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