Wayne County, Ohio - Chapter 8: Civil and Political History of Wayne County, 1910 (part 2 of 2)

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 anticpiity 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 woods uttered their weird voices, and her noble bosom warmed his heart as it grew cold in the hardships and struggles of the frontier.

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 I'utnams, the Carrols, the Jcft'ersous and Flamiltous constitiiled a new and immortal race of great commoners. They had created the elective and po])ular system of the constitution ; they had by the ordinance of 1787 proliibited sla\'ery in all this Northwest territory; the common schoc)Is (jf New Fiigland had inspired the philosophical analysis of human rights; Webster and Clay and Silas 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 net 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 c|uilted hood in winter, and a calico one for summer, and the blush of the clearing upon her cheek. Longfellow's Priscilla ;

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 pro\vling 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 jiewter plates; hunches 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 lullahys 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- 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 :

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 concjuers 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 humlfle hypocrisy of a broken tongue, and a simulated friendship, and tvlio 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 remnant before the mighty presence of moral forces. Of native brain and nervous ])owers excelled by few of the luiman 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 jiioneer; 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 W'ith sacrificial bra\'ery upon the terrors with which a confederacy had menaced the gathering civilization far-reaching from the woodland realms of King Philip, Pontiac, 'recumseh and Osceola. ll])on the morning horizon of the ])ioneers rose the savage files, and he heard the savage murmur of their fax'orite retreats.

But danger lurked in the suppressed fury and in the warning glance of the pioneer, and his moral power, rather than his pro'wess, 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 hags 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 magistracy of the older continent, by bis 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 \voods and the common law of necessity.

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 refiection 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, sufferingall 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 sensil)ilities. As the anniversary of the first organization of the county, a hundred years presented a panorama in which, from the log cabin to tbe palace, from a few to thousands, from poverty to wealth, from humble patriotism to greatness, the reminiscences 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 repuldic. 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; 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 W ashington in his conc|uest 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 ahsorbing 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 them beautiful, strong' and heroic, and great generations of eloctuent, 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 :