ournal: "We gave three cheers and christened the place Fort
Independence; and, after many difficulties, perplexities, and hardships
were surmounted, and we were on the good and promised land, felt that a
just tribute of respect to the day ought to be paid. There were in all,
including women and children, fifty in number. The men, under Captain
Tinker, ranged themselves on the beach and fired a federal salute of
fifteen rounds, and then the sixteenth in honor of New Connecticut.
Drank several toasts.... Closed with three cheers. Drank several pails
of grog. Supped and retired in good order."
This was the order of the four lawful settlements in the Ohio country:
first that of the Massachusetts men at Marietta in July, 1788; next,
that of the New Jersey men at Cincinnati in December, 1788; then that of
the Virginia men at Manchester in 1790; and then that of the Connecticut
men at Conneaut in 1796.
XVIII. THE STATE OF OHIO IN THE WAR OF 1812.
We may now begin to speak of the State of Ohio, for with the opening of
the present century her borders were defined. The rest of the Northwest
Territory was called Indiana Territory, and by 1804, Ohio found herself
a state of the Union. There has never since been any doubt of her being
there, and if it had not been for the great Ohio generals there might
now be no Union for any of the states to be in. But it is nevertheless
true that Ohio was never admitted to the Union by act of Congress,
and her life as a state dates only from the adoption of her final
constitution, or from the meeting of her first legislature at
Chillicothe, on the 1st of March, 1803.
The most memorable fact concerning the adoption of this constitution was
the great danger there was that it might allow some form of slavery
in the new state. Slavery had been forbidden from the beginning in the
Northwest Territory, but many of the settlers of the Ohio country were
from the slave states of New Jersey, Virginia, Maryland, and Kentucky,
and there was a strong feeling in favor of allowing women to be held as
slaves till they were thirty-five and men till they were twenty-eight
years old. But in the end, thanks to one of the Massachusetts men of
Marietta, Judge Ephraim Cutler, the friends of slavery were beaten, and
it was forbidden in Ohio in the same words which had forbidden it in the
Northwest Territory.
It had been a long fight and a narrow chance, and the clause that gave
the future to freedom was c
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