THE FEDERALIST FRONTIER: EARLY AMERICAN POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE OLD NORTHWEST ___________________________________________ A Dissertation presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School University of Missouri ___________________________________________ In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in History ___________________________________________ by KRISTOPHER MAULDEN Dr. Jeffrey L. Pasley, Faculty Adviser JULY 2012 The undersigned, appointed by the Dean of the Graduate School, have examined the thesis entitled: THE FEDERALIST FRONTIER: EARLY AMERICAN POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT IN THE OLD NORTHWEST Presented by Kristopher Maulden A candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy And hereby certify that in their opinion it is worthy of acceptance. ___________________________________________ ___________________________________________ ___________________________________________ ___________________________________________ ___________________________________________ ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First of all, I would like to thank my adviser Jeffrey L. Pasley for all of the work he has put in teaching courses, reading my work, and offering me advice and guidance whenever I needed it. His help has been invaluable, and without his help I doubt I could have ever finished this dissertation. I would also like to thank the other members of my committee – Kerby A. Miller, Mark M. Carroll, Robert L. Smale, and W. Raymond Wood – for reading my work, offering comments, and generally putting up with me. A special thank you goes to the staff at the libraries and archives in which I did research. The employees at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, Cincinnati Historical Society, Filson Historical Society, Indiana Historical Society, Ohio Historical Society, Missouri State Historical Society, and University of Missouri Libraries were always very professional and courteous, and I greatly appreciate their help and hospitality. I would also like to thank the Marietta College Library Special Collections for helping me to obtain records by mail that were very helpful in my work. I would also like to thank the entire History Department at the University of Missouri for their support in numerous ways. The faculty have earned my gratitude with their interest, advice, and openness to any questions I have had during my studies. The staff – Melinda, Nancy, Patty, and Sandy – have been lifesavers with numerous obstacles along the way, and their prompt work and friendliness was always a blessing for me. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the graduate students in the department. Their input and their interest has been most helpful, and above all I am glad to count so many of them as good friends. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS......................................................................................ii INTRODUCTION.................................................................................................. 1 The Cabin on Washington Street: Federalists and the Early American State in the Old Northwest CHAPTER ONE.................................................................................................. 26 Making a Federalist Frontier: The Northwest Indian War, 1789-1795 CHAPTER TWO................................................................................................. 84 The Speculator’s Republic: Federalist Administration in Territorial Ohio CHAPTER THREE ........................................................................................... 159 Federalist Frontier Echo: Jeffersonian Administration in Indiana and Illinois CHAPTER FOUR ............................................................................................. 227 “Our Strength Is Our Union”: Federalists in Ohio, 1803-1815 CHAPTER FIVE ............................................................................................... 280 Frontier Federalists, Western Whigs, and Good Feelings in the Northwest EPILOGUE ....................................................................................................... 315 Up the Capitol Steps: Abraham Lincoln and the New Western Whiggery BIBLIOGRAPHY............................................................................................... 334 VITA ................................................................................................................. 362 iii INTRODUCTION The Cabin on Washington Street: Federalists and the Early American State in the Old Northwest On initial approach, Ohio’s first land office is unimpressive. A fairly plain, one-room, split log cabin of about five hundred square feet, the office now stands in the side yard of a Marietta museum. In a way, the cabin – sitting alone and without much fanfare – is a fitting metaphor for some previous interpretations of the federal government in early American westward expansion. John Murrin argued that the U.S. government was “a midget institution in a giant land” that possessed “almost no internal functions.” Similarly, Robert H. Wiebe argued that the Westerners who settled on the lands such as those offered by the Marietta land office formed “fluid societies of strangers” who often disregarded “distant seats of authority” across the Appalachian Mountains. 1 Compared to the more 1 John Murrin, The Great Inversion, or Court versus Country: A Comparison of the Revolution Settlements in England (1688-1721) and America (1776-1816),” in Three British Revolutions, 1641, 1688, 1776 , ed. J.G.A. Pocock (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1 physically imposing military sites or even Indian mounds nearby, Murrin’s interpretation encourages historians to consider the land office cabin a true midget among giants, physical proof of a puny government presence in the vast expanses of the trans-Appalachian West. For them, the office might be among the oldest extant American buildings in the former Northwest Territory but it is a piece of trivia, an insignificant part of an unimportant government. Figure 1: The Marietta Land Office, which now sits north of Washington Street at the Campus Martius Museum. The cabin has been remodeled multiple times over its 200-plus years, one of which saw the addition of the large glass windows seen here. Photograph taken by the author. 1980), 425; and Robert H. Wiebe, The Opening of American Society: From the Adoption of the Constitution to the Eve of Disunion (New York: Knopf, 1984), 132. 2 However, the Ohio Company of Associates had much more in mind for their land office. Erected on the south side of Washington Street across from Campus Martius, which was the military camp built for the first settlers of Marietta, the land office was one of the first buildings completed in 1788. Both the land office and Campus Martius were perched on a hill above the main docks for the city. Thus, when people disembarked at Marietta, the Ohio Company planned for them to see immediately above them two symbols of the company’s power: Campus Martius presented a clear symbol of military protection and the land office showed civil authority at work. Though the Campus Martius blockhouse may have been more imposing, the land office was the official gateway to acquiring land and thus becoming respectable citizens in the Ohio Company’s new, corporate West. Plans for the rest of Marietta also reinforced regular and orderly settlement, the ideal underlying the Ohio Company. In addition to the land office and Campus Martius, the company laid out sixty rectangular blocks with streets running roughly parallel and perpendicular to the course of the Muskingum River. In all, their plans called for a new Western city containing roughly one thousand lots measuring 90 by 180 feet. 2 In the center of that planned community lay Washington Street, the main thoroughfare for the unofficial capital of the Ohio Company’s venture (and official capital of the Northwest Territory until 1800). 2 Ohio Company, meeting, November 10, 1787, in Archer Butler Hulbert, ed., Records of the Original Proceedings of the Ohio Company (Marietta, OH: Marietta Historical Commission, 1917), I: 20; Jervis Cutler, Topographical Description of the State of Ohio, Indiana Territory, and Louisiana (Boston: Charles Williams, 1812), 17; Andrew R.L. Cayton, The Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in the Ohio Country, 1780-1825 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1986), 28; and John W. Reps, The Making of Urban America: A History of City Planning in the United States (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965), 218. 3 People landing at the town’s main docks would disembark to Washington Street, and within a few blocks they would have found the land office on its central block. There, the office sold parcels of company land by company guidelines and the national government’s rectangular system. Fittingly, the office was in a planned city meant to represent the new order the Ohio Company was bringing west, and the land office cabin was the nerve center for distributing at once both Western lands and orderly settlement. 3 That order created a sense of refinement that often surprised visitors. In 1802, French botanist Francois André Michaux described a vibrant and complaisant Marietta “which fifteen years ago was not in existence” but already contained a shipyard and two hundred houses. Fortescue Cuming was similarly impressed in 1807, declaring, “This town is finely situated” with many houses “large, and having a certain air of taste.” Ohioans boasted about Marietta, too. Itinerant resident Jervis Cutler wrote glowingly