The Andrew Wylie Family Letters
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Affectionately Yours The Andrew Wylie Family Letters Volume II 1860 - 1918 Third Edition Affectionately Yours The Andrew Wylie Family Letters Volume 2 1860-1918 Third Edition 2012 Edited by Jo Burgess Wylie House Museum A department of the Indiana University Libraries Indiana University, 317 E. 2nd Street Bloomington, Indiana 47401 Andrew Wylie 1789 - 1851 Margaret Ritchie Wylie 1891 - 1859 THE ANDREW WYLIE FAMILY LETTERS 1860-1918 CONTENTS Preface iii Introduction v Chronology of Selected Events viii The Letters 1860 1 1861 14 1862 38 1863 52 1864 62 1865 70 1866 87 1867 106 1868 118 1869 122 1870 129 1871 132 1872 140 1878 149 1879 151 1881 153 1882 154 1883 159 1886 168 1887 170 1918 171 Appendices A. Genealogical charts The Andrew and Margaret Wylie Family 174 Ritchie Family 175 The Martin Family 176 C. “Two Friends, Pals in Boyhood, Died as Comrades in Civil War” 177 D. The Water Cure 180 Glossary of Names 183 i ii .PREFACE THIRD EDITION The first edition of this publication (1995) was made possible by an Indiana Heritage Research 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 Curator of the Museum, was the project director. They were assisted by several other volunteers, including Kara Rogers, Jessica Wimer, and Charles Geis. The second edition, published in 2002 included a few 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 many 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 abbreviating many words. We have included in the Appendices of Volume I a few images of actual letters so that you can see some of the original handwriting. The letters in this second volume range from 1860, the year after Margaret Wylie passed away through 1918 and chronicle the lives of the second generation, the eight children who survived both their parents. Though often widely scattered geographically, the bonds of famil- ial affection ensured a steady stream of correspondence that kept the siblings in touch with one another. How fortunate it is that so many letters were preserved and handed down. The original manuscripts are mostly housed in the Indiana University Archives and at Wylie House Museum; a few are in the hands of private collectors. 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 I of the Wylie Family Letters (1828 - 1859) as well as this volume and to visit Wylie House Museum at the corner of Second and Lincoln Streets in Bloom- ington, Indiana. For more information: 812-855-6224; [email protected]; http://www.iub. edu/~libwylie Jo Burgess Director, Wylie House Museum 2012 iii iv INTRODUCTION With this second volume of correspondence, the story of the family of Andrew and Margaret Ritchie Wylie extends from the Civil War into the twentieth century. In many ways, the context of their lives will be familiar to readers of the first volume of letters. For all of the Wylies’ new experiences and achievements, their world still is a precarious one that their writing seeks to articulate and make more stable. They struggle for success in work and in the raising of children. Great forces such as disease and the will of God are felt to create the very texture of their private worlds. And yet there are changes in the lives of the Wylies that belong to this particular era. Most of the letters collected here were written before 1875, and the Civil War echoes through many of them. Four years of a war that one historian has described as American’s effort “to make a successful society by force”1 seem not at all glorious in the deaths of two young Wylie men (from disease) early in the conflict. The war broke upon Americans’ daily lives with shocking force, creating both possibility and despair. Anderson Wylie, preaching the word of God, wrote eagerly of the war in 1861 as bringing a suitably just end to slavery; like many Americans, he welcomed a national purging. A year later he still was hoping for the same thing, but he was shaken by the fact that his own community was divided over the war. His livelihood was threatened, and he had a dark foreboding that the war was not only about slavery but also about God “teaching us what we gain by compromising with Sin.”2 Indeed, there was a range of opinion about the war even among the Wylies themselves. To Margaret Wylie Martin, living in Texas, the slaves seemed happy enough in their servitude, and, like many southerners, she believed that if “the Northern people could take Scriptural and reasonable views upon the subject of slavery” then “Sweet peace would again smile upon our homes and country.”3 These letters also brilliantly reveal how the Civil War resolved some things, but not the disparate memories of it; the war persisted in politics—local and national—for many decades. Two years after the war ended, Margaret, now returned to Indiana, believed that her husband Samuel had lost a possible position because people believed him to be “a rebel”4 and, given her own history, the meaning of her terse postscript “Hurrah for Grant”5 in 1872 is ambiguous at best. As was the case for many other American families during this period, the Wylie’s coming to maturity did not mean geographical stability. If anything, more Americans were on the move after 1860 than before. Although Andrew located in Washington, D.C., and Elizabeth spent these years in Bloomington, other Wylies seem perpetually on the move. They were part of an enormous national growth as Americans fully occupied a continent, experimented with larger national government, a larger marketplace, and the beginnings of a truly national popular culture. Amid this change, communities like Bloomington, and smaller places still, were not necessarily stable settlements. Margaret and her family circulated through an astonishing number of places during the time covered by these letters--from Texas to Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, and Missouri- -so that even in 1872 she was able to write, “I am learning in whatsoever sort of house…to be content.”6 Anderson, too, moved many times in pursuit of his ministerial career (a calling in many ways diminished in stature since mid-century), gaining a taste of big city life as well. But whatever their travels and dislocations, the Wylies’ letters remind us that strong forces v for stability still were at work in this changing nation. It is striking, for instance, to witness the persistent intellectual force of Protestant Christianity running throughout these letters, a reminder of how the Wylies’ world in this regard remained comparatively homogenous even in the face of the great changes they endured. A Biblical cosmology shaped so much of what they saw in their world. It explained private sorrows—a child’s death, the loss of a spouse. It also supplied the language of social critique. One of the Wylies’ correspondents who deplored the growing national frenzy for “money & power” spoke the language of many Americans when she summoned up images not of corporate growth or political scandal, but images of “The temples of Mammon & Moloch.” The worst form of corruption, for late-nineteenth-century Americans, still was moral corruption.7 Religious faith supplied a personal, emotional language, too, for the Wylies and many Americans like them. Their letters are, after all, most movingly read as a conversation among family members whose loves and tensions give us a sense of intimate life in a world similar but different from our own. So it is wonderful to read the long series of letters between Anderson and Elizabeth in which Anderson’s certainty about these things. And yet, as their correspondence deepened, Anderson admitted to a likeness between them, and allowed that it was not so easy for him to shake off the temporal world either: “I have just those tendencies” for unbelief, he wrote to her about her own doubts. “But by the help of God I do not mean ever to be borne down by anything earthly.”8 Anderson’s letters (and through his, Elizabeth’s, which unfortunately are few in number) are among the most compelling here for the way they stitched the family together. At first inclined to be a bit cool and didactic, Anderson becomes warmer and easier over the years as he discovers the satisfactions of family life and his love for his children. He talks about God, but also about his easy chair and his garden; and like nearly all of the Wylie offspring, he wonders whether brother Redick will ever be married. Margaret, too, emerges clearly through her correspondence, never more so than when she writes to an official of the Mission Board to say that, no matter what her husband has written, she does not intend to agree to another mission to China.