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]