The Andrew Wylie Family Letters

Affectionately Yours The Andrew Wylie Family Letters Volume I 1828 - 1859 Third Edition Affectionately Yours The Andrew Wylie Family Letters Volume I 1828 - 1859 Third Edition 2011 Edited by Jo Burgess Wylie House Museum A department of the Indiana University Libraries 317 E. 2nd St. Bloomington, Indiana 47401 THE ANDREW WYLIE FAMILY LETTERS 1829 - 1859 Andrew Wylie 1789 - 1851 Margaret Ritchie Wylie 1891 - 1859 CONTENTS Preface iii Introduction v The Letters 1829 1 1835 3 1837 5 1839 7 1840 9 1842 12 1843 18 1845 20 1846 24 1847 32 1848 43 1849 52 1850 63 1851 89 1852 120 1853 136 1854 153 1855 176 1856 196 1857 200 1858 207 1859 228 Appendices A. Genealogical charts 254 B. Samples of handwriting from letters 256 C. Chronology of selected events, 1829 - 1859 261 D. Glossary of Names 265 Index 279 i PREFACE THIRD EDITION The first edition of this publication (1995) was made possible by an Indiana Heritage Re- search Grant from the Indiana Historical Society and the Indiana Humanities Council. Elaine Herold, a Wylie House Museum volunteer was the primary editor and Bonnie Williams, then Cu- rator of the Museum, was the project director. They were assisted by several other volunteers. The second edition, published in 2002 saw the addition of an index and a few other minor changes. Since that time, the Museum has acquired a collection of some 100 letters from the Andrew Wylie family, passed down from his son, Andrew Wylie (1814-1905), and many hundreds of letters from the Theophilus A. Wylie family that were passed down from his daughter Louisa Wylie Boisen. This third edition of Affectionately Yours, Volumes I and II includes most of the letters from the former and a few from the latter collection. We have not standardized the spelling, capitalization, or punctuation because the original editors chose not to do that, feeling it added to the character of the letters to leave them as written. This may make it challenging for today’s readers, but we hope you will understand that 19th century correspondents often spelled phonetically, threw in punctuation when and where they thought of it or left it out altogether, and saved time and paper by ab- breviating many words. We have included in the Appendices a few images of actual letters so that you can see some of the original handwriting. The letters in this first volume range from 1829, the year Andrew Wylie (1789 - 1851) moved with his wife Margaret and their growing family from Washington County, Pennsylvania to Bloomington, Indiana, through 1859, the year that Margaret passed away. The twelve Wylie children scattered to many parts of the country and even to foreign lands as they grew up and married. These letters between those grown children and their father give us insight to both the family and the times. How fortunate it is that so many were preserved and handed down. The original manuscripts are housed in the Indiana University Archives and at Wylie House Museum. Many of them have now been scanned for preservation purposes and are available online at http:// dlib.indiana.edu/collections/findingaids/ We invite you to read Volume II of the Wylie Family Letters (1860 - 1918) and to visit Wylie House Museum at the corner of Second and Lincoln Streets in Bloomington, Indiana. For more information: 812-855-6224; [email protected]; http://www.iub.edu/~libwylie ii iii INTRODUCTION Andrew Wylie, the first president of Indiana University, usually is remembered for his public, academic achievements. But the letters that he and members of his family wrote reveal a different record ― an account of family, social, and economic life in early Indiana. Indeed, this record suggests that the Wylies and their contemporaries drew no rigid boundaries between “public” and “private”; private concerns ― the extravagance of a daughter-in-law, the health of a son, the daily trials of life in what was still a “frontier” state ― loom as large in the Wylie correspondence as the public responsibilities of maintaining a fledgling university.1 The letters that follow provide an exceptionally accessible and uniquely personal portrait of life in antebellum America, a world far removed from our own. In many respects, this world is easy to romanticize. At a time when “traditional” values seem everywhere under siege, the Wylies’ correspondence reveals people who firmly embraced their religious faith, placed primary importance on family, and self-consciously created a network of correspondence that linked together a far-flung circle of kin. Andrew Wylie emerges as a loving husband and devoted father ― a patriarch to be sure, but one whose authority was tempered by considerable empathy and affection. But the Wylies’ world also was a world of uncertainty, even danger. Their letters speak of the difficulties of communication and travel; bad roads (a problem in much of the early nineteenth- century United States, but one that was particularly acute in less settled regions) might delay long awaited family reunions; news of distant family and friends might take weeks, even months, to arrive. More significant was the precariousness of life itself. Infant and child mortality remained high; epidemics of measles and scarlet fever took their toll. Adults, as the Wylie correspondence makes clear, remained vulnerable to outbreaks of cholera, typhoid, and unspecified “fevers.” No cure existed for “consumption” or tuberculosis, one of the nineteenth-century’s most virulent killers; Andrew Wylie’s son John eventually would succumb to the disease.2 The relative frequency of such events did not make them any less painful for those who experienced them. Andrew Wylie worried constantly about his John’s condition, one sorrow of many. Three of the elder Wylie’s sons ― William, Craig, and Samuel ― died before he did (John survived him by nearly four years), and he took Samuel’s death especially hard. “My heart sinks,” he wrote to his wife, Margaret, upon learning of “Sam’s” impending demise. “So will yours when you read what I can hardly write. God support us under this heavy stroke. The Lord gave & he is about to take away: in all events blessed be the name of the Lord.”3 For Wylie, as for other nineteenth-century Americans, religious faith provided a crucial source of comfort, but it did not entirely assuage his grief. After Samuel’s death, he began to “feel the weight of years” and to “eat not with the relish I once enjoyed.”4 Uncertainty was not confined to matters of health. Small-town life in Bloomington, Indiana exhibited few of the dramatic changes that altered the landscape of antebellum America ― the erection of huge textile mills at Waltham and Lowell, Massachusetts, the transformation of once- proud artisans and yeomen farmers into semi-skilled wage laborers. But the Wylie correspondence provides evidence of subtle but equally significant transformations. A minister and an academic, Andrew Wylie could expect a peripatetic career, but the exigencies of an increasingly urban and commercial economy -- an economy that offered new opportunities both for success and for failure – required his sons to pursue their vocations away from Bloomington, even outside the state. If the Wylies’ letters reveal close-knit family ties, their very existence demonstrates the physical distance iv v between family members. 1 The correspondence reprinted here includes letters written by several members of the Wylie family and What historians and social scientists call “geographical mobility” did not necessarily bring their friends. This essay focuses on correspondence between Andrew Wylie and his son John, because success; young men who left home to seek their fortunes might be disappointed. Hampered by the latter provides an especially rich source for understanding the issues and tensions that animated nineteenth-century American society. illness and an inability to attract a reliable clientele, John Wylie’s attempts to establish a medical practice met with resounding failure, despite his father’s relatively generous financial assistance. 2 See Jack Larkin, The Reshaping of Everyday Life, 1790 – 1840 (New York: Harper, 1998), esp. 72-85; “My life has not been a happy one,” he wrote the latter in 1849. “Circumstances have not conspired and John Mack Faragher, Sugar Creek: Life on the Illinois Prairie (New Haven: Yale University Press, to wed me much to the world ― Prosperity hath not shown upon me nor lifted me up…”5 John’s 1986), esp. 88-95. troubles pale in comparison to the debilitating conditions and declining standards of living faced 3 Andrew Wylie to Margaret Wylie, December ? 1850. by many members of America’s emerging working classes, but they demonstrate that middle-class status ― a status increasingly synonymous with “white-collar” and “professional” occupations ― 4 Andrew Wylie to John Hosea Wylie, January 4, 1851. was neither easily achieved nor maintained.6 Like many of his contemporaries, John remained on the margins of middle-class existence, confronting both the ever-present possibility of downward 5 John Hosea Wylie to Andrew Wylie, June 15, 1849. mobility and the personal reproach that greeted “failures” in a culture that placed responsibility for 6 See, for example, Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City & the Rise of the American Working- success squarely on the shoulders of individuals. Class, 1788-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), esp. 107-142; and Stuart Blumin, The Andrew Wylie’s concerns about his daughter-in-law Caroline’s “extravagance” reveal anxieties Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (Cambridge: of a different sort. In fearing that her “expensive & shewy ways of life” would bankrupt his son Cambridge University Press, 1989, esp. 66-107. Andrew, economically and spiritually, Wylie expressed views that many of his contemporaries would have seconded.

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