Baughman township Chippewa township Canaan township Congress township Chester township Clinton township East Union township Franklin township Green township Milton township Paint township Plain township Sugarcreek township	$1,347,803 1,045,816 870,486 836,033 1,050,359 878,380 947,399 1,012,507 1,688,347 1,325,580 750,004 1,003,360 1,259,577	Saltcreek township Wayne township Wooster township Wooster City Fredericksburg Village Applecreek Village Creston Village Mt. Eaton Village Dalton Village Orrville Town Marshallville Village Doylestown Village	$ 620,797 1,441,715 1,037,905 2,550,000 101,691 157,122 333,828 67,055 184;225 370,000 129,000 268,000
Grand total of valuation in county			$24,374,153

( 9 ) CHAPTER VIII. CIVIL AND POLITICAL HISTORY OF WAYNE COUNTY. By Hon. L. R. Critchfield, Sr. PREFACE. We read with curiosity the histories with which it has been sought to perpetuate some memory of man. Rollin has condensed the history of the ancient world; Grote has given us the history of Greece; Livy and Gibbon the history of the Roman empire. We read Hallam's Middle Ages, and Guizot's Civilization, Hume and Macaulay, Prescott's Peru and Mexico, the life of Washington, the history of the United States, the modern histories Of Asia and Africa; but the world has no history of the masses of mankind. It is only by the mental effort called "faith" that we know that the common people of the world were like ourselves; that they lived and labored, loved, and perished as we do. Even in our own day we celebrate the birth of Washington, the greatness of Jackson ; we have nOn-partisan Lincoln clubs to keep alive the memory of the lamented martyr; but what of the dead, the heroes in common life, the faithful guardians of self government? The age is breaking this immortal solitude. Family reunions are resurrecting the old fathers and mothers ; yearly gatherings are extricating ancient virtue from the mould of the wilderness, and a new heart is throbbing loud enough to stir the dust of the pioneers. That we have constructed this magnificent era, is no longer thought by the reflecting man and we are beginning to confess in books the grandeur of the great actors of the past! Of the very foremost, Wayne county is keeping these records of gratitude. An elaborate history of Wayne county, some thirty years ago, came from the toilsome genius of Ben Douglas ; but the age is advanced in spiritual conception, the rude necessities that clothed the early fathers and mothers must give place to that mystic robe that adorned the visits of Gabriel, and amidst the clouds that habited the early settlements, the pure and splendid virtues of the pioneer must blaze like the morning star. As a sign of individual royalty a chain of gold must be thrown about the necks of these heroes of self government! It is to the man of common life, the king of the WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO - 131 wilderness, the nobleman of the log cabin, and the man that caught their mantle, that the better history commemorates. The New History of Wayne County is the history of men and women and children and their civil and political agency in the formation of government. To this subject, the writer has contributed the following pages. Strictly non-partisan, the words "republican- or "democratic" have reference to form of government, and not to parties; and whatever of party politics intervened in the great work of the fathers, the differences but enlarged that intellectual force necessary for greater objects. Constantly feeling the inclination to record more of the names of the prominent men that honored Wayne county by their patriotism and ability, the limits of the article, and the probable details of the history, were a restriction to the more ample record. To raise the inference that some of our ideas of individual independence, and American courage, that defies a world in arms, and some principles of government, may have been, possibly, influenced by colonial association with the Indians for two hundred years, and their defiance of a higher civilization, and stubborn retreat before a superior foe, that portion of the article on "Indian Government" is presented. That the Indian was a great barbaric man, intellectual, eloquent, and savage, our early history illustrates. To give the high origin of the early settlers of Wayne county, their character, their social purity and patriotism, the influences that perfected their vigilance for free institutions, the grandest of all labors that they performed in government in the Northwest, the practical and glorious results that have immortalized their early struggles, and their example as followed by their descendants, seemed to the writer an appropriate method of amplifying the subject. The civilization of the new states of the Northwest, and the renown of the pioneers, are attributable to a great ancestry. The highest and most symmetrical system of government is at once suggested by even a superficial view of the form and character of our national and state constitutions; they involve the perfection of intellectual and moral development and the presence of a sublime spirit. All antiquity was measured in this constitutional system to obtain the finish of a magnificent monument of government with surer foundations and more scientifically sustaining arches than had been conceived in the history of nations. It was true. and it was also a commonplace, and all Americans knew it, before it was uttered by the lips of Pitt and Burke, that all history might be searched, and the men of the Revolution were the learned and greatest men of the 132 - WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO. world! It would be a prolixity, in eulogy, to name the immortal patriots that gathered about the cradle of liberty, and offered devotion, and gifts of rhetoric, and wisdom, to the young goddess of the Revolution! There is not only symmetry in form, but logic and power, in the. expression and action of the three great divisions of government, federal, state and the reserved power of the people. The general poverty and virtue of the Revolutionary era was the frame about the splendid picture, a picture hung upon the heavens for the world to look at ! The spirit of the system announced the sublime expectation of the supreme, commanding force of popular action; and the people, in the marvelous impulses of patriotic sensibility of that era, started the machinery of liberty. The first of the great concerns of practical government was the unity of empire. Colonial claims extended from the silvery beaches of the Atlantic to beyond the limits of the Elysian fields of Hiawatha. Wrestling with the jealousies of colonial priority to obtain these boundless domains conveyed by the charters of the virgin Queen, and the Charleses, and the Jameses and the Georges, was a not less heroic labor than the bloody diplomacy of acquiring the vast possessions of the Indian nations. The achievement gave to the new republic the hills, and the rivers and the valleys, through whose picturesque gateway civilization passed into the new world of the West. EDUCATION. Of education, the opportunities lay at the foundation of the. republican superstructure. The public gifts of lands by Congress to the states for the schools, the dedication of the interest from perpetual trust funds arising from the sales of the lands by the constitutions of Ohio of 1802 and 1851 attest the genius of our fathers. The old "School Section Sixteen" is one of the romances of our western civilization, but a romance in real life, for the states of the Union now expend for education twice as much as Great Britain, three times as much as France, five times as much as Germany, eight times. as much as Austria, and ten times as much as Italy. THE REVOLUTIONARY PURPOSE. Essential to the preservation of a complex system of free government, the peculiar characteristics of revolutionary purpose were to build up political levels and achieve the altitudes of personal life. WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO - 133 In our history is a somewhat wonderful, ethical phenomena. The heroic fever of the Revolution consumed colonial caste, and the new man, the great commoner. appeared. Our Revolution developed the brotherhood of man. The magnificent postulate of the commoners of the republic was a political and legal equality of the people; the eternal philosophical truth of the great system of constitutional liberty. Predominant in the colonies, European caste degraded the commonalty by its haughty glance of patronizing benevolence. The farmer, the laborer, struggling with poverty, unadorned with imported ornament, unwelcome to the fetes of the aristocrats, contrasted greatly with the ruffled shirts, golden shoe buckles and powdered hair, the stately processions, the wealth, and the courtly pomp and refinement of the lord of the manor; but fashion faded in the great solicitudes of independence and the revolutionist was born in the wonderful contrasts of social life; and the tradesman, the merchant, the self-assertive professions, the school-man of New England and of the South, the people, arose in voluntary majesty to the comprehension of the value of man. The divine purpose intercepted the young surveyor of the Alleghanies, and Washington became immortal commoner of every age. He drew to his bosom the  Hamilton, and Greene, and Knox, and Schuyler, and Morris, and lieutenants, and the thought of a continent was transformed. The great commoner thought uncommonly in the philosophy of human rights. Franklin and Jefferson, Otis and Adams, Henry and Morris; then Marshall and Jay and Webster, Wright, Benton and Clay, in a chorus of eloquence, aroused the world to the beauty of free institutions. The great republican commoner is the hero of the great principles of our Magna Charta ; the Indian chief gazed long at his footsteps in the Northwest. THE CONSTITUTION. The Constitution of the United States arises in a very lofty originality; above the King John charter extorted by, and for, the barons on a memorable day! The principles of legal government in the states of England were a mosaic variety of common precedents, but only in name a prototype of the great system of the constitution of the United States. Dark medieval shadows confused the legal systems of Briton, Saxon and Norman; nor do Greece or Rome, or the states of its fallen empire, embellish any paragraph of our great constitution. It stands alone in original, solitary grandeur! There is a delicacy of mental and moral touch in its application and execution, 134 - WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO. and there has grown around this popular system a literature of interpretation, a common law, created by the superintending vigilance of the popular judgment. Statesmanship is that science that can anatomize the intellectual and moral throbs of the great people of America. Of popular progress, the Constitution was invested with the intention— Liberty should unseat the king! The magnificent face of men and women of American production should invoke the admiration of the globe. The political literature of presidents, and courts, senates and congresses, the taste, the dramatic power, was to outstrip all traditional civilization! No human artist can wield such a sword of the spirit as will dissect American influence in the subtle transformations of the world's barbaric instincts. Without the presence of these great men and this constitution, Wayne county would be a political myth. THE FOUNDERS OF GOVERNMENT IN THE NORTHWEST. Scarcely had the great ordinance of 1787 and the Constitution of the United States electrified the people of the old confederacy with the consciousness of national life, than the star of empire took its way to the northwestern wilderness. The genius of new states followed the star, and there began to pour into the happy valleys of Ohio, and along the sandy dunes of the northern lakes, the unique and splendid thinkers of the revolution. Uprising like an aurOra upon the summits of the Alleghanies appeared the mighty school master, and the teaching clergyman, the artist, the surveyor, the hero, the soldier from the Indian frontier, the statesman from the confederate congress, the legislator, the constitution maker, the physician, the lawyer, the laborer; and likewise there came the mother of heroic offspring; all cutting their way through roadless forests, rafting the streams, and fixing their tents in nature's solitude. Not only of men and women,—it was the immigration of principles, the spiritual light of a new empire was marching with them, and the great flashing eye of civilizatiOn confronted the savage and drove him back among the shadows of the forest. Forms of government began to methodize the inorganic state; religion, too, spread her divine wings over the solitude and intoned her songs with the birds of the woods; an exceptional race was seen whose intellectual face and beaming eyes soon mingled their illumination with the brilliant scenes of the northwestern morning! The beautiful face of the American, the inviolability Of virtue, were commencing their enchantment, but amidst the indescribable dangers WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO - 135 that lurked in savage life. The Revolutionary war had not ceased, but continued in dangerous hostility for nearly thirty years. Obliged by the treaty of 1783 to deliver up the western posts, Great Britain, under pretext of American violation of the treaty, had refused, and had British troops still in the posts in 1812; its Indian allies were incited to deeds of blood; canoes of savages were on the rivers; Indians traversed the county; their wigwams were in the woods; predatory bands murdered the inhabitants; Tecumseh had organized the Indian nations; battles were fought ; Indian revenge glutted its savagery as it slowly retreated; Indian titles were purchased, and safety secured for our people only long after the treaty of peace with Great Britain in 1815, and after British power was extinguished at the battle of New Orleans. Attracted to the territory of the Northwest, as the gift of Virginia to the general government, many of the early settlers of Wayne county were from that noble state, possessed of the sublime composure, determined will and personal courage that were a part of the education of the southern man and woman, and in the danger about their new homes, and in the war of 1812, this southern manhood and womanhood fearlessly met and conquered, not for a day, but for years, the difficulties of primeval nature. From Maryland were many others, and from every eastern and middle state came the founders of government. Amidst this splendid noontide of Wayne county, now embellished by art and education, we can truly behold the great men and women and the great crisis of 1796. A future of prophecy! The revelation of the Constitution of the United States was brooding over the wilderness ; only probabilities, and the visionary beauty of the manhood and womanhood of the West, was in its embrace. Angels were fluttering among the trees! Study has been given to these great men! Noted in Roman history is Myron's celebrated statue of the heifer, as being so fine a manifestation of sculpture that the butchers of the stalls about the Forum had difficulty in preventing their cattle from circling around and around the statue, to catch her marbled breath and the lambent light of her crystalline eye. So the impulses of the writer upon a higher plane and to a nobler object, circle around and around these statues of the pioneers that history has sculptured into divine expression. That the ancients made demigods of their heroes; that the Chinese worship their ancestors; that the Roman soldier was the conqueror of the world, bearing the urn that contained the ashes of his father,—is it a wonder? The superstition of loving our fathers is an hereditary virtue. Interpretation of fine principles and heroic deeds, is character. Of our heritage, the sublimest possession is the character of the pioneers of government. Liberty 136 - WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO. was then only a beautiful song, an ecstacy, a hope, an ideal gOddess, an eagle upon her hand with wings of gold ; Our ancestors threw the stars about her divine form. The lion slumbering in the revolutionary heart was ready to spring upon the world. He might have had his huge limbs and lofty head bound down by the multiplied webs of ancient systems ; Our powers might have become atrophied by disuse ; they were made glorious. It was a magnificent drama of an early world! On occasion of a pioneer picnic several years ago, at Highland park, my remarks were directed to the subject of the "Pioneer Mothers," and the gratification of the audience was a eulogy upon that noble character of the early founders of our institutions. Hopeful, patient, alert, prophetic, using the rifle, fearless, largely anxious in daily ministrations, fierce as a female lion over her young, the pioneer mother was advancing civilization, and erecting that imperishable monument that will never cease to proclaim the virtue and glory of our country ! Such was the sublime character of the founders of the first of new states ; a new nation covered with wounds, and pulsating with the blood of liberty behind them; an untreated empire of untold magnificence before them. With prudent and reflective energy we commenced our great career. It was a Watchful and wary ingress into dangers and savage life ; the measured and steady prOgress of law, amidst the claws Of the bear and the jealous tomahawk of the Indian. No settlement had been made in this new domain until April, 1788, when forty-six immigrants arrived at the mouth Of the Muskingum river. No constituted authority being there, Return Jonathan Meigs drew up a code of rules, on a sheet of foolscap, and tacked them to a large oak tree. Following up the Muskingum and its tributaries, immigration made settlements towards the north ; but it was not until 1806 that William Larwill, and in 1807 Joseph and John Larwill, his brothers, settled in Wayne county, John Bever being then engaged in surveying the sections of the county. The interminable exodus from the East then flowed, and formed the great population of the Northwest! The interesting and significant fact is that law was tacked up on an oak ! It was to be an empire of law ! INDIAN GOVERNMENT. With nations of Indians inhabiting the undefined territory of the old colonies, the Constitution of the United States became a comprehensive menace to aboriginal government. As a very ancient people they met Colum- WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO - 137 bus in the South ; they gazed with imperturbable interest on the Pilgrim Fathers! The tides of the Atlantic, and Pacific, the raging overflow of the great rivers, invaded their wigwams in every part of North America ; and it is a favorite impression of the writer that they had a system of government. To the nationalities that the Romans found in Gaul, several centuries before the Christian era, the aborigines of America bear resemblance. Formed of families were tribes, and of these the nation, and of the masses Of the tribes and of the chieftains the general assembly was formed. Of self-government the Indian system was conspicuous. Recognizing the inter-Indian obligations, but without permanent confederation, the Indian nations stood, sOlitary and alone, without international relations, in military dictatorship without the laws of war, and confronted by modern systems of civilization which they rejected in time of peace. To the world they were mere Arabs in an American wilderness. But they had a local government. The chiefs of the tribes were selected by the tribes, and of the nations by the tribes, and, as of all other nations, the most celebrated for their courage, endurance and intelligence were elevated to the position of leaders, and they were as absolute *km dictators as are known in every regular army. Divided into dif- nations, war was common among them and with the different European who contested territorial rights in the colonial period, and with the United States. Treaties and alliances among themselves and with the French, the British and Americans were frequent in the various contests of international policy, and in our Northwest, in the battle of Tippecanoe, their great leader, Tecumseh, illustrated the union of Indian nations with the British. To have no permanent federal center, or capital, was, incident to the Indian claims of vast possessions, and to the tribal excursions to the distant limits of their territory, apparently to maintain their possessory right to their hereditary domains. In all their negotiations for the sale of their lands, the terms and conditions, and their policy, were first considered and voted on by the Indian nations, and their leaders were selected and instructed as plenipotentiaries in national form, to the meetings with American national commissioners. To call the attention of the government to a viOlation of treaties, frequent embassies of the dignified denizens of the forest appeared at Washington. and their accomplishments excited the wonder of our national authorities. The strict observance of the marriage vow among the Indians was a family virtue. Their religion was a direct relation to the Great Spirit 'whOm they worshipped. They believed in the future life. Their medicine man was their priest, and he invoked the divine healing power to cure disease. 138 - WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO. The antiquity of this belief, and the Indian idea of the inferiority of the female, give probability to the supposition of his descent from some ancient race of people; as do also the agricultural department of Indian. life, which, together with the common drudgery of the family, was conducted by the female. The disinclination Of the Indian to any labOr except hunting and fishing and war, his frequent change of location, his habits of cruelty, classed him as a relic of barbarism. With much like the ceremony of knighthood, in the Middle ages, the youthful Indian was equipped as a warrior. Debased by ignoble passions, yet in bravery, in resenting a supposed wrong, in his slow retreat before superior forces, the Indian was possessed of the element of chivalry, and stands as a proud, self-governing, revengeful barbarian; and as we see him pictured, he is the most skillful, graceful and splendid horseman upon the American prairies. In vanity of ornament of himself and horse, he might well have been ranked as a knight of the Crusades, or that composite being of horse and man that surprised the Mexican on the invasion of Cortez! Indolent in time of peace; painting the body, wearing the skins of animals, expert in the movements of infantry and cavalry in time of war, with the warwhoop to encourage the attack ; with weird songs and crude poetry, their only records; these the editors of Tacitus cOntinually compare with the early Gaul. The tomahawk was a Gaulish weapon. Marius, in his great battles with the Cimbri, fought the same race that were destroyed by Harrison and Wayne in this great Northwest. Government of the Indian respected right of property and person, punished crimes, and promoted peace if nOt attacked in person or property. The high physical development of the Indian, his Roman nose and high cheek bones were Gaulish, and in the Persian, the Indian may trace his ancestry. The vast territory of the Northwest was claimed by the Indian as his heritage, and the international law of title by discovery and prescription was as ably reasoned by the Indian orators as by the supposed more civilized usurpers of Europe. Before our fathers, some Indian tribes had been settled for fifty years in what is now the state of Ohio; and, with a remarkable humanity, the Congress of the United States provided in the ordinance of 1787 that "the utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians ; their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent." The United States obtained possession of their lands on the Muskingum river as early as 1795, and between 1784 and 1805 some five treaties were made between the United States and various tribes of Indians, quieting their title to certain lands in WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO - 139 the Northwest, which the government afterwards purchased, and in 1842 the last possession of the Indians terminated in Ohio. The most dramatic and picturesque scenes ever witnessed were the occasions. of the meeting of the commissioners of the United States and the Indian chiefs, to define boundaries and purchase Indian lands. Treaties at Fort Stanwix in 1784; at Fort McIntosh in 1785; at Fort Finney in 1786; at Fort Harmar in 1789; at Greenville in 1795; at Fort Industry in 1805, with many able representatives of the government, including General St. Clair and General Wayne, and with the chiefs of eleven of the most powerful tribes of Indians of the Northwest, were as brilliantly conducted as the modern meetings of the peace congress, amidst the splendid architecture and display of the capital of the Netherlands! The more magnificent palaces of the stately oaks, the rivers sparkling, nature's parks of wild animals gathering about in the shadows; the concerts of the birds, the native dignity of the Indian chiefs, with that silent gravity that told of the approaching migration to distant lands; their splendid dress of doe akin, its fringes musical with the claws of the bear and with the teeth of the wolf, and above that sombre and silent face, that had been bronzed in yellow by the Master Hand of untold centuries, were waving plumes, that proclaimed the majesty of nature and native art, the exalted denizen whose warwhoop answered the victorious scream of the eagle, whose feathers adorned him—the tall, ornamented and thoughtful negotiator ! To intensify these great occasions was the presence of the government of the United States, in the continental dress of one of the heroes of the Revolution and hut lately conqueror of the Indians at the battle of Fort Defiance, the immortal Major-Gen. Anthony Wayne, and this great man gazed calmly into the eves of Corn Planter, and Red Jacket, and Little Turtle, and they yielded to inevitable destiny ; and at the treaty of Greenville, accomplished by General Wayne, peace was established and the lands of the Northwest obtained for the population of the new states. For negotiating treaties, for intellectual acumen, for embellished oratory, the Indian representatives ranked among the classical speakers of antiquity; but in his fine and majestic appearance there was a decadent chivalry, and an undertone that we hear in the plaintive cry of the whippoorwill. However, he was vise in selling cheaply a doubtful title, and in reserving, as it appeared to him, his still independent and proud seclusion among the majestic scenery of another west. Coursing through Wayne county were many trails of this nervous and uneasy race, traveling to and fro from east to west, and west to east, in 140 - WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO. fragmentary weakness ; with a village for a period near the junction of Buckeye and Madison streets, they were in amity with the early settlers, and disappeared in the progressive pressure of irresistible immigration. Their pathway was marked by the spasmodic desolation of revenge, largely incited by a British administration and emulated by a British soldiery. To their natural passions, inflamed by the desperation of inferior resistance, were added the European and Asiatic methods of extermination, of which history grows atrocious in the civil wars across the oceans. Of notice of danger to the pioneers from Indian attack, there were many magnanimous examples of Indian friendship. At that day the atmosphere of political life was burdened with the sighs of the Spanish inquisition, or the slavery, mutilation and murder of prisoners of war. Massacres of Wyoming, or of St. Clair's defeat, scarcely equalled the bloody dignity of the slaughter in the Netherlands, or in the civil wars of England. Now but a reminiscence, many of the principles of Indian justice and equity insensibly became an element in the common law of our great Northwest. The philosophy of the Indian sensibilities developed a rare exhibition on the great stage of nature ; the love of home, of territorial supremacy, of the picturesque hills, of the perspective valleys, and of their amphitheatres of forest and flower, of color and odor, of wild animal and ambuscade, gave to the Indian the highest action of the sensibilities, and the imminency of their loss, by the inevitable approach of the immigrant, aroused a passion that clothed many of the beautiful scenes of the West with the skeletons of the Indian and of the victims of Indian atrocity.. His existence, and national life, and primitive government, are but a tragic romance in civil and political life ; an unique curiosity in the history of nations. One of the greatest novelties in all history is the Indian in America! And among the early settlers of Wayne county ! Of his characteristics, his insatiate cruelty ranked him with the early and bloody struggles of the human race ; his cruelties in the Revolution have no sanction in the laws of modern warfare, and his evil passions had the fixed habit of inhuman and merciless revenge. Against the invader he was a monster, with a high development of intellectual power. Of George III, of Lord North, and of the British Parliament, the Indian was the bloody instrument ; associated, too, with the Hessian, whose rivalry in cruelty, and its British instigation, confound the thought of several centuries of moral progress. Of the disordered sensibilities of several thousand years, the savagery of the Indian is an evolution. The humanity with which he was considered in the ordinance of 1787, and in his association with the pioneers, is a pleasant reflection ; and in our love WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO - 141 of free government the history of ideas might find some political assimilation in two hundred years of colonial and Indian association; our love of liberty may insensibly be the partial reflection of that proud and life-sacrificing passion of independence that accompanied this native American into the shadows of the setting sun! ORGANIZED GOVERNMENT IN WAYNE COUNTY. Divided by the ordinance of 1787 into three great territorial divisions, Hamilton, Washington and Wayne, the great dominion of the latter embraced northern and northwestern Ohio, including the territory Of which was formed the states of Michigan and Indiana and parts of Illinois and Wisconsin; and, but for the crack of the rifle of a few daring white men, and the warwhoop of the Indian, it was an empire of silence. Aboriginal government, the tribe and its chief, alone disturbed the solitude. The eagle's feather was the only emblem of sovereignty ; conscience the only lawgiver of the pioneer, and it was the spirit of the great ordinance. It was then true, as Aristotle said over thousand years ago, that "It is better for a city to be governed by a man, than by good laws." The peaceable acquisition of territory, founded upon the recognition of Indian nationality and the equity of possession, - an acquisition that disclaimed the old world doctrine of title by discovery or conquest,—established the new political organism upon the foundations of righteousness, and a government of good men began to appear in the wilderness. 1. The government of a territorial Council in 1788. 2. The government of a territorial Legislature in 1799. 3. The government of the state in 1802. As a policy of necessity from sparseness of population, until 1799 the elective franchise was held in abeyance. THE TERRITORIAL COUNCIL. With the government of a Territorial Council in 1788, composed of Arthur St. Clair as governor, Winthrop Sargent as secretary, and Samuel H. Parsons, Mitchell Varnum and Return Jonathan Meigs as judges, all prominent men of the Revolution, meeting at Marietta, organized political energy began a memorable career. Laws were to be adopted by the governor and judges. To reside in the district and be possessed of One thousand acres of land were the qualifications of the governor. To have five hundred 142 - WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO. acres of land was required of the judges. They were to have common law jurisdiction. All county and township officers were to be appointed by the governor. Freedom of religious worship, and the encouragement of schools, and good faith toward the Indians were guaranteed by the great ordinance. Habeas corpus, trial by jury, representation, to give bail, judicial proceedings according to the common law, were cardinal doctrines of the congressional charter. Confined to the laws of the original states, the council at its first session adopted laws establishing a militia, courts, sheriffs, a court of probate, defining crimes, regulating marriages, creating the office of coroner, and acts of limitation. After ten years, with changes of judges, and many additional laws, now of common knowledge, the period arrived in 1798 when the territory contained five thousand free male inhabitants, and a territorial Legislature was to be elected by the people. THE TERRITORIAL LEGISLATURE. The Governor issued his proclamaion for the election of a General Assembly to meet at Cincinnati, in February, 1799. The General Assembly consisted of a House of Representatives, and a Legislative Council of five members, to be appointed by the President, out of ten names selected by the House, and met in Cincinnati in September, 1799. Not organized by the territorial government until 1796, Wayne county did not participate in the organic advantages of the council; but in 1798 was represented in the General Assembly by Charles F. Chobert De Joncaire, Solomon Sibley and Jacob Viscar, all of Detroit ; and this Legislature elected William Henry Harrison the delegate to Congress and adjourned to meet at Chillicothe in 1800 and again adjourned to 1801-2, and again adjourned until November, 1802, but never meeting, as in April, 1802, Congress authorized certain portions of the Northwest to form a state government. THE EARLY LAWS. Commencing in 1788 to legislate. the .early councils and territorial legislatures found the necessary legal examples in the states of Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Virginia, the homes from which in the main they had made the great exodus into the wilderness of the Northwest. From these ample sources a comprehensive body of laws were adopted, such as regulating the militia. establishing courts, for the appointment of sheriffs, respecting crimes, marriages, the office of coroner, limitation of times for civil and WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO - 143 criminal actions, as to the sale of liquor to Indians and soldiers, suppressing gambling, for dividing the counties into townships, and for the appointment of constables, overseers of the poor and township clerks, to create the office of clerk of the Legislature, making the records of the courts of the United States evidence, as to enclosures of ground, granting licenses to merchants, traders and tavern keepers, creating the office of treasurer-general and county treasurers, and as to the manner of raising money, as to highways, public buildings, prisons, strays, admission of attorneys, guardians, procedure in civil cases, and as to fees of public officers. To the common law of Great Britain was added legislation defining the jurisdiction of the courts and officers to execute process, providing for taxation and a treasurer-general, and county treasurer; organizing the militia : providing for marriage and divorce: defining crime and criminal and civil procedure; providing for highways, for the poor, for the creation of townships and counties, and such other legislation as was in the older states; for conveyance of real estate; for the settlement of estates, and other probate jurisdiction; for public buildings, and protection of the right of property and persons, until, when the constitution of 1802 was adopted, there existed a body of laws of which the present voluminous statutes are the evolution and amplification of the exigencies Of a growing commonwealth. Of consummate wisdom and foresight, the structure of the new states was a magnificent exception in all the history of government! That the early legislators were industriously establishing a government of the people, the acts of the council and territorial Legislature above are noted as evidences of the popular sovereignty of the times. More conclusive evidence of the sovereignty of the people arose between the Legislature and Governor St. Clair in 1800 in the denial of his right to exercise the vet,' power. and to lay out and change the boundaries of counties, under the ordinance of 1787. The contest grew more and more determined and much legislation was rendered useless. The Governor was afterwards condemned by Congress, and the people were confirmed in their resistance to the unconstitutional attempt of the Governor to interfere with the popular right. Of this disagreement the memory may have remained, and it may account for the absence of the veto power in the constitutions of 1802 and 1851. THE CONSTITUTION OF 1802. Reducing the great county of Wayne in the year 1800, the territory constituting the state of Indiana was organized with a separate territorial government. The territorial Legislature not having met in 1802, owing to 144 - WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO. the act of Congress authorizing the eastern section of the Northwest to form a state, in October, 1802, an election was held fOr members of the constitutional convention, which met at Chillicothe in November, 1802, and adopted a state constitution, and the state of Ohio was recognized by Congress as a state of the Union, in February, 1803. Its first General Assembly a: met in March, 1803. A supplementary act of Congress of March, 1803, made a munificent provision of tracts of land, for the use of schools and for making roads within the state, limited to certain territory of the three divisions, by general bearings. Wayne county was diminished by so much of the original limits as embraced any portion of Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin and Michigan, and was not approximately bounded until the year 1808, and controversies arising as to the western and northwestern boundaries of the new state, Congress ordered a survey of these boundaries by act of May 20, 1812, and in the same year Wayne county was organized under the state government, with Wooster as the county seat. To the delays incident to the uncertain boundaries and surveys, Wayne. county was not represented in the constitutional convention of 1802, nor in the state Legislature until 1815. In the constitutional convention of 1851 the county was represented by John Larwill, Leander Firestone and E. Wilson; and in that of 1872 by John K. McBride. Our fathers were the careful architects of the first new state of the Union. Slavery existed in all the thirteen states, except in the states of Massachusetts and Maine, and was, as the ordinance of 1787 wOuld indicate, in the course of ultimate extinction ; the descent of estates was especially provided for in the great charters of 1787, adverse to the English system, and the ordinance especially restricted all laws to be made for the Northwest territory to the policy of the laws of the older states, and carefully preserved the right of suffrage and self-government, the veto of the governor, freedom of religious sentiment and worship, the encouragement of schools and means of education, and a republican form of government. THE ELECTIVE FRANCHISE OF THE CONSTITUTION OF 1802. The elective franchise was an important question, both in the territorial condition of the government of the Northwest and in framing the constitution of 1802. The restrictions on the right to vote were varied in the different states, but our first constitution provided : To have been in the state One year, and to have labored on the roads, and to be a white male person above the age of twenty-one years, were the qualifications of a voter WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO - 145 The right of suffrage to the negro and his descendants was decided ad• versely, as well as his right to hold office. And while the right of suffrage was broad, by a strange perversity of principle, the exercise of it was limited. It was a political phenomenon. While this first constitution of the state provided for the election of senators and representatives to the General Assembly of the state, for governor, for sheriff and for coroner, and for all town and township officers ; the secretary of state, state treasurer and state auditor, the judges of the court of common pleas, consisting of a president and associate judges, with probate jurisdiction, and the judges of the supreme court, were to be appointed by the joint ballot of the General Assembly; and the clerks of the court were to be appointed by the respective courts. No constitutional provision being made for county recorder, auditor, treasurer, prosecuting attorney, or commissioners, or surveyor, they were afterward elected by provision of the Legislature as authorized by the constitution. The solution to submit the adoption of the constitution of 1802 to the people was defeated by an almost unanimous vote (twenty-seven to seven) and the was put into operation by the delegates to the convention; and it that after the year 1806 another constitutional convention might be held. As delegates to this convention, were many leading men both than and in after years; they were patriots. Of the reasons that operated to adopt the appointive system as to some of the state and county officers, we can, perhaps, only surmise that impressions prevailed, especially as to the courts, that created the judiciary system of the general government. On the frontier, harassed by Indians in the depredations incident to the war of 1812, and the war itself. busy to live, our pioneers held no convention after the year 18o6, hut the survivors of them, and the generation younger than them, conscious of the blot of the appointive system on the principle of self government. in the constitution of 1851 restored a complete elective system to the state. Illustrating the popular prudence in changing the fundamental law, the people refused the constitution of 1872, and for a period of one hundred and six years, since 1802, excepting some amendments changing the time and method of voting, and creating the circuit court, and enlarging the supreme court, have adhered to the first constitution for fifty years, and to the second for sixty. Exercising a distinguished influence on this and similar great questions, the names of many of the ablest men of Ohio, and of Wayne county, could be given to ornament these pages. In the practical application of the great principles of government, it is t extravagant to say that our fathers outranked all the legislators of the (10)             . 146 - WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO. world. They were educated and heroic; lovers of liberty. They were students of government, fearless, grand and incorruptible. Wayne county soon became pre-eminent among the counties of the new state. Republican government of the state can only be expressed in the legal terms of county organization, and the county organization in the legal terms of city, town and township gOvernment, and these in the primary legal terms of the power of the people. The state and county are but ministerial agencies ; the General Assembly, the supreme and inferior courts are constituent powers delegated by the people. That the federal and state gOvernments ascend from the people, and no power descends from the federal and state governments, both the federal and state constitutions expressly declare. But the system is inviolable as an organism, and is absolute law. Not only in passing laws, but in judicial proceedings, the Athenian populace voted by uplifted hand; and in the wards of the city of Rome the people voted by white and black beans. The senate of Rome were often rebuked by the popular will. By the usurpation by the emperors of the popular power, Rome fell, and Athens before the combinations of Philip. That the civil and political history of Wayne county may be truly observed, we must look to the city, the townships and towns in which original and initial force always has prevailed. THE CITY OF WOOSTER. The first election for city officers after incorporation was in March, 1818, consisting of a president and five trustees, and the board appointed a marshal, treasurer and collector. By-laws were drafted for the government Of the board, and ordinances passed for the government of the city. Wooster, as early as 1814, was called the Athens of northern Ohio. It is believed by the writer that Wayne county, and Wooster, the cOunty seat, and the territory known as the backbone of Ohio, had more able and educated men at that early day than any locality Of the Northwest. Beall, Sloane, Spink, William, Joseph H. and John Larwill, Henry, Bever, the Joneses, the Robinsons, Stibses, Quinbys, McConahays, Cox, Avery, Sprague, Christmas, Howards, Clingen, Dean, Lakes, Bissells, Tottens, and a much larger list of equally large men are remembered. Mather, a graduate of Yale, was the first teacher. Surveyors, physicians, lawyers, farmers, educated builders of state, and mothers, wives, daughters, bright as the stars themselves, were the heralds of the splendors of the future city and county and the fOunders of free institutions. Of the first action of the city officers as far back as WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO - 147 1812, having occasion to examine the records, I find their meetings conducted in full compliance with Jefferson's manual, and the legal form and character of ordinances would be approved by any court. For more than eighty years many of the ordinances for the government of the city have been in force. Acquainted with the city for many years, and especially the last twenty, my observation of its order, and respect for law, has impressed me that no other city in these respects is its superior. With extensive improvements conducted by the public service for several years, the city is seldom in the courts. The successful management of its finances, its administration of justice, and preservation of peace and good order, are evidence of the best administrative ability. It is a city of law. The cultivation of taste is a legal sequence in self-government to the masses of the people. Peace and order, the refining processes of individual worth, dwell in the temple of the republican heart in a popular system of government. Splendor is bred in the conceptions and shines in external life. Houses of lords, patrician caste and private egotism have mistaken a birth or a fortune for this spiritual dignity. Fine dwellings and ornamental houses, public improvements, higher education and universal taste; personal beauty, the magnificent buildings of a university, and its high purposes, the exceptional opportunities of the city schools: a state agricultural experiment station, and the manifold forms of its scientific development ; manufactures, merchandizing, have grown into a city of several thousands. Mental culture is a legal result of a people's government ; long and occult analysis is born in the primary efforts of political philosophy. The newspaper. the orator of the pulpit, the teacher, the physician, are metaphysicians ; the lawyer has struggled in the deceptive meshes of occult legal ideas in all the history of Wayne county, until a species of brilliancy, a sort of traditional electric light. illumines the city, from Avery to John McSweeney, whose unrivaled powers have ranked him among the orators, "That thundered over Greece, From Macedon to Artaxerxes' throne." TOWNSHIP AND TOWN GOVERNMENT. The republican system existed in the individual father and mother. A great nation in chaotic conception was brooding in the genius of the people. The home, the township, the county, the state, the nation, were the ascending series in the development of government, and the surveyor as early as 1807 was defining the sections of land to be the future legal home of the framers 148 - WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO. of government of the Northwest, and between that date and 1825 all the townships of Wayne county were formed and organized into political bodies. The forty-six families of the county in 1810, numbering three hundred and thirty-two, had grown in 1825 to perhaps over two thousand ; in 1850 to thirty-two thousand ; in 1870 tO thirty-five thousand. Anterior to the very early period of 1810, the three hundred and thirty-two population of Wayne county was governed by benevolence and brotherly kindness. Knowing the laws of the older states, their voluntary righteousness was the common law of the early rights of property and person; but in the organizing periods of the townships under the constitution of 1802, the observance of the early laws of the state became the necessary and paramount obligation. As the larger responsibilities of representation in the Legislature of the state, in state officers, in Congress, in the associate judgeships, and in the county offices, were to be met by the early settlers, the township governments supplied enlarged intellectual forces. These distinguished forces in township administration were the moral and spiritual foundation of a great republic. They were to observe the public roads, to care for the public schools, for trials by jury, for a local court, for a religious home, for individual liberty, for economy, for industry, for self-government; these are in divine harmony with the highest purpose that ever sanctified a state. The township is the primary organ of sentiment. Its legal environment the only free system ever formulated for the defense of human rights! And it but gives clearness to the view of township government when we consider that the then and present county treasurer, auditor and recorder are county agencies ; that the entire judicial system and its officers is but corrective; that the commissioners of the county in that early period, who exercised local administration, had but small means and could do but little for the people of the townships. These early people stood alone amidst the tall oaks of the forests, the swollen streams, the bridle-paths of the surveys, savage animals, and the dangers of Indian marauding. But they built roads and bridges; as overseers, they assisted the poor, they established and maintained justice's courts and juries ; they punished breaches of the peace, and violations of the rights of persons and property ; observed inviolate the rights of suffrage, and required the strictest accountability of their public officers; they contributed to the public expense by taxation, and required the strictest economy in public expenditures. Mindful of the constitutional recitals that "religion, morality and knowledge" are necessary to good government, they early erected churches and established religious worship ; they erected school houses, and maintained schOols by private subscriptions, and had the peculiar advantage WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO - 149 of that great class of teachers that accompanied the immigration of the early settlers from the eastern states; and they laid the foundation for that school system created by the legislation of the state in 1853, formulated by the senate committee, composed of Harvey Rice, George Rex, Of Wayne county, and Alonzo Cushing. They observed with patriotic care all the provisions of the bill of rights of the constitution of 1802. Industry pervaded the townships, and in but a little while Wayne county began its career of beautiful farms and magnificent productiveness. For a eulogy on the intelligence, dignity and versatility of the early settlers, we find them associate judges in the court of common pleas, when at an early period the writer admired the wisdom and integrity of their public services, and which judicial system continued until the system of the constitution of 185i was substituted in its place. Out of the number of these early statesmen, the county officers were largely chosen, and so great was the influence of the township leaders and the special domestic importance of township policy and control of the County treasury, that the commissioners of the county have almost wholly been selected from the people of the townships; and one is impressed that the selection, at an early day, of many of the members of both houses of the state Legislature, members of Congress. and constitutional conventions, from the townships, was somewhat precautional for the promotion of the original principles of our republican system. An intentional study of the development of township life shows the early formation of villages. the facilities for exchange of valuable ideas; the early advantages for education in many instances, the establishment of the newspaper: the discussion of the legislative policy, and the fitness of men for public office; the best methods of agriculture, and the supplementary knowledge of the press of the county seat and of the older states; and I am led forward from the early struggles of high purpose and republican government to that magnificent present, to the conventions of county and state exhibitions of agricultural wonders; to the comprehensive systems of education; the high qualification of teachers, and to the personal taste and attainments of the young women and men, that rival all productions of learning at the county seat. As an inevitable evolution, villages, towns and cities have modified monarchy. France, England, Germany, nearly the whole world, have yielded to representation. A financial question has become the menace to arbitrary power. Public convenience was a natural organizing incentive to the formation of villages and towns. The blacksmith, the tailor, the shoemaker, the wagon-