BRIAN HARTE
Land in the Old Northwest: A
Study of
Speculation, Sales, and Settlement on the
Connecticut Western Reserve
Settlers who came to the American West
from the Northeast carried with
them a vision of what their new lives
would involve. The act of moving
to the West required a leap of faith, a
presumption that they could convert
their vision into reality. Despite their
uncertainties, these pioneers were
aware of and depended on certain existing
parameters that would stabi-
lize their lives in the new land. For
instance, the Northwest Ordinance of
1787 assured settlers that their new
homes would be safely within the con-
fines of the United States and its
political order. Also, they carried their
New England culture with them, and that
culture included a set of assump-
tions about their place in society and
the location of their markets. The land
speculator also had a vision, and the
act of investment required no less a
leap of faith on his part. The
speculator assumed that the territory in which
he was investing would develop into a
viable and integral part of the
country, rise in value, and return a
profit to him. As one of the first large-
scale targets for both settlers and
investors, Ohio became the testing
grounds for both settlers' and
speculators' confidence in the future of
Western settlement and development.
Thus, the settlement of Ohio played a
pivotal role in the shaping of West-
ern attitudes and East-West relationships.
In the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, the state and
national governments of the United
States began to distribute their western
lands to settlers and speculators;
much of this land was located in the
Northwest Territory and, specifically,
the Ohio country. The United States
Government and the various private
groups of speculators viewed the land
market in the Northwest Territory
as an opportunity to turn a fast profit.
Although some people actually made
a significant sum of money, lands sales
were not the surest path to riches
for many investors. A large plot in
northeastern Ohio known as the Con-
necticut Western Reserve had inherent
disadvantages that turned its ini-
Brian Harte graduated from Yale University
in 1991, where he completed this thesis for
the History Department under the
guidance of his friend and mentor, Jay Gitlin.
Land in the Old Northwest 115 |
|
tial promise into a financial debacle for many of the members of the Con- necticut Land Company. Because of the area's isolation and the slow pace of settlement, conditions for settlers on the Reserve were extremely spartan, even when compared to the generally difficult life of other early nineteenth-century frontier settlers. Despite the incentives offered by the Connecticut Land Company, rapid and comprehensive settlement and development of northeastern Ohio did not occur until the second quarter of the nineteenth century, when the completion of the Erie and Ohio-Erie Canals provided the area with a practical commercial link to the rest of the country. The Western Reserve was a small part of the area that came to be called the Northwest Territory, which in turn was part of a larger inheritance that the United States came into by the terms of the Treaty of Paris and from the cessions of various states (including Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia) in the late 1780s. Numer- ous Indian groups inhabited parts of this land and presented a significant obstacle to American settlement of this inheritance. Although the British
1. The Erie Canal was opened in 1825, and in 1827, two more events paved the way for rapid economic development of the Western Reserve: the opening of the Ohio-Erie Canal, and the clearing of the mouth of the Cuyahoga. See chapters 10 and 11 of Harlan Hatcher, The Western Reserve, (New York, 1949). |
116 OHIO HISTORY
had prohibited colonists from settling
west of the Appalachian Mountains
by the Proclamation Line of 1763,
squatters had been trickling into the
Ohio River valley since the middle of
the eighteenth century. Most of them
settled south of the river: James Harrod
founded Kentucky's first perma-
nent settlement in 1774, and largely
through the efforts of the Transylvania
Land Company, one hundred and fifty men
lived in Kentucky by 1775.2
A few squatters, mostly trappers and
adventurous pioneers, had ventured
into the forested land north of the
Ohio, but such settlement was very
sparse, in part because of the Indian
threat. The ever-present danger of such
formidable tribes as the Miami,
Delaware, and Shawnee ensured that a set-
tler's life in the Ohio wilderness would
be lonely and insecure. However,
in the 1780s, the number of settlers
daring to establish themselves in Ohio
increased gradually, and the young
Confederation government took action
to regulate the settlement of its new
lands. By the terms of the 1785 Treaty
of Fort McIntosh, the government was
required to remove American set-
tlers from Indian lands, but even small
military excursions were ineffec-
tive in stopping the slow flow of
settlers to Ohio.3
The new American government needed to
keep a strict watch on the set-
tlement pattern of the West for a number
of reasons. First, the Confeder-
ation (and the later federal government)
was submerged in postwar debt.
The public domain was one of its few
assets, and sales to settlers could
therefore be used to help finance the
government. Second, a compact and
well-ordered settlement pattern was essential
for the protection of the
American settlers from Indian attacks.
Third, the development of repub-
lican government in the new areas--and
hence the protection of the fragile
republic of the East--depended on a
closely supervised plan of settlement,
growth, and government. The plans of the
government and of private com-
panies reflected the desire to establish
towns and governmental structures
that would ease the integration of these
new settled areas into the young
republic.
With these goals in mind, the Congress
of the Confederation debated
over and finally passed the Land
Ordinance of 1785. The general plan
called for surveyors to divide the land
into vertical ranges and square town-
ships, each six miles square. The
townships were further divided into
smaller tracts. The land was to be sold
in large townships and smaller lots,
theoretically to accommodate both
wealthy and less wealthy purchasers.
2. Kentucky grew rapidly: by 1782 there
were already 8,000 inhabitants, and it became
the 14th state in 1792. Source: Malcolm
J. Rohrbaugh, The Trans-Appalachian Frontier (New
York, 1978), 24-25.
3. For the most part, early Ohio
settlers ignored the threats of the Confederation's mili-
tia units, and when the troops destroyed
their dwellings, the settlers simply rebuilt their homes
as soon as the units departed. See
Rohrbaugh, 64-65.
Land in the Old Northwest 117
However, the terms of sale under the
Land Ordinance were too strict and
too expensive for the "common
buyer"--Congress demanded at least a
dollar per acre plus the cost of the
survey, payable immediately at the time
of sale. No terms of credit were offered
at first, and the land was sold only
at a public auction in New York City,
further restricting sales. Not sur-
prisingly, the government sold less than
73,000 acres of land in 1787.4
Because initial sales in small tracts
were so slow, Congress promptly
violated its policy of trying to cater
to small buyers by selling giant chunks
of land to wealthy groups of
speculators. Shortly after passing the North-
west Ordinance in 1787, Congress sold
the Ohio Company one million
acres for less than ten cents per acre,
and further authorized the Treasury
to negotiate for the sale of huge--over
a million acres--tracts to other
interested parties, such as the Scioto
Company and the John Cleves
Symmes group, at equally low prices.5
Although the government raised
large sums quickly by these actions,
public land sales may have been hurt
in the long run by the competition that
these private speculators would soon
provide for the government's own land
agents.
As settlement proceeded, the Indian
problem became more and more
significant. A series of undeclared wars
began with the establishment of
the first settlements in the territory.
The Indians, armed and assisted by
the British in Detroit and Canada,
effectively utilized raiding tactics to
disrupt settlements in the Ohio country.
The federal government became
increasingly worried about these Indians,
in part because its inability to
establish order within its own
boundaries caused international embarrass-
ment at a time when the new country was
seeking recognition from Eu-
rope. The Indians routed two American
military expeditions, the first led
by General Josiah Harmar in 1790, and
the second led by Arthur St. Clair
in the following year. Finally, on
August 20, 1794, General Anthony
Wayne led carefully trained militia
units to Fallen Timbers, where he de-
feated a confederacy of Indian tribesmen.
The subsequent Treaty of
Greenville mandated that the Indians
vacate most of the land in present-
day Ohio, leaving most of the area open
to white settlement.6 The ensu-
ing movement of people into the
Territory forced Congress to reconsider
its sales and credit policies to
accommodate the new settlers.
Congress then formulated the Land Law of
1796, which offered more
latitude to the small purchaser and
settler. Although the price of land rose
4. Rohrbaugh, The Land Office
Business (New York, 1968), 10-11.
5. Because of this policy, the Land
Ordinance of 1785 was essentially disregarded: "the
first arrangements for the disposal of
the public domain stood discredited and unused. The
rectangular system of surveys was a
disappointment because of its slowness and expense."
Rohrbaugh, The Land Office
Business,11.
6. See Thomas D. Clark, "Fallen
Timbers, Battle of," and "Greenville, Treaty of," in The
Reader's Encyclopedia of the American
West, ed. Howard R. Lamar (New York,
1977).
118 OHIO HISTORY
to a minimum of two dollars per acre,
buyers were given a year to pay the
full price; cash purchasers received a
discount. The law also permitted land
sales to occur in towns in the
territory, such as Cincinnati. However, the
minimum purchase size was 640 acres,
still too large and expensive a pur-
chase for a small-time buyer. Thus,
although Congress had high expecta-
tions for the new land law, sales were
very slow--only 49,000 acres were
sold in 1796 7--because the government
was not offering terms of sale
that were competitive with the offers
that the private companies made.
Ironically, in order to raise money, the
government had earlier sold large
plots at fantastically low prices to
these same companies which were now
undercutting the federal land agents.
For example, the John C. Symmes
group could offer a smaller minimum
purchase at one dollar per acre with
better credit terms than the Land Law of
1796 permitted.8 For the most
part, then, settlement was limited to
the lands owned by the speculative
companies; westward immigrants generally
avoided the public lands. After
only three years under the new law,
Congress began once again to plan a
new land sales strategy, this time with
the help and guidance of a repre-
sentative from Ohio.
Under the terms of the Northwest
Ordinance of 1787, when the popu-
lation of a territory passed five
thousand free white males of voting age,
its general assembly was permitted to
elect a delegate to Congress. The
Northwest Territory's first legislature
convened in 1799 and chose William
Henry Harrison as its representative in
Washington. Advised by Harrison,
Congress passed a new land law in 1800
that was more advantageous to
small buyers than the previous
legislation. Most significantly, the law ex-
panded the credit terms on land
purchases to allow up to four years of an-
nual installment payments. It also
reduced the minimum purchase size to
320 acres.9
The law of 1800 also created four land
districts in Ohio to better facili-
tate the sales of land from outposts in
the Northwest Territory; the districts
were centered in Cincinnati,
Chillicothe, Marietta, and Steubenville. Al-
though people continued to complain that
the terms of sale were still too
difficult for many potential buyers to
meet, income from sales of public
land increased significantly, reaching
10 percent of the total national in-
come in 1814.10 As settlers filled up
the Ohio country, Congress opened
7. Rohrbaugh, The Land Office
Business, 18.
8. Ibid., 18-19.
9. The Land Law of 1800 was the last
major piece of land policy legislation until 1820,
when Congress further reduced the
minimum price and the minimum tract size. For details
on the Land Law of 1800, see Rohrbaugh, The
Land Office Business, 19-22.
10. In his article "Land Policy,
1780-1896," from the Reader's Encyclopedia of the Amer-
ican West, P. W. Gates reports that land sales as a percentage of
national income rose to this
level from only 4 percent in 1805, and
rose further to 13 percent by 1819.
Land in the Old Northwest 119
up new territories in Illinois and
Indiana, and Jefferson's Secretary of the
Treasury, Albert Gallatin, established
six new land office districts in the
Northwest Territory (two were located in
Ohio), and another in St. Louis.
Although United States land policy would
continue to evolve during the
course of the nineteenth century, the
law of 1800 was a landmark piece of
legislation that attempted to address
directly the problems that both
buyers and sellers had encountered in
trying to settle the American West.
Although most of the Northwest Territory
fell under the Federal gov-
ernment's jurisdiction, some parts were
never public domain lands. For
instance, Virginia and Connecticut
maintained claims to large tracts of
land in the Ohio country. Virginia used
its reserved lands between the Lit-
tle Miami and Scioto Rivers to
compensate Revolutionary War veterans,
and, for the most part, this area was
not the site of large-scale speculative
ventures. Referring to its original
colonial charter of 1662, Connecticut
claimed a strip of land that extended
from Pennsylvania to the Mississip-
pi River. Although the state ceded most
of its western claims to the Con-
federation in 1786, Connecticut
maintained its claim to a piece of land that
fronted Lake Erie, extending 120 miles
to the west of the Pennsylvania
border, as a means of raising revenue
for the new state government.
Against the larger backdrop of United
States public land policies, the sce-
nario of speculation and settlement that
occurred on the private lands of
the Connecticut Western Reserve provides
a striking example of mis-
management and unmet expectations.
In 1795, after several years of
bickering, the General Assembly of
Connecticut created a committee of eight
legislators to organize the sale
of the Western Reserve to any interested
persons or groups for at least one
million dollars. The money from the sale
was designated to initiate the
Connecticut School Fund, a still-extant
endowment for the support of pub-
lic schools in the state. In response to
the offer, a group of wealthy New
England men formed an association in
September of 1795, organizing
themselves as the Connecticut Land
Company. After a month of negoti-
ations, the Connecticut Land Company
purchased the state's holdings in
northeastern Ohio for $1,200,000, with
most of the money to be paid out
on a five-year credit plan.11
11. A history of the Connecticut Land
Company can be found in the 1915-1916 Annual
Report of the Western Reserve Historical
Society (Cleveland, 1916), also referred to as Tract
No. 96 of their collection. "The
Connecticut Land Company and Accompanying Papers,"
edited by Claude L. Shepard, contains a
detailed history of the company as well as a num-
ber of documents that pertain to its
history and to the history of the Western Reserve- char-
ters, committee reports, and much more.
For details on the purchase of the Western Reserve,
see the "Report of the Connecticut
Committee on the Sale of the Western Reserve, Septem-
ber, 1795," pages 125-44.
120 OHIO HISTORY
The fifty-eight members of the Company
associated themselves into
thirty-five shareholding
"purchasers," with a purchaser sometimes con-
sisting of two or three men. The largest
investor, Oliver Phelps, invested
over $200,000 in the company.12 Most
of the men were from Connecticut
and, like Rufus Putnam of the Ohio
Company and John C. Symmes, they
were interested in making a fast profit
by entering the Ohio land market
when it was in its infancy.
The board of directors of the company
formulated plans for extin-
guishing Indian claims, surveying the
land, and selling it. Their first order
of business was to survey and partition
the Company's holdings. Although
many legislators and Company members had
assumed that the Western Re-
serve tract consisted of over three
million acres, the Reserve was really
an unmeasured quantity. In fact, the
Company members received an un-
pleasant shock when the first surveying
parties, led by Moses Cleaveland
and Augustus Porter in 1796, discovered
that their property actually con-
tained just under three million acres.
Unfortunately, in their overconfi-
dence, the Company had already sold the
rights to any Reserve lands in
excess of three million acres to the
Excess Company, which had then sold
the title to William Hull. Hull did not
lose all of his money immediately,
though--he was taken into the Company
and allowed to share in the prof-
its from land sales.13
The Company's teams surveyed the Western
Reserve along the lines of
the method mandated by the Land
Ordinance of 1785. That is, the tract was
divided into vertical ranges that were
numbered from east to west, and the
townships, each a unit of land five
miles square, were numbered within
each range from south to north. The land
was divided among the members
of the Company in an elaborate lottery
designed to compensate the
choosers of "bad lots" with an
appropriate number of "good lots." The
Company's Articles of Association also
included clauses that would al-
low the directors to set aside parcels
of land containing salt springs, the
sales of which would directly profit the
Company. The Company took ad-
vantage of this provision in 1798,
reserving a two-thousand acre tract of
land containing a salt spring and
attempting to lease it to future settlers.14
This venture proved unprofitable,
possibly because none of the settlers had
the means to pay for salt in 1798; in
fact, there were hardly any settlers at
all in 1798.
12. WRHS Tract No. 96 also contains
documentation of the original membership of the Con-
necticut Land Company, along with each
person's investment and holdings (pages 131- 34).
13. The error was due to inaccurate maps
which misplaced the Lake Erie shore. Much of
the land that the surveyors expected to
find was actually located in Lake Erie. The story of
the discovery of the error and the fatl
of the Excess Company is related in Hatcher, 39-43.
14. WRHS Tract No. 96, 83.
Land in the Old Northwest 121
Unfortunately, the members of the
Connecticut Land Company mis-
calculated the value of their purchase
and the desirability of the land to
eastern settlers. The members hoped to
make their profits exclusively from
the sale of land to settlers, believing
that the Reserve was primed for the
rapid settlement that was beginning to
occur in the Ohio Valley. They were
mistaken. Sales would be painfully slow,
a condition that was exacerbat-
ed by the general ignorance among the
investors about what the Western
Reserve consisted of and how to best
manage it.
The primary reason that sales of Reserve
lands would prove initially dis-
appointing was that the area was
essentially detached from the markets and
resources of the Ohio Valley and the
East. The lands in the middle and the
south of the state were fertile and well
watered. Natural resources, in-
cluding coal and timber, were abundant
in the southeastern part of the terri-
tory, where the Appalachian foothills
cross through the Ohio Valley. Most
importantly, a system of rivers,
including the Miami, the Scioto, and the
Muskingum, connected much of the state
to the Ohio River. The Ohio was
the economic link between the settlers
in the Territory and the cities of
Pittsburgh, New Orleans, the Eastern
ports, and the rest of the world. Set-
tlers in the Ohio Valley utilized these
rivers to sell the products of their
labor--mostly corn, wheat, and
livestock--to buyers in the South and
East. The result was the development of
an "economic axis" extending
from Pittsburgh to New Orleans along the
Ohio and Mississippi rivers,
through which settlers could also obtain
materials and supplies not avail-
able in the Northwest.15
In contrast, the Western Reserve land,
while also good farming land, was
isolated from the American market
system. To the east, the Appalachian
mountains inhibited the establishment of
efficient overland trading routes
with Eastern cities. The Reserve was
also sufficiently far north to prevent
efficient and economical overland
transportation of goods from and to the
Ohio River network. The Reserve's
extensive river system flowed into
Lake Erie, but to the north the Niagara
Falls and often-frozen St. Lawrence
River prohibited traders from reliably
travelling along this system back
to the East; furthermore, this route cut
through British Canada, and the
Montreal traders were not likely to give
preferential or fair treatment to
American farmers.
Realizing the need to compete
effectively in the Western land market,
the directors of the company did try to
provide incentives for settlement.
In its Articles of Association, the
Company allowed the directors to make
special provisions to the first settlers
on the Reserve. These were pioneers
15. The development and effects of this
important trade network in the Mississippi basin
is thoroughly discussed in Rohrbaugh, The
Trans-Appalachian Frontier, 93-1 14.
122 OHIO HISTORY
who would have to build their homes and
farms, improve the land, and
make a living without the benefit of
neighbors or experience. To better
accommodate them, the directors
identified the first townships to be set-
tled and paid for the erection of
sawmills and gristmills there. When the
city of Cleveland was founded in July
1796 at the mouth of the Cuyahoga,
settlement of the Western Reserve was
officially opened.
However, settlement proceeded slowly,
and the Company quickly de-
cided that further steps were necessary
to promote settlement. In 1797 and
again in 1798, the Company moved to
appropriate funds for the con-
struction of roads and bridges to
facilitate both internal transportation
through the Reserve and roads into it
from the East.16 In 1801, the Com-
pany paid for the construction of a road
from Buffalo through western New
York and Pennsylvania to the Reserve, an
indication that immigration was
occurring too slowly for the Company's
liking.17 Roads were not the only
investments that the Company made to
promote settlement. In 1798, the
purchasers voted to authorize the
directors to give small parcels of land
in Cleveland to blacksmiths and
mechanics. The directors also occasion-
ally gave free land to early settlers to
pay them back for "risque and hard-
ships encountered," and even to one
James Kingsbury and family for hav-
ing the first child born on the Reserve.18
Despite these attempts to improve the
land, Samuel Huntington attested
to Moses Cleaveland in several letters
that settlement and economic
conditions on the Reserve remained very
poor. Huntington was a Yale grad-
uate who migrated to Ohio in 1800 and
participated extensively in Ohio
politics. In a series of letters to
Cleaveland, the general agent for the Con-
necticut Land Company, Huntington tried
to rally support for Company-
sponsored improvements to the Reserve.
In 1801, he informed Cleaveland
that the roads into the city of
Cleveland were poorly maintained, needing
occasional cutting and clearing because
of storms.19 Little seems to have
been accomplished on that front, because
even as late as 1819, a land agent
named Seth Tracy complained that roads
in the eastern part of the Reserve
were so "extremely bad" that
it was difficult to promote and sell land.20
16. Roads within the Reserve were
desperately needed because instead of arranging for
an orderly settlement pattern, the
Company distributed its land to its members all at once.
This was a vital error, because it
resulted in settlements that were widely scattered over the
land, instead of a slowly moving
"frontier" of concentrated settlement.
17. WRHS Tract No. 96, 81.
18. More instances of the Company's
incentives are detailed in WHRS Tract No. 96,
79-83.
19. WRHS, Tract No. 95, The Samuel
Huntington Correspondence 1800-1812, 68.
20. Seth Tracy to Pierpont Edwards, 11
January 1819, Pierpont Edwards Papers, Yale Uni-
versity Manuscripts and Archives, New
Haven.
Land in the Old Northwest 123
Other travellers to the Reserve also
mentioned the poor state of roads and
the economic hardships of early Reserve
residents.21
Huntington also claimed that the lack of
a harbor in the city was a ter-
rible burden on the settlers, because it
was impossible for them to obtain
cheap goods through the Great Lakes
system without a suitable port. A
sharp bend in the Cuyahoga River just before
its junction with Lake Erie
prevented commercial craft from entering
the river. The bend also hindered
the smooth flow of water out of the
Reserve, and as a result, the river was
a stagnant marsh near its mouth.
Huntington wrote that because of the lack
of a proper port, "our salt iron,
potash & sugar kettles & such bulky arti-
cles cost us more to get from the falls,
than all the rest of the distance."
He encouraged the Company to invest a
significant amount of money into
the construction of a harbor at the
mouth of the Cuyahoga, boasting that
if Cleveland had a harbor, its people
"might supply the Ohio Country ...
cheaper than they can be supplied from
Pitt."22
Access to specie was another serious
problem that settlers everywhere
in the American West faced, and
Huntington confirmed that the Western
Reserve settlers seemed to have a
particular difficulty in obtaining cash.
A variety of currencies circulated in
Ohio: dollars, livres, pounds, notes
of the assorted state banks, and U.S.
Bank notes. In the late 1790s, furs,
services, and whiskey were acceptable
means of payment. Even in 1810,
land, cattle, and notes of credit served
as common transaction media in the
Reserve.23 Few settlers came
to Ohio with a significant amount of money,
and with a limited access to Eastern
markets, their ability to obtain money
was virtually nonexistent. Likewise,
they were unable to obtain the goods
and materials that they needed for a
comfortable life. Huntington wrote that
"[settlers] run to the merchants
with what money they can pick up, to buy
at an exorbitant price such articles as
they had been used to consume in the
old countries, without having any way of
exporting such commodities as
they might manufacture & send to
raise money."24 President Jefferson's
Embargo Act of 1807 exacerbated the
money problem by depressing the
New England commercial class and
stifling the little commerce and ex-
change that did exist between the East
and the Western Reserve.
The actions of the Connecticut Land
Company and the conditions on the
Western Reserve should be compared to
analogous proceedings on the
21. Among those who echoed Huntington's
complaints about the poor drainage of the riv-
er, the sorry condition of Reserve
roads, and the poor standard of living that existed on the
Reserve were the Rev. Joseph Badger (in
1800), John Melish (in 1811), and Dr. Zerah Haw-
ley (in 1820). See Hatcher, 76-88.
22. Huntington to Cleaveland, 15
November 1801, from WRHS Tract No. 95: Letters from
the Samuel Huntington Correspondence
1800-1812, 68.
23. Rohrbaugh, The Trans-Appalachian
Frontier, 104.
24. WRHS Tract No. 95, Huntington
Correspondence 1800-1812, 74.
124 OHIO HISTORY
other major private holdings in this
early American West. The Holland
Land Company's Purchase, a 3.3 million
acre tract in New York between
the western edge of that state and the
Genesee River, provides a conve-
nient comparison. Although the western
edge of the Holland Purchase was
about fifty miles east of the Ohio state
line, its size, features and early his-
tory were comparable to the Reserve. The
lands were purchased in 1792
by a group of Dutch investors. However,
in their organization and plan-
ning for land sales, the Dutch far
outmanaged their Connecticut rivals.
The clearest difference between the
policies of the two companies was
in their respective preparations for
sales. The Western Reserve was opened
for settlement less than a year after
its purchase, largely still unsurveyed
and unimproved. The Holland Tract was
set aside while developers
planned the establishment of
"frontier services" such as taverns, mills,
schools, churches, artisan shops, and
stores. They knew such services
would be attractive to and needed by
settlers. Before a single acre had been
sold, the owners had planned and
developed a network of villages and roads
to accommodate an effective market
system that was connected to Mon-
treal and New York City. They had also
rated the townships according to
a "quality index" that was
based on an analysis of the soil, vegetation,
drainage, and terrain in each area. The
indices helped them predict the pat-
tern of settlement and guided their
pricing and development policies. The
land was finally opened in 1800, after
eight years of such planning.25
Although the sales of land in upstate
New York were slow in the early
years, by 1803 land sales surged, and in
1810, more than fifteen thousand
people inhabited the Holland Tract. The
price of land rose from an aver-
age of slightly over two dollars per
acre in 1804 to as high as $4.50 per
acre in some areas in 1811.26 The
pricing policy of Joseph Ellicott, the res-
ident land agent, was fluid and
flexible. He was careful to coordinate his
pricing with local settlement patterns
and the quality of the land, instead
of simply mandating a minimum price for
all lands. The directors of the
Connecticut Land Company did not have
the foresight or the organization
to manage their tract so effectively.
For a number of years, the directors
also were unable to solve a prob-
lem concerning the questionable legal
status of the Company's claims; this
problem slowed settlement further. In
addition to the original sale of the
Western Reserve land area, the
Connecticut Land Company had also pur-
chased the rights to the
"juridicial and territorial right" to the tract, which
25. These surveys, land assessments, and
development plans are thoroughly discussed in
chapters 2-4 of William Wyckoff's
history of the Holland Land Company, The Developer's
Frontier (New Haven, 1988).
26. Wyckoff includes a number of charts
and maps; these data were extracted from in-
formation presented on pages 71 and 122.
Land in the Old Northwest 125
meant that the state of Connecticut had
forfeited to the Company its title
to the land and its right to govern it.
However, the validity of Connecti-
cut's initial title to the Reserve lands
was not at all certain because nu-
merous squatters and rival Pennsylvania
land-holders and speculators also
claimed land on the Reserve. Nor was the
method by which a new gov-
ernment should be established on the Reserve
certain because, to the cha-
grin of Governor Arthur St. Clair, the
area did not fall under the jurisdic-
tion of the Northwest Ordinance.
Settlers were unwilling to purchase and
settle land when the Company could
neither guarantee their titles nor pro-
vide a system of law to protect them.
In an attempt to solve this problem, the
Company urged the government
of Connecticut to accept authority over
the Reserve. The state refused to
do so, and in 1797 the Connecticut
Assembly tried to release jurisdiction
over the land to the United States
government.27 The following year, the
Connecticut Land Company also appealed
to Congress to accept juris-
diction, but both of these movements
were spurned by Congress. Finally,
in 1800, Congress appointed a committee
under John Marshall to consider
the cession of the Reserve into the
jurisdiction of the federal government.
Upon the committee's recommendations,
Congress passed the "Quieting
Act" in April, 1800. The law
authorized the President to deliver letters
patent to the governor of Connecticut
" ... whereby all the right, title, in-
terest, and estate to the soil of that
tract [the Western Reserve] ... shall be
released and conveyed ... to the said
governor ... for the purpose of quiet-
ing the grantees and purchasers ... and
confirming their titles to the soil
of the said tract of land." In
return, Connecticut was to "renounce forev-
er, for the use and benefit of the
United States, ... all territorial andjuris-
dictional claims [of the Western
Reserve]."28 The conditions for cession
were quickly met, and on July 10, 1800,
Ohio's Governor St. Clair an-
nounced the incorporation of the Western
Reserve into the Ohio Territo-
ry as Trumbull County.
However, these years of title
difficulties and sluggish sales had presented
a series of immense problems to the
Company members. In 1800, Marshall
reported that the Company had paid only
$100,000 of interest on the pur-
chase money to the state of Connecticut,
and that only about one thousand
people lived on the Reserve.29 In
May of that year and again in October,
the directors of the Company petitioned
the Connecticut Legislature to re-
27. The preceding information about the
Connecticut Land Company's difficulty with the
jurisdictional problem and the
accompanying problems of attracting settlers to this land can
be found in the more detailed history of
the same on pages 85-86 of WRHS Tract No. 96.
28. The "Accompanying
Documents" section of WRHS Tract No. 96 includes a transcript
of the Quieting Act (page 211).
29. WRHS Tract No. 96, 86.
126 OHIO HISTORY
lax the repayment terms of the Company's
original purchase. The direc-
tors complained that, due to the
title-issue embarrassment, the members
of the Company had been forced to sell
land at half its value, and were
"obliged to advance their other
property" in order to settle their debts with
the state.30 However, their
attempts to earn a credit reprieve were insuf-
ficient to relieve the Connecticut Land
Company's financial difficulties
or to save it. On January 5, 1809, the
Company was dissolved after less than
fourteen years of existence. At that
time, many of the original investors
who owed money to the state for the
purchase of the Reserve were unable
to make payments on their debts. The
managers of the Connecticut School
Fund, to which the proceeds of the
state's original sale of the Reserve were
allocated, issued a report that showed
that "a large amount of interest [on
the debts owed by the members of the
Company] was unpaid and that the
collateral securities of the original
debts were not safe."31
Just as Congress took years to formulate
a reasonable land policy be-
cause its members did not understand the
difficulties that settlers en-
countered on the frontier, the investors
in the Connecticut Land Compa-
ny never comprehended how difficult life
on the Reserve was: there was
no money, no supply of cheap goods, no
provisions for public education,
and no government--in short, no
convincing reasons to settle. The mem-
bers of the Company had hoped to profit
from the westward migration by
establishing a link between New England
and the Northwest Territory, but
during fourteen years of Company neglect
and mismanagement, most in-
vestors had never laid a foot on the
soil of their investment. Their igno-
rance of Reserve conditions contributed
greatly to the downfall of the
Company. Furthermore, the members of the
Connecticut Land Company
competed directly with each other for
settlers, a situation which reduced
their profits further, unlike the
members of the Holland Company who co-
ordinated their land sales within large
agencies.
The dissolution of the Company forced
the former members to inde-
pendently take on the duties that the
Company had assumed, including pro-
viding for publicity, incentives, and
improvements. However, their lack
of knowledge about their tracts often
prevented them from effectively im-
proving settlement. Pierpont Edwards was
one of the major investors in
the Connecticut Land Company. The
youngest son of the Reverend
Jonathan Edwards, he was a prominent
lawyer, politician, and judge in
New Haven and Bridgeport between his
first election to the state legisla-
ture in 1777 and his death in 1826. He
was a leader in the Democratic-
Republican party and a major liberal
voice in state politics. He was also
30. Ibid., 87.
31. Ibid., 91.
Land in the Old Northwest 127
a promiscuous land speculator, entering
into ventures in Vermont, South
Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. He
worked as an attorney for both the
South Carolina Yazoo Land Company and
the Connecticut Susquehanna
Company. Edwards invested sixty thousand
dollars in the Connecticut
Land Company, thereby laying claim to 5
percent of the Company hold-
ings on the Reserve.32 A
large piece of his land was located in present-day
Trumbull County, near the eastern edge
of Ohio; the agents that managed
his land there worked out of the town of
Mesopotamia, near the county seat
of Warren.
Pierpont Edwards was living proof that
speculators were not always
fully aware of the proceedings of their
land agents or of the conditions
under which settlers lived on the
Reserve. Although the Connecticut Land
Company was a failure, Edwards did not
learn from its mistakes and im-
prove his own managerial techniques.
Settlement upon his Reserve lands
remained erratic and slow after 1810.
Edwards' first agent in the Western
Reserve was his son John S. Edwards, who
died in 1813. The younger
Edwards, although a prominent Ohio
politician, was unsuccessful in sell-
ing his father's land, although his
father seems to have been completely
unaware of this fact. In a letter to the
man who became his next agent, Seth
Tracy, Pierpont Edwards confessed that
he "was utterly ignorant as to what
lands of mine in Mesopotamia have been
sold by my departed son. I have
had no account from him of a later state
than sometime early in the year
1807."33 The elder Edwards had not
only been out of touch with his son
and land agent for six years, but also
apparently had never been in the Re-
serve. Furthermore, he did not even
venture out there during Tracy's trou-
bled tenure as his land agent, which
lasted until 1819. Edwards had no idea
how much money his son had made for him,
what lands of his were reg-
istered at the land office, or how much
land his son had sold. The corre-
spondence to Edwards from Tracy during
the years of Tracy's tenure re-
veals what may have been commonplace
among speculators on the
Reserve: a great deal of mismanagement
and poor decision making on
Edwards' part. Tracy's difficulties in
dealing with the issues of money and
sales stand out in the letters, and his
problems in trying to communicate
these distinctly frontier complications
to his uncomprehending employ-
er in New England are evident, too.
Tracy clearly discloses Edwards'
frustrations with the slow pace of land
sales in his letters. Although the real
reason for the poor level of settle-
ment was the economic difficulty of
living on the Reserve, Tracy mentions
32. From listing of Connecticut Land
Company investors in WRHS Tract No. 96,
131-34, Source for Edwards' biographical
information: Dictionary of American Biogra-
phy, VI, 43-44.
33. Edwards to Tracy, 9 September 1813,
Edwards Papers.
128 OHIO HISTORY
other factors that contributed to the
situation. In 1814, he reported that the
ongoing War of 1812 had "much
retarded emigration from the East-
ward," and that fighting in the
Great Lakes area had discouraged settle-
ment of northern Ohio.34 Tracy
also reported that the war hampered his
efforts at collecting money from the
settlers, perhaps because Jefferson's
embargo of 1807 and the subsequent War
of 1812 interfered with com-
merce on the Great Lakes, too. In any
event, money was even less avail-
able than it normally was.
The limited availability of money and
the corresponding need for a gen-
erous credit policy created a number of
problems for Pierpont Edwards.
Foremost was the inability of settlers
to pay their installments when they
came due. Although Huntington had
reported to Cleveland about the
scarcity of currency back in 1801, Tracy
refers to it frequently as late as
1818. Shortly after assuming his duties
as Edwards' land agent, Tracy de-
duced that the settlers in the Trumbull
county area had been negligent in
making their payments, and that the sum
coming to Edwards in overdue
payments was "considerable."35
However, settlers typically did not even
have much money with them
when they arrived in the Reserve, and
they needed most of what they had
to establish themselves on their new
lands. According to Tracy, many of
the settlers who were unable to make
their payments followed one of two
paths: they either attempted to make a
partial settlement by paying part
of their debt or renegotiating their
contract, or they simply left their land
behind without paying or bothering to
void the contract.36 The latter group
of settlers presented an especially
difficult problem because, along with
the instances in which settlers died
with outstanding debts, each case had
to be dealt with on an individual basis.
The subsequent process of nego-
tiating each case required extensive
communication between the agent and
the owner, which was difficult because
of the great distance between them.
Other settlers arrived at a compromise
that helped them finance their
move to New Connecticut. Some used their
Connecticut property as a par-
tial payment for land in the Reserve.
Tracy described this system in a let-
ter in 1813: "land in the adjacent
town is for sale two and three dollars
per acre except in some cases where
exchanges have been made for farms
in the state of Connecticut which seems
to be the mode that many of the
land holders have adopted for several
years past to settle their lands."
Such a transaction benefited both buyer
and seller. The settler who en-
tered into such a deal was freed of the
difficulty of obtaining cash for the
34. Tracy to Edwards, 16 September 1814,
Edwards Papers.
35. Tracy to Edwards, 25 October 1813,
Edwards Papers.
36. Tracy to Edwards, 7 May 1814,
Edwards Papers.
Land in the Old Northwest 129
land payment and able to use what
available cash he had to establish him-
self on his purchase. Tracy thus
encouraged Edwards to enter into these
land-exchange agreements because they
were attractive to settlers and
therefore "advanced the price of
lands." Furthermore, the speculators
could oversee the condition and sale of
Connecticut lands much more con-
veniently than their Reserve lands six
hundred miles away. A Connecti-
cut parcel would also have held a much
more certain and stable position
in the real estate market than the
speculator's Ohio holdings. However,
Tracy never indicates in subsequent
letters that Edwards showed any in-
terest in the bargain.37
In general, Edwards was very frustrated
by the credit and payment sys-
tem that prevailed in the Ohio country.
Yet, for several years, he appar-
ently did not outline a specific credit
policy for his agent to follow. Tracy
therefore usually took the initiative in
establishing flexible terms of
credit in order to encourage settlement.
In 1817, he reported that he had
drawn up a contract with two men who
"were unable to pay any money
down, but I thought it would be for your
interest to settle them as they were
from the Eastward and whose people will
be likely to follow their friends."
The price of the land was three dollars
per acre, a very low price for 1817
compared to other deals Tracy was
making, and he allowed the two men
four years to pay their debt. Not happy
with such terms, Edwards sharply
scolded Tracy in 1818, insisting that in
future contracts, he receive some
significant down payment and that credit
be limited to three or four years
of annual payments.38
Edwards' poor knowledge of the
conditions on his western lands was
evidenced in his continuing insistence
that the price of his land remain sub-
stantially above the market value of the
surrounding lands. One of Tracy's
first observations upon taking office
was that Edwards' son--the first
agent--had substantially overvalued his
land. The Reserve was a buyer's
market, and Edwards faced stiff
competition from his neighbors for a lim-
ited number of interested settlers. On a
number of occasions Tracy reported
to him that the price he was demanding
was well above the price for "wild
lands" in the immediate vicinity.
In 1815, Tracy complained that Edwards
was asking for at least four dollars per
acre on all lots, regardless of the
land's quality--a situation that made it
nearly impossible for him to sell
37. Tracy twice makes mention of this
land-exchanging procedure: he describes the past
use of it by settlers in a letter to
Edwards dated 25 October 1813, then repeats his request
for further instructions on the subject
in the letter of 7 May 1814, but thereafter never rais-
es the subject again.
38. This incident is related by Tracy in
a letter to Edwards dated 5 May 1817. Edwards
rebukes him and sets his own credit
standards in a response to Tracy dated 5 June 1818. See
Pierpont Edwards Papers.
130 OHIO HISTORY
land.39 Five months later, he
elaborated on the price of his neighbors'
lands, stating that "no sales of
land can be made to any great amount while
lands contiguous to this place are
offered for two dollars and fifty cents
and three dollars per acre."40
And again, two years later, Tracy, admon-
ished for selling lots at three dollars
per acre, informed Edwards that his
"neighbors ... selling land around
me hold their land at three and four dol-
lars per acre, chiefly at three, and
unless I sell at the market price, few or
none will purchase."41 By
1818, Edwards seems to have finally acquiesced
to his agent's advice, giving permission
to Tracy to sell for as low as four
dollars per acre, which by then was near
the market price (although he
still pressed him to try to sell as high
as five dollars). He also permitted
sales on credit, provided that the
installments and interest were paid
promptly.42
Tracy had plenty of trouble in trying to
collect any money at all, but
sometimes settlers made payments in
currency that was drawn on local
banks. Obtaining currency that was
acceptable to Eastern banks was an-
other significant problem for the land
agent. Often, Western banks could
not back their currency with specie,
therefore making such money unus-
able to Eastern business and financial
centers. Many Western banks were
poorly managed, and unauthorized banks, unsound
currency, and coun-
terfeiting abounded in the Ohio country.
Even many of the Western
banks, such as the Western Reserve Bank
in Warren, would not accept the
currency of their neighboring banks
because they could not "hold out the
least encouragement of its being paid
for in specie."43 Therefore, in
1817, Tracy explained to Edwards that he
was having trouble collecting
"such money as is current in your
country which is very scarce here."44
In February 1818, he further reported
that "it is with much difficulty ...
that current money on the Eastern banks
can be procured while money is
so scarce and land buyers so unable to
pay their installments when they
become due."45
39. Tracy to Edwards, 23 January 1815,
Edwards Papers.
40. Tracy to Edwards, 17 June 1815,
Edwards Papers.
41. Tracy to Edwards, 7 May 1817,
Edwards Papers. Note that Edwards was not the only
one who was trying to sell his land at a
high price. For instance, Moses Cleaveland origi-
nally asked for 50 dollars per acre,
reports Hatcher, but many prospective buyers "even balked
at $25." Hatcher, 67.
42. Tracy to Edwards, 5 June 1818,
Edwards Papers.
43. Simon Perkins to William Crawford, 8
January 1817, quoted in Carl Wittke, ed., The
History of the State of Ohio (Columbus, 1942), vol. 2, The Frontier State
1803-1825, by
William T. Utter, 279.
44. Tracy to Edwards, 26 December 1817,
Edwards Papers.
45. Tracy to Edwards, 2 February 1818,
Edwards Papers. Hatcher further discusses the
chaotic banking situation in the
Reserve, and Ohio's attempts to reform it in the 1840s, in
Chapter 11.
Land in the Old Northwest 131
Edwards also became increasingly
impatient with Tracy's inability to
transmit to him the money that he did
collect and hold for him. In a letter
to Tracy dated June 5, 1818, Edwards
wrote that his agent owed him about
one thousand dollars (although this
figure was too high because he failed
to subtract the tax payments that Tracy
made for him). Edwards claimed
that since he had hired Tracy, he had actually
received only five hundred
dollars from him, and this all came in a
single remittance. The method by
which Tracy planned to make remittances
was to entrust the cash to a trav-
eler returning to the East. Thus, in
early 1818, Tracy had sent the five hun-
dred dollars with a reputable man to his
wife's father for him to deposit
in Hartford, into an account subject to
Edwards' order.46 This route was
obviously inefficient, confusing, and
subject to the risks of finding a trust-
worthy courier, and then praying that he
did not die or fall victim to rob-
bery on the long road back to
Connecticut. It also entailed the expense of
paying the carrier, so it could only be
done economically with large sums
of money.
Edwards formulated another method which,
although promising, ulti-
mately proved unsuccessful because the
status of currency in the West was
so confused. In 1818, Edwards instructed
Tracy to deposit his remittances
in an account in the United States
Branch Bank at Pittsburgh under
Edwards' name. Tracy would then mail the
deposit certificate to Edwards,
who could then withdraw the money from
the United States Bank at Mid-
dletown, Connecticut47 (as
could easily be done today). Unfortunately,
Tracy claimed to have attempted this
method, only to be spurned by the
Pittsburgh bank, which would not accept
the bills that he wanted to de-
posit: "none of the western bills
except the old Pittsburgh Bank bills were
received at the branch bank in that
place," he wrote. Tracy further stated
that he had also tried to buy a
cashier's check from the same bank, but the
bank would accept only "premium
notes" of the branch banks for payment.
This was impossible, he said, because
those bills were simply not avail-
able in the Western Reserve.48
Another of Tracy's responsibilities was
to pay the land taxes on
Edwards' unsold holdings. He generally
paid the taxes out of the money
that he collected from the settlers'
installments, and he seldom reported
much difficulty with raising at least
this much money out of the these pay-
ments. He did report, however, that the
property tax rate rose quickly from
year to year, increasing the burden on
land agents, who had to collect more
46. Tracy to Edwards, 2 February 1818,
Edwards Papers.
47. These instructions were detailed in
a letter from Edwards to Tracy, 5 June 1818, Ed-
wards Papers.
48. Tracy to Edwards, 8 October 1818,
Edwards Papers.
132 OHIO HISTORY
money from the settlers every year just
to pay the taxes. Consequently, the
agents, in turn, put more pressure on
the settlers to come up with the funds,
and the owner, Edwards in this case, had
to advance the money to the agent
if his payment collections came up
short. In 1814, Tracy reported that land
was taxed at one dollar per acre (almost
a third of the purchase price),
which amounted to an increase of about
50 percent over the previous year.
In those two years, Tracy collected one
hundred forty dollars from settlers,
which amounted to exactly six dollars
more than the total tax payments
for the same time period. Taxes
continued to increase in the next two years,
and for 1815, Tracy paid over one
hundred forty-six dollars. In the six years
from 1812 to 1817, he paid a total of
over six hundred dollars in taxes on
Edwards' land.49
Speculators and agents were not the only
ones inconvenienced by the
scarcity of money; it was a problem and
a fear for settlers, too. Tracy
pointed out the particular problems that
settlers encountered daily con-
cerning the circulation of money.
Settlers suffered from the difficulty of
obtaining Eastern currency, because
unlike Western paper, Eastern bills
were valid and redeemable at many banks
because they were backed by
specie. He commented on the
"confusion the banking system has produced
in this country. Our banks have issued
no paper for a long time on account
of the United States Banks and are
collecting in their dues which has almost
stopped the circulating medium."
Unfortunately, very few legitimate
bills existed in Ohio; many were drawn
upon one or another particular lo-
cal bank and not redeemable at any other
banks, including the United States
Bank. Tracy expressed the view of many
Western settlers when he said that
he hoped that "banks will be so
regulated that money will be put in cir-
culation in such a way as may be depended
on in future."50 Another prob-
lem that he reported to Pierpont Edwards
was counterfeiting. With so many
different kinds of currency in
circulation, it is not surprising that some in-
dividuals took advantage of the
situation to introduce bogus money and
"spurious bills" into the
system. Tracy recorded the case of a "bandilla of
counterfeiting, unprincipled men from
the older states of the union" per-
petrating their "nefarious
schemes," wreaking havoc with the state of
paper money in the Reserve.51
Settlers were obviously frustrated by
high prices, lack of currency, and
unavailable goods. For instance, Tracy
reported in 1815 that a number of
old settlers in Mesopotamia occasionally
ransacked some of Edwards' un-
49. The information about tax collection
and local tax rates from 1812 to 1817
is taken
from figures that Tracy submitted to
Edwards in letters (from the Edwards Papers) dated 7
May 1814, 16 September 1814, 26 February
1816, and 8 October 1818.
50. Quotations drawn from Tracy to
Edwards, 8 October 1818. Edwards Papers.
51. Tracy to Edwards, 24 November 1818,
Edwards Papers.
Land in the Old Northwest 133
sold lands for the timber and sugar
trees there.52 In that letter, he recounted
an incident where a prospective buyer
refused to buy a piece of land be-
cause two settlers had been drilling
one-inch holes in some two hundred
sugar trees, devaluing the land in the
process. Such incidents revealed that
in the absence of a police presence,
private property in the Reserve was
not always secure. Apparently, the
settlers also badly damaged the trees
because they could not even obtain
proper augers in the Reserve. In a fur-
ther testimony to the bleak isolation of
the Reserve, Tracy wrote in 1818
that "the scarcity of money has
roused the people to a more vigilant in-
dustry." The settlers were hardly
rewarded for their vigor, however, be-
cause at the end of a "very
productive season," a group of settlers were
unable to sell their vast numbers of
excess apples and, to avoid wasting
them, had to make about a hundred
barrels of cider.53
Speculators and agents tried to attract
a particular set of settlers to their
land, but they were often so desperate
to sell their land that they did not
have a choice about who came. Young
families were desirable in the West
because they could have children and
increase the population. Hard-
working, honest farmers would make the
settlement more appealing to fu-
ture buyers and raise the value and
profitability of the land for the sell-
ers. Skilled workers could provide
services for settlers. Emigrants from
New England might relay a positive
report on the area to friends back
home. Towns competed with each other to
attract such settlers. On the oth-
er hand, if an area had a reputation for
crime or settlers who lacked in-
tegrity, then settlement could be
retarded. Tracy was careful to note to
Edwards when skilled laborers or
professionals, such as physicians, set-
tled on the land. He also was sure to
tell his employer that the settlers he
had brought in were of high quality. He
described some as "young and in-
dustrious," pointed out where and
when families or groups of friends had
moved in, and commented on the prospects
of "more wealthy" people emi-
grating to Ohio.
Honest and wealthy people also carried
with them the obvious advan-
tage of being more likely and able to
pay their debts when they came due.
Tracy described many of the first
settlers as "unruly," a group that only
gradually gave way to the more
"desirable" settlers over time. He often
commented on their scandalous behavior.
Many were prone to trespass on
unsold lands; for instance, it was a
crowd of "old settlers" who mutilated
Edwards' sugar trees. These people may
have been the most poor, or they
52. Tracy to Edwards, 17 June 1815,
Edwards Papers. The perpetrators were arrested and
tried before the Supreme Court in Warren
in September, 1816, but Tracy neglects to disclose
their fates in subsequent letters.
53. Tracy to Edwards, 8 October 1818,
Edwards papers.
134 OHIO HISTORY
may have been the most hardened by the
difficult conditions. In cases
where purchasers were failing to pay
punctually, Edwards was clearly par-
tial to contractors who seemed
"industrious and honest," and "in a fair way
to do well;" he allowed such
settlers more freedom in making their pay-
ments. "I do not wish you to be
severe with the debtors, especially where
they appear to be industrious and are
making improvements," he told
Tracy's successor, George Swift.54 But
he was also quite willing to void
contracts when other settlers were
unable to make their payments on time;
he sometimes even instructed his agents
to initiate law suits to eject such
settlers from their land when they
became too delinquent.
Despite Seth Tracy's recital of the
difficulties he faced, Edwards was
unimpressed by his efforts and results
in selling land. He denounced him
for failing to sell a single lot during
the first two years of his tenure and
accused him of withholding remittances
from him. Moreover, he was dis-
pleased with the generous credit terms
and low prices that Tracy gave to
new settlers, frustrated by his poor
performance in collecting payments
when they came due, and accused him of
creating fraudulent contracts,
keeping poor records, and pretending to
have sent him letters outlining his
land sales progress in 1819--letters
which Tracy claimed were lost in the
mail. Consequently, Edwards revoked Tracy's
powers of attorney and fired
him in 1819.
In June of that year, Edwards sent
Robert Fairchild out to the Reserve
to settle his accounts with Tracy and
relieve him of his duties. "His ac-
counts were in perfect chaos,"
reported Fairchild. After spending three
days and three nights reorganizing
Tracy's records, he found that Tracy
owed Edwards over three thousand six
hundred dollars; Tracy had thought
that he owed less than one thousand.55
Tracy paid a thousand dollars im-
mediately, and was forced to mortgage
his 300-acre estate to finance the
remainder of his debt. But in 1822, a
Steubenville attorney named Collier,
acting for Edwards, took control of
Tracy's land and auctioned it for about
twenty-five hundred dollars.
Although Edwards rightfully did not
trust him, Tracy's efforts to pro-
mote the settlement of the Reserve and
to improve its habitability were
significant. For instance, upon Tracy's
initiative, Edwards paid for the
erection of a new saw mill in the center
of the town of Mesopotamia. To
further the settlement of the area,
Tracy signed contracts with young men
and families under extremely generous
terms, even though Edwards re-
buked him for doing so. And by his own
count in 1819, thirty-three fam-
ilies had settled in the town since
1816, yielding a population increase of
54. Edwards to George Swift, 14
September 1819, Edwards Papers.
55. Robert Fairchild to Edwards, 29 June
1819, Edwards papers.
Land in the Old Northwest 135
200 percent.56 Furthermore,
Pierpont Edwards' lack of knowledge about
his land persisted in spite of Tracy's
repeated attempts to convince him
to visit him in Ohio, a meeting which he
claimed would have been "of great
consequence to your business in this
place as there is [sic] many things
which are difficult to explain by letter
communications."57
After firing Tracy, Edwards hired George
Swift of New Haven to man-
age his land. Swift served until Edwards
died in 1826. After the Tracy de-
bacle, Edwards demanded a great deal
from Swift, and through him he
made a greater effort to assess the
state of his settlers and his land. In his
first instructions to Swift in 1819, he
directed him to "go to Mesopotamia
town, and for each person who owes me,
learn all you can of each man's
situation, his character as respects
sobriety and industry and the man-
agement of his farming and what
improvements he is making. Note down
at the time all you learn concerning
each man and furnish me with a copy
of all you think it will be useful for
me to know."58 Swift, following or-
ders, kept a careful account of all his
business proceedings and accounts
and relayed them regularly to Edwards.
Like Tracy, he mentioned that "the
difficulty of collecting debts and
procuring money that has for some time
past existed in this state still exists
in a considerable [condition]."59
However, in 1823, Swift reported that
agents and settlers had begun to uti-
lize a new plan that helped settlers
finance their purchase. "I have had fre-
quent applications from persons to
purchase," Swift wrote. "They wish to
have permission to go on to the land,
some for a year and some for two
years, and agree that at the expiration
of that time they will ... pay one
quarter of the price and the remainder
in three equal annual payments or
quit the land."60 Settlers
used the interim between settlement and payment
to establish their house and farm and
grow a year or two of crops to pay
for their land. He went on to report
that Edwards' neighbor and friend,
Simon Perkins, had sold a considerable
amount on land in this manner. Pre-
emption did not become a legal right on
surveyed public lands until 1841,
although settlers had argued for it at
least since the 1820s.61
56. Tracy to Edwards, 11 January 1819,
Edwards Papers. The population growth may have
had very little to do with Tracy's
efforts, because migration to the Reserve as a whole ac-
celerated after the end of the War of
1812 and the cold New England summer of 1816. See
Hatcher, 70-74.
57. Tracy to Edwards, 15 May 1815,
Edwards Papers.
58. Edwards to Swift, 14 September 1819,
Edwards Papers.
59. Swift to Edwards, 30 December 1821,
Edwards Papers.
60. Swift to Edwards, 2 January 1823,
Edwards Papers.
61. The struggle for the right of
preemption on all surveyed lands was long and sometimes
violent. Troops were occasionally called
out to evict people who settled on public land be-
fore it was auctioned, and settlers
organized claim associations to intimidate prospective
speculators. See P.W. Gates, "Land
Policy, 1780-1896," in The Reader's Encyclopedia of
the American West, 638-39.
136 OHIO HISTORY
Although Edwards was typical of many
Easterners who invested in land
in the West, other speculators seem to
have displayed more concern for
their affairs in Ohio. Shortly after
inheriting his father's New Connecti-
cut lands, Henry Leavitt Ellsworth
trekked out to the Reserve in 1811 to
investigate his agent's suspect
behavior. Ellsworth recorded his obser-
vations in a journal. His comments reveal
him to be more astute than Ed-
wards and more interested in his
investment. He noted the terrain of the
tract, and even favorably compared its
drainage and soil to that of the near-
by Holland Purchase. He also observed
that many areas of the Reserve
lacked roads, and travelers often had to
rely on marked trees and a com-
pass to find their way.62
Ellsworth's comments concerning the
inhabitants of the Reserve show
how much he learned about life on the
Reserve. He noted the haphazard
pattern of settlement--many of the towns
"were quite settled, though
there are yet many townships without a
single inhabitant." The destitution
of many of the settlers particularly
impressed him. On several occasions,
he sat for a meal or slept a night in a
settler's "small and scantily contrived"
shack. Once, he complained bitterly that
he had never seen "so much dirt
and filth in any human habitation"
as in the hut where he was spending the
night. Filthy and nearly inedible food,
cramped living conditions, and flea-
infested straw beds were constants among
the various log huts that
Ellsworth stayed in during his
month-long stay in the Western Reserve.
Pierpont Edwards' difficulties
epitomized a critical aspect of the set-
tlement of the American West: the fact
that the world he lived in was great-
ly different from the one that his
business was conducted in. Edwards was
an established Connecticut lawyer and
politician who could not compre-
hend the intricacies involved in typical
problems of settlement. He did not
understand the hardships of obtaining
legitimate currency, the difficulty
of clearing and improving land without
money, and the scarcity of com-
modities that drove people to steal
goods such as timber and sugar from
someone else's land. Every day, the
Westem settler faced an unstable, un-
certain future--a situation which
Edwards had no conception of.
But the position of the speculator was
in flux too. Historians have of-
ten judged the speculator for his
actions and how they affected trends in
Western settlement and development, as
if his activities and objectives
were a constant in the equation of
Western settlement. In the first half of
62. Henry Leavitt Ellsworth, A Tour
to New Connecticut in 1811, ed. Phillip R. Shriver
(Cleveland, 1985), 64. This journal
contains much more than a description of the Western
Reserve; the journal is an insightful
commentary on the people, the land, and the journey
through the Reserve and western New York
and Pennsylvania. The information here and the
following excerpts are taken from pages
56-74 of his journal, the major part that deals with
Ellsworth's inspection of the Reserve.
Land in the Old Northwest 137
the twentieth century, land historians
Benjamin H. Hibbard and Paul W.
Gates led an attack on the land
speculator. Gates criticized speculators for
driving up the price of land and
withholding the best lands from market,
claiming that their policies forced
settlement to proceed sporadically and
caused high rates of farm tenancy among
settlers (instead of outright own-
ership). However, since the 1940s,
revisionist historians have promoted
a different view, one more favorable to
the speculator. Roy M. Robbins
emphasized that speculators
"furnished capital necessary for building up
the new country. They actually
contributed heavily to settlement by
building up towns." Ray Allen
Billington recognized the role of the land
speculator as the middleman between the
settlers and the government. And
Bruno Fritzsche argued that "the
land speculator rather than the stereo-
typed pioneer may well be regarded as
the symbol of what is commonly
called 'Manifest Destiny.'"63 However,
these historians tended to neglect
the speculator's ideals and his ideas
and assumed that he was in control
of his situation, when, as Pierpont
Edwards proved, he often was not. Like
settlers, speculators shaped and were
shaped by the conditions in the West.
Edwards' obstinacy retarded settlement
on his land, but at the same time,
he was angry and frustrated that his
investment was not yielding a return;
his later policies reflected that
tension. Far from engrossing the best lands,
Edwards simply overvalued his land, and
in so doing, he hampered his
profit-making capacity.
In 1896, Frederick Jackson Turner wrote
"The Problem of the West,"
an article that discussed the
development of the American West in terms
of old institutions being applied to new
environments, and the initial di-
visions between the "old
world" and the "new frontier" that resulted. Grad-
ually, as more links were established
between the two regions, they be-
came more alike. Ultimately, he wrote,
the new society "assimilates itself
to the type of the older social
conditions of the East; but it bears within it
enduring and distinguishing survivals of
its frontier experience."64 Turner
applied the process to American history,
to the relationship between the
established East and the frontier West,
calling the development of the West
through this relationship the
"rebirth of American society" and the "con-
structive force" of democracy.
Although Turner was incorrect in many
of his ideas about the American
frontier, the problems experienced by
Pierpont Edwards, his settlers, the
Connecticut Land Company, and the
63. The arguments of Gates, Hibbard,
Robbins, Billington, Fritzsche, and many other land
historians are summarized and discussed
in Robert P. Swierenga, "Land Speculation and Its
Impact on American Economic Growth and
Welfare: A Historiographical Review," The West-
ern Historical Quarterly, 8 (July 1977), 283-302.
64. Frederick Jackson Turner, "The
Problem of the West," The Atlantic Monthly, Septem-
ber 1896.
138 OHIO HISTORY
United States Government lend credence
to one of Turner's general con-
cepts: that the West was a separate and
distinct entity from the East. De-
spite all cultural, political, and
economic links, this separation was the
cause of many problems both in the
administration and the settlement of
the West. The land agent was both a
symbol and an embodiment of this
East-West linkage, but, as the correspondence
between Tracy and Edwards
shows, the agent and the owner he
attempted to communicate with did not
always speak the same language.
Turner wrote that the men who crossed
the Alleghenies had "a keen
sense of the difference between them and
the dwellers on the coast."65 Seth
Tracy certainly had this sense, and he
tried to relate it to Edwards. Almost
without exception, he referred to Ohio
in his letters as "this place" or "this
country," implying a distinction
between Ohio and New England. He took
pains to remind Edwards of the problems
of obtaining money and the dif-
ficulty of life in the West. If Pierpont
Edwards was abstractly aware of
these difficulties, he had no idea how
deeply they penetrated frontier life,
nor how to modify his policies to
compensate for them. Henry Ellsworth
crossed the barrier and witnessed
firsthand how different life was on the
Western Reserve. The settlers were
trying to advance themselves eco-
nomically in the West, and in so doing,
they did develop an attitude unique
to the frontier. But they seemed too
worried about achieving the barest
form of daily survival and scraping
together a sufficient living to pay off
the nagging local land agent to worry
about idealism, manifest destiny,
"hope in democracy," or faith
in the common man. These were cliches and
slogans reserved for politicians and
historians.
Western settlers were not so much
recreating a world or relearning Turn-
er's "lessons of frontier
democracy." Rather, in their struggle to improve
their conditions, settlers were
constantly trying to shape and develop their
relationship with the East. Like Seth
Tracy, they had to repeatedly remind
Easterners that the West was quite
different from the East. Westerners sup-
ported and followed the leaders and
politicians who spoke to their needs.
They rallied around men like Andrew
Jackson and Henry Clay. They stood
in favor of internal improvements,
Indian removal, and a freer monetary
system, and they supported any measures
that would help bolster the West-
em economy and strengthen their links
with the East.
The American West did not develop in
isolation. In fact, the many links
between East and West were a given for
settlers and speculators alike.
However, the process of "taming the
wilderness" was not a convenient,
linear one, as Turner suggested. It was
a sporadic and confusing process
65. Ibid.
Land in the Old Northwest 139
that involved a great deal of hardship
and suffering. The Western Reserve
and its settlers stagnated for thirty
years, victims of economic isolation
and poor management. In 1815, Seth Tracy
and Pierpont Edwards both
must have wondered if their leaps of
faith would ever be justified.
BRIAN HARTE
Land in the Old Northwest: A
Study of
Speculation, Sales, and Settlement on the
Connecticut Western Reserve
Settlers who came to the American West
from the Northeast carried with
them a vision of what their new lives
would involve. The act of moving
to the West required a leap of faith, a
presumption that they could convert
their vision into reality. Despite their
uncertainties, these pioneers were
aware of and depended on certain existing
parameters that would stabi-
lize their lives in the new land. For
instance, the Northwest Ordinance of
1787 assured settlers that their new
homes would be safely within the con-
fines of the United States and its
political order. Also, they carried their
New England culture with them, and that
culture included a set of assump-
tions about their place in society and
the location of their markets. The land
speculator also had a vision, and the
act of investment required no less a
leap of faith on his part. The
speculator assumed that the territory in which
he was investing would develop into a
viable and integral part of the
country, rise in value, and return a
profit to him. As one of the first large-
scale targets for both settlers and
investors, Ohio became the testing
grounds for both settlers' and
speculators' confidence in the future of
Western settlement and development.
Thus, the settlement of Ohio played a
pivotal role in the shaping of West-
ern attitudes and East-West relationships.
In the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, the state and
national governments of the United
States began to distribute their western
lands to settlers and speculators;
much of this land was located in the
Northwest Territory and, specifically,
the Ohio country. The United States
Government and the various private
groups of speculators viewed the land
market in the Northwest Territory
as an opportunity to turn a fast profit.
Although some people actually made
a significant sum of money, lands sales
were not the surest path to riches
for many investors. A large plot in
northeastern Ohio known as the Con-
necticut Western Reserve had inherent
disadvantages that turned its ini-
Brian Harte graduated from Yale University
in 1991, where he completed this thesis for
the History Department under the
guidance of his friend and mentor, Jay Gitlin.