The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West
David McCullough
Simon & Schuster (May 2019)
They developed the Ohio Territory, propelling “as best they could the American ideals”
In her superb review of David McCullough’s latest book, Joyce E. Chaplin provides me with an excellent introduction to the situation on which McCullough focuses:
“If every generation of Americans gets the visionary colonizer it deserves, we get Elon Musk, but people in the early Republic got the Rev. Manasseh Cutler. Musk wants to settle Mars. In the 1780s, Cutler set his sights on the Ohio Territory, the subject of David McCullough’s new book, The Pioneers. Plans for Martian colonies dwell on technical feasibility; Ohio’s earlier colonization is a reminder that humans’ treatment of one another matters to such schemes, too.
“Ohio has quite a history. The characters who passed through during its early phases as part of the United States could adorn a novel. Folks on the famous side include Lewis and Clark (headed west), Aaron Burr (post-duel and mid-conspiracy against the American government), John Chapman (a.k.a. Johnny Appleseed, sower of fruit trees) and Charles Dickens (visitor to Cincinnati). The less famous characters include Harman and Margaret Blennerhasett, Anglo-Irish newlyweds who lit out for the territory because they were uncle and niece; the Revolutionary War veteran Rufus Putnam, whose frontier library tellingly featured Milton’s Paradise Lost; and Cajoe, an enslaved Virginia man who gained his freedom in Ohio, preached the Gospel and lived past his 100th birthday.
“McCullough tells the history of the Ohio Territory as a story of uplift, of what can happen when the doers of good are let loose upon a place. This is American history as a vision of our better selves. Lord knows we need it. And there are several inarguably admirable elements of Manasseh Cutler’s plan.
“Cutler and his supporters wanted the Ohio Territory, and eventual state, to be nonslaveholding, free within a nation where slavery was still legal. Their goal followed the tendency of the states in the North to repudiate slavery — at least within their own borders. Prohibiting slavery in new states extended that revolutionary logic outward. As the Northwest Ordinance (1787) declared, ‘There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory.’ Nor could the eventual states formed out of the Northwest Territory be admitted to the Union as slave states.”
After noting Hildreth’s final days, here are David McCullough’s concluding thoughts: “His was a complete life, he finished his work. But then it can be said, too, that those others of the foremost pioneers of Marietta had finished their work, each in his or her way, and no matter the adversities to be faced, propelled as they were by high, worthy purpose. They accomplished what they had set out to do not for money, not for possessions or fame, but to advance the quality and opportunities of life — to propel as best they could the American ideals.”