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129 CHAPTER 6 Intellectual Background and Education Sometimes when studying early will books in the back of the long reading room of the Tennessee State Library at Nashville, the pioneers would vanish, and in their stead came half remembered things, rummagings as it were among the odds and ends my head has at random gathered. Who wrote Ossian’s poems? And I would sit fishing for the name Macpherson ; often I forgot the will book for a memory—the joy of a first reading of The Vicar of Wakefield. More often still, I think, there would come the ghost of a big and ugly man, a Tory so opposed to the American Revolution he wrote in London a tract pointing out the virtues of England’s side— Dr. Samuel Johnson. He came, for instance, with John Rice, an early Nashville merchant, in business many years before his death in January, 1792, near the mouth of Red River.1 Rice was a wealthy bachelor with many small luxuries such as “framed pictures.” He also owned several thousand acres of land; Memphis stands on land owned, though not then clear of Indian title, by John Rice. He made a will some years before he died,2 and in it left land to be sold, the proceeds to go “for schooling” the poor of Cumberland. He seems at first glance to have nothing whatever in common with Dr. Johnson, eight years dead in London. Even the terms describing the occupations of Rice—land speculator, storekeeper—were unknown to Johnson and his world of literary men. Then, in scanning Rice’s inventory one finds along with Tom Jones and other books Dodsley’s Collection of Poems, and one remembers Johnson was a friend of Robert Dodsley. We cannot be certain that Dodsley’s Collection owned by John Rice was the same as that published in London in 1748; it may have been an American edition pirated in whole or part, or only one volume of the original three. 130| Chapter 6 Yet, whatever the edition, it was a link between John Rice, dead at the mouth of Red River, and the rich intellectual life of the British Isles of the eighteenth century. James Boswell in giving us Dr. Johnson gave us much of the life of his day. The man Johnson and such great ones as Hume, Goldsmith , Chesterfield, Adam Smith, Whitefield—names found often in early Cumberland inventories—could not be separated. All were in turn part of a world much wider than that of their own time and place. Johnson and his circle read and discussed Rousseau and Voltaire, and all men of their day with any pretensions to education were conversant with the language and literature of ancient Greece and Rome. They had almost as much respect for the literature of the past as we of today have for the technology of the present and the future. Such was the influence of this world that no settlement in the old West, no matter how remote, could quite escape it. James Smith,3 the first traveler to leave a record of his stay in the wilds of what was to be Middle Tennessee , had for company in 1766 a mulatto boy, a Psalm Book, and Watts’ Upon Prayer; previously, while a captive at Fort Duquesne he had studied the Bible. The Long Hunters usually carried with them at least a few books. The story that “Lulbegrud” Creek in Kentucky got its name because a party of hunters encamped there was reading Gulliver’s Travels is well known. Most of those who left accounts of childhoods on the border speak of the books owned by their families—works ranging from the Bible and Watts’ Poems for Children,4 through the usual Dilworth texts to Lord Chesterfield’s Advice, a work widely owned on the Cumberland, though not too well thought of by Dr. Johnson. Early, one finds Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, now and then his “Big Dictionary,” or bound copies of the Rambler. Johnson’s works, however, are less commonly found than those of Smollett, Whitefield , Shakespeare, Voltaire, and several other men. Books came to Middle Tennessee by flatboat and horseback through the hard cold of the winter of 1779–1780. Practically all inventories beginning with that of Nicholas Gentry, killed owning a Bible and a spelling book, to wealthy John Deadrick more than a dozen years later, whose eight volume Hume’s History of England sold for $18, list books...

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