Note 64 — OLD RUTLAND, MASSACHUSETTS THE CRADLE OF OHIO By EDWIN D. MEAD

The Ordinance of 1784, the original of the Ordinance of 1787, was drawn up by Jefferson himself, as chairman of the committee appointed by Congress to prepare a plan for the government of the territory. The draft of the committee’s report, in Jefferson’s own handwriting, is still preserved in the archives of the State Department at Washington. “It is as completely Jefferson’s own work,” says Bancroft, “as the Declaration of Independence.” Jefferson worked with the greatest earnestness to secure the insertion of a clause in the Ordinance of 1784 prohibiting slavery in the Northwest; and the clause was lost by only a single vote. “The voice of a single individual,” said Jefferson, who foresaw more clearly than any other what the conflict with slavery was to mean to the republic, “would have prevented this abominable crime. Heaven will not always be silent. The friends of the rights of human nature will in the end prevail.” They prevailed for the Northwest Territory with the achievement of Manasseh Cutler, Rufus Putnam and Nathan Dane.

Was it from Jefferson that Putnam and his men at Marietta caught their classical jargon? There was a great deal of pretentious classicism in America at that time, new towns everywhere being freighted with high-sounding Greek and Roman names. The founders of Marietta—so named in honor of Marie Antoinette—named one of their squares Capitolium; the road which led up from the river was the Sacra Via; and the new garrison, with blockhouses at the corners, was the Campus Martius. Jefferson had proposed dividing the Northwest into ten States, instead of five as was finally done, and for these States he proposed the names of Sylvania, Michigania, Assenisipia, Illinoia, Polypotamia, Cherronesus, Metropotamia, Saratoga, Pelisipia and Washington.