USA > Mississippi > The pioneers, preachers and people of the Mississippi Valley > Part 21
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plough, before they learn the lessons of Grecian and Roman philosophy and history ; and to those pur- suits was the carly American intellect obliged to devote itself, by a sort of simple and hearty and con- stant consecration. There was no possibility of escape ; no freedom or exemption from this obliga- tion. The early settlers had to solve the imperative instant questions of present want; problems that were urging themselves upon their attention with every day, and with every recurring season. When the forest is felled, and the soil is turned, and the granaries are established, and the mouths of wives and little ones filled, and their bodies clad, then may American intellect betake itself to the study and mak- ing of books.
These remarks apply to the sea-board here, as much as to the interior. We are comparatively a young peo- ple. Agriculture, commerce, manufactures-the earli- est practical problems of society-though now in some- what more developed forms, must still be studied. And if this is true of the country east of the moun- tains, how much more emphatically and peculiarly is it true of that west of the mountains! The for- mer is an old country in comparison with the latter. The earliest settlers of our race established them- selves there only in 1770-only ninety years ago-a brief space in a nation's life. And how vast and vari- ous were the tasks which at once presented them-
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selves to the few settlers, demanding instant and constant fulfillment, and threatening death if ne- glected. A boundless territory, to which the land lying east of the mountains is scarce more than a drop in the bucket, was to be wrested by sturdy and long- continued labor from the dominion of nature, freed from savage beasts, and made the cultivated fruitful home of civilized society. Tillable and arable fields, homes, gardens, towns, were all to be acquired by a series of laborious victories over the unresisting, yet opposing forces of nature.
Again : the men who did this must also maintain and cultivate and protect the structure of social life, by framing something-whether rude or elaborate matters not so much-but something in the nature of a body of laws, and a system of government. The crude and scanty means of educating the young and preaching the Gospel were also to be afforded ; but I need only mention them.
And still further : all this had to be done in the presence of a class of perils dreadful beyond anything conceivable by the citizens who now dwelt so securely under the shadow of strong municipal and State or- ganizations, and whose very recital makes the flesh creep, and the blood run cold. I mean the Indian and British hostilities, which were so long such a ter- rible and incessant drain upon the vigor and the very life-blood of the infant western common-
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wealths. Such requirements drew heavily upon all the functions of body, mind and heart ; chiefly how- ever upon the first. For the first task of a new na- tion, as I have shown, is for the muscles and sinews. Only when this is fulfilled comes the demand upon the brain and upon the soul.
But the western people have been steadily rising in the path thus indicated, for many years. In com- mon with the older communities.east of the moun- tains, they have been rising and advancing in the pilgrimage of humanity, up from the region of mus- cular development and animal activity, to that of intellectual and moral culture. Such progress can never be rapid. Life's great tasks are not achieved in a hurry. Personal culture is the work of time; and it is only in him who descends from a line of cultivated ancestors, that the highest exhibition of human attainments, ordinarily speaking, is possible. Much more is this true of a race-of a nation.
Around the early settler lay the broad shadows of the primeval forests. Beneath him was the rich turf that had never been disturbed by a coulter ; and around him the solemn primeval groves that had never reverberated to the sound of the axe-where only the deafening yell of the savage war-whoop had disturbed the silence, and where only the dreadful carnage of savage warfare had discolored the soil. He possessed broad streams, matchless in beauty, and a
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soil rich beyond measure; vacant; only awaiting occupancy; and returning the largest product and profit to the tiller's energy and industry. In this lovely country, cabin homes were to be erected, and the forms of social and civil organization to be esta- blished.
These things were rapidly done. And is this a little thing? Do you call this an insignificant product of a nation's brains ; a trifling net result of a nation's activity ? The crection of such a government as that whose blessings we now enjoy, where every man, the humblest, the poorest - where every child, though an outcast and alien, sits secure be- neath the broad and certain ægis of our national liberties, our national freedom, our national juris- prudence and police-do you call this, indeed, a small result? We have whittled ont, amongst us, constitutions for one-and-thirty confederated States. The vast genius and learning, the still vaster skill and talent, all the combined energies of France, month after month, and year after year, endeavored to construct a constitution ; and how has it failed ! It failed first, a little after our own Constitution went into successful operation ; and it has been fail- ing almost ever since. But what we have to show is a noble result of the labor of a nation's brains. If we had never written a book, if we had never penned a line save those which are found in our Congres-
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sional debates, and statute-books and Constitutions, I take it that we have nevertheless built one of the grandest intellectual pyramids the sun ever yet shone upon. This is not a tribute to national vanity ; it is a just statement of a nation's claims.
And now these settlers, hardy, intrepid, unkempt, unwashed backwoodsmen, betake themselves to their business as law-makers. And in this, as in every other business they proceed with a certain eager earnestness, a kind of rapt enthusiasm. If they are to be law- makers, they will be law-makers in deed and in truth ; and there shall be no shilly-shally, no child's play, no trifling about it. The laws may be simple, and even seasoned with a spice of grim comicality ; but they are stringent, direct, and effective. There was one, for example, at an early day in the West, that no man should be allowed to remain in that region who had not some visible and honorable means of support. Every man must have work to do, and must be doing it, sufficient to procure him the money, or the money's worth, which is necessary in order to live. There came into one of the new States where this law was in force, a young man who seemed to have no employment. His hands were in his pockets, and his mouth puckered to a whistle, and that seemed his business in this life. Some of the old gentlemen of the vicinity informed him that they had a statute of this description on their books, and that he must find
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some occupation, or he had better go to some other and idler country. But he fancied, as some of our young folks to-day are apt to do, that they were a set of incapable old fogies, who set an absurd over- value upon their laws and constitution, and that they were not to be heeded. In his coat pocket was the secret of his living-a pack of greasy cards, intc the mystery of the manipulation of which he pro- posed to initiate all the young men of the place ; winning their money, corrupting their morals, and debauching their dispositions ; and then to "gang his gate " as a missionary of the devil, onward to other regions, to repeat the same operation. At the expir- ation, however, of the notice served by the old fogy gentlemen, a writ was, to his astonishment, served upon him by an officer, and he was carried to the "jug," as they metaphorically called the jail, putting the end for the means, I fancy, because they saw clearly enough that the jug generally brings people there. Having deposited him here for safe keeping, due advertisement was made, and the young man, in pursuance of the quaint penalty attached to this law, was marched out into the middle of the public square, and set up on the horse block, where the sheriff, as auctioneer, knocked him down to the highest bidder. This fortunate person was the village blacksmith, who forthwith put a chain round his leg and took him to his smithy, where for three months, from six o'clock
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in the morning till six in the evening our young friend was inducted, with some exertion on the black- smith's part, and much more on his own, into the whole art and mystery of blowing and striking; and was deposited for safe keeping every night in the jail. At the expiration of his time, the young man, liberated from his confinement, shook off the dust of that town from his shoes, and as he turned his back to the place, swore it was the meanest country that a white man ever got into.
Their laws, I say, may have been strict, and the execution of them may have been stringent and swift enough ; for oftentimes the only sheriff was the ready rifle, resting upon the pummel of the saddle, and the only judge, the awful Judge Lynch, who held his dread tribunal under the shadow of the first tree, and whose decrees were executed without appeal, bill of exceptions, new trial, recommitment, respite or pardon, by stalwart men, who swung the culprit up by a rope led over the branch of a tree, instantly after judgment given.
The law of these new countries, whether codified and written by select wise men, or dictated by the clear but rough conclusions of the untutored shrewd conscience and commonsense of the community, must be enforced, and judgments under it executed. For laws not enforced are hotbeds of crime. The case here was urgent, the pressure instant; and the
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conduct of such courts of " Regulators " as very com- monly administered this prompt rude justice, though it seems, compared to our civilized and refined no- tions, harsh and barbarous in the extreme, was, in truth, the only possible means of securing any legal sanctions, any punishment for guilt or protection for innocence. For these new settlements were an Al- satia to which there gathered all the vagabonds, ruffians, swindlers, thieves, criminals of every name, whose evil deeds had made the older settlements too hot to hold them, and who trusted to renew a safer course of guilt among the wild forests and thinly scattered settlements. Society must and will protect itself; and until better means are provided, it will use those which are at hand. It has always been so since Cain, the murderer, felt that every man that found him would slay him, and since the hand of every man was against the first outlaw, Ishmael. It has always been so, down to the day when we have seen great cities rid, only by such rude and lament- able means, of bands of villians impregnable to their laws. It will be well for our own great Republic to remember this ; for precisely as our voters cease to consider thoughtfully, decide carefully, vote wisely, and act decisively-precisely as they shall fail in their great political duty of making good laws, choosing good men to enforce them, and then watch- ing sharply over the good laws and the good men
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too-just in that same measure, for every neglect do we take a step backward toward the law of the strong hand, social dismemberment, and barbarism.
Besides the law-making or law-enforcing assem- vlies of these rude foresters, whether more or less formal, the militia musters afforded another favorite opportunity for these social and genial people to gather themselves together. There was fighting, and desperate fighting too, in their midst or on their borders, for half a century and more after their first settlements. This long experience resulted in a decided tendency to military organizations and amusements ; and these drills and gatherings were punctually attended, and all the exercises of the oc- casion strictly and earnestly obeyed, both on account of their vast practical importance, and as a gratifica- tion of their military instincts. Such "public bandings," as they were called by a local synonym of the "trainings " and "musters" of other States and all similar gatherings, were eagerly made use of by politicians ; a class of men who very early be- came numerous and active in the West.
Perhaps this circumstance may be said to have produced the first manifestations of western mind, and one of its most prominent and characteristic ones,- viz .: oral political addresses-stump speeches, so called. This name was derived from the platform most commonly used by the orators of the back
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woods, whose actual or intended constituents, as the case might be, could not be troubled with the elabo- rate niceties of desks or boarded rostrums, and who, by a most natural ascent, usually occupied a stump, the convenient Pnyx of every country square or court-house green. These ambitious aspirants, com- inonly not much if at all more learned than their rugged auditory, and superior to them only in shrewdness, or desire of office, or impudence, or all, neither needed nor could use any subtle trains of reasoning or lofty sublimities of thought. Any excessive tumefactions of speech often collapsed ignominiously at the prick of some stinging joke, probably bearing no particular relation to the speak- er's speech, and applicable only because successful. Thus, a well-known anecdote of one of these windy gentlemen relates that he was quite overthrown at the summit of a gorgeous flight of eloquence, and left to slink dumbfounded from the stage, be- eause an unscrupulous adversary of tropes and figures bawled out at his back, " Guess he wouldn't talk quite so hifalutenatin' if he knowed how his breeches was torn out behind !" The horrified orator, deceived for an instant, clapped a hard to the part indicated, and was destroyed-overwhelmed in inextinguishable laughter.
But a trifling misadventure did not always upset the speaker. Thus, one of them who had let fly that
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favorite fowl of orators, the American eagle, was tracing his magnificent flight into the uppermost empyrean. He followed the wondrous bird with ecstatic eye and finger raised ; and as he cried out, " Don't you see him, fellow-citizens, a risin' higher and higher?"-an unsophisticated "fellow-citizen," in his immense simplicity, confiding that there was a real eagle, and gazing intently in vain to behold him, sung out, "Well, d-d if I can see him !" " Hoss!" exclaimed the speaker, transfixing the matter-of-fact man with his gaze and his gesture, and speaking in the same oratorical magnificence of tone-" Hoss ! I was a speakin' in a figger!" And off he went again with his eagle; his promptness and seriousness in the two transitions effectually shutting out any ridicule.
This audience was of men whose physique had been cultivated at the expense of much of their intellect ; whose sense was not proper but common ; whose knowledge had not come from books, but from the hard necessities and incessant exertions of a la- borious and perilous life. The speaker, then, must use their vernacular-a vernacular which we should think vulgar-and his metaphors and similes, if he used them at all, must be such as would readily pene- trate beneath their tangled hair, and find lodgment in their intellects. And he must, at the same time, appeal to their feelings ; for the feelings exercise a
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much quicker and surer power over the intellect, than the intellect over the feelings. He could not, accordingly, stand still and merely emit his words as a fountain passively pours out water, for he who would move his audience must be moved himself. It would never do for him to stand and read off a written paper, first looking at the audience and then back to his manuscript. It is the eye which wields the speaker's power over an assembly. If you would affect any man, your eyes must meet his. If you would transfuse into him your thought, your feeling, your passion, your imagination, your poetry, -if, in a word, you would transfuse your life into him, your eye must meet his; in the forcible old Scripture phrase, you must " see eye to eye." And, as it is with one man, so it is with many. For the manner of the word is powerful, much more than the word itself. It is not the brains which produce results, it is the individual, the being, the self, the I, behind them ; the manner of the speaking clothes the spoken words with whatever of power or beauty is exerted or shown by the speaker. It is the power of the orator accordingly, his earnestness, his pro- found conviction, his intense realization of lis trutlı, his yearning desire to transfer his conciousness of it to the hearers, which, as it were, throws it red-hot into their minds and hearts. They receive it; and the sensation or emotion which spreads among them
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as he speaks, flashes back to him from their kindling eyes ; and his strength, which he has sent out to them, comes back to him, grown gigantic with the strength of thousands; and now he speaks in the power of a thousand souls instead of one; and the flux and reflux of mutual influence, as managed for his purposes by the intellect of the speaker, thus become the means and the measure of his power over himself and them. Thus it is, that the rude fellow upon the barbarous backwoods hustings, who over- flows with language ungrammatical and unrhetorical, whose address fairly bristles with odd phrases and border lingo, becomes a prophet clothed in garments of supernatural power, and leads his audience, wil- ling captives, whithersoever he lists, till, like the ancient Franks when they made a king, they bear him on their shoulders to his triumph.
Such a people, not trained to logic nor disciplined in reasoning ; who proceed by common sense, practi- cal prudence, ordinary business forecast, and acquaint- ance with the men and things and principles of every- day life, yet of excitable passions and feelings, and who are only to be effectully appealed to by a speaker of the kind I have attempted to describe, and who is, in their phrase, "dead in earnest," are passing through a mental discipline preliminary to the higher walks of literature, and to the development of the nobler moral faculties.
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And this first manifestation of western mind-in their peculiar spoken eloquence, is always the same ; whether before a jury, on the stump, at the camp- meeting, at a militia muster, a barbacue, a corn- husking, a house-raising, a log-rolling, a wedding or a quilting-for the constituency is always the same- is unvarying and universal. The man who would move them, would fuse their minds into one homo- geneous subjection to his will, no matter what his other subordinate or collateral attainments, must al- ways have these elementary primal powers; the power to say whatever he has to say clearly and forcibly, and the power of saying it with the strength of conviction, earnestness and intense enthusiasm.
The men of the East, trained to a colder style of speech, who demand a reason for every thought sub- mitted to them ; who have had the discipline of two studious and orderly centuries this side the Atlantic ; who are under the organic influence of so many generations dwelling among churches and school- houses and printing-presses-a discipline which is a great privilege, a benign heritage, yea, even a benediction from above upon them-can scarcely conceive and could not at all comprehend the in- fluence which one of these western orators exerts upon his audience, or its gladdening and rejoicing effect upon his own nature ; nor how the people gather and throng around him and revel in his speech as an
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unbought, unpurchaseable pleasure, one of the rarest of life.
This rough people, born and bred in the wilderness, has, after the universal human fashion, expressed a characteristic and interesting representation of its traits and tendencies in its language. For there is, so to speak, a western Anglo-American language, corresponding singularly and strictly with the west- ern style of thought, and the character of western men. This language is thickly studded with rude proverbial forms, all redundant with wild untrained metaphors, some of which, if you please, we will call cant and slang. But all these phrases have a mean- ing, often quaintly and curiously expressed ; and they have usually sprung spontaneously out of the associa- tions or necessities of the speakers' lives. Or, again, they are as freely and naturally the outgrowth of the minds that produce them, as is the luxuriant cane of the strong deep rich soil of the brakes; not drawn or pressed forth by forces from outside, but the free fantastic blossoms of untaught spontaneous thoughts.
To this western language, as well as to the thought that threw it out, fun and humor gave a color almost predominant. Even in the hardest and sternest periods of their history, when the crack of the rifle and whiz of the tomahawk were constantly in their ears, they relished fun to the last and most exquisite degree. A vein of humor runs through all the nature
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of this people. They may seem stern, even savage ; sombre, and even sorrowful; self-possessed and quiet ; and all these they are, at times, perhaps often. But not constantly ; they are moved by the influence of the occasion, and carried out from these serious frames of mind. But they are jovial and fun-loving, always; and whatever their circumstances, they will have, from time to time, a season of such utter heart- felt relaxation as sometimes to border on license ; where the most uproarious jollity and glee is the order of the day. There is a curious entry in the diary of George Rogers Clark, made during a visit to Kentucky at a time when the whites were suffering greatly from the attacks of the savages, showing how this characteristic struck the hardy soldier : "25th July, 1776. Lieut. Lynn was married this day at Harrod's Station" -- remember that in all that year there was not a day when the neighborhood of Har- rod's Station was free from the presence of hostile savages-" and the merry-making was absolutely marvellous." Old Bishop Asbury, who made a jour- ney into the same region in 1783 or 1784, while the Indian fighting was still going on, and the people were pressed to the uttermost, says, " It is marvellous to see how the desire for matrimony reigneth in this country." The entrances upon these matrimonial speculations, so heartily ventured upon by the young people-by the girls generally at fifteen and the boys
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at seventeen-were invariably made the occasions for the jolliest and most thoroughgoing fun.
The negroes were ex officio, as ever, lovers of jokes and fun, and even in time of war were as cool and as inclined to jollity as their reckless masters. One of them, who was out along with his master and a band of foresters in hot pursuit of a party of Indians, who had committed an outrage upon some lonely cabin or blockhouse, made an observation which still remains on record; a simple speech enough, but which may serve to illustrate my point. The pursu- ers gained sight of the Indians while descending a hill. As the foremost of the whites was hastening forward, closely followed by the warlike Sambo, the captain of the whites, observing that the Indians greatly outnumbered his force, gave the low whistle which was the signal of retreat. Sambo, however, heedless of the unwelcome order of recall, pressed on down the hill with his white companion, and taking shelter in a thicket, observed an immense Indian peer- ing above the hill beyond, to reconnoitre the position of the pursuers, his head just visible from behind the trunk of a tree. Sambo raises his rifle and blazes away at him, singing out at the top of his voice, " Dar! Take dat to remember Sambo the black white man !" and then retraces his steps.
Even the Indians, usually reckoned so sombre and saturnine a race, were by no means destitute of a
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very peculiar dry and quaint humor. Indeed, it is beyond doubt that in the social security of their far and peaceful homes in the wilderness, they laughed and chatted and joked, and sung and told stories with as much glee, and careless, happy delight, as any civilized circles. But though the indications of their possession of wit and humor are equally well authenticated, they are much rarer. A good speci- men of Indian humor, without any such intention on the part of the savage, was a remark made by one of them while the fearful earthquakes of 1811-12 were devastating the valleys of the Mississippi and Ohio, and the wildest and most terrific freaks of nature were being exhibited in many portions of that vast area. While New Madrid seemed sinking bodily into the abyss, and the bed of the vast Mississippi River was undergoing an absolute change of location, its great floods rushing through the monstrous chasms which opened a new and strange path for the waters, while the great trees were rocking to and fro, trem- bling and falling, and the earth gaped in bottomless rents, the savage stood cool and stoical, his arms folded upon his breast, gazing upon the scene. A white man addressed him with the inquiry, "What do you make of all this? What do these things mean ?" The Indian, sorrowfully enough, and as if the last prop of all his hopes here and hereafter were gone, thus delivered a most original-and aboriginal
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