USA > Indiana > The Indiana centennial, 1916; a record of the celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of Indiana's admission to statehood > Part 26
Note: The text from this book was generated using artificial intelligence so there may be some errors. The full pages can be found on Archive.org (link on the Part 1 page).
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 10 | Part 11 | Part 12 | Part 13 | Part 14 | Part 15 | Part 16 | Part 17 | Part 18 | Part 19 | Part 20 | Part 21 | Part 22 | Part 23 | Part 24 | Part 25 | Part 26 | Part 27 | Part 28 | Part 29 | Part 30 | Part 31 | Part 32 | Part 33 | Part 34
*President of the Ohio Valley Historical Association.
325
OHIO VALLEY HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION
fication at the gracious words of welcome accorded us by the representatives of the two historical agencies of Indiana who united in inviting us to meet here at this time.
To me it seems very fitting that this Association em- bracing for its field of activity the Ohio Valley should meet here at this time in connection with the celebration of the first one hundred years of statehood of Indiana, a very large part of which is part of the Ohio Valley.
This is the tenth annual meeting of the Association which was organized in Cincinnati in 1907. Meetings have been held in Kentucky, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio and one meeting was held here jointly with the Mississippi Valley Historical Association and the American Historical Associa- tion in 1910. But this year we come the farthest north and west we have ever come for a meeting of our own to join with the Hoosier State in celebrating her centennial and to assist in investigating and preserving for the future some of her history.
The true history of a people is never written. The biog- raphies of great men are but pleasant or startling fictions. . A plain but eager boy, country born and country bred, ac- quires a thirst for knowledge. He reads books, questions na- ture, studies in the schools; then dares fate in some public career. He wins success because he is industrious, patient, hopeful. He knows himself to be a man with many faults and abundant weaknesses. But presently some fellow-man writes the story of his life and he is surprised to find himself a demi- god. The real man has lived and toiled, been wise at times and given to folly as other men. He has played, slept, thought, been vain or humble, and really dwelt in a very small space. But renewed in history, under the strong light of genius, he stands a-tip-toe on the mountains with the aurora in his face and his breath fills the universe. The historical man is a great savage like Attila, a destroyer like King Cam- byses, or a philosopher like Plato. Through the lapse of ages we see only this historical man. He stands on the pages of history for the age, the race, the civilization or savagery from which he sprang. How much of him is real and how much the shining figment of subsidiary genius no man can tell. Was Hamlet a crazy man at large, as told in Danish legends, or was he the sombre genius immortalized by Shake-
326
THE INDIANA CENTENNIAL
speare? Judged by modern standards Achilles and Ulysses, Agamemnon and Paris were but a lot of superstitious savages who waged insane and merciless war for a trivial cause. But when Homer associates them with the gods and makes them converse in the heat of battle with all the wisdom of Greek cul- ture and philosophy they take their places as fixed stars in the constellations of history. He who conceived the idea of Adam talking with God in the cool of the day, had the thought which carries us all back to that remote point in history in which we see no individual man. There man blends either with the shadows that obscure, or melts into the light that is per- fect. The pride of history has always chosen the latter. The nearer we approach the beginning the more prominent be- comes the individual hero or prophet. Science says that shad- ows emerging from the surrounding darkness are many times multiplied in bulk, by the doubtful light. But the poetry of tradition maintains that the primal man fresh from the source and center of things, was more than half divine. Even the lapse of a century serves to obscure the frailties of a great man and lift his virtues to the clouds. The politicians and pamphleteers of Washington's day assailed him with bitter- ness on the one hand or recognized his need of defense on the other. It is in the memory of thousands yet living that Lincoln was appraised by his friends as a well-meaning buf- foon, while his enemies regarded him as a buffoon bent on mischief. The estimate was false, but in its place we have today the ideal gentleman of the churches and of the schools of ethics, either character being as far from the real homely, hearty, common-sensed devoted Lincoln as ever General George H. Thomas was from the supposed paternal interest that gave him the nickname of "Old Pap." But after de- precating the historical man, the fact remains that, given the time, the conditions and the occasion, he was and is their rep- resentative-perhaps not always the best representative that might have been, but always such as the supreme forces of his time and country produced. The French Revolution was begotten of an earnest longing for liberty. Its immediate outcome was Robespierre and anarchy, bceause it was con- trolled by the passion of the outside rather than the conviction of its soul: the haste of the mob rather than the prudence of the thinker. But he is not yet born who shall record the
327
OHIO VALLEY HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION
true story of that mighty convulsion in its larger influence upon the destinies of man. Cortez has been almost deified in Prescott's splendid fiction that he misnamed a history, and yet through all the glamour of romance the merciless fortune hun- ter stands out as the representative of Spanish cruelty and heartlessness. Given the story of Cortez and the Mexican invasion, the mind sees at once and comprehends the Spain of the seventeenth century; its fierce thirst after gold, its spirit of adventure, its frenzies of cruelty and its mad rage for power. The naturalist finds a shell imbedded in the rock, a fossil seaweed and a remnant of coral, and straightway there expands before his vision an ancient ocean with low- lying shores. The sea swarms with life; the waves grind up the cast-off shells, transmuting them into sediment and strata which harden into stone and hold fast the history of an epoch forever. In like manner a very few events-even fragments of events; a few passages in the lives of representative men and women planted in the bed rock of history renew forever the age, the race, the people, the condition of their day and time. Let us step backward a century and behold the cabin builders of our western civilization. They were men of hum- ble origin. They knew a little and were eager that their chil- dren should know more. They possessed warm hearts, strong arms and abundant courage, but they had neither inheritance nor fame. Many of them came from a land of slaves, seek- ing the forest for its freedom and submitting to its privations and toils that their children might be free. Give us but one fragment from their history: "A few settlers in an Indiana neighborhood as soon as their cabins were up and roofed, the fireplaces constructed and the mud and stick chimneys half way completed, deferring the matter of providing floors and filling the spaces between the logs, turned their attention to the erection of a log schoolhouse. And when the winter came the children were taught by day, the mock legislature held its sessions by night, and the backwoods preachers divided the Word on the Sabbath." From such a fragment, added to the geography of the land, one may easily and readily pic- ture the progress that has led up to the present condition.
In the family circle about the cabin fire, in the daring faith of the pioneer father and the devotion of the pioneer mother, in the primal schoolhouses in the woods are to be found the
328
THE INDIANA CENTENNIAL
indexes of our history-such is our Western civilization. All the possibilities of civilization were in those rude beginnings. Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln were outgrowths of such conditions.
The beginnings of the history of a State are always pro- phetic of its character and ultimate destiny.
Whence came the foundations of our civilization? They were from the sea-bordered South, from the border slave States, from the mountains of Virginia, from the fertile fields of Pennsylvania, from New York and from New England. The log house in the wilderness was the sure prophesy of the best things to which we have attained. It matters not whence they came, you can detect the spirit that inspired them by the culture of the soil and the progress of the people. From the old fashioned debating clubs of those primal colleges of the people, great men arose to sway the destinies of the nation. The pioneers of Ohio and Indiana made but little noise in the world but no builders ever laid foundations of enlightened liberty more securely than they.
The log convention in Wayne County which made possible the success of Indiana's first elected Governor, Jonathan Jen- nings, to a place as delegate to the United States Congress largely determined the political character of those eastern counties. It was a protest against the insidious approaches of African slavery, and it was successful because of its deep- seated earnestness.
Near the beginning of the century Julia Dumont in the lit- tle county of Switzerland, Indiana, laid two foundations- the one of higher education, the other that of literature. A daily toiler in the schoolrooms of the pioneer period-a mighty worker by the dim lamps of the olden time she made the beginnings which have matured in our colleges and uni- versities. Today Indiana scholarship and energy are ac- knowledged all over the West. They have invaded the East and enthroned themselves in great financial, educational and literary centres.
In a small but remarkable community in Southern Indiana originated the first woman's club in this country and from it have emanated forces that have resulted in the emancipation of women. All these splendid achievements have grown up from the thought that instigated the pioneer schoolhouse in
329
OHIO VALLEY HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION
the woods. It filled the ranks with 200,000 young Indiana heroes and made the name Hoosier a terror to those who in their blindness would have destroyed the Union and blotted out the stars of liberty forever. It is to the beginnings of our history, to the humble toils and devotion of the pioneers that we must look for the inception of that spirit which has led us forward and upward. The pioneers moved on from their first crude efforts as strength and opportunity permitted. They gave us democracy, the outstanding feature of Ameri- can society. The early immigrant came with an appetite for freedom, for independence, for land and a home to call his very own. He came with some acquaintance of self-government, he came with unconquerable faith, he came ready to endure. He found that for which he came. He found opportunity and plenty of room. American democracy became possible because of the great natural wealth of the continent; because of the prosperity of the people, of the standard of in- telligence, the freedom of the individual in church and state. Each man was free to do as he pleased, to try new plans, to think for himself. The result was a new individual-the American; and America has a great future. She has domi- nated world thought. She has profoundly influenced world policies. She has become a world power. She still lures thousands from homes across the sea. She has rung the knell of monarchism and ecclesiasticism. She has insisted on the people's rights. The United States is still young. She has just about obtained her national majority. Europe has had a thousand years and more to reach her present position. She is still bound by custom and fettered by institutions she is afraid to destroy. We have no pyramids or sphinx, neither Palmyras in the sand nor mummies in marbled fastnesses of silent cities to preserve the forms and features of a change- less past. Our monuments are the people themselves, the ever-widening scope of their lives, their purposes, their pow- ers and their results. If we may continue to approach nearer and nearer to a state in which the happiness of the least shall be sacred to the whole, then will our monuments be the most commanding and enduring and grandly beautiful on earth.
20-15997
330
THE INDIANA CENTENNIAL
A HOOSIER DOMESDAY
By Prof. Frederic L. Paxson, University of Wisconsin
A very early poet of these regions has some lines that start out :
Blessed Indiana, in her soil Men seek the sure rewards of toil.
He wrote these verses nearly a hundred years ago-and proceeded then to describe his contemporaries, in language that might have been used with equal appropriateness last week, as:
Men who can legislate or plow, Wage politics or milk a cow, So plastic in their various parts That in the circle of the arts
With equal tact the Hoosier loons Hunt offices and hunt raccoons.
Some of them, if I am correctly informed, are hunting offices even yet, with a high percentage of chance that they will get some of the offices ; while the diversity of talent which the poet saw in Indiana still exists in our actual contemporary fact.
Today Indiana is that non-existent thing known as an average. Statisticians tell us that the truth is variant and that the average is rarely seen. But Indiana approximates an average of America and closely resembles the composite that the various corners of our country might present could they be brought together and intermingled. It is an average that makes a State with fewer of the very rich, with fewer of the very poor, with fewer of the foreign born, with a larger proportion of the home born than most of our other States; that makes a community born within itself, enlarging its own traditions and carrying on its own ideals; and because of the trend of its history it is singularly American in its point of view. Today Indiana with its centennial is giving to the Ohio Valley Historical Association one of the excuses for its exist- ence. Its neighbor States will repeat that same excuse, in the next few years as they fall in behind Indiana celebrating their own centennials. The line goes down the river, including Illi- nois, Alabama, Mississippi, and finally Missouri in 1921. The sequence is worthy of being noted, for it is of interest to Americans in general as well as to the historians of Indiana,
-
331
OHIO VALLEY HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION
and it will produce for the future historians of these regions records that will be a Domesday, and that will in a measure warrant the title that I have chosen for my remarks this evening.
The real Domesday, of course, is a thing that we need to fix our minds on from time to time.
After the great Norman Conqueror had been in England for about twenty years, after his barons had got themselves settled on the lands they had acquired, after the English law and the King's writ had begun to run smoothly once more, and after it had become tolerably certain that the will of the King was greater than the will of any of his subordinates, William set to work to record in his Domesday what he had in his fair land of England. He sent his officers out into the shires with instructions to gather together the people and swear them to tell the truth; and then to ask them how many freemen, how many serfs, how many knights their commu- nity could furnish ; what cattle, what horses, what swine, what fishponds, and so on down the line of their tangible property. They were to ask how things stood at the date of the Domes- day, how they had been in the days of the conquest, and what they formerly had been in the days of King Edward the Con- fessor ; and I suppose England was pretty seriously distressed during that summer, while the investigators were asking these questions and placing Englishmen under oath to tell the truth, because there was a strong feeling that those questions were to be the foundation of a new, more searching, and more rigorous taxation. But from the standard of government William was putting together the greatest governmental docu- ment that exists, a document typical of English government and ours, a document that begins not with governmental theory but with the absolute existent fact and that has lived long after the absolute fact. The questions that William sent out for the shires to answer-what now? what then? what formerly ?- brought a mass of information into the great Domesday book that scholars ever since have been trying to understand.
If we are to make our Domesday worth much to the scholar in another thousand years, we, too, must ask ques- tions; what now? what then? what formerly? what changes have taken place because of our conquest? what
332
THE INDIANA CENTENNIAL
changes have taken place because of the new order of life that has come into existence here? We too must send our historical inquisitors out into Indiana to take an inventory today, and to take it back in the days of our grandfathers, and again still farther back in the days of our grandfathers' grandfathers, that we may cover this century in Indiana with a Domesday that will give us information good for our souls and that will contain facts for the guidance of historians in all time.
The answer to the question what now? would have to be that Indiana, with its low percentage of foreign born, with its low percentage of the very rich, with its low per- centage of the very poor, and with its high percentage of farmers who know something of community life and of towns- men who are not too far from the country to know something of country life, is an average America, and perhaps the best example of an average that America presents. Indeed, so ex- cellent an example is Indiana of the rest of us, that we all look to Indiana in order to get a glimpse of what we think, for what Indiana thinks is likely to be a fair sample of what America thinks.
Yesterday the President of the United States crossed this State to tell citizens not very far away what he thinks, and doubtless before very long he will bring to you something of the same message. Tomorrow an ex-President of the United States is to tell you what he believes, and it is probable that before November all the gentlemen living who have been Presidents of the United States will deliver their message in the same way. Some are hopeful for the success of what they think; some are apprehensive; but whether hopeful or appre- hensive, the big outstanding fact is that they realize that what Indiana thinks today the country too may think and that what convinces Indiana is too true to be beaten at the polls. It has been true for many years that Indiana has told the country what it thought. One has only to call to memory that canvass forty years ago when a national chairman was frantically tele- graphing about the purchase of "mules" in Indiana, or the more recent canvass when a national secretary "saved" Indi- ana by means that a vice-President-elect could not discuss before reporters. Those were the days when the vote of the second Tuesday in October decided whether the purse strings
333
OHIO VALLEY HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION
should be loosed and the money poured out in Indiana. Those good old days are gone today. Indiana now reserves her for- mal vote until the rest of the country tells its opinion too. But what Indiana is going to think is still a question that is of a good deal of interest in many corners of the country, and if gentlemen could determine what Indiana thinks now many of them would sleep more tranquilly tonight, and some of them would fail to visit Indiana in the course of the next few weeks.
Out of its past Indiana has emerged a barometer of Ameri- can temper, today. What sequences can we pursue back from our grandfathers' to their grandfathers' days, to the first gen- eration of conquerors? What was there formerly in Indi- ana? The conquerors came drifting in shortly after 1800, following, as conquerors invariably do, the line of least resist- ance, traveling the roads nature had provided, which were nearly always waterways, and giving to Indiana the first of her establishments upon the lines nature had written across her face.
It is hard to imagine a worse territorial division than the boundaries of Indiana enclosed; including as they did the Maumee lands and those of the Kankakee, the basin of the Wabash and the valley of Whitewater. Here were four clear and distinct watersheds touching along the highlands, and their inhabitants stood back to back. In the early days of In- diana there was no logical grouping that could have made any common ground upon which to stand for self-government. The people drifted in, some across the boundary from Ohio. One section of Indiana is still only an overflow from Cincinnati, and has all its more important connections in the direction of Cincinnati. Others worked their way into the lower valley of the Wabash. Others came by the northern routes and filled up the Maumee region, and the Kankakee country finally developed after all the rest. If the settlers had come into these detached and disassociated areas from a com- mon source they would still have had abundant room for dif- ferences of opinion and rivalry of interests, because they looked in different directions, toward Cincinnati, toward New York and toward New Orleans. With business interests pointing to outside markets their local doings were not likely to be harmonious.
334
THE INDIANA CENTENNIAL
The different sections were not friendly even in the time of our grandfathers. Their leading families had come, some from the middle States, others from Virginia by way of Ken- tucky, others from New England; and in the first quarter of the last century southerners and middle staters and New Eng- landers had relatively few common points of view outside their language and their larger government. They were pro- vincialists, each with their own brand of provincialism, and with a conviction that his brand was best. And in this com- munity into which they came they found the sectionalism that nature had provided, and brought another sectionalism based upon the different communities from which they came. They saw life from their southern or their northern point of view, or in the spirit of their religious outlook in a genera- tion when men made much of their local point of view and found in their religion an active guide outside the church. These things counted for a great deal in shaping Indiana in her earlier period, and if our surveyors could be transported back into the first generation of Indiana they would have had to write down that Indiana was diverse, that it had not in any sense amalgamated, that section against section was pull- ing with an intensity that threatened badly for the future of the State. They might have said that if self-government on the American plan could succeed in Indiana it could succeed anywhere. If an arbitrary set of boundaries could bring to- gether people entirely disassociated and of different inter- ests-detached colonies with highly different outlooks-if this State could organize and function smoothly, there was hope for the American future. They must have reported friction, of course, and with it heat. This centennial is the centennial of a community in which the local fire has burned for a hun- dred years without exploding, in which life has been none too tranquil. This is not that happy country that is without a history, but it is a country with a happy history of struggles that have been kept under control and have been stopped short of the worst outbreaks. A self-government that has worked along from controversy to controversy and has nevertheless kept unbroken within its original limits throughout this time is a triumph for the American type of statehood. Indiana has its lessons for us today, but the first Indiana did not offer clear promise of its future.
335
OHIO VALLEY HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION
The first two generations in Indiana brought the grand- sons of the conquerors into public life, and wrote a new chap- ter for our Domesday. Something happened to Indiana, softening the animosities and blunting the sectionalism. The most surprising thing that our inquisitors would find is the fact that between 1816 and the Mexican War, water had begun to run uphill. Water in the colonial days had the aggravating habit of running only down hill. But now the steamboat ran up stream, changing the course of some of the internal communications. More than that, the State had begun its fight against geography. The Wabash highway had been turned into an important river and canal route, available from either end; the Michigan road had been run across from the Ohio to Lake Michigan, the National road had cut along the watershed through the middle of the State, and the water- ways, canals and turnpikes had broken down much of the isolation of section, making it possible to carry on a communi- cation between the sections that no sane man could have looked forward to in the days of the settlement of Indiana. By the close of the Mexican War, the turnpike had done its share, the canal had added its, and on top of the turnpike and canal were coming the earlier railways. There were not any railways in Indiana worthy of note until 1847, but the State was entering on a period that would bring every vital point into reasonable contact with every other point; so that, after fifty years of occupation the second generation born on Indiana soil could say that one of the things that had made for diversity in the original condition had been wiped away ; had been replaced by forces whose trend was a possible unifi- cation.
Need help finding more records? Try our genealogical records directory which has more than 1 million sources to help you more easily locate the available records.