Some 15,000 years ago nomadic hunters known as Paleo-Indians occupied caves and rock cliffs in the Ohio River valley. They gradually disappeared as the mammoths and mastodons they hunted migrated northward with the retreating glacial ice sheets. After 10,000 B.C., archaic Indian peoples lived in Ohio, leaving evidence of their hunting, fishing, and gathering activities. Between 1000 B.C. and 600 A.D. two groups of Mound Builders, the Adena and the Hopewell, both centered in present-day southern Ohio, flourished and left impressive remains in the form of mounds, geometric earthworks, and artifacts (see Indian Mounds). The Adena, first of the two, built thousands of conical burial mounds and effigy mounds, such as the Great Serpent Mound in Adams County. The Hopewell, appearing after 200 B.C., built geometric earthworks and large hilltop enclosures. The decline of these cultures hundreds of years before the Ohio country was reoccupied by historic Indian tribes in the eighteenth century led to nineteenth-century speculation that the Mound Builders constituted a "lost race." Modern archaeology has dispelled that notion and established a firm, if not yet fully understood, connection between the prehistoric and historic native peoples of the Eastern Woodlands, including Ohio.
Iroquois wars against the Huron and Erie Indians in the seventeenth century caused all tribes largely to abandon the Ohio country for about fifty years, while French explorers, including Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, explored the region and claimed it for New France. Thought to be the first white man to see the Ohio River, in 1669, La Salle's exploration brought French traders into the area in the early eighteenth century but no permanent French settlements. Various Indian tribes, especially the Shawnee, Miami, Delaware, Ottawa, and Wyandot, as well as British traders, also entered Ohio in the early eighteenth century. British colonial interests and claims in the Ohio Valley, especially those of Virginia, grew stronger by the 1740s and led to the outbreak of war between Britain and France in 1754. Known in North America as the French and Indian War, it found most of the Indians fighting with the French, who enjoyed the initial advantage in the Ohio country. Gradually the British turned the tide in their favor, and the Treaty of Paris in 1763 that ended the war gave them almost total possession of all of mainland North America east of the Mississippi River, including Ohio.
British attempts to limit the westward expansion of settlement across the Appalachian Mountains were mostly unsuccessful, and violence between Indians and white frontier settlers finally led to full-scale war by 1774, when Virginia royal governor Lord Dunmore led an expedition against the Indians along the Ohio River. The American Revolution soon overtook and subsumed these frontier conflicts in the larger struggle between Britain and its American colonies. During the war for American independence the Ohio Indians were allied with the British and fought against American forces entering the region from Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Kentucky. One tragic episode was the massacre at Gnadenhutten in 1782 of ninety-six peaceful Indian men, women, and children, Delawares who had been converted to Christianity by Moravian missionaries.
From Territory to State
In the early 1780s, Virginia, Massachusetts, and Connecticut ceded most of their western land claims to the new national government, and Ohio became part of the Northwest Territory, which also included the later states of Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 established a government for the territory with three stages of development leading to eventual statehood. First, a territorial governor and other officials appointed by Congress proclaimed laws and exercised executive authority. General Arthur St. Clair held the office of governor throughout Ohio's territorial period. In 1798 the second stage began when the "free male inhabitants" elected the first territorial legislature, which subsequently wrote the state's first constitution, paving the way for Ohio's admission as the seventeenth state on 1 March 1803. The first permanent white settlement, Marietta, appeared in 1788, and Cincinnati (originally Losantiville) followed later in the same year. Various land companies and speculators, most importantly the Ohio Company of Associates, the Connecticut Land Company, and John Cleves Symmes, began the process of buying and selling Ohio lands, but extensive settlement could not proceed until the threat of Indian attacks was ended.
In the early 1790s, several U.S. military campaigns against the Ohio Indians took place. At first they suffered major defeats, including the loss of more than 600 under the command of St. Clair in November 1791. A new expedition led by General Anthony Wayne, culminating in his victory at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in August 1794, vanquished Indian resistance and led to the Greenville Treaty in 1795. The Indian tribes ceded all of Ohio for white settlement except for the northwest corner; these remaining Indian lands were gradually yielded in subsequent treaties and the last group of Indians left Ohio in 1843.
Territorial governor St. Clair, a Federalist, clashed repeatedly with the emerging Republican party led by Thomas Worthington and Edward Tiffin of Chillicothe over issues of local versus federal control and executive versus legislative authority. With the election of Thomas Jefferson as president in 1800 the national political trend began to favor the interests of Ohio's Jeffersonian Republicans. The new state's boundaries gave political advantage to the mostly Republican Scioto Valley and Chillicothe, the first state capital. Tiffin was elected the first governor and Worthington one of the first pair of U.S. senators. The first state constitution gave the right to vote to all white males regardless of wealth and sharply limited the power of the governor over the legislature. The 1804 "Black Code" denied free blacks in the state the right to vote as well as many other political and civil rights, and although it was partially repealed in 1849, it remained in some form until the close of the Civil War.
Nineteenth-Century Ohio
The peace following the War of 1812 finally ended all threats of Indian or British resistance to American expansion in the lands north and west of the Ohio River, and Ohio's population began to grow rapidly. Cincinnati became the largest city on the Ohio frontier, drawing immigrants from all over the United States as well as from Europe.
Despite the overwhelming predominance of the Republican Party until the late 1820s, Ohio's political leaders divided constantly over regional, economic, and legal issues. The state's economy boomed after the War of 1812. However, the panic of 1819, brought on in part by actions of the Second Bank of the United States in attempting to end excessive local speculative banking practices, caused widespread economic hardship. Some state leaders favored an aggressive program of state aid for internal improvements, especially canals, to boost the economy. Two major canals were completed across the state from Lake Erie to the Ohio River, the Ohio and Erie Canal from Cleveland to Portsmouth in 1832 and the Miami and Erie Canal from Cincinnati to Toledo in 1843. Various branches and feeders connected to the main canal lines at different points in the state. During this same period the National Road was constructed from east to west across the central part of Ohio, stimulating the growth of Columbus, chosen in 1816 to be the permanent site of the state capital because of its central location and the financial support it offered for erecting public buildings. Before the Civil War, Ohio for a time led the nation in the production of corn, wheat, beef, pork, and wool.
By the late 1820s, Ohio's dominant Jeffersonian Republican Party divided and gave way to the spirited competition between Whigs and Democrats that lasted into the 1850s. The Whigs favored government aid for internal improvements, a more highly regulated banking system, and greater development of a public school system. The Democrats emphasized limits on the size and power of government and protection of personal liberty rather than vigorous social reform. They had the greatest appeal to small farmers and artisans and Catholics wary of evangelical Protestant activism in matters such as temperance, Sabbath observance, and public education. The rudiments of a system of public schools began to take shape by the mid-1840s. Denominational competition and town boosterism led to the building of dozens of small private colleges.
The slavery controversy entered Ohio politics in the 1830s as abolitionists did battle with pro-Southern conservatives for the allegiance of the state's citizens. The state became a major center of the Underground Railroad because of its key location between the South and Canada. Anti-abolitionist mobs in Cincinnati and elsewhere indicated powerful opposition in some quarters, but fear of the political power of Southern slaveowners helped to turn many Ohioans against slavery, or at least its further expansion. This led to third-party activity in the 1840s and early 1850s by the Liberty and then Free Soil parties, which helped to bring about the downfall of the Whigs. This realignment led to the formation of the Republican Party in Ohio in 1854 to oppose the Kansas- Nebraska Act and repeal of the Missouri Compromise. Republicans immediately became the dominant political force in Ohio and largely remained so for the rest of the nineteenth century.
By 1840, Ohio's population had swelled to over 1.5 million, making it the third most populous state in the union, and thousands of Irish and German immigrants in the ensuing decades kept the state's growth at a high level. Industries such as coal, iron, textiles, meatpacking, and agricultural machinery appeared even before the Civil War.
Ohio became one of the main sources of economic strength and manpower for the North during the Civil War. Ohioans who served in the Union Army numbered 350,000, and close to 35,000 died as a result of the conflict. An impressive number of Union military and civilian leaders came from the Buckeye state, including Ulysses S. Grant, William Tecumseh Sherman, Philip Sheridan, James McPherson, William S. Rosecrans, and Rutherford B. Hayes among the generals and Salmon P. Chase and Edwin M. Stanton in Lincoln's cabinet. The only military action that took place in the state was Confederate cavalry leader John Hunt Morgan's daring raid across southern Ohio in the summer of 1863.
As the Ohio economy was transformed during the nineteenth century, state government and politics evolved at a slower pace. A new state constitution in 1851 increased the number of elected offices, but a proposed constitution in 1873 that would have made more significant reforms was rejected. In 1867, Ohio voters rejected black male suffrage, but this became law anyway through the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution ratified in 1870. Large cities such as Cincinnati and Cleveland experienced rule by corrupt local bosses in the late nineteenth century, and the state legislature was increasingly influenced by corporate business interests. However, Ohio contributed seven U.S. presidents in this era, all Republicans, including Grant, Hayes, James A. Garfield, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, William Howard Taft, and Warren G. Harding.
The growth of big business in late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century Ohio centered on the development of energy resources (coal, natural gas, and oil refining) and industrial manufacturing (steel, rubber, glass, auto parts, and machinery.) The spectacular rise of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company, founded in Cleveland in 1870, characterized the new economic era. Northern Ohio became the most heavily industrialized part of the state, with Cleveland (iron, steel, heavy machinery), Akron (tire and rubber), Toledo (glass, auto parts), and Youngstown (steel) leading the way. But other cities and regions in the state also developed industrially in this period. Cincinnati remained a diversified manufacturing center, and Dayton was home to National Cash Register (NCR) and Delco (part of General Motors). Northwest Ohio experienced a boom in oil and gas production and new railroad lines were built through southeastern Ohio coal fields and throughout the rest of the state. At the beginning of the twentieth century Ohio led the nation in the number of miles of interurban rail track—electric trains that carried both rural and urban passengers between small towns and large cities. By 1900, Cleveland had surpassed Cincinnati to become Ohio's largest and most ethnically diverse city. Seventy-five percent of its residents were first-or second-generation immigrants, many from southern and eastern Europe, and forty different languages were spoken in the city.
Workers' wages and labor conditions varied considerably across Ohio industry, but the size and impersonal conditions of factories bred increasing worker discontent. Some companies tried to counter this with improved employee benefits, but still Ohio workers began to turn toward unions to protect their interests. The Knights of Labor's efforts at mass unionization in the 1870s and 1880s had some success in Ohio, but this approach could not survive the depression of 1893. The American Federation of Labor was founded in Columbus in 1886 but limited its membership to the skilled trades. Hocking Valley coal miners went on strike in 1884, leading to violence, but ultimately the coal operators prevailed. The miners regrouped and in 1890 helped to form the United Mine Workers of America. The radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) supported a strike by Akron rubber workers in 1913. That strike also proved unsuccessful due to strong employer opposition, as did a major steel strike in 1919. Ohio industrial workers did not make major gains in union representation and bargaining until the great labor upheavals of the 1930s.
Twentieth-Century Ohio
The beginning of the twentieth century brought continued economic growth and innovation. Orville and Wilbur Wright of Dayton made the first successful flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, on 17 December 1903. Another Daytonian, Charles F. Kettering, developed the self-starting engine for automobiles. Politically the new century found Ohio's large cities in the midst of struggles for progressive reform. Two outstanding mayors, Samuel M. ("Golden Rule") Jones in Toledo, and Tom Johnson in Cleveland, attacked corruption, instituted civil service reform, and generally made their cities healthier, safer, and more efficient for residents. In Columbus the Congregational minister and Social Gospel pioneer Washington Gladden led similar efforts. The progressive impulse spread throughout the state and led to significant actions at the 1912 state constitutional convention. Forty-one constitutional amendments were submitted to the voters, and thirty-three of them were approved on 3 September 1912. They included the power of citizen initiative and referendum in making state laws, home rule charters for cities, the direct primary, a workers compensation system, and greater regulation of natural resources.
Progressive reform continued at the state level under Democratic governor James M. Cox, who served from 1913 to 1915 and 1917 to 1921. He worked to implement the new constitutional provisions against corporate opposition and led the effort to consolidate and modernize rural school districts. However, in the stirred patriotic atmosphere of World War I, Cox advocated a state law, later held unconstitutional, banning the teaching of German in any school below the eighth grade. The Democrats selected Cox to run for president in 1920, with Franklin D. Roosevelt as his running mate, but another Ohioan, Senator Warren G. Harding, swept to victory in a landslide.
After some difficult postwar adjustments, Ohio experienced economic prosperity in the 1920s, especially in industries associated with automobile production or electrical equipment. Large numbers of African Americans from the Deep South and whites from Appalachia migrated north to Ohio cities seeking industrial employment. Blacks in particular were restricted by segregation customs in obtaining housing and the use of public accommodations. Racial and ethnic tensions surfaced in some locations, as did questions relating to the legal enforcement of prohibition. The revived Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s was very active in several Ohio cities, using its power to elect some public officials. However, by the latter part of the decade it was in decline, weakened by internal scandals and the firm opposition of many religious, racial, and ethnic leaders.
Highly industrialized Ohio was hit hard by the Great Depression of the 1930s. In 1932 an estimated 37 percent of all Ohio workers were unemployed. Industrial unemployment in northern Ohio cities ranged from fifty to eighty percent at its peak. Democrats returned to power in state government and looked to Franklin D. Roosevelt's administration for solutions. Most of the New Deal programs had a significant impact on Ohio, including the largest number of recipients of any state of relief from the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Organized labor stirred with the formation of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) to recruit among industrial workers. Its first major success was the 1936 sit-down strike by Akron's rubber workers. Strikes by steelworkers against Republic, Youngstown Sheet and Tube, and others in 1937 led to more violence and a temporary labor setback. World War II, however, brought union recognition and collective bargaining to the "Little Steel" companies.
Ohio played a key role in America's "arsenal of democracy" during World War II. About one million workers produced goods for the war effort, especially in aircraft, ordnance, and shipbuilding. Some 839,000 Ohioans served in the U.S. military and 23,000 were killed or missing in action. After the war, Ohio's industries worked at full capacity to meet pent-up consumer demand. The Saint Lawrence Seaway, completed in 1959, expanded Great Lakes shipping, and lock and dam improvements on the Ohio River maintained that historic waterway's commercial importance.
Between 1940 and 1960 Ohio's population grew by 40 percent, faster than the national average. However, in the 1970s and 1980s aging plants, high labor and energy costs, and increased foreign competition converged to deal Ohio's industrial economy a severe blow. Most of the large cities lost population and jobs to newer suburbs. The 1990s brought a return to growth, but Ohio's 2000 population of 11,353,000 was only six percent higher than its 1970 level, while the United States overall had grown by thirty-eight percent in that same period. Columbus had replaced Cleveland as the state's largest city.
After 1960, Ohio greatly expanded its system of public higher education, one of the achievements of the long-serving Republican governor James A. Rhodes (1963–1971, 1975–1983). However, he is also remembered for his controversial decision to send National Guard troops to quell student protests at Kent State University in 1970, which led to the death of four students. By the 1960s environmental protection had become a serious issue, as Ohio struggled to undo decades of neglect in this area. In 1997 the state supreme court declared the state's method of funding public schools inequitable and forced the General Assembly to begin to allocate increased funds to poorer districts. Ohio faced its approaching bicentennial in 2003 with both serious needs to be met and a renewed sense of optimism in doing so.
Bibliography
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Boryczka, Raymond, and Lorin Lee Cary. No Strength Without Union: An Illustrated History of Ohio Workers, 1803–1980. Columbus: Ohio Historical Society, 1982.
Brandt, Nat. The Town That Started the Civil War. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1990. The antislavery movement in Oberlin, Ohio.
Gerber, David A. Black Ohio and the Color Line: 1860–1915. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1976.
Grant, H. Roger. Ohio on the Move: Transportation in the Buckeye State. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000.
Havighurst, Walter. Ohio: A Bicentennial History. New York: Norton, 1976.
Hurt, R. Douglas. The Ohio Frontier: Crucible of the Old Northwest, 1720–1830. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996.
Knepper, George W. Ohio and Its People. 2d ed. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1997.
Lamis, Alexander P., ed. Ohio Politics. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1994.
Murdock, Eugene C. The Buckeye Empire: An Illustrated History of Ohio Enterprise. Northridge, Calif.: Windsor, 1988.
Shriver, Phillip R., and Clarence E. Wunderlin, eds. The Documentary Heritage of Ohio. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000. A comprehensive collection of primary sources.
