What’s in a Name? Cincinnati
Cincinnati was first founded as Losantiville in 1788, but the name didn't stick through the city's more than 200-year history.
What’s in a Name? is an occasional column by Robert W. Thurston digging into the history behind the names of local places.
Cincinnati is the closest large metropolitan city near Oxford, but it didn’t always go by its current name.
The first name for the city was the awkward Losantiville, chosen in 1788 by a few white families who settled there, meaning the “town across from the mouth of the river.” That stream was the Licking, which comes into the Ohio, that “dark and bloody river,” as the novelist Allan Eckart called it, on the Kentucky side. At that time, no Native Americans were displaced by the tiny settlement.
When Arthur St. Clair, the pompous governor of the almost brand-new Northwest Territory, arrived in the village in 1790, he unilaterally changed the name to Cincinnati. That is the plural form of Cincinnatus, the name of a Roman general who led an army once, maybe twice if you like legends, against an enemy Italian tribe. Cincinnatus retired back to his farm after his first (and only recorded) victory, 458 BCE, refusing to act as a dictator.
St. Clair took the new name for the town from the Roman ex-general and from the Society of the Cincinnati, founded in 1783 by Henry Knox, the brilliant artillery commander of the Revolutionary War. Knox’s idea was that the members, former officers of the Continental Army, would emulate Cincinnatus, go home, and forgo dictatorship. The Society was conceived as a hereditary organization for American and French officers who fought in the war and their male descendants — although that criterion was stretched to admit Winston Churchill in 1952. His American mother was a direct descendant of a Revolutionary officer. We still have members of the Society in the city and the surrounding area.
Cincinnati surely sounds better than Losantiville, but the name had political implications that were unpopular in a segment of the country’s elite. First, although George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and General “Mad” Anthony Wayne, later famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) for defeating the Northwest Indian Confederation near today’s Toledo in 1794, were among the original members, many leading figures were excluded because they had not served in the Continental Army. Thomas Jefferson had been ambassador to France during the fighting; his fellow Virginians (and slaveowners) Patrick Henry, James Madison and James Monroe were also left out.
Second and probably more important was the feeling among many that the Society of the Cincinnati, as a hereditary organization, might become the core of an American aristocracy, passing down titles the way the English did. Many Americans still admired Britain in various ways, with Hamilton the greatest fan, but the Revolution had left bitter memories of British policies, along with many dead and maimed. The British might come back, other leaders feared, and they did return in 1812-15. They burned Washington, D.C. and much else. King George III in “Hamilton” puts it a different way: he sings about the Americans that, unable to fend for themselves, “They’ll be back” in Britain’s embrace.
Meanwhile, the Society of the Cincinnati drove a further wedge between the Federalists (or Nationalists), who wanted a strong central government, and the Anti-Federalists (early Republicans), who feared concentrated federal power. Some of the friction was personal; Jefferson came to loathe Hamilton, who returned the feeling only slightly less vehemently. The heart of the dispute, though, was state and local rights versus strong federal authority, which the Society seemed to represent. At the birth of the Republic, issues we still deal with raised their contentious heads.
The Society of the Cincinnati lives on, with more than 4,400 members in the U.S., France and other countries. If you visit Washington and are looking for something off the usual path, try the headquarters of the organization at 2118 Massachusetts Ave. NW, two blocks from Dupont Circle. Built in 1905 at the then staggering cost of $750,000, the house will give you a good idea of how the American upper crust lived at the time and in the present — the yachts have gotten much bigger.
Our tradition has been that top military officers stay out of politics, or at least out of the White House. Ulysses S. Grant, in office 1869-77, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1953-61, are the exceptions, but they had no ambition to become dictators.
Basic disagreements about policy and personalities, and with them competing understandings of history, have been part of American life at least since the years just prior to the Revolution. We are currently in a new wave of rethinking our past and pulling down monuments of old heroes now considered bums. With all that in mind, future articles on “What’s in a Name?” will cover Butler and Darke Counties, St. Clair Township, the many sites named after Anthony Wayne, Hamilton, Symmes and more.
Robert W. Thurston, Emeritus Professor of History at Miami University, is currently working on a history of the Ohio Indian Wars and the Whiskey Rebellion of the 1790s.
