Free Thinker

by Kimberly A. Hamlin

  The youngest of the seven Chenoweth children, Alice, was born in January 1853, near Winchester, Virginia. Just three years later and less than 30 miles south of Peales Crossroads, Woodrow Wilson was born in Staunton, Virginia, to another minister and his wife. As a boy born to a family of privilege, however, Wilson’s life would not mirror Alice’s in any meaningful way until the two Virginians reconnected in the 1910s, in the White House, and realized that their shared Virginia heritage bound them together.

  AFTER THE Compromise of 1850 strengthened the Fugitive Slave Act, abolitionist sentiment grew in fervor. Reverend Alfred Chenoweth could no longer quietly abide his complicity in this humanitarian crisis. He determined to raise his children without the taint of slavery and to emancipate the men and women that his family had held in bondage. But how? Because Virginia was a slave state, Alfred prepared manumission papers and moved everyone to Washington, D.C., in 1854, when Alice was just one year old.

  In Washington, Alfred was appointed pastor at Ebenezer United Methodist Church, at the corner of 4th and D Streets, SE, one of the first churches founded by African Americans during slavery.11 He hoped that his post at Ebenezer would help Jerry, Mariah, and the other people formerly enslaved by his family to acclimate to their new lives as freedmen and freedwomen. But Alfred worried whether these men and women, especially the older ones, would be able to find work in the District and what freedom would mean for them in this precarious context.12

  Meanwhile, Alfred’s former neighbors condemned his “damned foolishness” because it threatened the social order of their society. The Chenoweths were cast out by their Virginia relatives and friends, who fretted that Alfred’s action would upset the balance of power on their own farms and plantations. Alice’s mother Ann bore the brunt of her husband’s decision, a decision in which she neither had a say nor agreed with fully but had to defend just the same.13 Ann never returned to Peales Crossroads and would raise her seven children in a series of unfamiliar places.

  Even though Alice was just one when her family left Virginia, this move shaped her understanding of her country, her upbringing, and herself. Indeed, it was one of the defining moments of her life. Alfred’s courageous decision also cast him as Alice’s lifelong hero. As she would later recall, “To those whose traditions of ancestry all center about one locality, it costs a fearful struggle to tear up root and branch and strike out into unknown fields among people of a different type and class; with dissimilar ideas and standards of action and belief. To such it is almost like the threat or presence of death in the household.” Her father’s decision required “a heroism, a fidelity to conscience and, withal, a confidence in one’s own judgement and beliefs that surpass the normal limit.” He made this change “in pursuance of a moral conviction,” knowing it would “surely result in financial loss and material discomfort,” something no one should expect from anyone who was “less than heroic.”14

  Alice was just an adolescent when she abandoned her belief in the biblical origins story that she had descended from a woman who dared eat fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, but she held tenaciously to Chenoweth family lore and the memory of her father’s bravery. She was equally, if paradoxically, drawn to the stature of the Chenoweth name and to her father’s decision to refuse his birthright, even though neither was supposed to pertain to a young woman. Alice learned early on that bucking social customs, family ties, and conventional wisdom in support of one’s moral convictions came with steep personal and financial costs. But in the tradition of her iconoclastic father, she would choose this same path in her own life, time and time again.

  RIGHTLY PREDICTING that the sectional conflict over slavery would soon turn violent and that much of the fight would take place in Virginia, Alice’s extended Chenoweth family had begun buying land in Indiana in the 1840s. First her uncle John, Alfred’s older brother, moved to Putnam County; a few years later, his aging parents joined him. And finally, in 1855, Alfred and his family, plus baby Alice’s black nurse Aunt Judy (a former slave), moved to Greencastle, Indiana, where Alfred had secured an appointment as a Methodist minister.

  In Greencastle, the Chenoweths lived in the upscale neighborhood known as the Eastern Enlargement, where their neighbors included the pharmaceutical pioneer Eli Lilly, the architect Elisha Braman, and faculty members from Indiana Asbury University, the new Methodist college (now known as DePauw University).15 This would be the first home that Alice was old enough to remember and the first home that the Chenoweths lived in for longer than one year.

  Greencastle had been settled as the county seat of Putnam County in the 1820s and boasted nearly 3,000 residents by the time the Chenoweths arrived in the 1850s. The town converged on a two-story, brick Greek Revival courthouse, ringed by restaurants and shops, including Eli Lilly’s first drug store, which opened in 1861. The spiritual and community center of Greencastle, however, was Indiana Asbury University, which began enrolling male students in 1837. In 1852, the railroad came to town, bringing increased growth and commerce and also, most likely, the Reverend Chenoweth and his family. With fertile farmlands, thriving local industry, and a prestigious new college, Greencastle prospered throughout the nineteenth century and attracted many settlers from the East and South.16

  Alice Chenoweth, age two, with her older sister Julia, living in Greencastle, Indiana.

  To the former county squires of Virginia, however, Greencastle seemed a provincial boondocks. As recently as 1836, the county clerk had paid residents $2 for each wolf they killed.17 One early resident lamented that it seemed as if the townspeople had “expended their entire stock of enterprise and public spirit upon the one object of founding the university, and have nothing left for further improvement.”18 Another observer recalled that in 1854, Greencastle was “celebrated for the unprogressive spirit and rusticity of its inhabitants, its miserable dwellings and filthy hotels.”19

  Even with new railroads, commerce, and colleges, Indiana lacked the gravitas of Virginia: no founding fathers or presidents hailed from Indiana (President William Henry Harrison served as governor of the Indiana Territories, but he was born in Virginia), and it had only been a state since 1816. Even the famed arboreal beauty of Putnam County was no match for the grand vistas of the Shenandoah Mountains. The Chenoweths missed the stature that being a Chenoweth in Virginia and a Virginian in America had conferred.

  Shortly after the Chenoweths arrived, Alice’s two oldest brothers, Bernard and William, began taking classes at Indiana Asbury (girls were not yet allowed to enroll); Alice and her younger siblings were taught by private tutors.20 In public school or with a private tutor, the books most commonly assigned to young students in the Midwest were McGuffey’s Eclectic Readers, the best-selling school books and, by the 1870s, the second-most-read books in America, behind only the King James Bible. The Readers contained stories, poems, and history lessons in increasing levels of difficulty. Through stories such as “Do Not Meddle,” “Boy on a Farm,” and “Respect for the Sabbath Rewarded,” children learned about gender and racial norms as well as the industriousness and Christian virtues of the ideal American.21

  Alice later recalled chafing against this rote style of learning, with its emphasis on memorization and its clear delineation between right and wrong. She remembered one grammar lesson that required students to use their dictionaries to complete the sentence “I like to ___ in the garden.” Eager to please the teacher and show off her erudition, one not-so-bright girl wrote in “ferment” because the dictionary told her it was a synonym for work. This impressed upon Alice that it might be misguided “to teach young people to have that absolutely blind faith in dictionary definitions and synonyms.” “Shades of meaning” are lost “by this blind adherence to authority.”22 Alice’s lifelong aversion to unquestioned authority seemed innate.

  Alice’s greatest teachers, however, were her family and her house full of books. Reverend Chenoweth was admired for being “affable, courteous, and companionable” as well as “sound in theol
ogy, unremitting in labor, and faithful to duty.”23 His youngest daughter imbibed these character lessons along with the warmth of his good reputation. From her father, Alice also learned biblical stories and the Methodist commitment to putting “faith and love into action.”

  In addition to her father’s regular Sunday sermons, Alice and her siblings were expected to attend annual revivals. Each year, the local churches joined together to sponsor these week-long events. As one such week dragged on, Alice and her friend Isabel felt panicked that they were the only two “eager sinners” in their Sunday school class who had not yet been saved. As the two girls stood worrying in the revival tent, “a tall, thin, dark, and terrible looking” clergyman came toward them, clasped their hands, and demanded: “Do you want to go to Hell?”

  The minister’s “explosive voice” made Alice “jump out of her small boots, while Isabel fell to weeping bitterly.” The minister brought the girls to the mourner’s bench, where they continued to cry until they fell asleep. Hours later, the clergyman found them still there, sleeping, and pronounced them saved. All the townspeople rejoiced and congratulated them. The following day, Alice and Isabel admitted to each other that they felt no different, despite their purported salvation. The next Sunday they were “taken in on probation” at church. Six months later the girls were confirmed as full members of the Methodist Church.24 Later in life, Alice credited the “extreme conservatism of this early training” with influencing her “radical views on questions of religion.”25

  Rather than seeking inspiration from her father’s Bible, Alice was drawn to the books of her eldest and favorite brother, Bernard Peale Chenoweth. Seventeen years her senior, Bernard was like a second father to Alice. In Greencastle, Bernard earned a reputation as being “very well educated, for he was a youth who got at the insides of books, character, and life.”26 She also befriended his classmates, including Greencastle’s most famous son, John Clark Ridpath, who would go on to become a prominent historian and writer and, eventually, a colleague to Alice. Her older brothers nicknamed her Robin because her eyes and mouth were always wide open and she “saw and heard everything.”27

  Like his father had done a generation earlier, young Bernard revolted against the religion of his parents. He began by reading the works of Thomas Paine, one of the most revered yet controversial contributors to American intellectual history. Credited with stirring up popular passion in support of the American Revolution through his best-selling pamphlet “Common Sense,” Paine nevertheless had become anathema to mainstream Americans by the early 1800s. In fact, Paine nearly rotted to death from an infected ulcer in a French prison because the American representative in France so opposed his blasphemous writings that he refused to intervene on Paine’s behalf. It took the election of Paine’s old friend Thomas Jefferson as president to bring him back to America in 1802. But even Jefferson’s blessing could not soften the fallout resulting from the publication of The Age of Reason.28

  In The Age of Reason, Paine critiqued the hypocrisy, material greed, and lust for power that he believed characterized the Christian Church, and he proclaimed that he did not accept any Bible stories that contravened the laws of science and reason. In other words, he rejected virgin births, earth-cleansing floods, water turned to wine, and the spontaneous generation of loaves and fishes. In place of these fables, Paine praised the God who created nature and rational minds. Bernard Chenoweth sided with Paine. In the fervently religious Chenoweth household, Alice recalled that Bernard had to buy two copies of The Age of Reason because their mother burned the first one.29

  INTELLECTUAL SKIRMISHES ASIDE, Alice’s family adjusted well to life in Putnam County. In 1858, the Methodist Church promoted Alfred to presiding elder over the Northwest District, and by 1860, he had amassed over $15,000 worth of property.30 To purchase this land, however, Alfred borrowed heavily from his father John. Alfred Chenoweth owned many acres of land, but his family remained cash poor.

  One Christmas, Alice later recounted to a friend, she wanted to buy her mother a sewing machine and her father a gold pencil. Having no understanding of money or that her family had little of it, she went to the general store at Courthouse Square. The proprietor told Alice’s mother Ann about her visit, and Ann managed to convince Alice that all her parents desired for Christmas were pink and white gum drops. Alice had always supposed that if her family didn’t have something it was simply because they did not want it, so her mother’s explanation made perfect sense. Growing up, she “had never heard and did not know the meaning of ‘we cannot afford it.’ ”31

  Even as the Chenoweths adjusted to their new life, Indiana would never be home. After all, they had not so much moved to Putnam County as they had moved away from Virginia in the hopes of avoiding war. But they soon learned that even in Greencastle, they would not be able to escape the coming national crisis.

  Indiana was a free state dominated by the Republican Party. But Putnam County had been settled by Southerners, and Democrats represented its citizens in Congress and in the mayor’s office. A vocal minority of Putnam County residents sympathized with slave ownership, in part because many, like the Chenoweths, had relatives in the South.32 With Greencastle so close to the National Road and on two railroad lines, many prominent politicians and thinkers passed through town. Alice and her siblings were privy to increasingly heated debates about slavery and secession.

  Eldest son Bernard—who had been named for his maternal grandfather, Bernard Peale, the man acquitted in 1816 for whipping his slave Rachel to death—felt the call to action. At age twenty-two, Bernard left college and traveled throughout the South, searching for a place where he could make a meaningful stand against slavery. The most pressing slavery-related question had to do with whether Kansas would be admitted to the Union as a slave state or as a free state. In 1859, Bernard moved to St. Joseph, Missouri, a border town at the epicenter of this controversy, and invested $1,500 in a Free Soil newspaper called the Free Democrat. Together with his partners, Bernard “set the border aflame” with his outspoken opposition to slavery.33

  On March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as the sixteenth president of the United States, prompting the escalation of hostilities with the seceding Southern states. The Free Democrat published its last edition on April 13. “At the firing of the first shot,” Bernard enlisted in the Union army.34 Days later, Alice’s second-eldest brother, William Erasmus, was among the first to join the 16th Indiana Infantry Regiment. Alice followed along on their adventures through letters. Even when separated, “Robin” was watching and learning.

  Alice recalled that her mother “felt faint and sick when she realized that two of her boys had gone to fight against her people. She knew that her own brothers and nephews would all be on the other side, and that [Alfred’s] were there too.”35 Alice’s uncle Jonathan Peale, Ann’s oldest brother, had inherited the family’s land at Peales Crossroads, and by 1860, he owned more than a dozen slaves. Jonathan leveraged his privilege in full support of the Confederacy. During the Shenandoah Valley Campaign of 1862, the Peales hosted Stonewall Jackson and sixty of his troops at their magnificent home. General Jackson even used the house, with its second-floor porches facing in both directions, as his headquarters during the Battle of Cross Keys and, later, as a hospital.36 Alice’s aunt Amanda Peale and her husband George Keezell also supported the Confederacy. Together they had one son, George Bernard Keezell, who assisted Confederate troops in the mundane tasks assigned to boys too young to take up arms.37 The Civil War splintered Alice’s family.

  THROUGHOUT THE FALL OF 1861, Bernard remained on the western front, while William’s regiment was sent back to the Winchester, Virginia, region of Alice’s birth. On October 21, William’s unit was dispatched on a routine reconnaissance mission across the Potomac River, near Ball’s Bluff. This mission ended in a humiliating defeat for the Union army and, among other things, revealed to the Confederates that Union leaders did not know their way around Virginia.

  Fo
llowing the Union trouncing at Ball’s Bluff, Indiana governor Oliver Morton, a passionate supporter of Lincoln, implored Reverend Chenoweth to volunteer his services as a Union scout in Virginia. Who could know Virginia backroads and valleys better than a circuit riding minister who had once traversed them on foot and on horseback? “It is my old State,” Alfred protested. “I love it and my people. I have done enough for my country. I have done my share. I have given my property, my friends, my home, and now my boys—all, all I have given for my conscience and my country’s sake. Surely I have done my whole duty. I will not betray my State.” But Governor Morton forwarded his name to President Lincoln. The president summoned Alfred to the White House and beseeched him “to make [Union generals] as familiar with [Virginia] as you are yourself.”38 With son William’s life in danger, Alfred reluctantly agreed.

  This decision left Alice’s mother at home alone with their four youngest children, ranging in age from eight to seventeen (son John had died years earlier). Alfred spent three months mapping the land of his youth and showing Union commanders its “real topography,” as Lincoln had commanded.39 His Methodist colleagues recalled that Reverend Chenoweth led “the marshaled hosts of freedom through the mountain gaps and defiles, which in earlier years he had traversed as an itinerant preacher, to decisive and cheering victories.”40

  Shortly after the Union victory at the Battle of Shiloh in April 1862, Alfred returned home to Greencastle. The Chenoweth family briefly rejoiced before learning, in June, that Bernard had become ill with typhoid fever and what he described as “temporary insanity.”41 After returning to active duty, Bernard became a protégé of General Ulysses S. Grant and was dispatched to New Orleans, where he met seventeen-year-old Caroline Van Deusen, a wealthy debutante. He returned to Greencastle to marry her in March 1863.42 Bernard’s visit cheered the Chenoweths, who waited for news from William, who eventually became captain of the 16th Indiana Infantry. Just days after Bernard’s wedding, sixteen-year-old Alfred, Alice’s youngest brother, shocked the family by secretly enlisting in the Union army. That July, he contracted “epidemic opthalmia,” for which the Army surgeon repeatedly “burnt his eyes with blue stone” (copper sulfide). Alfred continued to fight with his regiment, even as his eyesight deteriorated.43