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  • The PartisanWilliam Davis Gallagher and the Cause of Western Literature
  • Terry A. Barnhart (bio)

Few individuals in the early and mid–nineteenth century were more intimately connected with the cultural aspirations of Ohio and "the Great West" than the journalist, poet, and public official William Davis Gallagher (1808–1894). Gallagher and his literary compeers—Timothy Flint, James Hall, the brothers Daniel and Benjamin F. Drake, and William Turner Goggeshall—were prominent figures in the movement to create a distinctively western literature as an equal province of American letters. Muses Calliope and Clio had no more effective devotees than those who proclaimed the virtues of homegrown literature and history in the trans-Appalachian West. The call for a western literature was fervent and widespread, but few were more closely identified with the movement or did more to promote it than Gallagher. The cause of western literature from 1820 to 1860 speaks to several issues and problems relating to the construction of regional identity among those who identified themselves as "Westerners," and makes vital connections between literature, politics, and economic development that stand boldly forth in the rhetoric of region.1

Gallagher edited several literary journals between 1831 and 1839 that featured the work of western writers on western subjects. The most important of those endeavors were the Cincinnati Mirror, the Western Literary Journal and Monthly Review (continued as the Western Monthly Magazine and Literary Review), and the Hesperian. No less significant were Gallagher's offerings [End Page 101] as a poet. Several of the plays published in his Erato No. I, II, and III between 1835 and 1837 received critical acclaim, and his Selections from the Poetical Literature of the West, published in 1841, is the first anthology of western verse. Gallagher contributed several poems to the National Era from 1847 to 1852, and during the Civil War wrote patriotic verse relating to the grand themes of that conflict. He continued to write poetry and revise some of what he had already written until 1881, when he brought forward the penultimate version of his long-awaited Miami Woods, A Golden Wedding, and Other Poems. While Gallagher and his fellow regionalists were only partially successful in their efforts to create a distinctly western literature, the intellectual and cultural history of Ohio and the nation is none the poorer for his earnest and impassioned efforts.2

Born in Philadelphia on August 21, 1808, William Davis Gallagher was the third of four sons of Bernard Gallagher and Abigail Davis. Bernar refugee who participated in the Irish rebellion of 1803 before immigrating to Philadelphia. John Binns, editor of the Shamrock, is said to have helped Bernard obtain work in Philadelphia after his arrival, but his actual vocation is uncertain. Abigail Davis was the daughter of a Welsh farmer, who immigrated to the American colonies and was one of the "Jersey Blues" who died at Valley Forge in service of the Continental Army. Abigail's mother raised her in Bridgeport, New Jersey, before sending her to Philadelphia to receive a Quaker education. There she met and married Bernard, who died in 1814. Abigail moved from Philadelphia to Mount Pleasant in Hamilton County, Ohio, in 1816 with her four sons Edward, Francis, William, and John, either traveling in the company of relatives and family friends or joining those who were already there. This is virtually all that is known of Gallagher's parents and early childhood.3 [End Page 102]

Knowledge of William's early education is equally sketchy. He spent his first three years in Ohio working on his mother's farm and during the winter months received instruction in the local common school. His teacher in those days was Samuel Woodworth, who introduced him to the literary gleanings contained in the American Reader and the Columbian Orator. The youth took a liking to those books and his love of literature never dimmed. Gallagher appears to have been an industrious student, but he loved the woods and streams more than the confinement of school. He hunted and fished in the countryside outside of Cincinnati, where he occasionally played truant. His love of nature carried forward into later life, as he fondly recalled in his poem...

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