Alexander County IL Archives History - Books .....Chapter XXII The American Notes 1910 ************************************************ Copyright. All rights reserved. http://www.usgwarchives.net/copyright.htm http://www.usgwarchives.net/il/ilfiles.htm ************************************************ File contributed for use in USGenWeb Archives by: Joy Fisher sdgenweb@yahoo.com September 19, 2007, 10:26 pm Book Title: A History Of The City Of Cairo Illiniois CHAPTER XXII THE AMERICAN NOTES CHARLES DICKENS landed at Boston the 21st of January, 1842, and returned home from New York about the same date in the following June. He was, therefore, in the United States five months. He came in a steamer and returned in a sailing vessel. His reception at Boston was altogether a hearty one. The banquet given him at New York on the eve of his departure was all that he and his closest friends could have hoped for. He came to lecture and to stimulate the sale of his books, but chiefly in the interest of international copyright. His early letters home were friendly enough; but by the time he left Baltimore for his western trip he had found it difficult and probably impossible to arouse in the public mind the interest he felt in copyright matters, and the tone of his letters changed to accord with his feeling of disappointment. His unfavorable impressions of the country deepened as he dwelt on the obstinacy of the American people; and to this is due, largely, the spirit the notes everywhere manifest. It was to be expected, of course, that he would on his return home write a book—an account of his experiences and impressions while in the United States; but it was not supposed that the volume would be filled with sneers and caricatures. In a letter to Macready, written at Baltimore March 22nd, he named the cities he expected to visit on his western trip. He was to go from Baltimore to Harrisburg, and thence by canal and railroad to Pittsburg, thence down the Ohio to Cincinnati and Louisville, and to the Mississippi, up the same to St. Louis, over the prairies to Chicago, and thence eastward, through Canada, to New York. He left Pittsburg on the Messenger April 1st, Cincinnati on the Pike April 6th, Louisville on the Fulton April 7th and reached Cairo the forenoon of Saturday, April 9th. He arrived at St. Louis Sunday evening, April 10th, at about ten o'clock. He was not detained at Cairo by low water or by ice. He was here but an hour or two. His account of what he saw here was colored much more by his feelings than by his vision. There were then 1500 to 2000 people here. A million and a quarter dollars of English money had been spent in the purchase of lands and the making of improvements, all of which was then beginning to be lost by the failure, November 23, 1840, of his countrymen, John Wright & Company, Bankers, of Henrietta Street, Covent Garden, London. The Cairo improvements had been planned by Holbrook and his associates on the faith and belief that Wright & Company would furnish all the means necessary to make their enterprise a success. The bonds which Wright & Company handled were secured by a trust deed to the New York Life Insurance & Trust Company on all the lands of the company here between the two rivers. But other London financiers, disliking Wright & Company's handling of American securities, turned against them, broke them down entirely and forced them into bankruptcy and out of business; and with their retirement went down also the Cairo enterprise. Dickens kept along with the times too closely to be ignorant of these facts when he reached Cairo. The American publishers were, he said, growing rich on the sale of his books and he getting nothing, and the sight of Cairo only brought to mind the fact that many other Englishmen had fared badly in this country. He was in such temper of mind that nothing was needed to stimulate to unfriendly and unjust criticism. The following letter of May 1, 1842, to Henry Austin, his brother-in-law, will show his degree of ill humor when here April 9th,—three weeks before the letter was written. "Is it not a horrible thing that scoundrel booksellers should grow rich here from publishing books, the authors of which do not reap one farthing from their issue by scores of thousands; and that every vile blackguard and detestable newspaper, so filthy and bestial that no honest man would admit one into his house for a scullery doormat, should be able to publish those same writings side by side, cheek by jowl, with the coarsest and most obscene companions, with which they must become connected, in course of time in people's minds? Is it tolerable that besides being robbed and rifled an author should be forced to appear in any form, in any vulgar dress, in any atrocious company; that he should have no choice of his audience, no control over his own distorted text, and that he should be compelled to jostle out of the course the best men in this country, who only ask to live by writings? I vow before high Heaven that my blood so boils at these enormities that when I speak about them, I seem to grow twenty feet high, and to swell out in proportion. 'Robbers that ye are,' I think to myself when I get upon my legs, 'here goes.' " The following are extracts from the Notes: "Nor was the scenery, as we approached the junction of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, at all inspiriting in its influence. The trees were stunted in their growth; the banks were low and flat; the settlements and log cabins fewer in number; their inhabitants more wan and wretched than any we had encountered yet. No songs of birds were in the air, no pleasant scents, no moving lights and shadows from swift passing clouds. Hour after hour, the changeless glare of the hot, unwinking sky, shone upon the same monotonous objects. Hour after hour, the river rolled along, as wearily and slowly as the time itself. "At length, upon the morning of the third day, we arrived at a spot so much more desolate than any we had yet beheld, that the forlornest places we had passed, were, in comparison with it, full of interest. At the junction of the two rivers, on ground so flat and low and marshy, that at certain seasons of the year it is inundated to the house-tops, lies a breeding-place of fever, ague, and death; vaunted in England as a mine of Golden Hope, and speculated in, on the faith of monstrous representations, to many people's ruin. A dismal swamp, on which the half-built houses rot away; cleared here and there for the space of a few yards; and teeming, then, with rank unwholesome vegetation, in whose baleful shade the wretched wanderers who are tempted hither, droop, and die, and lay their bones; the hateful Mississippi circling and eddying before it, and turning off upon its southern course a slimy monster hideous to behold; a hotbed of disease, an ugly sepulchre, a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise; a place without one single quality, in earth or air or water, to commend it; such is this dismal Cairo. "But what words shall describe the Mississippi great father of rivers, who (praise be to Heaven) has no young children like him! An enormous ditch, sometimes two or three miles wide, running liquid mud, six miles an hour; its strong and frothy current choked and obstructed everywhere by huge logs and whole forest trees; now twining themselves together in great rafts, from the interstices of which a sedgy lazy foam works up, to float upon the water's top; now rolling past like monstrous bodies, their tangled roots showing like matted hair ; now glancing singly by like giant leeches; and now writhing round and round in the vortex of some small whirlpool like wounded snakes. The banks low, the trees dwarfish, the marshes swarming with frogs, the wretched cabins few and far apart, their inmates hollow-cheeked and pale, the weather very hot, mosquitoes penetrating into every crack and crevice of the boat, mud and slime on everything; nothing pleasant in its aspect, but the harmless lightning which flickers every night upon the dark horizon. "For two days we toiled up this foul stream, striking constantly against the floating timber, or stopping to avoid those more dangerous obstacles, the snags, or sawyers, which are the hidden trunks of trees that have their roots below the tide. When the nights are very dark, the look-out stationed in the head of the boat, knows by the ripple of the water if any great impediment be near at hand, and rings a bell beside him, which is the signal for the engine to be stopped; but always in the night this bell has work to do, and after every ring, there comes a blow which renders it no easy matter to remain in bed." Dickens after his arrival at St. Louis decided to return the way he came, at least as far as Cincinnati, and journey thence to Sandusky and thence into Canada, but before doing so, he went over to Belleville, which he described with much the same temper and language as that shown and used about Cairo. He went as far as Lebanon, in St. Clair County, to get a better view of the prairies. From Lebanon he returned to St. Louis and there took the same steamboat, the Fulton, for Cincinnati. Passing Cairo on his return trip he gave it a parting shot in these miasmatic words: "In good time next morning, however, we came again in sight of the detestable morass called Cairo; and stopping there took in wood, lay alongside a barge, whose starting timbers scarcely held together. It was moored to the bank, and on its side was painted 'Coffee House'; that being, I suppose, the floating paradise to which the people fly for shelter when they lose their houses for a month or two beneath the hideous waters of the Mississippi. But looking southward from this point, we had the satisfaction of seeing that intolerable river dragging its slimy length and ugly freight abruptly off towards New Orleans; and passing a yellow line which stretched across the current, were again upon the clear Ohio, never, I trust, to see the Mississippi more, saving in troubled dreams and nightmares." What Dickens wrote about Cairo was no more true than the following he wrote about Belleville: "Belleville was a small collection of wooden houses, huddled together in the very heart of the bush and swamp. Many of them had singularly bright doors of red and yellow; for the place had been lately visited by a traveling painter, 'who got along, as I was told, by eating his way.' The criminal court was sitting, and was at the moment trying some criminals for horse-stealing; with whom it would most likely go hard; for live stock of all kinds being necessarily very much exposed in the woods, is held by the community in rather higher value than human life; and for this reason, juries generally make a point of finding all men indicted for cattle-stealing, guilty, whether or no. "The horses belonging to the bar, the judge, and witnesses, were tied to temporary racks set up roughly in the road; by which is to be understood, a forest path, nearly knee deep in mud and slime. "There was an hotel in this place which, like all hotels in America, had its large dining-room for the public table. It was an odd, shambling, low-roofed out-house, half cow-shed and half kitchen, with a coarse brown canvas table-cloth, and tin sconces stuck against the walls, to hold candles at supper-time." "The American Notes" is one of the poorest of his books. Macaulay was requested to write a notice of the book, but after reading it declined, saying: "I cannot praise it, and I will not cut it up. I cannot praise it, though it contains a few lively dialogues and descriptions; for it seems to me to be, on the whole, a failure. It is written like the worst parts of ' Humphrey's Clock." What is meant to be easy and sprightly is vulgar and flippant. What is meant to be fine is a great deal too fine for me, as the description of the Fall of Niagara. A reader who wants an amusing account of the United States had better go to Mrs. Trollope, coarse and malignant as she is. A reader who wants information about American politics, manners, and literature had better go even to so poor a creature as Buckingham. In short, I pronounce the book, in spite of some gleams of genius, at once frivolous and dull." In "Martin Chuzzlewit" we find Dickens still caricaturing the United States and its people; and Cairo especially, under the name of "Eden," comes in for a large share of attention. It would seem that the one book, the "American Notes," would have been sufficient to satisfy his resentment, for such it seems to have been. Every one must, however, admire his wonderful writing. Then, too, we must remember that when he was here and for many years afterwards, Great Britain was hated and abused everywhere and by fully one-half of the people of the country. In the will of Lieutenant-Governor William Kinney, dated August 9, 1843, and probated in St. Clair County October 18th of that year, we find this clause: "I give R. K. Fleming, in consideration of his copying and writing for me a pamphlet against Charles Dickens, and other articles, one hundred dollars in cash." See volume IX, pp. 441-444, of the Historical Publications of the Illinois Historical Society. A certified copy of the will was filed in the recorder's office of Alexander County, October 1, 1909. Now, taking leave of Dickens, let us say that in his letters to Forster and others, he made it clear that when he reached home he would, to use his own fine language, stretch himself "twenty feet high and swell out in proportion," in railing at the American people. After twenty-five years, he came back to lecture, or rather to read. He landed at Boston, as before, but with feelings of anxiety about the reception that would be accorded him. What he had written in 1842 was much in his way in 1867. The incongruity of his second visit with his account of the first one was apparent; but his desire for money was too strong to forbid him asking the favor of the people whom he had so deliberately and maliciously traduced and insulted. If in man there are two natures, the one good and the other evil, it may be safely affirmed that out of the latter in Dickens " The American Notes" issued. But Cairo had a hard name before Dickens saw it. It had a hard name because it was a hard place. On the rivers were and always have been many hard characters. The central location of the place drew many of them here. River craft of every existing kind and pattern and doing all kinds of trading and business landed here. The site was low and often overflowed, and hence the long absence of improvements and settled inhabitants. The failures of land companies to overcome the natural obstacles in the way of establishing a town or city added to the unfavorable reputation the place bore. It was a low and a decidedly uninviting point, and the travelers upon the rivers never spoke well of it. They could not. They all seemed to think that at the junction of two such great rivers as the Ohio and Mississippi there ought to be a fine, not to say a grand city. The hard name arose in part from a hard state of things, but quite as much from the temper and disposition of some of the early Cairo inhabitants, who were jolly good fellows in their off-hand and don't-care sort of a way, and who, instead of trying to improve the reputation of the town, seemed to have sought to keep alive the unfavorable opinions of it by all sorts of remarkable stories and accounts of crimes and offenses which never had any existence save in their fertile brains. I might close this chapter without saying anything more concerning the reputation, which our city has so long borne; but to do so would not be correct historical treatment. Historical silence is not allowable save in cases of want of information. It is seldom attributed to ignorance or oversight. Most of us who live here know better than other people what has so generally been said of our city and is still often if not quite so generally said. The person spoken of is much more likely to remember what was spoken than the speaker where what was said or spoken is of an uncomplimentary nature. Cities, large and small, are not unlike individuals; but an individual may live down, so to speak, the bad reputation he has borne; but for this much time is often required. May not cities do the same? The public is often very incredulous and often demands a long period of probation. It is not admitting too much to say that our city should have made more progress in getting a good or a better name. The change has been slow but most of the time hopeful. It may be that the ground gained has all been lost by reason of the recent mobs and lynchings and their attendant circumstances; but if so, it is only another evidence that a reestablished name is much easier lost than one which had never needed re-establishment. The hindrance to our acquiring a better reputation has generally been ourselves. We have persistently denied that anything was needed here that was not equally needed in almost all other cities—river cities, especially. This is but saying that if Cairo is not worse than other places, there is no ground for complaint or need of improvement, nor is there any reason for being told we ought to be better. This fatal view of the matter hinders every effort for advancement. If one's reputation is what one's neighbors say of him, why may we not say a city's reputation is what its neighbors and the people generally, elsewhere, say of it? Whether they speak the truth or not is not very material in law or in the courts. There is absolutely no remedy other than the adoption and the faithful following of such course of conduct as will convince the public generally that we are better than we once were and deserve a better name. Some of our citizens lose all their patience when this matter is spoken of. Some say it is a falsehood and that Cairo is all right. Others say it has always been rather a wide open town, and it is useless to try to make it anything else. Others say Cairo is a city, and we must expect to have the usual city characteristics, and that vices of all kinds exist everywhere, and one hurts the town and business by talking about it; and that if it is such a place as is represented, one should not publish it abroad and keep people from coming here and investing in business enterprises and making the city the home of their families. And finally, others say, we don't care, Cairo is good enough for us; if one does not like the town as it is, let him go elsewhere; the world is wide. But not to pursue the matter further, Cairo is not the hard place it is so often represented to be. Many towns and cities in the state deserve no better name or reputation than our city. Let us cease, however, enjoining silence about evils whose existence or extent we should be able to deny. Let us, along with our great material improvement, seek also to improve, in corresponding degree, those other features of city administration which every one knows are of far greater importance than are matters of a wholly material nature. Additional Comments: Extracted from: A HISTORY OF THE CITY OF CAIRO ILLINOIS BY JOHN M. LANSDEN WITH MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS CHICAGO R. R. DONNELLEY & SONS COMPANY 1910 COPYRIGHTED, 1910 BY JOHN M. LANSDEN The Lakeside Press R. R. DONNELLEY & SONS COMPANY CHICAGO File at: http://files.usgwarchives.net/il/alexander/history/1910/ahistory/chapterx136gms.txt This file has been created by a form at http://www.genrecords.org/ilfiles/ File size: 19.5 Kb