Today’s #stampoftheday is an object lesson in what you can see when you look just a little closer. In this case, it’s a story that not only features mediocre (at best) political and military leadership but also a famous sculptor whose work includes the largest of the many controversial monuments to the Confederacy.
The stamp itself is a 3-cent stamp, issued on July 15, 1938 to mark the 150th anniversary of the establishment of a government for the Northwest Territory, more than 260,000 square miles of land that covered what is now the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin, as well as the northeastern part of Minnesota. It pictures Colonization of the West, a statue honoring that growth located in Marietta, Ohio, which was the territory’s first capital.
So far, there’s not much here. In fact, careful readers of these posts (if there are any) might say, “David, wait a minute. Didn’t you just write about the Northwest Territory on Monday? Seriously, do you really think that people want to read two posts about this? Heck, did you think they wanted to read even one post about it?”
If these questions were raised, I’d answer.
Yes;
Who knows (but I think so); and
I guess so.
So here’s the deal. Monday’s stamp was about a 3-cent stamp issued in 1937 to mark the 150th anniversary of the law creating the Northwest Territory. To remind you, the territory was land to the west of the original 13 colonies. France had claimed the land but turned it over to the British as part of the treaty that ended the French and Indian War. The British officially gave up their claims to the land in the treaty that ended the Revolutionary War. However, they maintained a presence there until after the War of 1812, apparently because they hoped to create some sort of a buffer area between the American colonies and the growing commercial center of Montreal.
Several of the new American states—Virginia, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, and Connecticut – claimed jurisdiction of some portion of the land. However, leaders of other states, such as Maryland, feared that if these claims were accepted, those expansionist states could continue to grow and tip the balance of power in their favor under the proposed system of federal government being considered by the colonies. So, in order to secure ratification of the proposed Articles of Confederation, the states ceded their claims to the federal government.
As noted in Monday’s post, the 1787 law created a process for governing the new territories and for allowing the creation of new states that could join the union when they had enough residents. In keeping with the process lead out in the law, Arthur St. Clair became the territory’s first governor on July 15, 1788.
St. Clair, who is our mediocre (at best) leader, was born in Scotland and purchased a commission in the British Army so he could fight in French and Indian War. After the war, he resigned his commission and settled in Ligonier Valley, Pennsylvania, (east of Pittsburgh) where he purchased land, erected mills, and ultimately became the largest landowner in Western Pennsylvania. He became a general in the American Army during the Revolutionary War and then a delegate to and president of the Confederation Congress. (According to one account I cited on Monday, his appointment as governor was a key part of the maneuvering that helped the Northwest Ordinance become law.)
As Governor, he formulated the Maxwell’s Code (named after its printer, William Maxwell), the territory’s first written criminal and civil laws. These consisted of 37 different laws with the stipulation that the laws had to have been passed previously in one of the original 13 states. The laws restructured the court system, protected residents against excessive taxes and declared that English common law would be the basis of legal decisions and laws in the Northwest Territory.
In 1790, St. Clair also changed the name of Losantiville, a settlement on the Ohio River to Cincinnati, after the Society of the Cincinnati, a group founded in 1783, to preserve the ideals and fellowship of officers of the Continental Army who served in the Revolutionary War. He also moved the territory’s administrative and military center to the recently built Fort Washington in that locale. (Had he not done this, would people have been rooting for the Losantiville Reds and Bengals?)
So far, he seems fine. But it’s interesting that St. Clair would choose to honor his military service because he apparently wasn’t much of a general. During the American Revolutionary War, he rose to the rank of major general in the Continental Army, but lost his command after a controversial retreat from Fort Ticonderoga. And in 1791 (after he renamed Cincinnati), more than 600 US troops under his command (as well as numerous women and children) died in a battle with Native Americans opposed to white settlement of the territory. This was, and remained, the Army’s worst defeat in more than a century of battles with Native Americans. Although an investigation exonerated him, in 1792, at the request of President Washington, St. Clair resigned his army commission. However, he continued to serve as Governor of the Northwest Territory.
St. Clair also doesn’t appear to have been a great politician and as the territory – particularly what is now Ohio – grew he was increasingly criticized for his partisanship, high-handedness, and arrogance in office. Things came to a head in 1802, when St. Clair stated the people of the territory “are no more bound by an act of Congress than we would be bound by an edict of the first consul of France.” This led President Thomas Jefferson to remove him from office as territorial governor and meant that St. Clair played no part in the organizing of the state of Ohio in 1803. However, in part because of his actions, Ohio’s first state constitution provided for a weak governor and a strong legislature. St. Clair apparently retired to western Pennsylvania where he died in poverty in 1818. (Despite his less-than-stellar reputation, he lives on in the names of several townships in Pennsylvania and Ohio; counties in Kentucky, Missouri and (oddly) Alabama; a street in Frankfort, KY; and a hotel 3-star hotel in Thurso, a town in the Scottish Highlands.)
Now to the racist sculptor. The statue shown on the stamp was created by Gutzon Borglum, who also created Mt. Rushmore and Stone Mountain, the largest of the many monuments created in the late 1800s and early 1900s when whites were cementing their dominance via institutionalized Jim Crow laws.
While Mount Rushmore has its own, very troubled history, let’s focus for a bit on Stone Mountain. In 1915, Borglum was approached by people who wanted to celebrate the Confederacy on the rock face of the mountain outside Atlanta. His plan, which was largely accepted, called for 50-foot tall images of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis and J.E.B. Stewart riding in a cavalry surrounded by stampeding horses and cavalrymen. Backers of the statue asked if he would add the KKK to the monument. While the plan conflicted with Borglum’s greater vision, he agreed to add a Klan altar for the base of Stone Mountain.
Borglum supposedly claimed he did so because he didn’t want to offend the donors paying for the monument. But, that’s disingenuous according to a recent article in the Washington Post that drew on work by John Taliaferro, author of the 2002 book ‘Great White Fathers: The Story Of The Obsessive Quest To Create Mount Rushmore.” Rather, the article noted, “Borglum was a racist long before arriving in Atlanta,” . The sculptor referred to immigrants as ‘slippered assassins’ and warned that America was becoming an alien ‘scrap heap.’ But the Klan might have hardened Borglum’s existing prejudices, Taliaferro writes. In fact, in a letter to a friend in New Jersey in the early 1920s, Borglum asked, ‘Is it true you joined the Ku Klux Klan? I hope so. They’re a fine lot of fellows as far as I can learn and if they elect the next President, by gosh I’m going to join ’em.'”
So there you have it. The Northwest Territory clearly was an important step forward. But its history, and the efforts to honor it, is more checkered than a quick glance at the stamp would reveal. Sometimes you just have to look a little more closely and dig just a bit deeper to get at other, almost hidden truths that temper, but don’t fully obscure, what is shown in the foreground.
Be well, stay safe, fight for justice and work for peace.
A correction
While Borghum was hired to create a monument at Stone Mountain, he never finished it. According to another piece in The Washington Post, “he was only able to whittle a gigantic silhouette of Lee’s head into Stone Mountain before a money dispute chased him from the project in 1925. Sculptor Henry Augustus Lukeman took over. He scraped away Borglum’s Lee and started fresh on the three-horsemen design before funds ran out in 1928.”
That carving stood untouched for 40 years. In the late 1950s, newly elected GA Governor Marvin Griffin, a staunch segregationist, had the state purchase the mountain for about $2 million. He formed an association to raise money to complete the monument and work began on a revised carving by 1964. The monument was dedicated in 1970 at an event attended by about 10,000 people, including then Vice President Spiro T. Agnew. It still stands, overlooking a 3,200 acre area that includes walking paths and other outdoor amenities, a privately managed amusement park, a golf course a lakeside Marriott resort, and a pop music-backed laser show on the face of the mountain including the faces of Lee, Jackson and Davis.