Michael: Most of us think of American westward expansion as this chaotic, gun-slinging free-for-all. But the first, and arguably most important, push west was the complete opposite: a meticulously planned, anti-slavery, pro-education utopia engineered by a New England pastor who was also a world-class lobbyist. Kevin: That sounds completely made up. A pastor-lobbyist? In the 1700s? That feels like a character from a historical comedy, not the architect of America's future. How does someone like that even get a meeting, let alone broker a massive deal? Michael: It’s an incredible, and largely untold, story. And it's at the very heart of David McCullough's final masterpiece, The Pioneers. Kevin: Ah, and McCullough was a giant of popular history, a two-time Pulitzer winner. What's fascinating is that for his last book, he chose to focus not on a famous president, but on this group of forgotten founders. It became a #1 bestseller, but it also stirred up some real controversy, which we should definitely get into. Michael: Absolutely. Because to understand America, you have to understand the story of this first frontier. It all starts with a character who feels like he's from a different century, a man named Manasseh Cutler.

Kevin: Okay, so set the scene for me. Who is this Manasseh Cutler? And what does he have to do with the Ohio Country? Michael: Well, picture this: it’s 1786. The Revolutionary War is over, but the country is broke. The soldiers who fought for independence were paid in something called Continental Certificates, which were basically worthless IOUs. They're veterans, heroes, and now they're destitute. Cutler is their pastor back in Ipswich, Massachusetts. But he's not just any pastor. He's a Yale graduate, a doctor, a botanist who corresponded with Benjamin Franklin about his discoveries. He's a true Renaissance man. Kevin: A polymath pastor. Got it. So his congregation is broke and needs a solution. Michael: Exactly. And they look west, to the vast, untamed wilderness across the Appalachian Mountains known as the Ohio Country. This land was just ceded to the U.S. by the British. They form a venture called the Ohio Company of Associates, with the goal of pooling their worthless scrip to buy a massive tract of land from the equally broke Congress. And they choose Manasseh Cutler, the intellectual with no political experience, to go to New York, the nation's temporary capital, and make the deal. Kevin: This already feels like a suicide mission. He's walking into a room of seasoned politicians and trying to buy a chunk of America with Monopoly money. Michael: It was. He arrived in July 1787, and the city was buzzing. The Constitutional Convention was happening in Philadelphia at the exact same time. The nation's future was being written, and Cutler walks in and starts lobbying. He dines with congressmen, uses his scientific credentials to open doors, and makes his pitch. But he's met with resistance. Congress is skeptical. The deal is on the verge of collapse. Kevin: So how does he pull it off? Michael: This is where the story turns from a simple land deal into something profound. At the same time, Congress is debating something called the Northwest Ordinance—the legislation that will govern this new territory. Cutler, in a moment of political genius, links his land purchase to the passage of this ordinance. He essentially says, "I'll make this deal financially irresistible for you, but you have to include certain principles in the law of the land." Kevin: Hold on. Congress was full of southern slaveholders. How on earth did a New England pastor get them to agree to ban slavery in a territory the size of the original 13 colonies? Was it just his charm? Michael: That's the genius of it. It wasn't just charm; it was a brilliant, and slightly shady, backroom deal. He realized his initial offer wasn't enough. So he partnered with a powerful New York speculator named William Duer and his Scioto Company. They secretly expanded the deal to five million acres, making it a massive windfall for the cash-strapped government. It was too much money to refuse. Kevin: So he made them an offer they couldn't refuse. Michael: Precisely. And in exchange, he got his non-negotiable terms written into the Northwest Ordinance. Article I: Freedom of religion. Article III: Public education must be funded by the sale of land. And the bombshell, Article VI: "There shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in the said territory." He got it passed. A historian later called it "one of the most ingenious, systematic and successful piece of lobbying" in American history. Kevin: Wow. So basically, he bundled a moral imperative with a massive financial incentive. It's like selling a car by throwing in a free house. You can't say no. He essentially coded an anti-slavery, pro-education operating system for the American West before it even existed. Michael: That's the perfect way to put it. He secured a blueprint for a more perfect union, a second chance to get right what the original founding had compromised on. It was an astonishing victory on paper.

Kevin: Okay, so they have this perfect blueprint for a society. But a blueprint is not a building. What happened when they actually had to go out and live in this 'utopia'? Michael: That’s where the idealism of New York collides with the brutal reality of the wilderness. The first group of 48 pioneers, led by the stoic Revolutionary War hero Rufus Putnam, set out in the dead of winter in 1787. They hacked their way over the mountains, built a massive boat they nicknamed the "Mayflower," and floated down the Ohio River to found the settlement of Marietta. Kevin: The "Mayflower," huh? They were clearly aware of the historical weight of what they were doing. Michael: They absolutely were. They saw themselves as creating a "city upon a hill," just like their Puritan ancestors. But the reality was far from poetic. The book really shines when it focuses on the personal stories, like that of Manasseh's son, Ephraim Cutler. He and his young family followed a few years later. Kevin: And I'm guessing their journey wasn't a pleasant trip down the river. Michael: It was a nightmare. Ephraim, his wife Leah, and their four small children made the trek. Along the way, their youngest child, a one-year-old boy, got sick and died. They had to bury him on the riverbank. A few weeks later, their oldest daughter, Mary, died of a fever. Ephraim wrote in his journal about the agony of having to "commit her to the earth in the dreary wilderness." On top of that, his wife Leah slipped and broke two ribs. It was just one tragedy after another. Kevin: Wow. That's just brutal. It completely shatters the romantic image of the plucky pioneer. The cost of that dream was immense, paid for by their own children. Michael: And the hardship didn't stop when they arrived. The winter of 1789 became known as the "Starving Year." An early frost destroyed the corn crop. Wild game disappeared. The settlers were on the brink of famine, surviving only because of the generosity of people like Isaac Williams, a farmer on the Virginia side of the river who sold them corn at a fair price when he could have become rich from their desperation. Kevin: And this is all before we even get to the conflict with the Native Americans. Michael: Exactly. And that conflict was terrifyingly real. The book details the Big Bottom Massacre, where a raiding party of Delaware and Wyandot warriors attacked an outlying settlement, killing fourteen people, including women and children. The news sent a shockwave of fear through Marietta. Kevin: This is where the book's controversy comes in, right? McCullough tells these stories of settler hardship, but from the Native American perspective, these weren't 'settlers,' they were invaders. The 'massacre' was an act of war to defend their land. Does the book grapple with that? Michael: It does, but critics argue not deeply enough. McCullough's strength is his narrative power, and he tells the story primarily through the eyes of the pioneers, using their diaries and letters. He portrays the conflict as a profound tragedy, but the narrative is firmly rooted in their perspective. He doesn't shy away from the violence, like the horrifying story of Colonel William Crawford's torture, but it's told as a "frontier nightmare" for the settlers. It's a valid criticism that the book could have explored the indigenous viewpoint more fully, which is a common critique of this kind of popular history. Kevin: So the dream of a peaceful, orderly society was immediately threatened by starvation, disease, and a brutal war. It's amazing anything survived. Michael: It culminated in St. Clair's Defeat in 1791, where a poorly prepared American army was ambushed. Over 600 U.S. soldiers were killed. It was the single greatest defeat of the American military by Native American forces in the nation's history. The utopian blueprint was soaked in blood.

Michael: And yet, despite the starvation, the war, the heartbreak... they didn't just survive. They built something that lasted. And that legacy is where the story gets truly profound. The principles of the Northwest Ordinance weren't just words on paper; they became the bedrock of Ohio society. Kevin: How did that play out in practice? Did they actually build the schools and ban slavery effectively? Michael: They did. Ephraim Cutler, the same man who lost two children on the trail, became a major figure in Ohio politics. He personally championed and pushed through the legislation that created Ohio's public school system, fulfilling the promise his father had embedded in the Ordinance decades earlier. But the most powerful legacy was on slavery. Kevin: So that anti-slavery clause Manasseh Cutler slipped into the deal in 1787 wasn't just a symbolic gesture. It created a free territory right on the border of slave states like Virginia and Kentucky, making it a literal front line in the fight for freedom. Michael: A literal front line. Marietta became a key station on the Underground Railroad. People in the town, descendants of those first pioneers, risked everything to help fugitive slaves cross the Ohio River to freedom. The book tells this incredible story of a visit from an elderly John Quincy Adams in the 1840s. Kevin: The former president? What was he doing in Marietta? Michael: He was a congressman by then, and the most prominent anti-slavery voice in Washington. He came to Ohio and met with the now-aging Ephraim Cutler. Ephraim told him the story of how his father, Manasseh, had ensured the anti-slavery clause was in the Ordinance. McCullough writes that as Adams listened, he was so moved that Ephraim "saw the tears gather in his eyes." It was this moment of connection, from the founding generation to the generation that would fight the Civil War, all centered on this principle born in the Ohio wilderness. Kevin: That's an amazing scene. It connects the dots across 50 years of history. Michael: It does. And it shaped the nation. Five states were carved out of that territory—Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin—all free states. It fundamentally shifted the balance ofpower in the country, leading directly to the tensions that erupted in the Civil War. It's no coincidence that Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote the world-changing novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, was living just down the river in Cincinnati, absorbing the stories of fugitive slaves crossing that very river. The ideas born in that Ohio settlement had immense consequences.

Michael: When you pull back, the story of The Pioneers is more than just a tale of settling Ohio. It's a story of a second founding. The first founding in 1776 was brilliant but was deeply compromised by the poison of slavery. The founding of the Northwest in 1787 was an attempt to get it right—to build a society on the principles of freedom and knowledge from the ground up. It was an audacious, and often tragic, experiment. Kevin: It really reframes how you think about the frontier. It wasn't just about rugged individualism; it was about collective, idealistic community-building. They were trying to build a better version of the country they had just fought for. Michael: And they paid a steep price for it. But the principles they fought for—and wrote into law—endured. They created a legacy of freedom in the heartland that would be crucial in the nation's greatest test. Kevin: It makes you wonder what principles we're willing to endure hardship for today. They literally bet their lives and their children's lives on the idea of a better-ordered society. What are our non-negotiable principles now? Michael: That's a powerful question. We'd love to hear what you all think. What parts of this story resonate with you? The political maneuvering, the personal sacrifice, the enduring legacy? Let us know your thoughts on our social channels. It’s a history that feels incredibly relevant. Kevin: This is Aibrary, signing off.