Contested Patriarchy: John Cleves Symmes and the Struggle for Family Control in the Post-revolutionary West

Tapping into a deep well of New England tradition, John Cleves Symmes attempted to shape and later launch two motherless grandsons during problematic years following the death of Maria Symmes and near-ruin of their disgraced Kentucky planter father, Peyton Short.¹ Differing perceptions held by the two men of their respective roles complicated Symmes’s relationship with the boys and forced him to confront the possibility that connections to their Symmes ancestry were under threat. Despite differences in origins, at first Symmes and Short saw in each other kindred spirits as farsighted businessmen-speculators poised to become gentlemen Ohio Valley land magnates, and Short’s quixotic nature was either overlooked or misinterpreted. When Short’s affairs collapsed, the realities of financial uncertainty forced Symmes to examine his idealization of the gentleman landowner and reconsider the importance of deportment, vocations, and locale for young men such as his grandsons confronting life in the post-revolutionary emerging West. In the process, the son-less Symmes also revealed that there were tensions regarding his eastern legacy in raising a Kentucky planter’s sons.

The mid-eighteenth-century New England culture into which Symmes was born dictated that fathers provide a source of livelihood for sons approaching adulthood. Occasionally, older brothers or other close kin assisted those unable to launch sons entirely themselves. Aid from family patriarchs had traditionally come as a gift or inheritance of land, but could include money, professional contacts, college education, or guidance. Families tended to decide each son’s path and sometimes expected them to repay the family coffer from their earnings.²

Symmes understood traditional New England patriarchal roles. In fact, much later he reminded a grown daughter that because he had consciously relaxed the usual patriarchal manner of granting land gifts, he expected her particular appreciation. It remains uncertain exactly who aided Symmes’s rise to become a New Jersey notable, but he achieved “many influential connections” through three well-placed marriages, especially for a boy whose clergyman father had become an itinerant missionary after losing his settled church.³ In any case, by the time Symmes was advising his grandsons, he identified with the national elite and imagined his patriarchal role involved guiding them gently into lives of plenty, engaging the professional or commercial marketplace as part of a gentleman’s well-rounded activities and not as a survival strategy.

Symmes had served New Jersey as a revolutionary militia colonel, constitution author, Supreme Court judge, legislator, and Continental Congress delegate. Reared by maternal grandparents on Long Island, he was the son of a Harvard-educated Massachusetts minister turned itinerant missionary during the Great Awakening. Symmes always felt a little defensive about not being college educated himself, although he trained in surveying, law, and the classics.⁴

Struck with western fever like so many after the Revolution, Symmes petitioned Congress to buy vast holdings in what is now southwestern Ohio—often called the Miami Purchase because it is bounded by the Great and Little Miami rivers. By 1788, he was a territorial judge and later led early settlers to the tract.⁵ He divided his time over the next decade among traveling the legal circuit, erecting his house and farm buildings, and colonizing his extensive property.

Scholars describe Symmes as quarrelsome, careless, and avaricious, but also meticulous, generous, good-natured, and wise.⁶ His life suffered the bipolar tensions of plenty and penury, status and embarrassment, love and loss. An important figure, Symmes nonetheless lost all his substantial holdings in legal settlements and was eventually reduced to writing his nephew to borrow a dollar to buy peaches.⁷ Eventually, Symmes made his conclusions regarding the best path to success as a man disillusioned by his own experience and when he was finally aware of the inadequacy of social connections in overcoming the insistent incursions of a market economy.

By the dawn of the nineteenth century, Symmes had served over a decade as one of three federally appointed territorial judges of the Old Northwest.⁸ Son-in-law William Henry Harrison, territorial...