History of Saint Louis City and County, from the earliest periods to the present day: including biographical sketches of representative men, Part 130

Author: Scharf, J. Thomas (John Thomas), 1843-1898
Publication date: 1883
Publisher: Philadelphia : L.H. Everts
Number of Pages: 1358

USA > Missouri > St Louis County > St Louis City > History of Saint Louis City and County, from the earliest periods to the present day: including biographical sketches of representative men > Part 130

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Surgical operations.

84 12

DEATHS, AREAS, AND CAUSES IN 1880.

Pneumonia .

Other diseases respiratory organs ..

71 304

Plithisis and tuberculosis pulmon ..

Marasmus, tabes mesenterica, and scrofula ...

Institu-

Other diseases of the braiu and nervous sys- tem ..

Rheumatism and gout.

Cancer and malignant tumor.

Inanition, waut of breast-milk, etc ..

Diphtheria

Croup

1881.

4th Quarter.

Execution by warrant of law

...

CULTURE AND LITERARY GROWTH IN SAINT LOUIS.

1587

NUMBER OF BIRTHS REPORTED DURING 1881.

COLOR.

SEX.

NATIVITY OF PARENTS.

NAME OF CHILD.

Nativity of Father stated only.

Nativity of Mother stated ouly.

Total.

White.

Colored.

Not stated.

Male.

Female.

Not stated.

Foreign.

Native.

Foreign Father

Foreign Mother

only.

Native.

Foreign.

Native.

Foreign.

Not stated.

Stated.

Not stated.

First quarter.

2036 1620

1928 1537 2138 2101

108 83 101 70

...

1066 855 1116 1110

969 765 1123 1060

773 650 788 738

724 543 826 843

402 278 464 441

94 87 102 95

3 6

1 15

1731 1384 1996

305 236

Second quarter. Third quarter .... Fourth quarter ...

2171

1916

255

Total

8066

7704

362

...

4147

3917

2949

2936

1585

378

119

7027

1039

CHAPTER XXXVI.

CULTURE AND LITERARY GROWTH IN ST. LOUIS.1

HENRY M. BRACKENRIDGE, in his charming little work, so often quoted in this volume,2 speaking of his renewal of intimacy with the friends of his child- hood, the Beauvois family, in Ste. Genevieve, relates that he was "much amused one evening with the tartness of Madame Beauvois," when a young Euro- pean merchant, whom she had taken as a boarder, " adapting his discourse to the ignorance of his hear- ers, informed them ' there was once a certain man called Mohammed who pretended to have received direct revelations from heaven, who wrote a book called the Koran, but that he was a great impostor.' ' My friend,' said the old lady, ' I believe you Europcans look upon us Crcoles (country born) as no better than savages, as you regard the savages as baboons. As you have given us a piece of news, I must return the favor by informing you that there is such a place as Rome, somewhere on the other side of the great ocean, and that a person called the pope, of whom, I prc- sume, you have never heard, resides there, and is con- sidered by all good Catholics as the head of their church.' Monsieur Beauvois and I laughed heartily at this little sally, while the coxcomb was not a little mortified."

It is not to be wondered at that in some parts of the country the opinion should exist that there never has been any culture nor literary activity until very recently in St. Louis, yet it is surprising that such views should be held by a considerable body of people

to the manner born. Such scems to be the case, how ever, and it will be a pleasing task to prove their error. The mistake probably would not exist were it not for narrow and fallacious opinions in regard to what con- stitutes culture and literature. These cannot properly be restricted within one class of thoughts in regard to speculative science, morals, and art, and yet there have been times when it was pretended that all phil- osophy was bounded by the limits of Aristotle and Aquinas, and other times when it was asserted that there could be no poctry except such as was written by the rules of Horace and Monsieur Boilcau. To- day, in St. Louis, the philosophical school of Aquinas has a distinct and coherent existence alongside the school of Hegel and Schelling and Kant, and the comedy of the situation is that cach of these schools ignores and denics the existence of the other with perfect sincerity and good faith.

The professors of the St. Louis University, pro- gressive as they are in other respects, will probably tell you, if you press them hard, that philosophy cannot go beyond that dictum of Anselm, " credo ut intelligam," upon which rests the system of scholasti- cism perfected by Aquinas and Duns Scotus.3 On the other hand, the school which has grown up around the Journal of Speculative Philosophy looks for truth in the absolute consciousness, the thought knowing itself, and demands understanding as the root of be- lief. It is not necessary to assume that cither school is entirely right or entirely wrong, or that the ex-

1 The author is indebted to Professor II. HI. Morgan for that portion of this chapter, indicated in the text, which treats of the contemporary period of literary growth and culture in St. Louis, beginning about 1857.

2 Recollections of the West.

2239

243

...

.. 1

only.

3 See that excellent manual, " Ethies ; or, Moral Philosophy," by Walter H. Ilill, S.J., Professor of Philosophy in the St. Louis University. Professor Hill says in his preface that "those ven- erable philosophers of the olden times reached their conclusions by rigorous logie, and their conclusions were right and true be- eause derived by necessary sequence from matter not subject to mutation. . .. Indeed, there is little doubt that nothing is gained by theorists who rejeet the teachings and the axioms received as certain among those sagacious thinkers."

1588

HISTORY OF SAINT LOUIS.

istence of the one demands the extinction of the other.

As with philosophy, so with culture, literature, and art. The modern evolution docs not make it neces- sary to assume an utter absence of progress in the past. " There were brave men before Agamemnon," and there was culture in St. Louis before the founda- tion of the schools of philosophy which originated with Professor William T. Harris. It is true the culture of old St. Louis was not very productive in the limited direction of book-making and lecturing ; its motto was prodesse quam conspici, but it was a genuine, solid culture nevertheless, and in some respects of a very exquisite quality, the culture of the ancien régime of France. It did not produce nor aspire at produc- tion, because its modesty was satisfied with the mas- terpieces of French, Latin, and Greek literature. Why should one attempt to produce inferior prose and poetry when he had the classics and Racine, Corneille, Vol- taire, Rousseau, Pascal, Molière to turn to? Why seek deeper depths in philosophy, science, and art when he could consult the memoirs of the Institute and the Academy, the works of the encyclopædists and philosophers, all at his elbow? The student, the inquirer, the gentleman of leisure, all found enough to satisfy them in their libraries and in the books sent to them by their correspondents in Paris.

Nor were these libraries inferior or insignificant. H. M. Brackenridge, when preparing his papers for the Missouri Gazette (1811-12), which were after- wards gathered in the volume called " Views of Loui- siana," had access to the library of Auguste Chouteau. " Here I found," said he, " several of the early writers of travels, and descriptions of Louisiana and Illinois, such as La Houton, Lafiteau, Hennepin, Charlevoix, etc., which I took to my lodgings to read at night, being always a night-student ; but I spent some hours in the day in examining and in perusing this fine col- lection." Some of the chapters in his " Glimpses of Louisiana" show that this collection, which, it has been conjectured, included the remains of the library of the Jesuit College at Kaskaskia, embraced, in adding to patriotic writers, a line of contributions to "Americana" such as were not known at all in New England at that time, were not studied by Irving and Prescott, only imperfectly examined by Bancroft, and never completely brought to the front of appreciation by English-speaking students until unearthed by Dr. O'Callaghan, and expounded by John Gilmary Shea and Francis Parkman.

In fact, in Upper and Lower Louisiana, in the period between 1760 and 1830, there was a very fine quality of culture among the people of the leisure

classes. We only have glimpses of this, because, as we have said, it was a culture which did not produce, but contented itself with having information and knowl- edge for its own use. But these chance glimpses reveal its fine quality. Note the instances above, and the fact that Brackenridge studicd Louisiana law from a manual (in two volumes, quarto) of the " Cou- tume de Paris," which he found in Mr. Beauvais' two-roomed " house of posts" in Ste. Genevieve. So, when James H. Lucas went to Arkansas Post from college, he found there a highly-educated and accom- plished French gentleman, whose influence probably saved him from going to the bad, and whose books and knowledge made a lawyer of him.

Such gentlemen were found throughout the coun- try, and there were many such in St. Louis, scholarly and highly-educated French and Spanish gentlemen, and professional men from the United States colleges, whose intercourse could attract and charm a man so accomplished as J. B. C. Lucas. The odd, eccentric doctor and professor, Shewe, the Prussian, of whom Brackenridge delights to tell, was “a scholar, a chemist, a painter, a divine, a philosopher, a pro- fessor of languages," with six diplomas, four in Latin,-" von from de Eleziac Academy from Baris, von from de Gullege aus Berlin, von from der School of Mines in Saxony," etc. Dr. Saugrain, another of his friends, both in Galliopolis and St. Louis, was a man of fine scholarship and science, and an original microscopist. Gen. William Clark was a man who had made great progress in the pursuit of Indian archæological subjects, as the unique museum gath- ered by him witnessed sufficiently well. What a pity and what a reflection it is upon the generation that succceded these early settlers that that museum, which attracted the inquiries of both hemispheres, was not retained in St. Louis! Brackenridge has put on record the fact that Mr. Bates (Frederick, the secretary of the Territory) was a man who " had an extensive library, and whose mind was richly stored with literature." He speaks, too, of the elder Char- less, the founder of the Missouri Gazette, as a man capable of appreciating and forwarding his literary pursuits.

Nor is this all. As he goes up the Missouri River, beyond the limits of civilization, we have glimpses of him and the trapper and hunter, Manuel Lisa,-the man of action par excellence,-reading " Don Quixote" together, with the yells of the wild Arrapahoes ringing in their ears. In Moses Austin's house at Mine à Breton he came across copies of Cuvier's " Theory of the Earth" and Sir Humphry Davy's " Agricultural Chemistry," books which presuppose both knowledge

1589

CULTURE AND LITERARY GROWTH IN SAINT LOUIS.

and taste. In New Madrid he lodged at the house of Madame Peyroux, widow of a former commandant of the place, and herc was also a fine library, Peyroux having been a man of literary standing. “ Monsieur Peyroux was the author of several publications, chiefly geological, of considerable merit. In one of his essays he maintains the opinion, with much in- genuity, that the northern lakes formerly discharged themselves into the Mississippi, by the Illinois as well as by the St. Lawrence."

It was in St. Louis that Brackenridge met the bot- anists Bradbury and Thomas Nuttall. The latter, one of the most enthusiastic and distinguished men in his science, came to this country from Yorkshire, and made St. Louis his headquarters while examining and clas- sifying the flora of the regions west of the Mississippi. His " Geological Sketch of the Mississippi Valley," and his " Travels in Arkansas," etc., are only two of the several works which he here found materials for writing. At Baton Rouge, again, our author camc across " an enlightened Spaniard, Don Juan Lopez, an old bachelor, who resembled Don Quixote in person, and had the same passion for spending a considerable portion of his income in the purchase of books, not of knight-errantry, but embracing general literature in its various branches." Here he found the works of Feejoo, Mariana, Ercila, Cervantes, and all the Spanish and Latin writers on the civil law and the Spanish codes and institutes.

Other similar glimpses might be afforded of this high culture of the leisure classes in Upper Louisiana, but enough has been given to illustrate the proposition. The early French inhabitants of St. Louis and vicinity, in fact, maintained a close and constant intercourse with France, and French culture in its highest types was reflected in their thought and speech. They were contemporary with some of the most active and burn- ing epochs of the French intellect, beginning with the scientific and politico-economical revolt of the ency- clopædists, and ending with the literary rebellion of the romanticists under Hugo and Dumas, and it took active, fresh, inquiring minds like those of these quick Frenchmen-men like Lucas and Gratiot-to keep abreast of such a rushing tide. The early American inhabitants, on the other hand,-army officers, and col- lege youths just endowed with their professions and with fortunes and reputations both to make,-wcre thoroughly imbucd with the spirit of English litera- turc before there was any American literature to speak of. Easton, Dr. Simpson, Col. Hammond, the Bateses, Bartons, Bentons, Riddicks, Hempsteads, Tuckers, Lanes, Charless, and the circle in which they moved, having classical tastes and a thorough acquaintance

with the English literature of Queen Anne and the Georges, were eager to welcome everything new which fell from the pen of Byron, Scott, Campbell, Edge- worth, Wordsworth, and their followers and satellites.

In addition to this, St. Louis was a focal point for distinguished European travelers, from Chateaubriand and Talleyrand to Lafayette and the Grand Duke of Weimar. These travelers, after traversing the East, came to St. Louis as to a place where they might re- fresh themselves once more with a not faint reflection of continental manners and culture, nor did they (if we may believe their own testimony) go away unre- warded. The mental activity of at least the early lawyers of St. Louis was prodigious. They were giants, earning large fees, taking a large and liberal interest in affairs, and studying hard in order to be able to cope with one another. We find Senator Ben- ton taking French lessons from Herr Shewe, and giving more time to the midnight lamp than to the midnight caucus. Dr. Linn, his colleague in the Senate, a man of very broad and generous culture, pursued his pro- fession as a science, and made curious studies into the natural phenomena of the strange region (New Madrid) in which was his home. The eccentric Judge N. Beverley Tucker, of St. Louis County Court, who had his office, his library, and his study in the stump of a hollow tree, did not waste the intervals of leisure which were spared him from the bench. It was in this stump that he wrote " George Balcombe," one of the best novels extant descriptive of Western border life,-" one of the most vigorous of American novels," says Gilmore Sinims, " as a narrative of action and the delineation of mental power." Here, too, he wrote " The Partisan Leader," truly what may be styled " an epoch-making book," for, published in 1837, it yet anticipated and mapped out, so to speak, the entire programme of the secession of 1861 as clearly and accurately as if he had been in the confidence of the leaders who conducted affairs at Montgomery, Ala., in the winter of 1861. This book, always a favorite at the South and much read, did a great deal towards inclining, shaping, and moulding the Southern mind to secession, familiarizing two generations with the idea, the expediency, and the practicability of such a last political resort. It crystallized and gave a con- crete form and body to the abstract speculations of John C. Calhoun, Robert Y. Hayne, and others of their opinions. Probably no single work of fiction, except " Uncle Tom's Cabin," ever accomplished so much in paving the way for revolution. Judge Tucker, who lived in Missouri from 1815 to 1830, always on his farm in Florissant, St. Louis Co., was a half-brother to John Randolph, eccentric as he, a

101

1590

HISTORY OF SAINT LOUIS.

States' rights doctrinaire, but a man of remarkably clear, logical mind, and of singularly fine reasoning powers. "In his style," says Mr. Simms, " I regard him as one of the best prose writers in the United States, at once rich, flowing, and classical ; ornate and copious, yet pure and classic ; full of energy, yet full of grace ; intense, yet stately ; passionate, yet never with a forfeiture of dignity." After he returned to Virginia from St. Louis lic became Professor of Juris- prudence in William and Mary College.

In a school where men like Judge Tucker, Rufus Easton, John Scott, Edward Hempstead, and Carr Lane were teachers, and where sueh talents and such rivalry existed as at the St. Louis bar, it was natural, nay more, it was imperative, that a strong tendency towards high and ornate culture should exist among the members. Other things being equal, the best- read and most polished orator bore off the palm. Ac- cordingly we find what, for a new and wild Western community, must be regarded as a surprising amount of literature among the carlier and later members of the St. Louis bar, not only a superficial smattering for convenience of ready use, but decp draughts at the fountains undefiled of pure literature, and those special studies of particular authors and branches which ordi- narily only exist in communitics where there is a very advanced state of culture. Here and there would be a lawyer or a doctor who turned his special attention to Horace, or Homer, or Catullus, or the Greek tra- gedians or comic writers ; here one who had read all the epigrammatists and satirists ; another who was a specialist in the works of the Greek and Latin fathers ; a third who had made a study of the whole Spanish comedy ; a fourth with a critical knowledge of the Elizabethan and Jacobean drama ; and a fifth with an exhaustive apprehension of the philosophy of Bacon and Locke and the whole sensationist school. One had a gift at quoting from the Latin poets in his ad- dresses to court and jury, another had Sheridan, the Colinans, Cibber, Otway, and all the dramatists of Charles and Anne at his tongue's tip.

This sort of thing gave a zest to the oratory of the bar, and influenced it and the society collected about it very sensibly. No one can pick up Hon. Thomas Hart Benton's " Thirty Years' View" without detect- ing the fact that the author, without being a very ex- act or profound scholar himself, was one who looked upon the possession of scholarship as the greatest of treasures, and was willing to toil unceasingly and be- stow immense pains to bring himself within the magic cirele. His work is elaborated as carefully as William Wirt's (another self-educated man), who thought cul- ture a gem more precious than diamonds. So Hon.

Henry S. Geyer, a lifelong lawyer, and scarcely aspiring to become anything else, used to polish all his speeches as if they were cameos. Mr. Geyer, by the way, was one of the earliest persons in St. Louis to publish a book, his compilation of the statutes of Missouri Territory having come out in 1817. We discover the same scholarly tendency and desire for classical decoration in the false and egotistical memoirs of Gen. James Wilkinson, and in the valuable Tennessee Re- ports of Return Jonathan Meigs, both of them men in- timately identified with St. Louis, where both lived, and they are apparent also in Brackenridge's " Views of Louisiana" and Stoddard's " Sketches of Louisiana," as if they knew that the people of and for whom they wrote were at once scholarly, critical, and capable of criticising severely what was offensive to their good taste.

This period of fine culture among the leisure classes, in the literary history of St. Louis, under or- dinary circumstances and in an average state of society, would have been succeeded by a period of literary production and creation. But neither the circumstances nor the state of society werc ordinary.

The material and actual crowded in and pressed the intellectual and spiritual into the background ; flood after flood, wave after wave of population and material progress swept over the germs of culture and smothered them out of sight under masses of the alluvion of wealth fructifying substance, and the plants did not seem to grow at all, for they were covered under faster than they could shoot up. It was a period of physical growth and of the coarse-fed toil which makes muscle swell and welter like the tight, constricted fold of the python, and this was swiftly succeeded by the volcanic period of intense political cxeitement, bourgeoning forth into civil war and the thrilling strain of a four years' struggle for national existence. This whole period of forty years, therefore, from 1825 to 1865, was unfavorable for the efflorescent and fruit-yielding stage of literary devel- opment, which demands comparative restfulness, ease, and quiet. The plowman in the field does not carve and engrave his plow-handles, nor does the soldier in the battle-front or the bivouac engrave his sword-blade. It was time for felling the forest, for preparing the glebe; it was seed-time, but not yet harvest.

The first part of this epoch was the period of the great irruption of immigration, and of the intense and mighty toil necessary to clear the woods away and prepare homes for population in the wilderness. This immigration came from the South, from Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, and Maryland, from Indiana,

1591

CULTURE AND LITERARY GROWTH IN SAINT LOUIS.

Illinois, Ohio, New England, Pennsylvania, and New York. There were plenty of educated people, younger sons of culivated families, old merchants and planters who had failed in the East and who now essaycd the virgin West, which offered them a fair chance to "pick flint and try it again ;" but the back woods people exceeded those of education and culture, and the back woods manner, with axe and saw and plow and steamboat, overcrowded all culture and education, for it was what the times and the situation demanded. If a man could not put his education and culture in his pocket and go to work with his hands with all his might, he would expose himself to what was wit- nessed a thousand times in the flush days of the early gold excitement in California and Australia, where the " navigators" and convicts and mechanics got out the gold, and the scholars, divines, lawyers, doctors, and statesmen waited upon them and did menial service.

Necessarily and essentially it was a period of work, of physical toil, of the exhaustive labor of building an empire and digging out roads to connect it with the rest of the world. . Yet this labor was sweetened and this time of toil prevented from degenerating into the mere animalism of the drudge and the beast of burden by the strong, steady influence of the educated, professional classes, so largely represented at all times in the history of St. Louis,-a body always influential, even by mere force and weight of num- bers, but trebly so by force of strong, vigorous in- tellect and fresh, original characters.

After a generation had passed away, and the city began to be strong in numbers and solidly built, there was a sufficient accumulation of wealth in the hands of the commercial and professional classes to encour- age the cultivation of leisure and the arts and anieni- ties which wait upon it. The foundations began to be laid of American literary institutions, scholarship, and culture to supply the place of the last expiring embers of the old European culture of early St. Louis. Schools, colleges, libraries, historical societies, academies of science and galleries of art, the germs of all these were being planted in a purely American way. At this time, however (1848), the great Ger- man immigration to St. Louis began, in consequence of the general failure of the revolutionary upheaval in Enrope. The first consequence of the introduction of this new element was disturbance, in consequence of a want of coalescence between the new and old factors in St. Louis society. The original St. Louis people were essentially and strongly conservative in politics, opinions, and morals. Pioneers in enterprise and in- dustry and all material objects of human effort, they

were anything but pioneers in thought and specula- tion. They would not venture to lead here, and they would only consent to follow upon beaten and well- known tracks. The German refugees, on the other hand, were exacting and offensive in the temerity of their radicalism.

To make things worse and widen the gulf sep- arating the two classes of the population, the anti- slavery agitation began to culminate soon after, the Germans all taking sides with the abolitionists, while three-fourths of the remaining inhabitants at first were pro-slavery, or at least opposed to the methods and the propaganda of abolitionism. As this agitation in- creased and intensified, there was a serious widening of the breach between the two classes of the commu- nity, and a coalition, political but not social, was formed between the Germans and what may be termed the New England element in St. Louis, con- sisting of either natives of the Eastern States or their descendants, immigrants into St. Louis from every part of the West north of the Ohio River. These, with some idealogues and fanatics among them, in- cluded many of the thriftiest, most enterprising, and most useful citizens of the place, the men who put up the work-shops and built the railroads, who fos- tered industry and developed trade in every direction, -men like Thomas Allen, for instance.

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History of Saint Louis City and County, from the earliest periods to the present day: including biographical sketches of representative men, Part 130

Author: Scharf, J. Thomas (John Thomas), 1843-1898 Publication date: 1883 Publisher: Philadelphia : L.H. Everts Number of Pages: 1358

Author: Scharf, J. Thomas (John Thomas), 1843-1898
Publication date: 1883
Publisher: Philadelphia : L.H. Everts
Number of Pages: 1358