Ohio History Journal

BOOK REVIEWS

 

Solon Robinson, Pioneer and Agriculturist; Selected Writings.

Edited by Herbert Anthony Kellar. Indiana Historical Col-

lections, XXI. (Indianapolis, Indiana, Historical Bureau,

1936. Vol. I: ⁵⁸2p. $2.00.)

Solon Robinson (1803-1880)  inaugurated his adult career by

founding a town and serving as an auctioneer in southern Indi-

ana. Subsequently, as a pioneer in northern Indiana, he formed

a Squatters' Union, ran a country store, sold real estate, engaged

actively in politics, established a reputation as a public speaker,

carried on experimental farming, promoted agricultural organiza-

tions, and contributed to farm periodicals, so identifying himself

with the welfare of his adopted state that he was widely known

as "Solon Robinson of Indiana." The picture of Robinson sup-

plied by one of his contemporaries, as seated before a table in his

log cabin, talking to a child seated on his knee, operating a churn

with his foot, and writing an article for the Cultivator at the same

time, is typical of the man.

A veritable Mark Twain of the rural world, Robinson quickly

achieved a national reputation because of his agricultural activi-

ties, writings, and travel articles. Leaving Indiana in 1851,

Robinson for a year edited The Plow, a farm periodical, in New

York City, became agricultural editor of the New York Tribune

from 1853 to 1868,  and retired to Florida to spend his last years,

writing for the Tribune, and engaging in other literary pursuits.

Despite a strenuous life he found time to write comprehen-

sive agricultural works, short stories, novels, and economic essays.

Of these, Facts for Farmers, an agricultural encyclopedia; Me-

won-i-toc, a tale of the frontier; A Dime a Day, and Hot Corn,

a collection of stories of slum life in New York, gained wide

popularity. In his travels between 1841 and 1851  Robinson vis-

ited the rural districts of nearly every state in the Union and por-

tions of Canada. More intimately acquainted with the rural scene

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BOOK REVIEWS                     375

than any man of his day, Robinson's acute observations on farmers

and planters, and their way of life, offer invaluable information

for the social and economic historian. His personality, ability,

vision, and achievements made him one of the interesting and in-

fluential figures in the United States in the nineteenth century.

Robinson, being one of the leading pioneers of Indiana, led

the Indiana Historical Bureau to decide on the publication of two

volumes devoted to his life and his writings.

Volume I contains a Contents-Calendar listing writings of

Robinson to and including 1845, an extended sketch of his life,

and selections from his writings between 1825 and 1845. Among

the latter may be mentioned early descriptions of northern In-

diana, the Constitution of the Squatters' Union, a romance, "The

Will," correspondence relating to his political, social, and economic

activities as a pioneer in Indiana; addresses and essays on agri-

cultural subjects, "Advice to Western Emigrants," articles on agri-

cultural organizations and accounts of travels in Indiana, Ken-

tucky, Ohio, Washington, D. C., Pennsylvania, Delaware, New

Jersey, New York, Illinois, Missouri, Tennessee, Mississippi, Mas-

sachusetts, and on the Great Lakes.

Volume II will be published later. Dr. Kellar, editor of the

volumes, is director of the McCormick Historical Association,

Chicago, Illinois.

 

 

The Tall Sycamore of the Wabash (Daniel Wolsey Voorhees).

By Leonard S. Kenworthy. (Boston, Bruce Humphries,

Inc., 1936. 155p. $2.00.)

The repeal of the Silver Purchase Act in 1893, a question as

fraught with economic and political implications as the repeal of

the Silver Purchase Law which Congress is wrestling with today,

is the subject of this book. The movement was led by Daniel W.

Voorhees, a dynamic Indiana politician and frontiersman. Per-

forming a political somersault, Voorhees led the repeal movement

in order to repay a political debt to Grover Cleveland. His posi-

tion as chairman of the powerful Senate Finance Committee,

placed him in a position to accomplish this feat, despite his pre-

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vious dramatic and virulent attacks upon the gold standard and

the bloated capitalists of Wall Street, whom he considered the

"forces of privilege and greed" of his day.

The comparison between the issues championed by Voorhees

and those confronting the nation today is striking. Kenworthy

points out that Voorhees was a "westerner fighting the vested in-

terests of the east; he was an inflationist pleading for the green-

back and silver dollar; he was a farmer upholding the farmers'

rights; he was a representative of the poorer classes fighting for

reductions and shifts in the tax burden; he was a radical senator

defending the south; he was a nationalist belligerently upholding

the flag of his country; he was a Jacksonian frontiersman attack-

ing the national banking system; he was a moderate protectionist

straddling the tariff issue."

With inflation talk rife, with the agricultural problem to the

fore as a result of the recent Supreme Court decision, with the

tariff the subject of bitter attacks upon the Administration, with

sectionalism rampant and class struggle mentioned on all sides,

with a growing nationalism feared and with taxation a keen

problem, this book is particularly timely and provocative.

With full justice to his colorful character but with painstaking

and scholarly care, the author has drawn a picture of this fasci-

nating figure who was "the product and embodiment of the rig-

orous, bold and boisterous frontier" and who "characterized mid-

dle-western Democracy from Stephen A. Douglas to William

Jennings Bryan." Kenworthy characterizes him as "impetuous,

partisan and narrow," but likewise, "generous and genial." He

was not a keen thinker nor an intellectual genius, he initiated no

new movements, but he defended many established ones. His

physique was commanding; his oratory stirring. In American

history he embodies the frontier politician who inherited his issues

from Andrew Jackson, did his utmost to solve them, and passed

on the residue to us.

That Kenworthy has not overestimated the importance of

Voorhees is attested by the fact that Claude Bowers has said that

"for thirty years he was never to lose the power to fascinate the

blase galleries of the House and Senate," while Meredith Nichol-

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BOOK REVIEWS                    377

son has called him the "greatest forensic orator of the Ohio Val-

ley in his day." The Nation declared that "his oratory had the

peculiarly American flavor which deserves preservation as a type

familiar in its day but now passing" and the New York Herald

Tribune pointed out upon his death that "almost alone among men

who fought the battles of Democracy in the sixties and seventies

. . . he retained into another generation his seat in Congress and

his unbroken hold on political power."

Born in a log cabin in Ohio in 1827, he was taken by covered

wagon to Indiana at two months of age. There he led the life of

a frontier lad, graduated from De Pauw University, rode the same

circuit with Lincoln in his early law practice, and rose to national

importance as a lawyer for one of John Brown's allies in the

Harper's Ferry expedition. Sent to Congress in 1861 as a north-

ern Democrat, he was tinged with Copperheadism and ousted in

1865 by a plot of the rabid reconstructionists who needed his vote

to override Johnson's vetoes. The death of Oliver P. Morton

sent him to the Senate in 1877 and the vote of Hoosierdom kept

him there until 1897, the year of his death. There he lashed

Wall Street and New England manufacturers, attacked protec-

tionists, pled for the South, fought for the silver and greenback

currency, and pressed the building of the Congressional Library.

Accused of helping to cause the panic of 1893, he succeeded to

the chairmanship of the Finance Committee and led the repeal

of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act.

The frontier is no longer a reality; it is a cherished tradition,

but in The Tall Sycamore of the Wabash, Leonard S. Kenworthy

makes it vivid to present-day readers. A graduate of Earlham

College in 1933, of Columbia University in 1934, and with further

graduate work at Harvard to his credit, he handles his material

in a scholarly way without sacrificing the dynamic character of

Daniel Voorhees. The use of Nast cartoons from Harper's

Weekly adds to the value of the book, as does the inclusion of a

bibliography and copious notes.

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