Opening paragraphs...........................

     The prominent Massachusetts minister and physician Manasseh Cutler captured the optimism of Americans at the dawn of their republic when he described the territory between Lake Erie and the Ohio River as "the garden of the world, the seat of wealth, and the centre of a great Empire."  In these lands, he mused, "the arts and sciences will be planted;  the seeds of virtue, happiness, and glory be firmly rooted and grow up to full maturity."  It's worth noting that, when he wasn't ministering to his New England flock or tending to his patients, Cutler speculated in Western lands and dreamed of wealth, and no doubt there was some marketing hyperbole in his lyrical description of territory so far from American civilization.  Indeed, that expanse struck most Easterners at the time as hopelessly inaccessible — on the far side of the merciless Appalachian Mountains, bordered on the north by British Canada and the south by Spanish Louisiana, peopled with hostile natives bent on protecting their homeland through whatever savage methods they could devise.
     But Cutler understood the new republic's expansionist impulse.  When he died in Massachusetts in 1923, those lands of his vision, now roughly the state of Ohio, boasted the country's fifth-largest population, with 581,434 residents.  These were young and hearty folk — 64 percent of them under the age of twenty-five — and by 1830 they had subdued nearly all the state's land suitable for cultivation.  By midcentury Ohio led the nation in production of corn, much of it transformed into whiskey and hogs for easy transport, and a decade later the state's population of 2,339,502 trailed only those of New York and Pennsylvania.  As a later historian put it, "Ohio recapitulated the history of colonial encounter, conquest, and postcolonial development with breathtaking speed."

-Robert W. Merry,  President McKinley:  Architect of the American Century