150 - WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO. maker, the carpenter, the merchant, the watch-repairer, the miller, the postmaster, and useful trades and employments required a center as a market ; defined lots, streets, the correction of illegal conduct; and law and its administration was necessary, and self-government found its original center in the village and. township. And in the village marshal, trustees and. supervisor of the village; of the justice of the peace; the constable, the township trustees, we find the beginnings of self-government. Guizot, in his History of Civilization, and Hallam in his History of the Middle Ages, the one of France, the other of England, describe with admirable fidelity the disorders of independent chieftains, barons, earls, defiant estates, rendering government a continual revolution. Silently, popular life was developing; villages, towns, cities, for domestic convenience, for foreign trade at the ports, and local exchange, grew, governed themselves, became the champions of order, aided the government to obtain the mastery over the fortified robber and lawless bandit of the large realms in which violence enslaved the people and debased the state. The foundation of all European government was force, power usurped by the sword, but the people have grown into the governing capacity of most of the governments of the world, and largely within the century just elapsed. The logic of our splendid system of elective peace, and that the state is the logical conclusion of the premises of individual freedom, and that the federal government is the logical conclusion of the premises of state and popular organizations,—all known as the constitutional system of the United States,—has pervaded the world. Of this self-governing principle, the colonies had no completed practice or publication, and the settlement of the Northwest, the growth of government from the individual to the state, had their birth in this Northwest territory, and necessarily, the new counties, the new state, have generated other states, and the world is in the embrace of the two American oceans. The grandest endowments of the age are our personal freedom and our all-pervading American liberty ! The Christian religion was uttering its voice in the early township, village and city churches, or even, anterior to these, in the log cabins of the pioneer. And here are the two sublimities of republican theory,—political, and religious freedom ; not voiced by the constitutions of our country solely to avoid the ignorance and cruelty of the sectarian persecutions of the Middle ages, the thousand years of blood from the fourth to the fourteenth century, but that the genius of the people might illumine their pathway in their ascent to happiness, and inspire them with the wisdom of brotherhood ; and that the WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO - 151 ever present spirit might endow them with the genius of national life! Without these conditions, the civil and political history of Wayne county would be a tinkling cymbal. Wayne county owes its greatness to being an, enlightened and Christian county! THE EARLY METHOD OF ENFORCING THE LAW. It may be observed with justice that a patriotic care governed our early people in the execution of fundamental law. To our early agencies of government we owe a debt of gratitude. The ordinance of 1787 restricted legislation in the Northwest territory to the policy and laws of the older states, and when the council had violated this provision the laws were instantly vetoed or repealed. In the execution of the laws passed by the early legislatures, constitutions were strictly construed, and power was exercised by officers from the highest to the lowest in a respectful manner to avoid infraction of the rights of person or property. It was the exercise of logic in discrimination of republican ideas, and these ideas were paramount in legislation primarily necessary in forming government. They continually prevailed in the amplification of laws, so that the growth of legislation was of an endogenous character, covering by broader provisions similar greater necessities. Provisions for the poor, school systems, roads and highways, taxes, always remained the same in principle, so that in the constitutions of 1802 and of 1851, while the larger population and progressive necessities demanded a broader and more perfect application of principles, the principles 'were identical, and not inimical to the spirit of the government. Enlightenment and conscience, patriotism, directed the execution of law. There was something signally brotherly in the motives of the early agencies of the people, and these were a tremendous force in promoting civil and political government. PROFESSIONAL INFLUENCES. Of the wise and tenacious men of the profession in asserting republican principles in the early days, were the early physicians and lawyers, of the press and the churches. Of the physicians, James Townsend was the first in 1811, remaining thirty years at Wooster ; John Cunningham, at Jeromeville in 1830, and from 1848 in Wooster; Daniel McPhail, in Wooster, in 1818; Edward Thompson, in 182o, afterward a bishop in the Methodist Episcopal church ; Stephen F. Day, at Wooster in 1827, and remained for thirty-four years ; Hezekiah 152 - WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO. Bissell and Samuel N. Bissell, at an early day; Moses Shaffer, first at Mt. Eaton, and about 1831 removed to Wooster, where he practiced for fifty years; Leander Firestone, first at Congress in 1841 and removed to Wooster in 1856; James D. Robinson, resident in Wooster. Of lawyers who were in Wayne county at an early: period was Levi. Cox, in 1815; Edward Avery, in 1817; Ezra Dean, in 1'824; Samuel Hemphill, about 1838; John P. Jeffries, in 1836; C. C. Parsons, in 1841; George Rex, in 1843'; John McSweeney, in 1845; Ohio F. Jones, in 1846; and the influence of These representatives and judicial officers and professional men was incalculably valuable in formulating the 'methods and carrying out .and preserving the principles of the new government. The republican system was favorable to the development of plain and democratic methods in the administration .of justice as Contrasted with the woolsack and the wig; physicians became patriots, and great lawyers were allowed the cultivation of eloquence and political philosophy; the courts and the legislators were, for the first time, free to modify the common law to accord with the self-government of the people and the plainer legal rules of action. Having increased in population to thirty-two thousand in 1851, very eminent results Were apparent in the county, in finer buildings, in the facilities of farming, in conveniences of travel, in education and religious worship, and in the professions of medicine and law. In the added half century, incalculable beauty marks the country and the numerous towns and county seat; a county infirmary; a children's home; public buildings suggest expensive philanthropy ; great schools, musical devices, fashion, taste, refinement, beauty, dignity, independence, dwell in palatial homes; the county seat has become the mast desirable dwelling place; and in railroads, newspapers, social integrity, and prosperity, Wayne county stands the meritorious rival of any county in Ohio. Of the most eminent forces in asserting the inviolability of the principles of popular right were the early newspapers, that, after many transformation of name, yet remain the medium of patriotic influence. From 1817 to the present time the newspapers of Wooster and Wayne county, in the broader field of fundamental principles of free government, voiced the patriotism of the pioneers and their descendants, and informed, encouraged and supported the intellectual and moral struggle for the great institutions of the Northwest, and for the systems of federal and state constitutions. For the republican system, the religion of the people of Wayne county was a powerful influence. Whether in the log cabin, or in God's first temples WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO - 153 among the umbrageous shadows of the forest, the Divine Presence was solacing the pioneer with hope, giving rest to the heavy laden and assurance of the dignity of his belief in the freedom of man. Churches were being erected as early as 1812, and church influence has been a magnificent conclusion of the righteousness of self-government. In the East they gave inspiration to the struggle for independence, in the Northwest they were the champions of liberty and gave sanctity to the cause of the people. THE CONSTITUTION OF 1851. Presumably the constitution of 1851 embraced the best thought of republican government. Rufus P. Ranney, as a leader, is believed to have been the ablest man in the convention; from Wayne county Leander Firestone and John Larwill and Ezra Wilson were, as non-professionals in legal study, among the ablest of their class. The convention was 'thoroughly imbued with democratic ideas. Correcting the appointive system of the constitution of 1802, every office 'was made elective; much of the constitution of 1802 was adopted, enlarged upon, and more clearly expressed; additional offices were created, as lieutenant-governor and attorney-general, a commission of five members to assist the supreme court, state school commissioner, board of public works, sinking fund commissioners, probate court and comptroller of the treasury. To change the time of holding elections, and the time of electing officers, amendments were adopted since 1851. That the federal form of executive, legislative and judicial, is also the state form of governor, legislature and the supreme court, is worthy of observation, being closely related to the principles of individual interests, and in the counties may be observed the legal checks on the closely related county agencies and the people. As a contrast to the refusal to submit the constitution of 1802 to the vote of the people, the constitution of 1851 was ratified at the state election in 1851, and the latter constitution provided that all amendments shall be voted on by the people. With enlargements of the public agencies, and labors incident to the growth of population, the constitution and laws since 1851 have been a remarkable system of popular encouragement; education alone stands pre-eminent in practical example. The refinement, the appropriation of invention, the dignity of social life, are splendidly manifest among the masses of Wayne county. Not the least among the acquirements of the people of Wayne county was an education in politics, not only in the law, but in the policy of administration. 154 - WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO. THE INFLUENCE OF PARTY ORGANIZATION AMONG THE PEOPLE. As to the interpretation of constitutional expression, the conformity of legislation to fundamental principles, and as to the practical effects of the exercise of executive power, political parties represent the divergence 'of public thought. They imply intellectual activity in the concerns of government. That portion of the farewell address of Washington as to parties had rather a reference to the future than the then present. Much confusion existed in the public thought at that day as to the effect of constitutional, provisions on the rights of the states, much enhanced by Hamilton's doctrine .of "implied power." French emissaries formed Jacobin clubs, in antagonism to the policy of Washington in not forming entangling alliances in the French and British war. The federalist and republican of that day were not only in disorganization as to any definite party plans, but their beliefs were a mosaic of individual and local contradictions. Not until 1828, when a portion of the people nominated Andrew Jackson for President, and other portions supported his opponent, were there party organizations, and it is difficult to find any difference of political views in that contest, except it be on the immense uncertainty of the meaning of a strict construction of the constitution! The possibility is hardly historical that the people of the Northwest were largely influenced by the party questions at Washington, until the population in the new state of Ohio was augmented to twenty thousand or thirty thousand. That at the county seats politics played some part in the intellectual and moral action of men of leisure and of the professions, during and after Jackson's administration, the existence of the county newspaper, the somewhat advanced methods of communication among the people, a partial relief from the burdens of clearing the forests, would indicate. The Missouri Compromise in 1820, the national strife as to the re-chartering of the Bank of the United States in Jackson's administration; in 1832, the so-called nullification attempt of South Carolina, the presidential election of 1840, the Mexican war of 1845, aroused the intellectual action of the people, but not that state of friction of a later period. Relegated to the states of Southern slavery, the question of the balance of power, of the free and slave states, grew into discordant controversy all along the highway of national events. Arrogance threatened dissolution of the Union; the demand of congressional action in favor of slavery marked the statesmanship of the South- ern states, and a great moral question involved in the question of slavery itself inspired in 1854 the creation of the Republican party. The great WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO - 155 political forces of the Democratic party of the Northern states dissevered their relation to the unconstitutional claims of slavery, and two of the leading men of Ohio, Henry B. Payne and George E. Pugh, in the Democratic" national convention at Charleston in 186o, repudiated, in the name of the state of Ohio, the southern claim of constitutional protection to slavery. Now traversing the whole history of the federal union, public thought was aroused and became invincible in the Civil war. Wayne county was not the least in thought and action in this great contest to finally settle the great constitutional principle of final union. Upon great questions of administration of the federal government, of state legislation, of county and township interests, the two great parties have expended thought and action; and intervening with apparent weakness for many years, a Prohibition party has beheld a popular-conquest of the principle of temperance. In debate, in public oratory, in newspaper rhetoric, in conscientious thoughtfulness and patriotism, the people of Wayne county have grown great reasoners in the philosophy of government. Critical in the alertness of intellect, party politics has become a popular science, and in Wayne county the politician has become as gentle and courteous as ever Plato and his disciples were in the gardens of the Academy. THE HEREDITY OF GOVERNING CAPACITY. One of the valuable thoughts of the occasion is that great governmental faculties are continued in mental suggestion and heredity. Public force is propagated by example and emulation; and in the succeeding inflexible adherence to principle, we see the acumen, the high integrity, and unsullied good breeding of the descendants, or successors, of the early fathers ; we hear in the later orators the eloquence and logic of the early republicans, and our love of the distinguishing' features of a republic is commingled with the love we bear to the great founders. Signally illustrative of this heredity was a consciousness of a violation of the principle of popular elections in the constitution of 1802, when the reason for the appointive system had ceased in the growth of the population of the state. The constitution of 1851 asserted the complete system of elective officers, changed the judicial system, and in the wisdom of revolutionary suggestion enlarged the legislation of the state. The eminence of this adherence to free government gave an unusual sanction to the principles of 1776. A patriotic jealousy and watchfulness characterized the early founders of our local government, and was aroused in 1824 when the alleged com- 156 - WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO. bination of John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay defeated the election of Andrew Jackson to the presidency, as an evasion of the spirit of the constitution and system of government. As the idol of the people, the hero of the Seminole war, and of the great victory over the British at New Orleans, Jackson's cause was almost universally espoused by the brave men and backwoodsmen of 1815. His after administration Was supported by the great body of the people in all the contests involving supposed principles for which the Revolution and the war of 1812 were contested. Partisanism does not seem to have entered into this phase of political history. The then still living pioneers of the country and the second generation united in adherence to what Was supposed to be an important principle, and in 1859 there was instituted a yearly celebration of the 8th of January, which has continued for fifty years as an offering to the patriotism and political integrity of our fathers and their attachment to a strict conformity to the republican system. The solitary munificence of this tribute can be appreciated in the thought of the exceptional character of the early guardians of constitutional liberty! The permanency of this unique celebration is associated with the enduring fame of Washington, and the love of the popular heart for the memory of Lincoln; these three great Presidents—the one achieving independence and the adoption of the constitution, the one destroying British influence in. America by the victory at New Orleans, and the incipient rebellion in South Carolina, the 'one in magnificent prudence and laborious wisdom giving his life for the preservation of the Union! Where is the history of their equals? The organization of townships as now existing in Wayne county was completed by the year 1825, and their system from the first settlements in 1806 until they had completed township governments was .conducted by men of ability, including many immigrants from France, Germany, Great Britain and Ireland; and as the older populations passed away, the intervening middle aged and youth carried forward the local government in an uninterrupted succession, a continuous and unbroken intellectual current. From the very beginning of man in masses, the higher history of his great spiritual power has not been given; and it is only in the faith of heredity, reproduction, of occasional eminence of achievement, that we know the inspiration of our predecessors. In occasional family records only may we. find the honest and noble township spirit; but, to a moral certainty, their fine patriotic thought has descended to the generation or two that honor the townships of Wayne county. Illustration of this pleasant reminiscence is largely exhibited in the county seat, of the important concerns of life, as religion, politics, law, trade, WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO - 157 governmental policy ; it is the debating center, it is the Atlas that bears the public world of thought on its shoulders. Should any county be celebrated for carrying forward the thought of its founders, Wayne county is that favored realm. The Larwills, the Joneses, the Quinbys, the Millers, the Wilhelms, the Currys, the Jeffries, the McMonigals, Flattery, Kaukes, Douglas, Anderson Adair, Blackburn, Zimmerman, McSweeney, the Funcks, Barretts, Marchand, Foreman, McClure, Smyser, the Howards, the Frances, Moses Shaffer, Day, the Powers, and a hundred others, all familiar names in politics, religious sects, government policy, for their respective views, stood like a solid rock of hereditary tenacity. Avoiding the criticism that the idea is commonplace, it may be observed that these American conditions, in the present height of several thousand years of progress, have no parallel in national life ; of other, and all other nationalities, it is a king, and nobility ; a house of lords; a military dictatorship; a suppressed popular movement ; some modification of the hypocrisy of Augustus; or the bloody monarchism of Tiberius, Caligula or Nero. The dome of no great capitol but ours is painted with emblems of popular jealousy of an oligarchy or aristocracy of power. The thinking people of the new Northwest are the bulwark of the republic ; they wear the mantle of their fathers. FORTY YEARS OF GOVERNMENT. Of the intelligence and fine nerve of the first citizens of Wayne county, the systems of bookkeeping, the handwriting and the legal requisites of public business bear witness. Within the first forty years after the incorporation of Wayne county the character of its institutions was determined, rand some of the prominent actors of the people's selection show a capacity for the highest positions. Benjamin Jones and Cyrus Spink were representatives in Congress ; Edward Avery became a judge of the supreme court of Ohio ; Reazin Beall, a major-general ; John Sloan, treasurer of the United States ; Levi Cox and Ezra Dean, president judges. There were nineteen associate judges, and twenty-three members of the state Legislature. Beall avenue, Bever street, Henry street, are memorials of the early settlers of that name ; and Larwill street and the records of Wayne county will, it is hoped, preserve the name of Joseph H. Larwill, one of the most eminent of the pioneers of 1807. In 1840 there were forty-six Revolutionary soldiers in Wayne county. The eloquence of their wounds, the dignity of their position, were constantly admonishing the people of the sacred trust of maintaining civil and political liberty. 158 - WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO. Of the county, city, town and township officers, the public records contain the history ; of all these municipal corporations, the officers and leading men were intimately associated in official life. That the city of Wooster was, at an early period, the centre of population ; that the municipal and township organizers were the source of mutual information ; that the early officers selected the foremost in interest for a practical system of home rule, and that these foremost men rose to higher representative positions by ,popular choice, may be assumed. The fact, in civil and political history, became a magnificent force, that transmuted all other forces into the popular system. That Wayne county has always had an exceptionally good system of county administration may be readilly observed in the records preserved since 1815. The entire judicial record of the county is marked by the able performance of duty. The records at the very earliest period are evidence of consummate skill and complete formality, and are precedents for almost one hundred years ; and one is impressed, surprised, at the remarkable accuracy with which the public business was conducted ; and as the judicial administration involves the capacity and integrity of judges, prosecuting attorneys, lawyers, clerks and sheriffs, this reference to them all is intended as an encomium. No judge of Wayne county has ever been impeached ; no lawyer disbarred ; no prosecuting attorney, no clerk or sheriff ever charged with delinquency in office. The right of trial by jury has never been infringed, and no juryman has ever been charged with any irregularity in the performance of his duty. There is not a single known instance of a grand jury being otherwise than conscientious in either returning or failing to return an indictment. The same high character belongs to the probate court, since it was created by the constitution of 1851, or while the probate business was within the jurisdiction of the court of common pleas under the constitution of 1802. The judges of this court for more than fifty years have been beyond reproach. The judgments of these courts have been reviewable by the higher courts ever since the formation of the county, and the whole system has been and is a protection to every right, and a relief against every wrong, to property or person. But few instances have occurred of violation of law being unpunished, and crimes of any magnitude are very rare in the history of the county. Of divorces, of which the judge of the court of common pleas has the sole jurisdiction. but few have been granted not necessary to the protection of the wife, or the honor of the husband. The financial system of WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO - 159 the county, conducted by a board of commissioners, the auditor and treasurer, the occasional duties of the prosecuting attorney and probate judge, and involving the safe custody and legal expenditure of the money contributed by the people for the support of the county and state government, is about as perfect as human ingenuity could devise. Of personal property enlisted by the assessors, and of real property as appraised, returned to the auditor, duplicates are given to the treasurer, exhibiting the amount to be collected as ascertained by the rate of taxation necessary for public purposes, and upon which the treasurer enters his collections and returns the same to the auditor. Not only the auditor's books, but the examination of the treasury by the commissioners and a private committee appointed by the probate judge, are precautions for the safety of the public money. The loaning of the money of the county to the banks at interest, and upon security, is an additional guaranty, to the treasurer's bond, of its safety. Nor are there fewer safeguards around the expenditure of the public money. It cannot be paid out but upon the order of the auditor, nor can he issue an order except according to express provision of law, unless the claim is allowed by the board of commissioners. The claim filed with them must remain five days before allowance, and no order can issue by the auditor until five days after the allowance. The prosecuting attorney may interpose in the expenditure, and the report of the business of the commissioners required to be filed by them in the court of common pleas is examined by a committee, and the expenditures reviewed by the court. The further review of the action of these officers is provided for by state inspection.. The further view that all the financial officers of the county give bond, that they are governed by strict law, and are responsible to the people at the election, present the system as exceedingly satisfactory to the contributors to the public expense. As the growth of the thought and experience of one hundred years, the system is a eulogy upon the framers of the government. As early as 1792 the offices of treasurer-general and county treasurers were created, and the mode of raising money to defray county expenses by the Council of the Territory, and in 1799 the Territorial Legislature created the offices of territorial treasurer and auditor of public accounts and for levying a territorial tax on lands, and to regulate county levies. In 1802 the constitution provided for the appointment by the Legislature of state treasurer and auditor and other officers were to be appointed as directed by law. Gradually the county system embraced a treasurer and auditor as appointive, then elective, and afterwards developed in the constitution of 1851. But 160 - WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO. prior to 1802 the county treasurer was a collector who reported to the state treasurer and auditor, and progressive legislation has added to the defective systems of the past the fine checks and supervision of the present. A successful administration of the finances of Wayne county is apparent from the records. Complications some thirty or forty years ago, in connection with the temporary use of county money by the banks, and from the good nature and accommodating spirit of the elective system, arose and produced a disturbance in the treasurer's office; but, in view of the large amount of money safely received and disbursed in the history of the county, a further notice of the trouble is not deemed of importance. The writer does not regard it inappropriate to say that the virtues of generosity were more predominant in the single case or two of financial embarrassment in the treasurer's office, than any inherent vice in the officer. Surveys underlying conveyances, the office of county surveyor and recorder may be considered in this relation. Records, maps, plats in these offices would tend to give them the name of the Wayne County Museum; more than relics, different from mere calculations or journal entries, associated with what seem the hieroglyphics of the surveyor, and the time-worn and time-stained canvas upon which human and departed genius has impressed the studious manifestation of scientific thought, they seem the interesting memorials of a superior race. To transfer the record evidence of the government land offices, to perpetuate the legal right of every section of land in Wayne county, of every plat of every town, their lots and streets and alleys, additions, vacations and dedications, their boundaries and the ranges and sections and divisions of sections, their purchase; sale, transfer deeds, mortgages, leases and releases, commencing a hundred years ago, these records attest the-truth of history, without which truth the ownership of property would be a chaos. Not only the magnitude of work, but the accuracy of it, attest the good fortune of the people that, as early as 1813, had William Larwill as the first and Levi Cox as the second recorder, and that, as early as 1814, had Joseph H. Larwill as the first, and Cyrus Spink as the second surveyor of Wayne county, and that they laid the foundations for the system of records that led on to the immense volumes of these offices and to the scientific methods of surveying. That there were so many distinguished men early and later that formed and continued the methods of county administration, is a remarkable fact in the history of Wayne county ; perhaps not as remarkable in any other county in the Northwest. WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO - 161 Of the participation of the residents of the towns and townships in county administration, a cursory observation of the records produces the impression that after the active energies of the first generation were employed, for twenty-five years, in county administration, it was conducted largely by officers of the townships, and almost wholly so in the respect of county commissioners. Of the associate judges, senators and representatives in the General Assembly, treasurers, auditors, recorders and surveyors, a majority came from the townships; at this present writing, every officer of the county administration, except the prosecuting attorney, is either from the townships directly or recently after removal to the county seat. The significance of this fact leads to a. very brief consideration of the conditions out of which it arises. The townships being organized in 1825 were rapidly settled, of the same character of population as the county seat; many of them were educated men and, township government demanding justices of the peace, trustees and other officers both in the townships and towns, they became familiar with modes not only of self-government, but county administration, and many of them were conspicuous for their intelligence and ability. Doubtless acquainted with the laws and official procedure of the older states, they were competent to make and administer laws that were necessary to the growth of a great state. The great principle of unity was the well authenticated fact of the integrity and patriotism of the people and their conscious responsibility of a sacred duty. In addition to some local legislation for the construction of public buildings, and to enable the city of Wooster to obtain the Baltimore & Ohio railway, an important elective- principle was established by the supreme court in the case of Lehman vs. McBride, by which the former was elected probate judge, in holding that soldiers of the Civil war in service in or out of the state were entitled to vote and have the same returned to the county of their residence. In forty years, a period that embraced the constitution of 1851, and a much shorter period than that in which any government of which history speaks was perfected, the people of Wayne county, and it is true of the whole state, in one single classification, were the distinguished authors of their county administration. WAYNE COUNTY AS THE SOURCE OF NORTHWESTERN GOVERNMENT.. Wayne county having been organized as a separate political body in 1812, an election was held to elect county officers in April of that year, as provided in the constitution of 1802. The county, within the state lines, was (11) 162 - WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO. laid out in the year 1808, but incorporated with diminished territory in 1812. By changes in forming new counties, it seems to have been re-incorporated in 1817, and not defined in its present form until 1846, a portion of its territory having been taken in 1824 to form Holmes county, and a portion to form Ashland county in 1846. Of the Northwest, the rapidly increasing population, the formation of new counties, and the immigration from Wayne county to the yet farther west, decreased its population from thirty-six thousand in 1840 to thirty-two thousand in 1850, and carrying with it the advanced methods of civil and political life, of their first homes in the new country. Of government as a necessity, such methods travel with rapidity and reflect their origin in institutions and practical life, at advanced distances of civilization. Of this transmission of population and experience in promoting order and obedience to law, Wayne county has been the continuous source from a very early day to the present time. INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIAL LIFE. The individual and social life of the pioneers has been scarcely mentioned, and demands a consideration in this article. The elevation of man by the consciousness of freedom, and by the doctrine of equal rights, is manifested in the high development of the sensibilities. Liberty is the progenitor of love. The Constitution of the United States created family emotion. It created the neighbor, the neighborhood, the peace and pleasure of proximity ; it is the father of family history and reunions. Wayne county is celebrated for the yearly reunions of widely scattered descendants. The reproductions and reminiscences of home are incentives to good government. That holy veneration for ancestors is distinguished in Wayne county. In memory of the immigrants of the Northwest,—the fathers and mothers,—yearly pioneer celebrations are regularly held by the aged living and participated in by every age. In August, 1896, by civic processions, addresses, pyrotechnic displays, the. people of Wayne county gave a week of conspicuous sensibility to the memory of the pioneers. The great character of these early architects of government is the logical theme of progress and is among the first solicitudes of studious thought. Requested to deliver the centennial address at the great centennial celebration then held in Wooster, the writer gave this subject a study that he does not disturb; and feels that to give this address a permanent place in the new history of Wayne county would be pleasing to the people and pertinent to the subject, and it is here inserted and dedicated to our great ancestors : WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO - 163 GREAT PRINCIPLES OF THE PIONEER FATHERS AND MOTHERS. [Address delivered by Hon. Lyman R. Critchfield at the Pioneer Day Centennial celebration of Wayne county, August 15, 1896.] Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen : As a matter of philosophical curiosity I have often thought that moral reflection assumed the aspect of capillary attraction—the ascension of successive moral ideas; that our daily business thought was characterized by expansion and our immoral processes of mind by gravitation, our highest trains of thought are religious and are the most ennobling and refining. The sensibilities constitute the highest class of human faculty, and hence in the ethics of religion, which display the grace of good manners, politeness, taste, beautiful expression, luminosity, a higher conception of personal art, of skill and harmony, and reverence for the good, we climb to the height of an exalted century. This is civilization! The rhetoric of the flags, the great orations of the human face, the mutual enthusiasm of reverence for the pioneers, are playing upon our hearts like the sunbeams on the singing statue of Memnon. Civilization is only about a hundred years old ! Liberty is only about a hundred years old ! The republicanism of the heart is only about a hundred years old! History contains no such beautiful picture as the pioneer and his wife, as they stand in the umbrageous setting, with their faces all glowing with the splendor of the century ahead ! Amidst the thronging reminiscences of a hundred years, We meet in commemoration of the legal incorporation of our great county, and with grateful hearts we honor the pioneers. Our century is perfected on a day of beauty, in a time of gorgeous apparel, in an illumination of many fixed stars of progress. Centuries come and centuries go, and man goes on forever, but the world has never witnessed such noble sensibilities intoning the harmony of any civilization. August 15, 1796; August 15, 1896! We gaze upon a century of virtue and love and liberty. And it commenced a hundred years ago! Noble footsteps, sweet voices, are echoing along the corridors of time. Flowers of every hue and every fragrance are blossoming in the dust. Rosy-fingered Aurora, as she stands tiptoe upon the misty mountain-top, gives her first morning kiss to the green hillocks, and the clustering flowers, beneath which repose the divine imagery of the pioneers ; and the sun, in all his course, illumines no more sacred mould than that which was wont to ennoble life within the little circle of our woodland heroes. The heroic man ! Aye, and the heroic 'woman, the early American woman of more than historic virtue, of more than historic courage: 164 - WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO. With what inspiration may I conceive, or with what rhetoric or eloquence may I paint the physical and moral picture of the pioneers; how in the fullness of the providence of God they glowed with the revelation of the liberty and power of the people in government, of faith in a personal God, and in immortality, and how they divinely fixed the purity of domestic life and social order, and the dignity of woman, and endured and loved through the great martyrdom of founding the greatest institutions of the world. They were the philosophers of free institutions. They were the greatest of their race. Plume ourselves, as self-love may dictate, upon our higher nerve and less muscle, less conflict and more judicial reflection, we are less brave and less pure than those whose voluntary dedication took the vanguard on the forest lines of progress. And it was an age of greatest peoples throughout the world, and of greatest institutions of any previous, or of all the centuries. Excelling as did the pioneers of a hundred years ago, our philosophy traverses the prior ages for the great formative causes of the illustrious Americans, who are our fathers and mothers. To acknowledge the eternal sovereignty of hereditary influences is an imperative premise, in .the logic of American character. And we may recur to the broken annals of centuries. We may scan the absorption of Greek civilization by the Romans, the downfall of the Roman empire, and the mixed populations of Roman, Goth and Vandal, and Anglo-Saxon, and Hun, and Celt, and Dane, with all their diversity of customs, laws and religion, and the storms of violence, and dissolution of states, and warring cities, and independent principalities, without union or magistracy, all bleeding on foreheads debased by an iron. crown, dismembering into a thousand fragments, and forming and reforming for a thousand years and more, over all the European states, and see the temper of populations toward the order, constitutional government and liberty which inspired the American pioneer With the great principles of government. Students of history, as all Americans were, they seem to have had the birthright perception of the grandeur of the great hereditary thought and impulse which a century ago presided over the political, moral and social life of the great pioneers. For twelve centuries the struggle went on of arrogant baron, and city, without an umpire ; then an elective one, then an elective monarchy, then an hereditary one; then the struggle for constitutional limitations of regal authority and .all authority. As long practice and skill in sculpture worked out the divine beauty of the Greek woman, or reflection and example in a thousand tests of color and proportion fixed Pilate to future ages uttering his "ecce homo" as he delivered Jesus to be crucified, so we 165 - WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO. may trace the patriot with his great and beautiful face and exalted bearing in the beginning of this Western empire, fashioned by centuries of struggle. And he was born amidst that tumult of popular revolution which then and thereafter ensanguined the battlements of every modern state. An age of storms lowered upon the pioneers. Product of the evolution of political and moral causes, our fathers were felling oaks While the invention of Doc. Guillotine was felling the one hundred and twenty-five thousand heads of aristocracy, and monarchy, which had grown in France from lawless banditism, when there was no people but aristocracy, and feudal serfs, and enslaved citizens of municipal tyranny, and no judicial idea in government, and no executive power but the sword. The fathers of the pioneers were contending with savagery in a Western hemisphere while the feudal barons were slaughtering their poor peasantry in the Thirty Years war in the German provinces. Holland was struggling for liberty under the Prince of Orange, Switzerland by isolation, as much as by principle, was playing her political romance in her mountains fired by the story of Tell, the Austrian Gessler, and the immortal Winkelried, and the little republic of San Marino sat, like an American child, amidst the flaming and bleeding contentions of the Italian cities. Beyond the analysis of all philosophy a composite English ancestry of Dane and Anglo-Saxon and Norman had risen to the' awful dignity of beheading the usurping Charles I, and English democrats like Vane and Sidney and Pym and Hampden had perished on the scaffold, or in the tower, in the advocacy of constitutional restriction of royal oppression, and of the power of the representative assembly, the great House of Commons, to govern the English people. Fleeing from the revengeful axe of Charles II, the regicides and the ironsides of Cromwell, and from the religious inquisitions of the state, the revolutionists, the vanguard of the reign of the popular will, began to appear in Virginia, in North Carolina and in Massachusetts; the Quakers and German in Pennsylvania; the French began to appear in Louisiana, and all European populations of America were educated in the struggle of the Middle ages for the unity of government under the limitations of law. Under magistracy and judicial authority of government rose the pioneers. The great constitution of the United States is but the manifestation of the judicial elective principle which struggled for its existence from the decline and fall of the Roman empire to the day of its adoption. The pioneers of settlement were also thoughtful pioneers of great principles of government. But the science of pioneering demanded the supremacy of another great principle of life—religious faith. Vain would be the attempt to trace the 166 - WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO. history of that philosophy which attempted to spiritualize matter, to give it self-creative power, and to analyze the human mind into the faculties of incomprehension. Disclosing the most abstruse and the most absurd schools of philosophers involved in the meshes of the agnostic fallacies of the great unknowable—from five hundred years before Christ—from Pythagoras and his disciples to Socrates, on to Plato and Aristotle, and Zeno, and Epicurus, and their disciples, Greeks, and Seneca, Lucretius and Cicero, Romans, to the Middle ages, when scholasticism attempted to adjust the Christian theory to the doctrines of Plato, reason became imbecile in the poison of infidelity, and, like government, religion was wielding its sceptre over a world of confusion. And then modern philosophy arose, and the German reformation, and the emancipation of thought, brought upon the stage Melancthon, and Erasmus, and Luther, and Locke and Lord Bacon, and on the other hand Descartes, Spinosa, Voltaire, Leibnitz, Kant, Schilling, Hegel, and later followed by Comte and Spencer, and hundreds of others, the former supporting, the latter, in platonic renaissance, attacking the great idea of a personal God. And notwithstanding the cruelties of the church, its inquisitions, its destruction of whole communities, the corruptions of its temporal power, and the degradation of its theology, which transformed our Heavenly Father into a savage, who took delight in the torture and death of the inquisition, and notwithstanding the almost universal influence in France and Germany of the infidel philosophers, Holland and Switzerland and England stood impregnable upon that promontory of progressive thought. where God had erected the lighthouse of religious truth. In all the bloody contentions of Catholic, and Episcopalian, of state religion, Presbyterianism, and Puritanism, of Lutheran and Jesuit, and notwithstanding the French infidelity which accompanied. French supplies and arms in the revolution, there flourished the great Christian merchants of Manhattan; the poor, but inflexible Puritan of Plymouth, the refugee of the Albigenses and Huguenots of the Carolinas, and the Republican Catholic of Maryland. God led the great republican hosts from wilderness to wilderness by the pillar of fire and pillar of cloud. The pioneer was a Christian and the prayerful worshipper of a personal Father. The pioneers believed in domestic equality, one of the great principles of civilization, which emerged from the dark and bloody sea of the Middle ages. Disappearing in the convulsions of empire, the beautiful face and form of the Greek female, the dignified and lofty bearing of the Roman matron, is seen no more for fifteen enslaving centuries. As they were even in the halcyon days of their renown in the thoroughfares of Athens and Rome, they WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO - 167 were the sport of the law-maker ; and in the common perception of the so-called philosophers of the prytaneum of the one city, and of the Roman senate, so inferior that they bore the personal blows of their husbands and the shadow of the harem; and legal brutality and death clouded the bright fancies of their exalted sex. As prisoners of war enslaved, trampled to death by a brutal soldiery, the females of the dark ages gave birth to inferior men and women, and through all the tumult of cities stormed, and estates dismantled, the hideous process of depreciating populations made progress toward the mental and moral decreptitude of the race, and prolonged the darkness of the centuries. In his history of civilization, Guizot announces that marriage was, in the dark ages, less esteemed than continence or celibacy. Aroused into moral enthusiasm by the Crusades, the creation of some unity and protection in government and the free thought and Christian light of the Reformation, the ancient mothers were rehabilitated in something of the tenderness and adoration with which remote antiquity had clothed them, and as the principles of free constitutions, and of the recognition of the true personality of God and the equality of all souls before Him, became the law of liberty and social life, they regained the queenly crown which had been beaten from woman's head in the ages of violence. And she, the ornament of the new world, was also a pioneer, and around her the protecting arm of her husband was placed in tenderness as the dangers of the wood's uttered their weird voices, and her noble bosom warmed his heart as it grew cold in the hardships and struggles of the frontier. The magnificent conditions of their freedom, their faith and their love inspired the pioneers with the noble philosophy of republicanism. Washington was then President of the United States; the eulogies of history were ranking him with Caesar and Fabius. Napoleon as First Consul was imitating his swift marches and sudden attacks, as he descended into the plains of Italy; he had become estranged from the lordly Fairfaxes and the aristocracy; his moderate education, his long marches in the woods as surveyor; the fidelity of the common people, and the treason of the influential, had hedged him all about with deathless patriotism, and he, with the Otises, and Adams, the Morrises, the Putnams, the Carrols, the Jeffersons and Hamiltons constituted a' new and immortal race of great commoners. They had created the elective and popular system of the constitution ; they had by the ordinance of 1787 prohibited slavery in all this Northwest territory ; the common schools of New England had inspired the philosophical analysis of 168 - WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO. human rights; Webster and Clay and Silas Wright and Benton and Jackson, and the great statesmen and generals of the West, grew into majesty as the composite blood of the heroic commonalty swelled the heart and soul of a new nation of commoners ; commoners who fifty years thence were to tie themselves to the masts amidst bursting shells and cannon balls, or from some promontory won by blood pour the storms of resistless war upon the last surviving deformity of feudal arrogance and slavery. Such were the pioneers; heralds of a great nation, a great religion, and a great domestic life. Power could not frighten them; infidelity could not confuse them; divorce did not dishonor them. Believe not that anything of outward splendor marked the simplicity of their great appointment. Moccasins for shoes, homemade linen or woolen for clothes somewhat uncouth, the red wammus, the coonskin cap, the uncut hair and beard, and the stalwart frame is the statue of the pioneer, as he stands in the background of the forest his shining rifle barrel across his arms ; and she is the statue in flannel clad, with a quilted hood in winter, and a calico one for summer, and the blush of the clearing upon her cheek. Longfellow's Priscilla : She, the Puritan girl, in the solitude of the forest, Making the humble house and the modest apparel of home spun, Beautiful with her beauty, and rich with the wealth of her being! And they grew upward as they gazed at the stars through the tree-tops, and their steps were soft in the moss of primeval shade, and they were agile and fleet among the deer, and the speculation of wary watching was in their eyes at hostile identations of the leaves of prowling animals and Indian cunning. Near by some limpid spring singing in rippling monotone the subterranean song of cooling hills, rose their cabin of rounded logs and puncheon floors, with doors of wooden hinges, and windows glassed in oil, and tables, benches and bedsteads made by hand from the growing tree, and in the broad fireplace with its external chimney of sticks and mud, the housewife cooked with heated cheeks and baked her cornbread in the ashes, and sat her table with pewter plates ; bunches of sage and medicinal roots were about the walls, and the rude ceilings were festooned with strings of drying pumpkins and hanging corn, and the cabin was noiseless in the shoeless feet of children, and upon a rude ladder they gracefully ascended garrets to their evening nests; and the lullabys of the day were drowned in the hum of the spinning wheel and in the feathery songs of the surrounding shades; and their light was the tallow dip, and their clock was the sunbeam in the door ; and the leaves pil- WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO - 169 lowed and mattressed the muscles of daily struggle among the roots, and sleep had its dreams of home. Here was the dignity of prose amidst the romance and poetry of nature. Sallying forth, either of them master of the rifle, either of them dispersed the prowling panther or the bear from the stable or the pen : Hidden in the alder bushes There he waited till the deer came. Till he saw two antlers lifted, Saw two eyes look from the thicket, Saw two nostrils point to windward, And a deer came down the pathway, Flecked with leafy light and shadow. Scarce a twig moved with his motion Scarce a leaf was stirred or ruffled. And the fearless and noble mother met the Indian at the doorway and cowed him with that sternness of penetration with which the divinity of a noble glance conquers all savage life. The pioneers were incomparably brave. And around them were prowling the nomadic butchers of the French and British wars. who veiled their clear purpose of assassination in the humble hypocrisy of a broken tongue, and a simulated friendship, and who never for a moment ungrasped the murderous weapon which their orators had chosen for savage arbitration. A resident of Europe in pre-historic times, and crossing to America upon the isthmus of the fabulous Atlantis, or in the opposite of Behring Straits, a great race and government existed in America before the acorns grew to mighty oaks. Vicissitudes unwritten dispersed a dismembered rem; nant before the mighty presence of moral forces. Of native brain and nervous powers excelled by few of the human family, the noble virtues were obsolete in the vacuity of moral will, and the cunning, artifice, and cruelty, with the inventive ingenuity of the Indian, were in the menacing shadows which enveloped the pioneer; and he became learned in the simulated signals of the bear and the mocking bird and the owl, and heard their warwhoop in the adjacent wigwams, and looked with sacrificial bravery upon the terrors with which a confederacy had menaced the gathering civilization far-reaching from the woodland realms of King Philip, Pontiac, Tecumseh and Osceola. Upon the morning horizon of the pioneers rose the savage files, and he heard the savage murmur of their favorite retreats. 170 - WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO. Down the rivers, o'er the prairies, Came the warriors of the nations, Came the Delawares and Mohawks, Came the Choctaws and Comanches, Came the Shoshones and Blackfeet, Came the Pawnees and the Omahaws, Came the Mandans and Dacotahs, Came the Hurons and Ojibways, With their weapons and their war gear Painted like the leaves of autumn, Painted like the sky of morning; In their faces stern defiance, In their hearts the feuds of ages, The ancestral thirst of venegance. But danger lurked in the suppressed fury and in the warning glance of the pioneer, and his moral power, rather than his prowess, working in the providence for which he prayed, had the leverage and the pressure of a great victory over savage life; and the growl, and the chatter, and the rustle, and the crackling, and the ominous impressions, the savage undertones of nature, the song of the cricket, the hoarse bass of the frog, the dreadful chimes of the rattlesnake, the rhythmic pulsations of the night, the weird beating vitality of the voiceless woods, mingled with the echoes of the warwhoop, and the drunken chant of these barbarians, and grew by the moral chemistry of virtue into the sweet tenor of patience and endurance in the great soul of -the pioneer. Before the gigantic savage chief, painted hideously for war, and with a tiger's eye, and armed with gleaming instruments of revenge and of death, the pioneer was the royal disarming angel of a new covenant of the family, religious faith and liberty. In social relations the pioneer was great hearted. Benevolence and hospitality reigned in the cabins of the pioneer. Magnetic forces massed the incomparable few into raisings, and log rollings, and huskings, and the red ear of corn made fiery faces and rumpled frills. Little Killbuck bore upon his tortuous bosom the floating raft laden with skins of the coon, the opossum, the deer, the bear, and the wild cat, and a few Spanish or American silver dollars to exchange at Zanesville for salt and flour, tobacco and whisky, and the missionary with saddle bags on horseback, of Baptist, Presbyterian, Lutheran or Methodist, was welcomed at the cabin doors, smoked the pipe of peace, strengthened his inspiration with the bottle of tansy bitters, and related the news of long Eastern months, and how the government at Philadelphia, at New York or Washington still lived, how the great commoners were still defying the world, and how John Marshall was electrifying the WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO - 171 magistracy of the older continent, by his great luminous conscience and philosophical intellect ; and these early judges of the township exteriorly rough and interiorly refined, sat upon stumps and, as jurors, upon logs, and administered justice intuitionally according to the inspiration of the woods and the common law of necessity. The politician was a rara avis among the pioneers : Then none was for a party; Then all were for the State; Then the great man helped the poor, And the poor man loved the great; Then lands were fairly portioned; Then spoils were fairly sold; The romans all were brothers In the brave days of old. For almost a half a century from the formation of the constitution, political parties were mere nomenclature, and but little less than depositaries of exploded suggestions of constitutional debate. Political independence now is retrograding to the more noble reflection and conservatism of the pioneer. Supposed to have been gradually ascending the zenith of civilization, if the present age adorns its ascension with the universality of great physical condition, of education, of science, of art, of commerce, of architecture, of magnificent houses and great cities, and great churches and great population, then its ascension is incomparably true. But great principles have not been added to constitutional government, not one beam from the effulgent throne of God, not one throb to the love of domestic life, not one impulse to the noble souls of the pioneer ! Patriotic, religious, pure, patient, suffering all things, and true and unchanging to the virtue of all future ages, my conscience, your conscience, at this hour, are full of the glory of a great ancestry, and we bow before them, with only less reverence than that we feel for the Divine Father. Attended by thousands of people of Wayne and adjoining counties, this celebration involved a high condition of the sensibilities. As the anniversary of the first organization of the county, a hundred years presented a panorama in which, from the log cabin to the palace, from a few to thousands, from poverty to wealth, from humble patriotism to greatness, the reminiscences 172 - WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO. invoked the dearest memories. The then present was Worthy of the past. Heroism had not died. There were present the heroes of the great wars. The patriotic spirit of the people of Wayne county has been demonstrated. in every war of the republic. Many of the early settlers had served under Washington ; they joined Gen. Reasin Beall in the war of 1812, and marched to the support of the frontier inhabitants of Wayne and Richland counties, and ultimately to Camp Huron ; they enlisted and fought in the battles of the Mexican war of 1845 ; they volunteered by thousands and fought, and many of them perished, in the war for the preservation of the Union in 1861, and the same hereditary patriotism inspired a noble array of young men to enlist in the war with Spain in 1898. Splendid in courage, the fathers and mothers of early Wayne county transmitted their virtues to their posterity. WAYNE AND ASSOCIATE COUNTIES PROLIFIC OF GREAT MEN. That the counties of Ohio were and are, respectively, of early superiority, leads to a broader suggestion and inspiration that solves the riddle of Ohio's great leadership and presidential glory among the states. The people were a distinguished composite race. The Celt, the Briton,. the Dane, the Saxon, the Norman, the German, the Welsh, invulnerable to the attack of the Roman empire, the Virginian, the followers of Penn, Maryland's colonial great men, the Puritan, and the Dutch of Manhattan, the Scotch, and the courtiers of the Carolinas ; this composite American conceived and bred a race too great for Britain, and transplanted the heroism and love of liberty, and the wisdom that attended Washington in his conquest of British soil and her great armies. From the races of the world there arises the new man, and the new woman, exalted to the intellectual dominion of government, and the progenitors of forty states. Of the third county of the Northwest, this unrivalled race, whose men were fearless and wise, and whose women were good and beautiful, made their home here a hundred years ago. Government was the absorbing question and principles of government the absorbing philosophy. Into the very nerves of men, into the very spirit and motive of action, into the very and only scheme of growth, individualism, personal liberty, patriotism, became incorporated elements. Liberty echoed in the crash of the falling oaks. She was delightful in the sunshine of the fields ; she was aromatic in the odor of the flowers. She garlanded the determined faces of men and women with the bloom of orchards, and golden grain. She made WAYNE COUNTY, OHIO - 173 them beautiful, strong and heroic, and great generations of eloquent, thoughtful people filled Ohio. The eastern division of the Northwest, and the wide territory of Wayne, the greatest of the subdivisions of the state, was unequalled in the character of its founders in all the counties of the new states of the Union. This splendid inception and continuance for over a century of the government of the people, we may safely leave to the. present and posterity, and repeat the invocation of Longfellow : Thou, too, sail on, O ship of State! Sail on, O Union, strong and great! Humanity with all its fears, With all the hopes of future years, Is hanging breathless on thy fate! We know what Master laid thy keel, What workman wrought thy ribs of steel, Who made each mast, and sail, and rope, What anvils rung, what hammers beat, In what a forge, and what a heat Were shaped the anchors of thy hope! Fear not each sudden sound and shock, 'Tis of the waves, and not the rock; 'Tis but the flapping of the sail, And not a rent made by the gale! In spite of rock and tempest's roar, In spite of false lights on the shore, Sail on, nor fear to breast the sea! CHAPTER IX. COUNTY, STATE AND NATIONAL REPRESENTATION. The subjoined is a correct list of the various officers who have served from Wayne county, in various official capacities, since the county's organization in 1812. The members of Congress who have represented districts of which Wayne county formed a part were: