The Book of the Bush Part 6

One evening as I was plodding my weary way homeward, I looked up and saw in the distance a man inspecting my cellar. I said, "Here's another disgusting fool who ain't seen it before." It certainly was a peculiar cellar, but not worth looking at so much. I hated the sight of it. It had no building over it, never was roofed in, and was sometimes full of snow.

The other fool proved to be Mr. Curtis, the teacher who had written the resolution of the meeting which voted me out of the school. He held out his hand, and I took it, but reluctantly, and under secret protest. I thought to myself, "This mine enemy has an axe to grind, or he would not be here. I'll be on my guard."

"I have been waiting for you some time," said Mr. Curtis. "I was told you were splitting rails in the forest, and would be home about sundown. I wanted to see you about opening school again. Mr. Rogers won't have anything to say to it, but the other two managers, Mr.

Strong and Mr. Demmond, want to engage you and me, one to teach in the upper storey of the school, the other down below, and I came up to ask you to see them about it."

"How does it happen that Mr. Sellars has not come over from Dresden?"

I said.

"Joliet is about the last place on this earth that Mr. Sellars will come to. Didn't you hear about him and Priscilla?" asked Mr. Curtis.

"No, I heard nothing since that meeting; only saw the school doors were closed every time I pa.s.sed that way."

"Well, I am surprised. I thought everybody knew by this time, though we did not like to say much about it."

I began to feel interested. Mr. Curtis had something pleasant to tell me about the misfortunes of my enemies, so I listened attentively.

It was a tale of western love, and its course was no smoother in Illinois than in any less enlightened country of old Europe. Miss Priscilla reckoned she could hoe her own row. She and Mr. Sellars conducted the Common School at Dresden with great success and harmony. All went merry as a marriage bell, and the marriage was to come off by-and-by--so hoped Miss Priscilla. During the recess she took the teacher's arm, and they walked to and fro lovingly. All Dresden said it was to be a match, but at the end of the term Miss Priscilla returned to Joliet--the match was not yet made.

It was at this time that the dissatisfaction with the new British teacher became extreme; Miss Priscilla fanned the flame of discontent. She did not "let concealment like a worm i' th' bud feed on her damask cheek," but boldly proposed that Mr. Sellars--a true-born native of New England, a good young man, always seen at meetings on the Sabbath--should be requested to take charge of the West Joliet school. So the meeting was held: I was voted out, Mr.

Sellars was voted in, and the daughters of the Puritans triumphed.

Miss Priscilla wrote to Dresden, announcing to her beloved the success of her diplomacy, requesting him to come to Joliet without delay, and a.s.sume direction of the new school. This letter fell into the hands of another lady who had just arrived at Dresden from New England in search of her husband, who happened to be Mr. Sellars.

The letter which that other lady wrote to Miss Priscilla I did not see, but it was said to be a masterpiece of composition, and it emptied two schools. Mr. Tucker went over to Dresden and looked around for Mr. Sellars, but that gentleman had gone out west, and was never heard of again. The west was a very wide unfenced s.p.a.ce, without railways.

"The fact is," said Mr. Curtis, "we were all kinder shamed the way things turned out, and we just let 'em rip. But people are now stirring about the school being closed so long, so Mr. Strong and Mr.

Demmond have concluded to engage you and me to conduct the school."

We were engaged that night, and I went rail-splitting no more. But I fenced my estate; and while running the line on the western boundary I found the grave of Highland Mary. It was in the middle of a grove of oak and hickory saplings, and was nearly hidden by hazel bushes.

The tombstone was a slab about two feet high, roughly hewn. Her epitaph was, "Mary Campbell, aged 7. 1827." That was all. Poor little Mary.

The Common Schools of Illinois were maintained princ.i.p.ally from the revenue derived from grants of land. When the country was first surveyed, one section of 640 acres in each township of six miles square was reserved for school purposes. There was a State law on education, but the management was entirely local, and was in the hands of a treasurer and three directors, elected biennally by the citizens of each school district. The revenue derived from the school section was sometimes not sufficient to defray the salary of the teacher, and then the deficiency was supplied by the parents of the children who had attended at the school; those citizens whose children did not attend were not taxed by the State for the Common Schools; they did not pay for that which they did not receive. In some instances only one school was maintained by the revenue of two school sections. When the attendance in the school was numerous, a young lady, called the "school-marm," a.s.sisted in the teaching.

Sometimes, as in the case of Miss Priscilla, she fell into trouble.

The books were provided by the enterprise of private citizens, and an occasional change of "Readers" was agreeable both to teachers and scholars. The best of old stories grow tiresome when repeated too often. One day a traveller from Cincinnati brought me samples of a new series of "Readers," offering on my approval, to subst.i.tute next day a new volume for every old one produced. I approved, and he presented each scholar with copies of the new series for nothing.

The teaching was secular, but certain virtues were inculcated either directly or indirectly. Truth and patriotism were recommended by the example of George Washington, who never told a lie, and who won with his sword the freedom of his country. There were lessons on history, in which the tyranny of the English Government was denounced; Kings, Lords and Bishops, especially Bishop Laud, were held up to eternal abhorrence; as was also England's greed of gain, her intolerance, bigotry, taxation; her penal and navigation laws. The glorious War of Independence was related at length. The children of the Puritans, of the Irish and the Germans, did not in those days imbibe much prejudice in favour of England or her inst.i.tutions, and the English teacher desirous of arriving at the truth, had the advantage of having heard both sides of many historical questions; of listening, as it were, to the scream of the American eagle, as well as to the roar of the British lion.

Mr. Curtis was a good teacher, systematic, patient, persevering, and ingenious. I ceased to hate him; Miss Priscilla's downfall cemented our friendship. We kept order in the school by moral suasion, but the task was sometimes difficult. My private feelings were in favour of the occasional use of the hickory stick, the American subst.i.tute for the rod of Solomon, and the birch of England.

The geography we taught was princ.i.p.ally that of the United States and her territories, s.p.a.cious maps of which were suspended round the school, continually reminding the scholars of their glorious inheritance. It was then full of vacant lots, over which roamed the Indian and the buffalo, species of animals now nearly extinct. We did not pay much attention to the rest of the world.

Elocution was inculcated a.s.siduously, and at regular intervals each boy and girl had to come forth and "speak a piece" in the presence of the scholars, teachers, and visitors.

Mental arithmetic and the use of fractions were taught daily. The use of the decimal in the American coinage is of great advantage; it is easier and more intelligible to children than the clumsy old system of pounds, shillings, pence, and farthings. It is a system which would no doubt have been long ago adopted by England, if it had not been humiliating to our national pride to take even a good thing from rebellious Yankees, and inferior Latin races. We cling fondly to absurdities because they are our own. In Australia wild rabbits are vermin, in England they are private property; and if one of the three millions of her miserable paupers is found with a rabbit in each of his coat pockets, he is fined 10s. or sent to gaol. Pope Gregory XIII. demonstrated the error of the calendar then in use, and all Catholic nations adopted his correction. But when the adoption of the calendar was proposed in Parliament, John Bull put his big foot down at once; he would receive no truth, not even a mathematical one, from the Pope of Rome, and it was only after the lapse of nearly 200 years, when the memory of Gregory and his calendar had almost faded away from the sensitive mind of Protestantism, that an Act was pa.s.sed, "equalising the style in Great Britain and Ireland with that used in other countries of Europe."

A fugitive slave with his wife and daughter came to Joliet. One day he was seized by three slave-hunters, who took him towards the ca.n.a.l.

A number of abolitionists a.s.sembled to rescue the slave, but the three men drew their revolvers, and no abolitionist had the courage to fire the first shot. The slave was put in a ca.n.a.l boat and went south; his wife remained in Joliet and earned her bread by weaving drugget; the daughter came to my school; she was of pure negro blood, but was taught with the white girls.

The abolitionists were increasing in number, and during the war with the South the slaves were freed. They are now like Israel in Egypt, they increase too rapidly. If father Abraham had sent them back to Africa when they were only four millions, he would have earned the grat.i.tude of his country. Now they number more than eight millions; the Sunny South agrees with their const.i.tution; they work as little and steal as much as possible. In the days of their bondage they were addicted to petty larceny; now they have votes, and when they achieve place and power they are addicted to grand larceny, and they loot the public treasury as unblushingly as the white politicians.

The n.i.g.g.e.r question has doubled in magnitude during the last thirty years, and there will have to be another abolition campaign of some kind. The blacks are incapable of ruling the whites; no time was given to educate them for their new duties, if teaching them was possible; the Declaration of Independence was in their case a mockery from the beginning. When all the old abolitionists and slave-holders are dead, another generation of men grown wiser by the failure of the policy of their forefathers may solve the black problem.

Complaint is made that the American education of to-day is in a chaotic condition, due to the want of any definite idea of what education is aiming at. There is evidence that the ancients of New England used to birch their boys, but after independence had been fought for and won, higher aims prevailed. The Puritan then believed that his children were born to a destiny far grander than that of any other children on the face of the earth; the treatment accorded to them was therefore to be different. The fundamental idea of American life was to be "Freedom," and the definition of "Freedom" by a learned American is, "The power which necessarily belongs to the self-conscious being of determining his actions in view of the highest, the universal good, and thereby of gradually realising in himself the eternal divine perfection." The definition seems a little hazy, but the workings of great minds are often unintelligible to common people. "The American citizen must be morally autonomous, regarding all inst.i.tutions as servants, not as masters. So far man has been for the most part a thrall. The true American must worship the inner G.o.d recognised as his own deepest and eternal self, not an outer G.o.d regarded as something different from himself."

Lucifer is said to have entertained a similar idea. He would not be a thrall, and the result as described by the republican Milton was truly disastrous:

"Him the Almighty Power Hurl'd headlong down to bottomless perdition Region of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace And rest can never dwell."

The manner in which the American citizen is to be made "morally autonomous, and placed beyond the control of current opinion," will require much money; his parents must therefore be rich; they must already have inherited wealth, or have obtained it by ability or labour. The course of training to be given to youth includes travelling for six years in foreign countries under private tutors, studying human history, ethnic, social, political, industrial, aesthetic, religious; gems of poetry; the elements of geometry; mechanics; art, plastic, and graphic; reading Confucius, Sakya-muni, Themistocles, Socrates, Julius Caesar, Paul, Mahommed, Charlemagne, Alfred, Gregory VII., St.

Bernard, St. Francis, Savonarola, Luther, Queen Elizabeth, Columbus, Washington, Lincoln, Homer, Virgil, Dante, Tennyson, and Lowell.

The boys on the prairies had to earn their bread; they could not spend six years travelling around and studying all the writers above mentioned, making themselves morally autonomous, and worshipping their own deepest and eternal selves. The best men America has produced were reared at home, and did ch.o.r.es out of school hours.

When I was expelled from school by the Yankees, Mr. McEvoy, the leading Irish politician, called me aside and said: "Whisper, you just hang round until next election, and we'll turn out the Yankee managers, and put you in the school again." The Germans were slow in acquiring political knowledge as well as in learning the English language; but language, politics, and law itself are the birthright of the Irish. By force of circ.u.mstances, and through the otherwise deplorable failure of Miss Priscilla, I resumed work in the school before the election, but Mr. McEvoy, true to his promise, organised the opposition--it is always the opposition--and ejected the Yankee managers, but in the fall of 1850 I resigned, and went a long way south.

When I returned, Joliet was a city, and Mr. Rendel, one of my German night scholars, was city marshal. I met him walking the streets, and carrying his staff of office with great dignity. I took up my abode in an upper apartment of the gaol, then in charge of Sheriff Cunningham, who had a farm in West Joliet, near a plank road, leading on to the prairie. I had known the Sheriff two years before, but did not see much of him at this time, though I was in daily communication with his son, Silas, the Deputy Sheriff. It was under these favourable circ.u.mstancesthat I was enabled to witness a General Gaol Delivery of all the prisoners in Joliet. One, charged with killing his third man, was out on bail. I saw him in Matheson's boarding-house making love to one of the hired girls, and she seemed quite pleased with his polite attentions. Matheson was elected Governor of the State of Illinois, and became a millionaire by dealing in railways. He was a native of Missouri, and a man of ability; In '49 I saw him at work in a machine shop.

The prisoners did not regain their freedom all at once, but in the s.p.a.ce of three weeks they trickled out one by one. The Deputy Sheriff, Silas, had been one of my pupils; he was now about seventeen years of age, and a model son of the prairies. His features were exceedingly thin, his eyes keen, his speech and movements slow, his mind cool and calculating. He never injured his const.i.tution by any violent exertion; in fact, he seemed to have taken leave of active life and all its worries, and to have settled down to an existence of ease and contemplation. If he had any anxiety about the safe custody of his prisoners he never showed it. He had finished his education, so I did not attempt to control him by moral suasion, or by anything else, but by degrees I succeeded in eliciting from him all the particulars he could impart about the criminals under his care.

There was no fence around the gaol, and Silas kept two of them always locked in. He "calkilated they wer kinder unsafe." They belonged to a society of horse thieves whose members were distributed at regular intervals along the prairies, and who forwarded their stolen animals by night to Chicago. The two gentlemen in gaol were of an untrustworthy character, and would be likely to slip away. About a week after my arrival I met Silas coming out of the gaol, and he said:

"They're gone, be gosh." Silas never wasted words.

"Who is gone?" I inquired.

"Why, them two horse thieves. Just look here."

We went round to the east side of the gaol, and there was a hole about two feet deep, and just wide enough to let a man through. The ground underneath the wall was rocky, but the two prisoners had been industrious, had picked a hole under the wall and had gone through.

"Where's the Sheriff?" I asked. "Won't Mr. Cunningham go after the men?"

"He's away at Bourbonnais' Grove, about suthin' or other, among the Bluenoses; can't say when he'll be back; it don't matter anyhow. He might just as well try to go to h.e.l.l backwards as catch them two horse thieves now."

Silas had still two other prisoners under his care, and he let them go outside as usual to enjoy the fresh air. They had both been committed for murder, but their crime was reckoned a respectable one compared to the mean one of horse stealing, so Silas gave them honourable treatment.

One of the prisoners was a widow lady who had killed another lady with an axe, at a hut near the ca.n.a.l on the road to Lockport. She seemed crazy, and when outside the gaol walked here and there in a helpless kind of way, muttering to herself; but sometimes an idea seemed to strike her that she had something to do Lockport way, and she started in that direction, forgetting very likely that she had done it already; but whenever Silas called her back, she returned without giving any trouble. One day, however, when Silas was asleep she went clean out of sight, and I did not see her any more. The Sheriff was still absent among the Bluenoses.

The fourth prisoner was an Englishman named Wilkins who owned a farm on the prairie, in the direction of Bourbonnais' Grove. A few weeks before, returning home from Joliet with his waggon and team of horses, he halted for a short time at a distillery, situated at the foot of the low bluff which bounded the bottom, through which ran the Aux Plaines River. It was a place at which the farmers often called to discuss politics, the prices of produce, and other matters, and also, if so disposed, to take in a supply of liquor. The corn whisky of Illinois was an article of commerce which found its way to many markets. Although it was sold at a low price at home, it became much more valuable after it had been exported to England or France, and had undergone scientific treatment by men of ability. The corn used in its manufacture was exceedingly cheap, as may be imagined when corn-fed pork was, in the winter of '49, offered for sale in Joliet at one cent per pound. After the poison of the prairies had been exported to Europe, a new flavour was imparted to it, and it became Cognac, or the best Irish or Scotch whisky.

Wilkins halted his team and went into the whisky-mill, where the owner, Robinson, was throwing charcoal into the furnace under his boiler with a long-handled shovel. He was an enterprising Englishman who was wooing the smiles of fortune with better prospects of success than the slow, hard-working farmer. I had seen him first in West Joliet in '49, when he was travelling around buying corn for his distillery. He was a handsome man, about thirty years of age, five feet ten inches in height, had been well educated, was quite able to hold his own among the men of the West, and accommodated himself to their manners and habits.

There were three other farmers present, and their talk drifted from one thing to another until it at last settled on the question of the relative advantages of life in England and the States. Robinson took the part of England, Wilkins stuck to the States; he said:

"A poor man has no chance at home; he is kept down by landlords, and can never get a farm of his own. In Illinois I am a free man, and have no one to lord it over me. If I had lived and slaved in England for a hundred years I should never have been any better off, and now I have a farm as good as any in Will County, and am just as good a man as e'er another in it."

Now Wilkins was only a small man, shorter by four inches than Robinson, who towered above him, and at once resented the claim to equality. He said:

"You as good as any other man, are you? Why there ain't a more miserable little skunk within twenty miles round Joliet."