The Printer's Kiss: The Life and Letters of a Civil War Newspaperman and His Family

2. Eliza’s Heritage

5 The scotch­irish origins of eliza Wylie Tomlinson would, for the most part, have drawn upon the same ethnic stock as her husband’s an­ cestors in northern england. Like her husband, eliza placed high a value on independence and identified with those who rebelled against tyranny at home and abroad. in fact, one of her Wylie ancestors left County An­ trim in ireland in 1797 because of his participation in the struggle for irish independence, and both sets of her grandparents settled in an area of southwestern Pennsylvania that became known as a nursery of scotch Presbyterian rebels. in addition, both of eliza’s grandfathers served in the American War for independence.1 Given the nonconformist origins of scottish Presbyterians, it is likely that as an infant eliza was rocked to the tune of “Nooo bishops!”As a “cra­ dle Presbyterian,” she, like her parents before her, would probably have learned at an early age never to swear allegiance to any civil or religious authority that interfered with a person’s direct access to God through Je­ sus Christ as revealed in scripture. her faith would have been grounded in such basic tenets of the reformed Tradition as the doctrines of grace and gratitude and the declaration that “God alone is Lord of the con­ science.” no doubt her theological bias would have led her to abhor the Eliza’s Heritage ChAPTer TWO } resistance to Tyrants is Obedience to God! —Whig petition, June 10, 1848, Brown County, Ohio 6 } the printer’s kiss hierarchy of the roman Catholic Church, distrust the Quaker emphasis on experience and inner light, and disdain anyone or anything she saw as ostentatious or excessive. For eliza, the good life would have been one lived in moderation, with the freedom to choose one’s religion and the right to representative government—in church and state.2 in addition to stories about resistance, rebellion, and the right to self­ government, which eliza probably heard growing up, she would also have heard accounts of life on the frontier. When her ancestral clans hopscotched westward across Pennsylvania and settled on the edge of the frontier in the Allegheny Mountains in the mid­ to late 1700s, there were still uprisings from native Americans in the area. in 1789, indians killed a family living near eliza’s maternal grandfather, Thomas Byers, who had settled just three years before on stonecoal, a 400­acre tract in West Finley Township of Washington County. in 1784 her paternal grandfather, Adam Wylie, had acquired 339 acres in Canton Township but took his family to safer ground for a number of years. several years later, a son of Adam Wylie, Dr. Adam Wylie, purchased 140 acres from his father, and it was on that tract that eliza and her two older brothers were born. But life for eliza in southwestern Pennsylvania among her kith and kin was not to be.3 in 1817, Dr. Adam Wylie, his wife, sarah, and their three children, Thomas Byers, Adam newton, and eliza—ages six, four, and two—made the short journey from their home in Washington County to the Ohio river. There they probably boarded a flatboat, the most common mode of river transportation for families moving west at that time. Between 1810 and 1820 an average of three thousand flatboats floated down the Ohio every year. They varied greatly in size and construction, but the more substantial ones looked like a barge with a wooden shoebox on top. A comfortably sized flatboat, about fifteen feet wide and thirty­five to one hundred feet long, could carry an extended family with everything from household goods to livestock. Although a vessel outfitted in such a man­ ner might look more like an ancient ark or American pigsty than a river­ worthyvessel, flatboats were especially useful to pioneers. Upon reaching their destination, they could easily dismantle the boat and sell the wood for cash or use it for building a house or barn.4 The trip downriver to ripley, Ohio, probably took eliza’s family about six days. To make themselves less vulnerable to attacks from indians and river pirates, they probably traveled in the spring, when the riverwas high and fast, and as part of a flatboat flotilla of other families, including some eliza’s heritage } 7 from Washington County. in ripley, the Wylies joined several families from Virginia who wanted to remove themselves from the...