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[Illustration: George Cary Eggleston]
RECOLLECTIONS OF A VARIED LIFE
BY GEORGE CARY EGGLESTON
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
1910
Copyright, 1910
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY
_Published March, 1910_
TO MARION MY WIFE
I DEDICATE THESE RECOLLECTIONS
OF A LIFE THAT SHE HAS LOYALLY
SHARED, ENCOURAGED, AND INSPIRED
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. Introductory 1
II. The Country as I First Knew It--Intensity of Its
Americanism--The Lure of New Orleans 2
III. Provincialism--A Travel Center--Road Conditions--
Mails--The Estrangement of Communities and Other
Isolating Conditions 4
IV. The Composite West--Dialect--The Intellectual Class 7
V. The Sturdy Kentuckians and Their Influence 9
VI. A Poor Boy's Career 13
VII. "Shooting Stock" 14
VIII. A Limitless Hospitality 16
IX. Industrial Independence and Thrift 18
X. Early Railroads--A Precocious Skeptic--Religious
Restriction of Culture 20
XI. Culture by Stealth 24
XII. Civilization on Wheels 26
XIII. A Breakfast Revolution 28
XIV. A Bathroom Episode 30
XV. Western School Methods 32
XVI. "The Hoosier Schoolmaster"--A Bit of Literary History 34
XVII. The Biggest Boy--A Vigorous Volunteer
Monitor--Charley Grebe 38
XVIII. What's in a Name? 42
XIX. A Buttermilk Poet 43
XX. Removal to Virginia--Impressions of Life There--The
Contradiction of the Critics in Their Creative
Incredulity 45
XXI. The Virginian Life 48
XXII. The Virginian Attitude Toward Money--Parson J----'s
Checks--The Charm of Leisureliness 49
XXIII. The Courtesy of the Virginians--Sex and
Education--Reading Habits--Virginia Women's Voices 55
XXIV. The Story of the West Wing--A Challenge to the
Ghosts--The Yellow-Gray Light--And Breakfast 60
XXV. Authors in Richmond--G. P. R. James, John Esten Cooke,
Mrs. Mowatt Ritchie, John R. Thompson, etc.--John Esten
Cooke, Gentleman--How Jeb Stuart Made Him a Major 66
XXVI. The Old Life in the Old Dominion and the New--An
Old Fogy's Doubts and Questionings 72
XXVII. Under Jeb Stuart's Command--The Legend of the
Mamelukes--The Life of the Cavaliers--Tristram
Shandy Does Bible Duty--The Delights of the War
Game and the Inspiration of It 76
XXVIII. Fitz Lee and an Adventure--A Friendly Old Foe 81
XXIX. Pestilence 86
XXX. Left Behind--A Gratuitous Law Practice Under
Difficulties--The Story of Tom Collins--A Death-Bed
Repentance and Its Prompt Recall 87
XXXI. Sharp-Shooter Service--Mortar Service at
Petersburg--The Outcome of a Strange Story 93
XXXII. The Beginning of Newspaper Life--Theodore Tilton
and Charles F. Briggs 99
XXXIII. Theodore Tilton 107
XXXIV. Further Reminiscences of Tilton 111
XXXV. The Tilton-Beecher Controversy--A Story as Yet Untold 115
XXXVI. My First Libel Suit 116
XXXVII. Libel Suit Experiences--The Queerest of Libel
Suits--John Y. McKane's Case 119
XXXVIII. Early Newspaper Experiences--Two Interviews with
President Grant--Grant's Method 123
XXXIX. Charlton T. Lewis 129
XL. Hearth and Home--Mary Mapes Dodge--Frank R.
Stockton--A Whimsical View of Plagiary 131
XLI. Some Plagiarists I Have Known--A Peculiar Case of
Plagiary--A Borrower from Stedman 139
XLII. The "Hoosier Schoolmaster's" Influence--Hearth and
Home Friendships and Literary Acquaintance--My First
Book--Mr. Howells and "A Rebel's Recollections"--My
First After-Dinner Speech--Mr. Howells, Mark Twain,
and Mr. Sanborn to the Rescue 145
XLIII. A Novelist by Accident--"A Man of Honor" and the
Plagiarists of Its Title--A "Warlock" on the Warpath
and a Lot of Fun Lost 151
XLIV. John Hay and the Pike County Ballads--His Own Story
of Them and of Incidents Connected with Them 157
XLV. A Disappointed Author--George Ripley's Collection
of Applications for His Discharge--Joe Harper's
Masterpiece--Manuscripts and Their Authors--Mr. George
P. Putnam's Story 166
XLVI. Joaquin Miller--Dress Reform a la Stedman 172
XLVII. Beginnings of Newspaper Illustration--Accident's Part
in the Literary Life--My First Boys' Book--How One
Thing Leads to Another 179
XLVIII. The First Time I Was Ever Robbed--The _Evening
Post_ Under Mr. Bryant--An Old-Fashioned Newspaper--Its
Distinguished Outside Staff--Its Regard for
Literature--Newspaper Literary Criticism and the
Critics of That Time--Thomas Bailey Aldrich's Idea
of New York as a Place of Residence--My Own
Appointment and the Strange Manner of It 186
XLIX. A Study of Mr. Bryant--The Irving Incident 194
L. Mr. Bryant's Tenderness Towards Poets--A Cover
Commendation--How I Grieved a Poet--Anonymous
Literary Criticism 199
LI. A Thrifty Poet's Plan--Mr. Bryant and the Poe
Article--The Longfellow Incident--The Tupper
Embarrassment 205
LII. Mr Bryant's _Index Expurgatorius_--An Effective
Blunder in English--Mr. Bryant's Dignified
Democracy--Mr. Cleveland's Coarser Method--Mr.
Bryant and British Snobbery 209
LIII. The Newspaper Critic's Function--A Literary News
"Beat"--Mr. Bryant and Contemporary Poets--Concerning
Genius--The True Story of "Thanatopsis" 217
LIV. An Extraordinary Case of Heterophemy--The Demolition
of a Critic 222
LV. Parke Godwin--"A Lion in a Den of Daniels"--The
Literary Shop Again--Literary Piracy--British
and American 227
LVI. The Way of Washington Officials--A Historical
Discovery--A Period Out of Place--A Futile Effort
to Make Peace--The "Intelligent Compositor" at His
Worst--Loring Pacha--War Correspondents--The Tourist
Correspondent--Loring's Story of Experience 234
LVII. "A Stranded Gold Bug"--Results of a Bit of Humor 247
LVIII. Mrs. Custer's "Boots and Saddles"--The Success
and Failure of Books 252
LIX. Letters of Introduction--The Disappointment of Lily
Browneyes--Mark Twain's Method--Some Dangerous Letters
of Introduction--Moses and My Green Spectacles 255
LX. English Literary Visitors--Mr. Edmund Gosse's
Visit--His Amusing Misconceptions--A Question of
Provincialism--A Literary Vandal 265
LXI. The Founding of the Authors' Club--Reminiscences
of Early Club Life--John Hay and Edwin Booth on
Dime Novels 272
LXII. The Authors Club--Its Ways and Its Work--Watch-Night
Frolics--Max O'Rell and Mark Twain--The Reckless
Injustice of the Humorists--Bishop Potter's
Opinion--The Club's Contribution of Statesmen and
Diplomats--The Delight of the Authors Club "After
the Authors Have Gone Home"--"Liber Scriptorum,"
the Club's Successful Publishing Venture 277
LXIII. In Newspaper Life Again--Editing the _Commercial
Advertiser_--John Bigelow's Discouraging
Opinion--Henry Marquand and Some of My
Brilliant "Cubs"--Men Who Have Made Place and
Name for Themselves--The Dread Task of the
Editor-in-Chief--Yachting with Marquand and the
Men I Met on Deck--Parke Godwin--Recollections of
a Great and Good Man--A Mystery of Forgetting 286
LXIV. Newspapers Then and Now--The Pulitzer Revolution--The
Lure of the _World_--A Little Dinner to James R.
Osgood 300
LXV. Service on the _World_--John A. Cockerill--An
Editorial Perplexity--Editorial Emergencies--In
Praise of the Printers--Donn Piatt--"A Syndicate
of Blackguards"--An Unmeant Crime 307
LXVI. First Acquaintance with Joseph Pulitzer--His
Hospitality, Courtesy, Kindliness, and Generosity--His
Intellectual Methods--The Maynard Case--Bryan's
Message and Mr. Pulitzer's Answer--Extraordinary
Political Foresight 319
LXVII. A Napoleonic Conception--A Challenge to the
Government--The Power of the Press 327
LXVIII. Recollections of Carl Schurz 333
LXIX. The End of Newspaper Life 337
LXX. My Working Ways--Extemporary Writing--The Strange
Perversity of the People in Fiction--The Novelist's
Sorest Perplexity--Working Hours and Working Ways--My
Two Rules as to Literary Style 339
RECOLLECTIONS OF A VARIED LIFE
I
Mr. Howells once said to me: "Every man's life is interesting--to
himself."
I suppose that is true, though in the cases of some men it seems
a difficult thing to understand.
At any rate it is not because of personal interest in my own life that
I am writing this book. I was perfectly sincere in wanting to call these
chapters "The Autobiography of an Unimportant Man," but on reflection
I remembered Franklin's wise saying that whenever he saw the phrase
"without vanity I may say," some peculiarly vain thing was sure to
follow.
I am seventy years old. My life has been one of unusually varied
activity. It has covered half the period embraced in the republic's
existence. It has afforded me opportunity to see and share that
development of physical, intellectual, and moral life conditions, which
has been perhaps the most marvelous recorded in the history of mankind.
Incidentally to the varied activities and accidents of my life, I have
been brought into contact with many interesting men, and into relation
with many interesting events. It is of these chiefly that I wish to
write, and if I were minded to offer an excuse for this book's
existence, this would be the marrow of it. But a book that needs excuse
is inexcusable. I make no apology. I am writing of the men and things I
remember, because I wish to do so, because my publisher wishes it, and
because he and I think that others will be interested in the result.
We shall see, later, how that is.
This will be altogether a good-humored book. I have no grudges to
gratify, no revenges to wreak, no debts of wrath to repay in cowardly
ways; and if I had I should put them all aside as unworthy. I have
found my fellow-men in the main kindly, just, and generous. The chief
pleasure I have had in living has been derived from my association with
them in good-fellowship and all kindliness. The very few of them who
have wronged me, I have forgiven. The few who have been offensive to me,
I have forgotten, with conscientiously diligent care. There has seemed
to me no better thing to do with them.
II
It is difficult for any one belonging to this modern time to realize the
conditions of life in this country in the eighteen-forties, the period
at which my recollection begins.
The country at that time was all American. The great tides of
immigration which have since made it the most cosmopolitan of countries,
had not set in. Foreigners among us were so few that they were regarded
with a great deal of curiosity, some contempt, and not a little pity.
Even in places like my native town of Vevay, Indiana, which had been
settled by a company of Swiss immigrants at the beginning of the
century, the feeling was strong that to be foreign was to be inferior.
Those who survived of the original Swiss settlers were generously
tolerated as unfortunates grown old, and on that account entitled to
a certain measure of respectful deference in spite of their taint.
[Sidenote: The Lure of New Orleans]
To us in the West, at least, all foreigners whose mother tongue was
other than English were "Dutchmen." There is reason to believe that
this careless and inattentive grouping prevailed in other parts of the
country as well as in the West. Why, otherwise, were the German speaking
people of Pennsylvania and the mountain regions south universally known
as "Pennsylvania Dutch?"
And yet, in spite of the prevailing conviction that everything foreign
was inferior, the people of the Ohio valley--who constituted the most
considerable group of Western Americans--looked with unapproving but
ardent admiration upon foreign life, manners, and ways of thinking as
these were exemplified in New Orleans.
In that early time, when the absence of bridges, the badness of roads,
and the primitive character of vehicular devices so greatly emphasized
overland distances, New Orleans was the one great outlet and inlet of
travel and traffic for all the region beyond the mountain barrier that
made the East seem as remote as far Cathay. Thither the people of the
West sent the produce of their orchards and their fields to find a
market; thence came the goods sold in the "stores," and the very
money--Spanish and French silver coins--that served as a circulating
medium. The men who annually voyaged thither on flat-boats, brought back
wondering tales of the strange things seen there, and especially of the
enormous wickedness encountered among a people who had scarcely heard
of the religious views accepted among ourselves as unquestioned and
unquestionable truth. I remember hearing a whole sermon on the subject
once. The preacher had taken alarm over the eagerness young men showed
to secure employment as "hands" on flat-boats for the sake of seeing
the wonderful city where buying and selling on the Sabbath excited no
comment. He feared contamination of the youth of the land, and with
a zeal that perhaps outran discretion, he urged God-fearing merchants
to abandon the business of shipping the country's produce to market,
declaring that he had rather see all of it go to waste than risk the
loss of a single young man's soul by sending him to a city so
unspeakably wicked that he confidently expected early news of its
destruction after the manner of Sodom and Gomorrah.
The "power of preaching" was well-nigh measureless in that time and
region, but so were the impulses of "business," and I believe the usual
number of flat-boats were sent out from the little town that year. The
merchants seemed to "take chances" of the loss of souls when certain
gain was the stake on the other side, a fact which strongly suggests
that human nature in that time and country was very much the same in
its essentials as human nature in all other times and countries.
III
[Sidenote: A Travel Center]
The remoteness of the different parts of the country from each other
in those days is difficult to understand, or even fairly to imagine
nowadays. For all purposes of civilization remoteness is properly
measured, not by miles, but by the difficulty of travel and intercourse.
It was in recognition of this that the founders of the Republic gave
to Congress authority to establish "post offices and post roads," and
that their successors lavished money upon endeavor to render human
intercourse easier, speedier, and cheaper by the construction of the
national road, by the digging of canals, and by efforts to improve the
postal service. In my early boyhood none of these things had come upon
us. There were no railroads crossing the Appalachian chain of mountains,
and no wagon roads that were better than tracks over ungraded hills and
quagmire trails through swamps and morasses. Measured by ease of access,
New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore were at a greater distance from
the dwellers in the West than Hong Kong or Singapore is now, while
Boston was remoter than the mountains of the moon.
There were no telegraphs available to us; the mails were irregular,
uncertain, and unsafe. The wagons, called stagecoaches, that carried
them, were subject to capture and looting at the hands of robber bands
who infested many parts of the country, having their headquarters
usually at some town where roads converged and lawlessness reigned
supreme.
One such town was Napoleon, Indiana. In illustration of its character an
anecdote was related in my boyhood. A man from the East made inquiry in
Cincinnati concerning routes to various points in the Hoosier State, and
beyond.
"If I want to go to Indianapolis, what road do I take?" he asked.
"Why, you go to Napoleon, and take the road northwest."
"If I want to go to Madison?"
"Go to Napoleon, and take the road southwest."
"Suppose I want to go to St. Louis?"
"Why, you go to Napoleon, and take the national road west."
And so on, through a long list, with Napoleon as the starting point of
each reply. At last the man asked in despair:
"Well now, stranger, suppose I wanted to go to Hell?"
The stranger answered without a moment's hesitation, "Oh, in that case,
just go to Napoleon, and stay there."
That is an episode, as the reader has probably discovered. To return
to the mails. It was not until 1845, and after long agitation, that the
rate on letters was reduced to five cents for distances less than three
hundred miles, and ten cents for greater distances. Newspaper postage
was relatively even higher.
The result of these conditions was that each quarter of the country
was shut out from everything like free communication with the other
quarters. Each section was isolated. Each was left to work out its own
salvation as best it might, without aid, without consultation, without
the chastening or the stimulation of contact and attrition. Each region
cherished its own prejudices, its own dialect, its own ways of living,
its own overweening self-consciousness of superiority to all the rest,
its own narrow bigotries, and its own suspicious contempt of everything
foreign to itself.
In brief, we had no national life in the eighteen-forties, or for long
afterwards,--no community of thought, or custom, or attitude of mind.
The several parts of the country were a loose bundle of segregated and,
in many ways, antagonistic communities, bound together only by a common
loyalty to the conviction that this was the greatest, most glorious,
most invincible country in the world, God-endowed with a mental, moral,
and physical superiority that put all the rest of earth's nations
completely out of the reckoning. We were all of us Americans--intense,
self-satisfied, self-glorifying Americans--but we had little else in
common. We did not know each other. We had been bred in radically
different ways. We had different ideals, different conceptions of life,
different standards of conduct, different ways of living, different
traditions, and different aspirations. The country was provincial to the
rest of the world, and still more narrowly provincial each region to the
others.
IV
[Sidenote: The Composite West]
I think, however, that the West was less provincial, probably, and less
narrow in its views and sympathies than were New England, the Middle
States, and the South at that time, and this for a very sufficient
reason.
The people in New England rarely came into contact with those of the
Middle and Southern States, and never with those of the West. The people
of the Middle States and those of the South were similarly shut within
themselves, having scarcely more than an imaginary acquaintance with the
dwellers in other parts of the country. The West was a common meeting
ground where men from New England, the Middle States, and the South
Atlantic region constituted a varied population, representative of all
the rest of the country, and dwelling together in so close a unity that
each group adopted many of the ways and ideas of the other groups, and
correspondingly modified its own. These were first steps taken toward
homogeneity in the West, such as were taken in no other part of the
country in that time of little travel and scanty intercourse among men.
The Virginians, Carolinians, and New Englanders who had migrated to the
West learned to make and appreciate the apple butter and the sauerkraut
of the Pennsylvanians; the pie of New England found favor with
Southerners in return for their hoecake, hominy, chine, and spareribs.
And as with material things, so also with things of the mind. Customs
were blended, usages were borrowed and modified, opinions were fused
together into new forms, and speech was wrought into something different
from that which any one group had known--a blend, better, richer, and
more forcible than any of its constituent parts had been.
In numbers the Virginians, Kentuckians, and Carolinians were a strong
majority in the West, and the so-called "Hoosier dialect," which
prevailed there, was nearly identical with that of the Virginian
mountains, Kentucky, and the rural parts of Carolina. But it was
enriched with many terms and forms of speech belonging to other
sections. Better still, it was chastened by the influence of the small
but very influential company of educated men and women who had come from
Virginia and Kentucky, and by the strenuous labors in behalf of good
English of the Yankee school-ma'ams, who taught us by precept to make
our verbs agree with their nominatives, and, per contra, by unconscious
example to say "doo," "noo," and the like, for "dew," "new," etc.
The prevalence of the dialect among the uneducated classes was indeed,
though indirectly, a ministry to the cause of good English. The educated
few, fearing contamination of their children's speech through daily
contact with the ignorant, were more than usually strict in exacting
correct usage at the hands of their youngsters. I very well remember
how grievously it afflicted my own young soul that I was forbidden,
under penalty, to say "chimbly" and "flanner" for "chimney" and
"flannel," to call inferior things "ornery," to use the compromise term
"'low"--abbreviation of "allow,"--which very generally took the place
of the Yankee "guess" and the Southern "reckon," and above all to call
tomatoes "tomatices."
It is of interest to recall the fact that this influential class of
educated men and women, included some really scholarly persons, as well
as a good many others who, without being scholarly, were educated and
accustomed to read. Among the scholarly ones, within the purview of
my memory, were such as Judge Algernon S. Stevens, Judge Algernon S.
Sullivan, Judge Miles Cary Eggleston, the Hendrickses, the Stapps,
the Rev. Hiram Wason, my own father, and Mrs. Julia L. Dumont, a very
brilliant woman, who taught school for love of it and wrote books that
in our time would have given her something more than the provincial
reputation she shared with Alice and Phoebe Cary, and some others.
V
[Sidenote: The Sturdy Kentuckians]
Of still greater consequence, perhaps, so far as influence upon their
time and country was concerned, were the better class of Kentuckians
who had crossed the Ohio to become sharers in the future of the great
Northwest.
These were mostly men of extraordinary energy--physical and mental--who
had mastered what the Kentucky schoolmasters could teach them, and
had made of their schooling the foundation of a broader education the
dominant characteristic of which was an enlightenment of mind quite
independent of scholarly acquisition.
These men were thinkers accustomed, by habit and inheritance, to look
facts straight in the face, to form their own opinions untrammeled by
tradition, unbiased by fine-spun equivocation, and wholly unrestrained
in their search for truth by conventional hobbles of any kind. Most
of them had more or less Scotch-Irish blood in their veins, and
were consequently wholesome optimists, full of courage, disposed to
righteousness of life for its own sake, and resolutely bent upon the
betterment of life by means of their own living.
Most of them numbered one or more Baptist or Methodist preachers among
their ancestry--men of healthy minds and open ones, men to whom religion
was far less a matter of emotion than of conduct, men who did the duty
that lay next to them--be it plowing or praying, preaching or fighting
Indians or Englishmen--with an equal mind.
Men of such descent were educated by environment in better ways than any
that schools can furnish. From infancy they had lived in an atmosphere
of backwoods culture,--culture drawn in part from such books as were
accessible to them, and in greater part from association with the strong
men who had migrated in early days to conquer the West and make of it a
princely possession of the Republic.
The books they had were few, but they were the very best that English
literature afforded, and they read them over and over again with
diligence and intelligence until they had made their own every
fecundative thought the books suggested. Then they went away, and
thought for themselves, with untrammeled freedom, of the things thus
presented to their minds. I have sometimes wondered if their method
of education, chiefly by independent thinking, and with comparatively
little reverence for mere "authority," might not have been better, in
its character-building results at least, than our modern, more bookish
process.
That question does not concern us now. What I wish to point out is the
fact that the country owes much to the influence of these strong men
of affairs and action, whose conviction that every man owes it to his
fellow-men so to live that this may be a better world for other men
to live in because of his having lived in it, gave that impulse to
education which later made Indiana a marvel and a model to the other
states in all that concerns education. Those men believed themselves and
their children entitled to the best in schooling as in everything else,
and from the very beginning they set out to secure it.
[Sidenote: Early Educational Impulses]
If a wandering schoolmaster came within call, they gave him a
schoolhouse and a place to live in, and bade him "keep school."
When he had canvassed the region round about for "scholars," and was
ready--with his ox gads--to open his educational institution, the three
or four of these men whose influence pervaded and dominated the region
round about, said a word or two to each other, and made themselves
responsible for the tuition fees of all the boys and girls in the
neighborhood whose parents were too poor to pay.
In the same spirit, years later, when an effort was made to establish
colleges in the state, these men or their children who had inherited
their impulse, were prompt to furnish the money needed, however hard
pressed they might be for money themselves. I remember that my mother--the
daughter of one of the most conspicuous of the Kentuckians--when she was
a young widow with four children to bring up on an income of about $250
a year, subscribed $100 to the foundation of Indiana Asbury University,
becoming, in return, the possessor of a perpetual scholarship, entitling
her for all time to maintain a student there free of tuition. It was
with money drawn from such sources that the colleges of Indiana were
founded.
Under the influence of these Kentuckians, Virginians, and men of
character who in smaller numbers had come out from New England and the
Middle States, there was from the first an impulse of betterment in the
very atmosphere of the West. Even the "poor whites" of the South who
had migrated to the Northwest in pursuit of their traditional dream of
finding a land where one might catch "two 'possums up one 'simmon tree,"
were distinctly uplifted by the influence of such men, not as a class,
perhaps, but in a sufficient number of individual cases to raise the
average level of their being. The greater number of these poor whites
continued to be the good-natured, indolent, unthrifty people that their
ancestors had always been. They remained content to be renters in a
region where the acquisition of land in independent ownership was easy.
They continued to content themselves with an inadequate cultivation of
their crops, and a meager living, consequent upon their neglect. They
continued to give to shooting, fishing, and rude social indulgences the
time they ought to have given to work. But their children were learning
to read and write, and, better still, were learning by observation the
advantages of a more industrious living, and when the golden age of
steamboating came, they sought and found profitable employment either
upon the river or about the wharves. The majority of these were content
to remain laborers, as deckhands and the like, but in some of them at
least ambition was born, and they became steamboat mates, pilots, and,
in some cases, the captains and even the owners of steamboats. On the
whole, I think the proportion of the class of people who thus achieved
a higher status, bettering themselves in enduring ways was quite as
large as it ever is in the history of an unfortunate or inferior class
of men. In the generations that have followed some at least of the
descendants of that "poor white" class, whose case had always been
accounted hopeless, have risen to distinction in intellectual ways. One
distinguished judge of our time, a man now of national reputation, is
the grandson of a poor white who negligently cultivated land rented from
a relative of my own. His father was my schoolmate for a season, and was
accounted inferior by those of us who were more fortunately descended.
So much for free institutions in a land of hope, opportunity, and
liberty, where the "pursuit of happiness" and betterment was accounted
an "unalienable right."
VI
[Sidenote: A Poor Boy's Career]
In another case that comes home to me for reasons, the betterment was
more immediate. My maternal grandfather, the old Kentuckian, George
Craig, whose name is preserved in many ways in the geographical
nomenclature of Southern Indiana, had an abundantly large family of
children. But with generously helpful intent it was his habit to adopt
bright boys and girls whose parents were poverty-stricken, in order to
give them such education as was available in that time and country, or,
in his favorite phrase, to "give them a show in the world." One of these
adopted boys was the child of parents incredibly poor. When he came to
my grandfather the boy had never seen a tablecloth or slept in a bed. He
knew nothing of the uses of a knife and fork. A glass tumbler was to him
a wonder thing. He could neither read nor write, though he was eleven
years of age. The towel given to him for use on his first introduction
to the family was an inscrutable mystery until one of the negro servants
explained its uses to him.
Less than a score of years later that boy was a lawyer of distinction, a
man of wide influence, a state senator of unusual standing, and chairman
of the committee that investigated and exposed the frauds perpetrated
upon the state in the building of the Madison and Indianapolis
railroad--the first highway of its kind constructed within the state.
In one sense, he owed all this to George Craig. In a truer sense he owed
it to his own native ability, which George Craig was shrewd enough to
discover in the uncouth and ignorant boy, and wise enough to give its
opportunity.
VII
It was a common practice of the thrifty and well-to-do of that time,
thus to adopt the children of their poorer neighbors and bring them up
as members of their own families. Still more common was the practice of
taking destitute orphans as "bound boys" or "bound girls." These were
legally bound to service, instead of being sent to the poorhouse, but in
practical effect they became members of the families to whose heads they
were "bound," and shared in all respects the privileges, the schooling,
and everything else that the children of the family enjoyed. They were
expected to work, when there was work to be done, but so was every
other member of the family, and there was never the least suggestion of
servile obligation involved or implied. I remember well the affection in
which my mother's "bound girls" held her and us children, and the way
in which, when they came to be married, their weddings were provided for
precisely as if they had been veritable daughters of the house.
On one of those occasions it was rumored in the village, that a
"shiveree"--Hoosier for charivari--was to mark the event. My father,
whose Virginian reverence for womanhood and marriage and personal
dignity, was prompt to resent that sort of insult, went to a neighbor
and borrowed two shotguns. As he carried them homeward through the main
street of the village, on the morning before the wedding, he encountered
the ruffian who had planned the "shiveree," and was arranging to carry
it out. The man asked him, in surprise, for my father was a studious
recluse in his habits, if he were going out after game.
[Sidenote: "Shooting Stock"]
"No," my father replied. "It is only that a very worthy young woman,
a member of my family, is to be married at my house to-night. I hear
that certain 'lewd fellows of the baser sort' are planning to insult
her and me and my family with what they call a 'shiveree.' If they do
anything of the kind, _I am going to fire four charges of buckshot
into the crowd_."
As my father was known to be a man who inflexibly kept his word, there
was no "shiveree" that night.
That father of mine was a man of the gentlest spirit imaginable, but at
the same time a man of resolute character, who scrupulously respected
the rights and the dignity of others, and insistently demanded a like
respect for his own. Quite episodically, but in illustration of the
manners of the time, I may here intrude an incident, related to me many
years afterwards by Judge Taylor, a venerable jurist of Madison. My
father was looking about him for a place in which to settle himself in
the practice of law. He was temporarily staying in Madison when a client
came to him. The man had been inveigled into a game of cards with some
sharpers, and they had worked off some counterfeit money upon him. He
purposed to sue them. My father explained that the law did not recognize
the obligation of gambling debts, and the man replied that he knew that
very well, but that he wanted to expose the rascals, and was willing to
spend money to that end. The case came before Judge Taylor. My father
made an eloquently bitter speech in exposition of the meanness of men
who--the reader can imagine the rest. It was to make that speech that
the client had employed the young lawyer, and, in Judge Taylor's opinion
he "got his money's worth of gall and vitriol." But while the speech
was in progress, the three rascals became excited and blustering under
the castigation, and he, the judge, overheard talk of "shooting the
fellow"--to wit my father. Just as the judge was meditating measures of
restraint that might be effective at a time when most men were walking
arsenals, he heard one of them hurriedly warn his fellows in this wise:
"Say--you'd better not talk too much about shooting--they tell me that
young lawyer comes from Virginia, and he _may be of shooting stock_."
The Virginians had a reputation for quickness on trigger in that region.
The warning was sufficient. The three gamblers took their punishment and
slunk away, and there was no assassination.
VIII
The readiness with which the well-to-do men of that region adopted or
otherwise made themselves responsible for the bringing up of destitute
children, was largely due to the conditions of life that prevailed in
that time and country. There was no considerable expense involved in
such adoption. The thrifty farmer, with more land than he could possibly
cultivate, produced, easily, all the food that even a multitudinous
family could consume. He produced also the wool, the flax, and the
cotton necessary for clothing, and these were carded, spun, woven, and
converted into garments for both sexes by the women folk of the home.
Little, if anything, was bought with actual money, and in the midst
of such abundance an extra mouth to feed and an extra back to clothe
counted for next to nothing, while at that time, when work, on
everybody's part, was regarded quite as a matter of course, the boy or
girl taken into a family was easily able to "earn his keep," as the
phrase was.
Nevertheless, there was a great-hearted generosity inspiring it all--a
broadly democratic conviction that everybody should have a chance in
life, and that he who had should share with his brother who had not,
freely and without thought of conferring favor.
[Sidenote: A Limitless Hospitality]
It was upon that principle, also, that the hospitality of that time
rested. There was always an abundance to eat, and there was always a bed
to spare for the stranger within the gates; or if the beds fell short,
it was always easy to spread a pallet before the fire, or, in extreme
circumstances, to make the stranger comfortable among a lot of quilts
in a corn-house or hay-mow.
It was my grandfather's rule and that of other men like him, to provide
work of some sort for every one who asked for it. An extra hoe in summer
was always of use, while in winter there was corn to be shelled, there
were apples to be "sorted," tools to be ground, ditches to be dug, stone
fences to be built, wood to be chopped, and a score of other things to
be done, that might employ an extra "hand" profitably. Only once in all
his life did George Craig refuse employment to a man asking for it. On
that occasion he gave supper, lodging, and breakfast to the wayfarer;
but during the evening the man complained that he had been walking all
day with a grain of corn in his shoe, and, as he sat before the fire, he
removed it, to his great relief but also to his undoing as an applicant
for permanent employment. For the energetic old Kentuckian could
conceive of no ground of patience with a man who would walk all day in
pain rather than take the small trouble of sitting down by the roadside
and removing the offending grain of corn from his shoe.
"I have no use," he said, "for a man as lazy as that."
Then his conscience came to the rescue.
"I can't hire a lazy fellow like you for wages," he said; "but I have a
ditch to be dug. There will be fifteen hundred running feet of it, and
if you choose, I'll let you work at it, at so much a foot. Then if you
work you'll make wages, while if you don't there'll be nothing for me
to lose on you but your keep, and I'll give you that."
The man decided to move on.
IX
The life of that early time differed in every way from American life as
men of the present day know it.
The isolation in which every community existed, compelled a degree of
local self-dependence the like of which the modern world knows nothing
of. The farmers did most things for themselves, and what they could not
conveniently do for themselves, was done for them in the villages by
independent craftsmen, each cunningly skilled in his trade and dependent
upon factories for nothing. In my native village, Vevay, which was in
nowise different from other Western villages upon which the region
round about depended for supplies, practically everything wanted was
made. There were two tinsmiths, who, with an assistant or two each,
in the persons of boys learning the trade, made every utensil of tin,
sheet-iron, or copper that was needed for twenty-odd miles around. There
were two saddlers and harnessmakers; two or three plasterers; several
brick masons; several carpenters, who knew their trade as no carpenter
does in our time when the planing mill furnishes everything already
shaped to his hand, so that the carpenter need know nothing but how to
drive nails or screws. There was a boot- and shoe-maker who made all
the shoes worn by men, women, and children in all that country, out of
leather bought of the local tanner, to whom all hides were sold by their
producers. There was a hatter who did all his own work, whose vats
yielded all the headgear needed, from the finest to the commonest,
and whose materials were the furs of animals caught or killed by the
farmers' boys and brought to town for sale. There was even a wireworker,
who provided sieves, strainers, and screenings of every kind, and there
was a rope walk where the cordage wanted was made.
[Sidenote: Industrial Independence]
In most households the women folk fashioned all the clothes worn by
persons of either sex, but to meet the demand for "Sunday bests" and
that of preachers who must wear broadcloth every day in the week, and
of extravagant young men who wished to dazzle all eyes with "store
clothes," there was a tailor who year after year fashioned garments upon
models learned in his youth and never departed from. No such thing as
ready-made clothing or boots or shoes--except women's slippers--was
known at the time of which I now write. Even socks and stockings were
never sold in the shops, except upon wedding and other infrequent
occasions. For ordinary wear they were knitted at home of home-spun
yarn. The statement made above is scarcely accurate. Both socks and
stockings were occasionally sold in the country stores, but they were
almost exclusively the surplus products of the industry of women on the
farms round about. So were the saddle blankets, and most of the bed
blankets used.
Local self-dependence was well-nigh perfect. The town depended on the
country and the country on the town, for nearly everything that was
eaten or woven or otherwise consumed. The day of dependence upon
factories had not yet dawned. The man who knew how to fashion any
article of human use, made his living by doing the work he knew how to
do, and was an independent, self-respecting man, usually owning his
comfortable home, and destined by middle age to possess a satisfactory
competence.
Whether all that was economically or socially better than the system
which has converted the independent, home-owning worker into a factory
hand, living in a tenement and carrying a dinner pail, while tariff
tribute from the consumer makes his employer at once a millionaire
and the more or less despotic master of a multitude of men--is a
question too large and too serious to be discussed in a book of random
recollections such as this. But every "strike" raises that question in
the minds of men who remember the more primitive conditions as lovingly
as I do.
As a matter of curious historical interest, too, it is worth while to
recall the fact that Henry Clay--before his desire to win the votes of
the Kentucky hemp-growers led him to become the leading advocate of
tariff protection--used to make eloquent speeches in behalf of free
trade, in which he drew horrifying pictures of life conditions in the
English manufacturing centers, and invoked the mercy of heaven to spare
this country from like conditions in which economic considerations
should ride down social ones, trample the life out of personal
independence, and convert the home-owning American workman into a mere
"hand" employed by a company of capitalists for their own enrichment at
cost of his manhood except in so far as the fiat of a trades union might
interpose to save him from slavery to the employing class.
Those were interesting speeches of Henry Clay's, made before he sacrificed
his convictions and his manhood to his vain desire to become President.
X
[Sidenote: The Early Railroad]
At the time of my earliest recollections there was not a mile of
railroad in Indiana or anywhere else west of Ohio, while even in Ohio
there were only the crudest beginnings of track construction, on isolated
lines that began nowhere and led no whither, connecting with nothing,
and usually failing to make even that connection.
He who would journey from the East to the West, soon came to the end of
the rails, and after that he must toilsomely make his way by stagecoach
across the mountains, walking for the most part in mud half-leg deep,
and carrying a fence rail on his shoulder with which to help the stalled
stagecoach out of frequent mires.
Nevertheless, we heard much of the railroad and its wonders. It was our
mystery story, our marvel, our current Arabian Nights' Entertainment.
We were told, and devoutly believed, that the "railcars" ran at the rate
of "a mile a minute." How or why the liars of that early period, when
lying must have been in its infancy as an art, happened to hit upon
sixty miles an hour as the uniform speed of railroad trains, I am
puzzled to imagine. But so it was. There was probably not in all the
world at that time a single mile of railroad track over which a train
could have been run at such a speed. As for the railroads in the Western
part of this country, they were chiefly primitive constructions, with
tracks consisting of strap iron--wagon tires in effect--loosely spiked
down to timber string pieces, over which it would have been reckless to
the verge of insanity to run a train at more than twelve miles an hour
under the most favorable circumstances. But we were told, over and over
again, till we devoutly believed it--as human creatures always believe
what they have been ceaselessly told without contradiction--that the
"railcars" always ran at the rate of a mile a minute.
The first railroad in Indiana was opened in 1847. A year or two later,
my brother Edward and I, made our first journey over it, from Madison to
Dupont, a distance of thirteen miles. Edward was at that time a victim
of the faith habit; I was beginning to manifest a skeptical, inquiring
tendency of mind which distressed those responsible for me. When Edward
reminded me that we were to enjoy our first experience of traveling at
the rate of a mile a minute, I borrowed his bull's-eye watch and set
myself to test the thing by timing it. When we reached Dupont, alter the
lapse of ninety-six minutes, in a journey of thirteen miles, I frankly
declared my unbelief in the "mile a minute" tradition. There was no
great harm in that, perhaps, but the skeptical spirit of inquiry that
had prompted me to subject the matter to a time test, very seriously
troubled my elders, who feared that I was destined to become a "free
thinker," as my father had been before me, though I was not permitted to
know that. I was alarmed about my skeptical tendencies myself, because
I believed the theology and demonology taught me at church, having no
means of subjecting them to scientific tests of any kind. I no longer
believed in the "mile a minute" tradition, as everybody around me
continued to do, but I still believed in the existence and malign
activity of a personal devil, and I accepted the assurance given me
that he was always at my side whispering doubts into my ears by way
of securing the damnation of my soul under the doctrine of salvation
by faith. The tortures I suffered on this account were well-nigh
incredible, for in spite of all I might do or say or think, the doubts
continued to arise in my mind, until at last I awoke to the fact that
I was beginning to doubt the doctrine of salvation by faith itself,
as a thing stultifying to the mind, unreasonable in itself, and
utterly unjust in its application to persons like myself, who found
it impossible to believe things which they had every reason to believe
were not true.
[Sidenote: A Precocious Skeptic]
Fortunately I was young and perfectly healthy, and so, after a deal
of psychological suffering I found peace by reconciling myself to the
conviction that I was foreordained to be damned in any case, and that
there was no use in making myself unhappy about it. In support of that
comforting assurance I secretly decided to accept the Presbyterian
doctrine of predestination instead of the Methodist theory of free
will in which I had been bred. I had to make this change of doctrinal
allegiance secretly, because its open avowal would have involved a sound
threshing behind the smoke-house, with perhaps a season of fasting and
prayer, designed to make the castigation "take."
I remember that when I had finally made up my mind that the doctrine
of predestination was true, and that I was clearly one of those who
were foreordained to be damned for incapacity to believe the incredible,
I became for a time thoroughly comfortable in my mind, very much
as I suppose a man of business is when he receives his discharge in
bankruptcy. I felt myself emancipated from many restraints that had sat
heavily on my boyish soul. Having decided, with the mature wisdom of
ten or a dozen years of age, that I was to be damned in any case, I saw
no reason why I should not read the fascinating books that had been
forbidden to me by the discipline of the Methodist Church, to which
I perforce belonged.