The Field of Mars Holds

Rufus Putnam had spent the worst winter of the Revolution at Valley Forge and had built the fortifications at Dorchester Heights that forced the British to evacuate Boston. When he designed Campus Martius in the summer of 1788, he was not thinking about symbolism. He was thinking about angles of fire, about the depth of picket walls, about where the blockhouses needed to be so that riflemen could cover the dead ground between them. He had seen what happened to positions that were not properly engineered. He was not going to let that happen at the confluence of the Ohio and Muskingum.

The name — Campus Martius, Field of Mars — was his kind of joke. These were Continental officers. They knew their Latin. They also knew that they were building a fortification in territory where the question of who had the right to be there had not been settled, regardless of what the Continental Congress had written in a land ordinance. The Delaware and Wyandot and Shawnee nations who had lived in the Ohio Country for generations had their own views about the matter, and those views were not recorded in the Ohio Company's charter.

For the first two years, things were calm enough. Arthur St. Clair arrived to establish territorial government. Courts began to function. Land was surveyed and distributed. Families arrived. Ephraim Cutler, Manasseh's son, planted a farm. Women who had followed their husbands to the Ohio Country began the work of making permanent households in a place where everything had to be built from the beginning: gardens, kitchens, schools, the small social institutions that make a settlement into a community.

Then came January 1791, and Big Bottom.

The news of the massacre reached Marietta within days. Twelve settlers dead, twenty miles upriver, at a settlement that had not fortified itself because everyone had believed the danger was past. The survivors who reached Marietta were in shock. The Ohio Company settlers who had not been at Big Bottom looked at Campus Martius with new eyes. The walls that Putnam had built — the walls some of them had privately thought were excessive caution — suddenly looked like they were barely enough.

Putnam had always known this was coming. Not this specific attack, not these specific victims, but the general fact: the Ohio Company's land purchase had not purchased peace. The federal government's assurances that the Native nations had ceded their claims were not matched by any actual consent from those nations. When he had designed the fortification with its covered passages between blockhouses, with its thick picket walls, with the interior layout that could shelter the entire population in an emergency, he had been designing for the reality that he understood: these settlers were in a contested country.

Through the winter and spring of 1791, raids increased. Settlers who strayed too far from Campus Martius disappeared. Supply boats on the river were ambushed. St. Clair organized a military campaign that autumn, marching north from Cincinnati toward the Miami towns on the Wabash. The settlers at Marietta waited.

The news of St. Clair's defeat — November 4, 1791, 632 soldiers killed, the army destroyed in less than three hours — arrived at Marietta in mid-November. It was the worst military disaster in American history to that point. St. Clair had survived, barely. His army had not. The settlers at Campus Martius understood clearly now that there was no federal military force capable of protecting them. They had only each other, and the walls Putnam had built.

The fort held for three more years. It held through raids that killed settlers who had ventured beyond its walls. It held through the uncertainty after St. Clair's defeat, when no one knew if there would be another American army or whether the federal government would simply abandon the Ohio settlements to their fate. It held until August 1794, when Anthony Wayne's army defeated the Native confederacy at Fallen Timbers, and then until August 1795, when the Treaty of Greenville established something like peace.

When peace finally came, the settlers left the fort and spread out across the land they had purchased and waited to use. Putnam's house remained standing inside what was left of the Campus Martius walls. He lived there until his death in 1824, surviving long enough to see Ohio become a state in 1803 and to see the settlement he had founded become a real town, with streets and churches and a college and a courthouse.

He had built the walls well enough that the community survived to need them. That was what he had set out to do.