Gerald Langford
The Richard Harding Davis Years NY, 1961

Document: 1813 Rachel Leet Wilson recollections (excerpt)

Source: Langford, Gerald The Richard Harding Davis Years, NY, 1961.

Note: Langford's reference to Solomon Spalding having spent a winter (of 1813-14 ?) at the Wilson home in northern Washington Co., PA was apparently paraphrased from a paragraph in Rebecca Harding Davis' "Manuscript Account" of her mother's and father's families (the original of which was in the "Davis papers" of Mrs. Hope Davis Kehrig as late as c. 1960).

Excerpts from this copyrighted text limited to "fair use" length.

 






G E R A L D   L A N G F O R D



The Richard Harding Davis Years


A Biography of a Mother and Son


Illustrated with Photographs




HOLT, RINEHART AND WINSTON


NEW YORK



 





{iv]


Copyright © 1961 by Gerald Langford

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce
this book or portions thereof in any form.

Published simultaneously in Canada by Holt, Rinehart
and Winston of Canada, Limited.

First Edition.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 61-5801
85141-0111

Printed in the united States of America





ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For permission to quote from various sources, thanks are due to the following:

Charles Scribner's Sons for a quotation from "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" in The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway (copyright 1953 by Charles Scribner's Sons); for quotations from Richard Harding Davis,




[v]

His Day, by Fairfax Downey (copyright 1933 by Charles Scribner's Sons; for quotations from The Adventures and Letters of Richard Harding Davis, edited by Charles Belmont Davis (copyright 1917 by Charles Scribner's Sons); for a quotation from Life's Adventures, by Elwood Worcester (copyright 1932 by Charles Scribner's Sons); and for quotations from the published works of Richard Harding Davis as specified in the notes; in particular, various titles included in The Novels and Stories of Richard Harding Davis (copyright 1916 by Charles Scribner's Sons).
    Houghton Mifflin Company for a quotation from The Martial Spirit, by Walter Millis (copyright 1931 by Houghton Mifflin Company).
    Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., for a quotation from Belgium, by Brand Whitlock (copyright 1919 by D. Appleton and Company).
    E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., for a quotation from The Confident Years, by Van Wyk Brooks (copyright 1952 by Van Wyl Brooks).
    Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., for a quotation from The Mauve Decade, by Thomas Beer (copyright 1926 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.).
    G.P. Putnam's Sons for quotations from Front Line and Deadline, by Granville Fortescue (copyright 1937 by Granville Fortescue).
    Harper & Brothers for a quotation from The Development of the American Short Story, by Fred Lewis Pattee (copyright 1923 by Harper & Brothers).
    Sir William Rothenstein's Executors for a quotation from Men and Memories, by Sir William Rothenstein (copyright 1931 and 1932 by Coward McCann, Inc.).
    Mrs. Lloyd C. Griscom for quotations from Diplomatically Speaking, by Lloyd C. Griscom (copyright 1940 by Little, Brown and Company).
    The University of Pennsylvania for quotations from Rebecca Harding Davis, Pioneer Realist, by Helen Woodard Sheaffer (unpublished doctoral dissertation, 1947).
    The University of Kentucky for quotations from Rivhard Harding Davis, The Development of a Journalist, by Scott Compton Osborn (unpublished doctoral dissertation, 1953).





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BOOK  I


Rebecca







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Chapter 1

"A Quiet, Dark Girl,
Coarsely Dressed in Brown"


By 1836 -- when five-year-old Rebecca Blaine Harding's family began preparing to move to Wheeling, Virginia -- the town already faced toward the industrial future as unmistakably as it embraced the agrarian past. It was a village of two sleepy streets, and news from the outside world was brought by a man on a galloping horse, although as Rebecca later recalled, "such haste was seldom thought necessary. Nobody was in a hurry to hear the news. Nobody was in a hurry to do anything, least of all to work or to make money. It mattered little whether you had money or not. If you were born into a good family, and were 'converted,' you were considered safe for this world and the next." On the other hand, the houses of Wheeling were blackened from the smoke of the steel mill located at the edge of towb, and it was this feature of her background that was to shape the growing child's social consciousness.

I look on the slow stream of human life creeping past, night and morning, to the great mills (she was to write in her first published story). Masses of men, with dull, besotted faces bent to the ground, sharpened here and there by pain or cunning; skin and muscle and flesh begrimed with smoke and ashes; stooping all night over boiling caldrons of metal, laired by day in dens of drunkenness and infamy; breathing from infancy to death an air saturated with fog and grease and soot, vileness for soul and body.

The Harding family came to Wheeling from Big Spring, Alabama (Huntsville was the new, official name of the little farming community),




4                                                              The Richard Harding Davis Years

but neither husband nor wife was a native of Alabama. Rebecca's mother, Rachel Leet Wilson had grown up in Washington, Pennsylvania. When she was still hardly more than a child, a recently emigrated Englishman named Richard Harding came to town seeking his fortune. He did not find his fortune in Washington but he did fall in love with Rachel, and when he moved on be promised to return one day and marry her. Nine years later he fulfilled his promise. Understandably Rachel's father opposed the suit of the unknown "foreigner" who reported only that he had "gone into business" in far-off Alabama. The couple therefore eloped in August, 1830.

Harding was thirty-four, a man of stern integrity as his daughter was to remember him. He came from a family of English colonists in Ireland, so that he was now doubly an alien. As if in token of such a feeling, he was always more interested in the literature of his ancestral home than in the business career he had adopted. Rachel, his bride of twenty-two, had been educated by her father's good friend Alexander Campbell, founder of the Disciples of Christ. "She was" Rebecca later wrote, "the most accurate historian and grammarian I ever have known and had enough knowledge to fit out half a dozen modern college bred women." Rachel's girlhood home, "Locust Hill," had been an English-style country estate which her devout Baptist father threw open to all impoverished strangers, especially Baptist preachers down on their luck. One of these latter whom the girl always remembered vividly, was a pale young Mr. Spalding, who while too ill to preach, spent a whole winter in her home writing a long story which he read aloud in the evenings. It was, according to Rebecca's later report, "a fictitious story which Joseph Smith published afterwards as the Book of Mormon.

Harding took his bride to his home in Big Spring, Alabama, a village boasting a general store, a forge, a home trader's shop, a shoemaker's hut, and a tavern, The Deep South was for Rachel an alien world in which she did not make friends quickly, and the following year she undertook the long trip back to stay with her own family in Washington, Pennsylvania, during the birth of her first child/ Rebecca's birthplace was therefore the home of her mother's sister, Rebecca Wilson Blaine who had acted as a mother to the nineteen-year-younger Rachel after the death of their mother.

Rebecca was always to remember as an uneasy dream the strange, semitropical village of her earliest years. In a reminiscent essay written



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[315]


Documentary


    The manuscript materials used in this book are from two main sources:
    The Barrert papers, as they will here be called, are Davis family papers, letters, notebooks, scrapbooks, and the like (some 5,000 items in all), assembled by Mr. Clifton Waller Banett and now part of the Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, which was recently presented to the Alderman Library of the University of Virginia.
    The Davis papers are a smaller but highly interesting collection of additional letters and papers in the possession of Mrs. Hope Davis Kehrig.
    In the interest of brevity the folIowing abbreviations will be used.
    The Adventures and Letters of Richard Harding Davis, edited by Charles Belmont Davis, New York, 1917, will be called Adventures.
    Richard Harding Davis, The Development of a Journalist, by Scott Compton Osborn, unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Kentucky, 1953, will be called Osborn dissertation.
    Rebecca Harding Davis, Pioneer Realist, by Helen Woodward Sheaffer, unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1947, will be called Sheaffer dissertation.
    All references to Davis's fiction are to the collected edition The Novels and Stories of Richard Harding Davis, New York, 1916.
    Quoted passages in the text are from the following sources.

Book I, Chapter 1

    Letters as follows in the order of appearance in the text: Rebecca to Cousin Jim (Wilson), May, 1861 		(Sheaffer dissertation, p. 18); Rebecca to Richard, August, 1888 (Barrett papers); Rebecca to James T. Fields, January 26, 1861 (Ibid.) Rebecca to Fields, May 15, 1861 (Ibid.)
    Rebecca Herding Davis, Bits of Gossip, New York, 1904, pp. 1-2, 69-70, 30, 10, 168, 182, 109-10, 165, 184-85, 113-15, 124, 31.
    Rebecca Harding Davis, "Life in the Iron Mills," Atlantic Monthly, April, 1861, pp. 430, 433, 439, 451.

    Rebecca's manuscript account of her mother's and father's families written for her own children (Davis papers).

    Rebecca Harding Davis, A Story of Today (original title of Margret Howth), Atlantic Monthly, November, 1861, p. 594, and December, i861, p. 708; Earthen Pitchers, Sctibner's Monthly, November, 1873, p. 80; John Andross, New York, 1874, p. 135; A Law unto Herself, Philadelphia, 1878, p. 26.
    P. L. Pattee, Century Readings in the American Short Story, New York, 1927, p. 158; and The Development of the American Short Story, New York, 1923, p. 171.


Book I, Chapter 2

    Letters as follows: Rebecca to James T. Fields, May 10, 1861 (Sheaffer dissertation, p. 56); Rebecca to Annie Fields, May 20, 1861 (Barrett papers); Rebecca to Fields, August 17, 1861 (Ibid.); Rebecca to Fields, September 17, 1861 (Ibid.); Rebecca to Fields, September 25, 1861 (Ibid.); Rebecca to Fields, October 25, 1861 (Ibid.); Rebecca to Fields, November 26, 1861 (Ibid); Rebecca to Fields, December 30. 1861 (Ibid.); Rebecca




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Transcriber's Comments

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