Warren was a reformer as well as a publisher. He was connected with New Harmony for a short time in community days, but left, returning in 1842 to establish a “time store.” In the “time store” he sold merchandise to none who could not return the actual cash cost, plus a profit which must be paid in a “labor note.” This form of currency represented a specified number of hours of labor, pledged by mechanics or others. When a customer entered his shop and began discussing a purchase, Warren started a clock which marked the amount of time consumed in the sale: this was the basis for computing the merchant’s profit. Warren could often be seen in the streets of New Harmony with large amounts of labor currency. This medium of exchange required careful handling, as some would appraise their labor too high, and now and then depreciation followed an over-issue by some careless or unscrupulous individual. Warren conducted this enterprise for about two years, departing to carry the gospel of “equitable commerce,” as he called it, elsewhere.
In 1838 the Workingmen’s Institute and Library was organized at Maclure’s suggestion and with money that he contributed. Later, Dr. Edward Murphy generously gave to this association a handsome building, which contains the library, an art gallery,—largely Dr. Murphy’s gift,—a hall, and museum. The building stands in a pretty park and is ideally adapted to its purposes. The library contains 12,000 volumes, well selected and particularly rich in scientific works. It includes every available book relating to American socialism, and many of the original New Harmony records are preserved there. Dr. Murphy has provided an endowment for it and for an annual course of lectures. The lecture course is greatly prized by the citizens, who have heard under its auspices many of the learned men of the day. There was no church in the village for many years; indeed, with the passing of Rapp little attention was paid to religious matters at New Harmony until late in the century, and though there are Episcopal and Methodist organizations in the village now, the life of the people does not centre about the churches as in most communities of the same size. An old citizen describes the attitude of the inhabitants toward religion as one of tolerance merely. Several branches of the Owen family are Episcopalians. Dancing as a feature of social life has survived from community times, and a first-of-May ball, followed by a dance for children, has long been fixed in the local calendar.
Thus Robert Owen’s brief experiment, failing of his purpose, led to the founding of an American family whose members have shown unusual talents, creditable alike to their distinguished progenitor and to the State which became, by chance, their home. He failed to establish an asylum for the oppressed, as he had intended, but he was responsible for the impulse that made of his village a centre of scientific inquiry and the home of men of renown. It is impossible to separate the New Harmony of to-day from the village of the past. At every turn, the buildings of the Rappites and the traces of Owen’s disciples suggest the old times; and descendants of the Owens, Fretageots, Beales, Fauntleroys, Dransfields, Wheatcrofts, and many others dating back to community times, still live there. New Harmony is a pleasant place in May and June, when the great lines of maples in the broad streets are at their best, and all the quiet valley is fresh and green. It invites by its air of antiquity and peace; the sheltered life is still possible there. In the present, it is the ideal Western village; in its memories it marks the first high tide of cultivation at the West.
CHAPTER V
THE HOOSIER INTERPRETED
The rural type in Indiana has found notable interpretation at the hands of two writers who, working independently of each other and at different periods, have made records of great social and literary value and interest. As already indicated, country life at the West and Southwest has not varied widely in different communities. The same social conditions and peculiarities of speech have been observable in many regions deriving population from common sources; but the type found in the Ohio Valley was best defined in Indiana, and it has gained its greatest fame through the interpretations of Edward Eggleston and James Whitcomb Riley. Their outlook on life has been wholly different, and their literary methods have been antipodal; but they have both been keen observers of the rural Indianians, though of different generations. They meet in a strong affection for their native soil, and in an appreciation of the essential domesticity and moral enlightenment of the people they depict.
I. Edward Eggleston
Switzerland County lies in the far southeastern corner of the State, and Vevay, its principal town and capital, is on the Ohio River. The name of the county is explained by the fact of its settlement by Swiss immigrants, who were drawn thither by the supposed adaptability of the soil to the growth of the grape. Vevay lies about midway between Louisville and Cincinnati, and the steamboats plying between these two cities are its only medium of communication with the world, as no railway touches it. It was to this pretty village that Joseph Cary Eggleston, the father of Edward and George Cary Eggleston, came in 1832. The impression has been abroad that the author of “The Hoosier Schoolmaster” was himself reared amid the squalor and ignorance which he described so vividly, but this is without foundation of fact. The Egglestons were of good Virginia stock, and the members of the Indiana branch of the family were cultivated people. Joseph Cary was graduated from William and Mary College in his seventeenth year with high honors. He had studied law before he left Virginia, and the fourteen years of his life that remained to him after his removal to Indiana were spent in the successful practice of his profession. He was, moreover, popular in the community, for he sat in both branches of the General Assembly, and was nominated for representative in Congress, but failed of election. He married, soon after reaching Indiana, the daughter of George Craig, of Craig township, in Switzerland County. The Craigs were of a distinguished Kentucky family, and, like the Egglestons, looked back to a Virginia ancestry. Edward Eggleston was born at Vevay in 1837, and has never failed to speak with great cordiality and affection of the pretty river town whose chief distinction lies in his own attainments. He has even taken occasion in recent years[41] to rebuke “a certain condescension in New Englanders,” which had prompted the Atlantic Monthly to comment on the hardship it must have been “to a highly organized man” to be born in southern Indiana in the crude early years of the nineteenth century. Dr. Eggleston declares that he has retained enough of local prejudice to feel that he would have lost more than he could have gained had Plymouth Rock or Beacon Hill been his birthplace rather than Vevay. He was sensitive to the loveliness of the Indiana spring and summer, and has paid tribute to it in words which it is a pleasure to repeat:—
“The sound of the anvil in the smithy, and the soft clatter of remote cow-bells on the ‘commons,’ linger in my mind as memories inseparable from my boyhood in Vevay. A certain poetic feeling which characterized me from childhood, and which, perhaps, finally determined my course toward literary pursuits, was nourished by my delight in the noble scenery about Vevay, Madison, and New Albany, in which places I lived at various times. My brother George and myself were walkers, partly because our father had been one before us. Nothing could be finer than our all-day excursions to the woods in search of hickory-nuts, wild grapes, blackberries, paw-paws, or of nothing at all but the sheer pleasure of wandering in one of the noblest forests that it ever fell to a boy’s lot to have for a playground. Then, too, when we had some business five or twenty miles away, we scorned to take the steamboat, but just set out afoot along the river bank, getting no end of pleasure out of the walk, and out of that sense of power which unusual fatigue, cheerfully borne, always gives.”[42]
Dr. Eggleston’s early life was full of vicissitude, but he has himself disclaimed credit for being what is called “a self-made man.” It is true that he had his own way to make, in great measure, but he began with all the benefits of good ancestry, and he was, in his own phrase, “born into an intellectual atmosphere.” Joseph Cary Eggleston, who died when Edward was only nine years old, provided in his will for the exchange of his law library for books of general interest, that his children might have good literature about them in their formative years—a direction that was followed faithfully by his widow. The boy Edward grew up with the ideal of a scholarly father before him, and with an ambition to know books and to read other languages than his own. He learned also the mystery of type-setting, and contributed items to the Vevay Reveille, duly “set up.” Dr. Eggleston records that in his primary schooling, conducted by his mother, he proved himself a dull scholar, but that some kind of climacteric was passed in his tenth year, and that thenceforward he was the pride of his teachers. Manual training was hardly dreamed of in those days, but Joseph Eggleston had an appreciation of its value and left what Edward has described as “a solemn injunction that his sons should be sent to the country every summer and taught manual labor on a farm.” This injunction was carefully obeyed, so that Edward Eggleston had an actual experience of farming and a contact with farm folk that was a part of his preparation for the writing of the tales that gave him his first fame. Judge Miles Eggleston, Joseph’s brother, was more distinctly an Indianian than any other member of the family by reason of his long residence in the State and his public services. Guilford Eggleston, Joseph Eggleston’s cousin, was identified with the family life at Vevay. He was a man of many accomplishments, and left a deep impression on Edward Eggleston, who has spoken of his brilliant talk as a perpetual inspiration: “He incessantly stimulated my love for literature, guided my choice of books, taught me to make a commonplace book of my reading, and by his conversation and example made me feel that to lead an intellectual life was the most laudable pursuit of a human being.” The direction thus given to the boyish impulse, and the atmosphere of his home, were of great importance to Edward, for of systematic schooling he was to know little. He was never but once in his life able to spend three consecutive months in school, and after he reached his tenth year the sum of his schooling was only eighteen months.
Joseph Eggleston had foreseen his own death and provided in various ways for the education of his sons. He purchased a scholarship in Asbury (DePauw) College, but continued ill health made it impossible for Edward to avail himself of its benefits, though his younger brother, George Cary, became a student there. Just what Edward Eggleston lost by his irregular schooling, which was almost wholly independent of instructors in the usual sense of the term, is hardly a profitable subject for speculation. By following his own bent, he strengthened himself along lines of natural preference, and he formed that habit of wise selection and rejection which in itself marks the educated man. Although schoolhouse doors were closed against him on account of his precarious health, he was nevertheless permitted to court death by close application in home study. He acquired, by the time he reached his twenty-fifth year, some knowledge of six or seven languages, and a familiar acquaintance with classical English and French poetry. He knew both the English and French dramatic literature, though, having been bred in the strictest teaching of the Methodists of that day, he read few novels, and he gives his own testimony that he should have esteemed it “a damnable sin to see a play on the stage.”