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Title: The Hoosiers

Author: Meredith Nicholson

Release date: September 12, 2021 [eBook #66276]
                Most recently updated: October 18, 2024

Language: English

Original publication: United States: The Macmillan Company

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HOOSIERS ***

THE HOOSIERS




National Studies in American Letters.

GEORGE EDWARD WOODBERRY, EDITOR.


  OLD CAMBRIDGE.
  By THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON.

  BROOK FARM.
  By LINDSAY SWIFT.

  THE HOOSIERS.
  By MEREDITH NICHOLSON.


  _IN PREPARATION._

  THE CLERGY IN AMERICAN LIFE AND LETTERS.
  By THE REV. DANIEL DULANY ADDISON.

  THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL NOVEL.
  By PAUL LEICESTER FORD.

  THE KNICKERBOCKERS.
  By THE REV. HENRY VAN DYKE, D.D.

  SOUTHERN HUMORISTS.
  By JOHN KENDRICK BANGS.

  FLOWER OF ESSEX.
  By THE EDITOR.


_Others to be announced._




  THE HOOSIERS

  BY
  MEREDITH NICHOLSON

  New York
  THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
  LONDON: MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD.
  1900

  _All rights reserved_




  COPYRIGHT, 1900,
  BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

  Norwood Press
  J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith
  Norwood Mass. U.S.A.




  To the Memory of
  CALEB MILLS
  SOMETIME PROFESSOR IN WABASH COLLEGE
  THE FRUITS OF WHOSE ENLIGHTENMENT, FORESIGHT
  AND COURAGE
  ARE AN ENDURING HERITAGE
  TO THE PEOPLE OF INDIANA




PREFACE


These pages represent an effort to give some hint of the forces that
have made for cultivation in Indiana. While the immediate purpose has
been an examination of the State’s performance in literature, it has
seemed proper to approach the subject with a slight review of Indiana’s
political and social history. Owing to limitations of space, much is
suggested merely which it would be profitable to discuss at length. It
is hoped that such matters as racial influences, folk-speech, etc.,
which are but lightly touched here, may appeal to others who will make
them the subject of more searching inquiry. Only names that have seemed
most significant are included; many creditable writers are necessarily
omitted.

I take pleasure in acknowledging my indebtedness to Dr. Edward
Eggleston, Miss Anna Nicholas, and Mr. Merrill Moores for their
courteous responses to many requests for information. Miss May Louise
Shipp gave me access to papers relating to her kinswoman, Mrs. Dumont,
which I could not have seen but for her kindness. Miss Eliza G.
Browning, the Public Librarian of Indianapolis, Mr. H. S. Wedding, the
Librarian of Wabash College, and Mr. Charles R. Dudley, of the Denver
Library, were most generous and indulgent on my behalf.

                                                                   M. N.

  DENVER, July, 1900.




CONTENTS


  CHAPTER I
                                                        PAGE

  INDIANA AND HER PEOPLE                                   1


  CHAPTER II

  THE RURAL TYPE AND THE DIALECT

    The Word “Hoosier”                                    29

    Pioneer Difficulties                                  36

    The Dialect                                           45


  CHAPTER III

  BRINGERS OF THE LIGHT

    Religious Influences                                  63

    Early Illiteracy                                      70

    Caleb Mills                                           79

    Julia L. Dumont and Catharine Merrill                 89


  CHAPTER IV

  AN EXPERIMENT IN SOCIALISM

    New Harmony                                           98

    Robert Dale Owen and William Maclure                 101

    Thomas Say and the Scientists                        104


  CHAPTER V

  THE HOOSIER INTERPRETED

    Edward Eggleston                                     134

    James Whitcomb Riley                                 156


  CHAPTER VI

  CRAWFORDSVILLE

    “The Hoosier Athens”                                 177

    Lew Wallace                                          180

    Maurice Thompson                                     199

    Mary H. Krout and Caroline V. Krout                  212


  CHAPTER VII

  “OF MAKING MANY BOOKS THERE IS NO END”

    Indiana a Point of Departure                         214

    Fiction                                              217

    History and Politics                                 226

    Miscellaneous                                        237


  CHAPTER VIII

  AN INDIANA CHOIR

    Early Writers                                        244

    Forceythe Willson and Elizabeth Conwell Willson      256

    Later Poets                                          265

    The Hoosier Landscape                                269


  INDEX                                                  273




THE HOOSIERS




CHAPTER I

INDIANA AND HER PEOPLE


The rise of Indiana as an enlightened commonwealth has been
accompanied by phenomena of unusual interest and variety, and whatever
contributions the State may make to the total of national achievement
in any department of endeavor are to be appraised in the light of her
history and development. The origin of the beginners of the State,
the influences that wrought upon them, the embarrassments that have
attended the later generations in their labors, become matters of
moment in any inquiry that is directed to their intellectual history.
It is not of so great importance that a few individuals within a
State shall, from time to time, show talent or genius, as that the
general level of cultivation in the community shall be continually
raised. Where, as in Indiana, the appearance of artistic talent
follows naturally an intellectual development that uplifts the whole,
the condition presented is at once interesting and admirable. Owing
to a misapprehension of the State’s social history, an exaggerated
importance has been given to the manifestations of creative talent
perceptible in Indiana, the assumption being in many quarters that the
Hoosier Commonwealth is in some way set apart from her neighbors by
reason of the uncouthness and ignorance of the inhabitants; and the
word “Hoosier” has perhaps been unfortunate as applied to Indianians
in that it has sometimes been taken as a synonym for boorishness
and illiteracy. The Indiana husbandmen, even in the pioneer period,
differed little or not at all from the settlers in other territorial
divisions of the West and Southwest; and the early Indiana townfolk
were the peers of any of their fellows of the urban class in the Ohio
Valley.

The Indianians came primarily of American stock, and they have been
influenced much less than the majority of their neighbors in other
states by the currents of alien migration that have flowed around and
beyond them. The frontiersmen, who carried the rifle and the axe to
make way for the plough, were brave, hardy, and intelligent; and those
who accompanied them and became builders of cities and framers and
interpreters of law, were their kinsmen, and possessed the natural
qualities and the cultivation that would have made them conspicuous
anywhere. The Indianians remained in a striking degree the fixed
population of the territory that fell to them. They were sustained and
lifted by religion through all their formative years, and when aroused
to the importance of education were quick to insure intelligence in
their posterity. The artistic impulse appeared naturally in later
generations. The value of the literature produced in the State may be
debatable, but there is no just occasion for surprise that attention to
literary expression has been so general.

Indiana has always lain near the currents of national life, and her
beginnings were joined to the larger fortunes of the national destiny.
Three flags have been emblems of government in her territory, and wars
whose principal incidents occurred far from the western wilderness
played an important part in her history. Early in the eighteenth
century the French settled on the Wabash, which was an essential link
in the chain of communication between the settlements of the St.
Lawrence and Great Lakes and those of the Lower Mississippi; and the
_coureurs des bois_, as they guided their frail navies up and down
the stream, or sang their _chansons de voyage_ as they lay in lonely
camps, gave the first color of romance to the Hoosier country. The
treaty signed at Paris, February 10, 1763, ended French dominion and
brought British rule. The American Revolution made itself felt on the
Wabash when, in 1779, George Rogers Clark effected the capture of Fort
Vincennes from a British commander. The first territorial governor
of Indiana became the ninth president of the United States after the
rollicking hard cider campaign of “Tippecanoe and Tyler too”; and
when, years afterward, Benjamin Harrison, his grandson, was elected
twenty-third president, the bonds between State and Nation were close
and strong. Indiana valiantly defended herself against the Indians in
the War of 1812; she sent five regiments to the Mexican War, equipped
208,300 volunteers for the war of the rebellion, and 7300 for the
war with Spain. Slavery was an issue on Indiana soil long before
the Northwest Territory had been divided. At a convention held at
Vincennes in 1802, a year and a half after the organization of Indiana
Territory, a memorial was sent to the National Congress asking that the
antislavery proviso in the ordinance of 1787 be repealed, and slavery
was thereafter a potent influence in territorial politics until the
admission of Indiana, as a free state, in 1816.[1]

The victories of George Rogers Clark were not only of great importance
in determining the future political relations of the Northwest
Territory, but they defined the character of the population that
should dominate in the region he conquered. The Ohio was the highway
that led into the new world, and the first comers to Indiana in the
years immediately following the Revolution were mainly drawn either
directly from Pennsylvania, the Carolinas, or Virginia, or were of
that fascinating band of hunters and frontiersmen of similar origin,
who had only a few years earlier begun the redemption of Tennessee
and Kentucky from savagery. Kentucky was a temporary resting-place
for many who later drifted West and Northwest; and their descendants,
markedly of Scotch-Irish origin, are still clearly defined in Indiana.
Philadelphia and Charleston were the two ports to which these
Presbyterian Irish came in greatest numbers in the early years of the
eighteenth century. They at once left the seaboard settlements and
spread along the Alleghanies, the Pennsylvanians moving southward
until they met their Carolina brethren, when the united stream swept
with fresh strength boldly into the Ohio Valley. Emigration from the
north of Ireland “waxed and waned,” says Dr. Eggleston,[2] “as the
great Irish linen industry of the last century declined or prospered.”
Some of these people were steady and thrifty; others were reckless
and adventurous. The frontier life afforded an outlet for their wild
spirits, and Indian wars and the hunting of big game were their
congenial employments. The Germans, also derived from Pennsylvania and
the Carolinas, joined the westward stream; the English, the Dutch, and
the Swiss added to it in varying degree, but the North-Irish element,
dating from the earliest settlement, was long potent in politics,
society, and religion, and became a most important factor in Indiana
history.

Northern Indiana was settled much more slowly than the southern half
of the State, owing primarily to the fierce resistance of the Miami
Confederacy, which barred ingress by way of the lakes, rivers, and
portages, and defeated successive armies that were sent against it.
When the way was opened, the Middle States and New England slowly
contributed to the population. Many of these immigrants paused first
in the Western Reserve of Ohio, and a smaller proportion in Michigan.
It is a question for the scientists whether the differences still
observable between the people of the northern prairie region in Indiana
and those of the woodland areas--differences of thrift, energy, and
initiative[3]--are not due as much to natural conditions as to racial
influences; and they may also have an explanation of the fact that
Indiana’s literary activity has been observed principally in the
southern half of the State, below a line drawn through Crawfordsville.
The seniority of the southern settlements is not a wholly satisfactory
solution, and the difference in antecedents invites speculation.

It happened fortunately that the worst element contributed to the
population of Indiana and Illinois in early years--known as “poor
whites”--was the least permanent. Dr. Eggleston describes them as “a
semi-nomadic people, descendants of the colonial bond-servants,”[4]
who moved on in large numbers to Missouri so early as 1845, and thence
from the famous Pike County scattered widely, appearing finally in
California, where Bret Harte took note of them. Professor Fiske in his
account of the dispersion of these people[5] does not mention Indiana
as one of their outlets, and the State’s proportion was unquestionably
small. Romance has not attached to them where they linger in Southern
Indiana, although they are of the same strain as their kindred at the
south who have so often delighted the readers of fiction. By way of
illustration it may be said that in the hills of Brown County the
traveller passes here and there a rude wagon drawn by oxen. A dusty
native walks beside the team, and seated on the floor of the wagon is
an old grandmother, smoking a clay pipe with great contentment. The
same picture may be met within the Kentucky and Tennessee mountains,
but with the difference that in those regions the story-tellers have
woven the spell of romance about the hill folk, whereas in Indiana
similar characters are looked upon as ugly and uninteresting.

The rural and urban classes produced a first generation that realized
a type drawing strength from both farm and town and destined to
steady improvement throughout the century. New people poured in from
the Eastern States and from Europe; but in no old community of the
seaboard has loftier dignity been conferred by long residence or
pioneer ancestry than in Indiana. This pride was brought in more
particularly from the Southeast, and there are still communities in
which the stranger will be sensible of it. The native Americans of
Indiana have continued the dominant element to a greater extent than
in most Northern States, 74 per cent of the total population in 1890
consisting of natives; 20 per cent of natives of other States; while
the foreign-born population comprised only 6 per cent of the total.[6]
In the larger cities, as Indianapolis, Evansville, and Fort Wayne, the
Germans had an important part from the beginning, and the Irish were
well distributed; but before the Scandinavians and Slavs had begun to
seek homes in America, the land values in Indiana had so appreciated
that this class of immigrants could find no footing. The centre of
population in the United States, which lay just east of Baltimore in
the first decade of the century, moved gradually westward, until, in
the last decade, it lay in Indiana at a point sixty-five miles south of
Indianapolis.

The older Indiana towns enjoyed in their beginnings all the benefits
that may be bestowed upon new communities by a people of good social
antecedents. Many of these towns have lost their prestige, owing to
changed political or commercial conditions; the departed glory of
some of them is only a tradition among the elders; but the charm of
many remains. Indiana, as Territory and State, has had three political
capitals, Vincennes and Corydon having enjoyed the distinction before
Indianapolis finally attained it. Vincennes, however, refused to fall
with her political dethronement, but built upon her memories, and
became “no mean city.” In 1847 the railway connecting Madison with
Indianapolis was completed. Madison was thus made the gateway of the
State, and one of the most important shipping points on the Ohio, with
daily steam packet to Cincinnati and Louisville; but this prosperity
was only temporary, for east and west lines of railway soon drew the
traffic away from the river. Madison retains its dignity in spite
of reverses, and is marked by an air of quaint gravity. It may be
called picturesque without offence to the inhabitants, who rejoice
in its repose and natural beauty, and do not complain because their
wharves are not so busy as they used to be. The social life there had
a distinction of its own, which has not vanished, though the names
identified with the town’s fame--Lanier, Hendricks, Bright, King, and
Marshall--have slowly disappeared, and few of the old régime remain.
The juxtaposition of Kentucky was not without an influence in the
years of the town’s ascendancy, and there was no little sympathy with
Southern political ideas in the ante-bellum days.

Brookville is another town which, like Madison, sent forth many men to
bring fame to other communities. It lies in the White Water Valley,
amid one of the loveliest landscapes in all Hoosierdom. The Wallaces,
the Nobles, and the Rays were identified with the place, and each of
these families gave a governor to the State. Abram A. Hammond, still
another governor, lived there for a short time, as did James B. Eads,
the distinguished engineer, who was a native of Lawrenceburg; and
William M. Chase, the artist, also a native Hoosier, is on Brookville’s
list of notables. John D. Howland and his brother, Livingston, lived
there before their removal to Indianapolis, where the former was one
of the most cultivated men of his day, and the latter a creditable
judge, and a wit much quoted by his contemporaries. Centerville lives
principally in its memories, having been the home of the Mortons, and
of others who attained distinction. The removal of the seat of Wayne
County to Richmond dealt the town a blow from which it has never
recovered, though it shares with its successful rival in the reputation
which the county enjoys for the cultivation of its people. The family
of Robert Underwood Johnson was prominent in Wayne County; and though
the poet and editor was not born there, he lived in the county from
early infancy until his graduation in 1871 from Earlham College, whose
seat is Richmond. His cousin, Mrs. Alice Williams Brotherton, the
author of two volumes of verse, and a contributor to the periodicals,
lived as a young woman at Cambridge, in the same county. Fort Wayne
has always stood a little apart from the capital and the other towns
lying nearer the Ohio. This has been due to its geographical position
and direct railway connection with Chicago and the seaboard cities.
Socially and commercially it has not been so intimately related to the
capital as most of the other Indiana towns; but it was an important
centre, with unmistakable metropolitan airs almost as soon as
Indianapolis. Fort Wayne’s list of distinguished citizens has included
Hugh McCulloch, a native of Maine, who was Secretary of the Treasury
under two presidents, and Jesse Lynch Williams, of North Carolina
Quaker stock, who was prominently identified with canal and railroad
building in Indiana. Mr. Williams was a leader in good works throughout
his long life. Mr. McCulloch wrote “Men and Measures,” a volume of
memoirs, and his family has produced a poet. A grandson and namesake of
Mr. Williams is the author of several volumes of fiction.

Lafayette is one of the most attractive of Indiana cities, fortunate in
its natural setting and in the friendliness of its people to all good
endeavors. Purdue University, the state school of technology, which is
situated there, is not diligent in the sciences to the neglect of the
arts. Roswell Smith (1829-1892), the founder of the _Century Magazine_,
practised law for twenty years at Lafayette. Terre Haute has been the
home of distinguished politicians rather than of famous literary folk;
but Richard W. Thompson, who became Secretary of the Navy in President
Hayes’s cabinet, was a writer of books; and Daniel W. Voorhees, long a
senator in Congress, was the greatest forensic orator of his day in the
Ohio Valley. Voorhees had none of the qualities essential in a great
lawyer, but he was most effective as a speaker before the people. The
code of 1852 contained a provision giving to the defence the final plea
to the jury in criminal trials; but this was changed in 1873 because
it had become notorious that Voorhees and others of similar persuasive
powers could almost invariably procure the acquittal of persons charged
with the gravest crimes by appealing to the natural sympathies and
domestic attachments of the jurors. Voorhees received from Berry
Sulgrove the name of the “tall sycamore of the Wabash.” His appearance
was commanding, and many of the dangerous qualities that go to the
making of personal magnetism were combined in him. Thomas H. Nelson,
also of the Terre Haute group, was worthy to be named with Thompson and
Voorhees as an orator, though never so widely known as they. He was a
native of Kentucky, and an accomplished man of the world, who filled
acceptably several diplomatic positions. Salem, in Washington County,
is another of the older towns that contained in its earliest years
families of marked cultivation. John Hay, the author, diplomat, and
cabinet officer, and Newton Booth, governor of California and senator
in Congress from that State, were born there. At least one generation
benefited by the instruction of John I. Morrison, sometimes called “the
Hoosier Arnold,” who sent out from the Salem Seminary in the third
decade of the century a group of men destined to take high place in
nearly every field that called for character and intelligence. Hanover,
the seat of Hanover College, enjoyed a somewhat similar atmosphere,
and Noble Butler, who afterward became, at Louisville, the teacher in
literature and elocution of Mary Anderson, the actress, was one of the
Hanover faculty.

Indianapolis was planned under the direction of Christopher Harrison, a
man of varied talents, who buried himself in the wilderness of Southern
Indiana early in the century, followed by the shadowy tradition that
he had been an unsuccessful suitor for the hand of Miss Patterson,
the famous Baltimore beauty who married Jerome Bonaparte. Emerging
from his exile, he became a resident of Salem, sought consolation in
politics, and was elected lieutenant-governor in 1816. Among those who
assisted in marking the lines of the new city was Alexander Ralston, a
Scotchman, who had aided in a similar task at the national capital, and
who brought to his work a fancy for diagonal avenues and broad streets
pleasantly suggestive of Washington. Ralston was said to have been
obscurely implicated in Burr’s conspiracy; but he became a resident
within the boundaries he had drawn for the capital in the woods, and
died there, an exemplary citizen. Indianapolis was named by Jeremiah
Sullivan, in the legislature of 1821, which formally designated the
site of the new capital. The older towns on the Ohio and in the White
Water Valley contributed at once to the population of the place, and
the currents of migration from the East and South met there. Dr.
Eggleston described the town in his novel “Roxy” as it appeared in
1840:--

  “The stumps stood in the streets; the mud was only navigable to a man
  on a tall horse; the buildings were ugly and unpainted, the people
  were raw immigrants dressed in butternut jeans, and for the most
  part afflicted either with the ‘agur’ or the ‘yellow janders’; the
  taverns were new wooden buildings with swinging signs that creaked
  in the wind, their floors being well coated with a yellow _adobe_
  from the boots of the guests. The alkaline biscuits on the table
  were yellow like the floors; the fried ‘middling’ looked much the
  same; the general yellowness had extended to the walls and the bed
  clothing, and, combined with the butternut jeans and copperas-dyed
  linsey-woolsey of the clothes, it gave the universe an air of having
  the jaundice.”

Old residents pronounce the description unfair; but however crude
the earlier years may have been, the founders were faithful to the
settlement, and among those who were there before 1840 were the
Fletcher, Morris, Merrill, Coe, Ray, Blake, Sharpe, Yandes, and
Holliday families, which were to be associated with the best that was
thought and done in the community. In 1839 Henry Ward Beecher became
pastor of the Second Presbyterian Church, and he was a useful citizen
through the nine years of his residence. Good lecture courses were
provided so early as 1855, and Edward Everett, Bayard Taylor, Dr.
Holland, Theodore Parker, Park Benjamin, and Ole Bull were cordially
welcomed. The Civil War disturbed the old order, lifting into social
and political prominence men who had had no connection with the
original leaders. Unfriendly feeling between the Eastern element and
the Southerners had already been manifested in political contests,
and the war greatly intensified it. “Copperhead” was the term of most
odious significance known to the majority of Indianians during the war,
and it continued to be such for many years afterward.

The club idea took hold in Indiana early, and societies for the
study of art, music, and literature have by no means been limited
to the capital. The Indianapolis Literary Club, formed in 1877, has
illustrated perhaps better than any other expression of the life
of Indiana, the quality of the men who have dominated there in the
last three decades. In a State where not to be an author is to be
distinguished, the members have written and read their essays in that
spirit of true cultivation which takes its aspirations and attainments
as a matter of course, and not too seriously. A president and a
vice-president of the United States have been on the club’s rolls, as
have cabinet officers, senators in Congress and foreign ministers; but
literary and ethical questions, oftener than political problems, have
vexed its discussions, and it has been more interested as a society in
Newman, Arnold, and Emerson, and in the thwarting of the _Zeitgeist_,
than in material things. The women of Indiana have been important
contributors to all agencies that tend toward ideal living, and at
Indianapolis they have exerted an intelligent and beneficent influence
in literature.

The first governors and law-givers were distinctly not of the bucolic
type; and it is an interesting fact of Indiana history that in an
agricultural State, where the “farmer’s vote” has been essential to the
winning party, farmers have rarely found their way to the governor’s
chair. James D. Williams, familiarly known as “Blue Jeans,” who was
elected over Benjamin Harrison in 1876, was the first farmer pure and
simple to hold the office of governor; and this was not until Indiana
had been sixty years a State, and had passed beyond the period in which
an appeal to “Jeffersonian simplicity” would naturally have been most
potent. The second farmer to be elected governor was Claude Matthews,
who was a candidate in the year of Mr. Cleveland’s second success,
and he was a college graduate and a man of affairs, and not really of
the farmer type. When, in 1896, for the third time, the State went to
the country for a governor, James A. Mount, a scientific farmer and
reformer of farm methods, was chosen. The name of Posey County has
long been used as a synonym for any dark and forbidding land; but the
public services of Thomas Posey, the last of Indiana’s territorial
governors, for whom the district was named, were of marked variety and
value, so that the name can hardly be used as a term of opprobrium,
particularly of the county that harbored the New Harmony settlement.
After Indiana had gained the dignity of statehood, and throughout her
earlier years, she continued fortunate in the class of men to whom she
gave her highest honors. Jennings, the first governor, was a native of
New Jersey. He was a fair scholar and wrote creditable English. The
Hendricks family came from Pennsylvania and contributed two governors
to the State, and a vice-president to the nation; and the name remains
after a century locally significant of character and attainment. David
Wallace, the father of General Lew Wallace, and Joseph A. Wright, who
was prominent in affairs in the earlier half of the century, were
natives of Pennsylvania. Wallace had been educated at West Point,
but resigned from the army to take up the law; he became noted as an
orator and was governor of the State. Wright, who paid his way through
Indiana University by acting as janitor, became governor, sat in the
United States Senate, and was minister to Prussia. Governor Whitcomb
was a native of Vermont, Governor Willard of New York, and Morton,
the foremost man of the Civil War period in the State, was a native
Indianian.

Isaac Blackford (1786-1859), for thirty-five years a justice of the
Supreme Court in Indiana, was a native of New Jersey and an alumnus
of Princeton. He was one of the ablest judges the State has ever
known, and his opinions as they appear in the eight volumes of reports
which he published are models of lucid and direct writing. The law has
always been served in Indiana by able men; and it is a satisfaction to
contemplate the bench and bar of the earliest times, when the court
was itinerant. Under the first constitution the Circuit Court bench
consisted of a presiding judge, who sat in all the courts of a circuit,
and of two associate justices, elected in each county, who were usually
not lawyers. They were supposed to insure an element of common-sense
equity in the judiciary, and even had power to overrule the presiding
judge and give the opinion of the court. But the lawyers had little
respect for the associate justices, and if the presiding judge could
not attend a sitting of the court, they declined to submit important
cases, and sought diversion at the expense of the associate justices by
raising profound questions of abstract law. An attorney named Pitcher
once used the phrase _de minimis non curat lex_ before an associate
justice described by Robert Dale Owen as an illiterate farmer, short
of stature, lean of person, and acrid of temper. The learned counsel
had expected to translate for the benefit of the bench, but before he
could speak, the justice interrupted impatiently, “Come, Pitcher, none
of your Pottawattomie; give us plain English.” The lawyer did not pause
or look at the court, but continued talking to the jury. “The case,”
said he, “turns chiefly on that well-known legal axiom which I have
already had occasion to bring to your notice,--_de minimis non curat
lex_,--which, when reduced to the capacity of this honorable court,
means--observe, gentlemen, means that the law does not care for little,
trifling things, and,”--turning sharply around on the diminutive figure
of the justice,--“neither do I!”

The first court houses were usually frame or log buildings of two
rooms, one for the grand jury and the other for the court. A pole
stretched across the room separated the members of the bar from the
populace. Spectators travelled hundreds of miles to attend court and
hear the lawyers “plead.” The young attorneys, called “squires,”
long clung to the queue as a kind of badge of their profession, and
were prone to disport themselves before the rustics in the court
yards of strange towns.[7] Good humor prevailed on the circuit; the
long horseback journeys brought health and appetite, and cheerful
landlords welcomed the bar at every county seat. Good horses, trained
to corduroy roads and swimming, were a necessary part of the lawyer’s
equipment; and a little quiet horse-trading between court-sittings was
not considered undignified. The itinerant courts contributed to the
political advantage of the attorneys, taking them constantly before the
people of a wide area. Political ambition was usual, and the lawyers
frequently cherished the hope of sitting in the State legislature, or
of reaching the bench, with a State office or the United States Senate
as their farthest goal.

The even balance maintained between the two greater parties in Indiana
through many years gave a zest to all political contests. Whether
the Hoosiers have expressed wise preferences or not in the years in
which their vote has been of consequence in national struggles may be
questioned, but it is interesting to remember that Indiana and New York
gave their electoral vote for the same candidate for the presidency
at every election between 1872 and 1896, and that their vote in all
these years, except in 1876, was with the winning side. Political
independence has been fostered to good purpose; in recent years there
have been instances of praiseworthy courage in the protest against
party tyranny. In no other Western State has the idea of the merit
system been propagated so vigorously as in Indiana. Lucius B. Swift,
of Indianapolis, and William Dudley Foulke, of Richmond, were leaders
in the movement for civil service reform, and enlisted under them from
the beginning in a roll of honor were Oliver T. Morton, Louis Howland,
Charles S. and Allen Lewis, of Indianapolis, and Henry M. Williams,
of Fort Wayne. Indiana University and Franklin and Butler Colleges
also gave moral support. Mr. Swift began, in 1889, the _Chronicle_, a
small paper whose publication was not undertaken for profit. For seven
years, or until its object had been attained, he made it a merciless
assailant of civil service abuses, local and national. When the
historian of civil service reform comes to his task he will find that
the _Chronicle_ has in many ways simplified his labors.

The successes of several Indiana authors were a great stimulus to
literary ambition in Indiana; and the literary clubs were an additional
encouragement. Poetry seems to the amateur much more easily achieved
than prose, and poets rose in every quarter of the State in the years
following the general recognition of James Whitcomb Riley and Maurice
Thompson. There was a time in Indiana when it was difficult to forecast
who would next turn poet, suggesting the Tractarian period in England,
of which Birrell writes that so prolific were the pamphleteers at the
high tide of the movement that a tract might at any time be served
upon one suddenly, like a sheriff’s process. At Indianapolis the end
seemed to have been reached when a retired banker, who had never been
suspected, began to inveigle friends into his office on the pretence
of business, but really to read them his own verses. Charles Dennis,
a local journalist, declared that there had appeared in the community
a peculiar crooking of the right elbow and a furtive sliding of the
hand into the left inside pocket, which was an unfailing preliminary
to the reading of a poem. Rhyming is, however, the least harmful of
amusements, and so fastidious a poet as Gray expressed his belief that
even a bad verse is better than the best observation ever made upon it.

  “But Time, who soonest drops the heaviest things
    That weight his pack, will carry diamonds long;”

and as the office of the discourager of genius is an ungrateful one, it
is doubtless well that many should implore the gods, in the faith that
an occasional prayer will be answered.




CHAPTER II

THE RURAL TYPE AND THE DIALECT


The origin of the term “Hoosier” is not known with certainty. It has
been applied to the inhabitants of Indiana for many years, and, after
“Yankee,” it is probably the sobriquet most famous as applied to the
people of a particular division of the country. So early as 1830,
“Hoosier” must have had an accepted meaning, within the State at least,
for John Finley printed in that year, as a New Year’s address for the
Indianapolis _Journal_, a poem called “The Hoosier Nest,” in which the
word occurs several times. It is a fair assumption that its meaning
was not obscure, or it would not have been used in a poem intended
for popular reading. “Hoosier” seems to have found its first literary
employment in Finley’s poem. Sulgrove, who was an authority in matters
of local history, was disposed to concede this point.[8] The poem is
interesting for its glimpse of Indiana rural life of the early period.
Finley was a Virginian who removed to Indiana in 1823 and had been
living in the State seven years when he published his poem. He was an
accomplished and versatile gentleman, and his verses, as collected
in 1866, show superior talents. One of his poems, “Bachelor’s Hall,”
has often been attributed to Thomas Moore. The “Hoosier Nest” is the
home of a settler, which a traveller hailed at nightfall. Receiving a
summons to enter, the stranger walked in,--

  “Where half a dozen Hoosieroons
  With mush-and-milk, tin cups and spoons.
  White heads, bare feet and dirty faces
  Seemed much inclined to keep their places.”

The stranger was invited to a meal of venison, milk, and johnny-cake,
and as he sat at the humble board he made an inventory of the cabin’s
contents:--

  “One side was lined with divers garments,
  The other spread with skins of varmints:
  Dried pumpkins overhead were strung,
  Where venison hams in plenty hung;
  Two rifles placed above the door;
  Three dogs lay stretched upon the floor,--
  In short, the domicile was rife
  With specimens of Hoosier life.”

“Hoosieroons” is never heard now, and was probably invented by Finley
for the sake of the rhyme. Both Governor Wright and O. H. Smith were of
the opinion that “Hoosier” was a corruption of “Who’s here” (_yere_ or
_hyer_) and Smith[9] has sought to dramatize its history:--

  “The night was dark, the rain falling in torrents, when the inmates
  of a small log cabin in the woods of early Indiana were aroused from
  their slumbers by a low knocking at the only door of the cabin. The
  man of the house, as he had been accustomed to do on like occasions,
  rose from his bed and hallooed, ‘Who’s here?’ The outsiders answered,
  ‘Friends, out bird-catching. Can we stay till morning?’ The door was
  opened, and the strangers entered. A good log fire soon gave light
  and warmth to the room. Stranger to the host: ‘What did you say when
  I knocked?’ ‘I said, Who’s here?’ ‘I thought you said Hoosier.’ The
  bird-catchers left after breakfast, but next night returned and
  hallooed at the door, ‘Hoosier;’ and from that time the Indianians
  have been called Hoosiers.”

This is the explanation usually given to inquirers within the State. The
objection has sometimes been raised to this story, that the natural
reply to a salutation in the wilderness would be “Who’s there?” out
of which “Hoosier” could hardly be formed; but careful observers of
Western and Southern dialects declare that “Who’s hyer?” was, and in
obscure localities remains, the common answer to a midnight hail.

Sulgrove related the incident of an Irishman, employed in excavating
the canal around the falls at Louisville, who declared after a fight in
which he had vanquished several fellow-laborers that he was “a husher,”
and this was offered as a possible origin of the word. The same writer
suggested another explanation, that a certain Colonel Lehmanowski,
a Polish officer who lectured through the West on Napoleon’s wars,
pronounced Hussar in a way that captivated some roystering fellow,
who applied the word to himself in self-glorification, pronouncing it
“Hoosier.” Lehmanowski’s identity has been established as a sojourner
in Indiana, and his son was a member of an Indiana regiment in the
Civil War. The Rev. Aaron Woods[10] is another contributor to the
literature of the subject, giving the Lehmanowski story with a few
variations. When the young men of the Indiana side of the Ohio crossed
over to Louisville, the Kentuckians made sport of them, calling them
“New Purchase greenies,” and declaring that they of the southern
side of the river were a superior race, composed of “half-alligator,
half-horse, and tipped off with snapping turtle!” Fighting grew out of
these boasts in the market-place and streets of Louisville. An Indiana
visitor who had heard Lehmanowski lecture on “The Wars of Europe” and
been captivated by the prowess of the Hussars, whipped one of the
Kentuckians, and bending over him cried, “I’m a Hoosier,” meaning,
“I’m a Hussar.” Mr. Woods adds that he was living in the State at the
time and that this was the true origin of the term. This is, however,
hardly conclusive. The whole Lehmanowski story seems to be based on
communication between Indiana and Kentucky workmen during the building
of the Ohio Falls Canal. The original canal was completed in 1830; and
as the Polish soldier was not in this region earlier than 1840, ten
years after the appearance of Finley’s poem, it is clear that those who
would reach the truth of the matter must go back of “The Hoosier Nest”
to find secure ground. No one has ever pretended that Finley originated
the word, and it is not at all likely that he did so; but his poem
gave it wide currency, and doubtless had much to do with fixing it
on the Indianians. Bartlett, in his “Dictionary of Americanisms,”
gives the novel solution of the problem that the men of superior
strength throughout the early West, the heroes of log-rollings and
house-raisings, were called “hushers” because of their ability to hush
or quiet their antagonists; and that “husher” was a common term for a
bully. The Ohio River boatmen carried the word to New Orleans, where
a foreigner among them, in attempting to apply the word to himself,
pronounced it “Hoosier.” Sulgrove may have had this meaning in mind in
citing his Irishman, though he is not explicit. Hoosier as a Christian
name has been known in the Ohio Valley; it was borne by a member of
the Indiana Methodist Conference in 1835. A Louisville baker named
Hoosier made a variety of sweet bread which was so much affected by
Indiana people that they were called “Hoosier’s customers,” “Hoosier’s
men,” and so on; but no date can be found for this. The Rev. T. A.
Goodwin, first heard the word at Cincinnati in 1830, where it described
a species of gingerbread, but without reference to Indiana.

It is clear that the cultivated people of Indiana recognized the
nickname in the early half of the century. Wright and Smith, as
mentioned above, had sought to determine its genesis; and Tilghman
A. Howard, when a congressman from Indiana, writing home to a friend
in 1840, spoke casually of the “Hoosier State.”[11] The word occurs
familiarly in Hall’s “New Purchase” (1855), and it is found also
in Beste’s rare volume, “The Wabash; or, Adventures of an English
Gentleman’s Family in the Interior of America,” published at London
in the same year, and in Mrs. Beecher’s “From Dawn to Daylight”
(1859). And when, in 1867, Sandford C. Cox published a book of verses
containing the couplet,--

  “If Sam is right, I would suggest
  A native Hoosier as the best,”--

the word was widely known, and thereafter it frequently occurs in all
printed records touching the State. It is reported from Tennessee,
Virginia, and South Carolina by independent observers, who say that the
idea of a rough countryman is always associated with it. In Missouri it
is sometimes used thus abstractly, but a native Indianian is usually
meant, without reference to his manners or literacy.

No reader of Hoosier chronicles can fail to be impressed by the
relation of the great forests to the people who came to possess and
tame them. Before they reached the Indiana wilderness in their advance
before civilization, the stalwart pioneers had swung their axes in
Pennsylvania or Kentucky, and had felt the influence of the great,
gloomy woodlands in their lives; but in Indiana this influence was
greatly intensified. They experienced an isolation that is not possible
to-day in any part of the country, and the loss of nearly every
civilizing agency that men value. These frontiersmen could hardly have
believed themselves the founders of a permanent society, for the exact
topography of much of their inheritance was unknown to them; large
areas were submerged for long periods, and the density of the woods
increased the difficulty of building roads and knitting the scattered
clearings and villages into a compact and sensitive commonwealth. Once
cleared, the land yielded a precarious living to the pioneers in return
for their labors and sacrifices; after the first dangers from beasts of
prey, the pestiferous small animals anticipated the harvest and ate the
corn. One ear in four acres remained after the gray squirrels had taken
their pleasure in a Johnson County field.[12] Sheep were out of the
question on account of the wolves; and always present and continuing
were the fevers that preyed on the worn husbandmen and sent many to
premature graves. The women, deprived of every comfort, contributed
their share of the labor, making homes of their cabins; dyeing the
wool, when they had it, with the ooze of the walnut, carding,
spinning, and weaving it, and finally cutting the cloth into garments;
or if linen were made, following the flax from the field through all
the processes of manufacture until it clothed the family.

The pioneers could not see then, as their children see now, that
the wilderness was a factor in their destiny; that it drove them
in upon themselves, strengthening their independence in material
things by shutting them off from older communities, and that it even
fastened upon their tongues the peculiarities of speech which they had
brought with them into the wilderness. But their isolation compelled
meditation, and when reading matter penetrated the woodlands it was
usually worth the trouble of transportation in a day of few roads
and little travel. The pioneers knew their Bibles and named their
children for the Bible heroes, and most of their other books were
religious. There have been worse places in which to form habits of
thought, and to lay the foundation for a good manner of writing our
language, than the Hoosier cabin. Lying before the fireplace in his
father’s humble Spencer County home during the fourteen years that
the family spent in Indiana,--years that were of the utmost importance
in his life,--Abraham Lincoln studied his few books and caught the
elusive language-spirit that later on gave character and beauty to his
utterances.

The social life of the first comers also drew its inspiration from
their environment, and was expressed in log-rolling, house-raising,
and other labors that could best be done by coöperation, and which
they concluded usually, in a fashion quite characteristic, with a
frolic. After the axe, the rifle was most important among their
belongings; for they trusted largely to the fortunes of the hunt for
food; and peltries became a valuable medium of exchange in their simple
economy. Expertness in the use of the rifle and friendly rivalry in
marksmanship among the settlers led to other social gatherings; and
even professional men took pride in the sport and participated in these
contests. The militia system in the early days was not an important
feature of Hoosier life. The Hoosier’s sense of humor has always been
keen, and where, as once occurred on muster day in the White Water
country, a part of the officer’s duty was to separate wearers of shoes
from those who appeared in moccasins, and bearers of cornstalks from
those who carried rifles, there was nothing of the pomp and pageantry
of war to captivate the imagination of the people.

The Hoosier fiddle was a factor in all the festivities of the country
folk. The fiddler was frequently an eccentric genius, ranking with
the rural poet, who was often merely a maker of idle rhymes; however,
the country fiddler in Indiana has held his own against latter-day
criticism and the competition of the village brass band. Governor
Whitcomb enjoyed local fame as a violinist, and Berry Sulgrove and
General Lew Wallace, in their younger years, were skilful with the
bow. Dr. H. W. Taylor, a conscientious student of early Hoosier
customs, connects the Hoosier fiddler with the Scotch Highlanders,
and has expressed his belief[13] that the Highlander folk coming to
the United States naturally sought the mountain country of Virginia,
North Carolina, Tennessee, and Georgia, and that the Scotch fiddle
and its traditions survive principally in these mountainous countries.
We are told that the fiddle of the Hoosiers is an exotic and cannot
long survive, though fifteen years after this prediction a contest of
Hoosier fiddlers was held in the largest hall at Indianapolis, and
many musicians of this old school appeared from the back districts to
compete for the prizes. The great aim of the old time fiddlers was to
make their instruments “talk.” Their tunes enjoyed such euphonious
names as “Old Dan Tucker,” “Old Zip Coon,” “Possum up a Gum Stump,”
“Irish Washerwoman,” “Waggoner,” “Ground Spy,” and “Jay Bird.” Dr.
Taylor discovered that the very Hoosier manner of bowing, _i.e._
fiddling, was derived from the Scotch, and he gives this description
of it: “The arm, long, bony, and sinewy, was stretched forwards,
downwards, and outwards from the shoulder, and at full length. There
was absolutely no movement of the wrist, a very little at the elbow,
and just a degree more at the shoulder.” Hall ironically observed that
the country fiddler could, like Paganini, play one tune or parts of
nearly two dozen tunes on one string; and like the great _maestro_
he played without notes, and with endless flourishes. He gives this
attractive portrait of one of the New Purchase fiddlers:--

  “He held his fiddle against his breast--perhaps out of affection--and
  his bow in the middle, and like a cart-whip; things enabling him,
  however, the more effectually to flog his instrument when rebellious:
  and the afflicted creature would scream right out in agony! Indeed,
  his Scremonah bore marks of premature old age--its fingerboard
  being indented with little pits, and its stomach was frightfully
  incrusted with rosin and other gummy things, till it looked as dark
  and careworn as Methuselah! Dan was, truly, no niggard of ‘rosum,’
  for he ‘greased’ as he termed it, between his tunes every time! and
  then, at his first few vigorous jerks, fell a shower of dust on the
  agitated bosom of his instrument, calling out in vain for mercy under
  the cruel punishment.”[14]

James Whitcomb Riley corroborates the impression of earlier writers in
a characteristic poem, “My Fiddle:”[15]--

  “My playin’s only middlin’--tunes I picked up when a boy--
  The kind o’-sort o’ fiddlin’ that the folks calls ‘cordaroy’;
  ‘The Old Fat Gal’ ‘Rye-Straw,’ and ‘My Sailyor’s on the Sea,’
  Is the old cowtillions _I_ ‘saw’ when the ch’ice is left to me;
          And so I plunk and plonk and plink
              And rosum-up my bow,
          And play the tunes that make you think
              The devil’s in your toe!”

In several of the Southern Indiana counties the least admirable traits
of the ancestors of the “poor whites” who came in from the South have
been continued into a third and fourth generation; but these do not
appear prominently in any fair or comprehensive examination of the
people. Much has been written of the lawlessness of Indianians, and
lynching and white-capping have sporadically been reported from many
of the southern counties. An attorney-general of the State who had
brought all the machinery of the law to bear upon particular instances
of lynching during his term of office, and who had given much study to
the phenomena presented by these outbreaks, expressed his opinion that
the right of way of the Baltimore and Southwestern Railway marked the
“lynching belt” in Indiana. Statistics in confirmation are lacking,
but it is safe to say that a large percentage of the lynchings reported
in the State have occurred either in counties on the line of the road
or in those immediately adjoining. Lynchings have also occurred in
at least half a dozen counties north of Indianapolis, so that all
the crimes of this sort perpetrated in Indiana cannot be charged to
the descendants of the “poor whites” in the more Southern counties.
Lynching has not been viewed with apathy, and every instance of it has
been followed by vigorous efforts at punishment. In 1889 a drastic
law was added to the statutes, defining lynching and providing severe
penalties. It struck to the quick of the matter by making possible the
impeachment of law officers who yield prisoners to a mob. But under
any circumstances these people are so intensely clannish that even the
sincerest prosecution usually fails for lack of witnesses. The Hon.
W. A. Ketcham, State attorney-general, after heroic efforts to fix
responsibility for the lynching of five men in Ripley County on the
night of September 14, 1898, gravely stated in his official report
that he had applied the Sherlock Holmes principle to the incident;
that is to say, after excluding every other possible hypothesis he had
assumed the correctness of the one remaining, and this he stated in his
syllabus of the case to be: “That A broke jail and travelled across
the country to the town where the revolver had been pawned, a distance
of seven miles, broke into the store, stole the revolver, returned
again, broke back into jail, shot himself, then killed B and C and hung
their dead bodies to a tree, put the finishing touches to his crime by
hanging D and E, and then in order that suspicion might be directed
against innocent men, finally hanged himself.”[16] The milder form of
outlawry, known as “white-capping,” has also been practised in Indiana
occasionally, and sometimes with barbarous cruelty; but it, like
lynching, is not peculiar to the State, and its extent has been greatly
exaggerated by Eastern newspapers.

It has been insisted by loyal Indianians that the speech of the later
generations of natives is almost normal English; that the rough
vernacular of their ancestors has been ground down in the schools,
and that the dictionaries are rapidly sanctioning new words, once
without authority, that inevitably crept into common speech through
the necessities of pioneer expression. It may fairly be questioned
whether, properly speaking, there ever existed a Hoosier dialect.
The really indigenous Indiana words and novel pronunciations are so
few as to make but a poor showing when collected; and while the word
“dialect” is employed as a term of convenience in this connection, it
can only be applied to a careless manner of speaking, in which novel
words are merely incidental. A book of colloquial terms, like Green’s
“Virginia Word Book,” could hardly be compiled for Indiana without
infringing upon the prior claims of other and older States to the
greater part of it. The so-called Hoosier dialect, where it survives
at all, is the speech of the first American settlers in Indiana,
greatly modified by time and schooling, but retaining, both in the
employment of colloquial terms and in pronunciation, the peculiarities
that were carried westward from tide water early in the nineteenth
century. The distinctive Indiana countryman, the real Hoosier, who
has been little in contact with the people of cities, speaks a good
deal as his Pennsylvania or North Carolina or Kentucky grandfather or
great-grandfather did before him, and has created nothing new. His
speech contains comparatively few words that are peculiar to the State
or to communities within it; but in the main it shares such deviations
from normal or literary English with the whole Southwest.

In his book “The Wabash” Beste describes his interview with an
Indiana carpenter, who questioned whether the traveller was really an
Englishman, because his speech was unlike that of the usual English
immigrants whose trouble with the aspirate had evoked derisive comment
among the Americans. This occurs in his chapter on Indianapolis, in
which the carpenter is quoted thus:

  “‘You do not say ‘ouse’ and ‘and’ for ‘house’ and ‘hand’; all the
  children, and all of you, pronounce all these words like Americans,
  and not as real English pronounce them. Their way of speaking
  makes us always say that we talk better English than the English
  themselves.’ I had, indeed, often heard the Americans laughed at
  for saying so; but now the matter was explained. My carpenter
  repeated with great accuracy various instances of provincialisms
  and vulgarisms which he and all of them had noticed more or less,
  in all the English emigrants who had come amongst them. Seeing none
  of any other class, they naturally supposed that all English people
  pronounced the language in the same manner, and so prided themselves
  upon the superiority of American English. For notwithstanding the
  disagreeable nasal tone and drawling whine in which most of them
  speak, and notwithstanding a few national phrases and the peculiar
  use and pronunciation of certain words, it must be admitted that the
  American people, in general, speak English without provincial dialect
  or vulgarisms. Whence, in fact, could they acquire such, since all
  the emigrants they see came from different parts of England, and the
  provincialisms of the one neutralize those of the other.”

Professor Whitney, in his “Language and the Study of Language,”
expresses in academic terms much the same idea.[17]

Lapses in pronunciation have never been punishable with death on the
Wabash, as at the fords of the Jordan, where the shibboleth test of
the Gileadites cost the Ephraimites forty and two thousand. The native
Indianian is not sensitive about his speech and refuses to be humble
before critics from the far East who say “idea-r” and “Philadelphia-r.”
James Whitcomb Riley has made the interesting and just observation
that the average countryman knows in reality a wider range of diction
than he permits himself to use, and that his abridgments and variations
are attributable to a fear lest he may offend his neighbors by using
the best language at his command.[18] This is wholly true, and it
is responsible in a measure for contributions to the common speech
of local idioms and phrases. In rural Indiana and generally in the
Southwest the phrase “’s th’ fellah says” is often used by a rustic
to indicate his own appreciation of the fact that he has employed an
unusual expression. Or it may be an actual quotation, as, for example,
“Come over fer a visit, an’ we’ll treat you ’n a hostile manner, ’s
Uncle Amos use t’ say.” This substitution of hostile for hospitable
once enjoyed wide currency in Indiana and Illinois. Sulgrove confirms
Riley’s impression:--

  “Correct pronunciation was positively regarded by the Southern
  immigration as a mark of aristocracy or, as they called it,
  ‘quality.’ The ‘ing’ in ‘evening,’ or ‘morning’ or any other words,
  was softened into ‘in,’ the full sound being held finical and
  ‘stuck up.’ So it was no unusual thing to hear such a comical string
  of emasculated ‘nasals’ as the question of a prominent Indiana
  lawyer of the Kentucky persuasion, ‘Where were you a-standin’ at
  the time of your perceivin’ of the hearin’ of the firin’ of the
  pistol?’... To ‘set’ was the right way to sit; an Indian did not
  scalp, he ‘skelped’: a child did not long for a thing, he ‘honed’ for
  it,--slang retains this Hoosier archaism; a woman was not dull, she
  was ‘daunsy’; commonly a gun was ‘shot’ instead of fired in all moods
  and tenses.”[19]

While the French settlements in Indiana made no appreciable impression
on the common speech, yet it has been assumed by some observers that
the inclination at the South to throw the accent of words forward, as
in gentle_men_, settle_ment_, was fairly attributable to the influence
of the French Catholics in Louisiana and of the Huguenots who were
scattered through the Southeastern colonies, though this would seem a
trifle finespun; but the idiosyncrasy noted exists at the South, no
matter what its real origin may have been, and it has been communicated
in some measure through Southern influences to the middle Western
people. However, Southern Indianians sometimes say _Tennes_-sy,
accenting the first syllable and slurring the last, illustrating again
the danger of accepting any theories or fixing any rules for general
guidance in such matters. Dr. Eggleston remembers only one French word
that survived from old French times in the Wabash country,--“cordelle,
to tow a boat by a rope carried along the shore.” The most striking
influence in the Indiana dialect is that of the Scotch-Irish, who
have left marked peculiarities of speech behind them wherever they
have gone. Notwithstanding the fact that both the English Quakers and
the Germans contributed largely to the settlement of Pennsylvania
and of the Southeastern colonies, the idiosyncrasies of speech most
perceptible in the regions deriving their population from those sources
are plainly Scotch-Irish; as, for example, the linguistic deficiency
which makes _strenth_ and _lenth_ of _strength_ and _length_, or
_bunnle_ of _bundle_, and the use of _nor_ for _than_, after a
comparative adjective. The use of _into_ for _in_ and _whenever_ for
_as soon as_ are other Scotch-Irish peculiarities. These, however, are
heard only in diminishing degree in Indiana, and many of the younger
generations of Hoosiers have never known them. The confusion of
_shall_ and _will_ and of _like_ and _as_ is traceable to North-Irish
influences, and is not peculiar to the spoken language at the South and
West, but is observed frequently in the newspapers, and is found even
in books.

The anonymous writer of “Pioneer Annals” (1875), a rare pamphlet that
contains much invaluable matter relating to the occupation of the White
Water Valley, speaks of the prevalence of Carolina Quakers among the
first settlers of that region, and remarks that when newcomers were
asked where they came from, the answer would be “Guilford County, near
Clemmens’s Store”; or “Beard’s Hatter-shop”; “Dobson’s Cross Roads”;
or “Deep-River Settlement of Friends.” The same writer gives a dialect
note which illustrates the ephemeral character of idiom. _Sleys_
(slays) was a term applied by the Carolinians to the reeds used by them
in their home-made looms. A Carolina emigrant bound for Indiana stopped
at Cincinnati and offered to sell a supply of these. It was in August,
and the storekeeper knew but one word having the same sound, sleighs,
which were not used in Cincinnati in midsummer. His ironical comment
almost led to a personal encounter before the Carolinian could explain.
John V. Hadley states in his “Seven Months a Prisoner” that “Guilford
County” and “Jamestown” (North Carolina) were household words in many
families of Hendricks County (Indiana), where he lived. At Jamestown,
on his way to Libby Prison, he was accosted by a citizen who asked
whether a former neighbor who had moved to Indiana, but still owned
property in North Carolina, had not enlisted in the Union army, the
purpose of the inquiry being to obtain testimony on which to confiscate
his estate.

The circulation of newly coined words has been so rapid in late years,
owing to the increase of communication between different parts of
the country, and to dissemination by the newspapers, that few useful
words originating obscurely are likely to remain local. Lowell amused
himself by tracing to unassailable English sources terms that were
assumed to be essentially American; and if Chaucer and the Elizabethans
may be invoked against our rural communities, the word-hunter’s
sport has grown much simpler when he may cite a usage in one State to
disestablish the priority claimed for it in another. There is risk
in all efforts to connect novel words with particular communities,
no matter how carefully it may be done, and it is becoming more and
more difficult to separate real dialect from slang. Lists of unusual
words that have been reported to the American Dialect Society afford
interesting instances of the danger of accepting terms as local which
are really in general use. The word _rambunctious_, reported from New
York State as expressing impudence and forwardness, cannot be peculiar
to that region,[20] for it is used in Indiana in identically the same
sense. Other words, collected through the same agency and common in
Indiana, are: _scads_, reported from Missouri, signifying a great
quantity; and _sight_, meaning a large amount, noted in New England and
New York. _Great hand for_, meaning a _penchant_, traced from Maine to
Ohio, may be followed also into Indiana, but this, like _druthers_,
for a preference or choice, belongs to the towns rather than to
the country. _Go like_, in the sense of imitation, as “_go like_ a
rooster,” is reported from both Maine and Indiana; and _foot-loose_,
meaning free and untrammelled, observed in Georgia, is used in the
towns, at least, of Indiana. The natural disposition of Americans
to exaggerate led to the creation by the Southeastern element in
Indiana population of _bodaciously_,[21] a corruption of audaciously;
and to the employment of _powerful_, indiscriminately with _big_ or
_little_, as a particularly emphatic superlative. Curiously enough
_powerful_, which is usually identified with the earlier generations
of the Southwest, is reported also from Eastern Massachusetts.[22]
_Sarcumstansis_ for _circumstances_, _b’ar_ for _bear_, and _thar_ for
_there_ reached Indiana through Kentucky, and are now rarely heard. Dr.
Eggleston employs the broad _a_ in “The Graysons,” where one character
says _bar_ while another pronounces the word correctly, explaining that
words are not always pronounced the same in a dialect--an observation
that has also been made by Mr. Riley.

Mrs. Henry Ward Beecher, whose unamiable novel, “From Dawn to
Daylight,” is a dreary picture of Indiana life, gives a few interesting
usages; as _a right smart chance of money_, _heap of plunder_, _sight
stronger_, _proper hard_, showing that her acquaintance was principally
with the Southern element, which she had known at Lawrenceburg and
Indianapolis. _Plunder_, as a synonym for baggage, seems to be largely
Southern and Western, and was probably derived from the Pennsylvania
Germans. The insolent intrusiveness of dialect is illustrated by the
appearance of the word in its colloquial sense in the first chapter of
General Wallace’s “Prince of India.” Dr. Eggleston in “The Graysons”
gives _weth_ for _with_, _air_ for _are_, _thes_ for _just_, _sher’f_
for _sheriff_, and _yer’s_ for _here is_. Indianians usually pronounce
the name of their State correctly, though the final vowel sometimes
becomes _y_. Benjamin S. Parker remembers that in the early days
pioneers sometimes said _Injuns_, _Injiana_, and _immejut_; but these
usages are obsolete in the State.[23] Mr. Riley frequently uses
_miled_ (mile), and yet the word is somewhat similarly spoken on
Nantucket, _maild_. _Ornery_, a vulgar form of ordinary, seems to be
generally used, and has been observed in the Middle States as well
as in Indiana and Kentucky. The injunction _mind out_, which is used
in Kentucky in such admonitions as “_mind out_ what you are doing,”
becomes _watch out_ in Indiana. _Wrench_ for _rinse_, used in the
States contiguous to the Ohio, is _rense_ in New England. _Critter_
for _horse_ is still heard in parts of rural Indiana, which derived
population through Kentucky, where the same usage is noted. _Fruit_, as
applied to stewed apples (apple sauce) only, is a curious limitation
of the noun, heard among old-fashioned people of Southern origin in
Indiana. _Some place_ for _somewhere_ is not chargeable to Indiana
alone, but this and the phrases _want on_ and _want off_ seem to be
used chiefly in the West Central States, and they belong to the
borderland between slang and dialect. It would seem a far cry from
the Hoosier speech to the classic Greek, and yet Dr. H. W. Taylor has
pursued this line of philological inquiry with astonishing results,
tracing an analogy of sound and sense most ingeniously between Greek
terms and words found in the American dialects.[24]

In the speech of the illiterate, there is usually something of rhythm
and cadence. All slang shares a feeling for the balance and nice
adjustment of words, and slang phrases are rarely clumsy. The cry of a
boy calling his mate has its peculiar crescendo, and pedlers the world
over run the scale of human expression in pursuit of odd effects. The
drawl of the Southerner and Southwesterner is not unmusical, though
it may try the patience of the stranger. Even cultivated Indianians,
particularly those of Southern antecedents, have the habit of clinging
to their words; they do not bite them off sharply. _G_ performs its
office as final consonant in _ing_ under many disadvantages; and it
was long ignored, though the school-teachers have struggled nobly to
restore it. The blending of words, which begins with childhood, is
often carried into maturity by the Indianian; thus by a lazy elision
“did you ever” is combined in _jever_, and “where did you get”
becomes _wherjuget_. _Ju_ is, in fact, usual in the Ohio Valley. The
history of the Italian _a_ in this country is in itself interesting.
In New England and in Virginia it finds recognition, whereas in the
intermediate region the narrower sound of the vowel prevails; and
likewise the softening of _r_ is noted in New England and among the
Virginians and other Southerners, while in the intermediate territory
and at the West _r_ receives its full sound. The shrill nasal tone
is still marked in the back country folk of New England, while
the Southern and Southwestern farmer’s speech is fuller and more
open-mouthed. Whether climatic influences have been potent in such
matters remains a matter of speculation, but such theories are to be
received with caution.

It is unfortunate that there are so few trustworthy records of the
early Southwestern speech, and that first and last bad grammar,
reckless spelling, and the indiscriminate distribution of the printer’s
apostrophe by writers who had no real knowledge to guide them, have
served to create an erroneous impression of the illiteracy of the
Indianians and their neighbors. It is likely that during the next
quarter of a century the continued fusion of the various elements of
Western population will create a dead level of speech, approximating
accuracy, so that in a typical American State like Indiana local usages
will disappear, and the only oddities discernible will be those of the
well-nigh universal slang, which even now reach Colorado and California
almost as soon as they are known at the Atlantic seaboard. At the South
and in New England, where there is less mingling of elements, the old
usages will probably endure much longer; and it is a fair assumption
that in the Mississippi Valley and in the Trans-Missouri country, a
normal American speech free of local idiosyncrasies will appear first.
Our keen sense of humor and our love of the conveniences of speech are
likely to continue to be national traits, leading to the creation and
adoption of slang from time to time; but where a people imply quotation
marks in all their lapses from propriety, they anticipate and destroy
criticism.

After all, there is nothing reprehensible in dialect, as we loosely
use the word, or even in slang. Flexibility is necessary to the living
language; and the word-hunter who really delights in his avocation, and
is not limited in his researches to the remoter fields of classical
philology, hearing in his daily walks and in the tranquil talk at
peaceful inns the pungent or pictorial word that no lexicographer has
yet detected, knows a joy that is greater than that of fly fishing or
butterfly hunting. “No language,” writes Lowell, “after it has faded
into diction, none that cannot suck up the feeding juices secreted for
it in the rich mother-earth of common folk, can bring forth a sound
and lusty book. True vigor and heartiness of phrase do not pass from
page to page, but from man to man, where the brain is kindled and the
lips suppled by downright living interests, and by passion in its very
throe.” He continues: “Language is the soil of thought, and our own
especially is a rich leaf-mould, the slow deposit of ages, the shed
foliage of feeling, fancy, and imagination, which has suffered an earth
change, that the vocal forest, as Howell called it, may clothe itself
anew with living green.” And this suggests Horace’s words, in “Ars
Poetica”:--

  “Ut silvae foliis pronos mutantur in annos,
  Prima cadunt; ita verborum vetus interit aetas,
  Et juvenum ritu florent modo nata vigentque.”

As the leaves have fallen through a century in the Wabash country,
they have buried words that will never reappear; and the change will
continue, old words vanishing and new ones taking their places, so long
as tradition and heredity yield to the schoolmaster, that ruthless
forester who grafts and trims to make all trees uniform.




CHAPTER III

BRINGERS OF THE LIGHT


In his address to the annual council of the Protestant Episcopal
diocese of Indiana in 1863, Bishop Upfold spoke with much vigor against
the use of flowers in the decoration of churches, and said:--

  “There is no sound principle, no true doctrine involved in the
  practice. It is all poetry, and the very romance of poetry, the
  conception of romantic and imaginative minds, dictated less by
  religious sentiment than by a fondness for show and gaudy display.
  Instead of the decoration concentrating the attention devoutly on
  the great and glorious fact which flowers are erroneously supposed
  to symbolize, it is far more likely to divert it, and impair the
  true spiritual emotions and impressions, which the commemorative
  services of the day (Easter) are destined to awaken and deepen....
  The practice will not be allowed in this diocese; and I now declare
  and desire it may be distinctly understood and remembered,--and I may
  as well say it, because I mean to do it--that I will not visit or
  officiate in any parish, to administer confirmation, or perform any
  other office on Easter Sunday, or on any other occasion, where this
  floral display is attempted.”

Bishop Upfold greatly modified his views before his death, in 1872; but
this declaration is expressive of the general religious attitude of
the earlier Indianians; it was Protestant, intensely Protestant. The
religious phenomena observable in the State are not complex and are
readily explained. The early French were, of course, Roman Catholics,
and their first priests were of the heroic type that had its highest
expression in Marquette and Joliet, and hardly less notably in Father
Sorin of the Order of the Holy Cross, who founded, in Northern Indiana,
Notre Dame University, and lived to see it one of the great Catholic
schools of the continent. But the prevalent religious ideas of the
Hoosiers were not inherited from the early French settlers. North
Carolina contributed members of the Society of Friends to the new
territory, and Virginia, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania sent Methodists,
Presbyterians, and Baptists, members of the sect established by
Alexander Campbell, and German Lutherans. Episcopalians were few among
the first Indiana colonists. The diocese of Indiana was created in
1838, and many earnest men have given their labor to its service
first and last; but the slow progress of the Episcopal Church in the
commonwealth has been due to conditions antedating the settlement of
the Ohio Valley, running back, indeed, to the efforts of James I. to
establish Scotch and English colonies in Ireland, the most turbulent
part of his kingdom, and thus forming the base for a migration to
America that was to color the life and thought of a vast area of new
soil. As so large a proportion of the pioneers had rejected apostolic
succession in the Old World, they saw no reason for accepting it in
the Western wilderness. The rugged apostles of Methodism, and the less
rugged but equally diligent and earnest preachers of Presbyterianism,
were leaders in the strenuous religious labors of the early years of
the century. The advance guard of these two religious bodies did not
always dwell together in unity; in educational work, for example,
envy, hatred, and malice were sometimes awakened. The Rev. F. C.
Holliday, writing in 1872,[25] complained of the self-complacency with
which the leading Presbyterians at the West had assumed authority
in educational matters, and “the quiet unscrupulousness with which
they seized upon the trust funds of the States for school purposes,
and made these schools as strictly denominational as though the funds
had been exclusively contributed by members of their own communion.”
It is true that Presbyterians controlled the State University in its
early years, but this was due to their zeal in education and to the
exceptional fitness of many Presbyterian clergymen for teaching.
Princeton extended a friendly hand to the Presbyterians who were
struggling in the new State, and sent, among others, the Rev. George
Bush (1796-1859), who reached Indianapolis in 1824, and two years later
shocked his congregation in the malarious village by denying that there
was any authority of Scripture for the Presbyterian form of church
government.[26] His views became increasingly radical and in 1829 he
left Indiana, accepted the chair of Hebrew and Oriental Literature in
the University of the City of New York, and became a Swedenborgian. He
was a life-long student and a writer of recognized ability.

The Baptists organized the first Protestant church in Indiana in
1798. The Methodists formed a society in 1803, and in 1805 Peter
Cartwright, one of the great pioneer Methodist evangelists, was at
work in the State. The oldest Presbyterian society was formed in
1806, near Vincennes, then the capital, and William Henry Harrison,
the governor, who had married a Presbyterian wife, was numbered among
its parishioners.[27] The very nature of the pioneer life compelled
the simplest of religious as well as of social observances. The
meeting-houses were of logs, and the ministers were often tillers of
the soil. One of the early Presbyterian clergymen aided the support
of his family by farming, writing the deeds, wills, and other formal
papers of his neighbors, by teaching singing, and by making shoes, and
from all these sources of labor, including his pay as minister, he
averaged only $80 a year for a period of sixteen years. Father (the
Rev. James) Havens, one of the famous apostles of Methodism, who,
in 1824, rode what was known as the Connersville circuit, embracing
several county seats, received $56.06-1/2 for his year’s services.
This does not indicate indifference among the scattered flock, but a
lack of actual money. Instances are reported of men splitting rails or
working in the harvest field at fifty cents a day in order to aid their
ministers. Meetings were held in wayside cabins, in which the near
neighbors gathered, and after the service the housewife prepared a meal
for the clerical guest, and for those of the little congregation who
remained. The ministers of the day were not always profound scholars,
but they were light-bearers, who went ahead of the schoolmasters,
communicating to scores of the youth of the new land an interest in
the world of men and books. It has been said that three-fourths of the
early students of Asbury (DePauw) University came from homes that were
visited by the itinerant Methodist preachers.[28]

Ministers were required to be extemporaneous speakers, and they
often indulged in joint debates that aroused the greatest interest.
These contests were markedly frequent during the period in which the
“Campbellite” movement gathered force and began to attract members of
the older religious societies. Lay discussion was common, and the free
interpretation of the Bible urged by the Campbellites encouraged it.
“Revivals” and camp-meetings were conducted frequently, and were often
attended with great excitement. During the first quarter of the century
religious enthusiasm manifested itself with an excess and abandon that
were unknown in politics. “Father” was often prefixed to the names
of the venerable pioneer ministers as a mark of affection, and in
recognition of long service. This was not unusual among the Methodists,
and even the Presbyterians occasionally bestowed the term on some of
their old and worn missionaries of the early days. Many of these men
lived until late in the century, and saw the theology of their young
manhood altered or superseded, and amid new men and new manners became
almost strangers in the land they had first known as a wilderness.

Great care had been taken to assure to the Northwest religious
liberty and free schools. The ordinance of 1787 touched directly on
the questions of religion and education in the Northwest Territory.
“No person,” it declared, “demeaning himself in a peaceable, orderly
manner shall ever be molested on account of his mode of worship or
religious sentiments in the said territory;” and “religion, morality
and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness
of mankind, schools and the means of education shall be forever
encouraged.” The ordinance has clearly been one of the great guiding
influences of the nation. It prepared the way in the Ohio Valley
for the attitude of the people toward slavery; and its assurance of
religious freedom and friendliness to learning brought to the new
territory the benefit of the experience of those who had striven for
such liberties and advantages in the seaboard colonies. The history
of civilization in Indiana may be said to date from its passage.
When, in 1804, Congress provided for the disposal of public lands in
the districts of Detroit, Kaskaskia, and Vincennes, the act carried
with it a reservation of the sixteenth section in each township for
the support of schools, and also an entire township in each land
district for the use of a seminary of learning; and later, the act of
1816 that raised Indiana Territory to statehood, provided “that one
entire township, which shall be designated by the President of the
United States, in addition to the one heretofore reserved for that
purpose, shall be reserved for the use of a seminary of learning,
to be appropriated solely to the use of such seminary.” Under the
first law Albert Gallatin, Secretary of the Treasury, selected a
township in Gibson County; and, following further the direction
of Congress, Governor Harrison approved, in 1806, an act of the
territorial legislature, incorporating Vincennes University, which
was not, however, fully open until 1810. The territorial legislators
believed that it would serve a good purpose to admit Indian youth
to the privileges of the school, and the law enjoined the trustees
“to use their utmost endeavors to induce the said aborigines to send
their children to the University for education, who, when sent,
shall be maintained, clothed, and educated at the expense of said
institution.”[29] Only one Indian ever availed himself of this offer.
In 1822 a law was enacted calling for the sale of the Gibson County
lands and the use of the proceeds for the State seminary already
planned at Bloomington. Thus the State boldly confiscated the fief of
one institution and turned it over to another--an act that led to long
litigation; and though Vincennes University was partially successful in
the courts, its revenue was curtailed and permanent injury resulted. It
continues, however, in spite of reverses a lively member of the company
of Indiana schools of the preparatory type.

Under the act of 1816 President Monroe designated Perry Township,
in the county which was named for him when, in 1818, Orange County
was divided.[30] The selection of the “seminary township” became of
great importance, for it determined not merely the location of the
contemplated seminary, but of the State University, into which it
grew. Efforts have been made repeatedly to remove the institution
from Bloomington, the town that rose about it; but they have been
unavailing. The site chosen by President Monroe, as it was impossible
for him to foresee, was not to remain the most fortunate in point
of convenience and accessibility; but Monroe County has clung
tenaciously to the honor conferred upon her, and seems destined to
carry her dignity through the twentieth century. The first principal
of the seminary was Baynard Rush Hall (1798-1865), the son of a
Philadelphia physician. He was a graduate of Union College and of
Princeton Theological Seminary. He was not only an early and valuable
teacher, but a pioneer author. One of his books “The New Purchase;
or Seven and a Half Years in the Far West” contains a vast amount of
information touching pioneer customs; and while it is not always wholly
good-natured, it is written in the main with spirit and humor.[31]
He declared his belief that he was “the very first man since the
creation of the world that read Greek in the New Purchase”; which
is extravagant, as many of the earlier Protestant ministers were
doubtless learned in the languages, even if the distinction of which
he boasted did not belong to some Roman Catholic missionary. Ten boys
and young men were all that were admitted to the new seminary when it
opened, May 1, 1824. The standards of admission seemed wholly novel
and unnecessary. “Daddy says he doesn’t see no sort a use in the high
larn’d things, and he wants me to larn Inglish only, and book-keepin’,
and surveyin’, so as to ’tend store and run a line,” was the tone of
protest heard from many applicants, as reported by Hall in the “New
Purchase.” Local politicians, viewing the new school as something
exclusive and aristocratic, declared that “it was a right smart chance
better to have no college nohow, if all folks hadn’t equal right to
larn what they most liked best.” Hall was the sole teacher employed
for the first three years, and during this period the only branches
taught were Greek and Latin.[32] While he thus filled all the offices
of the seminary in the woods, he organized his handful of students
into a literary society, which he called the _Henodelphisterian_,
and for which he made the rule that members should drop their proper
appellations while in the academic shades and assume Greek or Latin
names. “Thus,” says Judge Banta, in his reminiscences, “every member
of the society was an Ajax, a Pericles, a Timoleon.” Hall’s salary
at this time was two hundred and fifty dollars a year, and there is
ground for the suspicion that he compensated himself for deficiencies
of income by the free indulgence of his sense of humor. As the young
gentlemen of the _Henodelphisterian_ were occupied out of school
hours in wood-chopping and swine-herding, the joke was rather broad.
Additional instruction was demanded in the third year, and a teacher
of mathematics was employed. The seminary became the State University
in 1838, and among the first trustees were David Wallace, Governor
William Hendricks, Jesse L. Holman, Robert Dale Owen, and Richard W.
Thompson, all of whom were otherwise factors in the early history of
the State, and in several cases members of families distinguished in
subsequent generations. The University’s influence in the State has
been inestimable. It has usually been fortunate in its administrators,
and it has more and more grown to be the centre of agencies related
to the better life and advancement of the commonwealth. After leaving
Indiana, in 1831, Hall taught academies at Bordentown and Trenton, New
Jersey, at Poughkeepsie and Newburgh, New York, and in 1852 he became
principal of Park Institute, Brooklyn. He received the degree of A.M.
from Princeton and of D.D. from Rutgers College.

So early as 1793 W. Rivet, a French missionary, “a polite,
well-educated, and liberal-minded enthusiast, banished to this country
by the French Revolution,” had conducted a school successfully at
Vincennes. A system of county seminaries was introduced early in the
nineteenth century, and such schools were organized in about half of
the counties; and between 1825 and 1850 seventy-three private and
incorporated schools were opened, traces of which remain. These were
known sometimes by the name of the founder, or were identified with
the name of the town in which they were situated. The democratic idea
that secondary and higher education could not properly be provided
by the State found early and wide acceptance. It was believed that
the obligation of higher education should be undertaken by private
enterprise and by religious organizations; and out of this spirit
came a group of seminaries, similar to those of the counties, and
representing the several churches that had established outposts on the
frontier. Many of these grew into colleges. Hanover and Wabash colleges
thus began under Presbyterian auspices, DePauw (Asbury) University
under the Methodists, and Franklin College under the Baptists; and
while their beginnings were not strictly in the seminary, Notre Dame,
a Catholic university, and Earlham College, an institution of high
character allied to the Society of Friends, were of like origin.
Late in the period during which the seminaries flourished there rose
a number of schools for women, of the academic grade, and all of them
private or denominational.

Institutions for higher education often precede schools for primary and
intermediate training; and in Indiana care had been taken to provide
seminaries and colleges before the important matter of establishing
a common school system had received intelligent attention. David
Starr Jordan, long identified with education in Indiana, has remarked
that “the growth in educational systems is from above downwards.
In historical sequence Oxford must precede Rugby, and the German
University must come before the gymnasium.” Nearly half a century
after the organization of the first territorial government, no system
of common schools had been perfected in Indiana. Efforts had been
made and the subject had not been wholly overlooked by the lawmakers,
but a prejudice existed in the minds of many against free schools as
undemocratic. The principle that enlightenment must be a condition
precedent to the intelligent exercise of citizenship was not grasped
by the populace; and as a result of inattention the Hoosier, as
Eggleston’s schoolmaster found him, was appearing on the scene.
And yet, in 1837, while this type was increasing, a member of the
legislature declared, during the discussion of a proposed school tax,
that “When I die I want my epitaph written, ‘Here lies an enemy to free
schools.’”[33]

But while many enemies of common school education were blocking the
way, an unheralded champion was to appear, whose identity was not
generally known for several years after he took the field, and whose
services entitle him to first place among all who have striven for the
advancement of learning in Indiana. This was Caleb Mills, a native
of New Hampshire (1806) and a graduate of Dartmouth (1828) and of
Andover Theological Seminary (1833). In 1831 he had made a tour of
the Southwest in the interest of Sunday-schools, and the social and
intellectual conditions that he found had deeply impressed him. It
was a kind providence that led him back to Indiana in 1833, and that
gave to his adopted State the benefit of his sympathy, intelligence,
and spirit to the end of his life. Among his classmates at Dartmouth
were Milo Parker Jewett, who helped to mould the common school system
of Ohio, and later became the first president of Vassar College, and
Edmund O. Hovey, associated with Mills as a founder of Wabash College,
and long a member of its faculty. Others of his Indiana contemporaries
may have appreciated the gravity of the situation as fully as he, but
it was left for Mills to sound the alarm and lead the charge. In the
first year after he entered the State it was averred by a reputable
witness that “only about one child in eight between five and fifteen
years is able to read.” Dr. Joseph F. Tuttle, the honored president of
Wabash College for nearly a third of a century, described the condition
of affairs in these words:--

  “In 1840 there were 273,784 children in the State of school age, of
  whom only 48,180 attended the common schools. One-seventh of the
  adult population could not read, and a large proportion of those
  who could read did so imperfectly. In spite of the constitutional
  provision of the State and the famous ‘sixteenth section,’ the common
  schools of Indiana were in bad condition. As late as 1846 the State
  rated lowest among the free States as to its popular intelligence and
  means of popular education. Even the capital of the State did not
  have a free school until 1853, and then one was kept open only two
  months.”[34]

The census of 1840 showed the illiteracy of Indiana to be 14.32 per
cent. The return made by Illinois at this time was but little better,
while Ohio, on the eastern boundary, showed only 5.54 per cent of
illiterates. Omitting Illinois and Indiana, the illiteracy of the
Northern States was only one in forty; in Illinois and Indiana it was
one in seven. In twenty-two counties of Indiana the average illiteracy
was more than 26.5 per cent. Montgomery County, the home of Wabash
College, returned at this time one-fifth of her adult population as
illiterate, and Putnam County, the seat of Asbury College, returned
one-sixth of her adult population as belonging to the same class.[35]

With a knowledge of these facts Mills made and published, in the
winter of 1846, “An Address to the Legislature of Indiana,” and
signed it “One of the People.” The motto of this, as of his five
succeeding addresses, was, “Read, discuss, and circulate.” These were
all written in a tone well calculated to interest and arouse. He
handled his statistics skilfully, and made clear the alarming progress
of illiteracy in the State. He was as ready with suggestions as with
criticisms, and his several papers show him to have been thoroughly
informed as to the educational conditions existing in every part of
the country. He possessed great patience, and the series of pamphlets
was marked throughout by good temper. He wrote in a deliberate manner,
rarely showing haste or anxiety, as if confident of the impression that
would be created by fair and judicial statement, and with faith in the
ultimate triumph of his cause.

In the year following the publication of his first address, a call was
issued for a general meeting of educators to be held at Indianapolis.
Among those interested in the movement were Ovid Butler, afterward the
generous benefactor of Butler College, Henry Ward Beecher, pastor
of the Second Presbyterian Church of Indianapolis, and John Coburn.
A series of common school conventions followed, and was of great
value in unifying sentiment. In the roll of those who were prominent
in the first meeting appeared the names of Isaac Blackford, Oliver
H. Smith, Calvin Fletcher, Jeremiah Sullivan, Richard W. Thompson,
Solomon Meredith, and James Blake, who were of the saving remnant of
their time. As a result of the agitation by Mills, the conventions of
educators, and the ceaseless activity of many friends of education,
the legislature of 1847-1848 authorized the people to express their
sentiments for or against a tax for the support of free schools, at
the election to be held in the fall of 1848. This was a presidential
year, and the Mexican War issues were discussed bitterly in Indiana
and in the border States, where slavery lifted its head ominously; but
the advocates of free schools forced their issue and evoked from the
enemy a variety of objections which strike the sense curiously in these
later years. Should the industrious be taxed to support the indolent?
Should the people be made benevolent by law? There was priestcraft
in the scheme; free schools were merely a bait; the real object was
the union of Church and State. Free schools would make education too
common, said some; but the fiercest antagonism came from the class
for whom the friends of free schools were laboring--the wretchedly
poor and ignorant.[36] The vote on the school question was 13,000 less
than the vote for president cast the same day, but free schools won,
the affirmative vote being 78,523; the negative 61,887--a majority of
16,636 for free schools. The principal opposition to free schools was
manifested in the counties lying south of a line drawn across the map
along the southern boundary of Marion County, in which Indianapolis
is situated. The northern counties gave a majority of 18,270 for free
schools; while the southern division, deriving its population chiefly
from the South, gave a majority of 1634 against the proposition.
Professor Boone has pointed out that “notwithstanding the denser
population having the older settlements, the established industries,
and all of the colleges but one, the most insistent opposition to free
schools came from the southern half of the State. The influence of
local seminaries and colleges seems to have gone for nothing in the
movement for free elementary schools.”

Mills returned imperturbably to the attack in a third message
carefully scrutinizing this vote, and showing that of the thirty-one
counties voting negatively, twenty were below the general average of
intelligence. The same measure and tolerance that characterized all his
addresses show finely in this paper, in which he said: “Let the record
of the affirmative vote stand as a proof of the existence in our State
of the spirit of ’76. I rejoice that we have such indubitable evidence
of it. I rejoice that we have been furnished with such proof that we
are not the degenerate sons of noble fathers, but that we possess the
spirit to rebuke selfishness wherever found, and however disguised--a
kindred spirit to that which pledged life and fortune and sacred honor
to the cause of national independence.”

A new school law was framed by the legislature in 1848-1849, which
legalized public taxation for schools and changed the existing system
of school administration; but the respective counties were to be free
to adopt or reject the law as they might see fit, and it was only
a _via media_, beyond which lay still much ground for the friends
of education to conquer. At an election held in August, 1849, the
counties exercised their privilege to pass on the new law. Friends
and foes of free schools again conducted a heated campaign, both
sides amplifying the arguments advanced in the former contest. The
result was a majority in favor of the law of 15,767, a decrease from
the majority given in the preceding election, though the two results
may not fairly be compared, owing to local issues and animosities.
Fifty-nine counties voted for the law and thirty-one against it,
and of those that rejected it twenty were in the southern half of
the State. But the battle was more nearly won than the friends of
education imagined. The constitutional convention that met in 1850
prescribed in the organic law of Indiana a foundation which subsequent
legislatures have built upon until a comprehensive system of schools,
intelligently administered and adequately supported, is now the pride
of the State.[37] The friends of education were to meet with further
trials and discouragements; but the pioneer work in Indiana education
closed when the new constitution had been ratified by the people. It
is clear that any examination of the forces that raised Indiana into
an enlightened community must comprehend a knowledge of these early
struggles, and that the showier attainments of later citizens cannot
obscure for the sincere student the services of those who dared to
stand for the cause of free schools in the day of their peril.

Mills is an especially admirable and winning figure. He was hardly
equalled for sagacity and suavity among his contemporaries, and he
brought to bear upon his great task a steadfastness and quiet energy
that no defeat could overcome. The State recognized his abilities
and rewarded his services by confiding to him the office of State
superintendent of public instruction, of which he was the second
incumbent. He was deeply though sanely patriotic, and during the
Civil War his zeal for the Union cause was so marked that one of his
associates pronounced him the best recruiting officer in Indiana. He
belonged to Wabash College, and continued in its faculty until the
end of his long life (October 17, 1879), giving his last years, with
characteristic unselfishness and devotion, to the organization of the
college library.

The early Hoosier school-teachers were often poorly trained, and
sometimes were adventurers from England, Scotland, or Ireland.
Occasionally they were intemperate, and frequently they were eccentric
characters, whose vagaries made them ridiculous before their pupils;
but there were competent instructors among them. One of the most
charming figures in the history of cultivation in Indiana is Mrs.
Julia L. Dumont (1794-1857), who was born in Ohio, but for forty-three
years resided at Vevay, in Switzerland County. Among all the
light-bringers of the first half of the century in the Hoosier country
Mrs. Dumont was one of the most distinguished; and she was easily the
woman of most varied accomplishment in the Indiana of her day. She
possessed an instinct for teaching, and Dr. Eggleston remembers that
after she was sixty a schoolroom was built for her beside her husband’s
house, and that she taught the Vevay High School in her old age, when
no properly qualified teacher appeared to take charge of it. Dr.
Eggleston draws her portrait from memory:--

  “I can see the wonderful old lady now, as she was then, with her
  cape pinned awry, rocking her splint-bottom chair nervously while
  she talked, full of all manner of knowledge; gifted with something
  very like eloquence in speech, abounding in affection for her pupils
  and enthusiasm in teaching, she moved us strangely. Being infatuated
  with her we became fanatic in our pursuit of knowledge, so that the
  school hours were not enough, and we had a ‘lyceum’ in the evening
  for reading ‘compositions’ and a club for the study of history.
  If a recitation became very interesting, the entire school would
  sometimes be drawn into the discussion of the subject; all other
  lessons went to the wall; books of reference were brought out of her
  library; hours were consumed, and many a time the school session
  was prolonged until darkness forced us reluctantly to adjourn. Mrs.
  Dumont was the ideal of a teacher because she succeeded in forming
  character. She gave her pupils unstinted praise, not hypocritically,
  but because she lovingly saw the best in every one. We worked in the
  sunshine. A dull but industrious pupil was praised for diligence,
  a bright pupil for ability, a good one for general excellence. The
  dullards got more than their share, for, knowing how easily such an
  one is disheartened, Mrs. Dumont went out of her way to praise the
  first show of success in a slow scholar. She treated no two alike.
  She was full of all sorts of knack and tact, a person of infinite
  resource for calling out the human spirit.”[38]

Her natural grace and refinement gave to her discipline many a novel
turn. She endeavored, and most happily succeeded in the attempt, to
link the life of the time and place to “high thought and honorable
deeds.” Once, during her administration of the Vevay High School,
a game of ball proved so absorbing that the boys were an hour late
in reporting after the noon recess. They found the teacher calmly
enthroned in her rocking-chair. She did not ask for an explanation, but
spoke to them firmly of their indifference; they had humiliated her,
she said, before the whole town. No recesses would be allowed for a
week, and an apology must be forthcoming the following day. The apology
was duly submitted in writing. The remainder of the incident is best
described in Dr. Eggleston’s own words:--

  “The morning wore on without recess. The lessons were heard as usual.
  As the noon hour drew near, Mrs. Dumont rose from her chair and went
  into the library. We all felt that something was going to happen. She
  came out with a copy of Shakespeare, which she opened at about the
  fifth scene of the fourth act of the second part of King Henry IV.
  Giving the book to my next neighbor and myself, she bade us read the
  scene, alternating with the change of the speaker. You remember the
  famous dialogue in the scene between the dying king and the prince
  who has prematurely taken the crown from the bedside of the sleeping
  king. It was all wonderfully fresh to us and to our schoolmates,
  whose interest was divided between the scene and a curiosity as to
  the use the teacher meant to make of it. At length the reader who
  took the king’s part read:--

                                  “‘O, my son!
    Heaven put it in thy mind to take it hence,
    That thou mightst win the more thy father’s love,
    Pleading so wisely in excuse of it.’

  Then she took the book and closed it. The application was evident to
  all, but she made us a touching little speech, full of affection, and
  afterward restored the recess.”[39]

Mrs. Dumont was the first Hoosier to become known beyond the State
through imaginative writing. In the little school of story-tellers
and poets that flourished in the Ohio Valley in its early history,
she was one of the chief figures. It had not then become the fashion
to transcribe with fidelity our American local life, and her prose
sketches usually reflected nothing of the pioneer times. Her “Life
Sketches from Common Paths: A Series of American Tales,” published
at New York in 1856, is in the best manner of the day. Western is
italicized in the preface of “Ashton Gray,” the novelette which closes
the volume, and the author evidently believed that she was making
a record of the life that lay about her; but after all, the scene
is laid in Ohio and not in Indiana, and a Western atmosphere is not
discernible. The hero is the traditional hero of old romance, “whose
innate delicacy was refinement, and whose generous impulses, chivalry,”
and whose “extreme beauty” was a subject of comment from fair lips.
It is not surprising that Annabel, “the dreamy, the impressible,
the desolate Annabel,” should have found Ashton “her beau-ideal of
the distinctive characteristics of the fearless and self-sustained
backwoodsman.... The untamed horse that tosses his mane in the green
savannas could scarcely have moved with more freedom; and the perfect
development of limb and muscle evidently arose from the conscious vigor
and habitual action of one accustomed to tread, not the gay saloon
and prescribed walks of fashion, but the rough paths of danger, and
the limitless range of voiceless solitudes.” Ashton rescues three
children from a burning cabin, using a ladder, in keeping with the
best traditions, thus winning the heart of Annabel, who marries him
clandestinely, just before he is arrested for murder. He is acquitted
by the testimony of his supposed father, and an old Indian appears
opportunely to confess that Ashton was really the son of Colonel
Ainsworth, Annabel’s guardian.

There was a particular vocabulary that belonged to this school of
romance, and Mrs. Dumont employed it in all its copiousness. When
rightly used it minimized the importance of invention; and it was
better adapted to the portrayal of delicate and shrinking heroines
and noble and handsome heroes, than to the rougher work of depicting
action. A nice instinct was essential to its proper use, and no one of
her generation wielded it with more grace and ease than Mrs. Dumont.
Scott and Irving were the inspiration of the school in which she took
so high a place; and the verse which it produced so abundantly showed
frequently the influence of Mrs. Hemans. Mrs. Dumont’s technical skill
was superior to that of her Western contemporaries; but it is idle
and ungracious to criticise the writings of one whose talents were so
varied, and whose life was consecrated to good works.

Her name inevitably suggests that of another teacher, her kinswoman,
Miss Catharine Merrill (1824-1900), who, with a wider field and larger
opportunity, filled a similar place at Indianapolis for fifty years.
She was born at Corydon, the old capital. Samuel Merrill, her father,
was a cultivated man, a native of Vermont, and an early settler of
Indianapolis. He subscribed to the English reviews and owned a large
library, whose contents circulated freely among the pioneers. He
had been educated at Dartmouth, and occasionally taught the higher
branches, but he was a man of affairs, served the public in important
offices, and was one of the ablest of the State’s early financiers.
The daughter taught English literature in Butler College for eighteen
years, and during this time, and subsequently as a teacher of private
classes, inculcated in the minds of three generations a discriminating
taste for literature. Miss Merrill wrote (1869) “The Soldier of
Indiana,” a valuable record of the State’s participation in the war
of the rebellion, which contains much biographical matter that is
nowhere else collected. Mrs. Dumont and Miss Merrill afford delightful
illustrations of the compelling force of personality. In a sense one
succeeded the other, and, though they labored in different fields,
throughout a century they impressed upon the youth of the commonwealth
the nobility of character and the love of learning which they so
happily combined in themselves.

Samuel K. Hoshour is another sterling figure in Indiana pedagogy. He
was a native of Pennsylvania, and a minister, first in the Lutheran and
afterward in the Disciples Church; but he was a school-teacher first,
last, and always, and taught many hundreds of the youth of Indiana. He
was, in his later years, a resident of Indianapolis, and died there in
1883. Oliver P. Morton, Lew Wallace, and others of the distinguished
men of the State sat under his teaching. In the eyes of two generations
he was the embodiment of learning and scholarship; and he retained to
the last something of the austerity and exaggerated dignity of the
old-fashioned school-teacher. He was, indeed, always the schoolmaster,
and a pedant, though naïvely seeking to avoid the appearance of it.
He was a linguist of wide reputation, and delighted in comparative
philology. He had a fancy for unusual words, and took pleasure in
illuminating their meanings from obscure origins. He wrote a book,
prized by many of his old pupils, called “Altisonant Letters” (1840),
which, as the title indicates, was written in high-sounding words.
It is in the form of correspondence, and was devised as a kind of
philological primer, to be “a stepping-stone from the current everyday
English to the Latin and Greek.” The plan was not a bad one, and was
in some respects a forerunner of the inductive methods of teaching
languages that have since been popular.




CHAPTER IV

AN EXPERIMENT IN SOCIALISM


New Harmony, the scene of Robert Owen’s experiment in socialism,
lies in Posey County, in the far southwestern corner of Indiana. The
village is without direct communication with the outer world, but may
be approached by boat on the Wabash River, or by a branch railroad
which ends abruptly at New Harmony after a rough course through wheat
fields, which are, in spring and summer, a charming feature of the
landscape of this region. George Rapp gave expression to his peculiar
religious ideas in the community which he established there, and he
sold his large estate to Owen, who began building on the foundations
left by Rapp a social structure after plans of his own. Owen’s ideas
are not strikingly novel when taken in connection with the history
of socialism; but the movement carried to Indiana many distinguished
persons, and the life of subsequent generations in and about the
village has, to this day, been colored by it.

George Rapp came to the United States from Germany, in 1803, in
search of a more tolerant home for the sect which he had founded. He
purchased a tract of land in Butler County, Pennsylvania, and during
the summer of 1804 six hundred of his followers, chiefly mechanics
and laborers, joined him, and in the following year the community
known as the Harmony Society was formally organized. The members were
banded together in a Christian brotherhood, and were orthodox in all
essentials. Property was held in common, and thought was directed away
from mundane affairs to the second coming of the Lord, which Rapp
believed to be imminent. The members experienced, in 1807, a great
spiritual awakening, and one of its results was their acceptance of
celibacy as an implied if not obligatory tenet of the sect.

In 1814, the community sold the greater part of its holdings of real
estate in Pennsylvania and purchased 30,000 acres of land in Indiana,
of which Harmony became the centre. The following year the Rappites
moved to the lower Wabash and continued in a new wilderness their
severe labors and ascetic practices. They marked out a village in
squares, with broad streets, and built houses in which beauty was
sacrificed to stability. It is a tribute to their excellent workmanship
that many of these structures are still in use, having survived two
communistic experiments and falling at last to the incidental needs
of a Western village. The Rappites had been annoyed during their
sojourn in Pennsylvania by unsympathetic neighbors, and fearing similar
experiences with the rough characters that roamed the Wabash country in
those days, they deemed it wise to prepare a defence. They thereupon
built, of brick and stone, a substantial fortress which was used as a
granary. The walls were three feet thick and the loopholes were barred.
The story that this building was connected with Rapp’s house by an
underground passage is authoritatively denied at New Harmony.

The Rappites had first used a frame building as a place of worship,
but later they erected a large brick meeting-house, carving on the
pediment above the main door a wreath and a rose, the date, 1822, and
the inscription, “Mich IV, 8; in Memory of the Harmony Society; by
George Rapp, 1805.” The colonists were industrious and thrifty. They
cleared the land, planted vineyards, manufactured woollen and cotton
goods and shoes, and found a ready market for all their products. The
original population of the Pennsylvania settlement had been about six
hundred persons; and during the community’s life in Indiana accessions
of friends from Germany increased the number of members to between
seven and eight hundred. In 1824 Rapp again decided to move, and
appointed Richard Flower to negotiate a sale. Flower visited Scotland,
sought Robert Owen, a manufacturer and social reformer, and sold him
the Rappites’ land for $132,000. Subsequently there was an additional
sale of live-stock, tools, and merchandise for $50,000, so that the
total of Owen’s original investment at New Harmony was $182,000. The
Rappites thereupon disappeared from Indiana, returning to Pennsylvania,
where they established a new settlement called Economy, and prospered
greatly.

Robert Owen was born in Wales, March 14, 1771. His father was a
saddler, and Robert began his career under no favoring circumstances.
He became interested in cotton spinning, for which he showed genius and
at which he made a fortune. He married the daughter of David Dale, the
owner of extensive cotton mills at New Lanark, on the Clyde, became
Dale’s successor, and with growing fortune gave an increasing attention
to social and political questions. He was a pioneer in the reform of
factory abuses; and in his own establishment at New Lanark he made
practical application of his theories. He visited the Continent, where
he became acquainted with many persons of note, not the least of these
being Pestalozzi and Fellenberg; he was much in London, usually in
advocacy of some reform; he acquired skill in writing and speaking,
and taken altogether his biography gives the impression of a strong,
zealous, and indefatigable nature. He was intense and uncompromising,
and, it must be confessed, sadly lacking in humor. He expected to find
in the new world larger opportunities for the demonstration of his
principles. The New Harmony incident illustrates a curious conflict
between the ideal and the practical in Owen. It was quite like him to
undertake the planting of a communistic settlement in America, and to
invest his own money in it; but a natural business caution checked his
generous impulses, and while he extended a sweeping invitation to the
industrious and well-disposed of all creeds to join him, he was in no
haste to divide his property.

Owen’s lectures in the hall of the House of Representatives at
Washington, February 5 and March 27, 1825, before audiences composed
of the famous men of the day, gave wide publicity to his views. He
displayed a model of the ideal village which he proposed to found
on the Wabash. The community buildings were to form a hollow square
1000 feet long. The material needs of his proposed colony were all
provided for in the buildings of his model village; and he announced a
comprehensive system of education in which the young of the community
should be led from the lowest to the highest branches. Owen had
announced that “these new proceedings,” as he called his plans, were
to take effect at New Harmony--he gave the prefix to Rapp’s name for
the place--in April, 1826. He spent the summer of 1825 in England, but
returned to America in the fall, reaching New York November 7. His
hospitable invitation had awakened the interest of a large number of
persons, ranging from sincere converts to eccentric and irresponsible
vagabonds, drawn from all parts of the United States and Europe. What
is known in New Harmony literature as “the boat load of knowledge” set
out from Pittsburg in December, 1825. About thirty people assembled on
a keel boat, which they made comfortable for the voyage, and turned
toward New Harmony. The ice closed upon them near Beaver, and they did
not reach their destination until the middle of January. The passengers
included Robert Owen and his sons, Robert Dale and William, William
Maclure, Thomas Say, Charles A. Lesueur, Achilles Fretageot and wife,
Captain Donald Macdonald, Dr. Gerard Troost, Phiquepal d’Arusmont, and
Stedman Whitwell, a London architect.[40] Joseph Neef followed in the
spring, and Frances Wright, of Nashoba fame, who married d’Arusmont,
first appeared there in the second year of the community. Schoolcraft
and Rafinesque were both visitors at New Harmony, but not during the
life of the Owen community, though Rafinesque has been erroneously
named as an original member.

The strength of the keel boat’s contribution to the community lay
in special scientific knowledge; and if Owen’s inclination toward
socialism had been increased by the success of Rapp’s submissive
peasants, he erred gravely in his own choice of followers. William
Maclure (1763-1840) was a wealthy Scotchman, who turned from a
successful mercantile career to the natural sciences. He first visited
the United States in the last years of the eighteenth century, and
planned a geographical survey of the whole country. He explored at
his own expense a vast territory, and prepared maps showing the result
of his investigations. He was a founder of the Academy of Natural
Sciences, at Philadelphia, to which he gave generously of his fortune,
and was its president for more than twenty years. His friend, Thomas
Say (1787-1834), called “the father of American zoölogy,” was also
connected with the Academy in its formative years. The place of both
is secure in the history of American science. Lesueur came to the
United States from the West Indies. His scientific researches had
included extensive investigations in Australia, and he was an early,
if not indeed the first, student of the Mound-builders’ remains in
Indiana. He was an artist of considerable merit, and some of his
work may be seen in the New Harmony library. Troost (1776-1850) was
a scientist of wide and exact knowledge, who went to Tennessee after
the collapse of New Harmony, taught the sciences for many years in the
University of Nashville, and was for eighteen years State geologist.
Neef was a native of Alsace. He had been a teacher in Pestalozzi’s
school, in Switzerland, and met there his wife, who was educated under
the direction of Madame Pestalozzi. They removed to Philadelphia
immediately after their marriage, and became acquainted with Maclure,
who, like Owen, had been attracted by the Pestalozzi system, and who
persuaded them to join the Owenites. Little is known of Macdonald,
though there is a tradition at New Harmony that he returned to Scotland
and inherited a title of nobility.

Owen’s followers moved into the houses that had been vacated by Rapp’s
colonists, and set about organizing the new community. On April 27 Owen
addressed them in the Rappite church, which had been preëmpted for
sectarian uses and dedicated to liberal thought and free speech. He
spoke with great enthusiasm, declaring that he had come to introduce
a new and enlightened state of society, eliminate ignorance and
selfishness, and remove all cause for contest between individuals;
but the change from the new to the old could not be accomplished in
a day, and he called New Harmony a halfway house between the evils
he complained of and the ideal. In May, the _modus vivendi_ of a
preliminary society was promulgated, as a means of preparation for the
perfect community to which Owen looked forward. Negroes were excluded
from membership, though they might become “helpers,” or they might
form an independent community. Age and experience alone were to confer
precedence. For the first year a committee to be appointed by the
founder was to have charge of affairs, and later the society might
elect three representatives of this council. Members were required
to provide their own household effects, to accept houses assigned to
them, and to render their best services to the community. They were to
receive credit at the community store for their labor, which was to be
appraised by the committee of management. Members might be expelled
for cause, or they might voluntarily retire by giving a week’s notice,
receiving in merchandise any balance that remained to their credit.
Persons wishing to live in the community as non-participants in its
labors might do so by paying for the privilege, and the capital of any
who cared to become investors would be received. American products
were to have the preference in the purchase of supplies. The young
were to be drilled in military tactics, to the end that they might be
of service to their country in emergencies, until society had been
reformed and war made unnecessary.

Within six months nearly one thousand persons had gathered at New
Harmony, and a considerable proportion of these seem to have been
incapable, either through inexperience or disinclination, of aiding
in the success of Owen’s plans. Rapp’s industries had certainly not
fallen into the hands of skilled or adaptable laborers. Many of the
manufactories which he had made profitable were not operated under
the new régime, and less than a hundred farm laborers volunteered for
service in carrying on the plantations. Plans for education and social
pleasure were received more kindly than those requiring skilled labor.
All children between two and twelve were placed in a separate house,
and clothed, lodged, and educated at the public expense. The fall of
1825 found 130 children so cared for, and there were also day and
evening schools where old and young alike might receive elementary
instruction. A band was organized to provide music, and Tuesday
evenings were set apart for balls and Friday evenings for concerts.
Wednesday evenings were reserved for the more serious business of
discussing the purposes of the society. Military exercises, as proposed
by Owen, were duly conducted, and companies of artillery and infantry
were formed and drilled.

The senior Owen was absent in Scotland during the summer and fall
of 1825, but returned January 18, 1826, and was received with great
cordiality. He expressed his satisfaction with the progress that had
been made during his absence, and in a few days announced that he felt
justified in suspending the preparatory stage and inaugurating full
equality. A new constitution was adopted February 5, after careful
consideration in town meetings. It provided for community of property
and business and social coöperation. The members were to dwell together
as one family, and no discrimination was to be shown on account
of occupation. Similar houses were to be provided for all, and no
differences in food or clothing were to be permitted. The community
was to be divided into departments of Agriculture, Manufactures and
Mechanics, Literature and Science, Domestic and General Economy,
Education and Commerce. Superintendents for these departments were
to be chosen by an assembly consisting of all adult members of the
community; but the individuals in the several departments might select
their own foremen. A schism occurred before this constitution had been
signed by the members of the preliminary society. The exact cause is
not assigned in the _Gazette_, the official organ of the society,
conducted by Robert Dale Owen, which announced, February 15, that a
new community was about to be formed within two miles of the village
“by some respectable families who were members of the preliminary
society, but from conscientious motives have declined signing the new
constitution.” Two new communities were, indeed, organized, one called
Macluria and the other Feiba Peveli. This latter name was coined after
an intricate system of geographical nomenclature, invented by a member
of the society, by which the latitude and longitude of any place could
be represented. The sole direction of the community was intrusted to
Robert Owen two weeks after the reorganization, the inference from
this fact being that the separation of the two branches had eliminated
those who were antagonistic to the founder. At the end of the first
year the population was distributed about as follows: the original New
Harmony settlement, 800; Macluria, 120; Feiba Peveli, 60 or 70. The
relations between Owen and the seceders were apparently friendly. In
an address delivered at New Harmony, May 9, he spoke with satisfaction
of the success of his undertaking, saying that his hopes had been
surpassed, and mentioning both Macluria and Feiba Peveli with approval.
At Macluria temporary cabins had been built and more land had been
cultivated than was necessary to sustain the members. Spinning and
weaving were practised by the women and children, who produced cloth in
excess of their requirements. Feiba Peveli was a farming and gardening
community, reported by Owen to be doing well.

At this time the first Rappite church was given up to carpentry and
shoemaking. Boys received industrial training there and slept in the
loft. The second and more pretentious edifice had become a town hall,
used for lectures, open discussions, dances, and concerts. Rapp’s
former home--the best residence in the place--was occupied by Maclure,
who had given $45,000 to assist Owen in his enterprise. Owen lived at
the tavern, which was conducted by the society. The rank and file were
accommodated in four boarding-houses pending changes that would bring
all together at a common table. A uniform dress for the members had
been adopted, but it was not generally worn. Wide trousers, buttoned
over a short collarless jacket, were prescribed for the men; the women
wore a coat reaching to the knee, and pantalettes. Bernard, Duke of
Saxe-Weimar, who visited New Harmony in the spring of 1826, and wrote
a most entertaining account of the community, described the costume
and remarked that the members who had already donned it were of the
higher social class, and that these did not, in the gatherings at
the public hall, mingle with the ruder element. Previous conditions
and employments were evidently remembered in the community, in spite
of the founder’s insistence that there should be no discrimination.
Many in the settlement found the practical details of community life
exceedingly irksome; and one, a Russian lady, confided to the German
nobleman her disgust with New Harmony, stating that “some of the
society were too low, and the table was below all criticism.”

The educational features of the community were, from all testimony,
a great failure and disappointment. It was one thing to assemble
distinguished scientists, and quite another to organize them into an
effective teaching corps. The school taught by d’Arusmont lasted but
a short time, and Robert Dale Owen, who was himself a teacher in one
of the community schools, while admitting the man’s good qualities,
described him as “a wrong-headed genius, whose extravagance and
wilfulness and inordinate self-conceit destroyed his usefulness.”
Neef had been an officer under Napoleon, and his rough military habits
had not been wholly corrected by his subsequent association with
Pestalozzi. The Duke of Saxe-Weimar gives a lively picture of him,
drilling his boy pupils in military tactics as he led them to the
performance of certain labors in the village. Maclure, Say, and Troost
did not engage actively in teaching. Paul Brown stated, in a pamphlet
assailing the society, that he began teaching in the boarding-school in
September, 1826; but from his own story Brown was chiefly employed with
meditations on the evils of the place, and his manifestations of temper
argue against his value as a teacher. Madame Fretageot was associated
with Neef, and the two had charge of the boarding-school. Madame Neef
was not regularly employed as a teacher, but sometimes assisted her
husband.

Robert Owen’s unfriendly attitude toward religion had awakened
hostility in England before he came to the United States. Packard, one
of his biographers, expresses no doubt as to Owen’s disbelief in the
inspiration of the Bible and in the divine origin of Christianity.
Lloyd Jones, the writer of another life of Owen, seeks to mitigate the
effect of some of the statements in Owen’s “New Moral World”; but it
is sufficiently clear that when he was at the height of his fame and
usefulness in England, Owen estranged many of his most influential
friends and admirers by his flings at religion, which were serious
enough to arouse the wrath of an occasional heresy-hunting bishop.
Sargent, the author of “Robert Owen and his Philosophy,” says that
Owen suffered for his religious opinions “neglect, hatred, contempt,
calumny, and all the evils that follow the excommunicated man.” In his
“Declaration of Mental Independence” at New Harmony, July 4, 1826, Owen
inveighed against “a trinity of the most monstrous evils that could be
combined to inflict mental and physical evil upon the whole race. I
refer to private or individual property, absurd and irrational systems
of religion, and marriage founded on individual property combined with
some of these irrational systems of religion”--a statement that was
somewhat advanced for the Wabash Valley of that period. He seemed to
ignore the spiritual element in man, though, according to Sargent, he
expressed in his old age his belief that a Divine Providence had guided
him through his long career; and late in life he became a convert to
spiritualism. There is no evidence that Owen ever held loose ideas of
the relations of the sexes, though such opinions were attributed to
him. He believed that marriage should be founded on mutual sympathy
and congeniality, and he wished the imagination to be excluded and
judgment made the sole guide in such matters. This, like many of
his teachings, seems equivocal; but he believed that where these
prerequisites ceased to exist it should be possible to terminate a
marriage. Owen and Maclure both believed fully in the equality of the
sexes. New Harmony schools were co-educational, and women were admitted
to all the councils of the society. It is not clear that they were
always permitted to vote, though widows succeeded to the suffrages of
their husbands. A woman’s society was organized, and is supposed to
have been similar to literary clubs as now known, though there is but
one reference to the organization in the _Gazette_--a notice of the
postponement of a meeting in November, 1825.

Owen’s refusal to make a formal transfer of his property to the
community continued to be a cause of dissatisfaction. The founder spoke
hopefully of the future, but he took care that his enthusiasm should
not run away with his judgment, so he continued to hold his little
principality in fee simple. When questioned as to his intentions in
this particular, he replied, as officially reported in the _Gazette_ of
August 30, 1826: “I shall be ready to form such a community whenever
you are ready for it.... But progress must be made in community
education before all parties can be prepared for a community of common
property.” The assembly thereupon adopted a resolution that they meet
three evenings in the week for community education, but this was
evidently regarded by the members as a severe penalty to pay for the
cause of socialism. Robert Dale Owen wrote that the meetings continued
“with gradually lessening numbers.”

Troubles came thick and fast in the fall of 1826. Several adventurers
openly tried to defraud Owen, and an era of suspicion began. A man
named Taylor joined the community, at Owen’s invitation, to take
charge of the industries, but after getting possession of a tract of
land he started a distillery, greatly to the founder’s annoyance.
Brown describes with great particularity the unhappy condition that
prevailed during the fall and winter of 1826. He complains that Owen
was living in luxury at the tavern, while the laborers in the large
boarding-houses fared badly. Although there were several professional
gardeners in the community, there was a lack of vegetables, and the
necessities were doled out sparingly. Brown believed that the founder
was trying to retrieve his fortunes, and he speaks of him as “willing
to shift into the character of a retailer and tavern keeper.” The
_Gazette_ was, in Brown’s belief, the personal organ of Owen, whom he
calls “the lord proprietor of the press”; but this may be merely the
wail of the rejected, for Brown admits that his own contributions were
repeatedly scorned, so that to gain publicity he was obliged to post
them on the gateway of the educational society, taking them in at night
for safety. He says that in spite of the balls and promenade concerts
the people remained strangers, and he deplores the amount of time and
candles wasted in these frivolities. As to the educational features
of the place, Brown expresses his opinion that there was no other
place in the United States where a like number of children in the same
compass “were of so harsh, insolent, rash, boisterous, and barbarous
dispositions.” Brown deals drastically with the auditing department of
the community. He intimates that when a debit balance appeared against
a member on the books, credit was immediately stopped at the store. He
gives the instance of a gardener named Gilbert, who was suddenly served
with his discharge in December, when his family were ill, because he
was performing no labor and had fallen in arrears. Gilbert asked for an
investigation, which was held, and the court found in his favor.

Twenty heads of families were notified to quit February 1, 1827; March
21 there was an exodus of about eighty persons, who took a steamboat
for the upper Ohio, and March 28 the _Gazette_ contained an editorial
admitting the failure of New Harmony, the central community, but
maintaining that the auxiliary societies were successful. The reason
assigned for the collapse was that “the members were too various
in their feelings, and too dissimilar in their habits, to govern
themselves harmoniously as one community.” Owen delivered a farewell
address to the citizens, May 26. He spoke with patient forbearance of
the element that had joined the community merely to become a burden
upon him; but he was severe upon his associates who had undertaken
the educational work of the society but had failed to organize such
schools as he had expected. He had wished the children to be “educated
in similar habits, dispositions, and feelings, and be brought up truly
as members of one large family, without a single discordant feeling.”
If the schools had not proved ineffectual, he believed that even with
the heterogeneous mass that had collected on his lands a successful
society could have been founded. However, turning from these unpleasant
reflections, with characteristic optimism, he declared that “the
social system is now firmly established; the natural and easy means
of forming communities have been developed by your past experience....
New Harmony is now, therefore, literally surrounded by independent
communities, and applications are made almost daily by persons who
come from far and near to be permitted to establish themselves in a
similar manner.” The eight communities referred to were probably little
more than tentative colonies, planted on Owen’s lands under lease.
There is no evidence that a community organization was maintained for
any length of time at Macluria or Feiba Peveli after the collapse at
New Harmony village, and of the remainder of the eight to which Owen
referred there is no further record. They vanished with the others, and
presently passed to individual owners or lessees. Brown summarizes the
disappearance of communism and the return of the old order in these
words: “The greater part of the town was now resolved into individual
lots; a grocery was established opposite the tavern; painted sign
boards began to be stuck up on the buildings, pointing out places of
manufacture and trade; a sort of wax figure and puppet show was opened
at one of the boarding-houses, charging twenty-five cents for adults
and twelve and a half for children; and everything went on in the old
style.”

Owen’s teachings and example led to other experiments in America
besides those he personally conducted on the Wabash; but American
socialism of the Owen period was most fully expressed at New Harmony.
Owen’s ardor for social reforms continued unabated. He visited Mexico
shortly after the New Harmony failure, to secure a concession of land
for further experiments. The negotiations failed, and he is next heard
of at Cincinnati, in April, 1829, debating religious questions with
Alexander Campbell. He did not appear in America again until the fall
of 1844, when he spent a short time on his New Harmony lands, lectured
in many cities, established friendly relations with Brisbane and other
Fourierites, and, in the spring of 1845, visited Brook Farm. He was
last at New Harmony in the fall of 1846.

It could hardly be expected that a village which had been the home of
two orders of exiles could descend at once to the commonplace, and the
subsequent history of New Harmony is not disappointing. Through many
years scientists of distinction and radicals of all degrees visited the
place; Maclure made it his headquarters; Say lived and died there; the
sons of Robert Owen became residents and gained honorable distinction
in science and politics; books that still have value were written and
published in the village. Robert Dale Owen (1801-1877) turned from
communism to politics and literature, and few citizens of Indiana
have lived lives more useful or memorable. He was educated at Hofwyl,
under Fellenberg, and after a few years of commercial experience at
New Lanark, he joined the New Harmony community. He shared, in large
measure, his father’s interests in social and economic matters, and
after the fall of New Harmony he and Frances Wright conducted a radical
paper called the _Free Enquirer_ at New York. In 1833 he returned to
New Harmony and was soon launched upon a brilliant career. He was
elected a representative to the Indiana General Assembly and to the
National Congress, and he was an influential and active member of the
convention that revised the Indiana constitution. The Indiana laws
granting independent property rights to women were largely due to his
efforts, and he introduced in Congress, in December, 1845, the bill
under which the Smithsonian Institute was organized. He was appointed
chargé d’affaires at Naples in 1853, and when the grade of the post
was raised he was continued as minister until 1858. In 1863, he was
chairman of a commission appointed by the Secretary of War to examine
the condition of the freedmen. He had written to the President, urging
emancipation before this step had been determined upon, and Secretary
Chase said that Owen’s letter to Lincoln had greatly influenced the
President to make his proclamation. Mr. Owen wrote often and well, and
with a facility and force that gave him wide reputation for learning
and literary accomplishment. His books include “Pocahontas: A Dream”
(1837); “Hints on Architecture” (1849); “Footprints on the Boundary
of Another World” (1859); “Beyond the Breakers: A Novel” (1870);
“Debatable Land Between this World and the Next” (1872); and “Threading
my Way” (1874). He became deeply interested in spiritualism, and two
of his books, as the titles indicate, are devoted to this subject. He
travelled much and knew many of the men and women eminent in the early
years of the nineteenth century, including La Fayette and Mrs. Shelley.
His daughter Rosamund married Laurence Oliphant.

David Dale, another son of Robert (1807-1860), was educated at Hofwyl
and Glasgow, and reached New Harmony in the year of the community’s
failure. He was employed by the Indiana legislature to make a
geological survey of the State, and in 1839 the general government
engaged him to examine Western mineral lands. He explored Illinois,
Iowa, and Wisconsin under this appointment. Ten years later he made
similar surveys in Minnesota. During all this time New Harmony was his
home and headquarters, and the rendezvous of his associates, and his
collections of specimens were assembled there. He was State geologist
of Kentucky from 1854 to 1857, and then turned to Arkansas, of which
he made thorough geological surveys. In 1859 he was appointed State
geologist of Indiana, and held the office until his death. He was a
skilled chemist and a doctor of medicine as well as a trained natural
scientist and geologist. He knew the use of pencil and brush, and
illustrated his reports with sketches that greatly enhanced their value.

Military talent expressed itself in the Owen family in Richard, still
another of Robert’s sons (1810-1890), who was also a graduate of
Hofwyl. He came to America and engaged in business until the Mexican
War, in which he served as captain, and later assisted his brother,
David Dale, in his surveys of the Northwest. He taught the natural
sciences in the Military Institute of Kentucky, and when it was merged
in the University of Nashville he continued in the same capacity with
the new institution. Meanwhile he had, with the energy and ambition
characteristic of his family, earned the degree of Doctor of Medicine,
though he never practised. He served in the Civil War as colonel of the
Sixtieth Indiana Regiment, principally in the Southwest, and was once
taken prisoner. After the war he taught in the University of Indiana
for fifteen years, retiring finally to New Harmony, where, in the old
Rapp mansion, he continued his studies, writing constantly for the
scientific periodicals. He married a daughter of Neef. William Owen,
who had reached New Harmony in time to aid his brother, Robert Dale,
in editing the _Gazette_, continued to live in Indiana, and became a
successful financier. Descendants of Robert Owen still live at New
Harmony, and the name is one to conjure within all the lower Wabash
Valley.

The excellent work of the New Harmony press proves that good
craftsmanship was encouraged and appreciated in the early days.
The _Gazette_, and its successor, the _Disseminator_, are models
of accurate and tasteful typography, and the books published from
this isolated village are even more creditable. Say’s “American
Conchology” was wholly printed at New Harmony, the title page bearing
date 1830. Its copious illustrations are the work of New Harmony
lithographers, and the tinting of the engravings, which was done by
Mrs. Say, reproduces accurately the delicate shadings of the shells.
Her colors are still fresh and true in copies of this work. Parts of
Say’s “American Entomology,” which he had begun at Philadelphia, were
finished at New Harmony. Maclure was an industrious writer, and the
imprint of the New Harmony press is found in two substantial volumes,
one dated 1831, the other 1837, in which he collected short essays
on innumerable topics. Josiah Warren was for a time at least the New
Harmony publisher, and Michaux’s “North American Sylva” was reprinted
by him from plates brought from Paris by Maclure, though the unbound
sheets of the New Harmony edition were consumed by fire.

Warren was a reformer as well as a publisher. He was connected with New
Harmony for a short time in community days, but left, returning in 1842
to establish a “time store.” In the “time store” he sold merchandise
to none who could not return the actual cash cost, plus a profit which
must be paid in a “labor note.” This form of currency represented a
specified number of hours of labor, pledged by mechanics or others.
When a customer entered his shop and began discussing a purchase,
Warren started a clock which marked the amount of time consumed in the
sale: this was the basis for computing the merchant’s profit. Warren
could often be seen in the streets of New Harmony with large amounts of
labor currency. This medium of exchange required careful handling, as
some would appraise their labor too high, and now and then depreciation
followed an over-issue by some careless or unscrupulous individual.
Warren conducted this enterprise for about two years, departing to
carry the gospel of “equitable commerce,” as he called it, elsewhere.

In 1838 the Workingmen’s Institute and Library was organized at
Maclure’s suggestion and with money that he contributed. Later, Dr.
Edward Murphy generously gave to this association a handsome building,
which contains the library, an art gallery,--largely Dr. Murphy’s
gift,--a hall, and museum. The building stands in a pretty park and is
ideally adapted to its purposes. The library contains 12,000 volumes,
well selected and particularly rich in scientific works. It includes
every available book relating to American socialism, and many of the
original New Harmony records are preserved there. Dr. Murphy has
provided an endowment for it and for an annual course of lectures.
The lecture course is greatly prized by the citizens, who have heard
under its auspices many of the learned men of the day. There was no
church in the village for many years; indeed, with the passing of Rapp
little attention was paid to religious matters at New Harmony until
late in the century, and though there are Episcopal and Methodist
organizations in the village now, the life of the people does not
centre about the churches as in most communities of the same size. An
old citizen describes the attitude of the inhabitants toward religion
as one of tolerance merely. Several branches of the Owen family are
Episcopalians. Dancing as a feature of social life has survived from
community times, and a first-of-May ball, followed by a dance for
children, has long been fixed in the local calendar.

Thus Robert Owen’s brief experiment, failing of his purpose, led to
the founding of an American family whose members have shown unusual
talents, creditable alike to their distinguished progenitor and to the
State which became, by chance, their home. He failed to establish an
asylum for the oppressed, as he had intended, but he was responsible
for the impulse that made of his village a centre of scientific inquiry
and the home of men of renown. It is impossible to separate the New
Harmony of to-day from the village of the past. At every turn, the
buildings of the Rappites and the traces of Owen’s disciples suggest
the old times; and descendants of the Owens, Fretageots, Beales,
Fauntleroys, Dransfields, Wheatcrofts, and many others dating back to
community times, still live there. New Harmony is a pleasant place in
May and June, when the great lines of maples in the broad streets are
at their best, and all the quiet valley is fresh and green. It invites
by its air of antiquity and peace; the sheltered life is still possible
there. In the present, it is the ideal Western village; in its memories
it marks the first high tide of cultivation at the West.




CHAPTER V

THE HOOSIER INTERPRETED


The rural type in Indiana has found notable interpretation at the
hands of two writers who, working independently of each other and at
different periods, have made records of great social and literary
value and interest. As already indicated, country life at the West and
Southwest has not varied widely in different communities. The same
social conditions and peculiarities of speech have been observable in
many regions deriving population from common sources; but the type
found in the Ohio Valley was best defined in Indiana, and it has gained
its greatest fame through the interpretations of Edward Eggleston and
James Whitcomb Riley. Their outlook on life has been wholly different,
and their literary methods have been antipodal; but they have both
been keen observers of the rural Indianians, though of different
generations. They meet in a strong affection for their native
soil, and in an appreciation of the essential domesticity and moral
enlightenment of the people they depict.


I. _Edward Eggleston_

Switzerland County lies in the far southeastern corner of the State,
and Vevay, its principal town and capital, is on the Ohio River. The
name of the county is explained by the fact of its settlement by Swiss
immigrants, who were drawn thither by the supposed adaptability of
the soil to the growth of the grape. Vevay lies about midway between
Louisville and Cincinnati, and the steamboats plying between these
two cities are its only medium of communication with the world, as no
railway touches it. It was to this pretty village that Joseph Cary
Eggleston, the father of Edward and George Cary Eggleston, came in
1832. The impression has been abroad that the author of “The Hoosier
Schoolmaster” was himself reared amid the squalor and ignorance which
he described so vividly, but this is without foundation of fact. The
Egglestons were of good Virginia stock, and the members of the Indiana
branch of the family were cultivated people. Joseph Cary was graduated
from William and Mary College in his seventeenth year with high honors.
He had studied law before he left Virginia, and the fourteen years
of his life that remained to him after his removal to Indiana were
spent in the successful practice of his profession. He was, moreover,
popular in the community, for he sat in both branches of the General
Assembly, and was nominated for representative in Congress, but failed
of election. He married, soon after reaching Indiana, the daughter of
George Craig, of Craig township, in Switzerland County. The Craigs were
of a distinguished Kentucky family, and, like the Egglestons, looked
back to a Virginia ancestry. Edward Eggleston was born at Vevay in
1837, and has never failed to speak with great cordiality and affection
of the pretty river town whose chief distinction lies in his own
attainments. He has even taken occasion in recent years[41] to rebuke
“a certain condescension in New Englanders,” which had prompted the
_Atlantic Monthly_ to comment on the hardship it must have been “to a
highly organized man” to be born in southern Indiana in the crude early
years of the nineteenth century. Dr. Eggleston declares that he has
retained enough of local prejudice to feel that he would have lost more
than he could have gained had Plymouth Rock or Beacon Hill been his
birthplace rather than Vevay. He was sensitive to the loveliness of the
Indiana spring and summer, and has paid tribute to it in words which it
is a pleasure to repeat:--

  “The sound of the anvil in the smithy, and the soft clatter of
  remote cow-bells on the ‘commons,’ linger in my mind as memories
  inseparable from my boyhood in Vevay. A certain poetic feeling
  which characterized me from childhood, and which, perhaps, finally
  determined my course toward literary pursuits, was nourished by my
  delight in the noble scenery about Vevay, Madison, and New Albany,
  in which places I lived at various times. My brother George and
  myself were walkers, partly because our father had been one before
  us. Nothing could be finer than our all-day excursions to the woods
  in search of hickory-nuts, wild grapes, blackberries, paw-paws, or
  of nothing at all but the sheer pleasure of wandering in one of
  the noblest forests that it ever fell to a boy’s lot to have for a
  playground. Then, too, when we had some business five or twenty miles
  away, we scorned to take the steamboat, but just set out afoot along
  the river bank, getting no end of pleasure out of the walk, and
  out of that sense of power which unusual fatigue, cheerfully borne,
  always gives.”[42]

Dr. Eggleston’s early life was full of vicissitude, but he has himself
disclaimed credit for being what is called “a self-made man.” It is
true that he had his own way to make, in great measure, but he began
with all the benefits of good ancestry, and he was, in his own phrase,
“born into an intellectual atmosphere.” Joseph Cary Eggleston, who
died when Edward was only nine years old, provided in his will for
the exchange of his law library for books of general interest, that
his children might have good literature about them in their formative
years--a direction that was followed faithfully by his widow. The boy
Edward grew up with the ideal of a scholarly father before him, and
with an ambition to know books and to read other languages than his
own. He learned also the mystery of type-setting, and contributed items
to the Vevay _Reveille_, duly “set up.” Dr. Eggleston records that in
his primary schooling, conducted by his mother, he proved himself a
dull scholar, but that some kind of climacteric was passed in his tenth
year, and that thenceforward he was the pride of his teachers. Manual
training was hardly dreamed of in those days, but Joseph Eggleston
had an appreciation of its value and left what Edward has described
as “a solemn injunction that his sons should be sent to the country
every summer and taught manual labor on a farm.” This injunction was
carefully obeyed, so that Edward Eggleston had an actual experience of
farming and a contact with farm folk that was a part of his preparation
for the writing of the tales that gave him his first fame. Judge Miles
Eggleston, Joseph’s brother, was more distinctly an Indianian than
any other member of the family by reason of his long residence in the
State and his public services. Guilford Eggleston, Joseph Eggleston’s
cousin, was identified with the family life at Vevay. He was a man of
many accomplishments, and left a deep impression on Edward Eggleston,
who has spoken of his brilliant talk as a perpetual inspiration: “He
incessantly stimulated my love for literature, guided my choice of
books, taught me to make a commonplace book of my reading, and by his
conversation and example made me feel that to lead an intellectual
life was the most laudable pursuit of a human being.” The direction
thus given to the boyish impulse, and the atmosphere of his home, were
of great importance to Edward, for of systematic schooling he was to
know little. He was never but once in his life able to spend three
consecutive months in school, and after he reached his tenth year the
sum of his schooling was only eighteen months.

Joseph Eggleston had foreseen his own death and provided in various
ways for the education of his sons. He purchased a scholarship in
Asbury (DePauw) College, but continued ill health made it impossible
for Edward to avail himself of its benefits, though his younger
brother, George Cary, became a student there. Just what Edward
Eggleston lost by his irregular schooling, which was almost wholly
independent of instructors in the usual sense of the term, is hardly
a profitable subject for speculation. By following his own bent, he
strengthened himself along lines of natural preference, and he formed
that habit of wise selection and rejection which in itself marks the
educated man. Although schoolhouse doors were closed against him on
account of his precarious health, he was nevertheless permitted to
court death by close application in home study. He acquired, by the
time he reached his twenty-fifth year, some knowledge of six or seven
languages, and a familiar acquaintance with classical English and
French poetry. He knew both the English and French dramatic literature,
though, having been bred in the strictest teaching of the Methodists of
that day, he read few novels, and he gives his own testimony that he
should have esteemed it “a damnable sin to see a play on the stage.”

When Edward Eggleston was in his twelfth year, his mother remarried,
taking for her husband the Rev. William Terrell, a Methodist minister.
This change brought with it a wider horizon for the boy, as his
stepfather’s duties led the family away from Vevay to Madison and New
Albany, also on the Ohio, but larger towns than Vevay. When sixteen,
he spent more than a year with his father’s family in Virginia. The
sharp transition from the conditions in the newer to those of the older
country quickened his powers of observation. The tribulations of the
Western pioneers had been discussed in his hearing by his elders during
the most impressionable years of his childhood; his grandfather Craig’s
stone house was a reminder of times not remote when the Indians were a
daily menace; and the recitals of the wandering apostles of Methodism
in his mother’s house had given him further contact with the adventure
and romance of pioneer life. Virginia opened new vistas, and the novel
conditions of life that he found there extended his knowledge of men
and manners, and afforded an opportunity for criticism and comparison
that was of definite value. He found himself cousin to a considerable
part of the population, and this wide relationship gave him an
acquaintance with the charming social life of old Virginia; but he
counted himself an abolitionist, he says, from the time of this visit.

The abundant vitality of Dr. Eggleston’s later years has been so
strikingly characteristic that it is difficult to believe that ill
health followed him from semi-invalid boyhood into manhood; but the
year after his return from Virginia he was sent to Minnesota in the
hope that the change might benefit him, and the kind fates thus threw
him into still other and different experiences. He was in the new
Northwest when the free-soil excitement in Kansas thrilled the country,
and he set out afoot, with a dirk knife as his only weapon, for the
scene of conflict. He has himself described the failure and result of
this excursion:--

  “After weeks of weary walking and nights spent in the discomforts
  of frontier cabins, I grew sick at heart and longed for the
  companionship and refinements of home. I was rather glad to learn
  that men from the free States were entirely shut out of the besieged
  territory on the Iowa side. My moccasins were worn out, my feet
  were sore, my little stock of money was failing, and I was tired of
  husbanding it by eating crackers and cheese. I turned eastward at a
  point west of Cedar Falls, crossed the Mississippi at Muscatine, and
  after walking in all three or four hundred miles, I at length boarded
  a railway train at a station near Galesburg, and reached my nearest
  relatives after an enforced fast of twenty-four hours, without a cent
  in my pocket, and looking, in my soiled and travel-worn garments,
  like a young border ruffian. I had left home a pale invalid; I
  returned sun-browned and well.”

But this gain in bodily strength was not to profit him long. He had
been bred in the Methodist faith; his stepfather was a minister of
wide reputation in this denomination, and the youth, with his studious
disposition and gift for speech, turned naturally to the ministry. He
has said of himself that an inward conflict between his predisposition
to literary work and the tendency to religion and philanthropy began
in boyhood and has continued throughout his life. There were times in
his youth when his love for literature seemed an idolatry, and once in
a repentant mood he destroyed his youthful manuscripts and resolved
to abandon literature. He was now launched upon the Methodist circuit
rider’s life of hardship and peril, covering a four weeks’ itinerary
in the county of which New Albany is the capital, and performing his
duties with such diligence that in six months he was again a wreck. He
therefore removed to Minnesota, and continued in the ministry, save
for intervals of physical prostration, until, in 1866, he accepted
the editorship of _The Little Corporal_, a popular juvenile periodical
published at Chicago, and from that beginning was irresistibly drawn
to the business of making books. In 1874, he became pastor of a church
in Brooklyn, to which he gave the name of the Church of Christian
Endeavor, and which sought to make sunshine in shady places. It was,
indeed, the “Church of the Best Licks,” of the “Hoosier Schoolmaster,”
slightly conventionalized. Dr. Eggleston continued in the pastorate for
five years, devoting himself to his work with his accustomed zeal and
enthusiasm, which resulted in another collapse. He then retired finally
from the ministry; but the phrase, “Christian Endeavor,” first applied
by Dr. Eggleston to his Brooklyn church, is widely known as the name of
a society of young people.

Unconscious preparation for a life-employment has rarely been more
clearly exemplified in American literature than in the case of Dr.
Eggleston. This is not true as to his novels of Western life merely,
but as to the later historical writing in which he has so successfully
detected and appraised various aspects of our social growth. His
early experiences at the West were indelibly written in his memory,
and though he did not at once transcribe them, his work as editor
sharpened his instincts and helped him to an appreciation of his own
material. His removal to New York in 1870 was another fortunate step
of preparation, for it gave him a perspective which he could not have
gained had he remained at the West. He wrote almost immediately “The
Hoosier Schoolmaster,” the first draft, designed for _Hearth and Home_,
being in the form of a short story, which he extended to its present
form at the suggestion of one of the proprietors of the periodical.
The reading of Taine’s “Art in the Netherlands” was the quickening
influence that led to the writing of the story. Dr. Eggleston learned
from Taine that an artist should paint what he sees, and he therefore
undertook to portray the illiterate people of southern Indiana. The
story was published in book form and gained wide popularity, which has
not diminished in the thirty years since its appearance. Dr. Eggleston
has been criticised severely in Indiana for the series of novels
that began with “The Hoosier Schoolmaster,” but this criticism has
come largely from a new generation that does not view these tales in
the light of history, and is, therefore, hardly competent to pass on
their veracity. By the legal tests for expert witnesses Dr. Eggleston
is certainly qualified to speak; his own experience and the social
evolution of the people of Indiana contribute to the creation of his
competency; and when we add to these considerations his instinctive
interest in the beginnings and tendencies of American life, it is not
possible to reject him. He knew, as he says, “the antique Hoosier.” The
Indiana of 1850 was very different from that of 1870, and Dr. Eggleston
was looking backward a score of years when he created Ralph Hartsook,
the youthful schoolmaster, and threw about him an atmosphere of
ignorance and vice. The story is an instructive footnote to the history
of education in Indiana. “Bud Means” is of the second generation of
Hoosiers--the generation which, outside of the first social order, had
little or no benefit of education, and which sank to the condition
of illiteracy that awakened presently the efforts of the faithful few
who won the fight for free schools. Courage preceded knowledge as a
requirement of pedagogues in the period of which Dr. Eggleston wrote.
“‘Lickin’ and larnin’ goes together; no lickin’, no larnin’,’ declared
Pete Jones.” The student who may hereafter scan the educational history
of Indiana and read with dismay the statistics compiled by Mills, will
welcome this unadorned tale, that illuminates and confirms the dry
facts of the statistician. Eggleston, the novelist, kept Eggleston, the
preacher, well in hand, and there is no tedious moralizing in the book.
It is not difficult to understand the prompt recognition of the story
or its long-continued attraction. The subject was novel, the characters
were new, and the scene was set in a region that had never before been
seriously explored by the story-teller. It was, as an army officer put
it, a cavalry dash into literature. The incidents were linked together
with skill, and their air of entire credibility has not been lost in
the years that have passed since it surprised and delighted its first
readers. Enjoyment of the story was not limited to English readers.
It was translated into French by Madame Blanc, and was published in
condensed form in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ with the title “Le Maitre
d’École de Flat Creek.” German and Danish translations followed, so
that “Bud Means” has enjoyed opportunities for foreign travel quite
unusual among his neighbors.

“The End of the World” (1872) continued the series of stories which Dr.
Eggleston had begun in the “Schoolmaster.” Religious phenomena were
the most marked social expression in the time and place of which he
wrote. It was religion that offered to the isolated people of the new
frontier the only relief that their lives knew from toil, hardship, and
danger; and what appears now, at the distance of fifty years, to have
been a mania was with them a grave and vital matter. “The End of the
World” is a tale of the Millerite excitement, which swept the country
in 1842-1843, and Dr. Eggleston adapted it very entertainingly to the
purposes of fiction. “The Mystery of Metropolisville” (1873) led away
from Indiana into Minnesota, with which Dr. Eggleston had become
acquainted as a minister. Against a background of the land-booming
period, he illustrates the dangers and temptations of the pioneers; and
while the tale is less satisfactory than any of the Indiana series, it
remains after thirty years a readable novel. It was hardly possible
for Dr. Eggleston to forget wholly the people he had known on the
Ohio, and he introduces in “The Mystery of Metropolisville” a Hoosier
poet, who had left the “Waybosh” because his literary efforts were not
appreciated there. He carried his ambitions into Minnesota, became a
trapper and land speculator, and there, to quote from one of his own
stanzas,--

  “His Hoosier harp hangs on the wild water-willer.”

Dr. Eggleston had been established at New York for eight years when
he wrote “Roxy” (1878), one of the best of his books, and one which
depicts even more vividly than “The Hoosier Schoolmaster” his early
environment. He was now forty-one, and the years that had added to the
sum of his experience had developed also his natural instinct for
character. The dramatic quality, too, shows strongly in this tale,
which is, in its moral relation, a kind of Western “Scarlet Letter.”
There is more or less of Vevay in this novel,--it is not important
to inquire too curiously whether it be more or less,--and the pretty
river village, with its slight foreign color, which was derived from
the Swiss residents, the mystery and novelty of the broad river
highway, the simplicity of the life, its lazy gossip and its religious
enthusiasms, are all depicted with fidelity. The Bonabys, father and
son, the lurking figure of Nancy, Twonnet, and Roxy, possess the
interest that attaches to fresh types. The introduction of the volatile
Twonnet, a member of the Swiss Colony, in contrast with the sober Roxy,
the unobtrusive presentation of the religious problems that held the
attention of the community, and the blending of the threads of young
Bonaby’s destiny, are accomplished with skill and power.

In “The Circuit Rider” (1874) Dr. Eggleston crossed the Indiana
boundary into southern Ohio, but for all critical purposes the type
remained the same. Political frontiers do not deter the novelist,
who enjoys extra-territorial privileges. “The Circuit Rider” is not
so entertaining a story as “Roxy.” The characters do not take hold of
the imagination here as in the later book, and those somewhat vague
qualities that combine to the creation of atmosphere are not blended
so effectively. But as a picture of the strenuous religious life of
the Ohio Valley in the early half of the century, the story is most
important. In “Roxy” the strife between Calvinism and Wesleyism is more
strongly contrasted; but “The Circuit Rider” gives a vivid impression
of a period that was made remarkable by the heroism and sacrifice of
the Methodist evangelists. After “Roxy” Dr. Eggleston did not return
to the field of his early successes until he wrote “The Graysons”
(1887). Like “The Circuit Rider” this story is not, geographically
speaking, of Indiana, but it is nevertheless of that broader Hoosierdom
which comprehended a small part of southern Ohio and considerably more
of Illinois. This is one of the best of all the Hoosier cycle, and,
indeed, one of the best of American novels. There is not an inartistic
line in the book, and the manner in which Lincoln is introduced
as a character,--appearing as the attorney for a boy charged with
murder, and winning his freedom by a characteristic resort to homely
philosophy,--is achieved so simply that the reader is left wondering
whether it could really have been the great Lincoln who participated
in one scene, performed his part, and thereupon disappeared from the
stage. A clumsy artist would have dwelt upon Lincoln, hinting at
his future greatness and reluctantly dismissing him; Dr. Eggleston
introduces the incident (which is based on fact) with an inadvertence
that enhances its interest and increases its suggestiveness. The
dialect in this tale is much more critical than that in any other
novel of Dr. Eggleston’s Western series. In his earlier stories,
written before the scientific study of American folk-speech had been
undertaken, the dialect is more general. Dr. Eggleston’s other works
of fiction are: “Mr. Blake’s Walking Stick” (1869); “Book of Queer
Stories” (1870); “The Schoolmaster’s Stories for Boys and Girls”
(1874); “Queer Stories for Boys and Girls” (1884); “The Faith Doctor”
(1891); “Duffels” (1893). “The Faith Doctor” is a novel of New York,
in which the prevailing interest in what Dr. Eggleston called “aerial
therapeutics” supplies the motive. “Duffels” is a collection of short
stories written at intervals throughout his literary career, with
scenes laid in many parts of the country, and illustrating happily the
versatility and the story-telling gift of the author.

Dr. Eggleston began in 1880 researches for a history of life in the
United States. He pursued his studies abroad, as well as in American
libraries, and assembled at his summer home on Lake George a large
collection of Americana. The only published result of these studies
thus far is “The Beginners of a Nation” (1896), the most serious,
searching, and exhaustive essay in _Kultur-Geschichte_ yet presented
by an American. The mere politics of our history and its military
incidents had long received the attention of students, to the exclusion
of the social and domestic. A work such as Dr. Eggleston has undertaken
is vastly more difficult and therefore more important, for it requires
original research in the strictest sense. His other historical works so
far completed are: “A History of the United States and its People for
the Use of Schools” (1888); “The Household History of the United States
and its People” (1888); and “A First Book in American History” (1889).

Dr. Eggleston’s life makes in itself a delightful story of aspiration
and achievement. Many Americans have experienced hardship and
discouragement, but few have profited so richly as this novelist and
historian by every whim of fortune. Ill health has menaced him all
his days, but physical infirmity has never conquered his ambition or
diminished his mental vitality. There is about him an exuberance of
spirits that is not only a distinguishing personal trait, but a quality
of all his stories. And if ill health in his youth and young manhood
interrupted the orderly course of education, it also brought him
opportunities for acquiring a broad knowledge of American provincial
life that no school could have given him. When Dr. Eggleston began to
write there was, outside of New England, little local literature, and
the value of dialect in interpretative fiction was only beginning to be
understood. Cable, Page, Harris, Murfree, “Octave Thanet,” were names
unknown to the catalogues when “The Hoosier Schoolmaster” appeared.
Mark Twain and Bret Harte were well embarked upon their careers; but
the one was a humorist and the other a romanticist, and neither had
undertaken to reproduce local speech accurately. Dr. Eggleston was the
pioneer provincial realist; and if, as he says, the great American
novel is being written in sections, he certainly contributed early
chapters, and indicated the lines to be followed.

His marriage, in 1891, to Frances E. Goode, a granddaughter of his
father’s cousin, Judge Miles Cary Eggleston, renewed ties with Indiana
that had never been wholly broken during long years of absence. He has
often been a visitor to Madison, which was Mrs. Eggleston’s home, and
he spent the winter of 1899 in that beautiful and tranquil town.


II. _James Whitcomb Riley_

Crabbe and Burns are Mr. Riley’s forefathers in literature. Crabbe
was the pioneer in what may be called the realism of poetry; it was
he who rejected the romantic pastoralism that had so long peopled the
British fields with nymphs and shepherds, and introduced the crude
but actual country folk of England. The humor, the bold democracy,
and the social sophistication that he lacked were supplied in his own
day by Burns, and Burns had, too, the singing instinct and the bolder
art of which there are no traces in Crabbe. Something of Crabbe’s
realism and Burns’s humor and philosophy are agreeably combined in
Mr. Riley. His first successes were achieved in the portrayal of the
Indiana country and village folk in dialect. He has rarely seen fit
to vary his subject, and he has been faithful to the environment
from which he derived his inspiration. James Whitcomb Riley is an
interesting instance--perhaps, after Whittier, the most striking in
our literature--of a natural poet, taking his texts from the familiar
scenes and incidents of his own daily walks, and owing little or
nothing to the schools. He was born at Greenfield, the seat of
Hancock County, in 1849. His father, Reuben A. Riley, was a native
of Pennsylvania, of Dutch antecedents, though there is a tradition
of Irish ancestry in the family. He was a lawyer, who enjoyed a wide
reputation as an advocate, and was long reckoned among the most
effective political speakers in Indiana. He was a discriminating
reader and an occasional writer of both prose and verse. The poet’s
mother was a Marine, of a family in which an aptness for rhyming was
characteristic. The Greenfield schools have always been excellent, and
young Riley was fortunate in having for his teacher Lee O. Harris,
himself a poet, who tried to adapt the curriculum of the Hancock
County schools to the needs of an unusual pupil in whom imagination
predominated to the exclusion of mathematics.

Learning is, as Higginson has aptly condensed it, not accumulation, but
assimilation; and “the Hoosier poet” was born one of those fortunate
men to whom schools are a mere incident of education, but who walk
through the world with their eyes open, adding daily to their stock
of knowledge. Bagehot enlarges on this trait as he discovers it in
Shakespeare, “throughout all whose writings,” he says, “you see an
amazing sympathy with common people.” The common people caught and
held the attention of Mr. Riley, and as the annalist of their simple
lives he established himself firmly in public affection. The half a
dozen colleges within a radius of fifty miles of his home did not
attract him; he was bred to no business, but followed in a tentative
way occupations that brought him into contact with people. He began
to write because he felt the impulse, and not because he breathed
a literary atmosphere or looked forward to a literary career. His
imagination needed some outlet, and he made verses just as he drew
pictures or acquired a knack at playing the guitar, taking one talent
about as seriously as the other. A Western county seat, with its daily
advent of pilgrims from the farms, affords an entertaining panorama for
a bright boy, and Mr. Riley began in his youth that careful observation
of the Indiana country folk, their ways and their speech, that was
later to afford him a seemingly inexhaustible supply of material.

He had in his younger days something of Artemus Ward’s fondness for a
hoax, and he wrote “Leonaine,” in imitation of Poe’s manner, with so
marked success that several critics of discernment received the poem,
and the story of its discovery in an old school reader, in good faith.
In the experimental period of his career he read widely and to good
purpose, learning the mechanics of prosody from the best models. His
ear was naturally good, and he was distinctly original in his ideas of
form. He delighted in the manipulation of words into odd and surprising
combinations, and though the results were not always dignified, they
were, nevertheless, curious and amusing, and brought him a degree of
local fame. Mr. Riley’s contributions were wholly to newspapers through
many years, during which the more deliberate periodicals would have
none of him. He printed poems in the _Herald_, an Indianapolis weekly
paper, in which the poems of Edith M. Thomas and others who have since
gained a literary reputation first saw the light; and having attracted
the attention of E. B. Martindale, the owner of the Indianapolis
_Journal_, he was regularly employed on that paper, between 1877 and
1885, printing many of his best pieces there. He had the pleasure of
seeing his verses widely copied at that period, when the newspaper
press was his only medium of communication, and before he had printed
a volume. His first marked recognition followed the publication in the
_Journal_ of a series of poems signed “Benj. F. Johnson, of Boone,”
which not only awakened wide interest, but gave direction to a talent
that had theretofore been without definite aim. He encouraged the idea
that the poems were really the work of a countryman, and prefaced them
with letters in prose to add to their air of authenticity, much as
Lowell introduced the “Biglow Papers.” This series included “Thoughts
fer the Discuraged Farmer,” “When the Frost is on the Punkin,” and
“To My Old Friend, William Leachman,” which were winningly unaffected
and simple, bearing out capitally the impression of a bucolic poet
celebrating his own joys and sorrows. The charm of the “Benj. F.
Johnson” series lay in their perfect suggestion of a whimsical, lovable
character, and wherever Mr. Riley follows the method employed first in
those pieces, he never fails of his effect.

It should be remembered, in passing from Riley masquerading as “Benj.
F. Johnson” to Riley undisguised, that two kinds of dialect are
represented. The Boone County poet’s contributions are printed as
the old farmer is supposed to have written them, not as reported by
a critical listener. There is a difference between the attempt of an
illiterate man to express his own ideas on paper, and a transcript of
his utterances set down by one trained to the business--the vernacular
as observed and recorded by a conscious artist. In every community
there is a local humorist, a sayer of quaint things, whose oddities
of speech gain wide acceptance and circulation, and Mr. Riley is his
discoverer in Indiana. Lowell, with his own New England particularly
in mind, said that “almost every county has some good die-sinker
in phrase, whose mintage passes into the currency of the whole
neighborhood”; and this may be applied generally to the South and
West. Mr. Riley writes always with his eye on a character; and those
who question his dialect do not understand that there is ever present
in his mind a real individual. The feeling and the incident are not
peculiar to the type; they usually lie within the range of universal
experience; but the expression, the manner, the figure of the subject,
are suggested in the poem, not by speech alone, but by the lilt of
the line and the form of the stanza. Mr. Riley is more interested in
odd characters, possessing marked eccentricities, than in the common,
normal type of the farm or the country town, and the dialect that he
employs often departs from the usual vocabulary of the illiterate in
the field he studies, and follows lines of individual idiosyncrasy.
The shrewdly humorous farmer who is a whimsical philosopher and rude
moralist delights him. This character appears frequently in his poems,
often mourning for the old times, now delighting in “noon-time an’
June-time, down around the river”; and again expressing contentment
with his own lot, averring that “they’s nothin’ much patheticker ’n
just a-bein’ rich.” To these characters he gives a dialect that is
fuller than the usual rural speech: _ministratin’_ (ministering),
_resignated_ (resigned), _artificialer_ (more artificial),
_competenter_ (more competent), _tractabler_ (more tractable), and
_familiously_ (familiarly), not being properly in the Hoosier _lingua
rustica_, but easily conceivable as possible deviations. Mr. Riley has
been criticised for imputing to his characters such phrases as “when
the army broke out” and “durin’ the army,” referring to the Civil War,
and many careful observers declare that he could never have heard
these phrases; but very likely he has heard them from the eccentric
countrymen for whom he has so strong an affinity; or he may have coined
them outright as essential to the interpretation of such characters.
In the main, however, he may be followed safely as an accurate guide
in the speech of the Southeastern element of the population, and his
questionable usages and inconsistencies are few and slight, as the
phrase “don’t you know,” which does not always ring true, or “again”
and “agin,” used interchangeably and evidently as the rhyme may hint.
The abrupt beginning of a sentence, frequently noticed in Mr. Riley’s
dialect verses, is natural. The illiterate often experience difficulty
in opening a conversation, expressing only a fragment, to which an
interlocutor must prefix for himself the unspoken phrases. There is no
imposition in Mr. Riley’s dialect, for his amplifications of it are
always for the purpose of aiding in the suggestion of a character as he
conceives it; he does not pretend that he portrays in such instances a
type found at every cross-roads. “Doc Sifers” and “The Raggedy Man” are
not peculiar to Indiana, but have their respective counterparts in such
characters as Mark Twain’s “Pudd’n-head Wilson” and the wayside tramp,
who has lately been a feature of farce comedy rather than of our social
economy. “Fessler’s Bees,” “Nothin’ to say,” “Down to the Capital,”
“A Liz-town Humorist,” and “Squire Hawkins’s Story” show Mr. Riley at
his happiest as a delineator of the rural type. In these sketches he
gives in brief compass the effect of little dramas, now humorous, now
touched with simple and natural pathos, and showing a nice appreciation
of the color of language which is quite as essential in dialect as
in pure English. But it matters little that the _dramatis personæ_
change, or that the literary method varies; the same kindliness, the
same blending of humor and pathos, and the same background of “green
fields and running brooks” characterize all. “The crude man is,” the
poet believes, “generally moral,” and the Riley Hoosier is intuitively
religious, and is distinguished by his rectitude and sense of justice.

Mr. Riley made his work effective through the possession of a sound
instinct for appraising his material, combined with a good sense
of proportion. His touch grew steadily firmer, and he became more
fastidious as the public made greater demands upon him; for while
his poems in dialect gained him a hearing, he strove earnestly for
excellence in the use of literary English. He has written many poems of
sentiment gracefully and musically, and with no suggestion of dialect.
Abundant instances of his felicity in the strain of retrospect and
musing might be cited. The same chords have been struck time and
time again; but they take new life when he touches them, as in “The
All-Golden”:--

  “I catch my breath, as children do
  In woodland swings when life is new,
  And all the blood is warm as wine
  And tingles with a tang divine....
  O gracious dream, and gracious time,
  And gracious theme, and gracious rhyme--
  When buds of Spring begin to blow
  In blossoms that we used to know,
  And lure us back along the ways
  Of time’s all-golden yesterdays!”

It is not the farmer alone whose simple virtues appeal to him; but
rugged manhood anywhere commands his tribute, and he has hardly written
a more touching lyric than “Away,” whose subject was an Indiana
soldier:--

  “I cannot say, and I will not say
  That he is dead--He is just away!”

He has his own manner of expressing an idea, and this individuality
is so marked that it might lead to the belief that he had little
acquaintance with the classic English writers. But his series of
imitations, including the prose of Scott and Dickens and the
characteristic poems of Tennyson and Longfellow, are certainly the
work of one who reads to good purpose and has a feeling for style.
When he writes naturally there is no trace of bookishness in his work;
he rarely or never invokes the mythologies, though it has sometimes
pleased him to imagine Pan piping in Hoosier orchards. He is read
and quoted by many who are not habitual readers of poetry--who would
consider it a sign of weakness to be caught in the act of reading
poems of any kind, but who tolerate sentiment in him because he makes
it perfectly natural and surrounds it with a familiar atmosphere
of reality. The average man must be trapped into any display of
emotion, and Mr. Riley spreads for him many nets from which there is
no escape, as in “Nothin’ to say, my daughter,” where the subject is
the loneliness and isolation of the father whose daughter is about
to marry, and who faces the situation clumsily, in the manner of all
fathers, rich or poor. The remembrance of the dead wife and mother
adds to the pathos here. The old man turns naturally to the thought of
her:--

  “You don’t rickollect her, I reckon? No; you wasn’t a year old then!
  And now yer--how old _air_ you? W’y, child, not ‘_twenty_’! When?
  And yer nex’ birthday’s in Aprile? and you want to git married that
    day?
  I wisht yer mother was livin’!--but I hain’t got nothin’ to say!
  Twenty year! and as good a gyrl as parent ever found!
  There’s a straw ketched onto yer dress there--I’ll bresh it off--turn
    round.
  (Her mother was jest twenty when us two run away.)
  Nothin’ to say, my daughter! Nothin’ at all to say!”

The drolleries of childhood have furnished Mr. Riley subjects for some
of his most original and popular verses. Here, again, he does not
accept the conventional children of literature, whom he calls “the
refined children, the very proper children--the studiously thoughtful,
poetic children”; but he seeks “the rough-and-tumble little fellows ‘in
hodden gray,’ with frowzly heads, begrimed but laughing faces, and such
awful vulgarities of naturalness, and crimes of simplicity, and brazen
faith and trust, and love of life and everybody in it!” It is in this
spirit that he presents now the naïve, now the perversely erring, and
again the eerie and elfish child. He is a master of those enchantments
of childhood that transfigure and illumine and create a world of the
imagination for the young that is undiscoverable save to the elect few.
He does not write patronizingly to his audience; but listens, as one
should listen in the realm of childhood, with serious attention, and
then becomes an amanuensis, transcribing the children’s legends and
guesses at the riddle of existence in their own language. “The Raggedy
Man” is not a romantic figure; he is the shabby chore-man of the
well-to-do folk in the country town, and the friend and oracle of small
boys. His mind is filled with rare lore, he--

  “Knows ’bout Giunts, an’ Griffuns an’ Elves
  An’ the Squidgicum-Squees ’at swallers therselves!”

And he may be responsible, too, for “Little Orphant Annie’s” knowledge
of the “Gobble-uns,” which Mr. Riley turned into the most successful of
all his juvenile pieces. He reproduces most vividly a child’s eager,
breathless manner of speech, and the elisions and variations that make
the child-dialect. Interspersed through “The Child World,” a long poem
in rhymed couplets, are a number of droll juvenile recitatives; but
this poem has a much greater value than at first appears. It presents
an excellent picture of domestic life in a western country town, and
the town is Mr. Riley’s own Greenfield, on the National Road. This
poem is a faithful chronicle, lively and humorous, full of the local
atmosphere, and never dull. The descriptions of the characters are
in Mr. Riley’s happiest vein: the father of the house, a lawyer and
leading citizen; the patient mother; the children with their various
interests, leading up to “Uncle Mart,” the printer, who aspired to be
an actor--

  “He joyed in verse-quotations--which he took
  Out of the old ‘Type Foundry Specimen Book.’”

The poem is written in free, colloquial English, broken by lapses into
the vernacular. It contains some of his best writing, and proves him
to possess a range and breadth of vision that are not denoted in his
lyrical pieces alone. “The Flying Islands of the Night, a fantastic
drama in verse,” his only other effort of length, was written earlier.
It abounds in the curious and capricious, but it lacks in simplicity
and reserve--qualities that have steadily grown in him.

Humor is preëminent in Mr. Riley, and it suggests that of Dickens in
its kinship with pathos. It seems to be peculiar to the literature of
lowly life that there is heartache beneath much of its gayety, and
tears are almost inevitably associated with its laughter. Mr. Riley
never satirizes, never ridicules his creations; his attitude is always
that of the kindly and admiring advocate; and it is by enlisting
the sympathy of his readers, suggesting much to their feeling and
imagination, and awakening in them a response that aids and supplements
his own work, that Mr. Riley has won his way to the popular heart.
The restraints of fixed forms have not interfered with his adequate
expression of pure feeling. This is proved by the sonnet, “When She
Comes Home Again,” which is one of the tenderest of his poems. In the
day that saw many of his contemporaries in the younger choir of poets
carving cherry stones of verse after French patterns he found old
English models sufficient, and his own whim supplied all the variety
he needed. Heroic themes have not tempted him; he has never attained
sonority or power, and has never needed them; but melody and sweetness
and a singular gift of invention distinguish him.

Many imitators have paid tribute to Mr. Riley’s dialect verse, for
most can grow the flowers after the seed have been freely blown in
the market-place. Perhaps the best compliment that can be paid to
Mr. Riley’s essential veracity is to compare the verse of those who
have made attempts similar to his own. He is, for example, a much
better artist than Will Carleton, who came before him, and whose “Farm
Ballads” are deficient in humor; and he possesses a breadth of sympathy
and a depth of sincerity that Eugene Field did not attain in dialect
verse, though Field’s versatility and fecundity were amazing. There is
nowhere in Mr. Riley a trace of the coarse brutality with which Mr.
Hamlin Garland, for example, stamps the life of a region lying farther
west. There is no point of contact between Lowell and Mr. Riley in
their dialectic performances, as civic matters do not interest the
Indianian; and his view of the Civil War becomes naturally that of the
countryman who looks back with wistful melancholy, not to the national
danger and dread, but to the neighborhood’s glory and sorrow, as in
“Good-by, Jim.” It might also be said that Mr. Riley has never put the
thoughts of statesmen into the mouths of countrymen, as Lowell did,
consistency being one of his qualities. There has sprung up in Mr.
Riley’s time a choir of versifiers who are journalistic rather than
literary, and who write for the day, much as the reporters do. Mr.
Riley, more than any one else, has furnished the models for these, and
it would seem that verses could be multiplied interminably, or so long
as such refrains as “When father winds the clock” and “The hymns that
mother used to sing” can be found for texts.

With the publication of the “Benj. F. Johnson” poems in a paper-covered
booklet, Mr. Riley’s literary career began. The intervening years have
brought him continuous applause; his books of verse have been sold
widely in this country and in England, and that, too, in “the twilight
of the poets,” with its contemporaneous oblivion for many who have
labored bravely in the paths of song. He early added to his reputation
as a writer that of a most successful reader of his own poems, and on
both sides of the Atlantic his work and his unique personality have
won for him the friendship of many distinguished literary men of the
day. It is to be said that the devotion of the people of his own State
to their poet, from first to last, has been marked by a cordiality
and loyalty that might well be the envy of any man in any field of
endeavor. No other Western poet has ever occupied a similar place; and
the reciprocal devotion, on the other hand, of the poet to his own
people, is not less noteworthy or admirable. He has always resented
the suggestion that he should leave Indiana for Boston or New York,
where he might be more in touch with the makers of books; and in recent
years he purchased the old family residence at Greenfield, to which
he returns frequently for rest and inspiration. For fifteen years he
has been the best-known figure in Indianapolis, studying with tireless
attention the faces in the streets, nervously ranging the book-stores,
and often sitting down to write a poem at the desk of some absentee
in the _Journal_ office. His frequent reading and lecturing tours
have been miserable experiences for him, as he is utterly without the
instinct of locality, and has timidly sat in the hotels of strange
towns for many hours for lack of the courage requisite for exploration.
Precision and correctness have distinguished him in certain ways, being
marked, for example, in matters of dress and in his handwriting; his
manuscripts are flawlessly correct, and the slouch and negligence of
the traditional poet are not observed in him.

His long list of books includes “Afterwhiles” (1887); “Pipes of Pan at
Zekesbury” (1888); “Old-fashioned Roses” (1889); “Rhymes of Childhood”
(1891); and “Poems Here at Home” (1897); and he has known the luxury of
a cosmopolitan edition of his writings in a series that embraced the
definitive Stevenson. Fame came to Mr. Riley when he was still young,
and it is only a fair assumption that he has not exhausted his field,
but that he will grow more and more secure in it. Serious work it has
not always been possible for him to do, for his audience learned to
expect humor in all his verses, and refused to be disappointed; but
his ambition lies beyond humorous dialect, though he finds no fault
with the public preference. All that he writes is welcome, for he is
a preacher of sound optimism and a sincere believer in the final good
that comes to all.




CHAPTER VI

CRAWFORDSVILLE


There is an ineffable charm about an old town that has outlived its
ambition to be a great city, and Crawfordsville is a fine type of such
a place. The region was settled in 1823, and the Montgomery County
people, both farmers and townfolk, have long been counted among the
sturdiest and most intelligent in the State. A cultivated society has
always existed at Crawfordsville, and as the seat of Wabash College it
acquired in its youth an academic air that it has never shaken off.
The town has been called “The Hoosier Athens,” by envious and less
favored neighbors. The analogy is not wholly fortunate, as there are
neither porticoes nor statues on the college campus, and no Cimon found
occupation here, as at the elder Athens, in tree-planting. Nature had
anticipated the need of “groves of academe,” and the trees about the
college and through the town are truly of the forest primeval, giving
the agreeable impression of a _rus in urbe_. Crawfordsville has often
sent young men elsewhere to find occupation; but if its commercial
attractions have been slight, its educational advantages have been
proportionately great, and Wabash is able to point to a long list of
successful alumni. The spirit of change has rarely invaded the college,
and men are now holding chairs who have grown old in its service.
Wabash has been content to do honest college work and has never made
false pretensions as to its ability to do more. “Mere literature,” as
Bagehot fondly called it, has not been disregarded, and in no college
of ampler endowment have the classics been taught more sympathetically
or intelligently. It is one of the few colleges remaining at the West
which close their doors to women, although importunate hands have long
besought the wicket.

The honor and dignity of learning have come to have a real meaning
here, not only to those who seek instruction at the college, but to the
people of the town as well. Wabash may not have directly influenced
those who made Crawfordsville a seat of authorship, but certainly a
fortunate chance led makers of books to seek the congenial atmosphere
created by the college. In such a place one may not grow rich, but one
may dwell contented; and while coarser commerce has not flourished
greatly, much valuable manuscript has freighted the east-bound mails
from Crawfordsville. Authorship and scholarship alone have not engaged
the inhabitants. Joseph E. McDonald, later a senator in Congress, once
lived here, as did also John M. Butler, who became McDonald’s law
partner at Indianapolis and one of the ablest men of the Western bar.
Butler’s son, John Maurice Butler, was born at Crawfordsville, and his
untimely death (1896) removed the man of most charming personality,
and the keenest wit of his generation at the capital. Henry Beebee
Carrington had identified himself with Indiana’s participation in
the War of the Rebellion before he became (1870-1873) professor of
military science at Wabash. His stay at Crawfordsville was brief,
but the inhabitants prefer to believe that as he once breathed the
Athenian air they are entitled to share with Connecticut, his native
State and later home, in the credit for his writings. The Whitlocks and
the Elstons were among the first settlers, and were prominent in all
the earlier labors of the community. Henry S. Lane, General Wallace’s
brother-in-law, was a senator in Congress (1860-1867), and lived and
died here.


I. _General Lew Wallace_

General Lew Wallace, whose varied achievements have contributed so
largely to the town’s fame, was not born at Crawfordsville, but at
Brookville, in Franklin County, April 10, 1827. His father, David
Wallace, had resigned from the regular army soon after his graduation
from West Point in 1821. He studied law at Brookville, and soon began
an interesting public career. He was one of the political giants of
the State in his day, holding many offices and positions of honor.
His first wife, General Wallace’s mother, was the daughter of John
Test, of a family long prominent in the State. General Wallace was an
adventurous boy, impatient of all restraint, and fond of wandering,
and he therefore received little systematic education; but his father
owned an excellent library, and, as has happened with other boys who
have refused to submit to the schoolmaster, he found his own way to
the book shelves. He was for a time a student at Hoshour’s school at
Centerville; and he once ran away to join an older brother at Wabash;
but he was either unwilling or unable to break his nomadic habits,
and continued to roam the woods until, at sixteen, his school bills
were audited for the last time. He was beset by several ambitions;
literature, art, and a military career invited him. He had some skill
at sketching, and painted a portrait of Black Hawk, the Indian chief,
drawing on the family medicine chest for castor oil to use in mixing
his colors. He also completed a novel, “The Man at Arms: A Tale of
the Tenth Century,” of which he remembers little; but Sulgrove in one
of his chronicles darkly hints that it was of the school of G. P. R.
James. Robert Duncan, clerk of Marion County, in which Indianapolis
is situated, employed him as copyist, and he varied this prosaic
occupation by reading law in his father’s office. The Mexican War now
broke upon the country, and as Lewis--the second syllable disappeared
during the Civil War--had painted a picture and written a romance, he
now turned naturally to his third ambition. He organized a company and
went south with the First Indiana Infantry. The regiment saw little
of the war, but the campaign and his personal experience in military
matters confirmed young Wallace’s purpose to write a novel of Mexico,
for which, by a kind of prevision and the inspiration of Prescott,
he had already made tentative sketches. On his return to Indiana he
again took up the law, and practised at Covington until 1852, when
he removed to Crawfordsville, which has ever since been his home.
He presently organized a military company, known as the “Montgomery
Guards,” and equipped it with the Zouave uniform. This furnished an
outlet for his ceaseless energy, and also for his pocket-book, as the
State contributed nothing to the company’s support. He brought it to
a high standard of efficiency, and at the outbreak of the Civil War
it was one of the best-drilled military organizations in the country.
Governor Morton appointed Mr. Wallace adjutant-general of the State
at the first sign of hostilities, but he served in this capacity for
a short time only, and organized the Eleventh Indiana Regiment, with
his original Crawfordsville company as nucleus, and began an active
and brilliant career in the army. Almost immediately his regiment
distinguished itself in West Virginia. He was a brigadier-general
before the capture of Fort Henry, and was made major-general for
gallantry at Donelson. A year after Shiloh, a friend called General
Wallace’s attention to the official reports of that engagement, and he
learned for the first time that he had been censured for his conduct on
the first day of the battle. He asked at once for a court of inquiry,
which was denied, and a long controversy followed. This died out for
a time, but was renewed when Grant began the serial publication of
his memoirs. It was always maintained by General Wallace’s friends
that Grant was unjust to Wallace; that the Indiana officer faithfully
obeyed orders actually given him; and certainly no one who ever had
any acquaintance with General Wallace would believe him capable of
intentionally taking a circuitous route to a battle-field. The
effective service of his command on the second day of the battle
should forever have stilled criticism; as it was, Grant wrote in his
memoirs--the last words that ever came from his pen--a footnote to his
account of Pittsburg Landing that fairly acquitted General Wallace of
all blame. Much has been written, by participants and others, touching
the incident, and it has been made the subject of an exhaustive study
by George F. McGinnis.[43] While stationed at Baltimore, in 1864,
General Wallace prevented a Confederate descent upon Washington by
intercepting Jubal Early at Monocacy. He threw 6,000 men against
Early’s force of 28,000, suffering defeat, but detaining the enemy
until Grant could send reënforcements from Virginia. This was one of
the most important of all his military services, and he received for it
Grant’s cordial praise. General Wallace was a member of the court that
tried the conspirators implicated in the assassination of Lincoln; and
he was president of the commission that tried and convicted Captain
Henry Wirz, commandant of Andersonville Prison.

When General Wallace returned to Crawfordsville at the close of the
war he was thirty-eight; he had served creditably in one war and
with enviable distinction in a second, and he turned to the arts of
peace from a military experience that had given him wide reputation
and acquaintance among public men of the Civil War period. He began
industriously to reëstablish himself in his law practice, and varied
his occupation with study and literary work. “The Man at Arms,” his
youthful attempt at “A Tale of the Tenth Century,” had disappeared
during his absence in Mexico; but the ambition to write a romance
of the invasion of Cortez, and his manuscript beginnings of it, had
survived two wars, and he now set about finishing the story. He had
at this time no definite ambition to become an author, and he gave
his evenings to the writing of “The Fair God” with little idea of
ever publishing it. After its completion he carried it East with him
on a business journey. Whitelaw Reid gave him an introduction to a
Boston publisher, and the result was the appearance of the tale in
1873. He had spent in all about twelve years on the book, part having
been written, as already stated, in his boyhood; and the author’s
faithfulness to his early purpose through many years that had brought
new duties and obligations is in keeping with his whole character.

The scenes of “The Fair God” were unfamiliar to the novel reader, and
the very names in the book were somewhat disconcerting; but the tale
was received in the beginning with a fair degree of interest, and it
has ever since enjoyed a steady sale. The subsequent success of “Ben
Hur” directed attention anew to General Wallace’s earlier tale, but
the romance was something more than an amateur effort, and time has
not diminished its entertaining qualities. As a picture of Aztecan
civilization it is accurate, and the incidents are related in an
orderly and natural manner that holds the attention. The devotion of
the people to their religion is impressive; but the tale is essentially
a military romance. The battle scenes following the appearance of
Cortez and his Spaniards are described with an animation and an
amplitude that impart to the reader the sense of beholding a series of
great spectacles. The book is rich in those surprises which it is the
business of the romancer to produce; and the chapters descriptive of
the battle towers (_mantas_) which were among the European’s resources,
and of the retreat of the invaders, are noisy with the clang of battle.
The prophecies of the mystic priest Mualox, who sees through the eyes
of a child the coming of the Spaniards, are interesting; and curiously
enough they had their origin in an incident of General Wallace’s own
experience in Indiana, showing how the imagination may play upon the
commonplace. When he lived at Covington, he formed the acquaintance
of a tailor who was deeply interested in the occult sciences, and who
once invited General Wallace to his shop to witness manifestations of
his powers. The tailor placed his apprentice under a kind of hypnotic
influence, and told General Wallace to take the boy’s hand and to
follow in his own mind some route with whose details he was familiar.
General Wallace obeyed, mentally reviewing a highway that led to the
house of a farmer client. The boy’s lips moved, and he coherently
described the road, and presently the farmhouse, just as General
Wallace saw them; then he abruptly ceased to follow the leader’s train
of thought. He said that it was night; that some one came out of the
house with a light, walked about inspecting the barnyard, and then
returned to the house. The boy had now become exhausted; the tailor
revived him, and General Wallace went on to his home. A few days
later, when the countryman whose farm had figured in the incident
came to town, General Wallace asked him if he had been at home at
the hour mentioned; he replied that he had been at home and asleep.
Further questioning elicited the statement that at about the time of
the experiment at the tailor shop he had been aroused by noises in the
barnyard, and that, fearing some marauder was after his fowls, he had
taken a light and gone out to see that all was secure.

The friendly reception of “The Fair God” did not awaken any unusual
interest in General Wallace as a writer. He continued at Crawfordsville
the life of a lawyer of polite tastes, keenly interested in politics.
“The Fair God” out of the way, he began almost immediately to cast
about for some new literary employment. In about 1874 it occurred
to him to write a novelette, whose principal incident should be the
meeting of the Wise Men in the Desert and the birth of Christ. The
brief account in the Gospels had long appealed to his imagination, and
he wrote what is now the first book of “Ben Hur,” intending to offer
it to some magazine for publication as a sketch, with illustrations.
While the manuscript still lay in his desk, he met on a railway journey
an old friend, Colonel Robert G. Ingersoll, and in the course of
conversation the famous sceptic touched on the subject of Christianity.
General Wallace had always been indifferent in religious matters,
neither denying nor affirming; but Ingersoll’s downright iconoclasm
alarmed him. He determined to investigate the subject and form his
own conclusions; and he began researches and studies which continued
through five years. When he had concluded, he fully accepted the tenets
of Christian faith, and he had amplified his sketch of the Wise Men
into the novel “Ben Hur.” Continuous labor had not been possible during
the writing of this tale: he had been busy with everyday affairs;
politics received a share of his attention; and he became, in 1878, by
appointment of President Hayes, governor of New Mexico Territory. He
lived at Santa Fé for three years, and much of “Ben Hur” was written
in the governor’s house there. General Wallace had never visited
Palestine when he wrote “Ben Hur,” but there are points of resemblance
between the landscape of New Mexico and that of the Holy Land, and
these were of assistance. He procured a profile map of Palestine, and
was so attentive to topographical detail that later, when he visited
the scenes of his story in company with a recognized authority in
ancient history, every feature of the country as described in the book
was verified. An immense amount of labor is represented in this novel.
Many volumes were consulted in the search for antiquarian lore, that it
might lack nothing that would aid in conveying an accurate impression
of the period.

The book was capitally planned, striking episodes falling into place
naturally, and not too abundantly. The meeting of the Wise Men, the sea
fight, and the chariot race are dramatic to a degree; but the sombre
picture of the crucifixion is unmarred by excess. The reverence which
characterizes every mention of the Saviour is the author’s happiest
achievement in the story. The subject is difficult, but it is handled
with admirable taste and refinement. However, the book does not depend
for continued attention on its interest as a religious novel; it is
equally noteworthy for its comprehensive grasp of the politics of the
period, its picture of the various peoples that flowed through the
streets of Jerusalem and Antioch, and the suggestion of a romantic
commerce whose exploits lay in strange seas and beyond the deserts.
Nothing in the book is accomplished more skilfully than the slow
extinction of the idea of the coming of a great ruler of the world,
to rebuild the throne of Solomon, and the gradual acceptance of the
spiritual significance of Christ’s advent; and it may be taken, in
connection with the history of the novel, as a revelation of the growth
in the author’s own mind of a belief in the divine Saviour. Historical
novels, particularly those that look to antiquity for subjects, follow
necessarily certain traditions, and these are observed carefully by
General Wallace. Scott, more than any other, helped him, and “Ivanhoe,”
in particular, was his model. The writing in “Ben Hur” is uniformly
good, and the dialogue in archaic speech is well sustained. General
Wallace wrote out of an ample vocabulary enriched by the constant
reading of Oriental narrative, and in his descriptions the epithets
are always apposite. The success of “Ben Hur” was not immediate. It
sold slowly for several years, but it gained steadily in popularity
and continues in favor with the booksellers. It has been translated
into all the European languages, into Arabic and Japanese, and it is
accessible to the blind in raised-letter. The sale of the copyright
edition in America (1900) exceeds 1,200,000, which is probably
greater than that of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Many playwrights and actors
proposed to General Wallace from time to time the dramatization of
“Ben Hur,” but he feared that the spirit of reverence, which he had
so consistently communicated to the novel, would be lost in any play
founded upon its incidents. He declined all offers until, in 1899, a
plan was submitted which met his approval, and in the fall of that
year the play was given its first presentation at New York.

When President Garfield appointed General Wallace minister to Turkey,
he wrote across his commission “Ben Hur.” General Wallace called at the
White House, just before leaving for his post, to pay his respects to
the President, and Garfield said to him: “I expect another book from
you. Your official duties will not be so onerous that you cannot write
it. Make the scene Constantinople.” The opportunity thus presented for
further literary work was a consideration in accepting the post. The
Turkish occupation of Constantinople is an incident of great historical
importance, and in his search for material for a new romance, General
Wallace determined to write a tale that should present a picture of
the fierce struggle between Christian and Moslem. His studies at
Constantinople led to the writing of “The Prince of India.” The Prince
is “The Wandering Jew.” He appears as a man of mysterious gifts, who
wields great wealth and power. He has discovered what he believes to
be common ground upon which all the spiritually minded may meet,
irrespective of religion. He appears before the Emperor Constantine and
presents his plan for a universal religious union, but he horrifies
the theologians, and finding the Christians unsympathetic, he turns
to Mohammed, and bestows upon him the sword of Solomon, the sign of
conquest, which he had found in the tomb of Hiram, King of Tyre. The
tale has neither the interest of “Ben Hur” nor the novelty and military
ardor of “The Fair God.” The subject required deliberate treatment,
and the hero, who is a scholar and a mystic, naturally deals in words
oftener than in actions.

General Wallace’s other writings are “The Boyhood of Christ” (1889),
and “The Wooing of Malkatoon: a Turkish Tale, with Commodus, a Play”
(1898), both in blank verse.

There is nothing in General Wallace’s literary career to encourage
hasty and careless workmanship. His methods have been, from the
beginning, those of a conscientious artist, who strives for excellence
and is capable of cheerfully casting aside the work of many days if,
by additional labor, he can gain better results. He parleys with a
sentence or debates with a synonym with a caution that is akin to
Oriental diplomacy. He has probably never written even a social letter
carelessly, and if his correspondence were to be collected, it would
prove to be of the same quality as his best printed work. There has
always been a dignity in his ambitions. Military leadership came to
him naturally, and when he took up literature, it was in a serious
way, with subjects that were new and daring. By making every stroke
count, and paying no heed to changing literary fashions, he has, in the
intervals of unusually varied and exacting employments, cultivated the
literary art with enviable success.

Heredity and environment explain nothing in General Wallace. He is an
estray from the Orient, whom Occidental conditions have influenced
little. This is proved by all his imaginative writing, by his military
tastes, by many qualities of his personality, and by his appearance
and bearing. He has never written of American life, and the attraction
of Mexico as a field for fiction lay in the splendor and remoteness
of the early civilization of the country, combined with the romance
of its conquest by soldiers of Spain. In like manner, “Ben Hur” and
“The Prince of India” are such subjects as would naturally appeal
to him. His fancy has delighted always in the thought of pageantry,
conquest, mystery, and mighty deeds; it has pleased him to contemplate
the formal social life of the old heroic times. The beginning of his
friendship with the Sultan illustrates a sympathy, native in him, with
the Oriental character. General Wallace had reached Constantinople
after his appointment as minister, but had not been formally received.
On Friday, the Moslem Sunday, he went with the multitude to see the
Sultan go to prayer. General Wallace was entitled, by act of Congress,
to wear the uniform of a major-general in the United States army, and
he was clad in all the regalia of the rank. Between the gate of the
imperial park and the Mosque which the Sultan attended was a small
house, with a platform in front of it, set apart to strangers, and
there General Wallace viewed the procession. The dark man in the rich
uniform attracted the attention of the Sultan as he passed, and from
the Mosque he sent Osman Pasha, the hero of Plevna, then marshal of
the palace, to learn the identity of the stranger. On finding that he
was the new American minister awaiting audience, the Sultan sent an
invitation to General Wallace to accompany him on his return to the
palace, an honor never before accorded to a minister not yet received.
A carriage was sent for the American, who returned in the brilliant
cortège next to the carriage of the Sultan. The reception at the palace
was particularly distinguished, and thereafter the relations between
the two were intimate and cordial. The Sultan often summoned the
minister to the palace, sometimes requesting interviews at the dead of
night. All their conversation was through an interpreter, as the Sultan
knew no English and General Wallace did not speak French.

There was early stamped upon General Wallace an air of authority that
went well with the military profession; but later years have softened
this into a courtliness and grace of manner wholly charming. The
Oriental strain in him has become more and more pronounced, suggesting
that the years spent in the study of Eastern history, and his actual
contact with Oriental peoples, have emphasized it.

Mrs. Wallace (born Susan Arnold Elston) is a native of Crawfordsville.
Her father was a pioneer of central Indiana. The homes of his
descendants are grouped in Elston Grove, one of the prettiest spots in
Crawfordsville. General and Mrs. Wallace were married in 1852, and she
is “the wife of my youth,” to whom “Ben Hur” was dedicated. He received
so many consolatory letters based on this inscription, which seemed to
be misunderstood, that in later editions he changed it, adding “who
still abides with me.” Mrs. Wallace began writing at an early age, both
prose and verse. She has never collected her poems, though several of
them, as “The Patter of Little Feet,” written years ago, are frequently
brought to the attention of a new audience by the newspapers. She has
printed one book of fiction, “Ginevra” (1887), and three books of
travel sketches, “The Storied Sea” (1884); “The Land of the Pueblos”
(1888); and “The Repose in Egypt” (1888). Mrs. Wallace has a happy
manner of describing places and incidents, and the papers in these
volumes show the spontaneity and ease of good letters, and are without
the guide-book taint. They were intended, as the author stated in the
preface to “The Storied Sea,” for patient, gentle souls seeking rest
“from that weariness known in our dear native land as mental culture.”
Mrs. Wallace shares her husband’s liking for Eastern subjects, and her
Egyptian and Turkish papers, in particular, are delightful reading.


II. _Maurice Thompson_

No other Indianian has lived so faithfully as Maurice Thompson a
life devoted to literary ideals, and none of his contemporaries
among writers of the West and South has been more loyally devoted to
pure _belles-lettres_ than he. Abstract beauty has appealed to him
more strongly than to any other writer of the Indiana group, and he
has expressed it in his poems, through media suggested by his own
environment, with charm and grace. He is a native of Indiana, having
been born at Fairfield, near Brookville, September 9, 1844. His father
was of Scotch-Irish ancestry; his maternal grandfather was of Dutch
origin; and both lines were represented in the Southwestern migration
at the beginning of the century. In Maurice’s childhood his father,
who was a Baptist clergyman, made several changes of residence, all
tending southward, removing first to southeastern Missouri, then to
Kentucky, and again within a few years to the valley of the Coosawattee
in northern Georgia. Here the senior Thompson became a planter, and
Maurice enjoyed thereafter, until he reached manhood, a life in
which the study of books was ideally blended with the freedom of the
country. He has always expressed great obligations to his mother’s
influences during these years; her literary tastes were sound, and
she imparted to her children the love of good books, overcoming by
her own encouragement and guidance the absence of schools in their
neighborhood. Tutors were procured for higher mathematics and the
languages; but the chief impulse to the study of the old literatures
lay in the youth’s own taste and temperament. Like Lanier, Hayne,
Esten Cooke, John B. Tabb, and others who were to become known in
literature, he entered the Confederate army (1862), and saw hard
service until the surrender. Even these years of soldier experience
did not interrupt wholly his studies, for he usually managed to carry
with him some book worth reading, the essays of De Quincey and Carlyle
belonging to this period. Mr. Thompson returned to his father’s
plantation at the close of the war, and remained there for three
years, continuing his studies as before, but substituting hard manual
labor for the life of pleasant adventure by field and flood that had
given him from boyhood into early manhood an intimate acquaintance
with wild things. He now began, of necessity, to accommodate himself
to the changed conditions of the community and of his own family. He
had studied engineering, and he perfected himself in it, and read law.
Reconstruction moved forward slowly, and wishing to get as quickly
as possible into a region where his material prospects could be
improved, he went to Crawfordsville, without fixed purpose, and found
employment with a railway surveying party. He supported himself by
engineering until he felt justified in taking up the law, in which
he was successful, and to which he was constant until the increase of
literary reputation and steady employment in more congenial labor made
it possible for him to abandon it. His marriage to a daughter of John
Lee, an influential citizen of the county, fixed him as a resident of
Crawfordsville, which has since remained his home. For a number of
years he was prominent in local politics. He sat once in the State
legislature, and he was appointed State geologist in 1885.

Mr. Thompson had written experimentally in boyhood, and after his
removal to Indiana he continued the cultivation of his gifts, and
beginning slowly, attained to an abundant production, in both prose
and poetry, that made him through many years the Western author whose
name most frequently occurred in the indices of the best magazines.
During his youth in the Cherokee country he had been initiated into
the mysteries of archery by a hermit who lived in the midst of a pine
forest near his home. Mr. Thompson and his brother, Will H. Thompson,
were both enthusiastic archers and hunters, and their adventures in the
wilds of Florida were full of romantic interest. The bow was with them
a kind of protest against the shot-gun, and assured a less murderous
extirpation of game. Their own skill with the primitive weapon was
remarkable, and as a recurrence of interest in the bow in this country
is not imminent, they may be considered the last of American archers.
Proficiency in this sport and the acquaintance with woodcraft to which
it led were important influences in Mr. Thompson’s first literary work.
In the seventies, a great revival in archery swept the country, and
this was wholly due to a series of articles on archery and on hunting
with the long bow which Mr. Thompson printed in the periodicals. These
papers were gathered into a book (1878), and although he had published
three years before a volume of sketches called “Hoosier Mosaics,” his
writings on this subject, with the attractive title “The Witchery of
Archery,” gave him his first footing as an author. The long bow has
again fallen into disuse, but the freshness and zest of those sketches
have not passed away. However, the archer had found in his woodlands
more important material than he had yet made use of; for while he
was following Robin Hood, he was also the servant of Theocritus and
Meleager, and he wrote at this period many lyrics that suggested, by
their spirit at least, the Greek pastoral poetry more than anything
in English. They were published under the descriptive title “Songs
of Fair Weather” (1883), and are included also in a larger volume of
Mr. Thompson’s verse, “Poems” (1892). E. S. Nadal writes[44] that he
has never known any scenery so classical as the glades which border
the forests of Ohio and Indiana. In fancy, he is able to people them
with figures of mythology, and in no other spots, he says, has his
imagination been equal to this task. It is pleasant to find this
comment running into a reference to Mr. Thompson: “When I was the
literary reviewer of a New York daily,” says Mr. Nadal, “I was always
on the lookout for the verses of a young poet who lived in this part of
the world. I remember that one of his poems related how that once when
Diana was at her bath in some clear spring, no doubt known to the poet,
a sort of sublimated Hoosier of the fancy, himself quite nude and
classic, passed near by. He quickly, however, ran away far through the
green thick groves of May,--

  “‘Afeard lest down the wind of Spring
  He’d hear an arrow whispering.’”

There is a great deal of the Indiana landscape to be found through
Mr. Thompson’s poems, though he often looks southward to the north
Georgia hills and to Florida. Servile descriptions he does not give,
but against backgrounds traced with great delicacy and beauty he throws
suddenly and for a moment only some fleeting spirit of the woodland.
There is in his language “the continual slight novelty” which is
indispensable in poetry that is to haunt and taunt the memory. As an
instance of his felicity a poem called “Before Dawn” may be cited:--

  “A keen, insistent hint of dawn
    Fell from the mountain height;
  A wan, uncertain gleam betrayed
    The faltering of the night.

  “The emphasis of silence made
    The fog above the brook
  Intensely pale; the trees took on
    A haunted, haggard look.

  “Such quiet came, expectancy
    Filled all the earth and sky:
  Time seemed to pause a little space;
    I heard a dream go by!”

Such subjects he always handles finely, leaving the thought in a spell
of mild wonder and awe, as if something beautiful had passed and
vanished. Similar effects were often possible with him in his younger
days; and it is a question whether the moods from which such work
proceeds recur after youth, the dream, has departed and taken that from
the heart which “never comes again.” Those early pieces could not have
been written by an indoors man; there is a refreshing quality of the
open air in every line of them. The note is unusual, and is perhaps
best sounded rarely; lightness and deftness are necessary to him who
would evoke its entire purity and melody. In “The Death of the White
Heron,” “A Flight Shot,” “Diana,” “The Fawn,” and “In the Haunts of
Bass and Bream,” he trusted his fortunes to rhymed couplets of eight
syllables, which are particularly well adapted to his purposes. The
last-named poem relates with tantalizing deliberation the taking of
a bass; the life of the stream pending the capture is described in
musical, transitional passages to the refrain,--

  “Bubble, bubble, flows the stream,
  Like low music through a dream.”

He again employs couplets in one of the most appealing of all this
series, “In Exile,” which is the prayer of an archer of the new world
that England, the mother of archers, will call him home. Later Mr.
Thompson essayed a number of poems in a flexible ode form, showing
a broadening of his powers and a widening of his personal horizons.
The flight in such pieces as “In Captivity” and “Before Sunrise” is
longer than in the earlier poems. It is a pleasure to find a poet
to whom America is so satisfactory as a field that he dares to set
up the mocking-bird against the nightingale. Mr. Thompson makes the
home-songster a medium for communicating the spirit and significance of
our democracy to our friends overseas. The movement through all these
poems is free and vigorous, and the irregular lines please by the happy
chance of the rhymes. The pleasant winds of which the poet writes
so refreshingly creep often into his measures. Patriotic subjects
he touches with nobility and fervor; and he became the laureate of
reconstruction when he penned his ringing poem “To the South,” the
conclusion of which must not be omitted here:--

  “I am a Southerner;
  I love the South; I dared for her
  To fight from Lookout to the Sea,
  With her proud banner over me.
  But from my lips thanksgiving broke
  As God in battle thunder spoke,
  And that Black Idol, breeding drouth
  And dearth of human sympathy
  Throughout the sweet and sensuous South,
  Was, with its chains and human yoke,
  Blown hellward from the cannon’s mouth,
  While Freedom cheered behind the smoke!”

Again, when invited to read a poem before the Phi Beta Kappa, of
Harvard, in 1893, he chose for his subject “Lincoln’s Grave,”
expressing, with greater care, similar feelings of loyalty, and
recounting Lincoln’s high qualities with eloquent appreciation.

Mr. Thompson has published a number of novels: “A Tallahassee Girl”
(1882); “His Second Campaign” (1882); “At Love’s Extremes” (1885);
“A Banker of Bankersville” (1886); “A Fortnight of Folly” (1888);
and “Stories of the Cherokee Hills” (1899), a volume of short tales
reminiscent of slave days and the author’s boyhood. “A Tallahassee
Girl” is a graceful and pretty story, the scene of which is laid at
the South, as is true also of the two tales that immediately followed
it. They convey distinct impressions of phases of Southern life in
the early post-bellum period, and abound in romantic color. “Alice of
Old Vincennes” (1900), is a captivating tale of the French period of
Indiana history, closing with the surrender of Vincennes to Clark. The
heroine is delightful, and Father Beret is a character worthy of Dumas.
The book shows in all ways a marked advance over any previous prose
work of this author. He has also written “The Boys’ Book of Sports”
(1886); and “Louisiana” (1888), in the Stories of the States series,
and “The Ocala Boy” (1885), all for juvenile readers. He has written
many essays in which some phase of literature has been observed from
the point of view of a nature-lover; and his touch in such instances
is always light and his matter bright and stimulating. Two volumes of
such papers have been collected, “By-ways and Bird Notes” (1885) and
“Sylvan Secrets” (1887). The scientist and the litterateur meet in
his discussions of the mind and memory of birds, and the anatomy of
bird-song; and his essay on Shakespeare, written within sound of the
Gulf of Mexico, to the accompaniment of the songs of mocking-birds, is
wholly characteristic of his independence in literary matters. He has
been one of the most courageous champions of the romantic as against
the analytic and realistic. He delivered at the Hartford Theological
Seminary, in 1883, a series of lectures dealing comprehensively with
the question of morality in literature, and he embodied these in a
volume, “The Ethics of Literary Art” (1883). Mr. Thompson became,
in 1889, literary editor of the New York _Independent_, reserving,
however, the privilege of continuing his residence at Crawfordsville.
His home, “Sherwood Place,” is on a quiet margin of the town, and the
house has stood for half a century shielded from the public eye by
native beeches and alien pines. Mr. Thompson’s life is wholly devoted
to study and writing. His instincts are thoroughly scholarly, and in
some directions, as in Greek poetry and Old French literature, where
long and loving study have given him special knowledge, he is an
authority. He has no complaints of the world’s treatment of him or his
work, and he declares that his writings have been received with much
more cordiality than they have deserved. He is exceedingly kind to
beginners in literature, and his criticisms have been of benefit to
many young Western and Southern writers. Wabash College conferred upon
him, in 1900, the degree of Doctor of Letters.

His brother, Will H. Thompson, was born in Missouri (1846), and the
experiences of their youth and early manhood were similar. Will
Thompson was a marvellous archer, and shared his brother’s enthusiasm
for hunting with bow and arrow. He has not been, in recent years, a
resident of Crawfordsville, having removed to the State of Washington,
but he wrote while in Indiana his “High Tide at Gettysburg,” one of
the few poems of the Civil War that has adequately expressed the spirit
of battle and the larger meaning of the conflict.


III. _Mary H. Krout_--_Caroline V. Krout_

Mary H. Krout, another Crawfordsville author, has added to the
distinction of an Indiana family in which an admiral, George Brown,
and several scholars and scientists have appeared. In her girlhood she
wrote the verses “Little Brown Hands,” which have enjoyed a vitality
not always relished by the author, whose later and longer flights are
better deserving of recognition. Miss Krout has been an indefatigable
traveller, and her books include “Hawaii and a Revolution” (1898), an
account of her personal experiences in the Sandwich Islands during
the political crisis that preceded annexation; also “A Looker-on in
London” (1899), which describes novel phases of English life freshly.
Miss Krout more recently penetrated to the interior of China, visiting
cities remote from the beaten track of travel. Her sister, Caroline V.
Krout, a classical scholar of high attainment, has written, under the
nom de plume “Caroline Brown,” “Knights in Fustian” (1900), a novel of
Indiana. The “knights in fustian” are “Knights of the Golden Circle,”
a treasonable society which menaced Indiana during the Civil War. The
principal characters are the fatuous rustics, who indulge their crude
taste for the mysterious in the secret meetings and sonorous ritual of
the society. Miss Krout knows the people of her own soil thoroughly,
and the particular type that has attracted her is set out in her pages
with photographic accuracy. The tale is true to history and to the
local life, and its literary excellence places the author’s name high
on the roll of Western writers. She has also written many short stories
for the periodicals.




CHAPTER VII

“OF MAKING MANY BOOKS THERE IS NO END”


The multiplication of books by Indianians increased steadily during
the last decade of the nineteenth century. Much of the production in
prose is unimportant save as it is taken in connection with the general
rise of cultivation in the State, and not a little derives interest
principally from the personality of the writers. Fiction attracted
many during the period indicated, and the impulse in this direction
has been attended with notable successes. The part played by Indiana
in the Civil War has latterly received attention, and the newer
phases of village life have also been treated. Local history has not,
unfortunately, attracted the literary fledgling in Indiana so often as
could have been desired, though the field is inviting, and thorough
work of this kind is far likelier to enjoy permanency than fair or
indifferent fiction or mediocre verse. Criticism is naturally last to
receive attention, and little critical writing can be credited to the
State. It is, however, remarkable that so much good work is done in the
several departments, the inference being that where so many are moved
to make experiments, the general average of cultivation must be high.

Indiana has been a kind of way station for many who have gained their
chief distinction elsewhere. Joaquin Miller and John James Piatt were
born in Indiana, but left in childhood, and Mary Hartwell Catherwood
lived in the State for a number of years; but these writers may hardly
be numbered among Indiana authors. James Newton Matthews, an Indianian
who has lived for many years in Illinois, has written much good verse,
and is included in discriminating anthologies. Lyman Abbott began his
ministry in Indiana as pastor of the Congregational Church at Terre
Haute. Both Charles Warren Stoddard and Maurice Francis Egan were
members of the faculty of Notre Dame University at different periods.
The Rev. Arthur Wentworth Eaton, a poet and writer on Acadian life,
was once a resident of Indianapolis; and Henry F. Keenan, who wrote
“Trajan” and other novels, edited the Indianapolis _Sentinel_ before
he became an author. The Rev. Bernard Harrison Nadal (1812-1870) held
a professorship at Asbury University from 1854 to 1857, and was the
father of E. S. Nadal, an essayist whose critical papers appeal to the
admirers of a calm and pensive style of writing. Miss Lucy S. Furman’s
“Stories of a Sanctified Town” (1896) were written at Evansville,
though the scenes are laid in Kentucky. The Rev. James Cooley Fletcher,
of the well-known Indiana family of that name, is the author of “Brazil
and Brazilians” (1868); and his daughter, Julia Constance, wrote, under
the pen-name “George Fleming,” the novels “Kismet” (1877); “Mirage”
(1878); “The Head of Medusa” (1880); “Vestigia” (1884); and “Andromeda”
(1885). Both have long been absent from the State, Mr. Fletcher in
California and his daughter in Italy.


I. _Fiction_

Booth Tarkington stands with Mr. Riley as the exponent of a Hoosier who
is kindly, generous, humorous, and essentially domestic. His novel,
“A Gentleman from Indiana” (1899), depicts the semi-urban type that
Mr. Riley so often celebrates in verse. Whitecapping as introduced
in this story is only the coarse exploit of a vicious colony living
on the outskirts of the town in which Mr. Tarkington’s tale has its
habitation. The author plainly states that his whitecaps are not to
be confounded with vigilance committees that undertake to reform the
morals of individuals, but that they are rowdies who masquerade as
whitecaps merely for purposes of private mischief and vengeance. Their
settlement resembles in some degree the “tough neighborhood” often
found in cities. The hostility between the people of Plattville and
the Cross Roads element dates back to the first movement of population
on the long trail from North Carolina into the Ohio Valley. The Cross
Roads folk had been evil and worthless in their early homes, and they
carried their worst traits with them into Indiana. Mr. Tarkington
has followed accurately the social history of the good stock and the
bad, illustrating the antipathy existing between the prosperous and
intelligent and the idle and ignorant. The distinction of Plattville
as a county seat of the central West is well established, and its
indolence, amiability, and pride are characteristic. The hero is a new
type of Hoosier, who has little kinship with the earlier people of
Eggleston, or with the Hoosier as Riley reports him; he is a native,
but has experienced at an Eastern college an intellectual change “into
something rich and strange,” and after long absence becomes a pilgrim
of light among his own people.

Mr. Tarkington has a perfect appreciation of the strength of local
affection in the Hoosier, and also of the thoroughly American
absorption in politics which seems to be more marked in county seats of
a few thousand inhabitants than in large cities. History in towns like
Plattville is not dated, _anno urbis conditæ_, but from a political
incident or the visit of a President; and a national campaign is a
quadrennial blessing that renews in the obscurest inhabitant the sense
of his individual responsibility to the government. Mr. Tarkington
emphasizes the homogeneity of the Middle Western folk; and this is
warranted fully by the statisticians. The people of his town live
together like a great, kind family, who are sufficient unto themselves.
He has thrown into the story the sincerity, affection, and loyalty
that are their attributes; and he adds, moreover, the atmosphere of
the Indiana landscape, with a nice appreciation of its loveliness,
sometimes hinted and often charmingly expressed. There is a crisp,
bracing quality in the writing that fitly accompanies the story, which
is, taken all in all, one of the most creditable novels yet written
of life in the Ohio Valley. There is every reason why Mr. Tarkington
should know his Indiana well, as his family has been prominent in the
State for three generations, and he is a native, having been born at
Indianapolis (1869). He was educated at Purdue and Princeton, receiving
from the latter the degree of A.M. in 1898. He has also written (1900)
“Monsieur Beaucaire,” a dramatic novelette of the eighteenth century,
in which a few striking incidents are handled most effectively. The
story has the charm of an exquisite miniature.

Indiana village life has been made the subject of careful study by Anna
Nicholas, in a series of short stories collected under the title “An
Idyl of the Wabash” (1899). Religious phenomena have greatly attracted
Miss Nicholas, and she has supplemented Dr. Eggleston’s studies of an
earlier period with her artistic sketches of contemporary life. The
social importance of the church, the vagaries of belief in a typical
Western village, and the intensity of the “revival” spirit are treated
with sympathy and humor. Several of these tales are, between the lines,
a tribute to that vigorous Protestant evangelization of Indiana, which
triumphed over mud and malaria and carried the gospel far beyond the
sound of church bells. Miss Nicholas has written with keen penetration
of the suppressed tragic element in rural life, but without morbidity.
Her characters are always inevitably related to the incidents, and she
communicates with unfailing success a sense of the humble atmosphere
of her farm and village. These stories are distinguished by the evident
sincerity of their purpose to reflect life honestly, and they are
written in a straightforward manner that aids the impression. They
illustrate anew the possibilities of a local literature that follows
progressively the formative years of a community’s life. It is even
now difficult to persuade the present generations of Indianians that
Dr. Eggleston’s Hoosiers ever lived; and Miss Nicholas, Mr. Riley,
and Mr. Tarkington have continued the story that was begun by their
predecessor, adding chapters equally instructive and valuable.

Mary Jameson Judah’s “Down Our Way” (1897) is not limited to a
particular region, but combines with studies of the author’s own
Indiana, sketches of social life at the South. The allurements of those
organizations for individual improvement and general reform that have
enlisted the energies of so many women in recent years have appealed to
Mrs. Judah’s sense of humor; and her stories show a fine appreciation
of the niceties of social perspective and proportion in Southern and
Western cities. The short story is happily adapted to the need of the
casual observer of local life, and tales like these, which bear the
stamp of fidelity, have an inestimable value for future students.

An increasing attention to local historical matters has lately been
marked, and an excellent instance of this is afforded by Millard Cox
(“Henry Scott Clark”) in “The Legionaries” (1899), a story of the
Morgan raid into Indiana. The political and social conditions on the
Indiana-Kentucky border during the Civil War were interesting, and
worthy of the study that has been given to them in this novel. The
military episode of which Morgan was the chief figure, though slight
in comparison with the larger movements of the war, was dramatic and
daring, and it lends itself well to this romantic setting. Mr. Cox is a
native Indianian (1856).

James A. Wickersham, an Indiana educator, has analyzed certain
religious conditions minutely in “Enoch Willoughby” (1900). This is a
novel of character rather than of incident, and marks still another
departure in method among writers of the Indiana group. The tale is
not wholly indigenous, as the characters belong as truly to one State
as to another of the Middle West. The Willoughbys are studied as a
family in which peculiarities have always been observed, and in Enoch
an hereditary “queerness” is manifested in religious idiosyncrasies.

The revival of interest in romantic fiction, that marked the closing
years of the century, witnessed the unusual successes of a number of
novels by American authors. One of the most popular romances of this
period is “When Knighthood was in Flower” (1898), by Charles Major, a
native of Indianapolis (1856), who is living at Shelbyville, twenty
miles distant from the capital. Mr. Major served no apprenticeship as
an author; this romance was his first book. He was educated in the
Indiana public schools and at the University of Michigan, and was
actively engaged in the practice of law when he wrote the novel, as a
diversion, on his Sunday afternoons at home. The friendliness of the
English-reading public to this tale is not difficult to understand.
It is a love story whose chief characters, Charles Brandon and Mary
Tudor, possess those qualities of youth, vivacity, and spirit that so
inevitably win the heart in fiction or the drama. The tale is told by
Sir Edwin Caskoden, a master of the dance at the court of Henry VIII.,
and not by the author direct,--a familiar trick of the historical
novelist; and it serves an excellent purpose, affording a valid excuse
for the ostensible editor to render the sixteenth-century narrative
of Caskoden into racy nineteenth-century English. This novel is one
of the noteworthy achievements of Indianians in the field of romance,
suggesting again what has been so true of General Wallace,--that the
imagination is superior to all laws, and that the romantic vision
easily pierces barriers of circumstance.

George Cary Eggleston, a brother of Edward, was born at Vevay (1839),
received his preliminary education in the schools of Vevay and Madison,
and attended Asbury University, but did not complete his course there.
When still under seventeen he took charge of a school in a wild
district of the State, but at the end of his engagement he went to
Virginia to the old homestead of his father’s family, completed his
college course, studied law, and served in the Confederate army. He
has for many years been a well-known New York journalist, and he is
the author of many books. He has always maintained relations with his
native State, and has utilized his knowledge of it in his writings.
In his novel “A Man of Honor” (1873), the hero is an Indiana boy, the
son of a Kentucky mother and a Virginia father, as was the case with
Mr. Eggleston himself. Another novel, “Juggernaut” (1891), opens in
Indiana. A Hoosier boy is the hero, and the description of his early
life among the hills of southern Indiana is pleasantly reminiscent of
the author’s own experiences. In a number of juvenile stories, among
them being “The Last of the Flat-boats” (1900), Mr. Eggleston has drawn
upon his recollections of Hoosierdom, and there is, he says, something
of Indiana in everything that he has written. Before Mr. Eggleston had
seriously begun literary work the name of his brother Edward was so
identified with Hoosier soil that the younger man could hardly invade
it with literary intent without risking the charge of imitation;
yet it is significant of the tenacity of his early impressions that
throughout his life the scenes of his childhood and youth have
continued to invite his imagination.


II. _History and Politics_

It is a pleasure to include George W. Julian (1817-1899) among those
who have added lustre to Indiana’s name. He was born at Centerville,
Wayne County, of Quaker parents who had followed the familiar line
of march from North Carolina to Indiana. He worked in the fields,
studied by the light of the fireplace, taught school, read law, and
in general experienced those vicissitudes and embarrassments that
beset so many ambitious American youths of his generation. The law
was a stepping-stone to politics, and from 1840 until the last years
of his long life he was constantly an eager observer of political
movements when not an active participant in campaigns. He was a founder
and leader of the Free-soil party, and was its candidate for the
vice-presidency on the ticket headed by John P. Hale in 1852. He was
repeatedly elected a representative in Congress, first as a Free-soil
candidate, and thereafter as a Republican, from what was known as “the
burnt district” in eastern Indiana, serving through the Civil War. He
was a vigorous opponent of slavery, and his “Speeches on Political
Subjects” (1872), for which Lydia Maria Child wrote an introduction, is
a record of his radical opposition that began in 1850 and continued to
the close of the rebellion. His integrity of opinion was unimpeachable.
He was a laborious student, and, although without the graces of
oratory, he was an impressive and effective speaker. He shared the
ignominy that was visited upon Lovejoy, Phillips, Giddings, and others
of the early antislavery phalanx, and his Congressional campaigns were
marked by bitter and violent abuse from his opponents. His powers of
invective made him a formidable antagonist. When his severity was
criticised, he would say that “there is nothing in my speech but the
truth that hurts.” He was essentially a reformer and an independent,
and broke fearlessly with his party when he could not conscientiously
follow it. Thus he joined in the Liberal Republican movement, and
supported Greeley. He then became, and remained to the end of his
life, a Democrat, and was appointed by Mr. Cleveland surveyor-general
of New Mexico. He made his home for thirty years at Irvington, a
suburb of Indianapolis and the seat of Butler College, where he was
the village Nestor. He delighted in literature, lived among books,
contributed often to the periodical press, and wrote (1892) the “Life
of Joshua R. Giddings.”

Civic interests have marked also the career of William Dudley Foulke,
who was born in New York City (1848) and educated at Columbia College,
being graduated in 1869. Mr. Foulke’s antecedents were Quakers, and he
removed, in 1876, to Wayne County, one of the principal centres of the
Society of Friends in Indiana. Mr. Foulke practised law and sat in the
State senate (1883-1885) as a Republican, but became an independent
upon the nomination of Mr. Blaine, and thereafter gave his attention
to various political reforms, notably in the civil service, conducting
investigations and frequently delivering addresses. He published (1887)
“Slav and Saxon,” an essay on the future of the two races which are,
in his belief, to contend finally for supremacy in the world. He gave
many years to the study of the war period in Indiana, with a view to
writing the life of Oliver P. Morton, Indiana’s “War Governor,” who had
been a citizen of Wayne County; and this biography (1899) is not only a
thorough study of Morton’s public services, but of the period to which
he belonged as well.

Early associated with Mr. Foulke in civil service reform work in
Indiana was Oliver T. Morton (1860-1898), the son of Governor Morton,
who was born in Wayne County and educated at Yale and Oxford. His
volume of essays, “The Southern Empire” (1892), contains, besides the
title paper, an historical essay on Oxford and an excellent discussion
of civil service reform. The opening essay is a most suggestive
presentation of the slaveholders’ ambitions to found a vast tropical
slave empire. It is of interest to read this, in the light of the
senior Morton’s herculean efforts against slavery; but that one
generation may easily differ from another is proved by the concluding
essay in advocacy of the merit system, which found few friends in the
period of which Senator Morton was a dominating figure.

Mr. Foulke’s brother-in-law, Arthur Middleton Reeves (1856-1891),
found employment for his scholarly tastes in unusual channels. After
his graduation from Cornell (1878), he devoted himself to the study of
Icelandic language and lore, in which his interest had been aroused
by Professor Willard Fiske; and he subsequently continued his studies
abroad in Europe and Iceland. He was an industrious and painstaking
student, with a passion for accuracy, and the volume of his letters
collected and published for his friends shows him to have possessed
unusually varied talents. He wrote “The Finding of Wineland the Good:
The History of the Icelandic Discovery of America” (1890); “Lad and
Lass: Story of Life in Iceland” (1890); “Jan: A Short Story” (1892);
and he had begun, with Dr. Valtyr Gudmundsson of Copenhagen, a
translation of the _Laxdæla Saga_ when, on the occasion of a visit to
his home in Indiana, he was killed in a railway accident.

The first Indiana historian was John B. Dillon, who was born at
Wellsburg, West Virginia (1808), learned the printer’s trade, and
removed to Indiana in 1834. While resident at Logansport he studied
law and was admitted to the bar; but his quiet, studious habits and
natural reserve unfitted him for the practice, and he never tested his
powers. He turned, fortunately, to the study of Indiana’s history; and
appreciating the importance of assembling data before the death of
witnesses and participants, began collecting material, and published
(1859) a “History of Indiana,” covering the period from the first
explorations to 1856. This work represents many years of laborious
research in a field that was practically untouched. It is the point
of departure for all who study Indiana history, and it is as exact as
diligent care could make it. Dillon published “Notes on Historical
Evidence in Reference to Adverse Theories of the Origin and Nature of
the Government of the United States” (1871); and at his death left the
manuscript of a work called “Oddities of Colonial Legislation.” He
received a number of minor appointments under the Federal government,
residing at Washington from 1863 to 1875. He returned to Indianapolis
at the termination of these employments and died there, in 1879. He was
gentle, patient, modest, and industrious, a man of merit, faithful in
all things. He never married, and had no interests save those of the
student. His proper place was in the quiet alcoves of libraries; and it
must always be remembered to his credit that with little encouragement,
and for the love of the labor, rather than for any reward, he gave
many laborious years to the task of establishing the State’s place in
history.

Jacob P. Dunn, who wrote “Indiana: A Redemption from Slavery,” in the
American Commonwealth series (1888), employed critical methods that
were not known in Dillon’s day. His work deals with a brief period,
and with events that had not previously been viewed in their proper
perspective. He brought to bear upon his subject a scientific analysis
and an exhaustive research that show especial fitness for historical
writing. His descriptions of the early French _habitant_ are
delightfully written, and give a distinct impression of the first white
settlers of the Wabash. Mr. Dunn has written also “Massacres of the
Mountains” (1886), an account of the Indian wars of the West, which is
noteworthy for its thorough treatment of the Mountain Meadows incident.
It is a standard work of reference, and one of the most popular books
catalogued in Western libraries. Mr. Dunn served a term as State
librarian, and has been for many years tireless in promoting interest
in libraries for rural communities. He was born at Lawrenceburg (1855),
and was graduated (1874) from Earlham College.

John Clark Ridpath (1840-1900), one of the most prolific of Indiana
authors, was born in Putnam County and was graduated from Asbury
University, with which he was subsequently connected in various
teaching and administrative capacities for many years. He was a most
successful teacher, particularly of history. Besides many text-books he
published “A Cyclopædia of Universal History” (1885); “Great Races of
Mankind” (1894); “Life and Memoirs of Bishop William Taylor” (1895);
and many monographs on historical and biographical subjects.

Richard G. Boone’s “History of Education in Indiana” (1892) is one of
the most important books in the State’s bibliography. Mr. Boone is
also the author of “Education in the United States” (1894). He was for
ten years identified with the common schools of Indiana, and for seven
years held the chair of pedagogics at Indiana University, resigning to
become superintendent of schools at Cincinnati.

“The Puritan Republic” (1899), by Daniel Wait Howe, shows further the
grasp of newer methods in historical writing, and is distinguished by
thorough treatment and judicial temper. It would seem that nothing
could be added to the literature of this subject, which has attracted
so many skilled historians; but Judge Howe adduced much new material
and presented the old and familiar in an orderly and attractive
manner. This is a thorough and exact work, which has taken rank
with the accepted authorities. Judge Howe is entitled to his word on
the Puritan, as his ancestors were among the pioneers of Sudbury,
Massachusetts. He was born in Switzerland County (1839), was graduated
from Franklin College, served four years in the Civil War as an Indiana
soldier, and enjoyed the unusual distinction of sitting for fourteen
years continuously as a judge of the Superior Court at Indianapolis.
He has contributed valuable essays to the publications of the Indiana
Historical Society.

William H. English (1822-1896) gave many years to a study of the life
and services of George Rogers Clark, and produced (1896) “Conquest of
the Country Northwest of the River Ohio, and Life of George Rogers
Clark,” an elaborate work in two volumes, which is a veritable
encyclopædia of facts. As Clark had been one of the neglected figures
in American history, the preparation of his biography was in the nature
of a public service. Mr. English is also the author of an historical
and biographical work on the Indiana constitution. He was born in
Scott County, and received his education in the public schools and at
Hanover College. He served as a representative in Congress (1853-1861),
and in 1880 was the Democratic candidate for vice-president on the
ticket with Hancock.

“Early Indiana Trials and Sketches” (1858) is a racy record of the
personal experiences of Oliver H. Smith (1794-1859), who had a kind of
Boswellian instinct for the interesting. As a lawyer he “rode circuit”
with Miles Eggleston, David Wallace, James Rariden, John Test, and
others famous in the early days; and no one has written of these men
with nicer appreciation of their high qualities. He was elected a
senator in Congress in 1836, and served for one term.

William Wesley Woollen (1828) has also added to the literature of local
biography. His “Biographical and Historical Sketches of Early Indiana”
(1883) contains information that is nowhere else accessible, and it is,
moreover, a well-written and entertaining volume.

David Demaree Banta (1833-1896) wrote often and well on subjects of
local history, and his “Historical Sketch of Johnson County” (1881)
shines amid the dreary waste of Indiana County histories. It contains a
rare fund of information touching pioneer life in general, and reflects
in some degree the personality of the accomplished and versatile
author, who was a fine type of the native Hoosier.


III. _Miscellaneous_

The press of Indiana has aided greatly in the State’s intellectual
advance. In the larger towns the newspapers have usually been
well-written, and many of them have extended sympathetic encouragement
to beginners in authorship. Many Western writers found their first
friendly editors at the offices of the _Herald_ or _Journal_ at
Indianapolis. John H. Holliday, G. C. Matthews, Anna Nicholas, Elijah
W. Halford, Charles Richard Williams, A. H. Dooley, Lewis D. Hayes,
Morris Ross and Louis Howland are among those who, in the hurried
labors of daily newspaper-making, have found time to preach the gospel
of “sweetness and light” through the Indianapolis press. High on the
roll of Indiana journalists whose talents are especially deserving
of remembrance is Berry R. Sulgrove (1827-1890), who was born at
Indianapolis, attended local schools, learned the saddler’s trade,
and worked for a short time as a journeyman. His aptness and love of
learning had attracted attention, and in 1847 he was enabled to enter
Bethany College, West Virginia, then under the presidency of the famous
Alexander Campbell. His preparatory studies at the “Old Seminary” of
Indianapolis had been so thorough that he was graduated at the end
of one year with all the honors of the college, and delivered his
commencement oration in Greek. He studied law and practised for a
few years, but became connected with the _Journal_ in 1854, and was
thereafter identified with the press of Indianapolis. He possessed
an extraordinary memory that was a source of constant amazement to
his friends and associates. His information in many departments of
knowledge was both extensive and exact, and he retained, to the end
of his life, his interest in public matters, foreign and domestic.
He wrote with precision and grace, and his use of homely, local
illustrations added to the interest and force of what he had to say.
Now and then a Macaulay-like roll would sound in his sentences; and he
would frequently imitate Macaulay’s rhetorical tricks, as by declaring,
with conscious humor, that some local event had “never been equalled
between the old bridge and the bayou”; but he wrote usually without
affectation, and his prodigious memory made possible a variety of
suggestion and illustration that never failed to distinguish his work.
During many years he was at different times a contributor of editorial
matter to all of the Indianapolis newspapers, extending his field at
intervals to the Chicago and Cincinnati dailies. He wrote usually at
his home, and latterly had no desk in any newspaper office, though
a member of the _News_ staff to the end of his life. His manuscript
was famous among Western printers, who encountered it at Cincinnati,
Indianapolis, and Chicago, and in the day of Mr. Sulgrove’s greatest
activity seemed unable to escape from it. He wrote habitually on
the backs of old election tickets, on scraps of programmes, on bits
of paper picked up on his country walks, but never by any chance on
a clean new sheet designed for the purpose. His handwriting was
microscopic, but perfectly legible, carefully punctuated, and free from
erasure. A slip the length and breadth of the hand might contain half
a column. No more interesting figure than he ever appeared in Indiana
journalism; but his ambitions were not equal to his talents, and he was
long an obscure figure in the city of his birth, whose intimate history
he knew familiarly. His “History of Indianapolis and Marion County”
(1884) contains only slight hints of his superior abilities.

His contemporary, George C. Harding (1829-1881), was a native of
Tennessee, but gave the best years of his life to journalism at
Indianapolis. He was a student of human nature rather than of books,
but his literary instincts were true, and in the two weekly newspapers,
the _Herald_ and the _Review_, which he conducted, he was at once
the inspiration and the terror of his contributors. Some of the
sketches in a volume of his “Miscellaneous Writings” (1882) show an
agreeably humorous turn. He had the trained journalist’s appreciation
of condensed wisdom. It was his habit to repeat, week after week, a
satirical paragraph in which some individual was pilloried until
the victim’s name became a by-word and a hissing in the community.
Sometimes this served a moral purpose; again the intention was
purely humorous. Years ago a candidate for constable, who was also a
delegate to the nominating convention held at Indianapolis, received
therein exactly one vote. The question, “Who voted for Daubenspeck?”
was thereupon reiterated weekly in the _Herald_, until it passed
permanently into a phrase of local speech.

Angelina Teal’s “John Thorne’s Folks” (1884), and “Muriel Howe”
(1892); Margaret Holmes’s “Chamber Over the Gate” (1886); Martha
Livingstone Moody’s “Alan Thorne” (1889); Harriet Newell Lodge’s “A
Bit of Finesse” (1894); many excellent short stories by Helen Rockwood
Edson, literary essays by Harriet Noble and Kate Milner Rabb, and Ida
Husted Harper’s “Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony,” emphasize the part
that women have played in the State’s literary achievement. The Rev.
Charles R. Henderson, of Lafayette, a member of the faculty of Chicago
University, has been a prolific writer on sociological subjects.
John Augustine Wilstach, also of Lafayette, has busied himself with
philological studies. He translated Virgil (1884) and Dante (1888), and
coincidently with the publication of these versions issued critical
reviews of the literature touching his subjects. The text of Lucian
was edited for school use (1882) by Charles Richard Williams, who
became an Indianapolis journalist; and Demarchus C. Brown translated
selections of Lucian into English (1896). George Ade, who discovered
fresh subjects for materialistic fiction in Chicago, was born in
Indiana and educated at Purdue, as was also his illustrator, John T.
McCutcheon. Mr. Ade has a touch all his own, and his character studies
are thoroughly original. He and Hector Fuller, another Hoosier writer
of short fiction, show how the journalist may successfully turn his
hand to book-making. William P. Fishback, one of the founders of the
Indianapolis Literary Club, has published (1895) his “Recollections of
Lord Coleridge,” with whom he enjoyed a delightful acquaintance; and
another member of the club, Augustus Lynch Mason, wrote “Romance and
Tragedy of Pioneer Life” (1883). Benjamin Harrison’s public services
cannot obscure the fact of his authorship of “This Country of Ours”
(1899), a capital account of the functions of the several departments
of the Federal government.

That form of humorous writing which has become a feature of American
journalism, and which is, moreover, a sharply critical commentary
on contemporaneous American life, not to be rejected lightly, is
also produced in great volume in Indiana. This goes to the public
anonymously, but Emma Carleton, R. D. Stevenson (“Wickwire”), and Wood
Levette Wilson are among those whose dialogues, paragraphs, and jingles
constantly appear in many publications. S. W. Gillilan, who wrote
“Finnigan to Flannigan,” the verses in Irish dialect which have become
a kind of American railway classic, is an Indianian.




CHAPTER VIII

AN INDIANA CHOIR


I. _Early Writers_

The specific talent necessary to the expression of local life is much
rarer than the ability to write of life in the abstract. If the knack
of writing accompanied a sensibility to the life that lay nearest, we
should long ago have had an abundant American literature descriptive of
conditions that have passed and will not, in the very nature of things,
recur. But the line of impressionability may not be controlled; and
though many protests have been launched against minor American poets
for looking beyond the robin to the nightingale, the rejection of the
near continues, though in a diminishing degree. The early poets of the
Ohio Valley did not often approach closely to the Western soil; they
lacked insight and courage and their work was usually not interesting.
When they occasionally essayed a Western subject, they were unable
to bring to bear upon it any novelty of treatment; it was all “icily
regular, splendidly null.” William T. Coggeshall states in the preface
to his “Poets and Poetry of the West” (1864) that in the early years
of the nineteenth century “soldiers, hunters, and boatmen had among
them many songs descriptive of adventures incident to backwoods
life, some of which were not destitute of poetic merit; but they
were known only around campfires, or on ‘broadhorns’” (flat-boats),
and tradition, he adds, preserved none worthy to be included in his
anthology. But these racy songs would have been of greater value than
much of the verse that he has preserved in his pages, though as a
part of the history of development this, too, is not to be spurned.
Coggeshall’s work includes notices of ninety-seven men and fifty-five
women. Twenty-three of the total he attributes to Indiana by reason of
residence, and thirteen of the number were natives of the State. Only
a small proportion of the poets named by Coggeshall survived, though
the writers of the biographical notes accompanying his selections were
cordial and anxious to confer immortality. William D. Howells and John
J. Piatt are included, and Mr. Howells wrote several of the sketches.
It is diverting to read the opinion of Mr. Howells’s biographer that
“some of his prose sketches are quite equal in grace of conception
and individuality of treatment to any of his poems.” He was then
twenty-seven.

Cincinnati and Lexington, Kentucky, were early rivals for literary
prominence at the West: one was the seat of Cincinnati College,
the other of Transylvania University. Many books were published at
Lexington before 1825, and _The Medley_, or _Monthly Miscellany_,
which appeared there in 1803, is believed to have been the first
magazine published west of the Alleghanies. Hunt’s _Western Review_,
which was formerly regarded as the pioneer, dated from 1819, and was
also a Lexington publication. Lexington dropped out, and Louisville
fell into place as a defender of the literary faith with the advent
of George D. Prentice, who became the ardent champion of the muses in
the Ohio Valley. The headquarters of poets for this region was the
office of the Louisville _Journal_ during Prentice’s reign, and all
of the Coggeshall poets laid the tribute of their song before him.
To paraphrase Bishop Butler’s remark about the strawberry, quoted by
Walton, doubtless Prentice might have declined a poem or discouraged a
poet, but doubtless he never did. He was not an exacting critic, and he
encouraged many who were without talent; but he took away the reproach
of the neglected and unappreciated, and now and then he found a few
grains in the chaff to pay him for his trouble.

The _Literary Gazette_, which appeared at Cincinnati in 1824, with
the motto “Not to display learning, but to excite a taste for it,”
numbered Mrs. Julia L. Dumont, of Vevay, among its contributors; and
she was the first Indiana writer to become identified with the group of
aspirants that now began to appear along the Ohio. The prospectus of
another _Western Review_, published at Cincinnati for three years from
May, 1827, declared that “we are a scribbling and forthputting people.
Little as they have dreamed of the fact in the Atlantic country, we
have our thousand orators and poets.” However this may have been,
“the Atlantic country” invaded the Ohio Valley in 1835, when the
_Western Messenger_ was begun at Cincinnati, under the auspices of the
Western Unitarian Association. It was edited first by the Rev. Ephraim
Peabody, and later, at Louisville, by James Freeman Clarke. Clarke left
Louisville in 1840, and the _Messenger_ was continued at Cincinnati
by the Rev. W. H. Channing. John B. Dillon represented Indiana in its
table of contents, and found himself in good company, with Emerson,
William Ellery Channing, Jones Very, and C. P. Cranch. The periodical
was, as Venable calls it, “an exotic--a Boston flower blooming on
the Ohio,” and it ceased to appear in 1841. In the same year, the
_Ladies’ Repository_ made its appearance at Cincinnati, under Methodist
auspices, and was published continuously for thirty-six years. Mrs.
Dumont, Mrs. Sarah T. Bolton, Miss Mary Louise Chitwood, Mrs. Rebecca
S. Nichols, Mrs. A. L. Ruter Dufour, Horace P. Biddle, and Isaac H.
Julian were the principal Indiana contributors. The number of Indiana
writers increased steadily, and the _Genius of the West_, a Cincinnati
magazine dating from 1855, extended the list to include the names
of Benjamin S. Parker, John B. Dillon, and Louise E. Vickroy. Peter
Fishe Reed, also a contributor to the _Genius of the West_ and similar
magazines of the period, combined farming with literary experiments
near Mount Vernon (Indiana), and lived for a time at Indianapolis. The
majority of these pioneer periodicals lived only a short time, and the
Civil War brought a final interruption to most of them; they passed
out with the “annuals,” whose literary flavor was similar. Indiana’s
ante-bellum writers usually looked to Louisville and Cincinnati for
publicity, and no serious effort was made to establish literary
magazines within the State.[45] It curiously happened, however, that
Emerson Bennett, a voluminous producer of “penny dreadfuls,” published
a literary paper called the _Casket_, at Lawrenceburg (1846), but soon
abandoned it. The patient research of Venable discovered the _Western
Censor_, published at Indianapolis in 1823-1824, and _The Family
Schoolmaster_, which had a brief existence at Richmond in 1839. _The
Querist_ was conducted by Mrs. Nichols for a few months at Cincinnati
in 1844, and Henry Ward Beecher’s _Indiana Farmer and Gardener_ was
begun at Indianapolis in 1845, but removed to Cincinnati in the
following year. Beecher’s contributions to this paper were the nucleus
of his book “A Pleasant Talk about Fruits, Flowers, and Farming.” The
_Literary Messenger_ is credited to Versailles, 1854.

Coggeshall included among the Indianians in his anthology William
Wallace Harney, who was born (1832) at Bloomington, where his father
was a professor in Indiana University; and William Ross Wallace, born
(1819) at Lexington, Kentucky, and educated at Bloomington and Hanover
colleges; but as the literary life of both began after they had left
the State, they may hardly be catalogued as Indiana authors. The Rev.
Sidney Dyer, a native of New York State (1814), was for a number of
years (1852-1859), a Baptist minister at Indianapolis. He is the
author of a number of books, and his writings include many popular
songs and poems. Isaac H. Julian, a native of Wayne County (1823),
and the brother of George W. Julian, hardly added subsequently to the
reputation he had gained prior to the publication of Coggeshall’s
book, and the same is true of Granville M. Ballard, who was born in
Kentucky (1833), and after his graduation from Asbury University became
a resident of Indianapolis, where he is still living. Horace P. Biddle,
born in Ohio (1818-1900), removed at an early age to Indiana, where he
became prominent in affairs, and held many public offices before his
retirement. He aided in the early efforts in behalf of common school
education, and was a diligent student and writer. Noble Butler is
placed in Kentucky’s list of early writers, though his residence at
Hanover gives Indiana a claim upon him. He frequently translated German
poetry and wrote original verse occasionally; but the fugitive essays
of his nephew, Noble C. Butler, of Indianapolis, are better literature.
Coggeshall includes also Jonathan W. Gordon and Henry W. Ellsworth, of
Indianapolis, whose contributions to the literature of the period were
slight and without distinction. Ellsworth was a native of Connecticut
and a graduate of Yale (1834). Amanda L. Ruter Dufour (1822-1899) and
Laura M. Thurston (1812-1842) are properly included among Indiana’s
early poets. The latter wrote the lines “On Crossing the Alleghanies”
and “The Green Hills of My Fatherland,” which are above the average in
the collection and were once much applauded. George W. Cutter, whose
“Song of Steam,” beginning,--

  “Harness me down with your iron bands;
  Be sure of your curb and rein,”--

was once in favor, lived in Indiana, and sat in the General Assembly.
He died at Washington in 1865. Rebecca S. Nichols was long associated
with the little band of writers who printed verses and tales in
Louisville and Cincinnati publications, and her literary instincts were
truer than those of most of her contemporaries. She is still living at
Indianapolis.

A mournful interest attaches to the work of Mary Louise Chitwood, who
was born at Mount Carmel, October 29, 1832, and died there twenty-three
years later, sincerely mourned by the whole choir of Western poets.
Prentice had encouraged her, and he wrote a memoir to accompany a
volume of her verses that appeared in 1857. Her work promised well,
though it shared the defects of most of the verse of the day.

Sarah T. Bolton is one of the most interesting figures in Coggeshall,
and though born in Kentucky (1820), her long life was spent principally
in Indiana. Her husband, Nathaniel Bolton, edited the first newspaper
ever published in Indianapolis. Mrs. Bolton began writing at an early
age, and through many years it may be said that she stood for poetry
in Indiana. Many of her poems are stiff and formal and show little
originality; but often her pieces are free and spontaneous, and she
had humor, which most of the early poets of the West lacked. Her last
volume (1891) is dedicated “To the poets of Indiana, my children after
the spirit.” She was known to Willis and Morris, of the Knickerbocker
group contemporary with her. Her husband was appointed consul at
Geneva in 1855, and she lived for a number of years abroad, finding
fresh material for poems in her travels. She died at Indianapolis in
1893. Her best-known poem is “Paddle Your Own Canoe.” She was a loyal
Indianian and wrote the lines:--

  “The winds of Heaven never fanned,
  The circling sunlight never spanned
  The borders of a better land
      Than our own Indiana.”

Benjamin S. Parker, of all the poets discovered in Indiana by
Coggeshall, acquired the greatest skill in versification, and wrote
most comprehensively of the pioneer life. He was born on a farm near
New Castle (1833), and is one, at least, to whom the phrase “racy of
the soil” needs no explanation. He lived in a log cabin, performing the
hardest farm labor, and long observation of life at the West made him
an authority in matters of customs and dialect. His volume “The Cabin
in the Clearing” (1887) contains many poems in which the trials of the
earlier settlers are graphically depicted, and it was his right, as
one who had aided in the rough work of the pioneers, to urge the new
generations to use worthily the opportunities which they inherited. Of
the fauna and flora of his own woodlands Mr. Parker became the especial
celebrant. The following lines from one of his most graceful pieces are
characteristic of his happiest moods:--

  “I had a dream of other days,--
    In golden luxury waved the wheat;
  In tangled greenness shook the maize;
    The squirrels ran with nimble feet,
  And in and out among the trees
    The hangbird darted like a flame;
  The cat-bird piped his melodies,
    Purloining every warbler’s fame:
  And then I heard triumphal song,
  ’Tis morning and the days are long.”

Mr. Parker felt, more than any other poet of the Ohio Valley, the
grandeur of the vast woodlands as the pioneers found them, and he
has touched upon it constantly in his writings. He lived for several
years in Canada, as a consular officer, and wrote a series of poems
under Northern influences; but he has been most fortunate in subjects
derived from home experiences. He is a connecting link between the
earliest Indiana writers and their successors, and he has been one
of the humblest and most devoted and sincere of all the servants of
literature in his State.


II. _Forceythe Willson_

It is an abrupt transition from these pioneers of poesy to Forceythe
Willson, the only Indiana poet who ever came in contact with the New
England group. Emerson, in the preface to his “Parnassus” (1874), says,
“I have inserted only one of the remarkable poems of Forceythe Willson,
a young Wisconsin poet of extraordinary promise, who died very soon
after this was written.” The poem chosen was “In State.” This placing
of Willson in Wisconsin is, as Piatt says in his eloquent sketch of the
poet,[46] rather needless, for he was never connected with Wisconsin
in any way. He was born at Genesee Falls, New York, April 10, 1837. In
1846 his father removed to Kentucky, and in 1852 to New Albany. Willson
spent about a year at Antioch College, in Ohio, and went afterward
to Harvard, but left in his sophomore year, owing to ill health. His
home was in Indiana from 1852 to 1864. He wrote his best poems,
indeed the greater part of his slender product, at New Albany, and his
residence there, in immediate contact with the seat of war, colored
his distinctive work. He married, in 1863, Elizabeth Conwell Smith,
whom he had met the preceding year at New Albany, and whose literary
gifts created a bond of sympathy between them. They removed shortly
to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where one of Willson’s brothers was in
school. He purchased a house on the Mount Auburn road, near Lowell’s
home, with an outlook on the Charles River. James R. Gilmore (Edmund
Kirke) was his neighbor and saw much of him at Cambridge. He wrote, in
1895, his recollections, testifying to Willson’s unusual qualities, and
giving this description of his personal appearance:--

  “Take him, all in all, he was the most lovable man I ever knew; and
  as a mere specimen of physical manhood he was a joy to look at. A
  little above the medium height, he was perfectly proportioned and of
  a sinewy, symmetrical figure. His hair was raven black, wavy, and
  glossy as satin. His skin was alight olive, slightly tinged with red,
  and his features were regular, somewhat prominent, and exceedingly
  flexible, showing an organization of a highly sensitive character.
  But his eyes were what riveted the observer’s attention. Mr.
  Longfellow told me they were the finest type of the Oriental, but I
  never saw eyes--Eastern or Western--to compare with them in luminous
  power. They were full, large, and dark, with overhanging lashes; but
  for the life of me I cannot tell their precise color. At times they
  seemed a deep blue, at other times an intense black, and then they
  were balls of fire, as he was stirred by some strong emotion. They
  spoke the ready language of a deep, strong, fiery, yet chastened,
  nature as it was moved by love, joy, sorrow or indignation.”[47]

Piatt remarks upon his “Oriental look and manner,” and all who knew
him were impressed by his distinguished appearance and grave courtesy.
In 1858 New Albany became interested in spiritualism. Willson fell
under the spell and began a study of the subject. Piatt says that
Willson “soon abandoned the professors, but retained until his death
a serious spiritual theory or faith of his own. He believed--and he
was absolutely honest and sincere, I am sure, in his faith--that the
spirits of the dead could, and at times do, have communication with the
living.”

Willson seems not to have had an active occupation at any time. His
father had been successful in business, and dying at New Albany in
1859, left a comfortable fortune to his children. The poet lived by
himself for a number of years, at New Albany, in a small house where he
surrounded himself with books and led the life of a student. Louisville
is directly across the Ohio from New Albany, and Willson was known
to a few of the literary people on the Kentucky side, particularly
to Prentice. The approach of the Civil War aroused in him a deep
interest in its great issues, and he wrote editorials in support of
the Union cause for Prentice’s _Journal_. He began in the first year
of the war, and concluded later, his poem “In State,” which, in spite
of its occasional vagueness and its despairing view of the political
situation, is written in an effective stanza and is splendidly
imaginative. He gloomily assumed that the nation was dead--hence his
personification of it as a prone figure lying “in state,” and he brings
the rulers of Europe to look upon it,--

    “The winds have tied the drifted snow
    Around the face and chin; and lo,
    The sceptred giants come and go
  And shake their shadowy crowns and say: ‘We always feared it would be
    so!’”

There is hardly a stanza in the poem that does not contain some
striking image. It moves on in the mournful cadence of a _miserere_:--

    “The Sisterhood that was so sweet,
    The Starry System sphered complete,
    Which the mazed Orient used to greet,
  The Four and Thirty fallen Stars glimmer and glitter at her feet.”

He published, January 1, 1863, as a carrier’s address in the Louisville
_Journal_, “The Old Sergeant,” which Piatt believed to have been “the
transcript of a real history, none of the names in it being fictitious,
and the story being reported as exactly as possible from the lips
of a Federal assistant surgeon named Austin, with whom Willson was
acquainted at New Albany.” The poem appeared anonymously, and for some
reason, which was never explained, Willson seemed reluctant at first
to admit its authorship. It attracted wide attention. Gilmore relates
that early in 1863, in the office of the _Atlantic Monthly_, he met
Dr. Holmes, who held in his hand a copy of the Louisville _Journal_,
containing “The Old Sergeant.” “Read that,” said he, “and tell me if
it’s not the finest thing since the war began. Sit down and read it
here; you might lose it if I let you take it away.” The ballad is found
in “The Old Sergeant and Other Poems” (1867). It is a vivid narrative
of sustained power and interest, deriving strength from the earnestness
of the recital and the simple language, sometimes descending to army
slang, of the soldier. The poem is historically accurate and is a fine
celebration of the battle of Shiloh:

  “There was where Lew Wallace showed them he was of the canny kin,
  There was where old Nelson thundered, and where Rousseau waded in;
  There McCook sent ’em to breakfast, and we all began to win--
    There was where the grapeshot took me, just as we began to win.

  “Now, a shroud of snow and silence over everything was spread;
  And but for this old blue mantle and the old hat on my head,
  I should not have even doubted, to this moment, I was dead--
    For my footsteps were as silent as the snow upon the dead!”

There is a suggestion of Poe, whom Willson greatly admired, in the
repetition, with slight variation, of the third line of the stanza;
but such points Willson always considered carefully. He was certainly
not servilely imitative, and he is an ungenerous critic who would pick
flaws in a poem that is so fine as a whole. “The Old Sergeant” is
entitled to a place with the best poems of the war--with Mrs. Howe’s
“Battle Hymn,” Brownell’s stirring pieces, Will H. Thompson’s “High
Tide at Gettysburg,” and Ticknor’s “Little Giffen.” These stand apart
from Lowell’s “Commemoration Ode” and similar poems, which are civic
rather than military. In “The Rhyme of the Master’s Mate,” Willson
turned again to the heroic, and while the poem is less artistic than
“The Old Sergeant,” it has a swing and a stroke that fit his theme
well. His volume contains a number of mystical pieces, colored by his
belief in spiritualism, and a few lyrics, as “The Estray” and “Autumn
Song,” which have an elusive charm and increase admiration for his
talents. Willson was emphatically a masculine character. In literature
and in life he liked what he called “muscle,” and he certainly showed
a sinewy grasp in his best poems. It is related that once during the
war he organized, and armed at his own expense, a home guard to protect
New Albany in a dangerous crisis, and at other times he displayed
great personal courage. If it had not been for his ill health he would
undoubtedly have enlisted.

Willson was not immediately identified at Cambridge as the author of
“The Old Sergeant.” As Dr. Holmes said after Willson’s death, “He came
among us as softly and silently as a bird drops into his nest,” and it
was not like him to call attention to his own performances. After the
death of his wife and infant child, October 13, 1864, Willson was often
at Gilmore’s house, where he first saw Emerson. Gilmore relates that he
returned home one day from Boston to find Lowell lying at full length
on a lounge in the library, in animated conversation with Willson.
On this occasion an incident occurred illustrative of Willson’s gift
of “second sight.” Longfellow was mentioned in the conversation, and
Willson remarked that the poet would be there shortly. No one had
an intimation of the visit, but Willson described the route that
Longfellow was then following toward the house; and when the poet
presently arrived, he affirmed the statement of his itinerary as
Willson had given it. Willson’s interest in life ended with the death
of his wife, whose few poems he published privately. She is remembered
at New Albany as a girl of great beauty and refinement.

Willson left Cambridge in the fall of 1866 for New Albany. While there
he suffered hemorrhages of the lungs and was ill for a month. He never
regained his strength, and his death occurred February 2, 1867, at
Alfred, New York. His convictions as to spiritualism grew firmer after
his wife’s death, and toward the last, so one of his brothers wrote,
“his wife and child seemed to be with him constantly, and he talked
to them in a low voice.” He was buried at Laurel, the home of Mrs.
Willson’s family, in the White Water Valley. His wife and child lie in
one grave beside him. The quiet hilltop cemetery commands a view of one
of the loveliest landscapes in Indiana, and it is fitly touched with
something of the peace, strength, and beauty that are associated with
Willson’s name.


III. _Later Poets_

Willson marked the beginning of better things, and a livelier fancy and
a keener critical spirit is henceforward observable--in the writings
of a veteran like Parker, and in the new company of writers that was
forming. The Civil War had profoundly moved the Central States, and
Indiana had perhaps felt it more than her neighbors. Willson had lifted
his voice for the Union while the war cloud still lay upon the land,
and the Thompson brothers spoke for the South from Indiana soil on the
arrival of the era of better feeling. Ben D. House, who had served
in the Federal armies, wrote with truth and spirit. He ran away from
his home in Vermont when he was seventeen, and entered the army from
Massachusetts. He saw hard service, and received wounds which were a
constant menace for the remainder of his life. He was mustered out
finally at Indianapolis, and lived there almost continuously until
his death in 1887. His idiosyncrasies and affectations were many, and
included the wearing of a great cloak, in which he sombrely wrapped
himself in cold weather. His poems were printed privately by his
friends in 1892. He had fair luck with the sonnet, and wrote, on the
occasion of Grant’s death, “Appomattox,” which follows:--

  “To peace-white ashes sunk war’s lurid flame;
    The drums had ceased to growl, and died away
    The bark of guns, where fronting armies lay,
  And for the day the dogs of war were tame,
  And resting on the field of blood-fought fame,
    For peace at last o’er horrid war held sway
    On her won field, a score of years to-day,
  Where to her champion forth a white flag came.
  O nation’s chief, thine eyes have seen again
    A whiter flag come forth to summon thee
  Than that pale scarf which gleamed above war’s stain,
  To parley o’er the end of its red reign--
    The truce of God that sets from battle free
  Thy dauntless soul, and thy worn life from pain.”

Lee O. Harris, a native of Pennsylvania (1839), removed to the State
in 1852, and was an Indiana soldier in the Civil War. His verse, as
collected in “Interludes” (1893), shows little of the military feeling,
but is strongly domestic, a forerunner of the work of Mr. Riley, whose
teacher Mr. Harris had been at Greenfield.

Dan L. Paine, an Indianapolis journalist (1830-1895), possessed a
sound taste, and his occasional pieces were well executed. He wrote
an elegy on the death of his friend and fellow-journalist, George C.
Harding, which is a meditation on the courage of such spirits:--

  “On Freedom’s heights they stand as sentinels,
    Brave tropic suns, delve in earth’s deepest caves,
  And climb the ladder of the parallels
    To sleep in icy graves.”

Such felicities were not uncommon with him. He was the friend and
helpful critic of all the younger Indiana writers, and literary
reputations have been created from slighter talents than his. His poems
were collected privately, under the title “Club Moss” (1890).

So far nearly every name identified with the literary impulse in
Indiana has been met south of a line drawn across the State at
Crawfordsville; but Evaleen Stein carried it farther north, to
Lafayette. Miss Stein’s verse illustrates happily the growing
emancipation of the younger generation of Western poets from bare
didacticism, and an escape from the landscape of tradition. She finds
her subjects in nature, and draws pictures for the pleasure of it, and
not with the expectation of tacking a moral to the frame. Earnestness
and conviction characterize her verses, and there is often a kind of
exultance in the note when she sings of the rough hill pastures or
the marshes and bayous that invite her study. She has something of
Thoreau’s genius for details, and her volume “One Way to the Woods”
(1897) is an accurate calendar of the moods of nature. Her work marks
really a new generation, the change of fashion, and the passing of the
ante-bellum poets of the region. Twenty years earlier no Ohio Valley
poet would have explored a bayou, or could have written of it so
musically as Miss Stein:--

  “Ah, surely none would ever guess
  That through that tangled wilderness,
    Through those far forest depths remote,
  Lay any smallest path, much less
    A way wherein to guide a boat!”

A small volume of the poems of M. Genevieve Todd (1863-1896), of the
order of Sisters of Providence, was published after her death. They
are wholly devotional, and are marked by elevation of spirit wedded to
correct taste. Sister Mary Genevieve was born at Vevay, of Protestant
parents, and died at the convent of St. Mary’s of the Woods near Terre
Haute. Albion Fellows Bacon, Mrs. D. M. Jordan, Richard Lew Dawson,
and William R. Williams have also been creditable contributors to the
Hoosier anthology.

Indiana offers, on the whole, a fair field for poets. The prevailing
note of the landscape is tranquillity. There is hardly a spot in the
State that touches the imagination with a sense of power or grandeur,
and yet there are countless scenes of quiet beauty. The Wabash gathers
breadth and grace as it flows southward. Long curves here and there
give to the eye the illusion of a chain of lakes, and the river’s
valley is a rich garden. The Tippecanoe is another beautiful river,
famous among fishermen, and there are a number of charming lakes in the
northern part of the State. The Kankakee marsh was long haunted by the
migrant wild birds, and in recent years a wild goose was found there
with the piece of an Eskimo arrow, made of reindeer bone, through its
breast. Poets and novelists have found inspiration in the Kankakee.
Maurice Thompson and Evaleen Stein have celebrated the region in song;
and there is a tradition that the manuscript of “Ben Hur” visited both
the Kankakee and Lake Maxinkuckee at certain crises in its preparation.
The possibilities of mixed forests are nowhere more happily illustrated
than in Indiana, whether in the earliest wistful days of spring or
in the full glory of autumn. The beech and the elm, the maple, the
hickory and the walnut, and the humbler sassafras and pawpaw are
companions of a royal order of forestry, from which the sycamore--the
self-constituted guardian of rivers and creeks--is excluded by nature’s
decree confirmed by man’s preference. The variety of cereals that may
be grown saves the tilled areas from monotony. There are no vast plains
of corn or wheat as in Kansas or the Dakotas, but the corn ripens
between wheat stubble on one hand, and green pastures or remnants of
woodland on the other. The transitional seasons bring more of delight
to the senses than the full measure of winter and summer, and have for
the observer constant novelty and change. There are qualities in the
spring of the Ohio Valley--qualities of sweetness and wistfulness that
are peculiar to the region; and when the winds are all from the south,
and the winter wheat is brilliant in the fields; when the sap sings
beneath the rough bark of the old forest trees, and the young orchards
are a blur of pink and white, spirits are abroad there with messages
for the sons of men.




INDEX


  Abbott, Lyman, 215.

  Ade, George, 242.

  “Artemus Ward,” 159.


  Bacon, Albion Fellows, 269.

  Bagehot, Walter, 158, 178.

  Banta, D. D., 75, 236.

  Baptists, organized first church, 67.

  Beales, at New Harmony, 132.

  Beecher, Henry Ward, 18, 83, 250.

  Beecher, Mrs. H. W., 35, 56.

  “Ben Hur,” how written, 189, 193;
    MS. of, 270.

  Benjamin, Park, 19.

  Bennett, Emerson, 248.

  Bernard, Duke of Saxe-Weimar, 113, 115.

  Biddle, Horace P., 248, 251.

  Blackford, Isaac, 22, 83.

  Blake family, 18.

  Blake, James, 83.

  Bolton, Nathaniel, 253.

  Bolton, Sarah T., 253.

  Boone, Richard G., 234.

  Booth, Newton, 16.

  Brook Farm, Robert Owen visits, 123.

  Brookville, 12.

  Brotherton, Alice Williams, 13.

  Brown, Admiral George, 212.

  Brown, Demarchus C., 242.

  Brown, Paul, at New Harmony, 115, 119.

  Bull, Ole, 19.

  Bush, Rev. George, 66.

  Butler College, 26, 82, 95, 228.

  Butler, John M., 179.

  Butler, John Maurice, 179.

  Butler, Noble, 16, 251.

  Butler, Noble C., 251.

  Butler, Ovid, 82.


  Cambridge, 13.

  Campbell, Alexander, 123, 238.

  Carleton, Emma, 243.

  Carleton, Will, 172.

  Carrington, H. B., 179.

  Cartwright, Peter, 67.

  Catherwood, Mary Hartwell, 215.

  Centerville, 12.

  _Century Magazine_, 14.

  Channing, W. E., 248.

  Channing, W. H., 248.

  Chase, W. M., 12.

  Child, Lydia Maria, 227.

  Chitwood, Mary L., 248, 252.

  “Christian Endeavor,” origin of name, 144.

  _Civil Service Chronicle_, 26.

  Clark, George Rogers, 4, 5.

  Clarke, James Freeman, 248.

  Coburn, John, 83.

  Coe family, 18.

  Coggeshall, W. T., 245, 250, 251.

  Corydon, 11, 94.

  Costume at New Harmony, 113.

  Cox, Millard, 222.

  Cox, Sandford C., 36.

  Craig, George, 134.

  Cranch, C. P., 248.

  Crawfordsville, 8, 177, 267.

  Cutter, George W., 252.


  Dale, David, 102.

  D’Arusmont, Phiquepal, 105, 114.

  Dawson, Richard Lew, 269.

  Dennis, Charles, 28.

  DePauw University, 68, 77.

  Dillon, John B., 231, 249.

  Dooley, A. H., 237.

  Dransfields, at New Harmony, 132.

  Dufour, Mrs. A. L. Ruter, 248, 251.

  Dumont, Mrs. Julia L., 89-94, 247, 248.

  Duncan, Robert, 181.

  Dunn, Jacob P., 232.

  Dyer, Rev. Sidney, 250.


  Eads, James B., 12.

  Earlham College, 77.

  Eaton, Arthur Wentworth, 215.

  Edson, Helen Rockwood, 241.

  Egan, Maurice Francis, 215.

  Eggleston, Edward, 8, 17, 51, 79, 89, 91, 133-155, 225.

  Eggleston, George Cary, 134, 224.

  Eggleston, Guilford, 138.

  Eggleston, Joseph Cary, 134, 137, 139.

  Eggleston, Miles, 138, 236.

  Ellsworth, Henry W., 251.

  Emerson, R. W., 248, 263.

  English, William H., 235.

  Episcopalians, early difficulties of, 65.

  Everett, Edward, 19.


  Fauntleroys, at New Harmony, 132.

  Feiba Peveli, 111, 112, 122.

  Fellenberg, 102, 124.

  Field, Eugene, 172.

  Finley, John, 29, 34.

  Fishback, W. P., 242.

  Fiske, John, 8.

  Fletcher, Calvin, 83.

  Fletcher family, 18.

  Fletcher, Julia C., 216.

  Fletcher, Rev. J. C., 216.

  Flower, Richard, 101.

  Flowers in churches, 63.

  Fort Wayne, 13.

  Foulke, William Dudley, 26, 229.

  Franklin College, 26, 77.

  Fretageot, Achilles, 105.

  Fretageot, Madame, 115, 132.

  Fuller, Hector, 242.

  Furman, Lucy S., 216.


  Gallatin, Albert, 71.

  Garland, Hamlin, 172.

  Gillilan, S. W., 243.

  Gilmore, James R. (“Edmund Kirke”), 257, 260, 263.

  Goode, Frances E., 155.

  Goodwin, Rev. T. A., 35.

  Gordon, Jonathan W., 251.


  Hadley, John V., 53.

  Halford, E. W., 237.

  Hall, Bayard Rush, 73.

  Hanover College, 77.

  Harding, George C., 240, 267.

  Harney, W. W., 250.

  Harper, Ida Husted, 241.

  Harris, Leo O., 157, 266.

  Harrison, Benjamin, 4, 243.

  Harrison, Christopher, 16.

  Harrison, W. H., 4, 67, 71.

  Havens, Rev. James, 67.

  Hay, John, 16.

  Hayes, Lewis D., 237.

  Hayes, President, 190.

  Henderson, Rev. C. R., 241.

  Hendricks, William, 76.

  _Henodelphisterian_ Society, 75.

  Higginson, T. W., 157.

  Holland, J. G., 19.

  Holliday family, 18.

  Holliday, John H., 26, 237.

  Holliday, Rev. F. C., 65.

  Holman, Jesse L., 76.

  Holmes, O. W., 260, 263.

  “Hoosier Athens,” 177.

  Hoosier dialect, 45-62, 152, 163.

  Hoosier Fiddle, 41.

  Hoosier, origin of word, 29-36.

  “Hoosier Schoolmaster,” 145.

  Hoosierdom, extent of, 151.

  Hoshour, Samuel K., 96, 181.

  House, Ben D., 265.

  Hovey, Edmund O., 80.

  Howard, Tilghman A., 35.

  Howe, Daniel Wait, 234.

  Howells, W. D., 246.

  Howland, John D., 12.

  Howland, Livingston, 12.

  Howland, Louis, 26, 237.


  Indiana: relation to national life, 3-5;
    slavery in, 5;
    foreign and native element, 11;
    political preferences, 26;
    pioneers, 36, 39;
    religious influences, 65-69;
    education in, 70;
    illiteracy in, 81, 87;
    early poets, 245;
    landscape of, 36, 219, 269.

  Indiana University, 26, 73-76.

  Indianapolis, 17-20.

  Indianapolis Literary Club, 19.

  Ingersoll, Robert G., 189.


  James, G. P. R., 181.

  Jennings, Governor, 22.

  Jewett, Milo Parker, 80.

  Johnson, Robert Underwood, 13.

  Jordan, David S., 78.

  Jordan, Mrs. D. M., 269.

  Judah, Mary Jameson, 221.

  Julian, George W., 226, 251.

  Julian, Isaac H., 248, 251.


  Ketcham, W. A., 44.

  Keenan, Henry F., 215.

  Krout, Caroline V., 212.

  Krout, Mary H., 212.


  Lafayette, 14, 267.

  Lane, Henry S., 180.

  Lee, John, 202.

  Lehmanowski, Colonel, 32.

  Lesueur, Charles A., 104, 106.

  Lewis, Allen, 26.

  Lewis, Charles S., 26.

  Lincoln, Abraham, 38, 125, 152.

  Lodge, Harriett Newell, 241.

  Longfellow, H. W., 258, 263.

  Lowell, J. R., 160, 172, 263.

  Lynching, 43.


  Maclure, William, 104, 105, 115, 129.

  McCulloch, Hugh, 14.

  McCutcheon, John T., 242.

  McDonald, Joseph E., 179.

  McGinnis, Gen. George F., 184.

  Macluria, 111, 112, 122.

  Macdonald, Donald, 105, 107.

  Madison, 11, 155.

  Major, Charles, 223.

  “Mark Twain,” 164.

  Martindale, E. B., 160.

  Mason, A. L., 242.

  Matthews, Claude, 21.

  Matthews, G. C., 237.

  Matthews, James Newton, 215.

  Meredith, Solomon, 83.

  Merrill family, 18.

  Merrill, Miss Catharine, 94.

  Merrill, Samuel, 94.

  Militia, early, 39.

  Miller, Joaquin, 215.

  Millerites, 148.

  Mills, Caleb, 79, 80, 85-88.

  Moody, Martha Livingstone, 241.

  Morris family, 18.

  Morrison, John I., 16.

  Morton, Oliver P., 22, 229.

  Morton, Oliver T., 26, 229.

  Mount, James A., 21.

  Murphy, Dr. Edward, 130.


  Nadal, E. S., 204, 216.

  Nadal, Rev. Bernard H., 216.

  Nashoba, 105.

  Neef, Joseph, 105, 106.

  Neef, Madame, 115.

  Nelson, Thomas H., 15.

  New Albany, 140, 143, 256, 257, 258, 259.

  New Harmony, 21, 98-132.

  _New Harmony Disseminator_, 128.

  _New Harmony Gazette_, 111, 118, 128.

  Nicholas, Anna, 220, 237.

  Nichols, Rebecca S., 248, 250, 252.

  Noble, Harriet, 241.

  North Carolina, influence of, in dialect, 52.

  Notre Dame University, 77, 215.


  Oliphant, Laurence, 126.

  Owen, David Dale, 126.

  Owen, Richard, 127.

  Owen, Robert, 99, 101, 103, 104, 110, 115, 121, 122, 123, 124, 131.

  Owen, Robert Dale, 24, 76, 104, 111, 114, 124, 125.

  Owen, William, 104, 128.


  Paine, Dan L., 267.

  Parker, Benj. S., 56, 249, 254, 265.

  Parker, Theodore, 19.

  Peabody, Rev. Ephraim, 248.

  Pestalozzi, 102, 107.

  Piatt, John James, 215, 246, 256, 258, 260.

  Pioneers, books of, 38.

  Poe, Edgar A., 261.

  Poetry, characteristics of early Western, 244.

  “Poor Whites,” 8, 44.

  Posey, Thomas, 21.

  Prentice, George D., 246, 247, 253.

  Protestantism, phases of, in Indiana, 64.


  Rabb, Kate Milner, 241.

  Ralston, Alexander, 17.

  Rapp, George, 98-101.

  Rariden, James, 236.

  Ray family, 18.

  Reed, Peter Fishe, 249.

  Reeves, Arthur M., 230.

  Reid, Whitelaw, 185.

  Richmond, 13.

  Ridpath, John Clark, 233.

  Riley, James Whitcomb, 27, 42, 49, 57, 133, 156-176, 217.

  Riley, Reuben A., 157.

  Ross, Morris, 273.


  Salem, 16, 17.

  Say, Thomas, 104, 106, 115, 128.

  Scotch-Irish, 7, 51, 65.

  Sharpe family, 18.

  Smith, Elizabeth Conwell (Willson), 257.

  Smith, O. H., 31, 83, 236.

  Smith, Roswell, 14.

  Sorin, Father, 64.

  Stein, Evaleen, 267, 270.

  Stevenson, R. D., 243.

  Stoddard, Charles Warren, 215.

  Sulgrove, Berry, 15, 49, 181, 237.

  Sullivan, Jeremiah, 17.

  Swift, Lucius B., 26.


  Tarkington, Booth, 217-221.

  Taylor, Bayard, 19.

  Taylor, Dr. H. W., 40, 58.

  Teal, Angelina, 241.

  Terre Haute, 14, 215.

  Terrell, Rev. William, 140.

  Test, John, 180, 236.

  Thomas, Edith M., 159.

  Thompson, Maurice, 27, 199-211, 270.

  Thompson, Richard W., 14, 76, 83.

  Thompson, Will H., 202, 211.

  Thurston, Laura M., 252.

  Todd, M. Genevieve, 268.

  Troost, Gerard, 105, 106, 115.

  Tuttle, Joseph F., 80.


  Unitarians, in Ohio Valley, 248.

  Upfold, Bishop, 63.


  Venable, W. H., 249.

  Very, Jones, 248.

  Vevay, 89, 134.

  Vickroy, Louise E., 249.

  Vincennes, 5, 11.

  Vincennes University, 72.

  Voorhees, Daniel W., 15.


  Wabash College, 77, 80, 88, 173, 211.

  Wallace, David, 22, 76, 180, 236.

  Wallace, General Lew, 22, 56, 180-199, 261.

  Wallace, Mrs. Lew, 198.

  Wallace, William Ross, 250.

  Warren, Josiah, 129.

  Wheatcrofts, at New Harmony, 132.

  Whitcomb, Governor, 22.

  Whitecaps, 43.

  Whitwell, Stedman, 105.

  Wickersham, James A., 222.

  Willard, Governor, 22.

  Williams, Charles R., 237, 242.

  Williams, Henry M., 26.

  Williams, James D., 20.

  Williams, Jesse Lynch, 14.

  Williams, W. R., 269.

  Willson, Forceythe, 256-264.

  Wilson, W. L., 243.

  Wilstach, J. A., 241.

  Woodlands, influence of on pioneers, 36.

  Woods, Rev. Aaron, 33.

  Woollen, William Wesley, 236.

  Wright, Frances (D’Arusmont), 105, 124.

  Wright, Joseph A., 22, 31.


  Yandes family, 18.




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FOOTNOTES:


[1] Dunn’s “Indiana,” p. 302 _et seq._

[2] Preface to “The Hoosier Schoolmaster,” Library Edition.

[3] McCulloch’s “Men and Measures,” p. 78.

[4] Preface to “The Hoosier Schoolmaster,” Library Edition.

[5] “Old Virginia and Her Neighbors,” II, 320.

[6] Statistical Atlas, U. S. Census, 1890, p. 24.

[7] Smith’s “Early Indiana Trials,” p. 6.

[8] “History of Indianapolis and Marion County,” p. 72.

[9] “Early Indiana Trials,” p. 450.

[10] “Sketches,” p. 45.

[11] Woollen’s “Sketches,” p. 265.

[12] Banta’s “Johnson County,” p. 55.

[13] The _Current_, November, 1884.

[14] “The New Purchase,” p. 401.

[15] “Neighborly Poems,” p. 26.

[16] Report of W. A. Ketcham, attorney-general, 1897-8, p. 173.

[17] Fifth Edition, 1872, pp. 171-172.

[18] _The Forum_, Vol. 14, p. 465.

[19] Sulgrove, p. 90.

[20] “Dialect Notes,” Part VIII, p. 392.

[21] “The New Purchase,” p. 143.

[22] “Dialect Notes,” Part IV, p. 211.

[23] _D_ before _i_ or _u_ does not become _j_ in cultivated usage
anywhere at the west. Personally, I have never heard _Injiana_ within
the State; but I have heard it from a Bostonian, a native of Maine, who
had never lived outside of New England.

[24] “Souvenir of the Western Association of Writers,” 1891.

[25] “Indiana Methodism,” p. 317.

[26] Edson’s “Early Indiana Presbyterianism,” p. 171.

[27] Evans’s “Pioneer Preachers,” p. 43; Edson’s “Early Indiana
Presbyterianism,” p. 40.

[28] Goodwin’s “Heroic Women of Indiana Methodism,” p. 9.

[29] Woodburn’s “Higher Education in Indiana,” p. 31.

[30] Woodburn, p. 75.

[31] In Dr. Hall’s narrative “Woodville,” “Spiceburg,” “Sugartown,”
“Sproutsburg,” and “Timberopolis” are respectively Bloomington,
Spencer, Crawfordsville, Lafayette, and Indianapolis. The author
assumes the names “Carlton” and “Mr. Clarence.” “Cutswell” became
Governor Whitcomb; “The Rev. James Hilsbury” is the Rev. Isaac Reed;
“Dr. Bloduplex” is Dr. Wiley, and “Dr. Shrub” is the Rev. George Bush.

[32] Banta’s “History of Indiana University,” p. 44.

[33] Boone’s “History of Education in Indiana,” p. 87.

[34] “Caleb Mills and Indiana Common Schools,” _Tuttle Miscellany_,
Vol. 38.

[35] Boone’s “Education in Indiana,” p. 87.

[36] Boone, _supra_, p. 104 _et seq._

[37] In 1899 Indiana’s total school fund, exclusive of college
endowment, was $10,312,000. The school revenue for that year, from all
sources, was $6,534,300. The census of 1890 showed the per cent of
illiterates (ten years of age and older) in Indiana to be 6.32; in Ohio
5.24; in Illinois 5.25; in Michigan 5.92. In Massachusetts it was 6.22;
in New York 5.53; in New Jersey 6.50; in Pennsylvania 6.78.

[38] “Some Western Schoolmasters,” _Scribner’s Magazine_, Vol. 17, p.
747.

[39] _Scribner’s_, _supra_.

[40] One of the passengers on “the boat load of knowledge,” Victor
Duclas, is still living (July, 1900) at New Harmony.

[41] _The Forum_, November, 1890.

[42] _The Forum_, _supra_.

[43] “War Papers,” Indiana Commandery, Loyal Legion, 1898.

[44] “Essays at Home and Elsewhere,” p. 211.

[45] “Beginnings of Literary Culture in the Ohio Valley,” by W. H.
Venable, LL.D., p. 58 _et seq._

[46] _Atlantic Monthly_, Vol. 35.

[47] Indianapolis _News_, March 2, 1895.




TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES:


  Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.

  Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.

  Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized.



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