Ohio History Journal

ANDREW R.L. CAYTON

 

The State of Ohio's Early History:

A Review Essay

 

The Ohio Frontier: Crucible of the Old Northwest, 1720-1830. By R. Douglas

Hurt. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. xv + ⁴¹⁸p.; illustrations,

bibliographic essay, index. $35.00.)

 

 

 

It is axiomatic that each generation creates its own version of the past. As

much as historians value objectivity, most of them see it is a noble but

unattainable goal. Historians always have and always will interpret the past

through the prism of the present. They strive for fairness knowing that in the

end they distort the past in order to make sense of it, realizing that truth will

remain forever elusive. We never will know, for example, what it was like to

live on the Ohio frontier in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

We can take our faded newspapers, fragile letters and diaries, physical remains

of houses and canals, whatever scraps of information we can find, and attempt

to reconstruct that time and place as judiciously as possible. But this is a

world that it lost to us forever, inhabited by people who are no more than

ghosts.

Writing history, therefore, means trying to organize fragments of often du-

bious and contradictory information into a persuasive argument about some-

thing that we will never fully understand. Because interpretation is at the

heart of the historians' enterprise, the presentation of evidence is as critical as

the discovery of it. Indeed, form usually dictates content. Unfortunately, his-

torians today rarely think of themselves as writers; many remain oblivious to

the ways in which the forms and sources they choose dictate what they have

to say. The choices they make about where to begin and end, what to leave

out, what to emphasize, are choices made within boundaries established by

the questions that dominate their lives and by the evidence and forms of ex-

pression available to them.

Constructing a work of historical synthesis is a classic example of this

process. Typically, its building blocks are the writings of other historians,

that is, scholarly articles or book-length monographs, detailed interpretations

 

 

Andrew R.L. Cayton is Professor of History at Miami University. In the cause of full disclo-

sure, he freely admits that he is not only the author of Frontier Indiana (1996), a volume in the

same series as The Ohio Frontier, but that he recommended R. Douglas Hurt as a potential au-

thor of this book to the series' editors.

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The State of Ohio's Early History                                193

 

of primary research in well-defined, relatively narrow topics. Although the

author of a synthesis may do some primary research on his or her own, what

he or she writes is, more often than not, a matter of shaping the evidence and

conclusions of dozens of monographic studies into a coherent whole. Still,

while the author is heavily dependent on the questions and evidence of other

historians, the author of a synthesis does more than simply transcribe or

summarize their work.

The art of writing a synthesis is different from the art of writing a mono-

graph, just as teaching a survey of American history requires different skills

than teaching a graduate seminar on a particular subject. A synthesis is a

form in which historians step back, look at the forest rather than the trees,

and try to say something about the larger meanings of events in a particular

place during a particular period of time. Thus the publication of a book such

as R. Douglas Hurt's The Ohio Frontier is an important moment in the his-

tory of Ohio's history because it is not a monograph; it is a critical com-

pendium of the concerns and conclusions of the dozens of scholars who have

been trying to reconstruct bits and pieces of the state's past for the last several

decades. Hurt does such a skillful job of synthesizing the work of other his-

torians that his book tells us as much about Ohio's historiography as its his-

tory. The Ohio Frontier, assuming it reaches the wide audience it deserves,

will be for many people their only acquaintance with the kinds of things

scholars have been writing about early Ohio since the Second World War.

Hurt created his book with a popular audience in mind. This was a wise

decision, for academic historians (unless they are Ohio historians) will proba-

bly find little to interest them in The Ohio Frontier and its companion vol-

umes in the History of the Trans-Appalachian Frontier series being published

by Indiana University Press. Scholars who are concerned primarily with ques-

tions (about issues such as gender, race, class, and power) that transcend the

chronological or territorial boundaries established by traditional political his-

tory have no particular interest in a state or a region as a place. To them, a

particular area exists primarily as an evidentiary base for larger arguments

about the development of the United States or modern societies in general.¹

Contemporary academic historians, moreover, are in pursuit of conflict;

most want to suggest that the development of the political, economic, and

social structures of the United States was highly contested and always contin-

gent; in short, history did not have to evolve as it did. They are likely to be

dismissive of state histories because they (quite rightly) see them as reinforc-

ing arbitrary boundaries of time and space and because they tend to be by their

very nature celebratory. Because the requirements of the form dictate the na-

 

 

1. A particularly succinct and sophisticated statement of this position is Nancy Shoemaker,

"Regions as Categories of Analysis," Perspectives: The American Historical Association

Newsletter 34, 8 (1996), 7-8, 10.

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194                                                    OHIO HISTORY

 

ture of his narrative, the fact that Hurt was called upon to write a history of a

state that does not even exist until the last quarter of his book predetermines

the structures of his argument. Thoroughly whiggish (in the sense that it

views the past as an anticipation of the present), it is about how Ohio became

Ohio.

But this is precisely the reason many state and local historians, on the other

hand, will take great delight in The Ohio Frontier. They study Ohio because

they live here and because they feel some measure of affection for it as a par-

ticular place. They may occasionally resent the work of academic historians,

in part because it gets more national recognition, at least within the very nar-

row world of historical scholarship. They may also point out academic histo-

rians have no real feel for the place, no appreciation of its nuances and intrica-

cies. I remember one such historian politely but firmly telling me ten years

ago that I had no business writing a book² about Ohio's political culture be-

cause my Ph.D. was from an Ivy League university (Brown) and I had no real

acquaintance with the state; his genteel hostility was instantly transformed

into genteel friendliness when I protested that I had been born in Cincinnati,

raised in Marietta, and that my grandfather had received an M.A. in history

from Miami University. To him, my local credentials meant more than my

academic ones.

This tribal tendency to suspect outsiders is not entirely misplaced, for aca-

demic historians in pursuit of great questions do often treat the state's history

like a candidate for the presidency rather than as a candidate for the state legis-

lature. Still, the insularity of state history can be intellectually debilitating.

It promotes provincialism; it tends to underestimate the importance of the

state in the history of the nation, if not the world. Ohio, as Hurt points out,

was at the center of American development after the American Revolution, It

was, in Hurt's apt but unfortunately underdeveloped phrase, the "Crucible of

the Old Northwest." The preoccupation of local and state historians with the

peculiarities of the reputation of the place they study leads them to ignore

much of the vast literature being published by historians on life beyond Ohio.

So concerned are they with what makes Ohio distinctive that they neglect to

develop a sense of what Ohio has in common with other places.

The Ohio Frontier suffers from this failing. But then what state history

does not? How many authors of state histories have been able to escape the

territorial and temporal limits of the form? Certainly, none of Hurt's prede-

cessors did, although they tried. Nineteenth-century historians of early Ohio,

obsessed with sectional conflict and Civil War, tended to schematize the

state's history as a struggle between New Englanders and Southerners. In

their endeavors, Jacob Burnet, Samuel Prescott Hildreth, and Caleb Atwater

 

2. Later published as Andrew R.L. Cayton, The Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in

the Ohio Country, 1780-1825 (Kent, 1986).

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The State of Ohio's Early History                                   195

 

were avowedly partisan.³ They generally constructed the history of early

Ohio in personal terms, as a time of trial or triumph for their relatives and

friends. They published their evidence selectively, taking care to delete pas-

sages from letters or speeches which might cause offense or embarrassment.

Not until the twentieth century did anyone attempt a dispassionate study of

frontier Ohio. The great syntheses of early Ohio's history appeared in the

1930s and 1940s, the work of Beverley W. Bond, Jr., William T. Utter, and

Randolph Downes.⁴ Residents of Ohio (they were professors of history at,

respectively, the University of Cincinnati, Denison University, and the

University of Toledo), these men wrote about the origins of the state in a

mildly whiggish fashion; they saw the past in large part as a prelude to the

present. Influenced by the ideas of Frederick Jackson Turner, the great apostle

of frontier history, they were certain that the settlement of early Ohio was a

critical part of the general unfolding of a triumphant American civilization

across the North American continent. Yet Bond, Utter, and Downes were

among the first professionally-trained academic historians; they were more in-

terested in objectivity than argument. Reacting to the partisan histories of

the nineteenth century, they sought to base what they said on thorough

(indeed, exhaustive) research in primary documents. They spent years reading

newspapers and the manuscript collections of the Ohio Historical Society, the

Western Reserve Historical Society, and the Cincinnati Historical Society.

Their books reflected their deep familiarity with the sources and their concern

with their professional integrity.

Today, the books by Bond, Downes, and Utter are not only classics of their

kind, they are still very useful to historians of early Ohio. Thoroughly re-

searched and clearly written, they have the weight of official history. They

give us a narrative of the military, political, and economic triumph of the

state's white settlers. In part, this construction of Ohio's past simply re-

flected the interests and training of the authors. But their evidence also dic-

tated their subject matter. For what they read was what we today might call

headline news. They mined the papers of Ohio's leading politicians, Indian

fighters, land speculators, and merchants, and they wrote books that reflected

the concerns of Ohio's leading politicians, Indian fighters, land speculators,

and merchants. Their achievement was remarkable but incomplete: together,

they laid out the basic events, trends and prominent personalities of early

Ohio. But they did not tell us much about the lives of ordinary people.

In the fifty-plus years since Bond, Utter, and Downes published their work,

 

3. Jacob Burnet, Notes on the Settlement of the North-Western Territory (Cincinnati, 1847);

Samuel Prescott Hildreth, Pioneer History (Cincinnati, 1848); and Caleb Atwater, A History of

the State of Ohio: Natural and Civil (Cincinnati, 1838).

4. Beverley W. Bond, Jr., The Foundations of Ohio (Columbus, 1941); William T. Utter, The

Frontier State, 1803-1825 (Columbus, 1942); and Randolph Downes, Frontier Ohio, 1788-1803

(Columbus, 1935).

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196                                                      OHIO HISTORY

 

many scholars have studied Ohio from a variety of angles and with a variety

of techniques. A few have artfully blended academic and state history, most

notably Harry N. Scheiber in Ohio Canal Era, probably the best book ever

written on early Ohio.⁵    A  few, principally Stanley Elkins and Eric

McKitrick, have lightly touched on the history of the state while making bril-

liant arguments about frontier societies.⁶ A few, most prominently Donald J.

Ratcliffe, have immersed themselves in the intricacies of both local and state

history to make important contributions about the nature of politics in the

early American republic.⁷ A few, including the late Robert L. Jones, a long-

time professor of history at Marietta College, have told us a great deal about

agriculture in frontier Ohio.⁸ And many others have written dozens of sub-

stantive articles, edited hundreds of documents for publication, producing an

enormous amount of reliable information on life in early Ohio; of these, none

is more distinguished than my retired colleague, Dwight Smith.

Hurt does an excellent job of incorporating the evidence and arguments of

these scholars into his narrative. The Ohio Frontier is a model synthesis in

the ways that it organizes monographs and articles into a coherent portrait of

the state as a whole. What is most striking, however, about Hurt's book is

how little our understanding of the history of Ohio has changed since the days

of Bond, Utter, and Downes, how much his narrative resembles theirs. His

questions and his subjects remain very similar to theirs. For all the heroic

labor of the past half-century, we have added detail and nuance to their story

but we have not fundamentally revised it. Our richer and more sympathetic

understanding of Native American cultures, to which Hurt devotes a great deal

of his book, has not caused him to rethink the overall interpretation of how

Ohio became a state. He eschews a detailed narrative of early politics for

greater attention to subjects such as agriculture and religion-a wise move

given the abundance of political history-but one that does not fundamentally

alter our sense of the rapid settlement and expansion of the state of Ohio.

This continuity in subject matter reflects less on Hurt than it does on the

state of Ohio's early history. The lack of social history (for example, infor-

mation on women) in The Ohio Frontier is not surprising, given the lack of

work on the subject. What evidence did Hurt have to draw on? The fact that

the social history of early Ohio is so weak, however, is surprising, given the

 

 

 

5. Harry N. Scheiber, Ohio Canal Era: A Case Study of Government and the Economy,

1821-1860 (Athens, 1969).

6. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, "A Meaning for Turner's Frontier: Democracy in the

Old Northwest," Political Science Quarterly, 69 (1954), 321-53.

7. Donald J. Ratcliffe, "The Experience of Revolution and the Beginnings of Party Politics in

Ohio, 1776-1816," Ohio History, 85 (Summer, 1976), 186-230. See also the essays in Jeffrey

P. Brown and Andrew R.L. Cayton, eds., The Pursuit of Public Power: Political Culture in

Ohio, 1787-1861 (Kent, 1994).

8. Robert L. Jones, History of Agriculture in Ohio to 1880 (Kent, 1983).

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The State of Ohio's Early History                                  197

 

proliferation of such work on places all around Ohio in the frontier period, in-

cluding eastern Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Illinois.⁹ The biggest contrast

is with the commonwealth of Kentucky. A whole legion of ambitious and

smart historians have descended on the state south of the Ohio River and have

written a host of articles, books, and dissertations that combine detailed

knowledge of Kentucky's history with a sense of the larger significance of

North America's contested evolution. These works, of which John Mack

Faragher's Daniel Boone is probably the best known, engage the concerns of

contemporary academic historians with a respect for state history and elegant

prose.¹⁰ Race, class, gender, questions of power and contestation are all here.

Hurt draws on some of this work, but he is limited by the fact that there are

no comparable studies of Ohio. Why not?

Why do politics and war, commerce and land speculation, remain the meat

and potatoes of Ohio history? Why are there so few good studies of religion

which go beyond the confines of denominational history? Why do we know

so little about women? Why has our knowledge of African Americans pro-

gressed so little beyond what historians knew in the 1930s? Why is there not

more about family structures and labor? Why are there no important commu-

nity studies? Where is a book about the life of the mind in the Ohio Valley?

Why do we know so little about Cincinnati in the 1790s and so much about

Lexington? Why is there no social history of the Virginia Military District?

Why is our knowledge of material culture so thin? Even on a conventional

level, why are there no updated biographies of such important figures as

Arthur St. Clair?

There are scholars working on some of these subjects; so some of these

questions may soon be rendered moot. Still, Hurt's book suggests the need

for a revitalization of Ohio's early state history. That revitalization might

begin with a transformation in the ways in which state historians conceptual-

ize what they do-on at least four levels. First is the need to find new and

different kinds of sources, to supplement the well-known collections of his-

torical societies with more intensive research in local communities. Legal

records, for example, are a boon to the study of all kinds of issues. And ma-

terial culture offers a virtually unlimited number of insights about the lives of

early Ohioans.

Second, it is important to break free of the interpretive models that have so

 

 

9. See, for example, Thomas P. Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the

American Revolution (New York, 1986); Susan Gray, The Yankee West: Community Life on

the Michigan Frontier (Chapel Hill, 1996); and John Mack Faragher, Sugar Creek: Life on the

Illinois Prairie (New Haven, 1986).

10. John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (New

York, 1992). See also, Stephen Aron, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of

Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (Baltimore, 1996); and Elizabeth Perkins, Border

Life: Experience and Perception in the Ohio Valley (Chapel Hill, 1998).

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198                                                 OHIO HISTORY

 

long dominated Ohio's history. The fact that Ohio was the first state carved

out of the Northwest Territory and that it was the scene of the major battles

of the Indian Wars of the 1790s has distorted its history by focusing a dispro-

portionate amount of attention on political and military history. Which is

not to say that those things are unimportant. They are very important, and

we cannot understand the origins of Ohio without studying them. Rather, the

point is to supplement and revise our existing master narrative. The abun-

dance of information on and studies of political and military events has made

it difficult for Ohio historians to take up questions of social and cultural his-

tory. In other words, Ohio's history is so dramatic on the level of headlines

that it may have inhibited exploration of developments beneath the surface.

A third objective is the need to think beyond state boundaries. Douglas

Hurt cannot be faulted for writing a history defined by arbitrary lines on a

map; that was his assignment. But much of what is interesting about life in

early Ohio-religion, communication, popular culture, household economies,

commerce-is more profitably viewed from a regional perspective than from

that of a politically-defined unit. Take religion, for example. Hurt writes

about religion largely in terms of denominations, which is not surprising

since virtually all of the literature is denominational history. Still, would it

not be more profitable to think of religion in broader terms, to emphasize that

the experiences of many of the people who were simply passing through

Ohio in the early nineteenth century were not peculiar to that time and place?

The final challenge is perhaps an idiosyncratic one, but I will mention it

anyway. It involves rediscovering something like the fervor of nineteenth-

century historians who were writing history for a purpose that went beyond

their careers, academic debates, or boosterism. Today, many people find his-

tory boring not because historians are bad writers but because their books lack

passion. Readers cannot figure out why they should care about what hap-

pened to these people two hundred years ago. As excellent as Hurt is in de-

tailing what we know about life in early Ohio, especially with regard to agri-

culture, he is not particularly good at giving an overall shape to the material.

As a whole, The Ohio Frontier lacks a compelling argument; it is simply

one thing added to another until Ohio is complete. In fact, readers may find it

more interesting in its parts than as a whole.

It is unfair to criticize Hurt for reporting what historians know about Ohio

in a thorough and dispassionate fashion; many scholars will argue that that

was precisely what he should have done. Still, I fear that history will not

capture its rightful place in the minds and hearts of Americans until it is

driven by some kind of moral imperative that helps them reimagine the lives

of the living as well as learn about the lives of the dead.

My guess is that general readers will find The Ohio Frontier exactly what

the author must have hoped it would be: a definitive history of early Ohio, a

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The State of Ohio's Early History                             199

 

worthy successor to the works of Bond, Downes, and Utter. They will not

be, nor should they be, troubled by the questions I have tried to raise in this

review. My hope for historians, however, is that the book's publication will

mark the end of a long chapter in the history of Ohio's history, that they will

view its contents and organization as the summation of a century's worth of

work and its lacunae as a call for passionate engagement in renewing and re-

vising our always contested and elusive understanding of Ohio's past.

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