FIGHTING OVER SWAMPLAND - Holy Toledo!

I would say 1835 was, like most years, a revolutionary year in America. North of the Rio Grande  pro-slavery gringo emigrants rebelled against Mexican anti-slavery laws. In Boston, five thousand  white supremacists broke into a meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society, and dragged abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison through the streets at the end of a rope (above, center).

 In South Carolina 36 slaves and one 60 year old free-black carpenter were hanged for allegedly organizing a slave revolt (above). Meanwhile, far to the north, along the shores of Lake Erie, free whites did their very best to start a war over possession of 268 square miles of swamp known as “The Toledo Strip”.

In truth, the Great Black Swamp was what film maker Alfred Hitchcock would call a "magoffin'. It was not what people were really fighting over, even though it was what people were fighting over. It was not even much of a swamp by Louisiana standards.

It was great only because it occupied a swath of land 40 miles wide and 120 miles long, in the northwest corner the new state of Ohio – which was a little far north for a swamp.

It was a remnant of the ice ages, a collection of ponds and marshes interspersed with drumlins, all filled and drained by the 130 mile long Maumee River, which rose from the high ground around Fort Wayne, Indiana and fed into Lake Erie.  It's only claim to fame was that it formed a natural barrier between the state of Ohio and the territory of Michigan. The Black Swamp provided a bumper crop of mosquitoes each summer, and they, and the malaria they carried, made life difficult for any intrepid surveyors who might set up their theodolites upon such soggy ground.

The first real attempt to draw the border through this "mish marsh" was made in 1817, when Former Ohio Territorial Governor and U.S. Surveyor General Edward Tiffin (above), hired surveyor William Harris to mark the southern boundary of Michigan Territory.

According to the “Harris Line” the mouth of the Maumee River was in Michigan, and just blow the northern edge of the swamp.  In 1818 Ohio responded by hiring John Fulton to survey the border, which he found five miles further north, avoiding the swamp by going above it. 

Taken together the two lines bracketed the head of Great Black Swamp. And while the desire of each surveyor to avoid all those mosquitoes was understandable, the residents of Ohio and Michigan were confused as to where the border between them actually lay. They appealed to Washington, D.C.  But abiding by the political rule that whatever you do will make somebody angry with you, the Federal politicians decided to do nothing. After all, nobody would fight for ownership of a swamp.

Then in 1825 the Erie Canal (above) opened, connecting the port of New York City with the Great Lakes. It proved to be such an economic revolution that plans were immediately drawn up for a port at the mouth of the Maumee River, and a canal past the swamp to high ground at Fort Wayne, Indiana - Hoosier statehood having been granted in 1816. The dreamers then envisioned a canal from Fort Wayne southwest to the head of navigation on the Wabash River, at Lafayette. From there boats could carry the bounty of Hoosier farms to the Ohio River, thence to the Mississippi, New Orleans and the world.   

Those canals would make the port at Toledo (above, which had been established at the mouth of the Maumee River) as the hub of transportation for the entire center of the continent. A Toledo lawyer, John Fitch, noted that already it was the general opinion that “no place on the lake except Buffalo will rival it.” 

The politically active residents of Michigan Territory and the state of Ohio both began to organize. And Michigan residents became convinced Ohio politicians were plotting to steal Toledo, Michigan from them. Which was true.

The politics finally solidified when hot-headed 23 year old Stephen Mason (above) was appointed Territorial Governor of Michigan. He was a gift from President Andrew Jackson, a man who appreciated hot heads.

Mason (above, left,  in the dark top hat)  rallied his followers by saying, "...we are on the side of justice…we cannot fail to maintain our rights against the encroachments of a powerful neighboring state.” And on 12 February, 1835,  Governor Mason issued the “Pains and Penalties Act”,  making it illegal for a non-Michigan resident to enforce Ohio law in Toledo, Michigan Territory.

The Cleveland, Ohio newspapers called the Michigan claim to Toledo “as absurd as it is ridiculous.” And on 23 February, the defiant Ohio General Assembly, playing to their own base, voted to “run the border” of the Fulton Line -  meaning to mark it again as Toledo, Ohio, with stone posts that clearly said so. 

Then on April Fool’s day Michigan held  elections in the Toledo Strip. One week later, on 6 April, Ohio held competing elections in the Toledo Strip. Somebody was going to have to disappoint their supporters

Two days later a Michigan Country sheriff and an armed posse of 40 men rode into Toledo to enforce the Penalties Act. Several men snuck into the home of Benjamin Franklin Stickney (above), a major in the Ohio militia, who was either an “Ohio patriot” or a "Phio Nut" - depending on which side of the border you lived on.  

Now, even allowing for dysfunctional parenting, the level of strangeness displayed by Benjamin Stickney is staggering.  This respected member of the Ohio community and one of the founders of Toledo, named his eldest son “Number One” and his younger son “Number Two”. Stickney also had a daughter, and we can just call her “Light Sleeper”.

You see, on the night of 8 April, 1835,  Miss Stickney was awakened by a noise, and stepped into the hall to investigate. A creeping Michigan deputy clamped a hand over the startled child’s mouth, and held her silent, lest she shout a warning to her father.  Alas, Benjamin Stickney would not have heard her, as he was not at home. So two of his house guests were arrested and taken north for arraignment. Two days later they were released on bail. Or ransom, depending your state of residence and mind.

In handbills and letters to Ohio newspapers Major Stickney inflated the posse to 300 men “armed with muskets and bayonets".  He claimed the deputies had tried to gouge out his eyes (he wasn't there)  and had “throttled” his daughter.  He urged his fellow buckeyes to “turn out en masse to protect  their northern border and restrain the savage barbarity of the hordes of the north.”  You see, Major Stickney had a lot of money invested in Toledo, Ohio. 

Ohio Governor Robert Lucas (above), another Jackson Democrat, sent 40 men to guard his two surveyors "running the border line" - 29 year old Colonel Jonathan Emmerson Fletcher, and Colonel Sebried Dodge. 

The governor then went further and ordered the 100,000 members of the state militia to assemble in the tiny town of Perryville, Ohio (above), just up the Maumee River from Toledo. Only 10,000 actually responded,  and most of them never got to Perryville, because they got lost in the swamp.

Meanwhile on Sunday, 21 April a 30 man Michigan posse caught the Ohio “line runners” relaxing in camp at a cross roads bordering a field owned by Michigan Militia Colonel Eli Phillips (above).   Most of the buckeyes broke for the woods and escaped, but nine were caught in the open. And when the badgers  fired a volley over their heads the buckeyes wisely surrendered. 

All nine were arrested for violating the “Pains and Penalties Act”.  And on Monday morning six were granted bail and two more were released with just a warning to behave.  The only Ohioan who remained in jail was Jonathan Fletcher, the hot head surveyor, who refused to post bail “on principle.”  In the annals of Michigan this encounter was memorialized as the “Battle of Phillip’s Corner” (above). The whiff of gunpowder brought a degree of sanity back to Governor Mason, who suddenly discovered he was pretty far out on a political limb. And in the spirit of good will he suspended enforcement of his Pains and Penalties Act. 

But now it was the Ohio legislature’s turn to appease their base. Kidnapping was already illegal in Ohio, but buckeye politicians now felt it necessary to pass a new law providing hard labor for kidnapping anyone from Ohio. And they made Toledo (above) the capital of a new Ohio county.

In Toledo one observer noted “Men (were) galloping about – guns getting ready – wagons being filled with people and hurrying off, and everybody in commotion “ The little town of just 1,250 citizens had become a magnet for every nut case, political hot head and pugnacious drifter in the old Northwest Territories, looking for a fight.

 In July, two Michigan deputies tried to hold an auction of property seized for non payment of Michigan taxes, and a gang of Ohio “patriots”, led by Number Two Strikney, broke up the auction.  So, on 12 July 1835 a Michigan arrest warrant was issued for the son-of-a-patriot, for disturbing the peace.  Number Two, upon learning of the warrant, sent a message to the Michigan Sheriff to stay out of Toledo, Ohio, if he wanted to live.

That threat set Michigan Governor Mason off again. He ordered 250 men into Toledo, under Deputy Sheriff Joseph Wood, to arrest Number Two and his "gang".  Most of the Ohio “patriots” ran safely for the Maumee River border, but Number Two didn’t make it. 

When Sheriff Wood physically grabbed Number Two, he pulled what in Ohio was called a pen knife and in Michigan was described as “a dirk”.  Whatever the size of the blade,  “Two” stabbed the sheriff in the leg and then disappeared across the Maumee River (below). 

The wound was minor and the sheriff was able to ride home that night, having paused to finally arrest Number Two’s father, the infamous Major Stickney, and drag him back to Michigan, tied to the back of a horse. But before leaving town the Michiganders also smashed the offices of the pro-Ohio Toledo Gazette, behaving, claimed the paper, worse than an “Algerian robbery or Turkish persecution.” It seemed the residents were finally running short of hyperbole. What was left but gunpowder?

It was at this point that Andrew Jackson finally stepped in. How dare these common political jackasses act as if they by God Andrew Jackson himself!  On 29 August, 1835 the President removed Mason as governor of Michigan Territory.  Party leaders let it be known that Michigan would only be allowed to become a state after they accepted that Toledo was a town in Ohio. It was a bitter pill for the Badger rabble to swallow, particularly after all that rabble rousing.  But in that instant the heat seeped out of the issue.

As a sop for hurt badger feelings, the federal government granted Michigan the additional territory known as the Upper Peninsula. Michigan was finally admitted into the union as a state, sans Toledo, on 26 January, 1837.

So Ohio won. The canals were dug, and the buckeyes benefited from the taxes paid by the port at the mouth of the Maumee River.  In 1842 1,578 barrels of flour and 12,976 bushels of wheat were shipped through Toledo, and taxed by Ohio.  By 1852 the totals were a quarter million barrels flour and almost two million bushels of wheat. 

But Toledo did not become the transportation hub for the Midwest, because canal technology was superseded by the railroads, and Chicago superseded Toledo; which the Ohio patriots could have predicted in 1835 if they had calmed down and calmly thought about it for a few moments.

Meanwhile, in 1844, a party of surveyors were marking investigating and staking out the second place prize for Michigan, the Upper Peninsula,  when they found their compasses spinning wildly. This was caused by one of the largest concentrations of iron ore ever found on the planet Earth, which was surrounded by one of the largest concentrations of copper ore ever found on the Earth. 

Beginning in 1847 and continuing over the next one hundred and fifty years, over a billion tons of iron and several billion tons of copper were removed from those hills. None of the Michigan patriots could have predicted that. 

The truth was the future contained a bounty beyond the imagination of the patriots who willing to kill each other in 1835, all for possession of a swamp – and not a great swamp at that. It has long since been drained for farmland.  It is remains a basic rule of human history - That which people are willing to murder for today, they may consider worthless tomorrow.   Folks, you might remember that rule, next time a hot head starts calling for a war. Stop, stop and think. 

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The Personality of a Politician

I don't think you have to be crazy to be a politician, but a little screwball logic can solidify your base. On the other hand you don't want voters suspecting you might be completely loony. And navigating a path between those two alternatives can be tricky at times.

For example, in the 1980's a 5'1” tall combative obsessive/compulsive fire cracker named Ruthann Aron (above) dreamed big dreams.  Always big. She earned advanced degrees in both microbiology from Cornel and a law degree.  A college boyfriend remembered, "If she was angry, you knew it... There was nothing left to the imagination."  

Ruthann was even admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court - although she never did. Instead she took a quicker route to wealth, earning millions by developing shopping centers. She didn't make a lot of friends, of course. Just a lot of money.

Her urologist husband Barry (above), the father of her two children,  admitted at the time, “She gets in people’s faces in a very straightforward way and doesn’t tap dance too much.”  

But Ruthann's story really begins in the “Washington, D.C.” adjacent enclave of Montgomery county, Maryland (above), one of the richest and best educated counties in America. Everybody here, it seems came from some place else – the county was even named for a Revolutionary War hero who never set foot in the state. This is one of those big ponds where little fish either get eaten or grow big  And in 1994 it had not voted for a Republican Presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan retired. 

As Barry Rascovar noted for the Washington Post in mid-August of 1994, “...the last time there was a truly contested GOP Senate primary was in the early 1960s.”  It was here that our diminutive mother of two faced her first public test when, after just two years on the County Planning Board, Ruthann Aron decided to run for the United States Senate. She was a pro-choice member of the John Birch Society, who boasted, "I'm not a career politician. I'm a businesswoman."

It was a clever move. The dysfunctional Maryland G.O.P had little hope of beating the popular Democrat, Paul Sarbanes (above) who had held the Senate seat since 1976 and seemed a shoe-in for re-election. Even if she lost the primary, Ruthann could still lay a foundation for a future in politics.

The only drawback was that there were seven candidates vying for the Republican nomination, so Ruthann decided to stand out, by attacking her best known fellow Republican opponent, the  multimillionaire candy heir, ex-Senator from Tennessee, and ex-GOP Chairman, the handsome Bill Brock III.

Ruthann spent nearly a quarter of a million of her own dollars buying radio ads, in which two “hillbillies” laughed about the way Maryland voters were being fooled by the “tax-raising, carpetbagging, career politician”, Senator Brock (above).   The ex-Senator chose to not even mention Ruthann in his few radio ads. No since giving the little lady free publicity. 

Then, a poll released Labor Day weekend found Brock leading, as expected, but with just 23% of the vote. And in second place and well within the margin of error for a tie was Ruthann, at 20%.

With just two weeks to go before the primary, Brock decided he could no longer ignore the tiny upstart, and called an afternoon press conference for Thursday, 8 September, 1994, on the Rockville courthouse square (above). His stated intention was to attack his female opponent. That was sure to draw the media.

As the Baltimore Sun noted, “The minutes preceding yesterday's news conference had the feel of a mock thriller....About 2 p.m. the (Ruthann) Aron camp entered...About 10 minutes later, Mr. Brock arrived with his contingent of sign-wavers.” 

Neither Senator Block (above), nor his supporters had expected Ruthann to make an appearance. The Washington Post observed, “As reporters and photographers soaked up the awkward silence, the two camps stared mutely, and the whirring of (film) cameras was all that was heard.”

With the "little lady" just a few feet away, Senator Block decided to tone down his attacks, but retired Congresswoman Marjorie Holt (above), fired the shot across Ruthann's bow, describing, “...the aura of fraud and breach of contract that constantly surrounds the other candidate.”  After that,  the press conference devolved into two competing impromptu verbal slug fests,  during which Brock built on Holt's charge. According to the Post, Brock said, “She has been convicted by a jury of fraud, more than once," 

The reporters were having a ball,  bouncing "between the two candidates like pin balls.” Brock backed up the theatrical press conference with $220,000 in new radio ads, 800 ads in just 5 days, claiming that Ruthann had been convicted of fraud “more than once”, and had to pay “hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines”. Said his narrator in the ad, "Before Ruthann Aron starts attacking anybody, maybe she ought to look in the mirror.”

On Tuesday, 13 September, Ruthann lost the primary by 50,000 votes. Even worse, a poll released just before the election showed that rather than laying a foundation for her future, her campaign style had raised her negatives within the Republican Party to 16%.  Her reputation was not even helped when Block was easily beaten by the Democrat Sarbanes in the November general election. So, finding herself in a hole, Ruthann decided to keep digging.  She sued Brock for defamation of character. No politician had ever done that before.  I wonder why?

It took over a year for what the Baltimore Sun called Ruthann's “frivolous lawsuit” to work its way to trial, which it did in early 1996. “Jurors have been schooled”, wrote the Sun, “in subliminal suggestion...the role of Russian composer Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky in an effective campaign commercial....harked to the tonal difference between a major chord and a slamming jail door, listened again and again to the definition of "Ronald Reagan's 11th Commandment" (Thou shalt not speak ill of a fellow Republican) and been told that staff members look at members of Congress the way undertakers look at corpses.”

Chief witness for Brock was Arthur G. Kahn (above), a lawyer in a 1984 suit against Ruthann's real estate company, Research Incorporated. And he compared Ruthann to an octopus. When it was attacked, he said, "... it emits a dark fluid, a black fluid,  and it escapes in the darkness and muddies the waters." More specifically, Kahn testified that Ruthann had betrayed investors in one of her shopping malls. 

The mall had never been built, because Ruthann sold the rights to the project to a third party for $200,000. And kept that money. The jury decided she  had violated her agreement with the investors and awarded them $175,000, which Ruthann paid only after Arthur Kahn agreed to request the judge wipe the verdict from the record.  Which the judge had done.  

It had been a civil suit. Ruthann had lost it, but there had been no conviction, and the civil verdict had been wiped away, so technically what Senator Brock had said at the press conference had been a lie. But ...

....this new jury decided that was splitting hairs, and, besides, my bet is they just did not like Ruthann very much. Who did? Her own father, who had died during her campaign,  had written Ruthann out of his will. "I specifically and unequivocably leave absolutely nothing for my daughter...and direct my executor to reject any claim that she may make..."

The new jury found for Brock. Ruthann's claims were denied. That made two defeats in one election. Now she was really, double-dog-done in politics And that should have been the end of Ruthann's political dreams,  unless she had thrown herself into charity work or earned a Nobel Peace Prize or saved a sinking sack of kittens. Instead she switched to the Democratic Party and raised the curtain on Ruthann, act two. 

On Saturday, 7 June, 1997, Ruthann Aron was arrested for hiring a hit man to murder her old nemesis,  Arthur Kahn. And, as an afterthought, her own husband Doctor Barry Aron, who had finally asked for a divorce. 

The little lady had walked into the lobby of a Marriott Hotel, disguised in a trench coat, a wig, a floppy hat,  dark glasses and carrying the $500 down payment for a double murder. She must have looked like a munchkin spy. On tape she spelled out the names of her intended victims. "B like in boy, A-R-R-Y", she was heard saying.  The hitman/cop asked if Ruthann wanted her husband's death to look like a suicide.  Ruthann replied, "If it would pass muster".  It was an open and shut case. Mostly shut.

Ruthann insisted at both of her trials (the first jury hung, 11-1 for conviction) that she was crazy. Nine doctors argued she had a borderline personality disorder, had suffered a brain injury as a child, had 

been molested by her father.  But explaining her vindictive personality did  not justify her maniacal approach to politics and interpersonal relationships.  Let's just say she was nuts and let it go at that.

All 12 members of the second jury found Ruthann guilty of all counts. At her sentencing Ruthann's lawyer pointed out what her brief career in politics had cost the little lady. "She's lost her credibility, her reputation, her family as she knew it, her dignity, her lifestyle, her husband, almost everything she had”, he said.  She still got three years in jail,  with a suspended sentence of ten more years hanging over her head. Barry the urologist not only filed for divorce, he sued Ruthann for $7.5 million. So she counter-sued him for $24 million. Some people never learn. 

After she got out of jail in 2001, Ruth Ann moved to Florida, and changed her last name to Green.  And then she wrote her autobiography, in which she blamed everything on Barry. She called her self-published book, “Corrupted Justice: A Killer Husband,”   The jury didn't buy it, why should anybody else? 

And that is the end of the sad story of Ruthann  Aron-Green, She is still worth between $1 and $5 million. Her son died in the World Trade Center attack on 9/11.  Her daughter no longer speaks to her. The lesson from our little tale of this little lady is that if you sleep with a politician, you may or may not find love, but you will defiantly get screwed. Those people are nuts.

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