Woods,” and the other a noble statue of America, in Monument Square, commemorating the sons of Portland who died for the Union; no finer soldiers’ monument than this has ever been erected. Of other artists who have attained distinction, we may name H. B. Brown, now residing in London, whose landscapes and marine views have given him a recognized position among the best American artists; Charles O. Cole, portrait painter; and Charles Codman, J. R. Tilton, and J. B. Hudson, landscape painters.
Immense sums are being expended on the defences of the city by the United States government, as it is realized that in case of war with Great Britain this would be the point of attack, because Portland is the natural seaport of the Canadas, and Maine is thrust, in a provoking way, between the Maritime Provinces and the Province of Quebec. Portland can indulge in no dream of great commercial importance so long as the country which its position especially dominates is under a foreign flag; but if ever Maine should be annexed to Canada, or the annexation takes the alternative form, a great future is assured for a town so favorably located. In the meantime, the beautiful city must be content to be the centre of distribution for the pleasure travel of the summer, and for the other half of the year, by means of its capacious harbor, it can continue to furnish an outlet for that part of the business of the Great Lakes which in summer is handled at Montreal.
OLD RUTLAND, MASSACHUSETTS
THE CRADLE OF OHIO
By EDWIN D. MEAD
THE Old South Historical Society in Boston inaugurated in 1896 the custom of annual historical pilgrimages. It had learned from Parkman and Motley and Irving how vital and vivid history is made by visits to the scenes of history. Its pilgrimages must be short to places near home; but the good places to visit in New England are many. Great numbers of people, young and old, join in the pilgrimages. Six hundred went to the beautiful Whittier places beside the Merrimac, the second year; and as many the third year to the King Philip country, on Narragansett Bay.
The first year’s pilgrimage was to old Rutland, Massachusetts, “the cradle of Ohio.” A hundred of the young people went on the train from Boston, on that bright July day; and when they had climbed to the little village on the hill, and swept their eyes over the great expanse of country round about Wachusett and away to Monadnock, and strolled down to the old Rufus Putnam house, by whose fireside the settlement of Marietta was planned, a hundred more people had come from the surrounding villages; and a memorable little celebration was that under the maples after the luncheon, with the dozen energetic speeches from the young men and the older ones. It was a fine inauguration of the Old South pilgrimages, and woke many people to the great possibilities of the historical pilgrimage as an educational factor.6
Ten years before, there was hardly a man in Massachusetts who ever thought of Rutland as a historical town. The people of Princeton and Paxton and Hubbardston and Oakham looked across to the little village on the hill from their villages on the hills, and they did not think of it; the people of Worcester drove up of a Sunday to get a dinner at the old village tavern, and they did not think of it; the Amherst College boys and the Smith College girls rode past on the Central Massachusetts road, at the foot of the hill, on their way to Boston, and heard “Rutland!” called, but they thought nothing of history; and in Boston the last place to which people would have thought of arranging a historical pilgrimage was this same Rutland.
Yet when the Old South young people went there on their first pilgrimage, Rutland had already become a name almost as familiar in our homes as Salem or Sudbury or Deerfield. The Old South young people themselves had been led to think very much about it. In 1893, the year of the World’s Fair at Chicago, the great capital of the great West, a place undreamed of a hundred years before, when Rutland was witnessing its one world-historical event, the Old South lectures were devoted to “The Opening of the West.” Two of the eight lectures were upon “The Northwest Territory and the Ordinance of 1787” and “Marietta and the Western Reserve”; two of the leaflets issued in connection were Manasseh Cutler’s Description of Ohio in 1787 and Garfield’s address on The Northwest Territory and the Western Reserve; and one of the subjects set for the Old South essays was “The Part Taken by Massachusetts Men in Connection with the Ordinance of 1787.” These studies first kindled the imaginations of hundreds of young people and first roused them to the consciousness that westward expansion had been the great fact in our history from the time of the Revolution to the time of the Civil War; that New England had had a controlling part in this great movement, which, by successive waves, has reached Ohio, Illinois, Kansas, Colorado, Oregon, so that there is more good New England blood to-day west of the Hudson than there is east of it; and that this movement, which has transformed the United States from the little strip along the Atlantic coast which fought for independence to the great nation which stretches now from sea to sea, began at the old town of Rutland, Massachusetts. This Rutland on the hill is the cradle of Ohio, the cradle of the West.
It was not, by any means, these Boston lectures on “The Opening of the West” which reawakened Massachusetts and the country to the forgotten historical significance of old Rutland. That awakening was done by Senator Hoar, in his great oration at the Marietta centennial, in 1888. Senator Hoar’s oration did not indeed awaken Massachusetts to the great part taken by Massachusetts men in connection with the Ordinance of 1787, or the part of New England in the settlement and shaping of the West. No awakening to these things was necessary. There is no New England household which has not kindred households in the West, ever in close communication with the old home; and the momentous significance of the Ordinance of 1787, and the decisive part taken by Massachusetts statesmen in securing it, the Massachusetts historian and orator were never likely to let the people forget.
“At the foundation of the constitution of these new Northwestern States,” said Daniel Webster in his great reply to Hayne, “lies the celebrated Ordinance of 1787. We are accustomed to praise the lawgivers of antiquity; we help to perpetuate the fame of Solon and Lycurgus; but I doubt whether one single law of any lawgiver, ancient or modern, has produced effects of more distinct, marked and lasting character than the Ordinance of 1787. That instrument was drawn by Nathan Dane, a citizen of Massachusetts; and certainly it has happened to few men to be the authors of a political measure of more large and enduring consequence. It fixed forever the character of the population in the vast regions northwest of the Ohio, by excluding from them involuntary servitude. It impressed on the soil itself, while it was yet a wilderness, an incapacity to sustain any other than free men. It laid the interdict against personal servitude, in original compact, not only deeper than all local law, but deeper also than all local constitutions. We see its consequences at this moment, and we shall never cease to see them, perhaps, while the Ohio shall flow.”
Mr. Hoar spoke as strongly of the Ordinance, in his Marietta oration. “The Ordinance of 1787 belongs with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution; it is one of the three title-deeds of American constitutional liberty.” But the chief merit of his oration was not the new emphasis with which he said what Webster had said, but the picturesqueness and the power with which he brought the men and the events of that great period of the opening of the West home to the imagination. The oration was especially memorable for the manner in which it set Rufus Putnam, the man of action, the head of the Ohio Company, the leader of the Marietta colony, in the centre of the story, and made us see old Rutland as the cradle of the movement.
Complete religious liberty, the public support of schools, and the prohibition forever of slavery, – these were what the Ordinance of 1787 secured for the Northwest. “When older States or nations,” said Mr. Hoar, “where the chains of human bondage have been broken, shall utter the proud boast, ‘With a great sum obtained I this freedom,’ each sister of this imperial group – Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin – may lift her queenly head with the yet prouder answer, ‘But I was free-born.’ ” The moment of this antislavery article of the Ordinance, in view of the course of our national history during the century that has followed, it would not be possible to overstate. When the great test of civil war came, to settle of what sort this republic
See Editor’s Preface p. v.
