Recollections of a Varied Life Part 1

Recollections of a Varied Life.

by George Cary Eggleston.

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 a.s.sociation 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 ent.i.tled 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 const.i.tuted 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 G.o.d-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 ca.n.a.ls, 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 mora.s.ses. 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 h.e.l.l?"

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 att.i.tude 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, G.o.d-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 const.i.tuted 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 h.o.m.ogeneity 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 b.u.t.ter 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 const.i.tuent 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.