On the Cumberland Plateau: Thomas Hughes and the East Tennessee Rugby
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University of Tennessee, Knoxville TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 5-2014 Planting a "Community of Gentlemen and Ladies" on the Cumberland Plateau: Thomas Hughes and the East Tennessee Rugby Brenda Louise Alexander University of Tennessee - Knoxville, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Alexander, Brenda Louise, "Planting a "Community of Gentlemen and Ladies" on the Cumberland Plateau: Thomas Hughes and the East Tennessee Rugby. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2014. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/2674 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of TRACE: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Brenda Louise Alexander entitled "Planting a "Community of Gentlemen and Ladies" on the Cumberland Plateau: Thomas Hughes and the East Tennessee Rugby." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the equirr ements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in History. John Bohstedt, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Ernest F. Freeberg, Mark Hulsether, Vejas G. Liulevicius Accepted for the Council: Carolyn R. Hodges Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official studentecor r ds.) Planting a “Community of Gentlemen and Ladies” on the Cumberland Plateau: Thomas Hughes and the East Tennessee Rugby A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Brenda Louise Alexander May 2014 ABSTRACT On 5 October 1880, Thomas Hughes gave the “Opening Day” address at the Rugby colony on the Cumberland Plateau in rural East Tennessee. Hughes, a noted English author, philanthropist, and politician, was president of the Board of Aid to Land Ownership, Limited. This colonization company was formed in London in 1879 to assist the emigration of young well-to-do Britons who could not find suitable employment at home. Hughes envisioned the Board’s colony as a place where classically educated young men might engage in manual labor without losing status. He thought Rugby’s rugged environment would encourage these youth to reject the rampant materialism of the age and to live simply. Sending a stream of fine young Britons to the South was meant to strengthen the region and to heal divisions between the United States and Britain. Hughes’s fame ensured that he would be identified as the colony’s sole founder in the Rugby “myth” which was created in 1880. However, Hughes was not the colony’s only founder, nor did he play the central role in the colony that his fame or his role as president of the Board led everyone to expect. The Rugby “myth” perpetuated numerous misconceptions about the colony which this dissertation aims to refute. The Rugby colony never achieved Hughes’s noble goals. Nonetheless, this colonization project remains a visible reminder of intentions to establish a community where leading simple, godly lives would trump self-indulgence and self-promotion. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter 1, Introduction: The Rugby Myth 1-20 Chapter 2, Emigration and Colonization 21-52 Chapter 3, Boards of Aid to Land Ownership, 1877-1879 53-95 Chapter 4, Thomas Hughes 96-128 Chapter 5, Rugby, Tennessee, 1877-1880 129-154 Chapter 6, Thomas Hughes and Rugby, Tennessee,1880-1887 155-208 Chapter 7, Conclusion: The Rugby Reality 209-222 Bibliography 223-242 Vita 243 iii Chapter 1, Introduction: The Rugby Myth Was Tennessee’s Rugby colony a utopia or an idyllic rural community? Was the colonization project meant to be an experiment in Christian Socialism or a “naked land speculation”?1 Was the venture masterminded by a “genial man of letters” or by several self- interested individuals? 2 Was the colony to provide agricultural employment for young, well- educated English gentlemen, or was it to become the “great watering place of the South”? 3 Was the settlement doomed to failure because of its site or could strong, on-site leadership have created a thriving community? The answer to these questions is primarily “None of the above.” In particular, the colony was neither a utopia nor an experiment in Christian Socialism. Rugby’s story is more complex, more interesting, and more instructive. This dissertation is the first book- length treatment of the birth and childhood of “Tennessee’s Victorian Village.” 4 Explaining why the settlement was established and why it failed to become a sturdy community is the purpose of this work. Colonies have always been a compelling drama, even myth, of the American experience. Perry Miller expressed it well with his title: Errand into the Wilderness. The core myth depicts courageous pioneers carrying moral and material resources into the “wilderness” in order to realize personal dreams of leaving behind “Old World corruption” while making an honest fortune by hard work in the “New World.” In the process these pioneers were often creating communities that would be superior because founded on moral ideals, be it Pilgrim 1“Mr. Hughes’s Colony,” The New York Times , 12 July 1881. 2Ibid. 3Franklin W. Smith, Organization, Objects and Measures[;] Description of the Estate on the Plateau of East Tennessee[;] Geological Section of the Plateau or Tableland (Boston: The Board of Aid to Land Ownership, Limited, 1880), 16. 4Doug and Dawn Brachey, Tennessee’s Victorian Village (Brentwood, Tennessee: JM Productions, 1987). 1 Massachusetts, Catholic Maryland, or Cavalier Virginia which might then flourish because of spiritual genius. Rugby, Tennessee fits into this myth. In fact, Rugby generated its own myth, obscuring the real story about its establishment and early years. The dramatic demographic and geographic changes in the United States in the 1800s are one of the major themes of American history. As the land mass of the new nation expanded from sea to shining sea, the population exploded from five million in 1800 to seventy-six million by the end of the nineteenth century. European immigrants were responsible for much of this dramatic increase. Six million of the ten million Britons who emigrated at this time made the United States their new home. Two centuries earlier, English colonists had successfully established a string of settlements along the eastern coast of North America. By contrast, the nineteenth-century “host of colonies of various kinds that the English attempted to found in the United States…collapsed within a short time.” 5 A careful study of one of these colonies, Rugby in rural East Tennessee, makes one aware of how much capable leadership, serious planning and hard work, and resilient settlers contributed to the success of a colony. The majority of nineteenth-century British emigrants were from the working classes of a highly class-conscious society where those of lowly birth were destined to lives of deference and difficulties. However, “as opportunities for gentlemen diminished at home,” upper-class Britons also looked to America, especially to the American west, for employment as well as enjoyment. 6 Many of these Britons, emigrating as individuals or in nuclear families, took their chances of finding both lucrative employment and supportive communities in fast-growing and rapidly- changing America. Some were as disappointed as Martin Chuzzlewit, the central character in 5Charlotte Erickson, Leaving England: Essays on British Emigration in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 26. 6David Cannadine, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 429. 2 Charles Dickens’s novel, The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit . Unfortunately for Chuzzlewit, his American adventure was a time of peril rather than pleasure. Even limited contacts with Americans convinced Chuzzlewit that they were “universally venal” because of their rapacious greed and determined pursuit of “money or status.” 7 Because Chuzzlewit emigrated from England in hopes of making his fortune, he was a tempting target for land speculators who easily exploited his eagerness to prosper. He purchased property in Eden, a “new settlement on the banks of the Mississippi” that existed only in the imaginative mind, and on the bogus map, of a persuasive real estate agent. 8 Chuzzlewit was dismayed when he realized that he and his faithful traveling companion had been so decisively duped. Both men hurried home to an England which seemed a “real paradise” after their encounters with “America the hypocritical and avaricious.” 9 Based upon Dickens’s own “disillusioning experiences” during his first visit to America in 1842, the novel is merciless in its condemnation of the “pursuit of dollars, the absence of culture and reading habits, American ineptitude for social pleasure and censorship of unpopular ideas.” 10 In addition to mining his own unpleasant memories for material with which to construct his savage satire, Dickens also based his novel “extensively on the copious advice literature directed towards poor emigrants seeking a more viable level of subsistence in the United States in the 1830s and 1840s----books like Calvin Colton’s Manual for Emigrants to America (1832) and The British Mechanic’s and Labourer’s Hand Book and True Guide to the 7Patricia Ingham, “Introduction,” in The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit (London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1999), xviii. 8Malcolm Bradbury, Dangerous Pilgrimages: Trans-Atlantic Mythologies and the Novel (London; Secker and Warburg, 1995), 109. 9Patricia Ingham, “Introduction,” in The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit , xxi. The novel was initially serialized in 1843-1844.