Wayne County, Ohio - Chapter 8: Civil and Political History of Wayne County, 1910 (part 1 of 2)

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 zcv 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 veiw 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 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 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 liy the lips of Pitt and P)urke, that all history might he searched, and the men of the Revolution were the learned and greatest men of the 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 Re\'olutionary 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 accjuiring 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 hy 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 govermnent, the peculiar characteristics of revolutionary purpose were to build up political levels and achieve the altitudes of personal life.

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 ec|uality 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 had intercepted the young surveyor of the x\lleghanies, and Washington became the immortal commoner of every age. He drew to his bosom the young Hamilton, and Greene, and Knox, and Schuyler, and Morris, and other great lieutenants, and the thought of a continent was transformed.

The great commoner thought uncommonly in the philosophy of human rights. Eranklin 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 iMagna Charta; the Indian chief gazed long at his footsteps in the Northwest.

The Constitution

The Constitution of the Ehiited 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, hut 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 menial and moral touch in its application and execution, and there has grown aronnd 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 x^merican 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 he 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 peojile 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. LTprising 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 that lurked in sacage 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 IMyron'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 worshi]) their ancestors; that the Roman soldier was the con([ueror of the world, bearing the urn that contained the ashes of his father,- - is it a wonder? fl'he superstition of loving our fathers is an hereditary virtue. Interpretation of fine principles and heroic deeds, is character, (hf our heritage, the sublimest i)ossession is the character (T the pioneers of government. Liberty 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 hound down by the multiplied webs of ancient systems ; our powers miglit 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. Plopeful, 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 uncreated empire of untold magnificence before them. With prudent and reflective energy we commenced our great career. It was a 'watchful and wary ingress into dang'ers 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 lirothers, 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!

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- 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 w as 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 military dictators as are known in every regular amiy. Divided into different nations, war was common among them and with the different European powers '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 digaiified denizens of the forest a])peared at Washington, and their accom])lishments excited the wonder of our national authorities.

The strict ohscrvance 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.

The antiquity of this belief, and the Indian idea of the inferiority of the female, g''ive 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 frec|uent 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 eciuipped 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 \ve 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, cpiieting their title to certain lands in

The most dramatic and picturescjue 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 Stanwux 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 skin, its fringes musical wfith the claw'S 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 weaving plumes, that proclaimed the majesty of nature and native art, the exalted denizen, wdiose 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 but 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 eyes of Corn Planter, and Red Jacket, and Little Turtle, and they yielded to inevitable destiny ; and at tbe treaty of Greenville, accomplished by General Wayne, peace was established and the lauds of the Northwest obtained for the population of the new states.

b'or 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 crv of the whippoorwill. However, he was wise in selling cheaply a doubtful title', and in reserving, as it ap])cared 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 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 Avars 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 tbe 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 Avild 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 Avith 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 Avith the early and bloody struggles of the human race ; his' cruelties in the Revolution have no sanction in the laAvs of modern Avarfare, and his evil passions had the fixed habit of inhuman and merciless revenge. Against the invader he Avas a monster, Avith a high development of intellectual power. Of George III, of Lord North, and of the British Parliament, the Indian Avas the bloody instrument ; associated, too, Avith the Hessian, \vhose 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 Avith Avhich he Avas considered in the ordinance of 1787, and in his association Avith the pioneers, is a pleasant reflection ; and in our love 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 !

Divided hy 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 w-as formed the states of Michigan and Indiana and parts of Illinois and Wisconsin; and, hut for the crack of the rifle of a few^ daring wdiite 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 two thousand years ago, that "It is better for a city to be governed by a g"ood man, than by good law's.'' The peaceable acc[uisition of territory, founded upon the recognition of Indian nationality and the ec|uity of possession, - an accjuisition 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.

The Territorial Council

With the government of a Territorial Council in 1788, composed of Arthur St. Clair as governor, Winthrop Sarg'ent as secretary, and Samuel H. Parsons, Mitchell Varnum and Return Jonathan Meigs as judges, all ])rominent men of the Revolution, meeting at Marietta, organized political energy began a memorable career. Law's were to be adoi)ted by the g<wernor and judges. To reside in the district and he ])ossessed of one thousand acres of land were the qualifications of the governor. To have five hundred acres of land was rec]uired 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 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 Lhiited 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 veto 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.

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 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 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, wdth 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 w-ould 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 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

The right of sulYrage to the negro and his descendants was decided adversely, 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 tbe 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 tbe joint ballot of tbe 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 resolution to submit the adoption of the constitution of 1802 to the people was defeated by an almost unanimous vote (twenty-seven to seven) and tbe constitution was put into operation by the delegates to the convention; and it was provided that after the year 1806 another constitutional convention might be held. As delegates to this convention, were many leading men both then 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 1806, but the survivors of them, and the generation }'ounger than them, conscious of the blot of the appointive system on the principle of selfgovernment, in the constitution of 1851 restored a complete elective system to the state. Illustrating the jiopular prudence in changing the fundamental la'w, 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 intluence on this and similar great cpiestions, the names of many of the ablest men of Ohio, and of Ahayne count\-, could be given to ornament these pages.

In the practical ajjplication of the great principles of government, it is 111 t extravagant to say that our fathers outranked all the legislators of the ( io) 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 tbe 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 Avill. 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 ef|ually large men are rememhered. 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

1812, having occasion to examine the I'ecords, 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,

'Fhe re])ul)lican system existed in the indi\idual father and mother. A great nation in chaotic conception was brooding in the genius of the ]ieo])le. 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 of government of the Northwest, and between that date and 1825 all the townships of Wayne county were formed and org'anized 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-hve 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 hut 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 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 1851 '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 sy.stem.

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 repulilican 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 ta.ste and attainments of the young women and men, that rival all jiroductions 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 rc])resentation. A financial question has become the menace to arbitrary power.

I'ublic convenience was a natural organizing incenti\-e to the formation of villages and towns. The blacksmith, the tailor, the shoemaker, the wagon- maker, the carpenter, the merchant, the watch-repairer, the miller, the postmaster, and useful trades and employments rec|uired 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 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 1820, afterward a hishop in the Methodist h'.piscopal church; Stephen E. Day, at W'ooster in 1827, alid remained for thirty-four years; 1 lezekiah

Bissell and Samuel N. Bissell, at an early clay; 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 1824; 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 selfgovernment 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 most 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 transformations of name, yet remain the medium of patriotic influence. From 1817 to the present time the ne\vspapers of Wooster and ^Vayne 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 among the umbrageous shadows of the forest, the Dicine 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 185I

Presumably the constitution of 1851 embraced the best thought of republican government. Rufus P. Ranney, as a leader, is belieYed 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 lie voted on by the peo]>Ie. ^^h'th enlargements of the public agencies, and laliors 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 peojile of Wayne county was an education in politics, not only in the law, but in the policy of administration.

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 thoug'ht. 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 ciuestions 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 Southern states, and a great moral question involved in the question of slavery itself inspired in 1854 the creation of the Republican party. The great 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 i860, 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. AVayne 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 c|uestions 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 w'ere 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 w'as a consciousness of a violation of the principle of popular elections in the constitution of 1802, wdien the reason for the appointive system had ceased in the growfli 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 adlierence 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- 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 constiintion 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 hy 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 \vas 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 unicpie 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 ecjuals?

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, or occasional eminency 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.

governmental policy ; it is the debating center, it is the Atlas that bears the public world of thought on its shoulders. Should any county he celebrated for carrying for'ward 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, h'lattery, 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 in.stitutions was determined, and 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-genenal ; 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 hojied, preserve the name of Joseph H. Larwill, one of the most eminent of the pioneers of 1807.

Tn 1840 there were forty-six Revolutionary soldievs in Wayne county. The elof|uence of their wounds, the dignity of their position, were constantly admonishing the people of the sacred trust of maintainiug ci\'il and political liberty.

Of the county, city, to'wn and township officers, the pulDlic 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 coimty 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. d'he 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 jurisdictioi\, but few ha\'e been granted not necessary to the protection of the wife, or the honor of the husband. The financial system of 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 tbe commissioners reciuired 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 tbe people at the election, present the system as exceedingly satisfactory to the contributors to the public expense.

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 hy 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 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 hne 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 tliQ 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 he a chaos. Not only the magnitude of work, hut 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.

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 law's 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 w'hich 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 gawernment of which history s])eaks was ])erfected, the people of Wayne county, and it is true of the whole state, in one single classification, w'ere the distinguished authors of their county administration.

Wayne county having been organized as a se]Kirate ])olitical hodv in 1812. an election was held to elect county officers in ,\pril of that vear. as ])rovided in the constitution of 1802. The county, within the state lines, was (II) 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 thirtysix 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, W ayne county has been the continuous source from a very early day to the present time.

Individual And Social Life

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.

Reuuested 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:

Great Principles Of The Pioneer Fathers And Mothers

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 reflning. 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. Rosyfingered 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! Ave, and the heroic woman, the early American woman of more than historic virtue, of more than historic courage.

With what inspiration may I conceive, or with what rhetoric or elocjuence 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 the}^ 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 ]iure than those whose voluntary dedication took the ^'anguard 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 Ang'lo-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 ])erception 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. Eor 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 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 Ixirn 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 wdiile the feudal barons were slaughtering their poor peasantry in the Thirty Years war in the Gennan provinces. Flolland 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 Ydnkelried, 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 T, and English democrats like Vane and Sidney and Pym and Flampden 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 Plouse of Commons, to govern the English people. Fleeing from the re^'engeful axe of Charles II, the regicides and the ironsides of Cromwell, and from the religious incjuisitions 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 lint the manifestation of the judicial elective principle which struggled for its existence from the decline and fall of the Roman empire to the dav of its adoption. The pioneers of settlement were also thoughtful pioneers of great ])rinciples of government.

But the science of pioneering demanded the supremacy of another g'reat principle of life - relig'ious faith. Vain would he the attempt to trace the 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 unkno\vable - 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 fomier 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 Eather into a savage, who took delight in the torture and death of the inquisition, and notwithstanding the almost universal influence in Erance 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 Erench 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 civilizafion, 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 were the sport of the law-maker ; and in the common perception of the socalled 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.