Jasper Douthit's story; the autobiography of a pioneer

Front matter

JASPER DOUTHIT S

STORY

AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Foreword

THIS little book is the simple story of the ministry of my dear brother Jasper through many years to his own people in his own home land. It is what a little maid in a far away old time used to ask for, — "a truly story ' ' to the last line, and well I can testify that the half has not been told. But what he tells me goes right to the heart, as it will go to the hearts of the thousands who will read it, of our faith and name, and the ' ' Lend a Hand Society, ' ' of which we are all members in the wider interpretation of the happy thought that "joins hands and leaves nobody out."

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THE story of Jasper L. Douthit, as told by himself in these pages, is the story of a hard life, spent amid surroundings always simple, sometimes rude and rough, but it is the story of a life singularly devoted to high things, and such a story can never be wholly sad. This life was shot through and through with consecration, with devoutness, with an altruistic passion to uplift the particular section of God's earth into which he was bom, and to serve the people to whom he was related. The story is necessarily inadequately told, for no man can justly estimate his own life or properly tell his own story, least of all a man of Mr. Douthit's intense temperament, whose seriousness has never been sufficiently relieved by a sense of humor or freedom from care and the occasional recoil from labor which gives the imagination a chance to put in its shadings or to cushion the ragged rocks with moss and decorate the beetling cliffs with vines and flowers.

We have here a photograph and not a painting. Here is a realism that may mar the hterary attractiveness of the picture, but which greatly enhances its value as the material out of which true history must eventually be written. iVIr. Douthit appears in these pages as a chronicler rather than as an historian. He has given us a collection of facts which, superficially studied, may seem trifling and sometimes gruesome, but deeper study will disclose their value as it will reveal high joys and noble convictions. We have here a cross-section of a pioneer life whose part in the development of the Mississippi valley has never been adequately stated. The streams of immigration from over New England and over the sea — English, Celtic, Scandinavian, German, French, etc. — have been studied with such interest and with the help of such abundant material as to overshadow that other stream which poured out of Virginia and the Carolinas through Tennessee and Kentucky into southern Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri. Douthit, the people to whom he belongs, and the counties to whose service he has given his life, belong to this stream. He is necessarily a "mountain man." In temper, origin and environment as well as in appearance, he belongs to the tribe of Abraham Lincoln. The hard drinking, the fiery theology, the vehement prejudices, the bitter quarrels, the deadly feuds and withal, the robust intellects and stalwart consciences which figure in this tale find their counterpart and explanation in the south and the southeastward.

Mr. Douthit was a *' home missionary," but he expounded a foreign gospel. " About the last place on earth one would expect to find or try to plant a Unitarian church," was the common remark of his friends. Unitarianism was never put to a severer test than when Jasper Douthit sought with it to ameliorate the severities and remove the illiteracy and iniquities of southern Illinois in the sixties and the seventies. Channing's interpretation of the gospel in terms of gentleness and love, Theodore Parker's interpretation of Christianity in terms of justice and freedom to the slave, and Emerson's rendering of the universe in terms of order, progress and peace, were by Douthit set over against Calvinism in its most dogmatic form, the whiskey jug with its fiery contents, and the shot gun with its maximum of civic potency and political prowess, and the sequel shows that these higher interpretations of religion were tried and not found

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wanting. This story of the missionary work done by Jasper Douthit in Shelby county, Illinois, is a triumphant justification of the claim that the gospel of love is more than a match for the gospel of hate, and that a reasonable religion is better adapted to the needs of all classes and conditions of men than the religion of dogmatism and the unreasoning faith of bigotry.

Notwithstanding Mr. Douthit's attempt to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about his mission, to anyone conversant with the facts in the case these pages give an inadequate account of the work accomplished by this tireless missionary and his gentle, dreamy-eyed and shrinking but never faltering wife. The facts that can be put into figures — the churches built, the Sunday-schools maintained, the church members enrolled, the ministers, four or more, who have found their work in and through Mr. Douthit's mission, are such as to challenge admiration, perhaps to defy competition among his fellow ministers. But the tangible facts, thooC that evade an accounting — his part in modifying the harshness, ameliorating the bigotry, dissipating the illiteracy, improving the quality of the schools and refining and humanizing the village, city and

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country life throughout a wide area, represent the highest achievements of this missionary in " Egypt." It is not going too far afield to discover some strains of the humanitarian faith preached by Jasper Douthit, represented by the better fences, the more passable roads, the safer bridges, the flowers in the front yards, the well dressed and well kempt children sitting in up-todate school houses and receiving efficient tuition from competent teachers in the countryside traversed by him for over forty-five years.

When Mr. Douthit comes to Chicago there is a parish meeting of his own ready to greet him, and the present writer has heard his name pronounced with love and affection beyond the farthest ranges of the Rockies by those who have been strengthened by him in times of sorrow, who perchance have plighted marriage vows in his presence, or who have brought their children to receive baptismal blessings at his hands.

The Lithia Springs Chautauqua, situated in its ample and splendid forest, with its annually increasing throng of happy, gentle, appreciative men, women and children, drawn from Douthit's territory, for his bailiwick is a wide one, is a fitting and eloquent witness to the effectiveness of his work. The Unitarian friends who through the American Unitarian Association and other channels have made this work possible through all these years, can find no higher use for their money than to continue their support, with increasing confidence and generosity, of this great inter-denominational and cross-party conference that tells so mightily for personal purity, civic righteousness, and the spiritual life.

I have used the word " sad " in connection with the life of my friend Jasper Douthit. Like all sensitive souls, he has a great capacity for suffering. As will be seen, he has ever been torn by his ideals ; his spirit has been often fretted by the great chasm between the things he would and the things he could do. But Brother Douthit's power of enjoyment is also great, and I regret that he has not been able to put in the sunshine which made the shadows in the picture possible. But what artist can?

My acquaintance with Mr. Douthit began in the student days at Meadville. My first visit to his home was while he still lived on the old homestead in the log house with a frame enlargement, necessitated by the increasing family. This home at that day could be reached only

[ vi I on horseback ; it was a voyage by water and not a journey by land, so profound were the muddy depths between the dreary Httle station and the lonely little cabin. I have been in close touch with him and his work throughout the forty or more years of our acquaintance. I think I opened the campaign in Shelbyville, preaching the first sermon in the old court-house that led to the establishment of his church. I think I know the man and the temper of his spirit. Before the occasion comes, Douthit is often cast down ; after the occasion passes, he is often torn with disappointment and humiliation ; but he ever rises to the occasion and his uttered words are charged with courage, while his message is ever a cheerful one. The sickly, sorrowful looking man, once on the platform or in the pulpit, takes on robustness. His eyes flame, his voice, though often strident and sometimes shrieking, always carries conviction and sympathy and oftentimes enthusiasm.

Mr. Douthit and I have not always agreed. There have been times when I have seriously distressed him ; I probably have believed more in his work at times than he has in mine. On this account I can the more confidently declare the potency of the man, the contagious quality of his

[ vii ]

faith. His spirit was larger than his words, though his words represented ever the largest gospel that disturbed his countryside.

I have spoken of the support which his mission has received at the hands of the Unitarians, mostly from the east. Great credit is due those who have held up the hands of this Unitarian missionary whose antecedents, training, manner and method were so un-Unitarian. But in the interest of the next missionary I venture to add that much of the pathos in Douthit's work has been rooted in the carking anxieties as to how the modest needs of the humble home were to be supplied. The support was always enough to keep the light burning on the pulpit, but not enough to make the heart free from kitchen anxieties. The little margin between the " just enough to keep life " and the " enough to make life joyful " as well as loyal was often wanting. Jasper Douthit has never been an extravagant man; his home life and needs were of the simplest kind. If any money slipped through his fingers it was always for " the cause," and still it is sad to think that that small financial distance, the Dickens " six-pence " that made the difference between happiness and misery,

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was never quite covered in Douthit's expense book.

It would be interesting to know the aggregate of the money support given to this remarkable ministry during the forty-five or more years of its activity. It would doubtless seem a goodly sum, but compared with the hopes raised, the purposes strengthened, the loves engendered, aye, compared with the sums more lavishly expended on less important and less fertile causes, the sum would indeed be paltry. And certain it is that if the end could have been anticipated from the beginning, if the story, even as inadequately told in this book, had been known before it was enacted, far more willingly would have been added the small percentage of increase which would have made the difference between anxiety and confidence, sleepless nights and grateful sleep.

Take it all in all, I think the readers will be glad that Jasper Douthit has told his own story. They will read it, now with tear-dinmied eyes, and again, perhaps, with an incredulous smile. It is a story which it would be hard to parallel in modern American life for its uniqueness, its historic value, its heroic persistency and its

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spiritual suggestiveness. It is the story of an Oberlin of southern Illinois, a rustic Channing of the prairies, a Theodore Parker of the log house, reared in the land of mud and malaria.

Jenkin Lloyd Jones.

JASPER DOUTHIT'S STOEY

I was born October .10, 1834, in Shelby County, Illinois, on a farm four and one-half miles east of Shelbyville. My birthplace was at the head of Jordan Creek, named for my mother's father, Francis Jordan, who with his family, were the fii-st white settlers in that vicinity, whither they removed in 1828. The land consists chiefly of flat prairie, with groves of timber bordering the creeks, and the river Okaw, which at its mouth is called the Kaskaskia, flows through the plain. The soil around my birthplace is black, mucky, and very fertile. The roads are so muddy a part of the year as to be almost impassable for wagons. Most of the land was originally set apart by the state as swamp land, considered unfit for cultivation, and was sold for about fifty cents an acre. By drainage it has now become valuable farm land, and is worth one hundred dollars and more per acre. In digging wells, logs several inches in diameter are sometimes found from twenty-five to a hundred feet below the surface. Evidently this country was once covered with water to a great depth. Coal and gas may be found in many places at the depth of a hundred or more feet below the surface. The Lithia mineral springs are in the Okaw River woods, about two and one-half miles from my birthplace. These springs boil from the earth and at intervals emit gas, so that if fire is held close to the water it will bum.

I grew up where I was bom and worked on a farm until I was seventeen years old. Here on the family farm rest the bones of my mother and father and grandfather and grandmother Douthit and scores of relatives. By this graveyard is the Jordan Unitarian Chapel, where my brothers and sisters and most of their children and other relatives and neighbors worship. My life has been spent in Shelby County, excepting eighteen months when I was with my parents in Texas, in 1843-1844) ; part of a year at Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana, in 1856; a year in Hillsboro, 111., in 1858, as Superintendent of Public Schools ; a year in Massachusetts, in 1858 and 1859, in the employ of Fowler & Wells at their branch office in Boston, three years at the Meadville School in Pennsylvania, 1864 and 1867, and three months immediately after graduation, in 1867, as pastor of the Unitarian Society in Princeton, Illinois.

My great-grandfather, Evan Douthit, came with his family from Nashville, Tenn., about 1830, and built a log cabin home five miles east of where Jordan Chapel now stands. What interests me about this cabin, which stood until 1896, is the fact that this grandsire and his little Welsh-Irish wife, my great-grandmother, who lived to the age of a hundred and fifteen years and died in Palestine, Texas, were, in those early days, accustomed to walk together five miles through a pathless forest and high prairie grass, to attend religious meetings at a place two miles south of Lithia Springs. This great-grandfather was a " hardshell " Calvinistic Baptist preacher. About two years before I was bom, he and his family, with the exception of the oldest son, my grandfather, moved to Texas, then a part of Mexico, and he and his sons were with the army that finally captured Santa Anna and made Texas an independent republic.

My father and grandfather were pioneer farmers and cattle dealers. They drove herds of cattle all the way across the prairie from Shelby County to Chicago, years before there was any road to that small village by Lake Michigan.

Andrew E. Douthit, born in 1814, eldest son of John Douthit, who was the eldest son of Rev. Evan Douthit, was married to Mary Ann Jordan, on August 13, 1833. These were my parents. I am the oldest of a family of six sons and two daughters, one son having died in infancy. Three brothers and two sisters are now living near me and have ever been affectionate co-workers with me. One brother passed to Heaven over thirty years ago, after a brief but brilliant career looking toward the ministry. I cannot think of him as dead, but mightily alive and near me to this day.

My mother's people, as far back as I can learn, were habitual pioneers, ever keeping on the frontier. They came to the territory of Illinois through Tennessee from the South about the year 1804. In that year seven Jordan brothers came from Smith County, Tennessee, to Williamson County, Illinois. When ten years of age, my mother rode behind her father on horseback one hundred and fifty miles to this vicinity. Soon after her marriage all of my mother's people emigrated to Texas. Jordan's Saline, noted on the map of Texas, was founded by my uncle John Jordan. Grandfather Jordan and some others of the family died in Texas, and most of the survivors pushed on to California about the time of Freemont's journey across the mountains to that country. So far as I can ascertain, the Jordans were of Welsh-Irish descent, and the Douthits were Scotch-English and early immigrants to North Carolina.

My mother was bom in 1814) in a fort in Franklin County, southern Illinois. The fort was built by her father, Francis Jordan, and his brother Thomas, to protect their families and other pioneer settlers from the Indians. When mother was six years old, being the youngest of a large family of brothers and sisters, her father married for a second wife Mrs. Elizabeth Dement, a widow who also had a large family of children by her first husband. Some of this step-grandmother's children have been noted for public service to the state and country. Her son, Col. John Dement, was a member of the Illinois Legislature with Abraham Lincoln, Stephen A. Douglas and other celebrities. Col. Dement married the daughter of the famous Governor, also Brigadier General, Dodge, of Iowa, and their son, Hon. Henry D. Dement, served honorably as Secretary of State of Illinois for several years.

My mother, when quite young, had to work hard helping to keep house for her father's large family of children and stepchildren. She had no chance to go to school, but she learned to read and write by herself after the day's work was done. She was very conscientious — morbidly so, perhaps — and extremely sensitive to blame, but her conscience compelled her to speak out plainly for what she believed to be right and against what she believed to be wrong ; and for her frankness she was often blamed by those about her. She would weep over this, and yet persist in saying the unwelcome things. Thus when we were in Texas I often heard her denounce slavery and plead for the abused negro, and she would not consent to my father's owning slaves. She felt that she must also say things that were regarded as serious heresies in the old Baptist church ; but to all her heretical remarks the sharp sheriffs of the faith would say, *' Sister Mary Ann is good and kind-hearted to everybody, she doesn't know any better thaa to talk that way, and we must overlook her weakness."

My mother's life was for many years one of great trial and sorrow, but she was naturally hopeful and had very vivid religious experiences which gave her comfort and peace amidst the sorest trials. My first memory of her rehgious experiences made a deep impression upon my life and I will relate it here.

When a small child I was left alone one day to watch her where she had lain for weeks, helpless on a sick bed. It was thought she could not recover. I was suddenly startled by her springing from the bed and exclaiming, "Glory! Glory! Hallelujah!" followed by some other words about hearing a heavenly voice of sweet peace and good cheer. My father, hearing her shouts, came running to the house. I cried out with great alarm, until my mother, with a face that shone out like an angel's, spoke soothingly to me, saying she was so full of joy that she could not help what she did, and that she was going to get well. She did get better, and lived a score of years longer. Her prayer that she might see all her children grown was answered. Not long after that heavenly vision, she was baptized in the Okaw River. A great crowd witnessed the ceremony, and people said they never knew one who appeared so like an angel. Those who knew her love thus to think of her to this day. I think of her too when first her father and all her brothers and sisters had emigrated to what was then the far distant region of Texas. In the night-time I often heard her in her dreams call the names of her loved ones so loudly as to startle me from my sleep. In the daytime when she read a letter from them the tears would flow and she would drive harder at her spinning wheel as if to chase away sorrow, rehearsing the while snatches of those pathetic verses which Cowper puts into the mouth of Selkirk, on the lonely isle of the Pacific:

" I am out of humanity's reach ;

I must finish my journey alone. Never hear the sweet music of speech — I start at the sound of my own.

" Religion ! What treasure untold Resides in that heavenly word ! More precious than silver and gold. Or all that this earth can afford;"

Being the first grandchild and son of the eldest son of the eldest son in the third generation, my grandparents made much of me — I think they petted me to my hurt in some respects. When I was a little child my grandmother would take me in her lap as she sat in the old handmade hickory chair before the wide open fireplace on winter evenings. She would show me the pictures in the big family Bible and tell me the stories of Joseph and his brethren, and the good Samaritan. I learned more Bible truth from that grandmother than I ever learned from the preachers of my early years. In fact I have thought the good seeds planted in my heart then from the Great Book saved me in after years from despising the Bible when I heard the preachers quote it in support of slavery, liquor-drinking, the horrible doctrine of infant damnation, and the unalterable decree of endless torment for most folks — even the good people that were not of the elect.

That memory of my grandmother, with the open Bible and pictures, and the stories she told me have had more saving power over my life than all the Greek and Latin, the philosophy and theology, or the higher and lower criticism that I learned in adult years, though this later learning was very helpful. I treasure that copy of my grandmother's Bible to-day as a most precious heirloom.

I think it was in the fall of 1843, when I was about nine years old, that my father and grandfather Douthit, with part of their families, went to visit my mother's father's kindred, who had gone to Texas. We went in wagons over rough, dangerous roads, being one month on the journey. There we visited my great-grandfather and ^reat-grandmother Douthit, near Palestine, Texas. Great-grandmother was over one hundred years old then. She was little in body, weighing not more than eighty pounds, but bright in mind and " spry as a cricket," the neighbors said. I can see her now, in memory, skipping out of doors, to pick up chips to cook the family meals in the great open fireplace. Sometimes she sent me. Once when I was loitering for play, my mother called me to hurry up. Just then great-grandfather passed by, leaning upon his staff. He looked at me with rebuking eyes and said: "My boy, if you don't mind your mother, you can never grow to be a good man." I never forgot that rebuke.

I have a most beautiful picture in memory of [ 10 ]

the last time I saw the dear old grandsire. It was at a religious service in the country meeting-house near Palestine. Great-grandfather was the preacher. He was tall and spare, with long hair falling upon his shoulders, and beard, white as snow, reaching far down his breast. His countenance was florid and his eyes piercing; but his body was bent and feeble with nearly ninety years. He trembled with " the palsy," as they called it, so that while he stood to preach there were two stout men to support him, one at each arm. The sermon was very short. I cannot remember the words he spoke, but I caught the spirit of it ; and when in after j^ears I read the beautiful legend of St. John the Revelator, in his old age, an exile on the Isle of Patmos, I always thought of the two persons as if they were one picture and had preached to me the same sermon : " Little children, love one another."

My first experience with African slavery was in Texas. I worked with the slaves in the cotton fields and cotton gins, and came to love the negroes, for they were very kind to me. They would gather in their cabins on Sunday and of nights, to hear me read the Bible to them. Then seemed to come to me my first call to preach.

I saw slaves for slightest offenses cruelly beaten by drunken overseers, till blood ran down their bodies to their heels. I took their part, wept aloud at their suffering, and longed to live to help them toward the North Star.

In 1844, as we returned home from Texas on a boat down Red River to New Orleans, there was a beautiful mulatto mother with a bright child on board. My mother had four children then, myself the eldest. We played with the mulatto child and came to love it dearly. I remember how the mother of that child would say to my mother : " I love my children as j'ou do yours, but nobody can tear your children away from you and sell them to different owners as so many cattle. But I have had all of mine but one sold from me and widely separated from each other. Only this little one is left with me. And now they are taking me and it to sell at auction in New Orleans."

Then she would weep bitterly and my mother would weep with her. Finally, as our boat approached the wharf in New Orleans, that slave mother with her child in her arms went overboard, and in spite of all attempts to prevent, they sank forever. It "was thus that distressed mother sought to escape from the hell of slavery.

II

In body, I am a degenerate son of my foreparents, particularly of the Douthit family. Great-grandfather Douthit was tall and thin, but of wiry muscle. His eldest son, my grandfather, was a giant in strength. He and Col. Davy Crockett, the pioneer congressman and brave soldier, were related, and were near neighbors in eastern Tennessee. Colonel Crockett was famous for physical prowess. It will be remembered that he volunteered to fight for the independence of Texas and he and his company were overwhelmed and all killed in the Alamo. I have heard those say who knew, that my grandfather was the only man in the vicinity of Colonel Crockett's home in eastern Tennessee who could lift equally with him. In clearing up the woodland for cultivation, when a very heavy log was to be hfted and carried to the heap to be burned, John Douthit and David Crockett were the only two that could lift together, one at each end of the handspike held under the big end of the log. My father weighed about two hundred and seventy-five

pounds.

I was a puny, crying child, my mother said, and she hardly expected to raise me. I have never weighed more than a hundred and thirty pounds, and am nearly six feet in height. When thirty-five years of age, insurance companies refused to take any risk on my life ; and during much of my ministerial life, especially during strenuous periods, I have been horizontal at least one day in the week, on an average, and wholly unfit for any good to anybody. My mother died at fifty-eight, and I did not expect to live beyond that age. But here I am at the age of seventy-three, in better health in some respects than at any time in my life. To be so weU and able to keep busy is the surprise of my life and a marvel to those who have known me so long. I ascribe it primarily to the power of spirit over matter. I early learned to believe that the religion of Jesus taught that it is sinful to abuse the body. I came to believe that an ounce of prevention is worth more than a pound of cure. Therefore, from early in life, I have totally abstained from intoxicants, narcotics, opiates, and all harmful drugs. I have not in my lifetime spent for

CABIN BUILT IN 1830 BY MR. DOUTHIt's GREAT-GRANDFATHER

OLD LOG CHURCH, BUILT ABOUT SIXTY YEARS AGO

The hevm logs are now covered with boards myself and mj family five dollars for treatment with drugs, and not a dollar that I can remember for patent medicines. My diet for over fifty years has been mostly fruits, cereals and vegetables.

I am convinced that there is nothing that will strengthen a feeble constitution and so conduce to health and long life as to be at peace with the good God and to seek to bless one's neighbors. Alas ! the graveyards around me are populous with those of much stronger natural constitutions than I. They died prematurely for lack of knowledge and for want of more vital religion. They became slaves to bad habits in eating, drinking and living. ^ The first dollar I earned was by pulling " movers' " wagons out of the mud holes with a yoke of oxen. The state road along which emigrants moved passed by my father's home, and in the rainy season the wagons often stuck in the mud. I spent that first dollar for a year's subscription to the Phrenological Journal, published by Fowler & Wells, in New York City. That journal taught me the great importance of self-control and of a " sound mind in a sound body.'* I never spent a dollar in my life that I think resulted in greater benefit to me. It led to information that brought greater good. I made my start as a pubhc lecturer by speaking on phrenology and kindred subjects. I am aware of the fact that phrenology has been abused by being associated in many minds with " bumpology " and the examining of heads for twenty-five cents each, somewhat as the sublime science of astronomy has been abused by astrology. Nevertheless, the fundamental principles and practical importance of phrenology are now recognized by all who have thoroughly investigated it, including such eminent scientists, statesmen and philanthropists as Spencer, Gladstone, Horace Mann, Dr. Samuel G. Howe, and Henry Ward Beecher. I had the reputation at one time of being an expert in the phrenological delineation of character. I could hypnotize though I never could be hypnotized; but as a lecturer on psychology I became convinced that I was using learned words about a mysterious force that I did not at all understand, and, of course, could not explain — a force that in the hands of the unscrupulous might do much mischief. Therefore I stopped lecturing or demonstrating on the subject; and for the past forty years I have seldom mentioned it publicly. I continue, however, to hold an open mind ready for more light upon psychological questions.