The Pioneers

by David McCullough

  In mid-December 1811, Marietta was hit by a major earthquake. It happened at night. Doors and windows rattled loud enough to wake people from a sound sleep. Many instantly sprang from their beds thinking it an Indian attack. A neighbor of Samuel Hildreth grabbed an ax and stood ready at the door until he was nearly frozen, having put on no clothes.

  Elsewhere in town chimneys toppled. Downriver the shaking was even more pronounced. “The first shock was at half-past two o’clock [A.M.],” Ephraim Cutler recorded, “. . . the floors and joists made a noise much like a frame house in a violent wind; as our house is stone, and we never perceive the least motion in the hardest winds, we were of course alarmed.”

  About sunrise came another shock. At eight o’clock the house began to shake again and this time for forty-five minutes. In the course of the day ten distinctive shocks were felt.

  As was soon to become known, what happened there on the Ohio was mild compared to the great earthquake that hit at the same time in Missouri territory. There huge riverbanks collapsed. Islands in the river disappeared, and great gaps burst open in the earth engulfing trees, rocks, and whatever else was on the surface. Many took it to mean Judgment Day was upon them.

  With the new year came more quakes. In February 1812, Ohio was hit again and even harder than before. Ephraim Cutler happened this time to be in Zanesville. He was serving again in the state legislature, and the state capital had by then been relocated there from Chillicothe.

  “On the 3rd of February I was . . . in the senate chamber about nine o’clock in the morning, when the court house in which we were shook to that degree that nearly all the people, perhaps three hundred, rushed out. I felt a giddiness and nausea, which I found was the case with many others.” The spire on the courthouse vibrated a good twelve inches.

  Less than six months later, the United States was at war with Great Britain. The War of 1812, as it was to be known, was far from popular in the country, and among Federalists especially.

  New England was the section most strongly opposed and outspoken on the subject. Manasseh Cutler in a letter to Ephraim stated his views on both the war and President Madison in no uncertain terms. The war was “unprovoked, unnecessary, and abominably unjust,” he wrote. “Nor will it ever be much otherwise, until there is a commander-in-chief who is fit for the station. . . . In this quarter, the distresses of the war are most sensibly felt. Commerce has almost totally ceased.”

  The war was unpopular everywhere and in Marietta, too. In the July 6, 1812, edition of a new Federalist newspaper, Western Spectator, edited by a Marietta lawyer named Caleb Emerson, appeared the following editorial statement titled “Our Manifesto”:

  As war is declared, we must necessarily wish success to the army of our own country; of that country in whose welfare of all we shall hold dear in this world. But a state of war is the last situation in which we will be induced to be silent on the acts of an administration which we deem unfit to manage the concerns of our country.

  In a letter to Caleb Strong, a former United States senator and governor of Massachusetts, Rufus Putnam would write that though different opinions were to be found there in Marietta, he had little hope for the present foolish administration. “No sir, nothing that is generous candid or honest in the conduct [of our] present administration toward the British have I seen or expect to see from Mr. Madison.” Rufus Putnam and Ephraim Cutler were at the center of Ohio’s opposition to the war.

  Of the many concerns in Ohio, greatest and most immediate was that the British would rekindle the “Indian menace” and particularly in the northwest corner of the state. “The savages may now be expected to attack our frontiers in every direction,” warned the Western Spectator. Of extreme worry was news that the great Shawnee chief, Tecumseh, with some of his followers had joined the British Army, in the belief that an English triumph would allow him to establish the Indian state he envisioned.

  In August the British commander on the Canadian side of the border convinced the American in command at Detroit he must surrender Detroit or face a massacre. The elderly American commander, General William Hull, surrendered.

  And then there was the presence of a British fleet on Lake Erie. Clearly Ohio was very much in harm’s way.

  To add to this came a flood on the Ohio River such as no one had yet imagined. As early as 1755, a writer had said the river, as the winter thawed by warmth or rains in the spring, rose in vast floods, in some places exceeding twenty feet in height, but that rarely anywhere did it overflow its banks. Thomas Hutchins, the geographer of the United States, whose advice had been decisive in the Ohio Company’s choice of Marietta as the best of locations on the river, had stressed in a book published in 1778 that the Muskingum was “a fine, gentle river, confined by high banks, which prevent its floods from overflowing the surrounding lands.”

  The water began rising at Marietta in late January 1813, less than a year after the war had been declared. The river had been covered in ice, the ground in snow, when the weather suddenly turned warm and rain fell in torrents.

  Samuel Hildreth, with his unceasing fascination with nature, was to take close notice of it all. “In twenty-four hours after the commencement of the rise,” he would record, “the water was over the banks and rising at the rate of 8 inches per hour.”

  It was a spectacle such as he had never seen and he was thrilled to behold:

  The interest and grandeur of the scene was greatly augmented by the immense bodies of ice which covered the river from shore to shore, and of a thickness varying from 12 to 18 inches. . . .

  In the night, the rushing of the waters and the crashing of the ice against the dwelling houses in the streets near the river, was truly alarming and terrific. The water continued to rise until Thursday, 6 o’clock A.M., the 28th, when it ceased; and about 12:00 or one o’clock P.M., began falling slowly. . . . The banks of the river were left piled up with ice, to the height of six or eight feet.

  At the Cutler homestead, even at its presumably safe elevated location, the fast-rising water came high enough to flood the first floor. The family had to move quickly upstairs.

  As recorded in an old Cutler account book,

  The rise was rapid beyond any before known—so sudden as to prevent us from getting our stock off to a place of safety. We drove the cattle to the hill early in the morning, but had to carry our sheep off in a boat. . . . We got the hogs into the house, in the course of the night, except eight or ten that were drowned. We also lost two sheep and two calves; one was drowned, and the others perished in consequence of the cold and snow.

  Elsewhere on both rivers great damage had been done to orchards and fences and quantities of hay and grain. Farmers who had neglected to drive off their horses and cattle had lost all their stock.

  The sufferings of the whole community were much increased. With the rising of the water, many had fled to higher ground and built make-do temporary camps. When the waters subsided and they could return to their homes, the destruction they saw was like that left by an invading army.

  The height of the flood was estimated to have been forty-five feet above the low-water mark, or a full twenty feet higher than earlier estimated.

  In September 1813 came big news from Lake Erie. A young American naval officer, twenty-eight-year-old Oliver Hazard Perry, had succeeded in building a stout fleet of small ships on the lake, and on September 10, in a battle at Put-in-Bay, defeated the British Lake Squadron. In a succinct dispatch that was to become famous, Perry announced, “We have met the enemy, and they are ours.”

  “GLORIOUS NEWS!” ran one Marietta headline. The whole town was illuminated in celebration and “every demonstration of joy expressed.”

  In October in Ohio’s northwestern corner American forces under General William Henry Harrison won another decisive victory over British forces and Tecumseh and followers in a battle in which Tecumseh was killed and his following dispersed.

  With these victories the war moved elsewhere. Not until the
following summer did news from the conflict in the east stun the country in a way nothing yet had. On the evening of August 24, 1814, a British expeditionary force had seized Washington, burned the capitol, burned the White House, where the British officer in command personally directed the piling up of White House furniture that was put to flame.

  President Madison and Congress had been forced to flee.

  Americans everywhere, including a great number of those who opposed the war, were outraged. In Marietta, the Western Spectator asked in an impassioned editorial, “Shall we repose in apathy when our liberties are not only threatened, but openly assailed. Shall we cherish a lethargic sleep when the enemy is at our doors? Americans! . . . Awake . . . !”

  An American peace commission sent to Ghent in Belgium seemed to be making little progress.

  Then in January 1815, came the stunning news that an American army under General Andrew Jackson had won a crushing victory over the British in a battle at New Orleans. On top of that came word that the war had ended. Peace had already been signed at Ghent on Christmas Eve.

  “PEACE,” proclaimed the Western Spectator headline.

  In the little community of Warren, the Ephraim Cutler home became the scene of a long-remembered celebration. As one of the old pioneers in the community would write,

  The house was brilliantly illuminated, the word PEACE shining from the upper windows, and the judge came out upon the door-steps and made us a capital speech, to which we responded with hearty cheers and patriotic songs, and the discharge of our guns, after which we were invited into the house to partake of a bountiful repast spread in the long hall, to which we did ample justice.

  In early February 1815, just after the close of the war, Samuel Hildreth decided to make a trip back to Massachusetts for a visit. It was, as he well knew, the worst time of year to cross the Pennsylvania mountains on horseback, but there was also a winter lull in his professional demands. He had been in Ohio nine years by then and longed to see his mother and father, sisters and brother. The trip proved quite as difficult as expected all the way to the end, when he rode the last eight miles in a blinding snowstorm.

  “I reached my father’s house just at dusk, went in and asked if I could stay all night with them,” he would later write in a most memorable, good-hearted account.

  Not one of the family recognized me, not thinking of my being nearer to them than Marietta, as I had not written to notify them of my visit. My father said there was a tavern not far off and that they did not entertain travelers. . . . I replied, that it was so stormy I disliked going out again and thought they had better keep me. He then asked where I was from. I said Ohio. “Oh, I have a son there, living in Marietta.” I replied, “I know him well,” and began to smile at the curious blind play going on; this smile recalled some slight recognition of who it might be, and mother said it must be cousin Warren Hildreth, whom I resembled and who they thought was thus amusing himself at their expense. At length my father said it must be their son “Sam” but mother thought I looked too old and dark complexioned for him. The snow had tanned my face very much and made me several shades darker than usual. At length to settle all doubts my mother said if it was really “Sam” I must have a large scar on the top of my head on which there was no hair.

  (At the time of his birth, Samuel had had a large abscess near the top of his head, which his physician father had removed leaving a scar three inches long and nearly an inch wide.)

  I submitted my head to her inspection and she soon found the mark of recognition indelibly stamped and as fresh as when I left home nine years before. At the sight of this, all doubts vanished and I was heartily welcomed to the bosom of the rejoicing family and gladly allowed to pass the night. This scene served for a frequent subject of amusement during my visit.

  His “visit” stretched on into April, during which he purchased from his father the balance of his father’s Ohio lands, roughly 1,500 acres at 75 cents an acre, and with a credit of four years to pay it. Near the close of the visit, his younger brother, Charles, then seventeen, decided he, too, wanted to go to Ohio and perhaps study medicine under Samuel, to which Samuel happily agreed.

  “We reached Marietta the seventh day of May, I think,” Samuel concluded his account of the expedition, “and found the family all well and greatly rejoiced to see me and my brother.”

  He was both extremely glad to be home and full ready to get back to work.

  PART III

  1815–1863

   CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Cause of Learning

  If ignorance could be banished from our land, a real millennium would commence.

  —EPHRAIM CUTLER

  I.

  The home ground Dr. Hildreth returned to that spring of 1815 was in many ways, as was being said, a “new Ohio.” With the end of the War of 1812 came a great sense of relief that the threats of British invasion and native resistance were over, and almost at once came a pronounced surge of optimism and in the economy, production, investments, and confidence in the future.

  The Ohio River had become “one of the especially great thoroughfares,” the traffic greater than ever, the flow of freight in both directions such as never seen. The mass movement of American settlers heading west now numbering in the thousands, seemed to grow by the week, and was supplemented by unprecedented numbers of immigrants from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Germany.

  By 1815 Ohio’s population was approximately 500,000 and still growing. Cincinnati had become the fastest-growing city in America. But still more of the settlers traveling the river were bound for the territory beyond. In 1816, with a population of about 65,000, Indiana would become a state. In 1818 Illinois, too, would become a state, its population having reached approximately 35,000.

  More steamboats traveled in both directions, their “chugging” engines, and whistles, an increasing noise, had become a part of the scene. At Pittsburgh, Wheeling, and Cincinnati still more and larger steamboats were in production. One being built at Wheeling called the Washington would be, at 201 tons, the largest steamboat yet on the western rivers, the first double-decker and driven by a stern paddlewheel fully twelve feet wide, which was thought remarkable. It also had two smokestacks instead of one, a pilot house, elegantly appointed cabins, and included a “commodious” barroom.

  On Monday June 3, 1816, the all-new much anticipated Washington left Wheeling on her maiden voyage down the Ohio, with Captain Henry M. Shreve, her part owner and builder in command. On June 4, she anchored off Point Harmar. Then, the next morning, Wednesday, June 5, with steam up and all hands on deck weighing anchor, the boiler at the stern exploded with tremendous force sending scalding water over many of those on deck and blowing Captain Shreve and a number of the crew overboard.

  “It was terrible beyond conception,” declared one contemporary account. A half dozen or more of the victims were nearly skinned from head to foot. In stripping off their clothes their skin peeled off with them. The screams and groans of the agonizing sufferers made the scene even more horrible. Several people died, and more died later from the severity of their wounds.

  It was the worst steamboat disaster in the country until then. Yet except for the boiler that exploded there had been no damage to the ship and in only a few weeks the Washington continued on down the Ohio and the Mississippi, to New Orleans. Even more remarkably, the Washington made the trip back up the river in the record time of twenty-four days.

  Nor was there any letup in steam traffic on the rivers or the building of more steamboats. Or any end to steamboat accidents. The importance of the Ohio as a highway, indeed as a way of life, continued only to expand. In a matter of three years, there would be sixty-three steamboats on the river.

  Such boats could do about fifty miles a day, or more than twice the fastest-moving barge or keelboat. In another few years some of the newest steamboats on the Ohio could travel 100 miles in a day.

  II.

  The rapidly growing state’s capital had bee
n moved once again to a new location. This time it was a new town called Columbus at the center of the state. There was nothing especially impressive or inspiring about the new capitol, a modest, two-story brick building clearly intended to serve the purpose for the time being only, as all taking part seemed to understand.

  Ephraim Cutler arrived there on December 5, 1819, and was at first most pleasantly surprised by just about everything.

  “Several friends called on me that evening and gave me a welcome I did not expect,” he wrote to his wife, Sally. Almost immediately, with no trouble whatever, he found lodging in a house “very pleasantly situated” and all much to his liking. “No other member boards with me, but there are fifty within a few steps. I have the benefit of retirement in the midst of bustle and noise.” He urged her to write soon and let him know “every feeling of your heart,” and “if my dear children ever think of their father.”

  Writing to Sally two weeks later, Ephraim said he had found some agreeable, respectable men among the members whose company he enjoyed, but that “on the whole there is an unaccountable procrastination which is disgusting to me.” Nothing of a public nature had yet been accomplished.

  As would be said of Ephraim Cutler, he always wanted to do what was right. And as he had in his earlier years in the legislature battled to keep slavery out of Ohio, so now he had returned to politics determined to make possible the establishment of a public school system for the state. He felt it essential and long past due and he intended to make it happen.

  On December 24, he was extremely pleased to report to Sally, “I am appointed on a very important committee, who have under consideration a bill to regulate schools.” Already he was drawing up a bill “which I hope will be so constructed as to pass, and to produce a good effect.”