Eventually, however, the modus vivendi broke down. Initially, settler and Indigenous relations were good, as McCullough notes. Marietta, where Ephraim made his life-story, was the earliest and most important of the Ohio settlements that paved the way for westward settlement and a destination for pioneers seeking a new home and life-whether they settled in Marietta or used it as a staging point for further westward travels.

Initially an Edenic-like paradise, the opening of the Northwest Territories demanded the construction of forts and settlements. Lucky for the nation, he won his fight and Thomas Jefferson’s inclusion in the Northwest Ordinances the provision of prohibiting the expansion of slavery ensured the future states, Ohio especially, would remain free and become a bastion of abolitionist sentiment and politics inherited from the Puritan legacy.Įphraim Cutler, Manasseh’s son, was more willing than his father to settle the “Ohio country” and “ la Belle Rivière” (the beautiful river) that was the Ohio. He was also an ardent anti-slavery idealist, ensuring that his lobbying for the opening of the Northwest Territories for American settlement would be free of the sin of slavery and the moral decadence it wrought. More than any other man, Cutler was responsible for opening settlement to the American Midwest. A Yale man, he was minister, scientist, and politician. Manasseh Cutler was a New England Yankee, Puritan, through and through. Nominally a history of the settling of Ohio, the account focuses largely on the Cutler family from New England and their efforts to open settlement in the Northwest territories and how their efforts and ideals entrenched the American spirit in a land that would become essential to the American victory in the Civil War and the struggles against totalitarianism in the twentieth century. The Pioneers is another contribution to the drama of America and its ideals, its goodness and darkness, its hopes and shortcomings.

David McCullough is among America’s most respected and readable popular historians of the American story.

The pioneers mccullough