USA > Indiana > Vigo County > History of Indiana from its exploration to 1922, Vol II > Part 39
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April 11, it was announced that the army would organize training camps on the Plattsburg plan for the instruction of field and line officers of the new national army. This plan necessarily had to await the action of congress but it was favored by every- body.
April 18, Secretary of War Baker issued the order to establish fourteen citizen training camps where reserve officers and prospective officers for the drafted army were to be trained. The camp for Indi- ana, Ohio, and Kentucky was located at Fort Benja- min Harrison.28 Applicants were directed to report May 1, and training began May 8. The attendance was fixed at 2,500. Col. Edwin F. Glenn was detailed to take charge of the school.
On June 4, 1917, a call for volunteers for a second citizens' military training camp was issued. This session began August 27 and closed November 29. There had been 160,000 applications in eighteen days for the first camps but the response for the second was not so general, partly due to a misunderstanding that only men above the draft age would be re- ceived.29 July 13, the secretary of war announced the draft allotments to the states. Of the total number,
28 Indianapolis Star, April 19, 1917.
29 Official Bulletin, July 6, 1917.
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687,000, Indiana was allotted 17,510. The result of the registration, June 5, in Indiana was a list of 257,- 311 available men. Of these 1,149 were unnaturalized Germans. The registration was 100.6 per cent. of the census estimate for the state.3º July 19, the president promulgated the rules for the selective draft;31 the order of Provost Marshall General Crowder set Sep- tember 1 as the date on which the mobilization of the national army should begin. The first civilian train- ing camp at Fort Benjamin Harrison closed on Aug- ust 15, on which date Adjutant General Harry Mc- Cain ordered the men from Indiana and Kentucky to be notified of their individual appointments. A list of these is given in the Official Bulletin for August 9.
A supplementary registration, August 24, 1918, gave 24,015 who had come of age since June, 1917. The third draft, September 12, 1918, including all others between the ages of 18 and 45, gave 354,812, making a grand total of 626,138 in the draft.
It was realized that the withdrawal of so many men from active employment would seriously embar- rass factories and farms. The Council of National Defense as an effort to meet this need asked that training camps be established where boys too young for military service might be taught to do different kinds of work. Governor Goodrich in response to this appeal and a resolution of the Indiana state council proclaimed the week from August 6 to Aug- ust 12 as a period of special enrollment in the Boys' Working Reserve. A speaking campaign was organ- ized to cover the state and explain the movement to the people.32
30 Official Bulletin, June 25, 1917.
81 Official Bulletin, July 28, 1917. This gives the rules and the order of serial numbers in which the men were called.
32 Official Bulletin, August 13, 1917: "I appeal to the virile young manhood of Indiana with the thought that every American
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The official machinery for selecting and examin- ing the men for the national army was perfected as rapidly as possible. The district appeal boards, of which Indiana had four, were announced August 15. Each board was composed of five men who heard appeals in exemption cases from county or city boards.33 The directions for mobilization were issued, August 16, and on August 21, the secretary of war ordered the 17,510 men chosen from Indiana for the national army to be mobilized at Fort Zach- ary Taylor, at Louisville, Kentucky, with the troops from southern Illinois and Kentucky, 41,880 in all. On the first of September the Indiana guard was or- dered to mobilize at Camp Shelby, Hattiesburg, Mis- sissippi; except the First Indiana Field artillery, which was ordered to Camp Mills, on Long Island, preparatory to leaving with the Rainbow division for France.
The army organization for the over seas service was radically changed. A full regiment numbered 3,755 men, divided as follows: Headquarters officers
boy at work opposes a boy In Germany, and In all serlousness remind him that he is facing a man's job, the burdens, hardships, and sacrifices of which will increase as the war lengthens. To the parent I would say that this enrollment is for non-military service, that it will not interfere with the boy's education if he attends school, nor will it disturb him in his occupation if he is already employed, and that inasmuch as your written request for his furlough or discharge must be immediately granted, he is still amenable to parental control. To the people of the State of Indiana I most heartily recommend the work of this reserve as a permanent contribution to our economic forces and express the desire that the service to the state and nation rendered by these boys should be regarded by the public as just as useful and patriotic within the limits of the opportunity afforded as the service rendered by the soldiers in the trenches. In that spirit you should lend your co-operation." The governor's proclamation.
33 Official Bulletin, Aug. 15, 1917. The divisions are here given, the counties of each division and the members of each board.
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and company, 308; three battalions of four rifle com- panies each, 3,078; one supply company, 140; one machine gun company, 178; one medical detachment, 56. A rifle or infantry company consisted of 250 men and 6 officers. The company was made up of two officers, 22 section bombers and rifle grenadiers, two sections of riflemen of 12 men each, and one sec- tion of auto riflemen, 11 men and 4 guns. A machine gun company was composed of 6 officers and 172 men with 12 regular guns and 4 spare guns. For trans- portation and camp purposes the regiment was pro- vided with 22 combat wagons, 16 rolling kitchens, 22 baggage and ration wagons, 16 ration carts, 15 water carts, 3 medical carts, 24 machine gun carts, 59 rid- ing horses, 8 riding mules, 332 draft mules, 2 motor- cycles with sidecars, 1 motor car, and 42 bicycles. Aside from the usual equipment of guns, bayonets, and pistols, the regiment had 480 trench knives (40 to each company), 192 automatic rifles (16 to the company), and 3 one-pounder cannons. The head- quarters company consisted of one staff section of 36 men, one orderlies section of 29 men, one band section of 28 men, one signal platoon of 77 men, one sappers and bombers platoon of 43 men, one pioneer platoon of 55 men, and one one-pounder cannon platoon of 33 men.
The division was made up of one division head- quarters, 164 men; one battalion (4 companies) of machine-guns, 768 men; two infantry brigades com- posed, each, of 2 regiments and 3 machine-gun com- panies, 16,420 men; one field artillery brigade com- posed of 3 field artillery regiments and one trench- mortar battery, 5,068 men; one field signal battalion, 262 men ; one regiment of engineers, 1,666 men ; head- quarters and military police, 337 men; ammunition train, 962 men ; supply train, 472 men ; engineer train, 84 men ; four field hospital companies and four ambu-
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lance companies, 949 men. The total for the division was 27,152 men under a major general.34
Work on the control of food and fuel was begun as soon as it was ascertained that war was inevitable. The Indiana public utilities commission tried with only indifferent success to regulate the coal supply. After numerous conferences with coal mine operat- ors and dealers the matter was referred to the na- tional government. By presidential proclamation, August 21, the price of coal at the mines was fixed, for Indiana coal, at $1.95 per ton for run of the mine, $2.20 for screened coal, and $1.70 for slack. On the 30th of August the price of wheat was fixed at $2.20 at Chicago.
These facts are stated without any intention of estimating their historic value. The orders here given were not carried out at once. The different contingents of the national army were sent to Louis- ville as fast as the camp at that place was prepared to receive them. Most of the Indiana troops were ordered to report during the last half of September. The state and county papers of that period contain notices of their leaving the county seats. Patriotic crowds gathered at the stations to manifest the ap- preciation all felt for those who were making the sac- rifice. Preparations were begun at once to furnish everything to the men under arms to make their army life as pleasant as such life can be made. The generous response to all these demands indicated be- yond question that Indiana would do all, and more, that the government asked. The different organiza- tions of Indiana National guard reported to Hatties- burg, Mississippi, about the close of September, go-
34 Official Bulletin, Sept. 22, 1915. A study of this organi- zation will show what effect the present war has had on army organization. The ratlo of Infantry and artillery Is as three to four while cavalry has practically disappeared.
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ing by guard regiments from Fort Benjamin Har- rison. 85
No reliable records are available of the part Indi- ana took in the war. There were asked from the state 6,280 volunteers for the different branches of the service, and 39,586 responded. The Indiana· Na- tional guard on the Mexican border numbered 3,100, but when mustered into federal service had grown to 10,419.
After the war closed the soldiers were quietly returned home, May 7, 1919. A state-wide celebra- tion was held at Indianapolis to welcome the re- turned troops.
The excitement during the period was in no wise comparable to that at the outbreak of the Civil war. There was no immediate tangible danger, neither was the demand so great in the latter as in the for- mer war. The resources of the state are far greater now, the war was to be far away, there was no ques- tion concerning the loyalty of any large numbers of people, the machinery for raising the present army was all in national hands, though the state govern- ment assisted in every possible way, saving much time and money to the national government. In brief, the war, so far as Indiana was concerned, was a business affair, carried on in a business way, and without interfering much with the ordinary affairs of the people.
35 The Third guard regiment left Fort Benjamin Harrison for Hattiesburg, September 28. The First and Fourth had pre- ceded it a few days, while the Second still remained in the state several companies being on guard duty at the industrial centers of the state. Indianapolis News, Sept. 28, 1917.
CHAPTER XXXVIII
LITERARY HISTORY
§ 206 NEWSPAPERS
The history of literature is different in nature and distinct in subject-matter from that of education. It is true that literary men and women are educated, but the reverse is not true that most educated men and women are literary. Literature frequently springs up under the influence, or at least in the neighborhood, of schools, but much of our literature both in Indiana and elsewhere has not been even re- motely connected with any educational institution. Nothing in the field of research has been more puz- zling or elusive than the history of literature. The birth, development or inheritance of an inspiration is such an evanescent event that historians have not been able to find the evidence, nor have psychologists in their laboratories been able to account for it. It is reasonable to expect some explanation of literary genius, but in most cases about all that can be done is to hide our defeat as best we can under the old statement that genius is born, not made.
In spite of the inconclusiveness of the evidence and the disappointment at the results, there are events and circumstances in early Indiana history 60 closely connected with later literary production that they at least become interesting if not significant. The earliest activity in Indiana that might, by any stretch of the term, be called literary, was at Vin- cennes. Sometime during the year 1804, Elihu Stout, a former apprentice of the Bradfords, of Frankfort, Kentucky, and a personal friend of Andrew Jackson, drifted into Vincennes with the materials of a news-
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paper. The Indiana Gazette, as the paper was called, made its appearance on the natal day of the republic, 1804. Editor Stout was a printer rather than a lit- erary man, but he gathered about him a group of men, some of whom later developed literary taste if not skill.1
At the head of the group was Governor Harrison, whose frequent references to the classics in all his state papers do not permit us to forget that he was a college man. His state papers and personal letters show that he was not insensitive to literary charm. He delighted in the society of such men as Jo. Dav- iess, Benjamin Parke and Thomas Randolph. The pages of the Western Sun? give us occasional glances of these congenial characters in their little reading room, searching the eastern papers for news of the great Napoleon, or drawing up stilted communica- tions for the columns of the Sun, or perhaps taking part in some amateur theatrical performance in their
1 W. H. Venable, Beginnings of Literary Culture in the Ohio Valley, 260: "As early as 1806, the talented and aspiring young men who had settled here established what they called a 'Thespian Society,' and gave entertainments as often as once a week and sometimes oftener. These histrionic exhibitions were liberally patronized by the citizens and were well attended, and were very entertaining, instructive, and successful. The society continued to exist and flourish until several years after the admission of the state into the union, and with a waning existence until as late as 1830. All the younger members of the bar, the surgeons and officers of the army, the medical profession, and many of the merchants and those engaged in the trades took part In these literary performances. A programme of the play and the cast of characters were printed by the editor of the Sun, who also took part in the performances. I have files of many of these printed programmes." The facts of this section are taken from a series of articles in the Indianapolis Sunday Star of 1916.
2 The Indiana Gazette burned about one and one-half years after It was founded and the Western Sun took its place, begin- ning July 4, 1807.
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local playhouse. They even planned, and all but suc- ceeded, in establishing a college.
It seemed at one time that Vincennes would rival Lexington as a center of culture, but the exigencies of frontier life prevented the young plant from de- veloping even into flower. Harrison was called to lead the army against Tecumseh and never returned. Randolph and Daviess fell at Tippecanoe where they rest side by side on the battlefield. When the war was over the glory of the little capital on the Wa- bash had departed though its influence lived on. Social culture must wait to some extent on political accommodation and sectional selfishness. Indiana was set back socially a quarter of a century by the two removals of its capital. Vincennes had pro- gressed as far in 1810 as Indianapolis had in 1835. But Indiana has not been peculiar in this respect. The social capital of Kentucky was at Lexington and later at Louisville, while its political capital was at Frankfort. Cincinnati was deprived of the benefit of the political headship in Ohio, whose political capital flitted from Marietta to Chillicothe and thence to Columbus. Michigan, Illinois, Missouri and Wis- consin were in still worse luck. In fact Indiana was the first to secure the benefit of a united social, com- mercial and political capital.
Benjamin Parke and Isaac Blackford, two of the most scholarly of the Vincennes group, came on with the capital to Corydon. This village in 1814 was not without poetic charm. It is said Governor Harrison found life attractive on his Blue River farm, in com- pany with Spier Spencer, John Tipton, Dennis Pen- nington and their neighbors. Nearby was Squire Boone's mill, with the devout inscription :
I sit and sing my soul's salvation
And pledge the God of my creation.3
3 Charles Moores, in Indiana Magazine of History, XIII, 30.
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To this village, nestled in the hills, came Parke and Blackford, two of the best lawyers of early Indiana. Thither also came Governor Jennings, the politician. From New Albany or Louisville came Reuben W. Nelson with the inevitable newspaper, this one being named the Indiana Herald. By 1825 the capital could boast of such men as Armstrong Brandon, and his brother Jesse, who were the personal friends of Col. R. M. Johnson of Kentucky, and editors of the Indi- ana Gazette; Samuel Judah, a graduate of Rutgers; Charles Dewey, a graduate of Williams; Harbin Moore, our first attorney general; Samuel Merrill, a graduate of Dartmouth. Already they had organized a lyceum, had founded the State Law library and were flirting with several of the Muses when the ruthless hand of politics snatched from their town its chief attraction.
Outside of Vincennes the first newspaper pub- lished in Indiana was the Western Eagle, founded by Seth M. Leavenworth and William Hendricks at Madison, in 1813. They brought their press with them from Cincinnati. The Eagle soon moved out to Lexington and the Indiana Republican took its place. In 1815 there came to the thriving town of Brookville a peripatetic printer named John Scott, who founded the Brookville Enquirer in 1815. About the same time William C. Keen, an Ohio printer, with the aid of John Francis Dufour, founder of Vevay, established the Indiana Register at Vevay. Thus when Indiana became a state it had a half-dozen voices to announce the fact.
These pioneer Indiana papers are very poor spec- imens of the newspaper art, with their long articles culled from the eastern papers, the vacuous messages and proclamations of the governor and president, with one or more labored essays in language that
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would have astonished Milton, signed by some one of Plutarch's heroes.
After Benjamin Parke left Corydon he made his home at Salem. Here in the twenties and thirties he became one of the leaders in a group of veritably lit- erary men. Here, also, after he left Madison, was the home of Christopher Harrison, a graduate of St. Johns, Annapolis, whose tragic life itself was a romance. Ebenezer Patrick and Beebe Booth estab- lished the Salem Tocsin as early as March, 1818. An anonymous edition of the Life of Bonaparte (by a citizen of the United States) from this press in 1818, seems to be among the very first books of a literary character published in the state. The letters of "Agricola" in the Indiana Phoenix, published at Salem by Ebenezer Patrick, were somewhat like the later letters on farming by Henry Ward Beecher. Henry S. Handy, John Allen, James G. May, W. H. May, Dr. Charles Hay and Royal B. Child, all early citizens of Salem, were no ordinary backwoodsmen. Dr. Hay and Mr. Child issued a Whig paper, the Monitor, in which Dr. Hay discussed politics. Here, in Salem, in a cozy little brick cottage, October 8, 1838, was born John M. Hay, the poet and statesman, and here he lived till 1841.4 So strongly was the atmosphere of early Salem charged with literary sentiment that in 1827 a Literary Register was pub- lished, fed and supported by two strong literary societies which then flourished. Of this society also were the Truebloods and Morrisons, who led the fight for education in Indiana and kept Salem for a half century an educational center.
Among the aggressive characters, gathered around Editor Stout in territorial Vincennes, was John Os-
4 W. R. Thayer, The Life of John Hay, I, 5. The story of Lieutenant-Governor Harrison is told in Woollen's Biographical Sketches.
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borne, a refugee Loyalist from New York and upper Canada. Though a partner of Stout, he was opposed to him morally and politically. With the departure of the capital, the Western Sun was not able to sup- port two publishers, so Osborne set out again for the frontier. At Terre Haute he founded the Western Register, the pioneer paper of that city. As his ap- prentice, served Samuel B. Gookins, later the judge and lawyer, a native of Vermont. From Vermont also came Amory Kinney, a lawyer and educational leader. From Washington City came Thomas Dow- ling, the politician, a partner later of Milton Gregg in publishing the Western Statesman at Lawrence- burg. There were also Josephus and John Collett, the scientists. These were a few of the leaders in that early Terre Haute society which bred Jacob Page Chapman, the editor, Richard W. Thompson" and Daniel W. Voorhees, the eloquent lawyers and politicians.
From Terre Haute Mr. Osborne went to Green- castle where he was connected with the Hoosier Plow Boy, the first newspaper of that town, and was also active in the founding of Asbury university. As companions he had William J. Burns, Judge Delana R. Eckels, and the faculty of Asbury, many of whom were noted for literary ability. Osborne was always urgent in the anti-slavery and temperance causes.
The Whitewater valley and its tributary settle- ments have been, from the first, promoters of the broader culture, but no single town or city can claim the hegemony of the region. Brookville was the pio- neer and most distinguished community in the valley. A company of well-known lawyers of the old Third
5 Mr. Thompson is the author of The -Papacy and the Civil Power, History of the Protective Tariff, Footprints of the Jesuits, and Personal Recollections of Sixteen Presidents.
6 D. W. Voorhees, Forty Years of Oratory.
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circuit employed John Scott to publish the Enquirer and Indiana Telegraph at Brookville in 1815. Bethuel F. Morris, Miles C. Eggleston, D. J. Caswell, and William C. Drew were the leaders of this movement. Morris was later, for many years, a leading citizen of Indianapolis, Eggleston was the most famous of the old circuit judges, Caswell became a leader of the Cincinnati bar and Drew was the pioneer lawyer of Ripley county. Here, at Brookville, in 1833, C. F. Clarkson founded the Indiana American, one of the leading whig papers of the state, and edited it till 1853 when he passed the work on to a worthy succes- sor, Thomas A. Goodwin, a member of the first grad- uating class of Asbury. The Repository, founded in 1827, was a strictly literary journal, as was the Visi- tor, which ran for a decade or so after 1884.
Though Lawrenceburg was almost as early in the newspaper field as Brookville, two or three early papers died in their infancy before the Indiana Pal- ladium began its career in 1825. Its founders, Mil- ton Gregg and David V. Culley, are better known as citizens of other towns; Gregg as editor of the New Albany Tribune and Culley as registrar of the In- dianapolis land office. At the same time a wandering minstrel named W. Dawson found enough encour- agement among the starchy old Revolutionary heroes to enable him to publish a "Political and Literary Miscellany" which he called the Intelligencer. It was on the Western Statesman of Lawrenceburg un- der Gregg that Augustus Jocelyn, Judge David Laird, Thomas Dowling and C. F. Clarkson caught the typomania and carried the infection to as many Indiana towns.
The newspaper life of New Albany was for many years overshadowed by that of Louisville. Ebenezer Patrick, a Methodist preacher, after his experience with the Salem Tocsin, came to New Albany in 1821
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and founded the Chronicle. It was followed by a so- ciety paper, named the Miscroscope, in 1824. The Crescent of 1825 was backed by Reuben W. Nelson of the old Corydon Indiana Herald, who twice made races against William Hendricks for congress. His political articles show him to have been a writer of some skill, better than the average of his day. But the first real newspaper of New Albany was the Gazette, founded in 1830, the same year with the famous Louisville Journal of George D. Prentice. The files of the Gazette for twenty years mirror the eager energy of the little metropolis nestled at the foot of the Knobs. In its office were trained the Col- lins brothers, James, Henry and Thomas, Ignatius Mattingly, William and Leonard Green, Theodore L. Barnett, the rival and bitter enemy of the Chapmans of the Indianapolis Sentinel, and finally Milton Gregg. The Gazette, its successor, the Tribune, and their rival, the Ledger, were good papers, equals of the Louisville Journal in everything but literary elegance.
As noted above, Keen and Dufour had founded the Indiana Register at Vevay in 1816. Hither, in 1819, came John Douglas and printed this paper one year, before he went on to Corydon, whence as state printer he passed to Indianapolis to edit the Indiana State Journal. Here also worked John Allen before he started the famous Salem Annotater. The Vevay Weekly Messenger, published by W. C. Keen, after 1831, at his country home near Vevay, which he called "Printers' Retreat," was a purely literary sheet and retains some of the atmosphere in which the Egglestons, Julia Dumont and Amanda Dufour grew up.
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