Rufus Putnam, the "Father of Ohio" Rufus Putnam served in important capacities in both the
French and Indian War and the
American Revolutionary War. He was one of the most highly respected men in the early years of the United States. and the first settlers at
Marietta, Ohio in 1788. by James Sharples Jr. In 1776, the
Continental Army had encircled the British garrison in Boston, but could not dislodge it, and a long stalemate ensued. Putnam created a method of building portable fortifications, which were put in place under cover of darkness, along with cannon. This forced the British to evacuate Boston.
George Washington was so impressed that he made Putnam his chief engineer. After the war, Putnam and
Manasseh Cutler were instrumental in creating the
Northwest Ordinance, which opened up the Northwest Territory for settlement. This land was used to serve as compensation for what was owed to Revolutionary War veterans. It was also at Putnam's recommendation that the land would be surveyed and laid out in townships of six miles square. Putnam organized and led the first group of veterans to the territory. They settled at
Marietta, Ohio, where they built a large fort called
Campus Martius. , is now part of the
Campus Martius Museum in Marietta, Ohio. Putnam and Cutler insisted that the Northwest Territory would be free territory - no slavery. They were both from
Puritan New England, and the Puritans strongly believed that slavery was morally wrong. The Northwest Territory doubled the size of the United States, and establishing it as free of slavery proved to be of tremendous importance in the following decades. It encompassed what became Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin and part of Minnesota. Had those states been slave states, and their electoral votes gone to
Abraham Lincoln's main competitor, Lincoln would not have been elected president. The Civil War would not have been fought. And, even if eventually there had been a civil war, the North would probably have lost. Putnam, in the Puritan tradition, was influential in establishing education in the Northwest Territory. Substantial amounts of land were set aside for schools. Putnam had been one of the primary benefactors in the founding of
Leicester Academy in Massachusetts, and similarly, in 1798, he created the plan for the construction of the Muskingum Academy (now
Marietta College) in Ohio. In 1780, the directors of the Ohio Company appointed him superintendent of all its affairs relating to settlement north of the Ohio River. In 1796, he was commissioned by President George Washington as Surveyor-General of United States Lands. In 1788, he served as a judge in the Northwest Territory's first court. In 1802, he served in the convention to form a constitution for the State of Ohio.
Northwest Territory Starting even before the war, and accelerating with the establishment of Fort Henry across the Ohio River in West Virginia, numerous settlers encroached on Indian lands west of the Ohio River in a broad arc from west of Fort Henry as far upriver as where Fort Steuben (today Steubenville) was later established. That there was continuous occupation of such lands is certain, though the location and continuity of any particular settlement, at least a few of which were referred to loosely as "towns" is very much in doubt. Most prominent among these were a series of squatters settlements with various names circa 1774 to 1795 in the area of what is today Martin's Ferry, directly across river from Fort Henry. European settlement of Ohio may fairly be said to have been in progression before establishment of the Northwest Territory and the first generally recognized town of Marietta. . In 1787, the United States created the
Northwest Territory under the
Northwest Ordinance of that year.
Ebenezer Sproat became a shareholder of the
Ohio Company of Associates, and was engaged as a surveyor with the company. On April 7, 1788,
Ebenezer Sproat and a group of
American pioneers to the Northwest Territory, led by
Rufus Putnam, arrived at the confluence of the
Ohio and
Muskingum rivers to establish
Marietta, Ohio as the first permanent
American settlement in the Northwest Territory. Marietta was founded by
New Englanders. It was the first of what would become a prolific number of
New England settlements in what was then the
Northwest Territory. These New Englanders or "
Yankees" as they were called, were descended from the
Puritan English colonists who had settled
New England in the 1600s and were members of the
Congregationalist church. Correspondingly, the first church in Marietta was a Congregationalist church which was constructed 1786. Historians believe this is how Ohio came to be known as the Buckeye State and its residents as Buckeyes. The
Miami Company (also referred to as the "Symmes Purchase") managed settlement of land in the southwestern section. The
Connecticut Land Company administered settlement in the Connecticut
Western Reserve in present-day
Northeast Ohio. A heavy flood of migrants came from New York and especially New England, where there had been a growing hunger for land as population increased before the Revolutionary War. Most traveled to Ohio by
wagon and
stagecoach, following former Indian paths such as the
Northern Trace. Many also traveled part of the way by barges on the
Mohawk River across New York state. Farmers who settled in western New York after the war sometimes moved on to one or more locations in Ohio in their lifetimes, as new lands kept opening to the west. American settlement of the
Northwest Territory was resisted by Native Americans in the
Northwest Indian War. Two years after the Revolution, the US had begun offering people subsidies to move into the Ohio and Tennessee River Valleys to establish farms and, in an attempt to facilitate this, tried to force the Natives to sign a treaty in 1785 that would strip all of Ohio from them, excepting the Northwestern corner. Virtually all Native people's in the threatened territories joined forces and fought back. In Ohio, the Miami, Wyandot, Shawnee, Lenape, Seneca, Ottawa, Wabash, Illinois, Hochunk, Sauk and Fox nations joined under a Miami warrior who had been asked to fight as their War Chief, Little Turtle. They were eventually conquered by General
Anthony Wayne at the
Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794. They ceded much of present-day Ohio to the United States by the
Treaty of Greenville, concluded in 1795, which renegotiated to take even more land than the prior treaty. Oddly, though, most of the Natives stayed put, despite a handful of eviction attempts by the US military, leading to many communities establishing their own local boundaries between white and Native land, and later the formation of a few reservations in the western part of the state for the Shawnee, Lenape, Ottawa and Wyandot. The Lenape were pretty much all experimentally removed to Missouri around 1809, but when this went poorly, the government deigned not to remove any others, for the time being, other than most of the Shawnee over the Shawnee War. This was later undone after the Trail of Tears, which led the government into a scramble to convince all the remaining Natives in Ohio to relocate west peacefully. The last known full blood Wyandot to live in Ohio was Bill Moose (1836–1937). He gave a list of 12 individuals/families who remained behind removal. Draper Manuscripts also show that a few Shawnee, Mingo (mainly Seneca-Cayuga), and Lenape remained behind to. Also Mohawk and Brotherton (Narragansett) families as well. Starting in the early 19th century, after the acquisition of the Louisiana Purchase, Congress began investing heavily in trying to convince Natives in the East to relocate west of the Mississippi. The Lenape were a test, and were removed in 1809, but when they complained that the natives of that region were being aggressive towards them and there wasn't enough to hunt and forage, the project was scrapped for several more decades. The
U.S. Congress prohibited
slavery in the territory. (Once the population grew and the territory achieved statehood, the citizens could have legalized slavery, but chose not to do so.) The states of the Midwest would be known as Free States, in contrast to those states south of the Ohio River. Migrants to the latter came chiefly from
Virginia and other slave-holding states, and brought their culture and slaves with them. As Northeastern states abolished
slavery in the coming two generations, the free states would be known as Northern States. The
Northwest Territory originally included areas previously called
Ohio Country and
Illinois Country. As Ohio prepared for statehood,
Indiana Territory was carved out, reducing the Northwest Territory to approximately the size of present-day Ohio plus the eastern half of
Michigan's lower peninsula and a sliver of land in southeastern Indiana along Ohio's western border called "The Gore".
Statehood . Logan Co., Ohio, 1834 With Ohio's population reaching 45,000 in December 1801, Congress determined that the population was growing rapidly and Ohio could begin the path to statehood. The assumption was the territory would have in excess of the required 60,000 residents by the time it became a state. Congress passed the
Enabling Act of 1802 that outlined the process for Ohio to seek statehood. The residents convened a constitutional convention. They used numerous provisions from other states and rejected slavery. On February 19, 1803,
President Jefferson signed the act of Congress that approved Ohio's boundaries and constitution. Congress did not pass a specific resolution formally admitting Ohio as the 17th state. The current custom of Congress' declaring an official date of statehood did not begin until 1812, when
Louisiana was admitted as the 18th state.
Shawnee War and War of 1812 Starting around 1809, Shawnee leaders once again began to rally support to resist the United States. Under Shawnee chief
Tecumseh, the
Tecumseh's War officially began in Ohio in 1810. When the
War of 1812 began, the British forces from Canada entered Ohio and merged their forces with the Shawnee. This continued until Tecumseh was killed at the
Battle of the Thames in 1813. While most of the Shawnee fought in the war, many stayed out of the conflict- particularly in the groups referred to as the Piqua and Makojay, due to the influence of chief
Black Hoof. As a result, Piqua and Makojay both remained in Ohio after the rest were removed to the Missouri-Arkansas-Texas area. The Piqua would later be forcibly removed by the U.S. during the
Indian removals following the
Trail of Tears, though the Makojay vanished after Black Hoof's death. In 1812, the United States declared war on the United Kingdom. The
Royal Navy, in the midst of the
Napoleonic Wars and constantly in need of manpower, had begun stopping American ships and impressing British deserters who had fled to the United States, angering the U.S. government and public and leading to a sharp deterioration in Anglo-American relations. In addition, the British also supported Native Americans resisting the invasion of their traditional homelands by American colonizers. After war was declared, U.S. troops launched several unsuccessful invasions of
Canada. Ohio played a key role in the War of 1812, as it was on the front line in the Western theater and the scene of several notable battles both on land and in
Lake Erie. On September 10, 1813, the
Battle of Lake Erie, one of the major battles, took place in Lake Erie near
Put-in-Bay, Ohio. The American victory in the battle led to the U.S. gaining control over the Great Lakes for a period of time. The outcome of Tecumseh's War also caused the
Creek War in
Alabama in 1813. Tecumseh had approached several tribes there for help beforehand, but all had ignored his pleas, despite support. The
Red Sticks, a
Muscogee faction hostile to U.S. encroachment, began attacking American troops, aiming to drive them from their homelands. Other Muscogee who didn't support the Red Sticks fought alongside the United States, which eventually defeated the Red Sticks after the
Battle of Horseshoe Bend.
Indian Removals Ultimately, after the United States government used the Indian Removal Act of 1830 to force countless Native American tribes on the Trail of Tears, where all the southern states except for Florida were successfully emptied of Native peoples, the US government panicked because a majority of tribes did not want to be forced out of their own lands. Fearing further wars between Native tribes and American settlers, they pushed all remaining Native tribes in the East to migrate west against their own will, including all remaining tribes in Ohio. It is said that Ohio may actually have been a part of the Trail of Tears, according to
The Other Trail of Tears: The Removal of the Ohio Indians by Mary Stockwell. In 1838, the United States sent 7,000 soldiers to remove 16,000 Cherokee by force. Whites looted their homes. The largest Trail of Tears began, eventually taking 4,000 Indian lives. The Removal Act opened 25 million acres to white settlement and slavery. Upper Sandusky's traditionalist Wyandot go to Washington, D.C. to try to promote a separate removal agreement, but they are rejected. They return home, and their chief pulls a knife at a tribal council and lands in jail. The final tribe to leave were the Wyandot in 1843. ==Industrialization==