The Roots of Midwestern Order

The Roots of Midwestern Order Dedra McDonald Birzer (bio) A perennial question in the historiography of the Midwest concerns the region's identity. Is it a place uniquely its own? If so, what factors distinguish it from other American regions and what gave rise to those factors? Ample scholarship in the past decade answers that first question in the affirmative, finding the roots of Midwestern singularity in its formative document: the Northwest Ordinance. This document set forth a particular vision of order on multiple levels, ensuring liberty by providing for the inculcation of virtue among all people residing in the "Old Northwest." The order placed upon the land paralleled the order of the rightly framed soul. The Northwest Ordinance rested upon the intersection of the two as the foundation of a society that reflected the virtues enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Magna Carta. This essay focuses on two recent major works of Midwestern history that examine in detail the society shaped by that venerable document. Historian David McCullough's 2019 contribution, The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers who Brought the American Ideal West, carried the fascinating story of the creators of the Northwest Ordinance to the forefront of Midwestern history, describing in action-filled prose how Ephraim Cutler's band of pioneers brought the vision of the Ordinance, written largely by his father Manasseh, into life as they hewed the town of Marietta, Ohio out of the thickly wooded forests lining the Ohio and Muskingum Rivers.1 Jon Lauck's 2022 volume, The Good Country: A History of the American Midwest, 1800–1900, weaves together scholarship on the region, both recent and almost forgotten, to describe the first century of the society that emerged and flourished from its roots in the Northwest End Page 1 Ordinance.2 In many ways, Lauck's book is a testament to the imaginative and diverse scholarship of the past decade, as historians examined myriad aspects of Midwestern history, providing the strands that Lauck so deftly knit together. McCullough's book delves into the labors behind the passage of the Northwest Ordinances of 1785 and 1787 and their implementation north of the Ohio River with the earliest non-Native settlements in the area, beginning with Marietta. The book centers on several important families, who left troves of extant documents through which the author crafts a fascinating group biography of the founders of the Old Northwest. At the center are Massachusetts minister Manasseh Cutler and his sons, particularly Ephraim. In 1786, Cutler joined a group of Continental army veteran officers (he had served six months as army chaplain) "to launch a highly ambitious plan involving the immense reach of unsettled wilderness known as the Northwest Territory."3 This land, totaling 265,878 square miles, was ceded to the fledgling United States in the Paris Peace Treaty of 1783, doubling the country's size. The land south of the Ohio River was considered part of Virginia and was settled according to the Virginia system, "which allowed a man to take and mark for himself any unappropriated lands. By the New England system, so-called, the land lying north of the river was to be properly surveyed and sold, the establishment of settlements done by legal process, and lands of the natives to remain theirs until purchased from them."4 From the Ohio Company's very beginnings, the contrast between the Virginia system and the New England system set apart the region that became the Midwest from its southern neighbors. But before that, the area north of the Ohio River was considered "back country," with a few remote forts and hunters, trappers, fur traders, and squatters, along with many American Indian nations that severely resisted the encroachments of White settlement. The post-Revolutionary War financial crisis caused great misfortune, particularly for the veteran soldiers. Western settlement was a possible solution. General Rufus Putnam, the leading authority over the Newburgh Petition, headed the 1786 meeting, promising veterans land bounties in the Ohio country as payment for their services in the War for Independence, pending an official Congressional provision for granting land.5 Putnam's plan "was to form an association or company to purchase...