On the adoption of the North-West Ordinance the work of settlement made rapid progress. There were four main centres. The Ohio company founded Marietta at the mouth of the Mus kingum in 1788, and this is regarded as the oldest permanent settlement in the State. An association of New Jersey people, organized by John Cleves Symmes, secured a grant from Con gress in 1788-92 to a strip of 248,540 ac. on the Ohio, be tween the Great Miami and the Little Miami, which came to be known as the Symmes Purchase. Their chief settlements were Columbia (1788) and Cincinnati (1789). The Virginia Military district, between the Scioto and the Little Miami, reserved in 1784 for bounties to Virginia continental troops, was colonized in large measure by people from that State. Their chief towns were Massieville, now Manchester (1790) and Chillicothe (1796). A small company of Connecticut people under Moses Cleaveland founded Cleveland in 1796 and Youngstown was begun a few years later, but that portion of the State made very slow progress until after the opening of the Ohio and Erie canal in 1832.
During the Territorial period (1787-1803), Ohio was first a part of the unorganized North-West Territory (1787-99), then a part of the organized North-West Territory (1799-180o) and later the organized North-West Territory (1800-03), Indiana Territory having been detached from it on the west in 180o. The first Territorial government was established at Marietta in July 1788, and Gen. Arthur St. Clair, the governor, arrived in that month. His administration was characterized by the final struggle with the Indians. The Revolutionary War was succeeded by a series of Indian uprisings. Two campaigns, the first under Gen. Josiah Harmar (1753-1813) in 1790, and the second under Gen. St. Clair in 1791, failed on account of bad management and ignorance of Indian methods of warfare, and in 1793 Gen. An thony Wayne (q.v.) was sent out in command of a large force of regulars and volunteers. The decisive conflict, fought on Aug. 20, 1794, near the rapids of the Maumee, is called the battle of Fallen Timbers, because the Indians concealed themselves behind the trunks of trees which had been felled by a storm. Wayne's dragoons broke through the brushwood, attacked the left flank of the Indians and soon put them to flight. In the treaty of Greenville (Aug. 3, 1795) the Indians ceded their claims to the territory east and south of the Cuyahoga, the Tuscarawas, and an irregular line from Ft. Laurens (Bolivar) in Tuscarawas county to Ft. Recovery in Mercer county, practically the whole of eastern and southern Ohio. The Jay treaty was ratified in the same year, and in 1796 the British finally evacuated Detroit and the Maumee and Sandusky forts. By cessions and purchase in 1804, 1808 and 1817-18, the State secured all of the lands of the Indians except their immediate homes, and these were finally exchanged for territory west of the Mississippi. The last remnant migrated in 1841. Gen. Wayne's victory was followed by an extensive immi gration of New Englanders, of Germans, Scotch-Irish and Quakers from Pennsylvania and of settlers from Virginia and Kentucky, many of whom came to escape the evils of slavery. This rapid increase of population led to the establishment of the organized Territorial government in 1799, and to the admission of the State into the Union in 1803.
The Congressional Enabling act of April 30, 1802 followed that alternative of the North-West Ordinance which provided for five States in determining the boundaries, and in consequence the Indiana and Michigan districts were detached. A rigid adherence
to the boundary authorized in 1787, however, would have resulted in the loss to Ohio of 470 sq.m. of territory in the north-western part of the State, including the lake port of Toledo. After a long and bitter dispute-the Toledo War (see TOLEDO )-the present line, which is several miles north of the south bend of Lake Michigan, was definitely fixed in 1837, when Michigan came into the Union. (For the settlement of the eastern boundary, see PENNSYLVANIA.) After having been temporarily at Marietta, Cin cinnati, Chillicothe and Zanesville, the capital was established at Columbus in 1816.
Since Congress did not pass any formal act of admission there has been some controversy as to when Ohio became a State. The Enabling act was passed April 30, 1802, the first State Legislature met March I, 1803, the Territorial judges gave up their offices on April 15, 1803, and the Federal senators and representatives took their seats in Congress Oct. 17, 1803. Congress decided in 1806, in connection with the payment of salaries to Territorial officials, that March 1803, was the date when State Government began. During the War of 1812 the Indians under the lead of Tecumseh were again on the side of the British. Battles were fought at Ft. Meigs (1813) and Ft. Stephenson (Fremont, 1813), and Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry's naval victory on Lake Erie in 1813 was on the Ohio side of the boundary line.
Owing to the prohibition of slavery, the vast majority of the early immigrants to Ohio came from the north, but, until the Mexican War forced the slavery question into the foreground, the Democrats usually controlled the State, because the prin ciples of that party were more in harmony with frontier ideas of equality. The Whigs were successful in the presidential elections of 1836 and 1840, partly because of the financial panic and partly because their candidate, William Henry Harrison, was a "favourite son," and in the election of 1844, because of the unpopularity of the Texas issue. Victory was with the Democrats in 1848 and 1852, but since the organization of the Republican Party in 1854 the State has uniformly given to the Republican presidential can didates its electoral votes, except in 1912 and 1916 when a split in the dominant party (Republican) allowed the Democrats to win. In the Civil War Ohio loyally supported the Union, fur nishing 319,659 men for the army. Dissatisfaction with the President's emancipation programme resulted in the election of a Democratic Congressional delegation in 1862, but the tide turned again after Gettysburg and Vicksburg; Clement L. Val landigham, the Democratic leader, was deported from the State by military order, and the Republicans were successful in the elections of 1863 and 1864. A detachment of the Confederate cavalry under Gen. John Morgan invaded the State in 1863, but was badly defeated in the battle of Buffington's island (July 18). In 1873 the Democrats succeeded for the first time since 1856 in electing a governor, but in the years that have since elapsed the administrations have been almost evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans. Six presidents have come from Ohio, William Henry Harrison, Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, William McKinley, William Howard Taft and Warren G. Harding.