The Printer's Kiss

The Life and Letters of a Civil War Newspaperman and His Family

Patricia A. Donohoe

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781612778402
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Amerikanische Bürgerkriegsgeschichte

In language that resonates with power and beauty, this compilation of personal letters written from 1844 to 1864 tells the compelling story of controversial newspaper editor Will Tomlinson, his opinionated wife (Eliza Wylie Tomlinson), and their two children (Byers and Belle) in the treacherous borderlands around that "abolitionist hellhole, " Ripley, Ohio. The Printer's Kiss includes many of Tomlinson's columns that appeared in the Ripley Bee, the local Ripley newspaper, and excerpts from a short story in the Columbian Magazine. It features many of his letters to his family and a remarkable number of letters from Eliza and the children to Tomlinson while he was away during the Civil War, serving variously as quartermaster sergeant for the Fifth Ohio, as captain of a company of counterinsurgents in West Virginia, as an independent scout and spy in Kentucky, as a nurse on a hospital boat, and as a compositor for the Cincinnati Gazette.

During his career, Tomlinson published ten newspapers in Ohio and one in Iowa, where he lived from 1854 to 1860. Described by his contemporaries as brilliant and erratic, coarse and literary, Tomlinson left a trail of ink covering topics ranging from antislavery sentiment to spiritualist fervor and partisan politics. His personal writings reveal the man behind the press, disappointed by his weakness for alcohol and by Eliza's refusal to condone his plan to raise a Negro company. His eloquent descriptions ache with the discomfort of standing fourteen hours at a compositor's table, shooting cattle to feed soldiers, and having to defend himself against accusations of adultery. Tomlinson was fatally shot by a Kentucky Copperhead in 1863.

Eliza's letters pulse with the fears of a Union family on the lookout for slave hunters, Morgan's Raiders, and bad news from the battlefield. Like her husband, she freely condemns inept politicians and southern rebels. She also questions her husband's military competence, but she usually writes about domestic matters - the children, friends, and finances.

The intimate details in these letters will engage readers with suspenseful accounts of survival in the borderlands during the Civil War, camp life, and guerrilla warfare and commentary on political and military events, journalism in the mid-1800s, and the roles of women and children. Most importantly, readers will be exposed to the story of how one articulate and loyal Union family refused to give up hope when faced with tragic disruption.

CHAPTER ONE

Tomlinson’s Origins

Who that has his God and country near his heart,
will run the fearful risk by cowardly remaining at home?
—Hickory Sprout, Piketon, Ohio, October 3, 1844

INFORMATION about the background of Will Tomlinson is sketchy and inconclusive prior to his turning up in Ripley, Ohio, sometime in the early 1840s. According to the genealogy that comprises “The Family History,” he was born on August 2, 1823, in northern England. There is some question as to whether he was born in the county of Northumberland or its neighboring county to the west, Cumberland, but records recovered to date seem to point to the latter and to his baptism there in September 1824, by the Church of England in the Parish of Camerton, adjacent to the village of Seaton. It is unclear whether his father, George Tomlinson, was a captain in the Royal Navy, as family records suggest, or a stonemason, as recent research may indicate, or possibly both at one time or another. It is also unclear as to whether his mother, Jane Todhunter, was “Lady Jane,” the daughter of Sir William Todhunter, as family accounts maintain, or simply the offspring of a local farmer or auctioneer, according to local records. Tomlinson never mentioned his father in his letters, and he alluded to his mother but once and that only in passing. “The Family History” does not list any siblings for Tomlinson, even though the letter collection includes three letters from Anne T. Hunter Skinner, who identifies herself as his sister and Tomlinson as her only brother.¹

Regardless of his parents’ background or which county his birthplace was, Tomlinson would have been born into a culture with some distinctive characteristics. Because of their proximity to Scotland, the northern reaches of Cumberland and Northumberland were generally known as border country, and residents referred to themselves as “borderers.” Derived from the same ethnic stock that settled Northern Ireland, the clans of northern England had been entangled in border disputes between Scotland and England for more than seven centuries. Constantly at war with outsiders and with each other as control of their homeland shifted, borderers developed a distinctive warrior culture that not only strongly differentiated them from other English-speaking immigrants but also came to dominate the American backcountry, where they settled in large numbers. Their child-rearing practices were geared to mold their offspring into strong, wily survivors. Male children were taught to be fiercely independent, proud, and courageous. Unfortunately, such programming could also lead to minimal impulse control and quick, explosive reaction to opposition. The cultural expectation that women should be long-suffering workers who knew their place often led to a sense of alienation and pent-up emotions that sometimes resulted in polarized and violent relationships.²

These cultural tendencies appear to be reflected in Tomlinson’s values and behavior—with one important exception. There is no indication of violence in the relationship between him and Eliza. But in many other respects, Tomlinson was definitely a product of his culture. He obviously loved a good fight with other men—in print or in person. He was also proud of his family and his work, and the choices he made as an editor and a soldier could be seen as demonstrating courageous leadership. It is also interesting that he chose to spend most of his adult life in southern Ohio, where the Appalachian culture of the Scotch-Irish and English border people tended to be dominant in the early 1800s. It was in Brown County, Ohio, in fact, that Tomlinson swore allegiance to his adopted country. In his naturalization record, dated November 6, 1845, he stated that he left his native Cumberland and arrived in Quebec in Lower Canada in 1828, when he was four years old. According to own testimony, he came to the United States through Fort Covington, Franklin County, New York, in 1838 when he was fourteen years old and lived in the United States from then on, including the requisite two-year residency in the state of Ohio preceding his petition for naturalization.³

The dates of his arrival in Canada and later in the United States are particularly interesting from a historical perspective. The early nineteenth century brought rapid growth in manufacturing and mining in northern England. Coal mines and iron works shredded the landscape, while small landowners, who had been an important part of a rural economy, quickly found themselves displaced by laws that favored land barons. By 1828, the date that Tomlinson emigrated from Cumberland to Quebec, so many immigrants had already left the northern regions of Great Britain for North America that serious concerns arose as to how the dwindling labor pool could supply the region’s industry. To make matters worse, some of the workers left behind tended to be less skilled and motivated than those who could afford the costs of transatlantic relocation. As a four-year-old, Tomlinson was, of course, too young to be part of the labor pool when he came to North America, but he was obviously part of a large migration from northern England during that time. There is no indication whether he traveled to Canada with his parents or with other relatives or acquaintances. The absence of any references or details about his parents in his letters, however, could suggest that he was separated from them at an early age and immigrated with other adults who acted as his guardians.⁴

Tomlinson’s immigration to the United States in 1838 and the fact that he lived a while in Ogdensburg, New York, could also be linked to a historical event, the Canadian Patriot Movement, otherwise known as the Rebellions of 1837 and 1838. The British government’s dismissal of the patriots’ demand for self-government led to armed rebellion against a privileged oligarchy. British forces quickly captured many rebels and summarily executed or imprisoned them. But some escaped across the border into northern New York, where they regrouped and recruited sympathetic Americans. In November 1838 they launched an unsuccessful attack against the British from Ogdensburg. Many of the captured rebels were executed or sent to a brutal penal colony in Tasmania, then known as Van Dieman’s Land. Few prisoners, political or criminal, ever returned from this devil’s island at end of the earth. Of seventy-two Canadians imprisoned under cruel conditions there, thirteen died and forty apparently never returned home.⁵

No evidence has emerged to directly link Tomlinson or a relative to the Canadian rebels, but in June 1844, in the fourth issue of Freedom’s Casket, Tomlinson chose to feature a New York Tribune review of a pamphlet detailing the inhuman ordeal of a prisoner sent to Van Dieman’s Land for participating in the attack that originated from Ogdensburg. The fact that Tomlinson chose that one article to feature from hundreds at his disposal and placed it in a prominent position on the front page of his first newspaper, some six years and seven hundred miles distant from the scene of the “ill-fated” expedition, raises questions about his involvement in the revolt or association with the patriots. It is possible that he left Canada at that particular time because he or those close to him were at least in sympathy with the rebels, if not in league with them.⁶

At any rate, when Tomlinson arrived in Ripley in the early 1840s, the youthful twenty-year-old brought with him an age-old heritage grounded in the fight for independence, a passion for eradicating tyranny, and a degree of journalistic acumen and life experience that already imbued his voice with an air of authority. In the June 8, 1844, issue of Freedom’s Casket, he printed his response to the following question submitted to him the previous week: “Can the members of the Methodist Episcopal Conference, after the late action of that body, and other denominations which have either taken similar ground, or gone a step further in rebuke of slavery, with christian [sic] consistency, lend their suffrages to elevate men to important civil offices known to be wedded to slavery, in its actual practice, and pledged for its perpetuation?” Tomlinson’s answer: “decidedly in the negative.”⁷

CHAPTER TWO

Eliza’s Heritage

Resistance to Tyrants is Obedience to God!
—Whig petition, June 10, 1848, Brown County, Ohio

THE SCOTCH-IRISH ORIGINS of Eliza Wylie Tomlinson would, for the most part, have drawn upon the same ethnic stock as her husband’s ancestors in northern England. Like her husband, Eliza placed high a value on independence and identified with those who rebelled against tyranny at home and abroad. In fact, one of her Wylie ancestors left County Antrim in Ireland in 1797 because of his participation in the struggle for Irish independence, and both sets of her grandparents settled in an area of southwestern Pennsylvania that became known as a nursery of Scotch Presbyterian rebels. In addition, both of Eliza’s grandfathers served in the American War for Independence.¹

Given the nonconformist origins of Scottish Presbyterians, it is likely that as an infant Eliza was rocked to the tune of “Nooo bishops!” As a “cradle Presbyterian,” she, like her parents before her, would probably have learned at an early age never to swear allegiance to any civil or religious authority that interfered with a person’s direct access to God through Jesus Christ as revealed in scripture. Her faith would have been grounded in such basic tenets of the Reformed Tradition as the doctrines of grace and gratitude and the declaration that “God alone is Lord of the conscience.” No doubt her theological bias would have led her to abhor the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church, distrust the Quaker emphasis on experience and inner light, and disdain anyone or anything she saw as ostentatious or excessive. For Eliza, the good life would have been one lived in moderation, with the freedom to choose one’s religion and the right to representative government—in church and state.²

In addition to stories about resistance, rebellion, and the right to self-government, which Eliza probably heard growing up, she would also have heard accounts of life on the frontier. When her ancestral clans hopscotched westward across Pennsylvania and settled on the edge of the frontier in the Allegheny Mountains in the mid- to late 1700s, there were still uprisings from Native Americans in the area. In 1789, Indians killed a family living near Eliza’s maternal grandfather, Thomas Byers, who had settled just three years before on Stonecoal, a 400-acre tract in West Finley Township of Washington County. In 1784 her paternal grandfather, Adam Wylie, had acquired 339 acres in Canton Township but took his family to safer ground for a number of years. Several years later, a son of Adam Wylie, Dr. Adam Wylie, purchased 140 acres from his father, and it was on that tract that Eliza and her two older brothers were born. But life for Eliza in southwestern Pennsylvania among her kith and kin was not to be.³

In 1817, Dr. Adam Wylie, his wife, Sarah, and their three children, Thomas Byers, Adam Newton, and Eliza—ages six, four, and two—made the short journey from their home in Washington County to the Ohio River. There they probably boarded a flatboat, the most common mode of river transportation for families moving west at that time. Between 1810 and 1820 an average of three thousand flatboats floated down the Ohio every year. They varied greatly in size and construction, but the more substantial ones looked like a barge with a wooden shoebox on top. A comfortably sized flatboat, about fifteen feet wide and thirty-five to one hundred feet long, could carry an extended family with everything from household goods to livestock. Although a vessel outfitted in such a manner might look more like an ancient ark or American pigsty than a river-worthy vessel, flatboats were especially useful to pioneers. Upon reaching their destination, they could easily dismantle the boat and sell the wood for cash or use it for building a house or barn.⁴

The trip downriver to Ripley, Ohio, probably took Eliza’s family about six days. To make themselves less vulnerable to attacks from Indians and river pirates, they probably traveled in the spring, when the river was high and fast, and as part of a flatboat flotilla of other families, including some from Washington County. In Ripley, the Wylies joined several families from Virginia who wanted to remove themselves from the slaveholding practices of that region. A number of these families had much in common with the Wylies; besides their Scotch-Irish heritage and Presbyterian faith, they shared an abhorrence of any encroachment on their individual freedoms. Hardworking, resilient, and thrifty, they just wanted to be left alone to develop their little plats on the frontier into prosperous enterprises.⁵

Eliza’s parents, married just twenty years after the American Revolution, quickly adapted to life in the new state of Ohio. They soon made inroads into the wild, but growing, little river town of Ripley and joined twenty-two other residents to form the Presbyterian Church there. The church included many of the town’s leading families, and in 1822 the congregation called the Reverend John Rankin, an avowed abolitionist, to be its installed pastor. Meanwhile, the name Wylie became well known in Ripley. A local newspaper listed Dr. Adam Wylie as one of three physicians among 120 residents in 1827. He became one of the town’s first officers, serving as a trustee for at least six terms from 1826 to 1831. In 1831 he was one of fourteen physicians in Brown County reported as being taxed on their income, and his was apparently enough to invest in real estate and pay taxes on six town lots.⁶

As Eliza grew into a young woman, life in Ripley became more complicated. Increasing numbers of slaves escaping across the Ohio River brought more parties of slave catchers in hot pursuit. Slave hunters with mercenary motives became an increasing menace, especially to townspeople suspected of aiding fugitives. In 1820 it became legal for slaveholders to return a slave to Kentucky from any state. Meanwhile, on the national scene, the Missouri Compromise and slave revolts in the South kindled fears that the emancipation of slaves would threaten the prevailing social order in the North as well as the South. But the Reverend Rankin was undaunted. He agreed to have the Castigator, a Ripley newspaper, publish letters he had written to his brother on the evils of slavery. By the mid- to late 1820s, Ripley’s reputation had taken a bold step in the direction of earning its eventual epithet as an “abolitionist hellhole.”⁷

In the 1830s, when Eliza would have been rounding out her second decade and surveying the prospects for a husband and home of her own, she found herself tied to her parents’ hearth more than ever. Eliza’s mother, Sarah, had never been physically strong and was frequently bedridden with sickness. No doubt Sarah’s frailty meant that Eliza became the primary caretaker not only of her mother but also of her younger brother and sister, William B. F. and Margaret Shannon. The huge flood of 1832, when much of Ripley was underwater, also presented serious challenges. Even though the Wylie house was on high ground above the flood plain, Dr. Wylie would have been at the forefront in dealing with flood-induced cholera. Then, a few years later, on the heels of President Jackson’s requirement in 1836 that only gold and silver currency could be ...