Ohio Country Research Articles

America’s First Interstate: The National Road, 1806–1853

America’s First Interstate: The National Road, 1806–1853

Justice Samuel Nelson and the Seneca Indians

Justice Samuel Nelson and the Seneca Indians Laurence M. Hauptman (bio) Scholars examining the career of Justice Samuel Nelson, who served on the Supreme Court from 1845 to 1872, have considered the jurist's record on the bench to be mediocre.1 According to historian Frank Otto Gatell, Justice Nelson "did not leave a deep impression on the history of the court."2 Political scientist Carl B. Swisher concluded that Nelson was a "stable, sound, and unspectactular judge"; that he "was not a man of deeply philosophical bent or soaring imagination"; and that he exhibited an "unwillingness to stretch the law to make it conform to local moral sentiment."3 Indeed, Nelson has largely been viewed through the lens of his concurring opinion in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857).4 Consequently, scholars have labeled him a "doughface justice," castigating him, along with Justice Robert Grier of Pennsylvania, for being the only two Northern jurists on the bench who voted with the majority in the case.5 In assessing Nelson's overall importance, scholars examining the justice's service on the Taney-led and Chase-led Courts have failed to analyze or even mention two of his most important opinions: Fellows v. Blacksmith (1857) and The New York Indians (1866). In the first of these cases, Nelson favored the Tonawanda Senecas; a decade later, the justice favored the treaty rights of the Seneca Nation of Indians.6 The cases permanently affected the Tonawanda Senecas and the Seneca Nation of Indians, two separate, federally recognized governments that today occupy four reservations in western New York State: Allegany, Cattaraugus, Oil Spring, and Tonawanda. After the Revolution, the Senecas, original members of the Iroquois Confederacy, occupied approximately six million acres of lands. Their vast territory was attractive to land speculators, promoters of canals and turnpikes, New York politicians pushing for Empire State development, and Americans seeking access to the Great Lakes and Ohio Country. As a result, from the time of the federal Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1784 onward, [End Page 7] the Senecas faced unrelenting pressures to cede all or select parcels of their land. Despite specific assurances made by the Washington administration in the federal Treaty of Canandaigua in1794 to guarantee the Seneca land base, dispossession continued. In the federal Treaty of Big Tree in 1797, federal officials recognized ten, later eleven, Seneca reservations totaling 202,000 acres. However, because of the nefarious actions of state and federal politicians in collusion with the Holland and later Ogden Land Companies, the Senecas continued to be dispossessed and threatened with removal to the Indian Territory well into the 1850s.7 The question arises about why Nelson favored the Senecas' position in his opinions in 1857 and 1866. After all, Nelson had been a loyal member of Martin Van Buren's Albany Regency, the fledgling Democratic political machine that dominated New York politics in the 1820s, and which in the 1830s had pushed for Indian removal from New York State. Even Nelson's appointment to the United States Supreme Court in 1845 was tied to Jacksonian politics after three Whigs had been rejected by the Democratic-controlled Senate.8 However, Nelson was to write the Court's opinion in Fellows v. Blacksmith. and convince all of his fellow jurists, including five appointed by Presidents Jackson and Van Buren, to vote with him. He even persuaded Justice James Moore Wayne, a Georgian who had actively been a proponent Click for larger view View full resolution Table 1. Seneca Land Losses in Treaties During Justice Nelson's Lifetime* [End Page 8] Click for larger view View full resolution Scholars mostly remember Samuel Nelson as a "dough-face" for his concurring opinion in Dred Scott v. Sand-ford (1857) and have failed to consider two of his seminal opinions favoring the Tonawanda Senecas and the Seneca Nation of Indians. of removal of Creeks and Cherokees, to support his opinion.9 Justice Nelson's favorable response to the crises facing the Senecas was conditioned by a myriad of factors. He selectively drew inspiration and ideas from four separate sources. First, Nelson's residence in Cooperstown, New York, and his connections there to the family of James Fenimore Cooper...

A Sturdy Sapling in the Trans-Appalachian West: The Origins and Development of the Holmes County Amish Community, 1809–1846

For five states carved out of the Northwest Territories, the first half of the nineteenth century was a frontier era, replete with the first European settlers and the development of the first towns. As with any historical narrative, it is necessary to "reach" on either side of that era to provide context to the era in question. It is with this chronological connection in mind that the earliest history of what is known today as the Greater Holmes County Amish settlement is examined, specifically the arrival and growth of the Amish in the Walnut Creek area on the east side of Holmes County. The theme of this article is the "chain of migration" that describes the trans-Appalachian migration of the Amish into the Ohio country. The links in this chain include the kinship and familial connections, coupled with information and encouragement that bridged the divisions brought about by families and individuals moving from Pennsylvania into Ohio. The consequence of these linkages was the redevelopment of a common ecological space that was sustainable and viable, and it is these networks that defined the initial shape of the settlement itself during its early development in and around Walnut Creek. In turn, these early settlement patterns still influence the social and cultural makeup of the Greater Holmes County Amish settlement today.

Pacifist Prophet: Papunhank and the Quest for Peace in Early America

Could one Native American prophet simultaneously embrace strict pacifism, Nativism, and resistance to European imperialism? Richard W. Pointer answers yes in his biography of Papunhank, a Munsee prophet baptized by Moravians in 1763 as Johannes. Pointer argues the same impulses that motivated Nativist prophets like Neolin drove Papunhank to embrace Moravian Christianity. He did so, Pointer argues, because the Moravian path fit with his own spiritual journey and its commitment to absolute pacifism. Papunhank’s pacifism, paired with his equally firm commitment to maintaining the independence of his community from both colonial predation and the Indigenous cultural practices he had rejected, make him a “surprising, countercultural figure in the eighteenth century”(5).Pacifist Prophet begins by exploring the context of Papunhank’s Munsee upbringing. Born around 1705, Papunhank lived most of his seventy years away from European or Indigenous recordkeepers. Pointer traces how the Munsee (living primarily in the lower Hudson Valley) had to navigate relationships with the powerful Six Nations and neighboring colonies. Chapter 2 examines Papunhank’s road to becoming a prophet and then his gradual moves toward Christianity. Pointer argues Papunhank’s first recorded statement in 1760 reveals that his “pilgrimage” involved “mostly indigenous spiritual practices and methods” (51). Papunhank’s journey began with a vision, which led him to gain renown as a prophet and healer. But a journey that began with the sort of neotraditionalist practices becoming common at the time led him first to absolute pacifism and then Christianity. Chapter 3 traces Papunhank’s meeting with Moravians that included both German missionaries and Indigenous converts. Although intrigued by the Quakers he met, Papunhank decided to join the Moravians, whose emphasis on Christ’s bloody sacrifice as a source of spiritual power, Pointer suggests, would have appealed to a Munsee worldview. Chapter 4 details Papunhank and his followers’ struggle to avoid both the conflict known as Pontiac’s War and the violent reprisals of Indian-hating whites. Chapter 5 traces their refounding of Wyalusing as a Moravian town with the permission of the Six Nations. Chapter 6 details how, in the wake of the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, Papunhank and the Munsee, Lenape, and Mahican converts living in Wyalusing decided to seek refuge in the Ohio Country. Chapter 7 covers the final years of Papunhank’s life, taken up with his efforts to keep the Indigenous Moravian communities of Schönbrunn and Gnadenhütten out of the Shawnee war with Virginia (known as Dunmore’s War) while staying in the good graces of the nearby Lenape. Papunhank’s death in May 1775 meant that he did not live to see the slaughter of the residents of Gnadenhütten—including his family—at the hands of Pennsylvania militia in 1782.Pacifist Prophet is a nuanced look at an unusual figure, grounded in deft use of German-language accounts of Papunhank’s Moravian coreligionists. And while this is a book about Papunhank, some of the author’s assessments would have been strengthened by more discussion of the Moravians and the Quakers whom Papunhank looked to as potential spiritual and political allies. Papunhank sought both to build an Indigenous Christian community and to nonviolently resist the European imperial project, but Pointer never fully spells out how he views the Quakers’ and especially the Moravians’ relationship with that project. Were they gentler agents of empire, or were they countercultural fringe actors swimming against that current, more in line with Papunhank’s own vision? Pointer acknowledges that much of his subject’s life will remain unknown; therefore, a closer look at the company he kept—who provided most of the surviving evidence of his life—would have clarified what will nevertheless be an important book for scholars of eighteenth-century Nativism and Christianity alike.

To Risk It All: General Forbes, the Capture of Fort Duquesne, and the Course of Empire in the Ohio Country. By Michael N. McConnell

<i>To Risk It All: General Forbes, the Capture of Fort Duquesne, and the Course of Empire in the Ohio Country.</i> By Michael N. McConnell

To Risk It All: General Forbes, the Capture of Fort Duquesne, and the Course of Empire in the Ohio Country

To Risk It All: General Forbes, the Capture of Fort Duquesne, and the Course of Empire in the Ohio Country

The Fort Shirley Site: A Nexus of Archaeology and History on Pennsylvania’s Colonial Frontier

Abstract By 1753 Irish-born trader and land speculator George Croghan’s luck was waning in the shadow of French incursions into the Ohio and Allegheny valleys. In 1754 he found himself at his Aughwick plantation, the steward of a refugee group of Mingo Seneca Natives supportive of British aspirations to drive the French from their homes in the Ohio Country. Croghan fortified this post after Braddock’s defeat at the Battle of the Monongahela on July 9, 1755. The fortification, dubbed “Fort Shirley,” would serve as the advance post for John Armstrong’s raid on the Native town of Kittanning on September 8, 1756. Archaeology at the site is bringing new evidence to bear on the historic narrative of backcountry Native American diplomacy. The examination of material culture from the Fort Shirley Site calls attention to ethnic diversity on the Pennsylvania frontier at the outbreak of the French and Indian War alluded to in the written record.

Challenging Colonial Narratives: Nineteenth-Century Great Lakes Archaeology

Challenging Colonial Narratives: Nineteenth-Century Great Lakes Archaeology

Pacifist Prophet: Papunhank and the Quest for Peace in Early America

Pacifist Prophet: Papunhank and the Quest for Peace in Early America

Pacifist Prophet: Papunhank and the Quest for Peace in Early America

Pacifist Prophet: Papunhank and the Quest for Peace in Early America

George Washington, Chief Executive Officer

George Washington, Chief Executive Officer Tom Cutterham (bio) You Never Forget Your First: A Biography of George Washington alexis coe Viking Press, 2020 304 pp. The Cabinet: George Washington and the Creation of an American Institution lindsay m. chervinsky Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020 432 pp. Never Caught: The Washingtons' Relentless Pursuit of Their Runaway Slave, Ona Judge erica armstrong dunbar 37 INK, 2017 288 pp. When George Washington was eleven, his father's death left most of the family's property—including sixty-four enslaved people—divided among his two older half-brothers. He was destined to no more than a very minor place in the colonial Virginia gentry. Moving "with seeming ease between the sometimes desperate conditions" of his mother's home at Ferry Farm, and the "genteel abundance" of his half-brother's Mount Vernon estate, he supplemented his minimal schoolroom education by practicing penmanship and the art of polite sociability. As Alexis Coe puts it in her accessible and sprightly new biography, "Washington understood his role" (7). His access to the world of elite wealth and power was conditional. He was the eager, needy relative in search of opportunities to serve his betters—and the colonizing mission to which they were dedicated. At seventeen, with a leg up from his connections, he became a licensed surveyor and [End Page 233] began amassing property in the Shenandoah Valley. It was the start of half a century of acquisition and expansion that made Washington one of the wealthiest, most powerful men on the continent. You Never Forget Your First raises the question of what it means to take George Washington seriously. Its titular innuendo is paired with a cover illustration that puts a cheeky smile on the first president's face—even if, like most eighteenth-century sitters, his lips remain tightly sealed, keeping his problematic teeth obscured. In the introduction, Coe situates herself as a puckish outsider intent on disrupting the "Dad History" genre. But Washington himself is not the butt of the joke. Coe's argument is that the reverence and worn-out conventions that characterize previous biographies serve to obscure their subject from posterity's careful consideration. Her book, including its unorthodox packaging, is crafted to jolt readers to renewed attention. Coe is also blunt about Washington's life as an enslaver, the "forced-labor camps" we tend to call plantations (43), and his active participation in indigenous "genocide" (75). The idea is not to make light of the man but to treat him as a historical problem, something worthy of investigation. Washington's uncanny ability to understand his role continued to be central to his success, long after his half-brother Lawrence's death elevated George to a more stable footing in Virginia's plantocracy. It is true that his blundering failure to conduct armed diplomacy among the French imperialists and Native nations in Ohio country helped trigger a global war that would reshape the British empire and set the stage for revolution. But he was a junior officer in his early twenties, keen to cut a figure as a man of action. Prepared by an upbringing among white Virginians who coveted possession of both Black bodies and Native territory, Washington saw no legitimate limit to the colony's western claims, nor any need to compromise with those who saw things differently. It was that spirit that soon brought him, along with many of his fellow colonists, into conflict with the metropole itself. His role—one he never wavered from—was to give firm and manly leadership to this vision of continental, imperial entitlement. For Coe, what drove Washington was not so much his settler-colonial mindset as the "arsenal of personal grievances" he had stockpiled through years of social climbing. "At his core," she writes, "he was still a man eager to be recognized" (53). On this account, war against Britain gave him a [End Page 234] stage on which to prove himself—including, perhaps, to Sally Fairfax, the impeccably genteel object of his youthful affections. Presentation, appearance, and the dynamics of relative status were always likely to be matters of concern to someone who grew up seeking the charity of...

Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age ed. by Kate Fullagar and Michael A. McDonnell

Reviewed by: Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age ed. by Kate Fullagar and Michael A. McDonnell Katie Lantz (bio) Keywords Native Americans, Indigenous peoples, British Empire, Africa, North America Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age. Edited by Kate Fullagar and Michael A. McDonnell. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. Pp. 356. Paper, $39.95.) In Facing Empire: Indigenous Experiences in a Revolutionary Age, editors Kate Fullagar and Michael McDonnell place indigenous peoples at the center of histories of the British Empire during the Age of Revolution (1760–1840). Even indigeneity, the editors observe, is a category born of empire: a shorthand through which colonial officials could distinguish between imperial subjects imported by empire, and those whose residence pre-dated imperial imposition. These essays range from Australia, the West African coast, Pacific Islands, the Great Lakes, the Persian Gulf, the Ohio country, to the Scottish Highlands. The editors facilitate comparisons between diverse indigenous experiences and strategies, and seek to demonstrate that Native peoples collectively influenced European policies and practices during the Age of Revolutions. Most of these essays offer stories of indigenous peoples deploying strategies to advance their own goals in new imperial contexts. Set on the shores of Lake Huron, Michael McDonnell's essay demonstrates the power of the Anishinaabe Odawa to teach British newcomers to trade and engage in diplomacy on Native terms during the 1760s and 1770s and in the aftermath of the Seven Years' War, when the French ceded their northern North American claims to the British Empire. Rebecca Shumway explores the Fante, a community on the coast of modern-day Ghana, between 1807 and the mid-nineteenth century. Taking advantage of confused British policy toward West Africa, the Fante drew British military commanders to their defense against the encroaching Asante kingdom. Sujit Sivasudaram examines the Persian Gulf, a space of many peoples and diverse communities contesting power. Colin Calloway tells a complex borderlands story of Iroquois, Shawnee, British, French, and eventually American powers competing for advantage in the Ohio country, from the 1750s to the 1770s. Nicole Ulrich examines class formation in the Cape of Good Hope from the 1790s through the 1810s, as the [End Page 334] region passed from Dutch East India Company to British colonial rule. Tony Ballantyne considers late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century New Zealand, where multiple Māori leaders competed for trade advantages, and interacted with Samuel Marsden, a missionary skilled at interpolating his cosmology into new cultural contexts. Kate Fullagar shows how Ostecano, a Cherokee leader, and Mai, the son of a prominent family from Ra'iatea, tried to maneuver the British into serving the interests of their communities and homelands during the late eighteenth century. Justin Brooks compares the experiences of Scottish Highlanders, North American Indians, and Bengalis in South Asia, 1745–1775. In each region, Brooks finds that British imperial policy evolved from diplomacy to increased use of military force to secure colonial aims. Finally, Elspeth Martini explores the efforts of an Ojibwe Methodist missionary, Shawundais, alias John Sunday, to convert his people and protect their lands around the upper Great Lakes during the mid-nineteenth century. The other primary pattern examines how indigenous peoples adapted to environmental change caused by imported plants and animals—and the commercial exploitation of resources for external markets. Bill Gammage shows how Aboriginal peoples before the colonization of Australia used fire to cultivate a mix of grassland and forests, ecosystems that supported the plants and animals and their lifeways. Robert Kenny reveals how Australian settlers' livestock transformed the landscape cultivated by the Taungurung—and how the Taungurung drew on their cosmological knowledge to resist invaders who unbalanced their lands. Examining two Pacific archipelagos, Tahiti and Samoa, from the 1760s to 1840s, Jennifer Newell depicts how Tahitians and Samoans incorporated British plants, animals, and cosmology into their environments and cultures. Joshua Reid carries the interaction between settler colonialism and indigenous lifeways into maritime space, and compares the Māori of the South Pacific and the Makah of northwestern North America, during the mid-nineteenth century. By framing essays around indigenous peoples "facing empire," this collection locates specific Native groups in binary relationships with the British Empire. Editors Fullagar...

“Every Shrub Seemed Pregnant with Her Charms”: A Woman, Her Wonder, and the Ohio Country in Gilbert Imlay’s The Emigrants

Gilbert Imlay’s 1793 epistolary novel The Emigrants, which dramatizes several characters’ journey across the Alleghenies to occupy and develop a tract in the Ohio country, features the use of allusions and commonplaces that illuminate this fiction’s provocative campaign to conciliate physiocracy, proto-feminism, and the new philosophy with the expulsion of indigenous people in the region. Imlay uses Pope, Sterne and Thomson to justify and eroticize U.S. expansiveness. The heroine Caroline T—n embodies, especially, the wondering, wonderful vindication of a world-historical land-grab. Comparisons with contemporary stories by Chateaubriand, Blake, Radcliffe, and the Seneca leader known as the Cornplanter highlight ways in which Imlay—partaking of a rhetorical repertoire demonstrably familiar to his peers—mutes history, religion, appropriation, and aggression in favour of erotic appeal, a series of emblematic, excusatory metonymies, and the picturesque language of an early phase of the North American real estate pitch.

The Indian World of George Washington by Colin G. Calloway

Reviewed by: The Indian World of George Washington by Colin G. Calloway Timothy J. Shannon (bio) The Indian World of George Washington. By Colin G. Calloway. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. Pp. xviii, 621. $34.95 cloth) Among the founders, George Washington had the most extensive experience with Native Americans. As a young man, he relied on them as allies and guides in the Ohio country, and he fought alongside and against them during the Seven Years' War. He engaged with them as allies and enemies again during the American Revolution, and as the first president of the United States, he conducted diplomacy with them that laid the foundations of federal Indian policy. For Washington, Indians were neither the "merciless Indian Savages" mentioned in the Declaration of Independence nor the archetypal inhabitants of an Enlightenment philosopher's state of nature. They were individual human beings who participated with him in the events that created the United States. [End Page 332] Colin Calloway sets out to recapture that shared experience in this important new book, the first biography of Washington to give Native Americans equal billing. An indication of that purpose is a list in the opening pages that names more than one hundred individual Indians whose own stories shape the narrative than follows. Calloway divides that story into three sections. The first covers Washington's trial by fire as a public figure in the Seven Years' War. The second part covers the Revolutionary War, when Washington once again found himself entangled in the world of Native American warfare and diplomacy. In the final part, Calloway reconstructs Washington's relations with Native Americans during the 1790s, when as president, he dealt with warfare on the nation's borderlands and initiated the federal government's Indian relations. Of course, there is no shortage of Washington biographies or histories of Native Americans in the Revolutionary era, so what is gained by weaving these two familiar topics together? Calloway presents several good answers. First, he reminds us that Indians were a constant presence in the long course of Washington's public life, and as such, they played a more complicated and influential role in the creation of the United States than is typically acknowledged. Second, Calloway's analysis reminds us that among the founders, proximity to Indians did not equal intimacy with them. Yes, Washington knew many individual Indians by name and often called them friends and brothers in diplomatic councils, but we also know that in no sense of the phrase did he ever "go native" as a result of these encounters. In this long book, there is no evidence that Washington ever came to see the world through Indian eyes. Calloway's last lesson concerns another kind of barrier that separated Native and colonial peoples in North America: land. From Washington's early days as a surveyor to his financial dealings in retirement, he tried to turn Indian homelands into real estate, and like many of his peers, he never realized the profits he anticipated. At various points in his life, Washington speculated in lands in Virginia, Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York. All of these [End Page 333] ventures were premised on the dispossession of Native Americans. Even Washington's efforts to secure peaceful coexistence with Indians in the new nation assumed that diplomacy was a more effective means than war for securing title to Indian lands. This book succeeds in putting Indians back into the story of Washington's life. The frustration readers may feel in the end is that for all they have learned about Washington's interactions with Indians, they still know very little about what he thought of them. Unlike Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, Washington was not prone to writing about Indians in a reflective way. He may have known more Indians by name than any of his peers, but the tragedy in this story is that the leader indispensable to the founding of the nation never clearly articulated for better or worse the place he saw for Indians within it. Timothy J. Shannon TIMOTHY J. SHANNON is a professor of history at Gettysburg College. His most recent book is Indian Captive, Indian King: Peter...

"From Such Beginnings, Much May Be Expected"

"From Such Beginnings, Much May Be Expected" Brandon C. Downing (bio) In The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West, David McCullough provides his version of how the West was won. He starts with a group of Revolutionary War veterans from New England led by Rufus Putnam, Manasseh Cutler, and Benjamin Tupper who founded the Ohio Company of Associates to secure land purchases in the Northwest Territory. Like all pioneer stories, their story was not an easy one. This was late eighteenth-century America where the advancing line of Euro-American settlement barely crossed the Appalachian Mountains. Compared to the thriving and well-developed eastern seaboard, the backcountry had "no roads. … no bridges, no towns, churches, schools, stores, or way-side taverns. … not one permanent legal settlement" (7). If the travelers survived the journey to the Ohio Country, then an uncountable number of trees of enormous size had to be cleared, houses had to be built, sustenance had to be obtained, and fields had to be sown and crops harvested. On top of the hard labor, settlers had to be vigilant against possible Indian attack; bears, wolves, and panthers lurking in the woods; and the harshness of the climate. Their success in overcoming these numerous obstacles enabled them to establish the first permanent settlement of the Northwest Territory—Marietta, Ohio—in 1788. McCullough is a good storyteller, and he succeeds in presenting the different personalities of the various settlers and the trials they had to endure to travel, build, and live in "their infant city." He illustrates the hardships endured by so many suffering from "Ohio fever" in their efforts to get from Massachusetts to the frontier. One couple, Ephraim and Leah Cutler, lost two children to illness: their one-year-old son, Hezekiah, and just a few days later their seven-year-old daughter, Mary. Even if one did survive the [End Page 173] journey, the realities of frontier life did not provide much certainty. Many residents suffered tremendously during the winter of the "Starving Year" (1789): measles took the lives of several children and smallpox took even more lives later that season. Not all was bad. McCullough also weaves in individual highlights such as the first wedding of the Northwest Territory between Rowena Tupper and Winthrop Sargent; the great escape of John Mathews from an Indian attack (sans trousers); and the building of Harman and Margaret Blennerhassett's opulent mansion by the notable and selftrained architect, Joseph Barker. Even during bleak times, when the settlers were confined to Campus Martius during the Northwest Indian War, they "enliven[ed] the off-hours within the stockade [with] a variety of games and sporting events—foot races, boxing matches" (117). These personal accounts provide a good description of what frontier life was like in the Ohio valley, and McCullough's ability to portray a vivid scene of so many individuals and families in one narrative is a testament to good, regional history. Despite the title, McCullough's book is not about the American West as one might imagine it. Instead, he primarily focuses on the individuals who founded, developed, and progressed the city of Marietta. This, however, is a good place to start because Marietta represented what the federal government envisioned the West to be—organized. Much of this organization was laid out in the Land Ordinance of 1785. In order to avoid lawsuits over property boundaries, collect taxes to pay for the Revolutionary War, and to satisfy land bounties to veterans, the land purchased by the Ohio Company of Associates would be divided into square townships six miles in length with thirty-six square miles in total. These organized township grids were similar to those found in New England. If the Land Ordinance was the form, then the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 was the function as it established a territorial government and a method for admitting territories into states. The more recognizable provisions of this ordinance included the outlawing of slavery, reserving land for schools, ensuring trial by jury, and guaranteeing religious freedom. It was these articles that McCullough claims to be the "American ideals" the first pioneers of Ohio brought with them to...

Unsettling the West: Violence and State Building in the Ohio Valley

Rob Harper’s new work, Unsettling the West, is a welcome entry in the literature that examines early modern state building. Focusing on the eighteenth century Ohio Valley, Harper explores the interconnections between violence, state building, and colonialism. American state building in Ohio, Harper argues, challenges both top-down and bottom-up interpretations of the subject, and particularly disputes long-standing assumptions that only minimal violence accompanied American state formation. Classic Weberian models of orderly top-down state formation did not occur, nor was the Ohio Valley a region where individualistic Turnerian settlers, disdaining established political authority, developed a state-building process that was both democratically bottom-up and violence free. Harper emphasizes that the Turnerian interpretation, by skimming lightly over the violence that accompanied what used to be disingenuously termed “American westward movement,” missed an important opportunity to analyze the centrality of violence to American state formation, not to mention Native dispossession.Violence in the Ohio Valley also owed much to the region’s long history as contested colonial space. The French and British empires, British settlers from the seaboard colonies, and Shawnees, Delawares, Wyandots, and Haudenosaunees, all jockeyed for control of the region in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. None completely succeeded, making the Ohio Valley a place where multiple representatives of multiple polities sought to exercise power, including British imperial agents and military commanders, Indigenous diplomats and political leaders, and colonial officials ranging from governors and influential legislators to local militia officers and traders. In response, Ohio’s tribal nations and settler colonists made selective, opportunistic alliances, with each other as well as among themselves. Through these interethnic and intercultural coalitions and the patronage networks they created, Ohio’s inhabitants attempted to manipulate multiple sources of governmental power in pursuit of locally desired objectives. One of their major concerns was containing intercommunity violence. Individual mediators or larger coalitions strove, often successfully, to prevent violent encounters between small parties of Native peoples and colonists from spiraling into general warfare.Engaging with colonial governments was risky business, however. State officials sought to bolster their feeble authority by extending state power into the Ohio country, frequently by force of arms. Government-supplied weapons and soldiers destabilized the painstakingly constructed local coalitions, allowing Native peoples and land-hungry colonists the means to wage renewed war while, in Harper’s words, “leaving their respective peoples desperate for state protection” (20). Each outbreak of organized violence drove Ohio Valley residents into closer alliances with emergent state power in an attempt to restrain the violence that state officials (possibly even the same ones now being incorporated into a reconstituted coalition) had unleashed in the first place. The result remained a complex political landscape of negotiation and networking in which Native nations, colonists, and government officials participated in remaking the political order after the collapse of the British colonial system in the 1780s.A new American “imperial republic” (176) fitfully emerged by the 1790s. Harper emphasizes that both Native peoples and settlers participated in the creation of this state, though with diametrically opposed expectations of their place in it. Harper claims that Native peoples remained a recognized component within the new American polity, an analysis that seems to rely on present-day legal understandings of Native nations as third sovereign spaces. This assessment seems dubious; the immediate reality of the early American state was an unwelcoming one for Native peoples. Settlers would continue forcing Native peoples from the Ohio Valley, by fair means and foul, using the legal mechanism of treaty-based land cessions but also through all-too-familiar acts of violence.

Reclaiming Congressman Philip Doddridge from Tidewater Cultural Imperialism

Reclaiming Congressman Philip Doddridge from Tidewater Cultural Imperialism Samuel J. Richards Western Pennsylvanians reacted with praise or condemnation when President Donald Trump declared "Pittsburgh, not Paris" in June 2017 as a reason for withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement. In doing so, Trump conjured a vision of Pittsburgh that has not existed for at least thirty years. It was not the first time a well-connected, wealthy, political leader of the United States used an exaggerated depiction of life just west of the Alleghenies to promote a political vision. In 2008, then US senator Barack Obama faced accusations of elitism when he provided his own outsider's interpretation of small-town Pennsylvanians during a private campaign stop in San Francisco. He described the region's working-class citizens as "bitter" and "cling[ing] to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them."1 This was nothing new. From the earliest days of European settlement, people in the upper Ohio River Valley of southwestern Pennsylvania, western (later West) Virginia, and the Ohio Country have been subject to misrepresentation by better-connected writers from Yankee New England and the Virginia Tidewater. This upper Ohio Valley region, hereinafter the trans-Allegheny West, is not truly mid-Atlantic or Midwestern.2 It is Appalachian. Speeches by President Trump and then senator Barack Obama show the trans-Allegheny region remains misrepresented by outsiders who use it as a prop to further political goals. Edward Watts describes this as "Yankee cultural imperialism."3 It is helpful to consider a parallel Tidewater cultural imperialism when examining Virginia history. A century after West Virginia historian Charles Ambler's defining study of sectionalism, some historians might be tired of hearing variations on a theme of east/west divisions. However, east/west sectionalism remains evident as historical accounts continue to prize eastern views.4 Amanda E. Hayes posits, "Of the acceptable prejudices that remain, [End Page 1] the negative mainstream American attitude toward Appalachia has gone largely unchallenged for decades."5 Hayes is too kind. Anti-Appalachian views have influenced historical accounts for centuries as told by those living east of the Allegheny Mountains.6 These views seem impermeable to the debunking tendency among historians who continue to perpetuate elements of the self-serving, hagiographies first peddled by early Virginia's Tidewater elite. This is compounded by the oft-repeated truism that there is more known about Appalachia that is untrue than any other region of the country. These themes remain pervasive in portrayals of Philip Doddridge (1773–1832), a congressman who represented part of the upper Ohio Valley in what is now West Virginia. This article considers ways he is portrayed in order to offer a useful and critical view of his role as a politician. Doddridge's efforts on behalf of western Virginians are now shrouded by generations of misrepresentation. Old Dominion elites in Richmond used Doddridge's roots in the trans-Allegheny West to dismiss his arguments, a bias enshrined in primary sources used by historians. These sources and the narratives created using them deserve greater scrutiny. Some historians have reduced Doddridge to a caricature by relying too heavily on sources laden with the anti-Appalachian views of Virginia's eastern elites motivated by self-preservation of their plantation lifestyles reliant on black slavery. In other instances, historians omit Doddridge's name from accounts of historical events in which he played a key role. Similarly, advocates for an independent West Virginia later used Doddridge to fit their own purpose to highlight western needs to separate from Richmond. These competing approaches continue to influence lopsided narratives that sometimes bizarrely exclude Philip Doddridge from summaries of the Virginia Constitutional Convention of 1829–30 for which he was a chief proponent and the leading reformer. By better examining his efforts and including them in recounting Virginia history, historians can help redress Tidewater cultural imperialism that continues to dominate popular understandings of Virginia history. Doddridge as Historical Prop Philip Doddridge's legacy faded more rapidly in the nation's capital and Richmond than it did in the trans-Allegheny West. A few days after his death, Washington, DC, aldermen requested a portrait of Doddridge for council chambers...

Breaking the Appalachian Barrier: Maryland as the Gateway to Ohio and the West, 1750-1850 by John Hrastar

Reviewed by: Breaking the Appalachian Barrier: Maryland as the Gateway to Ohio and the West, 1750-1850 by John Hrastar Billy Joe Peyton Breaking the Appalachian Barrier: Maryland as the Gateway to Ohio and the West, 1750-1850. By John Hrastar. (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2018. Pp. viii, 255. Paper, $49.95, ISBN 978-1-47667044-7.) Before 1750, the Appalachian Mountains formed a natural barrier between British possessions along the eastern seaboard and French territorial claims west of the mountains. The Ohio Company of Virginia received a charter from the British government to settle the Ohio Country in 1749. France claimed the area that same year, with the competing claims culminating in the French and Indian War a few years later. By 1752, the Ohio Company had cleared a [End Page 149] primitive road from Wills Creek, a tributary of the eastward-flowing Potomac River, at Cumberland, Maryland, to the Monongahela River near present-day Brownsville, Pennsylvania. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and other early leaders recognized the Potomac-Monongahela corridor as a choice location to break the Appalachian barrier. Maryland subsequently emerged as an important gateway to the West, a development that helped shape the demographic and political composition of residents living in Ohio and beyond. Breaking the Appalachian Barrier: Maryland as the Gateway to Ohio and the West, 1750-1850 touches on a range of important historical issues, including colonial wars for empire, federal and state involvement in internal improvements, and the evolution of transportation technology. It also covers related themes, such as Native Americans' reactions to colonial westward migration (and their loss of territory), the disposition of western land claims by eastern states after U.S. independence, and the Land Ordinances of 1784, 1785, and 1787. The book's final chapters detail three principal nineteenth-century transportation routes that spanned the Appalachian Mountains in Maryland: the Cumberland Road, the nation's first interstate highway; the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, which was nearly obsolete from the day it opened; and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, the country's first long-distance carrier. In the preface, author John Hrastar admits that the facts about the opening of the Ohio Country have been well covered. He states, "The objective of this book is to focus on the people and events that contributed to breaking the Appalachian barrier as a single story in its own right" (p. 2). Without question, Hrastar exhibits a masterful ability to combine a series of seemingly separate and distinct projects into a unified, well-documented, and interesting story that details an essential building block of U.S. history. Therein lies the primary contribution of Breaking the Appalachian Barrier. The author has produced an encyclopedic account of the myriad transportation projects that crossed the formidable Appalachians to link Maryland with Ohio between 1750 and 1850. He provides an exhaustive backstory for each one, while clearly explaining the contextual and historical forces at work. Detailed and accurate maps are a standard component of any good transportation history, and Hrastar exceeds the standard with the inclusion of seventeen maps that detail early roads, Native American land cessions, Ohio land subdivisions, and more. In summary, Breaking the Appalachian Barrier is a must-read for anyone with a general interest in U.S. transportation history. Moreover, it details the specific forces that shaped westward migration and transformed Maryland into an important gateway for settlers moving to and through Ohio for a hundred years. Billy Joe Peyton West Virginia State University Copyright © 2019 The Southern Historical Association

Beyond Pontiac’s Shadow: Michilimackinac and the Anglo-Indian War of 1763 by Keith R. Widder

Reviewed by: Beyond Pontiac’s Shadow: Michilimackinac and the Anglo-Indian War of 1763 by Keith R. Widder Matthew Smith Keith R. Widder, Beyond Pontiac’s Shadow: Michilimackinac and the Anglo-Indian War of 1763. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press; Mackinac Island: Mackinac State Historic Parks, 2013. 331 pp. $49.95. Keith R. Widder’s Beyond Pontiac’s Shadow was published to mark the 250th anniversary of Pontiac’s War; or the Anglo-Indian War of 1763, as it is called here. Notwithstanding his panoramic vision, Widder focuses on the micro-historical significance of a single site—Fort Michilimackinac—captured from the British at the start of the conflict. Michilimackinac was, he emphasizes, “part of a larger story that reached to Montreal, Quebec, London, Paris, New York, the Ohio country, Detroit, the Illinois country, the Mississippi River, New Orleans, Lake Superior, and to points further north and west” (xii). Yet Michilimackinac deserves consideration in itself, as a microcosm of the changing world beyond its palisades. Departing from conventional narratives depicting the conflict as a rupture in the fabric of colonial America, Widder focuses on the fort’s capture as a bloody but ambiguous episode in “the saga of Indians, British, French-Canadians, and métis struggling to build an enduring peace and a viable fur trade based upon trust” (55). No historian is better qualified to trace this saga than Widder, the former curator of history for Mackinac State Historic Parks (co-publishers here with Michigan State University Press), who has written extensively on the colonial and early national history of the Great Lakes. Widder’s work complements the ethnographic turn in recent borderlands history, most notably Richard White’s The Middle Ground, as well as Michael A. McDonnell (Masters of Empire), credited with the present construction of the Anglo-Indian War. Fort Michilimackinac dominated the straits between Lakes Huron and Michigan, and with it the strategic and commercial fortunes of the Great Lakes borderlands, or pays d’en haut. It was, wrote one contemporary, “a rendezvous for all the Canadians trading with the northern savages” (9). But it was much more than that. It was the crucible in which early alliances between the British, Indians, and Canadians were forged—the center of the all-encompassing fur trade, binding peoples of the region through complex networks of trade and credit, religion and kinship. The loss of Fort Michilimackinac on June 2, 1763, Widder contends, was a traumatic but temporary blow to British authority. As the presumptive colonial power following victory in the French and Indian Wars and the Treaty [End Page 81] of Paris earlier that year, the British were humiliated when a small party of Ojibwe warriors stormed the garrison under the cover of a game of bagatiway (lacrosse). Such unpreparedness highlighted the key factors underwriting the conflict. The Ojibwe and other Indians refused to acknowledge British treaty claims, considering that French cessions were never France’s to cede. Initial attempts to extend the ritual Covenant Chain first brokered between the British and the Iroquois in the seventeenth century quickly broke down in the pays d’en haut. Much blame is laid at Governor General Jeffrey Amherst, whose “parsimony and low opinion of Native people” (75) revealed itself in the withholding of diplomatic gifts. While Amherst disdained gift giving as unnecessary extravagance, Indian leaders understood the custom as a proper form of tribute. Indian resistance reflected fears that European relations, characterized by diplomacy under the French, were being replaced by coercion under the new regime. Amherst’s failing, argues Widder, was to see “both the cause and solution to the violence of 1763 to be military in nature” (170). In fact, the fall of Michilimackinac was the climax rather than the prelude of efforts to expel the British. In spite of deep mistrust Amherst and other British leaders held towards local Indians, Native people were in fact most anxious to prevent their region disintegrating into bloody chaos. Widder moves beyond the obvious facts of bloodshed and conflict, “allowing Native people, Canadians, and British in the Michilimackinac borderland to tell us how they lived their everyday lives and their story about their participation in the war.” He notes that...

Slavery’s Borderland: Freedom and Bondage along the Ohio River by Matthew Salafia

Reviewed by: Slavery’s Borderland: Freedom and Bondage along the Ohio River by Matthew Salafia Vernon L. Volpe Matthew Salafia, Slavery’s Borderland: Freedom and Bondage along the Ohio River. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. 330 pp. $24.95. Harriet Beecher Stowe penned the most memorable image of an Ohio River boundary between slavery and freedom in her tale of Eliza braving the ice floes of the frozen river with little Harry in her arms. Other writers such as Alexis de Tocqueville and Frederick Law Olmsted helped to create the stark contrast between enterprising free states such as Ohio and “indolent” slave states such as Kentucky. Yet in Slavery’s Borderland, Matthew Salafia (North Dakota State University) presents an intriguing alternative image of the Ohio River country and its unique status within a dividing Union. Not precisely a definitive border between “freedom” and slavery, the Ohio River did differentiate a region while shaping an ongoing debate concerning the legal status of blacks on both sides of the river. The strength of Salafia’s analysis lies in its localist orientation. He largely avoids generalizations and stereotypes to examine actual evidence, often in the form of circumstances and testimony contained in various legal disputes and rulings (some well-known, others quite obscure). These first-person accounts reveal a great deal about how white and black residents interpreted free status or bondage in the Ohio River region. He also compares vital statistics (free black or slave population, land values and production, etc.) in showing a surprising amount of “overlap” between “cross-river” communities, or counties situated on opposing sides of the river. The result is an original (and somewhat surprising) presentation of the Ohio River region that deserves attention from regional scholars and students of the sectional conflict alike. Conceding that the Ohio River remained a border between rather distinct states (if not societies), Salafia highlights the contradictions and ambiguity white and black, free and slave faced in the Ohio country. (He includes Ohio, Indiana and Kentucky in this portrait while setting Illinois mostly aside.) Surely tensions, and potential conflicts, remained but instead Salafia illustrates how (in the end) accommodation among the white residents largely held sway. Even Kentucky adhered to its favored self-image as a “moderate” slave state where the peculiar institution remained “mild” on its path to a natural if gradual death. As war emerged, Kentucky’s predictable (but doomed) efforts at neutrality failed as the state resisted emancipation while only “joining” the Confederacy once the war ended. Residents of the region would not know this result as they strove, literally [End Page 57] for decades, to resolve the inherent conflicts in a river system divided by competing laws and loyalties. The author is quite sensitive to the demands of geography (given the powerful presence of the Ohio), the role played by emerging markets and new technology (chiefly the steamboat), as well as developments owing to the passage of time. The result, he proposes, was a regional outlook (chiefly among the white residents to be sure) that rejected extreme positions, preferred compromise within the Union, and did not much benefit the black population, free or slave. In the end, the region contributed little to the rise of sectional discord. Neither did it resolve the national crisis over slavery and racial inequality. Thanks to Salafia’s diligent research and careful analysis we now have a better understanding of how the Ohio River created a “borderland” with rather distinctive characteristics and contributions. But his work also demonstrates how complex such a regional history can be. On the one hand the Ohio River counties often displayed similar qualities and supported a familiar outlook. Yet conditions and attitudes in southern Ohio or Indiana (not to mention Cincinnati or Louisville) could vary quite remarkably from those in the northern region of these states. But neither was the “mid-West” New England or the Deep South. The Ohio River did indeed mean different things to different people. Vernon L. Volpe University of Nebraska at Kearney Kearney, Nebraska Copyright © 2018 Paul Mokrzycki Renfro