Marietta

Northwest Ordinance Enacted

The Continental Congress enacted the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 on July 13, establishing the framework for organizing and governing the territory north of the Ohio River and east of the Mississippi. The Ordinance, shaped significantly by Manasseh Cutler's lobbying, contained three provisions of lasting national importance: it established that new territories would eventually become states equal to the original thirteen; it created a bill of rights for territorial residents; and it prohibited slavery throughout the Northwest Territory. The last provision was the first federal restriction on slavery's expansion and set the terms for the political conflicts that would lead to the Civil War seven decades later. Cutler conducted his lobbying in New York during July 1787, while the Constitutional Convention was simultaneously deliberating in Philadelphia. The Ordinance was the Continental Congress's last significant legislative achievement before the new Constitution replaced it.

Ohio Company Land Purchase Completed

The Ohio Company of Associates completed its purchase of approximately 1.5 million acres of land along the Ohio River from the Continental Congress on October 27, 1787. The price was approximately $1 million, payable in government land warrants — the nearly worthless certificates that the government had issued to Revolutionary War veterans in lieu of pay. The deal was simultaneously a financial rescue for veterans who held the warrants and a mechanism for the government to dispose of its western land claims. The purchase was negotiated primarily by Manasseh Cutler and Winthrop Sargent. It came with the condition — which Cutler had lobbied for — that the territory would be governed under the Northwest Ordinance's framework, with its prohibitions on slavery and its promise of eventual statehood.

First Ohio Company Settlers Arrive at the Confluence

On April 7, 1788, the first party of Ohio Company settlers arrived at the confluence of the Ohio and Muskingum Rivers under the leadership of Rufus Putnam. The group included forty-eight men — mostly Revolutionary War veterans — who had traveled down the Ohio River from Pittsburgh on a flatboat named the Mayflower in deliberate reference to the Pilgrim founding of New England. They were met by Brigadier General Josiah Harmar and his federal troops, who had been stationed at the confluence to receive them. The settlers named their settlement Marietta in honor of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, acknowledging the French alliance that had made American independence possible. Governor Arthur St. Clair arrived later that year to establish the territorial government, making Marietta simultaneously the first American settlement and the seat of government for the entire Northwest Territory.

Campus Martius Fortification Constructed

Through the summer and fall of 1788, the Ohio Company settlers constructed Campus Martius — the central stockade fortification designed by Rufus Putnam. The fortification combined genuine military engineering (Putnam had been Washington's chief engineer) with the layout of a planned town: interior streets, reserved lots for schools and churches, and the houses of the settlers built into the walls themselves. The design reflected the founders' understanding that they were building a permanent community, not a temporary military post. Campus Martius covered about four acres and was surrounded by a high picket wall reinforced with blockhouses at the corners. It could shelter the entire settlement population during attacks. The Rufus Putnam house, built into the northwest corner of the fortification, is the only structure from the original Campus Martius that survives.

Northwest Territorial Government Established at Marietta

Governor Arthur St. Clair arrived at Marietta in July 1788 and formally established the government of the Northwest Territory, with Marietta as the territorial capital. St. Clair appointed the territorial judges, organized the first courts, and began the process of creating the legal infrastructure the Ordinance required. The territorial government at Marietta was the first republican civil government in American history to be extended to a newly settled region. It demonstrated that the constitutional framework created by the Northwest Ordinance was workable in practice. Marietta simultaneously housed the territorial executive, judiciary, and the beginnings of a legislative process.

Big Bottom Massacre

On January 2, 1791, a party of Delaware and Wyandot warriors attacked an outlying Ohio Company settlement at Big Bottom, approximately twenty miles up the Muskingum River from Marietta. Twelve settlers were killed and two taken captive; only five survived by escaping into the forest. The settlement's defenders had no time to reach their weapons before the attack overwhelmed them. The Big Bottom Massacre ended the relatively peaceful period of the Ohio Company's early years and forced the territorial government and the federal government to acknowledge that the question of Native sovereignty over the Northwest Territory had not been resolved by the land purchase. It accelerated the military campaigns that led to St. Clair's Defeat later that year and ultimately to Anthony Wayne's Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794.

St. Clair's Defeat (Battle of the Wabash)

On November 4, 1791, a confederacy of Native nations led by Little Turtle of the Miami and Blue Jacket of the Shawnee destroyed Arthur St. Clair's army on the Wabash River, killing 632 soldiers and wounding 264 more — the worst defeat of a United States Army by Native forces in the nation's history. St. Clair escaped only by being helped onto a horse and fleeing the field. The disaster reverberated through Marietta. St. Clair had recruited many of his men from the Ohio settlements, and the families of those men had remained at Campus Martius and the surrounding area. The defeat demonstrated that the federal government's strategy of asserting sovereignty through negotiated land purchases was not working, and that the Native nations of the Ohio Country had the military capacity to destroy American settlements if they chose to coordinate.

Battle of Fallen Timbers Ends the Frontier War

On August 20, 1794, General Anthony Wayne's Legion of the United States defeated the Native confederacy at the Battle of Fallen Timbers near present-day Toledo, Ohio. The engagement lasted less than an hour. The confederacy's British allies at Fort Miami declined to open their gates to the retreating warriors, demonstrating that Britain would not actually fight the United States over the Northwest Territory. For Marietta, Fallen Timbers ended six years of frontier warfare. The Treaty of Greenville in August 1795, which followed the battle, opened most of Ohio to American settlement under terms that the Native nations who had previously resisted agreed to accept. The settlers who had sheltered in Campus Martius and lived under the constant threat of attack could begin to build the town that Rufus Putnam had envisioned.

Treaty of Greenville — Peace on the Frontier

The Treaty of Greenville, signed August 3, 1795, between Anthony Wayne and the chiefs of twelve Native nations, formally ended the Northwest Indian War and opened most of the Ohio Country to American settlement. For Marietta, it meant the end of the raids and ambushes that had killed settlers and confined the population to Campus Martius during the worst years. The treaty was simultaneously a military and diplomatic achievement and a profound dispossession. The Native nations who signed it ceded lands they had lived on for generations under terms that removed them from most of Ohio. The same settlement process that fulfilled the Northwest Ordinance's republican promise produced an ethnic cleansing of the Ohio Valley's original inhabitants.

Muskingum Academy Established (Later Marietta College)

The founders of Marietta had set aside land for education from the beginning — Manasseh Cutler had insisted on educational reservations in the Ohio Company's plan. In 1797, the Muskingum Academy was established, which eventually developed into Marietta College, chartered in 1835. It is one of the oldest colleges in the Midwest and reflects the New England founders' commitment to a literate, educated republican citizenry as the foundation of self-government. The college's founding was consistent with the Northwest Ordinance's language about religion, morality, and knowledge being "necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind" — a phrase Cutler had helped write. It translated the Ordinance's educational aspirations into institutional form.

Ohio Statehood — Northwest Ordinance Fulfilled

Ohio became the seventeenth state of the United States on March 1, 1803, fulfilling the Northwest Ordinance's promise that the territory's residents would eventually achieve full statehood equal to the original thirteen states. The Ohio constitution, adopted in 1802, prohibited slavery — a direct continuation of the Northwest Ordinance's provision, preserved by Ephraim Cutler's decisive vote at the constitutional convention. For Marietta, statehood completed the arc that had begun with the Ohio Company's founding. The fifteen-year experiment in republican governance on the frontier had succeeded. The town that Rufus Putnam and Manasseh Cutler had envisioned as a model for Western expansion had contributed to a model that the rest of the Northwest Territory followed — Indiana in 1816, Illinois in 1818, Michigan in 1837, Wisconsin in 1848.