more cattle back over the mountains of Pennsylvania to markets in the east, no small or easy task. As he would explain, “There was no other means of raising funds to pay my debts, and it resulted in placing many poor families who had nothing to buy land within very flourishing circumstances.”