10 OHIO HISTORY
TO CINCINNATI*
by EDWARD A. M'LAUGHLIN
Fair is thy seat, in soft recumbent
rest
Beneath the grove-clad hills; whence
morning wings
The gentle breezes of the fragrant
west,
That kiss the surface of a thousand
springs:
Nature, her many-colored mantle
flings
Around thee, and adorns thee as a
bride;
While polished Art his gorgeous
tribute brings,
And dome and spire ascending far and
wide
Their pointed shadows dip in thy
Ohio's tide.
So fair in infancy -- O what shall be
Thy blooming prime, expanding like
the rose
In fragrant beauty; when a century
Hath passed upon thy birth, and time
bestows
The largess of a world that freely
throws
Her various tribute from remotest
shores,
To enrich the Western Rome: Here
shall repose
Science and art; and from time's
subtile ores --
Nature's unfolded page -- knowledge enrich her stores.
So sings the Muse as she with fancy's
eye,
Scans, from imagination's lofty
height,
Thy radiant beaming day -- where it doth lie
In the deep future; glowing on the
night
From whose dark womb, empires unveil
to light;
Mantled, and diademed, and sceptered
there,
Thou waitest but the advent of thy
flight,
When, like a royal Queen, stately and
fair,
The City of the West ascends the
regal chair.
* An excerpt from a poem found in a
collection of poems by Edward A. M'Laughlin
entitled Lovers of the Deep, which
was originally printed at Cincinnati in October 1841.
The 312-page volume was dedicated to
Nicholas Longworth. William T. Coggeshall, The
Poets and Poetry of the West (Columbus, 1860), 247-249.
CINCINNATI ATHENS OF THE WEST 1830-1861
by LOUIS LEONARD TUCKER
"All books are divisible into two classes," John Ruskin wrote in Of Kings' Treasuries, "the books of the hour, and the books of all time." Ruskin was well aware that a dichotomy of this type was not absolute, that a few works could easily qualify for admittance into both classes. Frances Trollope's celebrated opus, Domestic Manners of the Americans,1 which was published in 1832, was assuredly one of these. An overnight sensation on two continents at its first printing, it still ranks as one of the classic travel accounts of the nineteenth century. If Domestic Manners brought fame and fortune to its author, it provided few positive benefits to its main subject, the city of Cincinnati, Ohio. It did bring a blazing notoriety to the Ohio city, and Cincinnati still is suffering from the effects of it. While based on only twenty-five months of residence in the Queen City (from February 1828 to March 1830), it fashioned an image of ante-bellum Cincinnati that remained granitically fixed in American historiography for more than half a century -- and it is still embedded there to some degree. The image is that of "Porkopolis," and the mental impres- sions evoked by that colorful appellation are well known to every student of Western American history. "Porkopolis" connoted, first and foremost, hog center of the United States, or, as another British traveler more delicately phrased it, "pork-shop of the Union."2 It conjured up the vision of a city in which fat hogs waddled through the streets at will; of putrefactive streets and market stalls; of massive slaughter houses which emitted an effluvium that was a stench in the nostrils of all, except localites; of streams brimming
NOTES ARE ON PAGES 67-68 |
12 OHIO HISTORY
with inedible slaughter house remains,
their waters brought to a fiery red
hue by frequent infusions of hog blood.
No discussion of Mrs. Trollope's
"Porkopolis" would be complete
without a specimen of the "old woman's"
evocative literary style.
It seems hardly fair to quarrel with a
place because its staple com-
modity is not pretty, but I am sure I
should have liked Cincinnati much
better if the people had not dealt so
very largely in hogs. The immense
quantity of business done in this line
would hardly be believed by those
who had not witnessed it. I never saw a
newspaper without remarking
such advertisements as the following:
"Wanted, immediately, 4,000 fat
hogs."
"For sale, 2,000 barrels of prime
pork."
But the annoyance came nearer than this;
if I determined upon a
walk up Main-street, the chances were
five hundred to one against my
reaching the shady side without brushing
a snout fresh dripping from
the kennel; when we had screwed our
courage to the enterprise of
mounting a certain noble-looking
sugar-loaf hill, that promised pure
air and a fine view, we found the brook
we had to cross, at its foot,
red with the stream from a pig
slaughter-house; while our noses, instead
of meeting "the thyme that loves
the green hill's breast," were greeted
by odours that I will not describe, and
which I heartily hope my readers
cannot imagine; our feet, that on
leaving the city had expected to
press the flowery sod, literally got
entangled in pigs' tails and jawbones:
and thus the prettiest walk in the
neighbourhood was interdicted for
ever.3
The ubiquitous hogs represented for Mrs.
Trollope but one of "Porkopolis's"
many shocking defects. She disliked the
hurly-burly boom town atmosphere,
rampant materialism, licentious
democracy, disrespectful servants, and boorish
frontiersmen and nouveau riche who
were in constant search of "that honey
of Hybla, vulgarly called money,"
who were forever unleashing deadly
quantities of yellow amber from their
tobacco-laden mouths, and whose table
manners would make Tom Jones' culinary
habits appear impeccable by
comparison.
Some of her more devastating salvos were
directed against a Cincinnati
that was beginning to regard itself as
an "Athens of the West." In her view,
Cincinnati was a land of stale
stupidity, populated by vulgar dolts who had
not the vaguest conception of things of
the mind and spirit. In the drawing
rooms, she noted, "The gentlemen
spit, talk of elections and the price of
produce, and spit again."4 By
her standards, the cultural and intellectual
tone of the city was depressingly dull.
In recounting a literary conversation
with "a gentleman said to be a
scholar and a man of reading," she indirectly
wrote off the entire city as a kind of
frontier "Dullsville" in these words:
Our poor Lord Byron, as may be supposed,
was the bull'seye against
which every dart in his black little
quiver was aimed. I had never heard
any serious gentleman talk of Lord Byron
at full length before, and I
listened attentively. It was evident
that the noble passages which are
graven on the hearts of the genuine
lovers of poetry had altogther
escaped the serious gentleman's
attention; and it was equally evident
that he knew by rote all those that they
wish the mighty master had
never written. I told him so, and I
shall not soon forget the look he
gave me.
CINCINNATI -- ATHENS OF THE WEST 13 |
Of other authors his knowledge was very imperfect, but his criticisms very amusing. Of Pope, he said, "He is so entirely gone by, that in our country it is considered quite fustian to speak of him." But I persevered, and named "the Rape of the Lock" as evincing some little talent, and being in a tone that might still hope for admittance in the drawing-room; but, on the mention of this poem, the serious gentleman became almost as strongly agitated as when he talked of Don Juan; and I was unfeignedly at a loss to comprehend the nature of his feelings, till he muttered, with an indignant shake of the handkerchief, "The very title!" At the name of Dryden he smiled, and the smile spoke as plainly as a smile could speak, "How the old woman twaddles!" "We only know Dryden by quotations, Madam," [he answered], "and these indeed, are found only in books that have long since had their day." "And Shakespeare, sir?" "Shakespeare, Madam, is obscene, and, thank God, WE are sufficiently advanced to have found it out! If we must have the abomination of stage plays, let them at least be marked by the refinement of the age in which we live." This was certainly being au courant du jour. Of Massenger he knew nothing. Of Ford he had never heard. Gray had had his day. Prior he had never read, but understood he was a very childish writer. Chaucer and Spenser he tied in a couple, and dismissed by saying, that he thought it was neither more nor less than affectation to talk of authors who wrote in a tongue no longer intelligible. [Mrs. Trollope concluded with this sharp thrust]: This was the most literary conversation I was ever present at in Cincinnati.5 Domestic Manners fell upon the world of letters with the impact of an H-bomb. It not only obliterated the modest reputation Cincinnati was developing in the early 1830's as a cultural and intellectual center of the West, but it also laid a cloud of radioactive fallout over the city in the form of the "Porkopolis" projection. For the next sixty years, those few researchers who were engaged in an examination of American cultural and intellectual history studiously avoided the southwest Ohio city. |
14 OHIO HISTORY
What is surprising about this vacuum in
scholarship is that knowledgeable
researchers must have realized that Mrs.
Trollope's picture of Cincinnati was
overdrawn to the point of caricature.
Contemporary reviews of her book had
been devastating in their criticism. The
respected Edinburgh Review casti-
gated her as "an irresponsible
caricaturist who drew her sketches not with
pen and India ink but with vitriol and a
blacking brush." It branded her book
as "nothing but four-and-thirty
chapters of American scandal." American
critics by the score meticulously
catalogued Mrs. Trollope's inaccuracies
and her deficiencies as a chronicler of
the young nation's manners and
morals, and cultural and intellectual
traditions. While some Cincinnati
newspapers reprinted long extracts from Domestic
Manners, their editors
regarded the book as "palpably
sinister." They quite properly accused Mrs.
Trollope of exacting literary revenge on
Cincinnati in order to atone for
the deep financial ducking she underwent
there, and more significantly, for
the humiliating social repudiation she
experienced at the hands of the
grandes dames of the Queen City.6 The Countess de Chambrun
once inquired
of some Cincinnati dowagers, who were
social lions during Mrs. Trollope's
period of residence, why the English
woman wrote of the city with such
bitterness. The standard reply was:
"My dear, she never could get in. Her
manners were bad and she had no
refinement. After seeing how she behaved
in market no one could think of asking
her inside a drawing room."7 This
attitude of exclusiveness by the
Cincinnati ladies assuredly outraged the
socially-sensitive Englishwoman. And on
those rare occasions when they
did invite her to a social function, they did not endear
themselves by asking
if she fled England to escape body
lice!
Of all the harsh indictments rendered by
contemporary authorities, the
following is unquestionably the most
telling in the context of the thesis of
this paper:
No observer was certainly ever less
qualified to judge of the prospects
or even of the happiness of a young
people. No one could have been
worse adapted by nature for a task of
learning whether a nation was in
a way to thrive. Whatever she saw she
judged, as most women do, from
her own standing-point. If a thing were
ugly to her eyes, it ought to be
ugly to all eyes, -- and if ugly, it
must be bad.
She was endowed . . . with much creative
power, with considerable
humor and a genuine feeling for romance.
But she was neither clear-
sighted nor accurate; and in her
attempts to describe morals, manners,
and even facts, was unable to avoid the
pitfalls of exaggeration.8
This sharp judgment was rendered shortly
after the publication of Domestic
Manners by Mrs. Trollope's own son, Anthony Trollope.
With the passage of time, the savage
strictures of the critics were for-
gotten, and the sprightly phrased venom
of Mrs. Trollope began to enjoy
a warm flirtation with Truth. It became
the considered judgment of posterity
that, if she were not totally accurate
in her account, Mrs. Trollope had
come close enough to merit recognition
as a discerning analyst of American
mores. She was regarded very much like Huck Finn, of whom it
was said:
"There were things which he
stretched, but mainly he told the truth."
In the genre of travel literature, Domestic
Manners achieved a singular
CINCINNATI -- ATHENS OF THE WEST 15 |
distinction, and in American historiography, pre-Civil War Cincinnati became the "monster piggery." So it remained until 1891, until William Henry Venable published his landmark work, Beginnings of Literary Culture in the Ohio Valley.9 While conceived as a broad study of cultural developments in the entire Ohio Valley, with a special emphasis on literary attainments, Venable's work devoted more space to the cultural and intellectual affairs of Cincinnati than to those of any other Ohio Valley city. This overbalanced emphasis underscored a point that Venable did not explicitly state or develop: that Cincinnati was the cultural center of the Ohio Valley. If the book were narrow in scope and skeletal in its treatment of Cincinnati, it did cast a powerful beam of scholarship upon a heretofore blackened area of Western cultural history. Since the appearance of Venable's book, a handful of researchers have poked about the rubble of "Porkopolis," and while their studies also are lacking in depth and comprehensiveness, they have resulted in the partial rehabilitation of Cincinnati's reputation as an early center of culture. Cincinnati is con- spicuously featured in the far-ranging studies of Ralph Rusk, James Miller, R. Carlyle Buley, Louis B. Wright, and Richard C. Wade.10 Walter Sutton's recent study of the Western Book Trade11 is a more noteworthy addition to the growing bibliography on Western urban history, since it is a concentrated examination of nineteenth-century Cincinnati as a publishing center. Its find- ings alone will profoundly affect any future interpretation of the cultural life of pre-Civil War Cincinnati. In recent years, a rash of articles has appeared in the quarterly journals of The Cincinnati Historical Society and The Ohio Historical Society, which treat in depth special facets of the cultural and intellectual life of pre-Civil War Cincinnati. If there is as yet no definite volume encompassing all aspects of this extensive area of inquiry and carrying the story up to the Civil War, there is already sufficient published evidence to confirm the thesis that Cincinnati, during at least the three- decade period preceding the Civil War, had the most vibrant, the most sophisticated, and the most variegated cultural and intellectual life of any urban center west of the Allegheny Mountains. While it may not have attained the exalted status of a London or even of a Boston, the Ohio city could rightfully lay claim to the title of "Athens of the West." |
16 OHIO HISTORY
It is a well-known fact that virtually
every Western city of any size and
cultural pretension, from Pittsburgh to
Marietta to Chillicothe to St. Louis,
boasted of being the "Athens of the
West." Even Athens, Ohio, claimed the
distinction. Recognition as a cultural
capital was esteemed in the nineteenth
century as one of the most signal honors
that could come to a city. From
the late eighteenth century until the
steamboat age became firmly established,
roughly about 1830, Lexington, Kentucky,
was the acknowledged cultural
Gulliver of the West.12 Transylvania
University, that remarkable frontier
institution, provided the generating
force for the flowering of Lexington. The
unfortunate destruction of the college
by fire in May 1829 all but terminated
Lexington's tenure of cultural
supremacy. As the inland Kentucky city fell
by the wayside, Cincinnati assumed the
mantle of leadership and retained
it for the next three decades. Even a
Cleveland newspaper was forced to
concede in 1837 that Cincinnati was
becoming "the American Athens for
the West!"13 Excluding New Orleans,
which was more Southern than Western,
Cincinnati's main trans-Allegheny
competitors were Pittsburgh, Louisville,
and St. Louis. Population figures
assuredly do not constitute an absolute
index for ascertaining the quality of a
given city's cultural and intellectual
life, but the following comparative
statistics for 1850 do bear a salient
significance in the context of Western
urban maturity: Louisville, 43,194;
Pittsburgh, 46,601; St. Louis, 77,860;
Cincinnati, 115,436.14 Why no mention
of Chicago? Chicago, at this time, had
only 29,963!
Cincinnati's rise to cultural and
intellectual prominence was closely linked
to its phenomenal economic and
commercial expansion during the Steam-
boat Age. By 1825 Cincinnati was the
steamboat capital of the Ohio Valley,
and by mid-century it was the economic
colossus of the entire West. Wide-
eyed tourists frequently referred to it
as the "Corinth of the West," the
"Tyre of the West," the
"Wonder City of the West," and, of course, the
"Queen of the West."
The designations were apt. This was not
Chamber of Commerce rhetoric.
Cincinnati by mid-century possessed an
impressive economic portfolio; it
was the largest inland port in the
nation; the supreme pork producer in the
world; the leading beer and liquor
producer in the nation; the prime soap,
candle, furniture, shoe, stove and boat
manufacturer in the West, and the
principal printing center of the West.15
Its economy was "enormous, diversi-
fied and amazing." Cairo kept
itself clean with Cincinnati soap. Hannibal
lived in Cincinnati pre-fabricated
houses. Memphis read Cincinnati news-
papers. Vicksburg drank Cincinnati
whiskey. New Orleans ate Cincinnati
ham. Everybody in the West studied
Cincinnati McGuffey Readers. Here
was the quintessence of
"Boomtown." A visitor from Boston wrote to his
sister in 1848:
I have seen so much and heard more noise
than for many years before
.... This city you must know is one of the
towns that you read of -- a
description of it cannot be given while
rattling omnibuses and carts
drown the senses. It is one great
bee-hive -- exhibiting more activity
than New York.16
CINCINNATI -- ATHENS OF THE WEST 17 |
|
Accounts like this are legion for the 1850's in particular, when Cincinnati ranked as the fifth most populous city in the nation and the economic "Empress of the West." In 1859 Charles Cist stated with only slight exaggera- tion that "with the exception of Philadelphia, Cincinnati is probably the most extensive manufacturing city in the United States."17 The economic boom of the "Herculean City," as John Quincy Adams described it in 1844,18 laid the basis for the cultural explosion that took place in the 1830-1860 period. Pork production paved the way for Shakespeare. After a long discourse of exaltation on the material and cultural progress of Cincinnati, a French visitor in 1851 properly concluded: "It is the hogs which have made all this possible!"19 And, as was common throughout the growing cities of the young nation, the leading devotees of culture were also the principal captains of industry and commerce. But contrary to the vitriolic shafts of Mrs. Trollope, the culture-vultures of Cincinnati were men of some educational substance and social refinement. Mrs. Trollope failed to make a distinction between the itinerant hog-drovers and the "First Gentlemen" of the city. On cold winter evenings, the same men who were amassing Olympian fortunes in vile-smelling slaughter houses and hot, grimy foundries con- vened in sumptuously furnished town houses and, applying the scheme of Linnaeus, classified fossilized botanical specimens taken from the banks of the Ohio River; or sat primly in the drawing room of Samuel Foote's majestic mansion on Third Street by Vine, sipping Madeira wine, eating sponge cake and listening to William Greene, of the illustrious Rhode Island Greenes, read literary selections submitted anonymously by Lyman Beecher's mousey |
18 OHIO HISTORY |
little daughter Harriet or Daniel Drake; or sat enraptured in John Bates's National Theatre as the renowned Shakespearian actor, James E. Murdoch, delivered the "To be or not to be" soliloquy from "Hamlet"; or wandered down to Joseph Dorfeuille's Western Museum to inspect Egyptian antiquities; or spent an hour in the National Art Union, one of the largest art galleries in the city, gazing upon the latest acquisition of statuary formed by Hiram Powers, an ex-Cincinnatian, now a world celebrity in Florence, Italy. A striking percentage of these economic elite were also men of cultural and intellectual proclivities. There was an appreciable number of literate and refined Southern and "middle state" representatives among the economic and cultural leaders of the Queen City, but the greatest number were New Englanders by birth and breeding. As one scans the list of subscribers to, and members of, the formal agencies of cultural life -- libraries, lyceums, museums, debating societies, the historical society and the like -- he repeatedly encounters the names of transplanted New Englanders: men like Salmon P. Chase, Alphonso Taft, Calvin Stowe, William Greene, Samuel and John Foote, Nathan Guilford, William D. Gallagher, Timothy Walker, James Perkins, Nathaniel Wright, and Bellamy Storer. These men hardly can be equated with the stereotyped Cincinnatian of Domestic Manners -- the hard-drinking, loose-talking, tobac- co-spitting boor. When the vanguard of the Lyman Beecher family came to Cincinnati in 1831 to inspect Lane Theological Seminary and the city in general, they were profoundly impressed by the social and cultural climate of the Queen City. Wrote Catherine to sister Harriet, who had stayed behind: I have become somewhat acquainted with those ladies we shall have the most to do with, and find them intelligent, New England sort of folks. Indeed, this is a New England city in all its habits, and its inhabitants are more than half from New England.... I know of no place in the world where there is so fair a prospect of finding every thing that makes social and domestic life pleasant.20 A transplanted Vermonter, who was a Harvard graduate, took up residence in Cincinnati in 1831 and informed a friend: "The society in this city is as polished as the highest circles of Boston. Indeed it is made up of emigrants |
CINCINNATI -- ATHENS OF THE WEST 19 |
|
from the Eastern cities almost exclusively. I mean the first society."21 The abundance of New Englanders led to the formation of a New England Society in Cincinnati in 1845, and the membership of this group constituted an intellectual elite, or "braintrust," that few other Western cities could match.22 These New Englanders infused the Queen City with their distinctive Puritan-developed cultural and intellectual values, and they made the "life of the mind" as much a trait of urban existence in Cincinnati as the production of pork and beer or the search for the "honey of Hybla." While New Englanders were the most numerous figures on the cultural landscape, a Kentuckian and a New Jersey immigrant stood out in Olympian majesty. Daniel Drake and Nicholas Longworth were the prime architects of the "Athens of the West." Drake and Longworth were as dissimilar in physical appearance as they were in temperament, yet both shared a deep conviction that their adopted city was destined to become the seat of civiliza- tion in inner America. Animated by this belief, the volatile Drake and the mild-mannered Longworth lavished time and financial resources upon every cultural and intellectual activity initiated in the Queen City. Drake's massive achievements as a culture-builder and civic booster have been amply documented in a number of studies, most recently in Emmet Horine's sympathetic but carefully researched biography.23 A man of incre- dible versatility and prodigious energy, Drake was an harmonious human multitude, like Jefferson, a "host within himself." He made it his life's mission to transform a crude frontier community into the cultural capital of a new Western American civilization. Philadelphia, where he had studied medicine, became the basic model for his vision. The dynamic Drake was a one-man cultural task force during his long, contentious career in Cincinnati. Edward |
20 OHIO HISTORY
Mansfield, a contemporary, described him
as "the founder of some, and
the friend of all good
institutions."24 Practically every cultural and intellectual
agency of this period owed its existence
to this singular medical figure and
cultural leader, who represented the
quintessence of enlightenment and
liberalism. Venable wrote of him:
"So many good works did he undertake,
so much did he accomplish, so effectually
did he stimulate exertion in others,
both friends and enemies, that I think
he may be called with propriety the
Franklin of Cincinnati."25
Longworth is more widely known as a real
estate entrepreneur, horticul-
turist, and wine producer than as a patron
of the arts.26 Yet, he, too, was
a prime builder of the "Athens of
the West," and there is a substantial
body of evidence in The Cincinnati
Historical Society to support this state-
ment. The extensive Hiram Powers
Collection, for example, reveals that
Longworth surreptitiously functioned as
a kind of "National Humanities
Foundation" for impoverished and
talented young literati, artists, and
sculptors.27 He subsidized them and
their families, encouraged them to pursue
their cultural endeavors, commissioned
works from them, induced other
wealthy Cincinnatians to buy their
productions, and, in other countless ways,
kept the lamp of fine arts brightly
burning in the Queen City. Had it not
been for Longworth, Hiram Powers never
would have experienced his
spectacular and lucrative sculpturing
career in Florence.
When Ormsby M. Mitchel sought to
establish an observatory in the early
1840's and thereby make Cincinnati the
astronomical center of the nation,
a plan which most thinking Cincinnatians
regarded as an act of lunacy,
Longworth promptly donated four choice
acres of land on the brim of Mt. Ida,
later to be named Mt. Adams. He also
made sizable contributions to the
building fund for the observatory and
his name stood high on the list of
subscribers for the purchase of the
"great" telescope, which was manufactured
in Munich, Germany, at a cost of
$10,000. The "Croesus of Cincinnati" --
this is what the Pulszkys called this
diffident, strange-looking little man who
came to Cincinnati at the turn of the
century with $3 in his pocket and who
soon became one of the wealthiest men in
the nation. His fierce determination
to become a financial success was
complemented by an equally passionate
desire to elevate the aesthetic tone of
the raw Western community which he
had come to love.28
As for the scope of cultural and
intellectual life in pre-Civil War Cincinnati,
by quantitative standards, it was indeed
impressive. There was a kaleidoscopic
variety of cultural and intellectual
agencies: debating clubs, literary clubs,
elocution societies, lyceums, an
historical society, subscription libraries,
singing societies, an observatory and
astronomical society, a Society for the
Promotion of Useful Knowledge, theatres,
opera houses, art clubs -- and so
on almost ad infinitum. These
agencies offered a great deal of room in which
active minds could range. An extract
from the Reverend Moncure Conway's
Autobiography provides a partial insight into the quality, as well as
range,
of cultural and intellectual life in the
1850's. It need be noted that Conway,
a Unitarian, was no provincial rustic.
Nor was he a Chamber-of-Commerce-
CINCINNATI -- ATHENS OF THE WEST 21 |
|
type booster. He was well-traveled, highly refined, and he maintained strong intellectual ties with the Concord, Massachusetts Transcendentalists. Be- cause of Conway's broad frame of geographical reference and cultural background, his judgments bear a special significance. He wrote: Cincinnati was the most cultivated of the Western cities. A third of the population being German, there were societies devoted to music, and in that art the city was ahead of all others in America except Boston. There was a fine orchestra which gave symphony concerts, and a "St. Cecelia-Verein" which sang classical pieces rarely heard elsewhere. There was an admirable literary club, which met every week to converse and regale itself with squibs, recitations, cigars, and Catawba wine. To it belonged young men who afterwards became eminent figures in the world: Rutherford Hayes, President of the United States; [Edward F.] Noyes, a distinguished general and Minister to France; A. R. Spofford, librarian of Congress; Judge Stallo, Minister to Italy, Judge James, Judge Manning Force, and others. There was a good city library, with a Lyceum that had courses of lectures during the winter and enabled us to listen to the most famous public teachers. Emerson, Holmes, Agassiz, H[enry] W. Beecher, [and] Wendell Phillips had not yet been superseded in western halls by vaudeville shows. There was a grand-opera house, and we had annually several weeks of opera or oper- atic concerts. I remember Patti singing there in a troupe when she was a small girl. There were two good theatres, the National and Wood's .... There were fair stock companies at both theatres, and they played good English comedies and melodrama.29 In a later passage, Conway added: "Our city was popularly styled 'the Queen of the West,' but a Paul might have named it the Athens of the West, for every 'new thing' found headquarters there."30 If on occasion the dignity |
22 OHIO HISTORY |
|
of a lyceum discussion were shattered by an overly passionate discussant addressing the chairman as "a jackass," or if a theatre performance were marred by a riot in which men slashed away with bowie-knives, the general character of intellectual doings was surprisingly sophisticated and exhibited a maturity which is nowhere to be seen in the "Porkopolis" of Mrs. Trollope's Domestic Manners. Space restrictions prevent a recitation and appraisal of the cultural achievements of individual personalities. Consider, for example, the possi- bilities for analysis offered by the names of such literati as: Drake, Harriet and Lyman Beecher, Calvin Stowe, Timothy Flint, James Hall; of such a musical genius as Stephen Collins Foster; of such educational figures as the McGuffey brothers, Joseph Ray and Catherine Beecher; of such scientific- minded men as Ormsby Mitchel, John Locke, and Daniel Drake; of such artists as Hiram Powers, Aaron Corwine, Thomas Buchanan Read, Miner K. Kellogg, and Robert S. Duncanson. Since printing has always been regarded as a significant adjunct of culture, the scope of this activity in pre-Civil War Cincinnati should be noted. Walter Sutton's work, The Western Book Trade, clearly establishes the fact that Cincinnati was the publishing capital of the West in the 1830-1861 period. An authority on Cincinnati imprints has written: "After 1821 no one knows just how many different books and pamphlets were published in Cincinnati. They were on almost any subject one can think of, from backroom humor to advanced philosophical speculation. It is difficult to say how many were written by local authors, but certainly the majority were."31 Charles Cist reported in 1841 that one to two million books were printed annually in |
CINCINNATI -- ATHENS OF THE WEST 23 |
|
Cincinnati.32 According to Professor Sutton, by 1850 only three other Amer- ican cities, New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, outranked the Queen City in the production of books.33 A large portion of this output was school textbooks, the most noted being the "Eclectic Series." McGuffey Readers by the millions were printed in Cincinnati and distributed throughout the West, and who can calculate the extent of influence of this work in the shaping of American civilization? By 1859 the W. B. Smith and Company, producers of the "Eclectic Series," ranked as the leading schoolbook publisher in the nation. Its slogan was "School Books for the Million." Over two million copies roared off its presses annually, and more than 500,000 students in the West were regular users of the "Eclectic Series." With pardonable pride, civic-booster Charles Cist wrote in 1859 that "the moral and educational influences of this establishment are of vast public importance, and radiate from Cincinnati, as a centre, all over the Union. Wherever children congregate, in their far-away schoolrooms, or by the happy firesides of home, sit down to learn their lessons out of Eclectic School Books, there this influence is active, and none may measure the untold good it is accomplishing."34 |
24 OHIO HISTORY
Literary works of diverse types were
also published in tremendous volume;
because of this, Cincinnati earned yet
another sobriquet suggesting regional
cultural dominance -- "Literary
Emporium of the West."35
A careful evaluation of the travel
accounts of perceptive visitors to Cin-
cinnati, both foreign and domestic,
produces the conclusion that the Queen
City was something more than a "Hog
Butcher For the West."36 Charles
Dickens, Captain Frederick Maryatt,
Basil Hall, Frederika Bremer, Harriet
Martineau, Francis and Theresa Pulszky
-- the accounts of these and other
discriminating Europeans give the lie to
Madame Trollope's description of
Cincinnati as a city "in want of
refinement." "For more reasons than one,"
Harriet Martineau wrote in 1838, "I
should prefer Cincinnati as a residence
to any other large city of the United
States."37 At least three other British
travelers of this era were frank to
confess that, if circumstance dictated their
immigration to America -- "which
God forbid," hastily amended one, -- they
would select Cincinnati as their place
of residence. After touring the United
States in 1859, a Russian industrialist
published a travel account in Moscow,
which was later serialized in the
journal Russian Messenger. He also found
Cincinnati to be the best in the West:
Cincinnati is not only the center of
western manufacturing -- it is
also head of its intellectual
development. There are three medical
colleges and a university there, not
counting other scholarly and peda-
gogical institutions. A public
observatory has been built on one of
the hills adjacent to the city by the
astronomer Mitchel and capital
contributed by wealthy citizens. . . .
Frequently a thousand people of
both sexes fill the lecture halls of
Cincinnati. Learned men who travel
from place to place give public lectures
here. . . . Farmers will come from
afar to hear competent explanations of
the wonders of nature. Such a
general participation in scientific
education is not to be found in the
mass of the European population, whose
lower ranks are ill-prepared for
such lectures. Cincinnati, moreover,
influences the West through its
papers, journals and various
periodicals. Here there are published thirty-
five English language newspapers and
around twelve in German.38
Domestic travelers were equally as
liberal in lavishing kind words upon
the Queen City during its "Golden
Age." Charles Fenno Hoffman, the cul-
tivated New York literary artist,
visited Cincinnati in 1835 and spoke
glowingly of its cultural and material character. He
attributed its sophisti-
cation to the large contingent of
refined Easterners who had settled there.
Wrote Hoffman:
The New-Yorker, for instance, plumes
himself upon placing a bottle
of Lynch's best before you; the
Philadelphian on having a maitre de
cuisine who adds to his abstruser
knowledge of the sacred mysteries the
cunning art of putting butter into as
tempting rolls as ever sported
their golden curl upon a Chestnut-street
breakfast table; the centre
table of the Bostonian is covered with
new publications fresh from the
American Athens; and you may be sure to
find the last new song of
Bayley on the music-stand of the fair
Baltimorean. I hardly need add,
that the picture of life and manners
here by an exceedingly clever English
caricaturist has about as much
vrai-semblance as if the beaux and
belles of Kamschatka had sat for the
portraits.39
CINCINNATI -- ATHENS OF THE WEST 25
Practically all of these observers
commented on the importance of the
hog in the Queen City's "way of
life," but unlike Mrs. Trollope, they did
not accentuate the negative and
eliminate the positive. If their accounts lack
the sprightly grace of Mrs. Trollope's
prose, they contain a more significant
ingredient -- namely, Truth.
A decade before Mrs. Trollope made her
historic appearance in Cincinnati,
Gorham Worth, an emigrant from the
Hudson Valley of New York, established
residence there. He arrived in the
southwest Ohio city with the customary
arrogant air of the Easterner and he
held the traditional preconceived notion
that Cincinnati must be one step removed
from savagry. Very quickly, Worth
experienced a transformation of
attitude. After attending a dinner at the
home of David Kilgour, a "First
Gentleman" of the city, Worth wrote:
Talk of the back woods! said I to
myself, after dining with Mr. Kilgour
-- by the beard of Jupiter, I have never
seen anything east of the
mountains to be compared to the luxuries
of that table! The costly
dinner service, -- the splendid cut
glass, -- the rich wines, -- the sumptuous
dinner itself! Talk to me no more of the
back woods, said I -- these
people live in the style of princes. I
did not, however, like my friend
St. Clair, after a great dinner at Findlay's,
mistake my longitude in the
dark, and walk off the bank into the
river! But I marched off most
heroically, over the stones, and through
the puddles, repeating to myself
at every step -- "talk to me no
more about the back woods!" -- "talk to
me no more about the back
woods!" always emphasizing the last two
words -- and before I reached home,
setting the line to music, and
repeating it, like the chorus of an old
ballad.40
While Worth's remarks referred to the
richness of material life, they also
could be applied to the intellectual and
cultural tone of the Queen City in
the pre-Civil War period. Historians
considering this aspect of Cincinnati's
history would do well to adhere to
Worth's dictum and talk no more about
the "back woods." Moreover,
they should talk less about hogs. This is not
to suggest that we should adopt modern
Russian historical values and sum-
marily inter Mrs. Trollope's
"Porkopolis" and resurrect the "Athens of the
West" in its place. Rather we
should recognize that pre-Civil War Cincinnati
was a two-headed coin, and it is time to
turn the coin over and take a look
at the hidden side.
THE AUTHOR: Louis Leonard Tucker
is Assistant Commissioner for State His-
tory in New York.
10 OHIO HISTORY
TO CINCINNATI*
by EDWARD A. M'LAUGHLIN
Fair is thy seat, in soft recumbent
rest
Beneath the grove-clad hills; whence
morning wings
The gentle breezes of the fragrant
west,
That kiss the surface of a thousand
springs:
Nature, her many-colored mantle
flings
Around thee, and adorns thee as a
bride;
While polished Art his gorgeous
tribute brings,
And dome and spire ascending far and
wide
Their pointed shadows dip in thy
Ohio's tide.
So fair in infancy -- O what shall be
Thy blooming prime, expanding like
the rose
In fragrant beauty; when a century
Hath passed upon thy birth, and time
bestows
The largess of a world that freely
throws
Her various tribute from remotest
shores,
To enrich the Western Rome: Here
shall repose
Science and art; and from time's
subtile ores --
Nature's unfolded page -- knowledge enrich her stores.
So sings the Muse as she with fancy's
eye,
Scans, from imagination's lofty
height,
Thy radiant beaming day -- where it doth lie
In the deep future; glowing on the
night
From whose dark womb, empires unveil
to light;
Mantled, and diademed, and sceptered
there,
Thou waitest but the advent of thy
flight,
When, like a royal Queen, stately and
fair,
The City of the West ascends the
regal chair.
* An excerpt from a poem found in a
collection of poems by Edward A. M'Laughlin
entitled Lovers of the Deep, which
was originally printed at Cincinnati in October 1841.
The 312-page volume was dedicated to
Nicholas Longworth. William T. Coggeshall, The
Poets and Poetry of the West (Columbus, 1860), 247-249.