Even the Anti-means Baptists have suffered from the dire spirit of the age. They are today a very respectable body of people calling themselves “Primitive Baptists.” Perhaps the description in the text never applied to the whole denomination, but only to the Hardshells of certain localities. Some of these intensely conservative churches, I have reason to believe, were always composed of reputable people. But what is said above is not in the least exaggerated as a description of many of the churches in Indiana and Illinois. Their opposition to the temperance reformation was both theoretical and practical. A rather able minister of the denomination whom I knew as a boy used to lie in besotted drunkenness by the roadside. I am sorry to confess that he once represented the county in the State legislature. The piece of a sermon given in this chapter was heard near Cairo, Illinois, in the days before the war. Most of the preachers were illiterate farmers. I have heard one of them hold forth two hours at a stretch. But even in that day there were men among the Hardshells whose ability and character commanded respect. This was true, especially in Kentucky, where able men like the two Dudleys held to the Antinomian wing of their denomination. But the Hardshells are perceptibly less hard than they were. You may march at the rear of the column among Hunkers and Hardshells if you will, but you are obliged to march. Those who will not go voluntarily, the time-spirit, walking behind, prods onward with a goad. ↩
The elaborate etymological treatment of this word in its various forms in our best dictionary is a fine illustration of the fact that something more than scholarship is needed for penetrating the mysteries of current folk-speech. “Brash”—often “bresh”—in the sense of refuse, boughs of trees, is only another form of “brush”; the two are used as one word by the people. “Brash” in the sense of brittle has no conscious connection with the noun in popular usage, but it is accounted by the people the same word as “brash” in the sense of rash or impetuous. The suggestion in the Century Dictionary that the words spelled “brash” are of modern formation violates the soundest canon of antiquarian research, which is that a word phrase or custom widely diffused among plain or rustic people is of necessity of ancient origin. Now “brash,” the adjective, exists in both senses in two or three of the most widely separated dialects of the United States, and hence must have come from England. Indeed, it appears in Wright’s Dictionary of Provincial English in precisely the sense it has in the text. ↩
The total absence of the word “pail” not only from the dialect, but even from cultivated speech in the Southern and Border States until very recently, is a fact I leave to be explained on further investigation. The word is an old one and a good one, but I fancy that its use in England could not have been generally diffused in the seventeenth century. So a Hoosier or a Kentuckian never pared an apple, but peeled it. Much light might be thrown on the origin and history of our dialects by investigating their deficiencies. ↩
Some time after this book appeared Dr. Brown-Séquard announced his theory of the dual brain. A writer in an English magazine called attention to the fact that the discovery had been anticipated by an imaginative writer, and cited the passage in the text as proving that the author of The Hoosier Schoolmaster had outrun Dr. Brown-Séquard in perceiving the duality of the brain. It is a matter for surprise that an author, even an “imaginative” one, should have made so great a discovery without suspecting its meaning until it was explained by someone else. ↩
The reader may be interested to know that “Phil” was drawn from the life, as was old Mowley and in part “General Jackson” also. Between 1867 and 1870, I visited many jails and poorhouses with philanthropic purpose, publishing the results of my examination in some cases in The Chicago Tribune. Some of the abuses pointed out were reformed, others linger till this day, I believe. ↩
I have already mentioned the absence of “pail” and “pare” from the ancient Hoosier folk-speech. “Brook” is likewise absent. The illiterate Indiana countryman before the Civil War, let us say, had no pails, pared no apples, husked no corn, crossed no brooks. The same is true, I believe, of the South generally. As the first settlers on the Southern coast entered the land by the rivers, each smaller stream was regarded as a branch of the larger one. A small stream was therefore called a “branch.” The word brook was probably lost in the first generation. But a small stream is often called a “run” in the Middle and Southern belt. Halliwell gives “rundel” as used with the same signification in England, and he gives “ryn” in the same sense from an old manuscript. ↩
“Juberous” is in none of the vocabularies that I have seen. I once treated this word in print as an undoubted corruption of “dubious,” and when used subjectively it apparently feels the influence of dubious, as where one says: “I feel mighty juberous about it.” But it is much oftener applied as in the text to the object of fear, as “The bridge looks kind o’ juberous.” Halliwell gives the verb “juberd” and defines it as “to jeopard or endanger.” It is clearly a dialect form of “jeopard,” and I make no doubt that “juberous” is a dialect variation of “jeopardous,” occasionally used as a form
