Ohio's Road to Statehood

At a glance

The prize: the Forks of the Ohio

The contest that turned the Ohio Country into a battlefield began at the Forks of the Ohio, where the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers meet to form the Ohio itself at modern Pittsburgh. The site of Fort Duquesne and Fort Pitt is a National Historic Landmark "for its role in the strategic struggles between Native Americans, French colonists, and British colonists for control of the Ohio River watershed" (Wikipedia, Forks of the Ohio). Whoever held the Forks held the river road into the entire valley, and holding it triggered the French and Indian War of 1754-1763. Ohio's own nations were never mere bystanders in that contest: the Shawnee town at the mouth of the Scioto held roughly 1,200 people before it was abandoned in 1758 and its people moved north toward modern Chillicothe.

A line on the map, and a war over it

The Royal Proclamation of October 7, 1763 tried to reserve the lands west of the Appalachian watershed to Native nations, "strictly forbid[ding]" British subjects from settling there (Avalon Project, Proclamation of 1763). The same year, Pontiac's War broke out across the Great Lakes. In autumn 1764 Colonel Henry Bouquet marched nearly 1,500 regulars and militia from Fort Pitt into the Ohio Country, reaching the Tuscarawas River on October 13; the Shawnee, Ohio Seneca-Cayuga and Lenape agreed to return their captives, and more than 200 were handed over before the army withdrew on November 18.

1774: Yellow Creek, Logan and Camp Charlotte

On April 30, 1774, a party led by Daniel and Jacob Greathouse killed members of the Mingo leader Logan's family at Baker's Bottom, on the Virginia side of the Ohio opposite the mouth of Yellow Creek -- not, as is sometimes assumed, on the Ohio side of the river at all (Thwaites & Kellogg, Documentary History of Dunmore's War, 1905). Logan blamed a man he called "Colonel Cresap," but the editors of the documentary record concluded that Michael Cresap, who in any case held only the rank of captain, "took no part" in the Yellow Creek killings.

Virginia's royal governor, Lord Dunmore, marched two columns into the valley in response. At Point Pleasant, at the mouth of the Kanawha, Shawnee and Mingo warriors under Cornstalk attacked Colonel Andrew Lewis's army on October 10, 1774 (Wikipedia, Battle of Point Pleasant). Dunmore then advanced to Camp Charlotte on the Pickaway Plains, about eight miles from the main Shawnee town near modern Circleville. The Shawnee agreed to return prisoners and treat the Ohio River as a hunting boundary, in an arrangement meant to be finalized the next spring -- a plan the Revolution overtook before it could happen (Thwaites & Kellogg, 1905).

Logan himself refused to come to the council, instead sending his now-famous speech to be delivered by John Gibson. Thomas Jefferson printed it in Notes on the State of Virginia, challenging "the whole orations of Demosthenes and Cicero" to produce anything superior; its closing line reads, "Who is there to mourn for Logan? -- Not one." (Avalon Project, Jefferson's Notes, Query VI).

The Revolution in the Ohio Country

The Treaty of Fort Pitt, signed September 17, 1778, is usually called the first formal treaty between the United States and a Native nation. Signed by White Eyes, John Killbuck Jr. and Captain Pipe for the Lenape, its sixth article held out the possibility that friendly nations might join together "and to form a state whereof the Delaware nation shall be the head, and have a representation in Congress" -- provided Congress approved. Congress's approval, in the words of one historian, "was never granted" (Kappler, Treaty with the Delawares, 1778).

Fort Laurens, Ohio's only Continental Army fort, was built near Bolivar in November-December 1778 and named for Henry Laurens, president of Congress. A British-led force of Wyandot, Mingo, Munsee and Lenape besieged it from February 22 to about March 20, 1779; the starving garrison boiled their moccasins, and a relief column arrived three days after the siege lifted. The last soldiers left on August 2, 1779. Remains of a soldier excavated at the fort site in 1973 were reburied with military honors in 1976 as the Unknown Patriot of the American Revolution.

The war's darkest episode in Ohio came on March 8, 1782, at Gnadenhutten in Tuscarawas County. Pennsylvania militia found Christian Lenape and Mohican people who had returned from a forced relocation to harvest corn left standing at their mission town, held them overnight, and killed them the next morning. Counts of the dead vary -- Ohio's official land history gives 96, the missionary John Heckewelder wrote that the number "exceeded ninety," and a state historical marker says "about ninety" -- but every source agrees the dead were unarmed Christian converts, families gathered to bring in a harvest, not the "warriors" that the killers' own account to the press claimed (Knepper, Official Ohio Lands Book, 2002; Heckewelder, Narrative, 1820). Two boys escaped. Three months later, in June 1782, Colonel William Crawford led an expedition against Wyandot and Lenape towns on the Sandusky in what both a 1930 state memorial and Ohio History Central present as revenge for Gnadenhutten; the expedition collapsed, Crawford was captured, and his Lenape captors began torturing him on the afternoon of June 11, 1782, three-quarters of a mile from Captain Pipe's house on Tymochtee Creek. He died that evening (Butterfield, Expedition against Sandusky, 1873).

The Treaty of Paris, signed September 3, 1783, ended the Revolution and ceded everything south of the Great Lakes and east of the Mississippi to the new United States -- a treaty text that does not mention the region's Native nations at all (Avalon Project, Treaty of Paris 1783).

Claims, cessions and a grid laid over Ohio

With peace came the question of who would own the land, and the states with western claims began surrendering them to Congress. Virginia ceded its claim in 1784 but kept about 4.2 million acres between the Scioto and Little Miami rivers for its Revolutionary War veterans -- the Virginia Military District, the only part of Ohio not laid out on the rectangular federal survey grid (Knepper, 2002). Connecticut surrendered its own claim in 1786 but kept the Western Reserve along Lake Erie, selling most of it to the Connecticut Land Company in 1795.

The Land Ordinance of May 20, 1785 set up the system that would define the state: six-mile-square townships divided into 36 one-mile sections, sold for a minimum of $1 an acre, with section 16 of every township reserved for public schools -- "the first federal aid to education, predating the Constitution itself" (Knepper, 2002). Surveyor Thomas Hutchins began the first federal land survey from a stake on the north bank of the Ohio near modern East Liverpool on September 30, 1785, but stopped after less than four miles on October 8 for fear of Indian attack, not resuming until the following August. The exact spot where the nation's public land survey system began has never been relocated; the general area lies under the pool of a dam, and a marker on State Route 39 estimates the point was 1,112 feet to its south (National Historic Landmark nomination, Beginning Point of the U.S. Public Land Survey).

A series of treaties tried, and repeatedly failed, to settle the resulting land disputes peacefully. The Treaty of Fort McIntosh (January 21, 1785) drew a line with the Wyandot, Lenape, Ojibwe and Odawa; Ohio History Central notes that many of the Native signers were younger men without real authority, and that some were drunk on American liquor during the talks (Ohio History Central, Treaty of Fort McIntosh). The Treaty of Fort Finney (January 31, 1786) forced Shawnee signers to "acknowledge the United States to be the sole and absolute sovereigns" of ceded territory. The Northwest Ordinance of July 13, 1787 promised that "the utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians; their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent" -- a promise the following decade of warfare did not keep (Avalon Project, Northwest Ordinance). The Treaty of Fort Harmar (January 9, 1789) simply renewed the Fort McIntosh line; none of it stopped American settlement on land the treaties had reserved.

The Northwest Indian War

What followed was full-scale war, and it began in humiliating fashion for the young United States. In October 1790, General Josiah Harmar marched from Fort Washington (Cincinnati) with 1,453 men, only 320 of them regulars; his detachments were beaten near Kekionga (modern Fort Wayne, Indiana) and most of the militia fled (Ohio History Central, Harmar's Defeat).

Far worse followed a year later. On November 4, 1791, near the site of modern Fort Recovery in Mercer County, a Native force that likely included Little Turtle, Blue Jacket, Buckongahelas, Tarhe and Egushawa attacked General Arthur St. Clair's army of about 1,400 effective men about half an hour before sunrise. The fighting lasted roughly four hours before what a congressional report afterward called "the retreat ... disorderly in the extreme" -- a rout that St. Clair himself said ran 29 miles back to Fort Jefferson (House committee report, May 8, 1792, American State Papers, Military Affairs, vol. 1). Sources disagree on the exact toll -- 623 killed and 258 wounded of 1,400 by one count, 648 killed and 279 injured of 1,450 by another -- but the House's own historians summarize it simply: "more than 600 American soldiers were killed" (House History, Committees Fact Sheet). The U.S. Army Quartermaster Museum calls it "among the worst defeats in the history of the United States Army" (QM Museum). Native losses, by contrast, are estimated at only about 21 killed and 40 wounded.

The defeat triggered the first investigation any committee of Congress ever conducted, authorized March 27, 1792. Its report found packsaddles unfit for use, forges shipped without anvils, levies paid a mere three dollars, and discharge notes so worthless that some soldiers sold them "for one dollar, or one gallon of whiskey" -- but it cleared St. Clair himself, finding him "cool and deliberate," and blamed the army's supply contractors instead (American State Papers, Military Affairs, vol. 1).

Congress rebuilt the regular army as the Legion of the United States under General Anthony Wayne. On Christmas Day 1793, the Legion reached St. Clair's old battlefield, found it still strewn with human bones, buried the remains, and built Fort Recovery on the spot. On June 30-July 1, 1794, a large Native force under Little Turtle and Blue Jacket struck a supply train near the new fort and then attacked the fort itself; its 250 defenders held, though estimates of the toll on both sides vary. On August 20, 1794, Wayne's Legion met as many as 1,100 warriors sheltering among storm-felled timber near modern Maumee and drove them off decisively at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, ending the war (Pratt, Ohio Valley Historical Archaeology, vol. 18).

The Treaty of Greenville

Wayne signed the resulting Treaty of Greenville on August 3, 1795 at Greenville in Darke County, as "sole commissioner," with representatives of the Wyandot, Lenape, Shawnee, Odawa, Ojibwe, Potawatomi, Myaamia and several smaller nations. George Washington ratified it on December 22, 1795. The treaty drew a new boundary line running up the Cuyahoga, down the Tuscarawas, west past Loramie's store to Fort Recovery, then southwest to the Ohio River near the mouth of the Kentucky River -- everything east and south of that line was ceded, along with sixteen separate tracts scattered from Loramie's store to Detroit and Chicago. The Ohio Auditor's office puts the total Greenville cession at 16,930,417 acres ($9,500 a year "forever" was promised in return, split among the signing nations) (Kappler, Treaty with the Wyandot etc., 1795; Knepper, 2002). An official return counted 1,130 Native people present at the signing, and roughly 90 leaders made their marks on the parchment -- among them Tarhe, Buckongahelas, Blue Jacket and Little Turtle -- witnessed by William Henry Harrison, then serving as Wayne's aide-de-camp and, decades later, the ninth president of the United States. On the surviving parchment at the National Archives, many of the marks are drawn figures -- birds, animals, a turtle-like shape -- beside red wax seals (National Archives, Ratified Indian Treaty 23).

The territory becomes a state

With Greenville signed and the British finally withdrawing their Great Lakes garrisons under the Jay Treaty in the summer of 1796, American settlement of Ohio accelerated fast. Ebenezer Zane cut a bridle path across the state in 1796-97, a Shawnee man named Tomepomehala guiding the route, giving rise to Zanesville where it crossed the Muskingum. Governor Arthur St. Clair's territorial government moved its seat from Marietta to Cincinnati, and then, by an act of Congress on May 7, 1800, the seat shifted to "Chilicothe, on Scioto river."

There, a political faction known as the Chillicothe Junto -- led by Thomas Worthington, his brother-in-law Edward Tiffin and Nathaniel Massie -- organized against St. Clair's Federalist administration (Wikipedia, Chillicothe Junto). Congress's Enabling Act of April 30, 1802 called 35 delegates to a convention at Chillicothe, and though the 1800 census had counted only 45,365 people -- short of the 60,000 the Northwest Ordinance called for -- a House committee judged the number would be reached in time.

The convention met from November 1 to 29, 1802, with Edward Tiffin elected president. The vote that it was "expedient" to form a state passed 32 to 1, with only Ephraim Cutler of Washington County opposed (Journal of the Convention, 1802). St. Clair himself, opposing statehood on this timeline, told the convention that the Enabling Act "is not binding on the people, and is in truth a nullity" -- a challenge to federal authority that cost him his job; Secretary of State James Madison removed him as governor within days, citing "an intemperance and indecorum of language" (St. Clair Papers, vol. 1).

The convention's closest and most consequential vote had nothing to do with statehood itself. On November 22, delegates voted 19-15 to let Black and mixed-race men already living in the territory vote, if they registered their citizenship. Four days later, on the third reading, a motion to strike that same proviso was recorded as tied 17-17 -- but the roll actually named only 16 delegates voting to strike it and 17 to keep it. It was President Tiffin's own vote, cast for the side to strike, that made the tally 17-17 and, "the convention being equally divided, and Mr. President declaring himself with the yeas," removed Black suffrage from the document Ohio adopted (Journal of the Convention, 1802). The finished constitution was never submitted to Ohio's voters for ratification at all.

Worthington carried the constitution to Washington, arriving December 19, 1802 and presenting it three days later. An act of Congress dated February 19, 1803 declared that Ohio's people had formed a constitution "whereby the said state has become one of the United States of America." Ohio's first General Assembly met at Chillicothe on March 1, 1803, and Tiffin, already elected governor that January, took office that same month. The National Archives treats February 19 as the legal date of statehood, while Ohio itself has long celebrated March 1 -- and in 1953, 150 years after the fact, Congress passed a joint resolution making March 1, 1803 the state's admission date beyond any legal doubt, a measure Ohio's own official land history calls passed "one would hope tongue in cheek" (67 Stat. 407, Public Law 83-204; Knepper, 2002). Tax protesters have since tried to argue that Ohio was not really a state in 1913 when the 16th Amendment was ratified; the IRS lists this among its examples of frivolous tax arguments, noting simply that Ohio "became a state in 1803" (IRS, "The Truth About Frivolous Tax Arguments").

Statehood did not end the story for Ohio's Native nations. The Treaty of Fort Industry in 1805 pushed the boundary line further west, and further treaties in 1817 and 1818 confined the remaining nations to reserves; the last of those, at Upper Sandusky, was given up in 1842, and the Wyandot -- the final nation to leave -- departed Ohio in July 1843.

Sources

• Wikipedia, Forks of the Ohio
• Avalon Project, Royal Proclamation of 1763
• Thwaites & Kellogg, Documentary History of Dunmore's War, 1774 (1905)
• Wikipedia, Battle of Point Pleasant
• Avalon Project, Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia
• Kappler, Treaty with the Delawares, 1778
• Knepper, Official Ohio Lands Book (Ohio Auditor of State, 2002)
• Heckewelder, Narrative of the Mission of the United Brethren (1820)
• Butterfield, Expedition against Sandusky under Col. William Crawford (1873)
• Avalon Project, Treaty of Paris 1783
• National Historic Landmark nomination, Beginning Point of the U.S. Public Land Survey
• Ohio History Central, Treaty of Fort McIntosh (1785)
• Avalon Project, Northwest Ordinance
• Ohio History Central, Harmar's Defeat
• American State Papers, Military Affairs, vol. 1 (1832)
• House History, Committees Fact Sheet
• U.S. Army Quartermaster Museum, St. Clair's Campaign
• Pratt, Ohio Valley Historical Archaeology, vol. 18 (2003)
• Kappler, Treaty with the Wyandot etc. (Greenville), 1795
• National Archives, Ratified Indian Treaty 23 (Greenville)
• Wikipedia, Chillicothe Junto
• Smith, The St. Clair Papers, vol. 1 (1882)
• Journal of the Convention of the Territory ... North-west of the Ohio (1802)
• 67 Stat. 407, Public Law 83-204 (1953)
• IRS, "The Truth About Frivolous Tax Arguments" (2006)