Ohio History Journal


JOHN JAMES PIATT, REPRESENTATIVE FIGURE

JOHN JAMES PIATT, REPRESENTATIVE FIGURE

OF A MOMENTOUS PERIOD

 

By CLARE DOWLER

 

Biographical and Critical Study.

The development of Ohio from 1830 to I880 was spectacular.

It characterized, in a fashion, the development of the whole nation.

In this typical region, it would be hard to find a more representa-

tive man than John James Piatt. His life span began as Ohio was

emerging out of the wilderness, as "Johnny Appleseed's" trees

were bearing abundantly, and as the completion of a system of

internal canals and waterways filliped the growth of the State to

an accelerated speed. In his boyhood he was excited by the new

marvels of steam--by Robert Fulton's steamboat which, only

twenty-three years before Piatt's birth, had startled the woods-

men and settlers along the Ohio as it paddled its way from Pitts-

burgh to New Orleans; by the steam locomotive which only five

years before Piatt's birth had drawn a train of cars along twenty-

three miles of track on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. Piatt's

images, his themes, his references illustrate strikingly the imprint

of the new mode of life upon his generation.

He had not the qualities of a Daniel Boone. In the periodic

westward movements of frontiersmen, Boone represented the first,

the trail-blazer-Indian-killer type. Piatt represented the second,

the tiller of the soil, the man who subjugated the ruthless forces

of nature, who began to grope for expression and tried to make

articulate the life he represented. Nor had he the background of

a James Russell Lowell. Piatt's forebears should not be dis-

paraged, although they excelled in wars, rebelling against tyranny,

rather than in literary accomplishment.

It was good that his ancestors were of the crusading type,

that he himself was what he was, for in general, the effete east-

erner could not write about the new West like one actually bred in

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