TRACK SEVENTEEN: Marietta

Both Lincoln and Tocqueville imagined that there could be a larger and more satisfying democracy than one that allowed slavery, Indian removal, and a greedy, exploitative system that allowed a few rich men to control resources and profits. Their ideal was that individualism and individual pursuit of happiness need not be isolating and crass.

Self interest, properly understood, could bring prosperity through helping one another. Such harmony required effort, and a great example was the community barn-raising. Barn raising was a socializing event with a practical goal. One could still feel self-sufficient and independent yet at the same time know you were actually entitled to receiving help from your neighbors. Lincoln said that all government should routinely work the same way: a government such that each person can do what they need to have done, but cannot do so well or not at all, by themselves.

Do you recall the young surveyor in Pittsburgh whom I mentioned? He also explored other areas west of his native Virginia, and he said that he found the Ohio Valley especially beautiful, particularly the area where the Muskingum River meets the Ohio River, at what is now Marietta. After the Revolutionary War, that surveyor, now President George Washington, set aside land there for grants to former military. In time, the cemetery at Marietta became the one with the highest number of burials of Revolutionary War soldiers.

The city cemetery at Marietta was established on the site of the Ohio Hopewell culture of indigenous people who built the Marietta Earthworks -- that is, native American burial mounds -- about 1500 years earlier. The archaeological site, at the confluence of the Muskingum and Ohio Rivers, was a center of a Native American culture that was connected by trade routes from the Great Lakes to Florida. Primarily along the waterways, there was exchange of goods among small villages all across what is now the eastern half of the United States.

Chapman regularly visited his father, at Marietta, and his step-mother and siblings. Quite a few Marietta residents supported Abolition and made Marietta the birthplace the Underground Railroad, in league with free black residents of the town. Marietta College was an early institution of higher education and was supported by the townspeople. Activists in the Temperance and Women’s Suffrage Movements are also prominent in the history of Marietta. At the same time, it was a thriving center of riverboat trade and traffic of many kinds. Living in Marietta provided opportunities to observe that fairness and compassion were the allies of economic dynamism and successful entrepreneurship.

Washington said, “No colony in America was ever settled under such favorable auspices as that commenced at the Muskingum.”