Marietta

The Revolution's Last Campaign: Marietta, Ohio and the Fulfillment of the American Experiment

Long before the first axe bit into timber along the banks of the Muskingum River, the land that would become Marietta, Ohio, existed as an idea—a promise made to soldiers who had bled for independence and a test of whether the principles of the American Revolution could survive the transition from battlefield rhetoric to practical governance. Marietta was not a site of musket volleys or cavalry charges during the War for Independence, yet it may be the single most important place in America for understanding what the Revolution ultimately meant. Founded in April 1788 by veterans of the Continental Army, Marietta became the first permanent, organized American settlement in the Northwest Territory, the proving ground for the Northwest Ordinance, the seat of the first civilian government west of the Appalachians, and the crucible in which revolutionary ideals about liberty, governance, and ordered expansion were forged into reality. Territorial government under the Northwest Ordinance was first inaugurated at Marietta on July 15, 1788.

The first territorial laws were enacted and the first court of justice in the Northwest Territory was convened at Campus Martius in September 1788. To study Marietta is to study the Revolution's endgame—the moment when a fragile republic attempted to become a continental nation.

The story begins not in Ohio but in the hardship camps and unpaid ranks of the Continental Army. By the war's end in 1783, thousands of veterans held little more than depreciated currency and paper promises from a government that could barely fund itself under the Articles of Confederation. Among these veterans was Brigadier General Rufus Putnam, a self-taught engineer from Massachusetts who had designed the fortifications at Dorchester Heights that forced the British evacuation of Boston in 1776. After the Battle of Lexington and Concord, Putnam enlisted the same day, on April 19, 1775, in one of Massachusetts's first revolutionary regiments.

He organized the batteries and fortifications in Boston and New York City in 1776–77 and then successfully commanded a regiment under General Horatio Gates at the Battle of Saratoga.

In 1778 he built new fortifications at West Point, and in 1779 he served under General Anthony Wayne. Putnam understood both the political frustrations of the officer corps and the vast potential of the western lands that Britain had ceded to the United States in the Treaty of Paris.

Indeed, Putnam did more than merely understand the frustrations of his fellow officers—he helped channel them into political action. The Ohio Company of Associates grew out of a petition to Congress framed by Putnam, acting for a group of officers encamped at Newburgh, New York, in the last year of the Revolution. Signed by 288 officers "in the Continental line of the army," the petition reminded Congress of its promise of "certain Grants of Land" to officers and soldiers who served to the "establishment of Peace."

Putnam forwarded the petition to General George Washington, Commander-in-Chief of the American army, with the request that he lay it before Congress, together with his own commendation.

Washington forwarded the Newburgh petition to the Congress of the Confederation without immediate result, but Putnam continued his interest in land in the West.

As early as 1783, Putnam and his fellow officer General Benjamin Tupper began circulating petitions among veterans, proposing that Congress grant western lands in lieu of back pay. Tupper, who had served with distinction from Bunker Hill through the siege of Yorktown, traveled down the Ohio River in 1785 and returned with glowing reports of the country's fertility and promise. Together, Putnam and Tupper became the driving forces behind the Ohio Company of Associates, organized at the Bunch of Grapes Tavern in Boston on March 1, 1786, with the explicit purpose of purchasing and settling lands northwest of the Ohio River. In the course of a year 250 investors acquired shares in the Ohio Company.

Yet the Ohio Company's ambitions required more than soldierly determination. They required a legal framework, and it was here that the Reverend Manasseh Cutler proved indispensable. Cutler was a Congregationalist minister from Ipswich, Massachusetts, a trained botanist, a man of formidable intellect and even more formidable political skill. Cutler was born in Killingly in the Connecticut Colony. In 1765, he graduated from Yale College and went on to become one of the foremost scientific minds in New England— in 1785, Cutler was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society, and his specimens from Marietta in 1788 are considered by herbaria experts to be the first obtained in Ohio.

In 1778, he became chaplain to General Jonathan Titcomb's brigade and took part in General John Sullivan's expedition to Rhode Island, giving him firsthand experience with the struggles of the military cause.

In the summer of 1787, Cutler traveled to New York, where the Confederation Congress was sitting, and engaged in a campaign of lobbying that would shape the future of the continent. When Cutler presented the Ohio Company's agenda to the federal government, he also took the opportunity to influence the language of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.

He was influential in the passage of the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and wrote the section prohibiting slavery in the Northwest Territory.

During the Continental Congress, Cutler took a leading part in drafting the famous Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which was finally presented to Congress by Massachusetts delegate Nathan Dane. In order to smooth passage of the Northwest Ordinance, Cutler influenced and won the votes of key congressmen by making them partners in his land company. The Ordinance, passed on July 13, 1787, did far more than authorize land sales— drafted prior to the Constitution of the United States, the Ordinance of 1787 provided the mechanism by which prospective states would enter the Union on an equal basis with existing states. It also prohibited slavery in the new territory and pledged good faith in dealing with Native American tribes.

With the legal framework secured, in 1787 the company contracted with the federal government to purchase a million and a half acres in what is now southeast Ohio, to be paid for in depreciated continental currency and military land warrants. The advance party set out in December 1787. The 48 men setting out from Massachusetts and Connecticut that winter included former Revolutionary War soldiers as well as surveyors