CHAPTER V

Growth of Ohio Under Early Democracy-Establishment of the School System-Guilford, Atwater and Cutler-Jeremiah Mor

row Elected Governor-The Era of Good Feeling-Split in the Democratic Party.

About the year 1820 the Democratic-Republican Party began to drop the name Republican, under which it had been known up to that time, and adopt the word Democrat, which remains until this day. The second half of the compound name owed its temporary use not to an American sentiment but to a European prejudice. It would have been more natural for the party, in abbreviating the name, to have used the first half, but in France and England the word Democrat signified a low, coarse fellow. Benjamin Franklin and others brought this meaning of the word back to America with them, and to evade any such implication the young party dropped the first half of its name and used only the word Republican. It is said that the derogatory sense in which the word was used about the beginning of the nineteenth century made it objectionable to Andrew Jackson all his life. The American spirit of disregard for European prejudices, however, gradually brought about the use of the name Democrat. The Secretaries of State for Ohio have uniformly begun to use the name Democrat in their reports with the year 1820, but William A. Taylor, the Ohio historian, in his Hundred Year Book, boldly tabulates all the governors of Ohio from 1803 as Democrats. That is what they really were; the name and not the principles of the party underwent a change.

It was, then, to the Democratic Party that the care, management and development of the young state was committed and under Democratic rule Ohio made marvelous advancement in the first twenty years of the nineteenth century. In the year 1800 the population of the state was 42,000. In 1810 it had risen to 230,000, and in 1820 it approached 600,000.