Judge James G.
Johnson of the Ohio Supreme Court, in a public address, made note
that the State of Ohio was not only the first state carved from
the Northwest Territory but was really the first addition to the
United States, for although Vermont (1791), Kentucky (1792) and
Tennessee (1796) were admitted before Ohio, the first was cut off
from New York and the two latter from Virginia. Ohio came in by
virtue of her rights under the Articles of 1787 and "there is a
great fact that Ohio was the first political state ever formed in
the world which never had been governed by a king and the
Ordinance of 1787 dedicated it forever to freedom." And from the
date of its admission we leave the continuation of Ohio History
to the pen of another, a history which shall reveal the greatness
of a state due in no small measure to the mingling of racial roots
and elemental characteristics which is scarcely equaled in the
annals of any other of the American commonwealths. We have shown
how the sections of the State were settled by streams from the
original colonies, by strains of blood from different stocks, a
theme worthy an ample chapter. As numerous writers have pointed
out, and our own pages have narrated, there were five principal
nerve centers of the nascent state:
1. The Ohio
Company, on the Ohio River, mainly from Connecticut and
Massachusetts, representing perhaps the more liberal element of
the New England Puritanic stock;
2. The Symmes
Purchase, between the Miamis, whose immigrants were designated as
a band of New Jersians, with a mixture of Scotch-Irish and
Hollanders;
3. The Virginia
Military District, between the Scioto and the Little Miami Rivers,
in which the racial inflow was partly Marylandic, but mostly
Virginian, the hardy, rollicking, fighting Anglo-Saxon stock,
whose venturesome representatives brought with them the flavor of
the old world aristocracy with its dignity, luxury and courtesy;
4.. The Western
Reserve, with its distinctively austere indomitable Puritan type,
a colony, "whose foundations were hewn from the granitic rock of
New England Calvanism";
5. The "Seven
Ranges," consisting of the tract extending west from the
Pennsylvania line between the Ohio Company on the south and the
Western Reserve on the north.
The settlers in
this section were not a few native born Quakers; a few settlers
from the German Palatinate; many Germans, of the stock which has
produced the variety known as "Pennsylvania Dutch," and many
Scotch-Irish, the people that prevailed in Western Pennsylvania;
Swede and French colonists located west of the Seven Ranges. The
five chief centers of settlement were long separated by
intervening forests, but slowly the paths of travel and channels
of commerce brought them into closer and closer contact; gradually
the ties of a common purpose and a similar effort began to unite
them. Natively they differed widely in customs, training,
religious faith and forms of worship, and in modes of living and
thinking. But they were to be merged into a collective and
concordant genus. In the melting process of struggle and sacrifice
and cooperative endeavor, the racial traits were to be commingled
until "all were ultimately subdued to a predominate type."
"And here," said
General Benjamin R. Cowen, "upon the Ohio territory was a fit
place for the experiment of constructing society upon a new basis;
here theories hitherto unknown or deemed impracticable were to
exhibit a spectacle for which the previous history of the world
had furnished no example; Ohio being the most westerly of the
eastern states and the most easterly of the western states, the
abundance and variety of her natural resources were such as to fix
the choice of the most desirable emigrants on this soil, so that
we had a selection of the best from the oncoming tide that swept
athwart the continent. A common danger and a common purpose
brought about the fusion and they were no longer Virginians,
Pennsylvanians or New Englanders, but Ohioans. Thus, Cavalier and
Roundhead, Huguenot, Catholic and Prostestant, Puritan, Baptist
and Quaker, Scotch-Irish, Anglo-Saxon, Teuton and Celt coalesced,
strongly welded by the common interests."
And truly is it
too much to assert that not until the amalgamation, on the Ohio
soil, of the variant, migrant nationalities, with the political,
mental, moral, social and religious characteristics, peculiar to
each, was there produced the strictly ethnological type known as
the American ?
" What heroism,
what perils, then ;
How true of
heart and strong of hand,
How earnest,
resolute, those pioneer men ? "
Randall, Emilius O, and Daniel J
Ryan. "Western Reserve." History of Ohio; The
Rise and Progress of an
American State. New York: The Century History
Company, 1912. 572-600.
