Running the Ohio River Gauntlet (pages 47-54)
(page 47, par. 2, line 7) Enslaved men may have been coached to reload the guns Some slaves on New Jersey farms were permitted to use the master’s guns on their own to hunt for small game. I judge it doubtful that the severe and suspicious General David Forman was such a master. Afro-American army veterans’ familiarity with guns would also not have applied. See: Voelz, Peter M. Slave and Soldier: The Military Impact of Blacks in the Colonial Americas for a comprehensive consideration of blacks in military service during the Revolutionary War, where veterans would have had extensive experience with firearms during stressful battlefield conditions. Unlike other states, New Jersey had only a handful of free or enslaved Afro-American veterans who had served in American military units, as spelled by Grundset, Eric G. et al., Forgotten Patriots – African American and American Indian Patriots of the Revolutionary War. None of David Forman’s slaves had served as American soldiers. One had run away from Forman’s plantation during the war, enlisted as a British soldier, and evacuated with the British from New York City in 1783, as recoded in the Book of Negroes.
(page 49, par. 2, line 1) Quick thinking black hands Forman and Draper, Journey Down the Ohio and Mississippi 1888, pp. 25-26. My description of the child overboard incident includes inferred details from the circumstances, such as the pitch darkness of a new moon, deeper draft of the keel boat and its use of an anchor when mooring in comparison to the flatboats, extreme vigilance and precautions taken by the sojourners terrified of Indian attack, and individuals’ actions as the incident transpired. Samuel S. Forman’s recollection glosses over which child was thought to have fallen overboard, whether he was ready to jump into the river as I assert, whether any of the slaves could swim and were willing saviors, and the reactions of all involved. One aspect is inescapable from this and other incidents on this epic quest across the American trans-Allegheny borderlands: it was an intense, often dangerous, sometimes wondrous, intimate, and shared experience among masters, employees and the enslaved; white and black; adults and children. Surely it was an experience of a lifetime for most involved, one they carried with them throughout their lives.
(page 50, par. 3, line 9) had served as a business agent a few years before For details of Samuel S. Forman’s stints circa 1784-1789 as a merchant clerk in New York City and as supercargo on a grain shipment to Charlestown, SC, see: Forman Brief Biography, Atlas and Argus 1861
(page 50, par. 5) Fort Wheeling was twice attacked during the Revolutionary War. Episodes from those incursions were already becoming staples of local lore, while the protagonists were still very much part of the tiny frontier community. In 1778 a Shawnee and Wyandotte raiding force cornered a horseman named McCullough outside the fort. Faced with imminent death, and with his pursuers between him and safety, he leapt while mounted down the steep embankment. Horse and rider landed upright and uninjured, and proceeded to gallop away much faster than their pursuers.
A later siege of Fort Henry occurred in the summer of 1782. The Forman visitors may have met a survivor of that incident, Betty Zane (abt. 1761-1831). While still a teenager she distinguished herself by running from the besieged fort, fetching a small keg of gunpowder abandoned in error in a neighbor’s house, and returning it to the grateful American defenders. All the time she managed to evade bullets and arrows hurled by the astonished attackers. See entry by E. D. Lloyd-Kimbrel in: Garraty, John A., and Mark C. Carnes, eds. American National Biography.
Jacob Parkhurst in his Sketches of the Life and Adventures of Jacob asserted that the last Indian atrocity in the Wheeling area occurred in the mid-1780s. Three girls were set upon, scalped, and left for dead by unknown, presumably Indian, attackers. One was found still alive days later and survived for a short time “They wrapped her in a blanket, and carried her to Father Crafts, where she lived several days, but her skull had been fractured, and the flies had lodged their eggs inside her skull, that grew into large creepers which appeared about the time she died.”
(page 52, par. 5) Ohio Land Company Articles of incorporation and correspondence among founders in: Winthrop Sargent Papers. Boston: MHS, Ms. N-877. See also histories of Marietta, Ohio: David. McCullough, The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West; and Cutler, Julia The Founders of Ohio – Brief Sketches of the Forty-Eight Pioneers.
At Marietta, private enterprise and Federal business were not easily distinguished. General Arthur St. Clair was a principal in the Ohio land company and simultaneously was George Washington’s designated governor of the entire Northwest Territory. General Varnum,, of the Revolutionary War, was an initial leader of settlers, who landed in early April of 1788 on his Company’s forty-five tone galley Union bearing forty-eight of the initial settler contingent. The settlers immediately set to work building their fortified settlement, but did take a nostalgic turn in renaming their workhorse boat Mayflower. Varnum died shortly thereafter from a fever. Which one it was hard to tell and hardly mattered for the lack of effective treatments. Mosquitoes and flies took over low lying areas in the Ohio River Valley during summers. That was one hazard the Formans avoided by their winter travels.
General Rufus Putnam owned 5 shares of the Ohio Company, more than any single settler, and was in charge at the settlement. People addressed him as general in deference to his command during the last war. Currently he was a judge in the Northwest Territory administration. Absentee Ohio Company shareholders, never intending to settle but rooting for success of the venture, included Secretary of War General Henry Knox, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, Arthur Lee, and Northwest Territory governor General Arthur Sinclair himself.
(page 52, par. 5) Marietta {Ohio Territory}, where there was an American garrison at Fort Harmar and a settlement, just a year and half old, of the Ohio Land Company McCullough, David The Pioneers. Mr. McCullough offers an engaging account of the creation of Marietta, Ohio, its key personalities, and their long-term influence on public support for education, government based on aspirational principals, and development of the Northwest Territory as free states. The book is a very enjoyable work of popular history bringing attention to a critical and little-known portion of American history. I believe the author underplays the importance of Native Americans in the region, and the corrosive effects of certain government leaders using their positions in the Ohio Land Company for personal gain.
Still useful old histories of Marietta and the founding of Ohio include: Burnet, Jacob. Notes on the Early Settlement of the Northwestern Territory, 1847; Hildreth, S.P. Pioneer History: Being an Account of the First Examinations of the Ohio Valley, and the Early Settlement of the Northwest Territory, 1848; Hildreth, S.P., and C. Stephen Bagley. Memoirs of the Early Pioneer Settlers of Ohio, 1852; and Hulbert, Archer Butler: The Records of the Original Proceedings of the Ohio Company, 2 Vols., 1917.
Samuel S. Forman opined that it was nice to “meet with old acquaintances in such a dreary place” Forman and Draper, Op cit., pp. 27.
(page 91, par. 5, line 1) Denny and the American delegation then declared success He revealed that the American representatives expected nothing less of the Indians than “perfect submission to the constituted authorities” In: Military Journal of Major Ebenezer Denny, pp. 121-122.
(page 53, par. 3, line 4) “lack of tact and diplomacy, and want of sympathy” Pershing, Benjamin Harrison. “Winthrop Sargent: A Builder in The Old Northwest.” University of Chicago, PhD dissertation, 1927, p. 3, and Abstract of Theses at University of Chicago, Vol. VI, 1927-28, p. 231.
Rowena Tupper (1766–1790), Rowena married Winthrop Sargent in 1789, the first marriage ceremony that took place in Marietta under the laws of the Northwest Territory. After her and their child’s deaths in childbirth, Sargent married Hannah Ober of Massachusetts a year later in mid-February 1791. They had a daughter, Hannah, born August 25, 1791 in Massachusetts. Unfortunately, mother died the next day. See the article by: James J. Kirschke in A Garraty, John A., and Mark C. Carnes, eds. American National Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 24 Vols., 1999.
(page 53, par. 3)“find a retreat from the ingratitude – never more to visit the Atlantic shore” Winthrop Sargent’s diary for July 15, 1786, in: Winthrop Sargent Papers, Op. cit., Ms. N-877.