Smithsonian American Presidency A Glorious Burden - Stanley L. Klos Pittsburgh-Post Gazette,

Earliest U.S. presidents are mostly forgotten

Smithsonian American Presidency A Glorious Burden - Stan Klos Documents

Monday, February 16, 2004

What we like to say to people when they come here is: 'George Washington was the first president of the United States, right?'

"Wrong."

That's from David Halaas, museum division director for the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center.

Halaas was riffing on the 10 men -- including Pennsylvanians Thomas McKean, Thomas Mifflin and Arthur St. Clair -- who served as president during the chaotic 1780s. That's when the Articles of Confederation gave the chief executive not a fraction of the power he has today. The federal government's crippling weakness would not end until the U.S. Constitution went into effect in 1789. Washington was inaugurated and the American Presidency as most of us know it began.

There are enough presidential artifacts on loan from the Smithsonian Institution at the history center right now to make "Antiques Roadshow" look like a garage sale. There's an inkstand Abraham Lincoln used while drafting the Emancipation Proclamation, one of those wacky imperial White House guard uniforms Richard Nixon introduced in the 1970s, and so much more that docent Alan Schneider says he can satisfy visitors "in 10 minutes or for three hours."

Yet amid all that history, I found myself concentrating most on Arthur St. Clair. The richest landowner in Western Pennsylvania in the 1760s, St. Clair was all but broke by the time he died in 1818. Today, we can't even remember what we did with Lower St. Clair.

But St. Clair was a president of the United States under the Articles of Confederation, from Feb. 2, 1787, to Jan. 21, 1788, and had quite the year. While he served, the Confederation Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, which apart from the Constitution might be the most important legislation this nation ever passed.

It allowed settlers north and west of the Ohio River to form territorial governments, and established the process of establishing states equal to the original 13. Equally important, slavery was prohibited, so Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin were baptized free of America's original sin.

St. Clair was also at the helm on Sept. 17, 1787, when 12 state delegations voted to approve the U.S. Constitution. So why don't we know more about him?

That's a question Stanley Klos is trying to answer. Klos has been studying, collecting and dealing 18th-century documents for two decades. He lent some for this exhibition, including a 1782 printing of the Articles of Confederation.

President Who? Forgotten Founders by Stanley L. Klos

A resident of Upper St. Clair -- he says he was drawn by its school district, not its name -- Klos is seeking more recognition for St. Clair and the other Confederation presidents. Klos points out that the Articles brought our United States into "perpetual union," a phrase Lincoln noted in 1861 to argue that states had no right to secede.

St. Clair may be hobbled by his military record. He was with Washington in the crossing of the Delaware, but was also the general who "lost" Fort Ticonderoga. The exhibit includes an April 1777 letter from John Hancock directing St. Clair to Ticonderoga to head off the advancing British Army.

"You wonder what's going to happen in the e-mail age," Halaas said as we looked at the John Hancock on the 227-year-old letter.

That wasn't St. Clair's worst defeat. While serving as governor of the Northwest Territory in 1791, a gout-stricken St. Clair led an army against the Indians -- and lost 700 men along the Wabash River. That is the largest defeat of U.S. forces by Indians, more than three times the number lost at Little Big Horn.

Despite that, St. Clair served as governor of the territory for another decade. He only found himself out of a job when he crossed President Thomas Jefferson.

In the summer of 1818, when he was 84, St. Clair's buggy overturned on a visit to family in Youngstown, Ohio. He died a few days later and was buried in old St. Clair Cemetery in Greensburg. He had been living in a log house five miles west of Ligonier.

You can find more about St. Clair on www.arthurstclair.com. History is kinder to Western Pennsylvania's only president there.

Pittsburgh-Post Gazette, Brian O'Neill can be reached at boneill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1947.

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