Ohio

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OHIO

In 1787 the Northwest Ordinance defined the boundaries of what became the future state of Ohio, and Congress authorized the first legal settlements there by white Americans. The Massachusetts-based Ohio Company established Marietta in April 1788, and settlement in John Cleves Symmes's Miami Purchase began in November. Vigorous and successful resistance by the indigenous tribes inhibited in-migration for several years until the United States Army under Anthony Wayne defeated them at the Battle of Fallen Timbers on 20 August 1794. By the Treaty of Greenville of 3 August 1795, the tribes conceded the title to three-quarters of the future state to the federal government, restricting their tribal lands to the northwestern quarter. The process of settlement now began in earnest and federal land sales accelerated. By 1800 the future state had acquired a population of 42,159 (of whom about 14,400 were adult), mainly clustered close to the Ohio and Scioto Rivers.

In 1798 the population of the Northwest Territory was judged large enough to justify the election of a territorial legislature, which made laws for the territory subject to the veto of the federally appointed territorial governor, Arthur St. Clair. In 1800 Congress divided the Northwest Territory by creating the Indiana Territory, and the remaining eastern division of the Northwest Territory began to debate the desirability of statehood. When St. Clair persuaded the legislature to support a further division of the territory in order to postpone statehood and perhaps gerrymander a pro-Federalist state east of the Scioto, the Republican opposition, led by Thomas Worthington, prompted a massive petition campaign and persuaded the new Republican majority in Congress to authorize the calling of a constitutional convention, even though the territory had not yet reached the mandated size of population.

Elected in October 1802, the Republican-dominated convention voted for statehood and drafted a constitution that prohibited slavery, weakened gubernatorial power, and gave control of the legislature to what in practice amounted to a white adult male electorate. After becoming a state in March 1803, Ohio proved a consistent Democratic Republican stronghold, supporting Presidents Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe, though suffering strong internal divisions over the role of the judiciary. In 1812 the state enthusiastically backed the War of 1812 against Britain, which resulted in two invasions of Ohio, in 1812 and 1813, by British troops and the Shawnee leader Tecumseh's native warriors. Security was not restored until late in 1813, with naval victory at Put-in-Bay on Lake Erie in September and military defeat of the hostile forces at the Battle of the Thames in Upper Canada (Ontario) in October. National victory made possible the treaties of 1817 and 1818 that finally expunged the title of the Indian tribes in northwestern Ohio and restricted the three thousand natives who remained to a few small reservations until the last were moved westward in 1842.

The extraordinary rate of white settlement that followed statehood gave Ohio a population of 230,760 in 1810. The interior of southern Ohio opened up, especially the Scioto, Muskingum, and Miami Valleys, which were settled mainly by people from Pennsylvania and the Upper South. The land between the Scioto and the Little Miami Rivers had been reserved to pay the wages owed to Virginia's Revolutionary War veterans, with the result that although the warrants had largely passed into the hands of speculators, settlers in this military district came disproportionately from Virginia and Kentucky. The process of rapid settlement slowed after 1809 during the years of Indian hostility and war but resumed with even greater intensity after 1813. New Englanders now flooded into northeastern Ohio, on to the lands known as the Western Reserve (or New Connecticut), which had been reserved in 1800 by Connecticut to pay off its Revolutionary War debts. At the same time German farmers from Pennsylvania settled the upland wheat-growing area south of the Reserve. The interior filled as Ohio's population doubled in a decade to 581,434 in 1820, making it the fifth most populous state in the nation. Although varied in religious character and regional origin, its people consisted primarily of white migrants born in the United States, with only a minute proportion of unnaturalized foreigners. The black population also remained less than 1 percent of the whole, thanks largely to the law discouraging black immigration passed in 1807, though numbers began to increase in the 1820s.

Essentially a land of farmers producing for their families' immediate needs, Ohio from an early date generated an agricultural surplus, mainly of corn and pork, for sale outside the state. After 1818 the state's development slowed considerably during the hardships of the Panic of 1819 and the subsequent depression. Then, in 1825, the state government embarked on an ambitious canal program, notably connecting Lake Erie with the Ohio River, which duly stimulated a considerable economic recovery as commercial agriculture expanded. Many backward and frontier areas still remained as population growth now occurred mainly in the older counties, where small market towns developed rapidly. From the start, Cincinnati had been the major commercial entrepôt, and after 1815 it began to develop some industry. Between 1824 and 1829 its population doubled in size to 24,143, more than the state's other urban centers put together. By 1830 Ohio, with a population of 937,903, was a highly heterogeneous state that supported an active and contentious public life; its voters divided evenly between the Jacksonian Democrats and their National Republican opponents, and as the state with the fourth-largest number of electoral votes and U.S. representatives, Ohio was already regarded as a critical swing state in national elections.

bibliography

Cayton, Andrew R. L., and Stuart D. Hobbs, eds. "The Center of a Great Empire": The Ohio Country in the Early American Republic. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005.

Hurt, R. Douglas. The Ohio Frontier: Crucible of the Old Northwest, 1720–1830. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.

Ratcliffe, Donald J. Party Spirit in a Frontier Republic: Democratic Politics in Ohio, 1793–1821. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998.

——. The Politics of Long Division: The Birth of the Second Party System in Ohio, 1818-1828. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2000.

Donald J. Ratcliffe

Encyclopedia of the New American Nation