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
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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.
