style="font-size:15px;"> Massachusetts makes no false or exclusive claims of credit for the Ordinance of 1787. She does not forget the services of William Grayson, nor those of Richard Henry Lee. She does not forget Thomas Jefferson.7
The names of Nathan Dane, Rufus Putnam, Rufus King, Timothy Pickering and Manasseh Cutler are names of the greatest moment in the history of the West. No other group of men did so much as these Massachusetts men to determine what the great West should be, by securing the right organization and institutions for the Northwest Territory and by securing at the beginning the right kind of settlers for Ohio.
It was really Manasseh Cutler who did most at the final decisive moment to secure the adoption of the clause in the great Ordinance which forever dedicated the Northwest to freedom. Of all these Massachusetts men he was by far the most interesting personality; and of all revelations of the inner character of that critical period, none is more interesting or valuable than that given by his Life and Letters. It is to be remembered too that the first company of men for Marietta – Cutler urged Adelphia as the right name for the town – started from Manasseh Cutler’s own home in Ipswich, joining others at Danvers, December 3, 1787, almost a month before the Rutland farmers left to join Putnam at Hartford. For the shrine of Manasseh Cutler is not at Rutland, but at Hamilton, which was a part of Ipswich. The home of Nathan Dane was Beverly.
“It happened,” said Edward Everett Hale, at the Marietta centennial, “that it was Manasseh Cutler who was to be the one who should call upon that Continental Congress to do the duty which they had pushed aside for five or six years. It happened that this diplomatist succeeded in doing in four days what had not been done in four years before. What was the weight which Manasseh Cutler threw into the scale? It was not wealth; it was not the armor of the old time; it was simply the fact, known to all men, that the men of New England would not emigrate into any region where labor and its honest recompense is dishonorable. The New England men will not go where it is not honorable to do an honest day’s work, and for that honest day’s work to claim an honest recompense. They never have done it, and they never will do it; and it was that potent fact, known to all men, that Manasseh Cutler had to urge in his private conversation and in his diplomatic work. When he said, ‘I am going away from New York, and my constituents are not going to do this thing,’ he meant exactly what he said. They were not going to any place where labor was dishonorable, and where workmen were not recognized as freemen. If they had not taken his promises, they would not have come here; they would have gone to the Holland Company’s lands in New York, or where Massachusetts was begging them to go – into the valley of the Penobscot or the Kennebec.”
Senator Hoar, in his oration, said of Manasseh Cutler:
“He was probably the fittest man on the continent, except Franklin, for a mission of delicate diplomacy. It was said just now that Putnam was a man after Washington’s pattern and after Washington’s own heart. Cutler was a man after Franklin’s pattern and after Franklin’s own heart. He was the most learned naturalist in America, as Franklin was the greatest master in physical science. He was a man of consummate prudence in speech and conduct; of courtly manners; a favorite in the drawing-room and in the camp; with a wide circle of friends and correspondents among the most famous men of his time. During his brief service in Congress, he made a speech on the judicial system, in 1803, which shows his profound mastery of constitutional principles. It now fell to his lot to conduct a negotiation second only in importance to that which Franklin conducted with France in 1778. Never was ambassador crowned with success more rapid or more complete.”
But here, in old Rutland, it is not with Manasseh Cutler that we are concerned, but with Rufus Putnam. Rufus Putnam was the head of the Ohio Company, and the leader in the actual settlement of the new Territory. It was with Putnam that Manasseh Cutler chiefly conferred concerning the proposed Ohio colony. He left Boston for New York, on his important mission, on the evening of June 25, 1787, and on that day he records in his diary: “I conversed with General Putnam, and settled the principles on which I am to contract with Congress for lands on account of the Ohio Company.” Of Rufus Putnam, Senator Hoar said in his oration, after his tributes to Varnum, Meigs, Parsons, Tupper and the rest:
“But what can be said which shall be adequate to the worth of him who was the originator, inspirer, leader, and guide of the Ohio settlement from the time when he first conceived it, in the closing days of the Revolution, until Ohio took her place in the Union as a free State in the summer of 1803? Every one of that honorable body would have felt it as a personal wrong had he been told that the foremost honors of this occasion would not be given to Rufus Putnam. Lossing calls him ‘the father of Ohio.’ Burnet says, ‘He was regarded as their principal chief and leader.’ He was chosen the superintendent at the meeting of the Ohio Company in Boston, November 21, 1787, ‘to be obeyed and respected accordingly.’ The agents of the company, when they voted in 1789 ‘that the 7th of April be forever observed as a public festival,’ speak of it as ‘the day when General Putnam commenced the settlement in this country.’ Harris dedicates the documents collected in his appendix to Rufus Putnam, ‘the founder and father of the State.’ He was a man after Washington’s own pattern and after Washington’s own heart; of the blood and near kindred of Israel Putnam, the man who ‘dared to lead where any man dared to follow.’ ”
Mr. Hoar recounts the great services of Putnam during the Revolution, beginning with his brilliant success in the fortification of Dorchester Heights:
“We take no leaf from the pure chaplet of Washington’s fame when we say that the success of the first great military operation of the Revolution was due to Rufus Putnam.”
But it was not Senator Hoar’s task to narrate the military services of General Putnam.8
“We have to do,” he said, “only with the entrenchments constructed under the command of this great engineer for the constitutional fortress of American liberty. Putnam removed his family to Rutland, Worcester County, Mass., early in 1780. His house is yet standing, about ten miles from the birthplace of the grandfather of President Garfield. He himself returned to Rutland when the war was over. He had the noble public spirit of his day, to which no duty seemed trifling or obscure. For five years he tilled his farm and accepted and performed the public offices to which his neighbors called him. He was representative to the General Court, selectman, constable, tax collector and committee to lay out school lots for the town; State surveyor, commissioner to treat with the Penobscot Indians and volunteer in putting down Shays’s Rebellion. He was one of the founders and first trustees of Leicester Academy, and, with his family of eight children, gave from his modest means a hundred pounds toward its endowment. But he had larger plans in mind. The town constable of Rutland was planning an empire.”
Putnam’s chief counsellor in his design at the first was Washington, whose part altogether in the opening of the West was so noteworthy. Mr. Hoar tells of the correspondence between Putnam and Washington, and follows the interesting history to the organization of the Ohio Company, at the Bunch of Grapes Tavern in Boston, in 1786, and the departure of the Massachusetts emigrants at the end of the next year.
“Putnam went out from his simple house in Rutland to dwell no more in his native Massachusetts. It is a plain, wooden dwelling, perhaps a little better than the average of the farmers’ houses of New England of that day; yet about which of Europe’s palaces do holier memories cling! Honor and fame, and freedom and empire, and the faith of America went with him as he crossed the threshold.”
To Rutland, as one who loved the old town and its history has well said, “belongs the honor of having carried into action the Ordinance of 1787. Standing on Rutland hill, and looking around the immense basin of which it forms the centre, it is with conscious pride that one looks upon the old landmarks and calls up to the imagination the strong and brave and true men whose traditions have permeated the soil and left their marks in the civilization which has been the type for the development of the whole
The Ordinance of 1784, the original of the Ordinance of 1787, was drawn up by Jefferson himself, as chairman of the committee appointed by Congress to prepare a plan for the government of the territory. The draft of the committee’s report, in Jefferson’s own handwriting, is still preserved in the archives of the State Department at Washington. “It is as completely Jefferson’s own work,” says Bancroft, “as the Declaration of Independence.” Jefferson worked with the greatest earnestness to secure the insertion of a clause in the Ordinance of 1784 prohibiting slavery in the Northwest; and the clause was lost by only a single vote. “The voice of a single individual,” said Jefferson, who foresaw more clearly than any other what the conflict with slavery was to mean to the republic, “would have prevented this abominable crime. Heaven will not always be silent. The friends of the rights of human nature will in the end prevail.” They prevailed for the Northwest Territory with the achievement of Manasseh Cutler, Rufus Putnam and Nathan Dane.
Was it from Jefferson that Putnam and his men at Marietta caught their classical jargon? There was a great deal of pretentious classicism in America at that time, new towns everywhere being freighted with high-sounding Greek and Roman names. The founders of Marietta – so named in honor of Marie Antoinette – named one of their squares
Rufus Putnam was born in Sutton, Massachusetts, April 9, 1738, just fifty years before he founded Marietta, where he died May 1, 1824. He was a cousin of General Putnam. Early in life he was a millwright and a farmer; but he studied mathematics, surveying and engineering – after distinguished service in the old French war – and became our leading engineer during the Revolution, and an able officer in many campaigns. He first planned the Ohio settlement, and at the outset made it a distinct condition that there should be no slavery in the territory. Five years after the founding of Marietta, Putnam was made Surveyor-General of the United States; and his services in Ohio until the time of his death were of high importance.
