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377 A Concluding Unscientific Postscript 377 CHAPTER 10 A Concluding Unscientific Postscript No; yes, remember me to everyone. I was much attached to them all. And tell them that my life was a great, and to others unknown and unintelligible, suffering. It all looked like pride and vanity, but it was not. —Søren Kierkegaard on his deathbed, when asked if he had any last message for his friends Daughter, I want some music to cheer me through this dark valley. —the last words of Raccoon John Smith As both America’s Era of Good Feeling and Alexander Campbell’s sweet dream of a Messianic Age built on the foundations of his Restored Gospel quietly passed away with a whimper in the midst of the northern and southern sectional strifes that would lead finally to the Civil War, Raccoon John spent the autumn years of his life and ministry in genteel Georgetown, ironically , finally in the gracious lifestyle to which he had begun to aspire so many years before in the hills of Wayne County. He was the Grand Old Man of a respected religious denomination (or the church, as some of course preferred to think of it) in Kentucky, and his name within it was already, and indeed always would be, legend. He received calls from admiring visitors such as Albert Allen, and recounted to them his recollections of the heroic days in which he first fought to establish the true faith. He and Nancy purchased three slaves (again perhaps with James and Maria Lee’s help): a man named Jerry and a woman named Marena in the same year as their move to Georgetown, and after settling there, another woman named Winnie.1 Thus, finally Nancy’s worn hands were relieved of a portion of their drudgery, both the increasingly palsied John and his remaining single son Harvey were spared doing menial chores, and the two youngest Smith girls could receive calls from the local Scott County swains in the atmosphere of southern respectability. In fact, both Harvey and Emma Smith made what must have been considered extremely good matches, and although very little is known about Mary, she may have done so as well. On December 18, 1852, Raccoon John performed the ceremony for twenty-nine-year-old Harvey to wed Mary C. Stedman, 378 Raccoon John Smith daughter of the well-to-do Georgetown manufacturer and entrepreneur Leander C. Stedman and his wife, Isabella, who herself was a member of the prestigious Kidd family of Fayette County. Almost exactly one year later, Emma Smith married Albertis Ratliff Ringo,2 scion of a distinguished Fleming and Montgomery County family and one of the wealthiest young men in Georgetown at that time. Like James Lee, A. R. Ringo was a merchant and moneylender, known as “the walking banker” because of his ready propensity to make loans on the spur of the moment directly from his pocket, and he had both a house and business interests in no less an eastern seaboard commercial hub than Philadelphia as well as his home base in the Bluegrass.3 Along with Lee, too, he may have assumed a portion of his in-laws’ debts and expenses, and it’s certain that he helped Harvey get a start in business. Finally, Raccoon John performed the wedding for his youngest daughter, Mary, to W. C. Tomlinson on May 1, 1856,4 although the joy of the occasion was no doubt subdued by the death that same year of John and Nancy’s secondoldest surviving daughter, Eliza Ann, back in Owingsville.5 According to the 1850 Federal Census of Bath County, Eliza Ann and her husband, Edgar, had one child, William,6 but it is not certain that either Edgar or William survived her. W. C. and Mary Tomlinson seem to have settled in Audrain County, Missouri , fairly early in their marriage, but Tomlinson appears to have died at some time during or soon after the end of the Civil War; he may have been a soldier and a casualty, but we cannot say for sure. It is likewise uncertain whether they had any offspring or not. Mary remarried to Robert S. Steele in Audrain County on April 3, 1867,7 and by that time the Ringos had settled in the same county’s governmental seat, known as Mexico, as well, and had established a hotel and a bank.8 Raccoon John was, indeed, a long way from where his plodding, hardworking father had been...

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