1. INTRODUCCIÓN
1.3. La definición del “Sluggish Cognitive Tempo”
In 1787, as the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia and the Continental Congress drafted the Northwest Ordinance in New York, Manasseh Cutler, a
Massachusetts minister little known to the congressmen and delegates, visited both. Cutler traveled on behalf of the Ohio Company of Associates, a group of New Englanders, many of them veterans of the Continental Army, who had subscribed to shares in a proposed purchase of western lands. The Company had charged Cutler with negotiating a contract for federal lands in the Northwest Territory. Ultimately, Cutler, aided by another company representative, Winthrop Sargent, secured an agreement for 1.5 million acres along the Ohio River, in return for a promised payment of one million dollars in federal securities. The deal Cutler struck “far exceeded any private contract ever made before in the United States,” one congressional delegate opined; he told Cutler he had never known “so much attention” paid to a proposal, nor “more pressing to bring it to a close.”1
Cutler’s purchase represented the beginning of what, in hindsight, can be
denominated the first federal land system—a moment in the late 1780s when the federal government sold large tracts of territorial land to speculative land companies. In most histories of public lands, federal sales to the companies represent a brief aberration from the otherwise steady march from the 1785 Land Ordinance to the federal land office system of 1800.2 In fact, in empowering non-state actors to pursue important
1 “An Account of Dr. Cutler’s Work for the Ordinance of 1787,” July 13, 1787, Vol. 63, Manasseh Cutler Papers, Special Collections,
Northwestern University Library.
2 Few of the broad-scale histories of the federal land system spend considerable time on the sales to the land companies: Paul Gates,
for instance, discusses them in two pages, Gates, History of Public Land Law Development, 70-72, while Malcolm Rohrborough devotes a page and a half, Rohrborough, The Land Office Business, 11-12.
governmental ends, the large-scale sales were far more characteristic of eighteenth- century governance than the abortive federal surveys and sales of the 1780s. These transactions resembled the state land systems in that purchasers, not the government, would bear the administrative costs and reap the potential profits. The land companies themselves harkened to prerevolutionary predecessors such as the Vandalia, Indiana, and (identically named) Ohio Company.3
But the Ohio Company and its primary imitator, the Miami Company, also diverged from these earlier precedents. Unlike prerevolutionary land companies, which often existed in uneasy tension and often outright conflict with government, the Ohio and Miami Companies would not be unsanctioned, autonomous efforts to craft statelets in the wilderness on the strength of Indian purchases. Rather, at least in aspiration, they more closely resembled quasi-public corporate entities like the East India Company long used to subsidize and support imperial ventures. The Companies, in fact, sold themselves based on their commitment to federal state-building. Purchasing lands directly from the federal government itself, the companies, especially the Ohio Company, envisioned themselves as forerunners and participants in the national political project of extending federal authority and law onto the seemingly ungovernable frontier. As historians have persuasively traced, the land companies represented a projection of federal power—
3 On prerevolutionary land companies, see Patrick Griffin, American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier (New
York: Hill and Wang, 2007), 73-123; Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture by the University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 5-38; Thomas Perkins Abernethy, Western Lands and the American Revolution (New York, London: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1937); Peter Rhoads Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America, 1st ed (New York: W.W. Norton, 2008), 283-88. On the East India Company as a form of quasi-public governance, see Philip J. Stern, The Company-State: Corporate Sovereignty and the Early Modern Foundation of the British Empire in India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Philip J. Stern, “‘Bundles of Hyphens’: Corporations as Legal Communities in the Early Modern British Empire,” Lauren Benton and Richard J. Ross, eds., Legal Pluralism and Empires, 1500-1850 (NYU Press, 2013).
through governance, demographics, finance, and military capacity—along the Ohio Valley.4
Existing literature has captured less well how the land companies would achieve these aims. Recent scholarship has emphasized the growth and expansion of corporations in the early republic, stressing their role as sources of economic and political power and as polities within the broader polity. What distinguished the land companies from the era’s wider mushrooming of corporate governance was that they possessed and controlled territory through ownership. In this sense, the Ohio and Miami Companies were less forward-looking, toward an age of business corporations, than backward-looking: the Companies were eighteenth-century municipal corporations writ large, where power and authority to pursue governmental goals derived precisely from title to property.
Controlling land, and especially how it was distributed, was not only the companies’ core business but also their promise as an implement of policy, in the eyes of both proponents and federal officials. The diverse and extravagant promises Cutler and others insisted settlement would accomplish underscored how central title was to ideas about
governance during this period.5
4 For previous histories of the Ohio and Miami Companies, particularly stressing their status as an investment in federal authority, see
Andrew R. L Cayton, The Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in the Ohio Country, 1780-1825 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1986), 12–67; Bethel Saler, The Settlers’ Empire: Colonialism and State Formation in America’s Old Northwest (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014), 52–57; Timothy J. Shannon, “The Ohio Company and the Meaning of Opportunity in the American West, 1786-1795,” The New England Quarterly 64, no. 3 (September 1, 1991): 393–413;
5 The key work in this context is Hendrick Hartog’s insightful study of New York City. Hendrik Hartog, Public Property and Private
Power: The Corporation of the City of New York in American Law, 1730-1870(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983). As Hartog argues, especially in the eighteenth century, the corporation’s ‘management of [its] corporate estate [w]as a mode of public planning and governance”; he especially stresses the importance of the corporation’s exercise of authority by controlling grants of waterfront lots. Ibid, 43-68.
None of the three companies discussed here ever formally incorporated, although the Ohio Company’s charter contained a provision, never fulfilled, that called for incorporation either through Congress or one of the states. Articles of an Association by the Name of the Ohio Company (Worcester, Mass.: Printed by Isaiah Thomas, 1786), 6 Nonetheless, they fit within a model of corporate governance, drawn from pre-revolutionary practice, in which governments “engag[ed] private entities to finance, construct, and manage civic instructions and ostensibly public assets”—including, in this instance, the public domain. Brian Phillips Murphy, Building the Empire State: Political Economy in the Early Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 7. In fact, as Pauline Maier suggests, incorporation in Massachusetts in the 1780s often focused on land management. The Ohio Company’s elaborate system for
One aspect of the companies’ landholding was especially important in recrafting the territories: the promise of “system.” Though historians have generally interpreted this commitment as symbolic of a broader Federalist embrace of order and hierarchy, the land companies emphasized system in a quite literal sense: lands would surveyed and distributed through a well-defined and explicit process that the companies crafted
deliberately, in contrast to the unplanned and haphazard land practices that had produced the territories’ property chaos. This methodical approach to selling land would facilitate other goals—paying down the federal debt, crafting peaceful Indian relations, and, more broadly, curbing and channeling the seeming anarchic impulses of land speculation. The companies’ landownership would allow them to regulate settlement and avoid “the monopoly of lands,” which, undemocratically, “placed much power in the hands of a few.” In other words, paradoxically, empowering a handful of private land companies seemed to offer a solution to private enrichment at public expense by creating a form of governance over much of the territories. Title, in this sense, served as a form of
sovereignty.6
That, at least, was the ideology that underlay the first federal land system. But in practice, the “system” that the companies promised was largely self-serving rhetoric. Like William Blount and other predecessors, the land companies succumbed to the speculative lure of title: visions of millions of acres of lands seduced them into gambling subdividing its domain in fact resembled the smaller-scale divisions of property within Massachusetts town corporations. Pauline Maier, “The Revolutionary Origins of the American Corporation,” The William and Mary Quarterly 50, no. 1 (1993): 51, 53-55. For additional works considering corporations and their implications for governance during this period, see Andrew M. Schocket, Founding Corporate Power in Early National Philadelphia (DeKalb, Ill. : Northern Illinois University Press, 2007); Hannah Atlee Farber, “Underwritten States: Marine Insurance and the Making of Bodies Politic in America, 1622-1815” (Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 2014); Sarah Barringer Gordon, “The African Supplement: Religion, Race, and Corporate Law in Early National America,” The William and Mary Quarterly 72, no. 3 (2015): 385–422.
6 Rufus Putnam to George Washington, June 16, 1783, in MRP,216. For an example of this discussion of system, see Cayton, The
on inchoate and uncertain ownership. The clearest example of this process was a third land company, the Tennessee Company, a creation of Georgia’s so-called Yazoo sales that became deeply entangled with politics and finance in the Southwest Territory. Federal officials interpreted the Tennessee Company’s vision of quasi-sovereignty as a threat rather than a boon to national authority. But in time, it became clear that the federally endorsed Ohio and Miami Companies were far more similar to the Tennessee Company than their supporters’ rhetoric suggested.
In the end, corporate control of land by all three companies proved antithetical, rather than complementary, to federal interests. When their speculative gambles failed dramatically, all parties came away disillusioned. The companies felt that the federal government had opportunistically taken advantage of their hazarding of both financial and personal risk, without providing the support they believed implicit in the partnership. From the perspective of federal officials, the land companies left property messes that fell to Congress and the federal government to resolve, exacerbating rather than clarifying the tangle of title in the territories. “System” proved illusory. After the first federal land system produced results very similar to the chaotic jumble of ownership produced by the state land schemes, it was soon abandoned.
* * *
The Ohio Company began with a 1783 petition by a group of continental army officers for land in the Ohio country, which they already anticipated would become a “Colloney of the United States” and ultimately a state. The petition’s drafter and prime mover was Brigadier General Rufus Putnam, an engineer from a middling family in
central Massachusetts who had worked as a surveyor before the Revolution. Though the petition languished, three years later Putnam convened interested parties at the Bunch of Grapes Tavern in Boston to draft the articles of association for a land company.7
At the core of the Ohio Company’s plan was federal debt. “The design of this association,” read the articles’ first line, “is to raise a fund in Continental Certificates for the sole purpose . . . of purchasing Lands in the Western territory (belonging to the
United States).” Continental certificates were paper promises of future repayment issued by a cash-starved Continental Congress to pay for the creation and supply of a national military. By war’s end, these certificates had been issued to soldiers, officers,
tradesmen—anyone with outstanding financial claims against the United States. The lack of confidence in the new national government’s financial security meant that these
certificates traded at a heavy discount; in 1784, Putnam found them selling for as little as 18-20% of their face value.8
The Ohio Company proposed to raise $1,000,000 in Continental Specie
Certificates, which would then be redeemed for western lands. Rather than purchasing land outright, investors would purchase a “share” in the Company that would entitle them to a portion of the lands. There would be a thousand shares in the company, which could be purchased for $1,000 in certificates and $10 in gold or silver; the hard currency would
7 “Petition for the Ohio Country,” May 7, 1783, in MRP, 215; “Information,” January 25, 1786, in The Records of the Original
Proceedings of the Ohio Company: Ohio Company Series (Marietta, Ohio: Marietta Historical Commission, 1917), 1:1-4. On Putnam’s life, see his autobiography, “Rufus Putnam’s Memorandum Book of Family Concerns,” in MRP, 39-126.
8Articles of an Association by the Name of the Ohio Company, 3; Rufus Putnam to George Washington, April 5, 1784, in MRP, 223.
On federal finance and the Revolutionary War debt during this period, see Max M. Edling, A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 164-216; Max M. Edling, A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State, 1783-1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 81- 107.
be used to pay the Company’s operating expenses. Individuals were limited to a total of five shares; multiple purchasers could also pool their resources and obtain a share.9
The Ohio Company met again a year later, after agents had already begun soliciting subscribers across New England. At this meeting, Putnam was unanimously appointed as one of three directors of the Company. The other two were Samuel Holden Parsons, a Connecticut native and Revolutionary War general who had served as
congressional treaty commissioner at the 1785 Treaty of Fort Finney with the Shawnees, and Manasseh Cutler, former army chaplain and a clergyman in Ipswich, Massachusetts, with a particular interest in natural science. A fourth man, Winthrop Sargent, was appointed as the Company’s Secretary. Also from Massachusetts, Sargent had served as an artillerist during the war, and a surveyor in the Ohio Country for the Continental Congress. Later that year, they would be joined by James Varnum, a former general from Rhode Island, as director, and Richard Platt as treasurer. The Company charged the newly appointed directors to “immediately” apply to Congress to purchase lands. “We are in Serious earnest,” Parsons wrote a Connecticut delegate.10
In summer 1787, Manasseh Cutler journeyed to New York to reach an agreement with the Continental Congress. A political neophyte, Cutler nonetheless quickly
insinuated himself into the nation’s political elite, dining with James Madison and Elbridge Gerry at the constitutional convention, and with Arthur St. Clair (then President of Congress), and Henry Knox, the Secretary at War, in New York. There, Cutler found Congress in the midst of drafting the Northwest Ordinance for the governance of the new
9Articles of an Association by the Name of the Ohio Company, 3-6.
10 “Second General Meeting of the Ohio Company,” March 8, 1787, in Records of the Original Proceedings of the Ohio Company, 12-
13; Samuel Holden Parsons to William Samuel Johnson, April 23, 1787, Folder 6: Correspondence, 1786-87, Samuel Holden Parsons Papers, Connecticut Historical Society
federal territory, including the Ohio Country; he proposed a number of (unspecified) amendments, which, he was happy to note, “have all been made.”11
The actual contract proved harder to secure. To be sure, Congress salivated at the prospect of retiring large chunks of the national debt, and the “mode of Sale” that Cutler proposed would also “exempt the United States from the greatest part of the expence” of surveying and selling the land under the 1785 Land Ordinance. But, as one
congressional delegate complained, Congress found it impossible “to get anything done,” even the “plainest propositions” like Cutler’s proposed purchase. The largest obstacle was price. While Congress sought $1 per acre, Cutler insisted on $.33 an acre, which Congress refused.12
A breakthrough occurred on the evening of July 20, when William Duer called on Cutler. Duer was the secretary of the Board of Treasury, the congressional committee charged with negotiating the contract with Cutler. He was also an influential New York financier. He came to Cutler on behalf of a group of the city’s “principal characters” who proposed expanding the Ohio Company’s proposal to “take in another Company but that it should be a kept a profound secret.” Cutler, they urged, would negotiate for a much larger purchase than originally planned, and this new company—later dubbed the Scioto
11 “An Account of Dr. Cutler’s Work for the Ordinance of 1787.” Jeffrey Pasley convincingly argues that Cutler’s outlook was
substantially shaped by notions of gentility, which also explained his success in securing political access. “Private Access and Public Power: Gentility and Lobbying in the Early Congress,” in Kenneth R. Bowling and Donald R. Kennon, eds., The House and Senate in the 1790s: Petitioning, Lobbying, and Institutional Development (Athens, Ohio: Published for the United States Capitol Historical Society by Ohio University Press, 2002), 57-99.
12 Virginia Delegates to Edmund Randolph, November 3, 1787, in Paul Hubert Smith, ed., Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774-
1789 (Washington: U.S. Govt. Print. Off, 1976), 24:535-39; Richard Henry Lee to Francis Lightfoot Lee, July 14, 1787, in ibid., 24:353-54; “Proposals for the Purchase of Lands on the North West of the Ohio Belonging to the United States by the Associated Ohio Company,” July 27, 1787, Folder 10: Ohio Lands, Samuel Holden Parsons Papers; “An Account of Dr. Cutler’s Work for the Ordinance of 1787.”
Company, after its location—would pay for the additional land. “The plan struck me agreeably,” Cutler recorded, and “Sargent insisted on my undertaking [it].”13
Encompassing Duer’s proposed purchase made Congress much more receptive, since they were now discussing retiring millions of the public debt. The parties agreed that, although the nominal price would remain a dollar per acre, the actual price would be reduced to $.66 per acre on account of “bad lands.” But another obstacle remained, due to intense regional horse-trading over who would fill the newly created positions in the territorial government created by the Northwest Ordinance. Over dinner with some southern congressmen, Cutler negotiated that Parsons and Varnum would serve as territorial judges, while Sargent would serve as the territorial secretary.14
With the deals struck, “matters went on much better,” and three months later, Cutler signed a formal contract. The Ohio Company would pay $1,000,000 in two installments: $500,000 up front with a right of immediate entry, with an additional $500,000 due after the surveying of the tract within seven years, at which point the government would legally transfer title. The one and a half million acres purchased would be located along the Ohio River, to be surveyed following the Ordinance of 1785, with tracts reserved for future sale and to support education and ministers. The actual price in specie worked out to eight cents per acre.15