Old Corydon by CHARLESMOORES, Indianapolis, Member of the State His- Torical Commission

Old Corydon By CHARLESMOORES, Indianapolis, Member of the State His- torical Commission The sentimentalist is wont to personify a commonwealth as a broad-shouldered, underclad young woman lifting a torch or flourishing a sword or emptying a cornucopia. She com- mands deference because in her Amasonian presence-like that of our latter-day Golduh-no mere man would dare cross her purposes. Her monster physique offers no sug- gestion of a possible maternity, the normal function of a state, nor any hint of a useful occupation-although a state really ought to have something to do. In the effort to set before you the picture of Indiana’s birthplace I would personify our State, not as torchbearer, sword swinger or cornucopia-emptier, but as the mother of us all, who, at the close oi her first century, is still young and strong aad wise and fit to bear and rear and train her children for a place among America’s idealists. This year Indiana is struggling after a memory of her infancy. Like one who is world-weary she finds it hard to c0mmand.a clear vision of the place where she was born. Many a loyal Hoosier shamefacedly confesses his ignorance of the capital of a hundred years ago and wonders where Corydon is and what it is like. Even the cultivated non- classicist pronounces it Corydon and the railway conductor calls it Croydon. Where William Henry Harrison and John Tipton and Isaac Blackford and many a comrade and friend of Wash- ington used to gather and James Monroe and Andrew Jack- son received a royal hospitality, and while men were still talking of. Napoleon, Indiana’s tiny capital rested in village simplicity among sheltering elms and nestling hills. To be great it is not necessary to be big. Richard Hard- ing Davis was bigger than Robert Louis Stevenson, and Moores: Old Corydon 21 Shafter outweighed Napoleon. In the days when American civilization was in the making, more leaders gravitated to- ward Springfield and Richmond than ever enjoyed the hospitality of Kansas City or Chicago. In Corydon the capital there were only a score who had reached the age of forty- five. In the decade of its primacy-from 1813 to 1824-the group who came there year after year to lay the foundations for a commonwealth were pioneers of a distinctive type. They were not unlettered men to whom learning had been denied, nor brawlers escaping the restraints of civilization, nor as in the Kentucky of 1800 or the Arizona of 1900, were they rebels against stable government who believed in a liquid and dilute constitution. On the contrary, many of them were missionaries of education and of political idealism who had come to Indiana to create a commonwealth with all the stability which the years of revolution and of consti- tutional reaction had made them covet so earnestly. At the same time they hoped to realize more completely than in the elder east the democracy of which Jefferson was the fore- runner and Jackson the apostle. To them equality under a stable government was a passion and the exclusion of human slavery a religion. The Corydon of a hundred years ago was a protest against commercialism. It had no metropolitan ambitions like Madi- son. It was not cosmopolitan like Vincennes. It had no river trade, no Indian trade, no land speculators. It was an easy-going, old-fashioned Virginia village, with an ambi- tion to be decent and to cultivate the social spirit. Its older houses were log cabins, but it had some generous brick colonial residences, which still stand. Democracy had be- come a social ideal everywhere. The man in the big colonial house and the man in the log cabin neither patronized nor toadied. Labor was not self-assertive as it is today, for everybody labored. Wealth signified little, for the only com- modity it could buy was land, and the more land a man had the more labor he had to provide. Where slavery was for- bidden and labor scarce, men coveted large land-holdings about as much as a tired housewife longs for a big house with many rooms and no servants. 22 Indiana Magazine of History One way to judge the character of a town is by its representative men. Old Corydon as a social study calls for a broader view, for the student must consider the things done there and the men who did them; those whose labor drew them there from time to time as well as those to whom Cory- don was home. Of the men who lived in Corydon while it was Indiana’s capital, Dennis Pennington, John Tipton, Spier Spencer, and Isaac Blackford were probably the leaders, and of those whose duties brought them there often and kept them there, mention may be made of Governors William Henry Harrison, Jonathan Jennings, and William Hendricks, Treas- urer Samuel Merrill, Secretary of State Robert A. New, and Judges Benjamin Parke, James Scott, and John Johnson. Some of these were men of state-wide fame, but the one who is always identified in history and tradition with the fate and fortune of Harrison county is Dennis Pennington; from the time he came with the family of Daniel Boone and other adventure hunters at the dawn of the nineteenth century to open the wilderness and wrest it from the treacherous Indian, until long after his heroic fight to prevent the removal of the capital to Indianapolis he was Harrison county’s trusted and devoted champion. His portrait done in oil hangs in the Representatives’ Hall in the old capitol to show how far character can surpass human beauty. Dennis Pennington’s spelling was even more unconven- tional than Washington’s. He gained his culture by the slow process of social attrition. He was too busy with the affairs of men to read books. He held closely and consciously to his heart the ideals of the community and from the earliest days threw the weight of no inconsiderable influence into the anti-slavery fight, warning a friend in 1815: “Let us be on our guard when our convention men are chosen that they be men opposed to slavery.” Dennis Pennington is remembered because he built the cutest little State house that was not hatched from an easter egg or set up to play dolls in; so ugly that men love to look at it. For nearly a generation he was a legislative leader, representing Corydon and serving as speaker in the Terri- torial legislature of 1810, and serving again in the Consti- tutional Convention of 1816, in thirteen sessions of the State Moores: Old Corydon 23 Senate and in five sessions of the House. Such scant records as are preserved of the early legislatures sh,ow that “Uncle Dennis” as he was called gave to the lawmaking in which he bore so conspicuous a part an unusual degree of horse sense and old-fashioned honesty. As representative of a river county he can not be blamed for trying to put off the inevitable eclipse of Corydon, and the removal of the capital, for it took longer then to travel from the river civilization to the semi-barbarism of Indianapolis than it requires now to go from Indianapolis to Constantinople, and the journey was fraught with graver dangers than those of floating mines or treacherous submarines. A brave fight he waged each win- ter, when the General Assembly took up its regular program of trying to lower the cost. of boarding the legislators by threatening to adjourn to some cheaper town. No Hansard has preserved for us Uncle Dennis’ blunt eloquence when he made his brave defense of the Corydon cuisine as against the cheap labor of Charleston’s cooks. The danger was so real that even the Corydon Zndiana Gazette of December 14, 1820, whose motto was “Willing to praise but not afraid to blame,” and which discussed only questions of great import, came out December 14, 1820, boldly with this editorial utterance: The old f:inious resolution to remove the legishture to Charleston or some other place where it is im:igined members can get boarding lower than Corxdon is going the fornxil rounds of legislation, when it is under- stood that no more is intended by it than to beat down the prices of boarding. This nefarious measure was opposed by Simon Yandes of Marion and supported by the jurist Joseph Holman, the bloodthirsty fighter John Tipton, and the financier Samuel Merrill of Switzerland county. The price of board was fixed by law of the county commissioners at 371/2 cents for break- fast or dinner, 25 cents for supper, and lodging 12% cents, with whiskey at 371/2 cents a quart. Whether legislative agitation brought it down, we shall never know, but the vote of 11 ayes to 16 noes shows that Corydon’s cohorts won the skirmish under Dennis Pennington’s leadership. Samuel Merrill’s account of the village in the Zndiana Gazateer for 1849 mentions the stone courthouse built by 24 Indiana Magazine of History the Speaker of the House of Representatives-and a better man the State never had-who it was said was often called from the hammer and trowel to the chair: The other buildings there, uot exceediug one hundred in number, were either cabius or of hewn logs. As the town was but little visited except during the sessious of the legislature, there wits then often a luge crowd, while the Ineiii!s of :iccomuiodation were not in proportion.

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