Stateside With Rosalea: Ohio

So here we are at the dawn of the nineteenth century. The yeardomoter clicked over to double zeroes in clear defiance of the doomsayers who had predicted the end of the world-- as they do every fin de siècle. And we find ourselves standing on the Appalachian Mountains looking towards what is known as the First American West.

Kiwi readers can picture it like this: you’re standing on the Southern Alps looking towards the Tasman Sea, only there is no Tasman Sea—just a huge expanse of land stretching to the horizon. It was quite a climb, so mop your brow with this kerchief, my hearties!

Omigosh! Not THAT kerchief—it’s the one with Jefferson’s map on it! Not that I can find any evidence that he ever actually drew a map of what the Northwest Territory’s eventual states would look like, but he did name ten of them and delineate exactly where they would be. Here is an approximation of what those states would have looked like, along with the quaint names Jefferson assigned. Another attempt at mapping them is here, but with a few more states added in to the south and whimsically named by the modern mapmaker.

But wait! Maybe I was wrong about the end of the world not being nigh. For some people, it certainly was, despite an attempt forty years before Ohio’s statehood to prevent such a fate.

In 1763, King George III had declared it was his “royal will and pleasure” to “reserve under our sovereignty, protection and dominion, for the use of the said Indians, … all the lands and territories lying to the westward of the sources of the rivers which fall into the sea from the west and northwest." The proclamation thus established the Appalachian mountain range as the western boundary of the original colonies.

The 1763 Royal Proclamation also insisted that the only purchaser of land in those westward territories could be the British Crown, and then only if the Crown was approached by Indians wanting to sell, not the other way around. An article about the proclamation on the website of Library and Archives Canada reflects on the role this “Indian Bill of Rights” played in subsequent treaty-making between indigenous peoples and colonial governments. But for the purposes of our trip around the United States in the order in which they were admitted to the Union, you need only know the Royal Proclamation was just one more reason for the colonists to revolt.

Between the time of the Royal Proclamation and the 1803 admission to the Union of Ohio as the first state formed from the Northwest Territory, came the American Revolution, the establishment of a Confederation of United States—during which time a committee headed by Jefferson laid out its plans for the lands it now figured it had claim to, having defeated the British—and the formal adoption of the Northwest Ordinance by the US Congress in 1787.

The Northwest Ordinance is one of the most important documents in US history because it established how new states would be admitted to the Union, and how territories would be administered until they were admitted. Furthermore, in 1799, Congress passed an An Act to Regulate Trade and Intercourse With the Indian Tribes, and to Preserve Peace on the Frontiers, which minutely delineated “the boundary line, established by treaty between the United States and various Indian tribes”, and established the concept of government-licensed traders and agents to deal with the Indians.

As the historian Stephen Warren says in the transcript (pdf) of Episode Two of the PBS documentary We Shall Remain:

“I don't think we appreciate just how ruthless Thomas Jefferson was as President in 1801, and how ruthless folks like Jefferson's territorial governor, William Henry Harrison were in the period specifically after 1800. The Americans employed what was called the ‘factory system.’ And what that was, was the establishment of government forts throughout the old Northwest where the government would accept furs in exchange for goods. And it became a way of making native people into debtors of the United States. And when Thomas Jefferson becomes President, in his first term he writes William Henry Harrison and says, you know, essentially, ‘Through the factory system, native people will incur debts beyond what they are willing to pay, and they will only be able to pay those back through a cession of lands.’”

Ohio is one of the five states carved out of the Northwest Territory that, together with Minnesota, Iowa, and Missouri, comprise the eight states known as the American Midwest. Some sources, such as Wikipedia, include the Plains States of North and South Dakota, Nebraska, and Kansas in the Midwest, based on the US Census Bureau’s classification and map.

rosalea.barker@gmail.com

--PEACE--

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