A period of conflict always leaves behind it changed and unsettled conditions. Between the close of a war and the final readjustment of affairs leading up to a settled and permanent life, there must be a time of reorganization. Into this period of reconstruction the western territory about the Great Lakes passed at the close of the War of 1812. Since the Ordinance of 1787 the Northwest Territory had been subdivided. Ohio had become a state in 1802, and the region west of it had all been included in a territory under the general name of Indiana, of which section William Henry Harrison was the first governor. From Indiana, in its turn, Michigan was set off in 1805, with William Hull as its first governor. On Hull’s retirement from public life, after the surrender of Detroit, Colonel Lewis Cass was appointed governor of Michigan Territory. As the man who had most influence on the Northwest during these years of reconstruction, Governor Cass deserves detailed notice. Born in Exeter, New Hampshire, in 1782, Lewis Cass was the son of a soldier of the Revolution. During his son’s boyhood Major Cass, the father, was with Anthony Wayne or in command of Fort Hamilton, and after the peace of Greenville he brought his family, as did so many of the soldiers, to the rich country through which he had marched in war time. The young man divided his time between Marietta, where he began the study of law, and the frontier, where his father was hewing a home and making a living out of the wilderness. Under the state constitution of Ohio the first certificate of admission to the bar was given in 1802 to Lewis Cass. In the school of the county court the young lawyer gained a first-hand knowledge of the practice of the law and an understanding of the people of the frontier and how to deal with them, both of which served him well in his governorship. Even before he reached the proper age of eligibility he was sent to the Ohio legislature, and at the outbreak of the War of 1812 he was given a colonel’s commission. Cass was one of the three Ohio colonels who served with Hull in the ill-starred Detroit expedition. Indeed, he led one of the few successful minor charges of that campaign. To his great indignation he was included by his general in that surrender, although he was not at the fort. For some months he was prisoner of war on parole. As soon as he was released he joined Harrison, under whom he did such efficient service that Harrison left him after the battle of the Thames in command of Detroit and the northwest frontier. The President soon appointed Cass governor of Michigan Territory, which then included only the lower peninsula of the present state, but to which the territory that is now Wisconsin was added in 1818 under the name of the Huron District.