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.