American Thumb-prints: Mettle of Our Men and Women. Kate Stephens
Puritan aggressiveness, with Anglo-Saxon tenacity and sincerity, as their steamers paddled up the muddy current of the Missouri and their canvas-covered wagons creaked and rumbled over the sod, concealing then its motherhood of mighty crops of corn and wheat, upon which they were to build their home. They were enthusiasts even on a road beset with hostiles of the slave State to the east. Their enthusiasm worked out in two general lines, one the self-interest of building themselves a home—towns, schools, churches—the other the idealism of the anti-slavery faith. They were founding a State which was within a few years to afford to northern forces in the struggle centring about slavery the highest percentage of soldiers of any commonwealth; and their spirit forecast the sequent fact that troops from the midst of their self-immolation would also record the highest percentage of deaths.
They came from many quarters to that territorial settlement of theirs, but the radical, recalcitrant stock which had nested in and peopled the northeastern coast of our country was in the notable majorities from Western States—from Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, and Iowa; and from New England, New York, and Pennsylvania also. Some came, indeed, who could trace no descent from Puritan or Quaker or Huguenot forebear. But there was still the potent heirship of spirit.
To these men nature gave the gift of seeing their side of the then universal question. She added a living sympathy with workers, and an acute sense of the poverty and oppression which humanity at large is always suffering from those who take because they have power. A free discussion of slavery and their opposition to slave-holding had put this deep down in their hearts.
Each man of them—and each woman also—was in fixed principle and earnestness a pioneer, in pursuit of and dwelling in a world not yet before the eyes of flesh but sun-radiant to the eyes of the spirit—the ideal the pioneer must ever see—and holding the present and actual as but a mote in the beam from that central light.
From a more humorous point of view, each man was clearly a Knight of La Mancha stripped of the mediæval and Spanish trapping of his prototype. His Dulcinea—an unexampled combination of idealism and practicality—his much-enduring wife, upon whose frame and anxious-eyed face were stamped a yearning for the graces of life. Her fervor, with true woman strength, was ever persistent. “I always compose my poems best,” said one of the haler of these dames whose verses piped from a corner of the University town’s morning journal, “on wash-day and over the tub.”
These were the conditions of those men and women of the fifties and early sixties to less lifted, more fleshly souls. The old enthusiasm that lighted our race in 1620 and many sequent years in Massachusetts Bay, and the old devotion that led the Huguenots and other oppressed peoples to our Southern coasts and on “over the mountains,” were kindled afresh. And the old exaltation of the descendants of these many peoples—the uplifting that made way for and supported the act of the Fourth of July in 1776—rose anew. The flame of an idea was in the air heating and refining the grossest spirits—and the subtle forces of the Kansans’ vanguard were far from the grossest.
Once in their new home these men and women lived under circumstances a people has almost never thriven under—circumstances which would prey upon every fibre of calmness, repose, and sober-mindedness, and possibly in the end deprive their folk of consideration for the past and its judgments. “Govern the Kansas of 1855 and ’56!” exclaimed Governor Shannon years after that time. “You might as well have attempted to govern the devil in hell.” “Shall the Sabbath never immigrate,” cried a Massachusetts woman in 1855 in a letter to friends at home, “and the commandments too?”
Among this people was little presence of what men had wrought. As in the early settlements of our Atlantic seaboard, all was to be made, everything to be done, even to the hewing of logs for houses and digging of wells for water; and in Kansas pressure for energy and time was vastly increased over those earlier years by the seaboard. The draughting of laws for controlling a mixed population, with elements in it confessedly there for turbulence and bloodshed, was for a time secondary to shingle-making.
Such primitive efforts were more than a generation ago—in fact, fifty years. But the spirit with which those early comers inaugurated and carried on their settlement did not perish when the daily need of its support had passed away. It still abode as a descent of spirit, meaning an inheritance of spirit, a contagion of spirit, and to its characteristic features we can to-day as easily point—to its human sympathies and willingness for experiment—as to the persistence of a physical mark—the Bourbon nose in royal portraits, say, or the “Austrian lips” of the Hapsburg mouth. Its evidences are all about you when you are within the confines of the present-day Kansans, and you are reminded of the Puritanism which still subordinates to itself much that is alien in Massachusetts; or you think of the sturdy practicality of the early Dutch which still modifies New York; or you may go farther afield and recall the most persistent spirit of the Gauls of Cæsar, novis plerumque rebus student, which to our time has been the spirit of the Gauls of the Empire and of President Loubet.
The Kansan has still his human-heartedness and his willingness to experiment for better things. Exploded hypotheses in manufacture, farming, and other interests scattered in startling frequency over the vast acreage of his State, testify to these traits.
He has to this day kept his receptivity of mind. Even now he scorns a consideration for fine distinctions. He still loves a buoyant optimism. And for all these reasons he often and readily grants faith to the fellow who amuses him, who can talk loud and fast, who promises much, and who gets the most notices in his local dailies. He is like the author of Don Juan, inasmuch as he “wants a hero,” and at times he is willing to put up with as grievous a one as was foisted upon the poet. In the end, however, he has native bed-rock sense, and as his politics in their finality show, he commonly measures rascals aright. But in his active pursuit and process of finding them out he has offered himself a spectacle to less simple-minded, more sophisticated men.
Some years ago, in a grove of primeval oaks, elms, and black-walnuts neighboring the yellow Kaw and their University town, those settlers of early days held an old-time barbecue. The meeting fell in the gold and translucence of the September that glorifies that land. Great crowds of men and women came by rail and by wagon, and walking about in the shade, or in the purple clouds that rose from the trampings of many feet and stood gleaming in the sunshine, they were stretching hands to one another and crying each to some new-discovered, old acquaintance, “Is this you?” “How long is it now?” “Thirty-five years?” “You’ve prospered?” and such words as old soldiers would use having fought a great fight together—not for pelf or loot but for moral outcome—and had then lost one another for many a year.
Moving among them you would readily see signs of that “possession of the god” the Greeks meant when they said ἐνθουσιαμóς. Characteristic marks of it were at every turn. There was the mobile body—nervous, angular, expressive—and a skin of fine grain. There was the longish hair, matted, if very fine, in broad locks; if coarse, standing about the head in electric stiffness and confusion—the hair shown in the print of John Brown, in fact. There were eyes often saddened by the sleeplessness of the idealist—eyes with an uneasy glitter and a vision directed far away, as if not noting life, nor death, nor daily things near by, but fixed rather upon some startling shape on the horizon. The teeth were inclined to wedge-shape and set far apart. There was a firmly shut and finely curved mouth. “We make our own mouths,” says Dr. Holmes. About this people was smouldering fire which might leap into flame at any gust of mischance or oppression.
This describes the appearance in later decades of the corporate man of the fifties and early sixties—
“to whom was given
So much of earth, so much of heaven,
And such impetuous blood.”
A sky whose mystery and melancholy, whose solitary calm and elemental rage stimulate and depress even his penned and grazing cattle, has spread over him for more than a generation. With his intensity and his predisposition to a new contrat social he and his descendants have been subjected to Kansas heat, which at times marks more than one hundred in the shade, and to a frost that leaves the check of the thermometer far below zero. He and his children, cultivators of their rich soil, have been subject