The Pioneers

by David McCullough

  The first such drive occurred in 1800 and was the first ever out of Ohio and he kept at it annually for thirty years. “These trips over the mountains were attended with much anxiety and fatigue,” wrote his daughter Julia.

  Sometimes he realized a profit upon his cattle, perhaps as often a loss was experienced. For some years the roads over the Mountains were infested by men of desperate character who laid in wait for drovers and many robberies were committed, and several murders perpetrated by them. From these dangers, father, although several times placed in circumstances of known peril, was mercifully preserved.

  It was on such a drive a few years after his vote on slavery that Ephraim crossed paths with a party of slave drivers and masters, with two or three “droves” of Negroes, and, as he wrote, he “gave one of the drivers and the master who rode in a carriage, a lecture they will be likely to remember,” adding, too, that he felt better for it. “I felt some energy, and what little humility I possess was roused at this shocking sight.”

  Another of the noblest of those objectives championed by the original pioneers, including most prominently Manasseh Cutler and Rufus Putnam, was higher education. In January 1795, at a meeting held in Marietta, the directors of the Ohio Company determined that two townships be reserved for the creation of a university and that a surveying party under Rufus Putnam and a guard of some fifteen men set off on the Hocking River to determine the site.

  Manasseh Cutler would write,

  This was a strange introduction of the higher classics to the Northwest. In a fleet of canoes, propelled by the power of the setting pole against the swift and narrow channel of the Great Hocking, accompanied by armed guards against the lurking savages, and carrying with them the pork, beans, and hard tack that made up their rough fare, the committee of old veterans of three wars proceeded to fix, with compass and chain, the boundaries of the University lands. There was little of culture and polish in the undertaking, but rifles, canoes, and salt pork were never put to a better use.

  And in this same cause now Ephraim and Rufus Putnam took the lead at Chillicothe in the signing of a charter to establish a state university at the location first surveyed on a series of hills overlooking the Hocking River. With the same brightly optimistic spirit that had inspired Putnam and others to call Marietta a “city,” the little college town that was to emerge in the wilderness by the Hocking would be called Athens, and while it was Manasseh Cutler’s idea to name the new institution the “American University,” the name chosen was Ohio University.

  But there was still more to be done in the cause for learning. From Athens to the settlement Ephraim had helped establish at Ames was approximately seven miles, and there in Ames at about this same time, as Ephraim would write, “the intellectual wants of the neighborhood” became the subject of much conversation. And so it was decided to establish a public library there in the wilderness that would become famous as the “Coonskin Library.”

  A library society of some twenty-five members was organized, each of whom was assessed $2.50. The first name on the list and first librarian was Ephraim and the library was to be located in his house. To cover the cost of the books, it was decided to collect raccoon skins and proceeds from the sales of these back in Boston made possible the purchase of some fifty “choice books” selected appropriately by Manasseh Cutler.

  Life for the Cutlers on their Federal Creek farm, meantime, had changed greatly. In November 1801 Ephraim’s brother Jervis had appeared on the scene once again, and in the month following their younger brother Charles, too, arrived and moved in with the family.

  Charles was twenty-nine, a Harvard graduate and schoolteacher, and he had come to take the place of the one previous teacher in the Ames community who had proven unacceptably “intemperate.” Charles had long suffered from poor health and so had headed west also in the hope of benefiting from a change in climate. But Charles also, it seems, was an alcoholic, and had long been a worry back home. Details of his troubles during his time with Ephraim and the family are few, but tragically three years later Charles died there at age thirty-two. The sorrow felt was great indeed, and particularly by his father. Because of the great western adventure he had helped set in motion, two of his grandchildren were buried on the banks of the Ohio River. Now one of his own children was gone.

  “It is painful indeed to reflect that he should fall a victim of his own imprudence,” Manasseh Cutler wrote to Ephraim on receiving the news. “It is not possible for me to express the distress and anxiety of my mind for him—nor the extreme disappointment after I had struggled with almost insurmountable difficulties to get him through college, that the prospects that which early opened for usefulness and respectability, should prove abortive. But the will of God is done.”

  Brother Jervis, by contrast, seems to have taken hold quickly and in impressive fashion, having hired a shop in Marietta and set himself up in the tinning business. “He is in great spirits and has the reputation of an uncommon industry,” Ephraim was pleased to report to their father. In another year or so he had branched out to an active fur trade in Chillicothe.

  The momentum of change seemed only to increase all the while and there was no question that the hand of Jefferson, in Ephraim’s expression, brought it on. He had removed and replaced Arthur St. Clair as governor, a move long overdue. At age sixty-eight St. Clair was in poor health and often out of touch. On a recent visit to Chillicothe he had gotten quite drunk. He would retire to his properties in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, where he was to die impoverished and living in a log cabin.

  Jefferson also removed Rufus Putnam from the office of surveyor general of the United States, a position to which President Washington had commissioned him. As Ephraim would write, “no man in the territory more entirely deserved and enjoyed the respect and confidence of the people than General Rufus Putnam.”

  The Ohio legislature completed a state constitution, and it was carried to Washington, to Jefferson, who sent it on to Congress, where it was approved by both the Senate and House. It was then returned to the president, who signed it into law, and thus on February 19, 1803, Ohio became the seventeenth state of the Union and the first state established in the Northwest Territory.

  Later in 1803, on an infinitely grander scale Jefferson brought about great historic change with the purchase by the United States from France of the vast Louisiana Territory west of the Mississippi. Further he commissioned Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, both experienced soldiers, to explore what had now suddenly become the new and far vaster Northwest Territory.

  On the evening of September 13, the reality of this was brought home to Marietta, when Meriwether Lewis and his crew on their way down the Ohio stopped there to lay over for the night. But as everyone in town was soon to learn their progress was delayed several hours the next morning when it was discovered that two of the crew had gone ashore during the night and gotten so drunk they were of no use.

  With the pull of the west growing greater than ever, the number and variety of those appearing on the scene at Marietta on their journeys on the Ohio was bound only to increase.

  Among the great many who were altogether inconspicuous was a family from Leominster, Massachusetts, not far from Rutland, Rufus Putnam’s hometown. Their name was Chapman and they took up frontier life in Washington County, in a log cabin on Duck Creek, fifteen miles north of Marietta, and seven miles from the nearest neighbor. They were there to stay, except for one eccentric, thirty-year-old son named John, who could not remain anywhere for long and was to become famous as Johnny Appleseed.

  Like Rufus Putnam, he had a great, lifelong love of apple trees and had committed himself to supplying settlers with apple seeds or young trees, while, at the same time, he spread the gospel according to the Swedish theologian Emanuel Swedenborg. Much would be written and said about Johnny Appleseed, including much that had little or no bearing on the truth. But as for his appearance there is no doubt. It was described as outlandish even on the frontier.

>   He was quick and restless in his motions and conversation; his beard and hair were long and dark, and his eyes black and sparkling. He lived the roughest life, and often slept in the woods. His clothing was mostly old, being generally given to him in exchange for apple trees. He went barefooted, and often traveled miles through the snow in that way. . . . He was welcome everywhere among the settlers, and was treated with great kindness even by the Indians.

  His wanderings, almost entirely in Ohio, were to go on for more than forty years. The legend would last far longer.

   CHAPTER SIX

  The Burr Conspiracy

  Your talents and acquirements seemed to have destined you for something more than vegetable life . . . it would seem there has been, without explanation, a sort of consent between our minds.

  —AARON BURR TO HARMAN BLENNERHASSETT, APRIL 15, 1806

  I.

  Any thought that Blennerhassett Island could suddenly figure as the focal point of a national crisis, or that the affluent, rather odd owner of the island would be at the center of the drama, would have been utterly inconceivable to those who made Marietta their home and way of life—or that the arrival on the scene of one single public figure would set it all off.

  The first appearance of Colonel Aaron Burr and his means of travel were not to be forgotten. He arrived on board as luxurious a flatboat as yet seen on the Ohio River, a “floating house,” as he liked to say, built to his specifications at Pittsburgh. It was sixty feet in length, fourteen feet wide, flat-bottomed, squared-off, roofed from stem to stern, and included a dining room, kitchen with fireplace, two bedrooms, and windows of glass. A slender stairway led to the rooftop, which served as a promenade where one might enjoy the passing river scenery or evening air. That a craft so large should carry a man quite so small made the spectacle all the more memorable.

  The date was May 5, 1805. Less than a year earlier, on the morning of July 11, 1804, Aaron Burr had shot and killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel and it had been only a matter of months since he ceased to be vice president, all of which was well-known in Marietta.

  He was denounced as a murderer and by all conventional rules a ruined politician. He, however, did not see it that way. He had come west to explore some new and mysterious pursuits and as Hamilton himself had once said, he was “bold enough to think no enterprise too hazardous and sanguine enough to think none too difficult.”

  Though he stood only about five feet, six inches and at age forty-nine was going bald, Aaron Burr, still trim and handsome with luminous, almost hypnotic hazel eyes, had a way of charming nearly everyone, male or female. As his first biographer, James Parton, would write:

  He succeeded best with young men and with unsophisticated elderly gentlemen. . . . Many young men loved him almost with the love of woman, and made him their model, and succeeded in copying his virtues and his faults. He, on his part . . . succeeded in so imprinting his own character on theirs, that their career in life was like his—glorious at the beginning, disastrous, if not disgraceful, at the close.

  Both Hamilton and Jefferson had called him the Catiline of America, referring to the unprincipled ancient Roman notorious for scheming against the republic.

  His lineage was highly distinguished. His grandfather on his mother’s side was the great New England divine Jonathan Edwards. His father, Aaron Burr, a scholar and theologian, was the president of the College of New Jersey at Princeton. Burr himself had graduated with distinction from Princeton when he was only sixteen.

  He served as an officer in the Revolution, married, took up the law and New York politics and succeeded in both rapidly and conspicuously. In the words of a satiric poem of the time:

  Tho’ small his stature, yet his well known name,

  Shines with full splendor on the rolls of fame.

  Ultimately, running as a Republican—or Democrat—against Thomas Jefferson he wound up tying with Jefferson in the 1800 presidential race against John Adams, and by a painfully drawn-out decision by the House of Representatives became vice president. In the meantime his most trusted political ally, his wife, Theodosia, had died.

  What exactly his intentions were on his expedition west was hard to say, since he left a number of different impressions wherever he went, depending on whom he was talking to. To some he implied he had come primarily to learn as much as he could about the western country to determine his next undertaking. To others it seemed he wanted to stake out a new settlement farther south down the Mississippi. Then there were hints and rumors of founding a vast empire in the provinces of Mexico, and there were discussions, too, about the probability of a separation of the western states from the Union. But again it depended on with whom he was conversing.

  According to one observer, when Burr spoke, it was “with such animation, with such apparent frankness and negligence, as would induce a person to believe he was a man of guiltless and ingenuous heart.” Burr also implied secrets and high, even risky adventure to come. There was no human being, the same observer continued, more “mysterious and inscrutable.”

  Rumors and fearful speculation about a “Burr conspiracy” kept growing. The impression among many was that he hoped for hostilities between the United States and Spain along the Louisiana-Mexico border to detach New Orleans from the United States and establish a new independent country.

  “How long will it be,” asked an editorial in Philadelphia’s United States Gazette, “before we hear of Colonel Burr being at the head of a revolutionary party on the western waters? . . . How soon will Colonel Burr engage in the reduction of Mexico?”

  On landing at Marietta he made a visit to the ancient Mound, which seems to have interested him greatly, as did the Marietta shipyards. Much the most important stop followed, when the little Colonel stepped ashore on Blennerhassett Island on the balmy evening of May 5. With him was a single traveling companion named Gabriel Shaw, a wealthy New York law client.

  As someone who happened also to be deeply in debt and in need of all the financial support possible for his grandiose schemes, whatever they might be, Burr already knew something about the Blennerhassetts and their wealth. On seeing their “castle in the wilderness” and the way of life there, he had no doubt he had come to the right place.

  Many there were in Marietta, however, and especially among the veterans of the Revolution, who looked on Burr with considerable suspicion if not utter contempt, as the murderer of Hamilton, one of the heroes of the war, as well as a major stockholder in the Ohio Company. To those like Rufus Putnam and Ebenezer Sproat, as later said, Burr’s arrival at Blennerhassett was “an evil hour” in which he, “like Satan in the Eden of old,” visited this “earthly paradise, only to deceive and destroy.”

  The one surviving eyewitness account of the visit was written long afterward by the Blennerhassetts’ son, Harman Jr., a small boy at the time. Burr was received with “the usual hospitality of the island,” he wrote, and his father in particular was “much taken with the accomplished manners and agreeable wit and conversation of the ex–vice president.”

  When, at about eleven o’clock, Burr and Shaw were invited to spend the night, they politely declined, saying they preferred to sleep on the boat. The Blennerhassetts then walked them to the boat. On approaching the mooring, Burr slipped on the sandbank and fell. He immediately recovered himself, it is said, though not without observing, “That’s an ill-omen!”

  The morning after, he cast off downstream, heading away on his mysterious mission.

  What all had been discussed or learned or revealed to his hosts during the course of conversation the evening before, no one ever said, but the months following gave rise to considerable correspondence between Burr and Harman Blennerhassett, in which Burr, in one beguiling letter, expressed the view that Blennerhassett deserved a more active, engaged life than the one he was leading, surrounded only with comforts and pleasures, all a merely passive existence. Far better, Burr said, that someone of such marked intelligence and talent as he get action,
take part in the world, particularly for a man with a growing family and a gradually diminishing fortune.

  It appears also that at some point the evening before, Burr had put forth to Blennerhassett the prospect of a takeover of Mexico with Burr as the emperor and Blennerhassett as his ambassador to Great Britain.

  The ever-gullible Blanny had been taken as never before, and the result was all Burr could have desired. In a long letter to Burr dated December 21, 1805, Blennerhassett declared himself ready to pursue a full change in life. “I hope, sir, you will not regard it indelicate in me to observe to you how highly I should be honored in being associated with you, in any contemplated enterprise you would permit me to participate in.”

  With mail as slow as it was, and with Burr ever on the move, he did not respond for more than three months, but in a letter from Washington dated April 15, 1806, he expressed his “utmost pleasure” in learning that Blennerhassett was to return to the real world. He congratulated him for giving up his “vegetable life” for one of activity. “Your talents and acquirements seemed to have destined you for something more.”

  But as much still depended on certain “contingencies,” Burr said, the business at hand could not be explained by letter, and must be deferred until private discussion was possible.

  On August 27, 1806, almost a year from his first visit, Aaron Burr reappeared at Marietta and made a contract with Dudley Woodbridge, Jr., for the building of fifteen large flatboats capable of transporting 500 men, the recruits to be gathered for his mysterious expedition southward down the Ohio and Mississippi. As Woodbridge would later testify in court, “I immediately made a contract with Colonel Barker to build the boats.”