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Wade Hall 129 Politicians, Teachers, Preachers, and Occasional Poets Writing as an Avocation Throughout most of the nineteenth century most Kentucky writing was done by men and a few women whose vocation was elsewhere—politics, law, business, education, journalism, ministry, or soldiering. There were few if any professional writers. Except for writing connected with literary-based professions such as the law, the ministry, and journalism, a person simply couldn’t make a living from his or her pen. Even so, fine writing was practiced by Kentuckians , usually after they had done the day’s practical chores. In the privacy of their offices or kitchens or bedrooms, they wrote poems, essays, orations, and autobiographies—most of which were never published. Newspapers and magazines, however, welcomed legions of would-be poets and fictionists. This chapter samples the range of writing by unexpected belletrists. Here are men and women who write poetry and prose that is valued more for its form and style than for its content or moral lessons. Of course, fine writing can be found in unusual places, from the courts of justice to the halls of ivy, from the halls of Congress to the battlefield. The most famous American physician-poet is New Jersey’s William Carlos Williams, but Kentucky has produced Daniel Drake, who was born in New Jersey in 1785 but moved with his family to Mayslick, in Mason County, when he was three. After studying medicine at the University of Pennsylvania , he returned to Kentucky and practiced and taught medicine at several regional universities. In addition to medical treatises, he wrote Pioneer Life in Kentucky (1870), a popular book about early Kentucky life. A lesser-known poet is Elisha Bartlett, who taught medicine at Transylvania University in Lexington and authored Simple Settings, a collection of verse in triplets about characters in the novels of Dickens. Another physician-poet is John M. Harney, who was born in 1789 in Delaware but wound up practicing medicine in Bardstown. One of his jingles, “The Whippowil,” begins, “There is a strange, mysterious bird, / Which few have seen, but all have heard . . . Whippowil.” A more recent writer of note is Abraham Flexner, a native of Kentucky, a pioneer in medical education, and the author of a delightful autobiography, I Remember (1940), in which he recalls his Jewish boyhood in Louisville. Many educators are called to be writers, but few are chosen. One of the 129 130 The Kentucky Anthology chosen ones is Mary Jane Holmes, a native of Massachusetts who taught for several years in Woodford County and in 1854 published Tempest and Sunshine , or Life in Kentucky, a novel based in part on a farm near Versailles. After she moved to New York State, she continued to write popular sentimental novels, including four more with Kentucky characters and settings: Homestead on the Hillside, Lena Rivers, Marian Grey, and Hugh Worthington. Lawyers and politicians seem to go together, perhaps because so many lawyers become politicians. Since the beginning, Kentucky has been blessed (or cursed) with an abundance of both. Good lawyers are usually good speakers , and good speakers make good, or at least successful, politicians. These men lived during the Golden Age of Spread-Eagle Oratory, and a roll call of effective lawyers who were also politicians and orators includes John J. Crittenden, born in 1787 near Versailles and later a governor and a senator; Thomas F. Marshall, a Kentuckian who preached temperance and practiced inebriety, and who, when he was a congressman, gave an impassioned oration in Washington on temperance before the Total Abstinence and Vigilance Society; and Richard H. Menefee, born in 1809 at Owingsville, a congressman who in 1838 gave a toast in response to a salute to Kentucky by Daniel Webster: “Kentucky,” he orated, “stands by the Union in her living efforts; she means to hold fast to it in her expiring groans. With Massachusetts she means to perish, if perish she must, with hands clenched, in death, upon the Union.” Another proud Kentucky orator was George Robertson, born near Harrodsburg in 1790. He was a congressman and later chief justice of the Kentucky Court of Appeals; in an 1855 anniversary address on the settlement of Kentucky, he concluded his remarks with a model of spread-eagle oratory: “Let us, come what may, be true to God, true to ourselves, and faithful to our children, our country and mankind. And then, whenever or wherever it may be our doom to look, for the last time, on earth, we...

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