OH, USA
Ohio Statehood — Northwest Ordinance Fulfilled
March 1, 1803
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.
People Involved
Massachusetts engineer officer who served as the Continental Army's chief engineer and designed the fortifications at Boston and West Point. Founded the Ohio Company of Associates with Manasseh Cutler, led the first settlers to Marietta in April 1788, and designed Campus Martius. Served as Surveyor General of the United States under Washington.
Massachusetts Congregationalist minister and self-taught scientist who lobbied Congress for the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and negotiated the Ohio Company land purchase. His July 1787 lobbying campaign in New York — conducted while the Constitutional Convention was simultaneously meeting in Philadelphia — produced both the Ordinance and the land deal that made Marietta possible. He never permanently settled there himself.
Son of Manasseh Cutler who settled permanently in the Marietta area and became one of the most important figures in Ohio's constitutional convention of 1802. Ephraim Cutler, despite being ill with a fever, cast the decisive vote that kept slavery out of the Ohio state constitution, preserving the Northwest Ordinance's prohibition and cementing Ohio's status as a free state.
Nephew of Revolutionary War General Israel "Old Put" Putnam who settled in Marietta with the original Ohio Company group. He served as a ranger and scout during the frontier war years, operating between Campus Martius and the outer settlements. His connection to his famous uncle linked Marietta symbolically to the Revolutionary War generation that had founded it.
Wife of Rufus Putnam and one of the women who helped establish domestic and community life at Marietta. The Putnam household at Campus Martius became a center of the settlement's social life. Women of the founding generation managed homes, gardens, and children through years of frontier isolation and periodic warfare, making the survival of the community possible.