Book: The Reign of Law

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DEDICATION

TO THE MEMORY OF A FATHER AND MOTHER WHOSE SELF-SACRIFICE, HIGH
SYMPATHY, AND DEVOTION THE WRITING OF THIS STORY HAS CAUSED TO LIVE
AFRESH IN THE EVER-GROWING, NEVER-AGING, GRATITUDE OF THEIR SON




HEMP

THE REIGN OF LAW

A TALE OF THE KENTUCKY HEMP FIELDS



HEMP


The Anglo-Saxon farmers had scarce conquered foothold, stronghold,
freehold in the Western wilderness before they became sowers of
hemp--with remembrance of Virginia, with remembrance of dear
ancestral Britain. Away back in the days when they lived with wife,
child, flock in frontier wooden fortresses and hardly ventured
forth for water, salt, game, tillage--in the very summer of that
wild daylight ride of Tomlinson and Bell, by comparison with
which, my children, the midnight ride of Paul Revere, was as tame
as the pitching of a rocking-horse in a boy's nursery--on that
history-making twelfth of August, of the year 1782, when these two
backwoods riflemen, during that same Revolution the Kentuckians
then fighting a branch of that same British army, rushed out of
Bryan's Station for the rousing of the settlements and the saving
of the West--hemp was growing tall and thick near the walls of the
fort.

Hemp in Kentucky in 1782--early landmark in the history of the
soil, of the people. Cultivated first for the needs of cabin and
clearing solely; for twine and rope, towel and table, sheet and
shirt. By and by not for cabin and clearing only; not for tow-
homespun, fur-clad Kentucky alone. To the north had begun the
building of ships, American ships for American commerce, for
American arms, for a nation which Nature had herself created and
had distinguished as a sea-faring race. To the south had begun the
raising of cotton. As the great period of shipbuilding went on--
greatest during the twenty years or more ending in 1860; as the
great period of cotton-raising and cotton-baling went on--never so
great before as that in that same year--the two parts of the nation
looked equally to the one border plateau lying between them, to
several counties of Kentucky, for most of the nation's hemp. It was
in those days of the North that the CONSTITUTION was rigged with
Russian hemp on one side, with American hemp on the other, for a
patriotic test of the superiority of home-grown, home-prepared
fibre; and thanks to the latter, before those days ended with the
outbreak of the Civil War, the country had become second to Great
Britain alone in her ocean craft, and but little behind that
mistress of the seas. So that in response to this double demand for
hemp on the American ship and hemp on the southern plantation, at
the close of that period of national history on land and sea, from
those few counties of Kentucky, in the year 1859, were taken well-
nigh forty thousand tons of the well-cleaned bast.

What history it wrought in those years, directly for the republic,
indirectly for the world! What ineffaceable marks it left on
Kentucky itself, land, land-owners! To make way for it, a forest
the like of which no human eye will ever see again was felled; and
with the forest went its pastures, its waters. The roads of
Kentucky, those long limestone turnpikes connecting the towns and
villages with the farms--they were early made necessary by the
hauling of the hemp. For the sake of it slaves were perpetually
being trained, hired, bartered; lands perpetually rented and sold;
fortunes made or lost. The advancing price of farms, the westward
movement of poor families and consequent dispersion of the
Kentuckians over cheaper territory, whither they carried the same
passion for the cultivation of the same plant,--thus making
Missouri the second hemp-producing state in the Union,--the
regulation of the hours in the Kentucky cabin, in the house, at the
rope-walk, in the factory,--what phase of life went unaffected by
the pursuit and fascination of it. Thought, care, hope of the
farmer oftentimes throughout the entire year! Upon it depending, it
may be, the college of his son, the accomplishments of his
daughter, the luxuries of his wife, the house he would build, the
stock he could own. His own pleasures also: his deer hunting in the
South, his fox hunting at home, his fishing on the great lakes, his
excursions on the old floating palaces of the Mississippi down to
New Orleans--all these depending in large measure upon his hemp,
that thickest gold-dust of his golden acres.

With the Civil War began the long decline, lasting still. The
record stands that throughout the one hundred and twenty-five odd
years elapsing from the entrance of the Anglo-Saxon farmers into
the wilderness down to the present time, a few counties of Kentucky
have furnished army and navy, the entire country, with all but a
small part of the native hemp consumed. Little comparatively is
cultivated in Kentucky now. The traveller may still see it here and
there, crowning those ever-renewing, self-renewing inexhaustible
fields. But the time cannot be far distant when the industry there
will have become extinct. Its place in the nation's markets will be
still further taken by metals, by other fibres, by finer varieties
of the same fibre, by the same variety cultivated in soils less
valuable. The history of it in Kentucky will be ended, and, being
ended, lost.

Some morning when the roar of March winds is no more heard in the
tossing woods, but along still brown boughs a faint, veil-like
greenness runs; when every spring, welling out of the soaked earth,
trickles through banks of sod unbarred by ice; before a bee is
abroad under the calling sky; before the red of apple-buds becomes
a sign in the low orchards, or the high song of the thrush is
pouring forth far away at wet pale-green sunsets, the sower, the
earliest sower of the hemp, goes forth into the fields.

Warm they must be, soft and warm, those fields, its chosen
birthplace. Up-turned by the plough, crossed and recrossed by the
harrow, clodless, levelled, deep, fine, fertile--some extinct
river-bottom, some valley threaded by streams, some table-land of
mild rays, moist airs, alluvial or limestone soils--such is the
favorite cradle of the hemp in Nature. Back and forth with measured
tread, with measured distance, broadcast the sower sows, scattering
with plenteous hand those small oval-shaped fruits, gray-green,
black-striped, heavily packed with living marrow.

Lightly covered over by drag or harrow, under the rolled earth now
they lie, those mighty, those inert seeds. Down into the darkness
about them the sun rays penetrate day by day, stroking them with
the brushes of light, prodding them with spears of flame. Drops of
nightly dews, drops from the coursing clouds, trickle down to them,
moistening the dryness, closing up the little hollows of the
ground, drawing the particles of maternal earth more closely.
Suddenly--as an insect that has been feigning death cautiously
unrolls itself and starts into action--in each seed the great
miracle of life begins. Each awakens as from a sleep, as from
pretended death. It starts, it moves, it bursts its ashen woody
shell, it takes two opposite courses, the white, fibril-tapered
root hurrying away from the sun; the tiny stem, bearing its lance-
like leaves, ascending graceful, brave like a palm.

Some morning, not many days later, the farmer, walking out into his
barn lot and casting a look in the direction of his field, sees--or
does he not see?--the surface of it less dark. What is that
uncertain flush low on the ground, that irresistible rush of
multitudinous green? A fortnight, and the field is brown no longer.
Overflowing it, burying it out of sight, is the shallow tidal sea
of the hemp, ever rippling. Green are the woods now with their
varied greenness. Green are the pastures. Green here and there are
the fields: with the bluish green of young oats and wheat; with the
gray green of young barley and rye: with orderly dots of dull dark
green in vast array--the hills of Indian maize. But as the eye
sweeps the whole landscape undulating far and near, from the hues
of tree, pasture, and corn of every kind, it turns to the color of
the hemp. With that in view, all other shades in nature seem dead
and count for nothing. Far reflected, conspicuous, brilliant,
strange; masses of living emerald, saturated with blazing sunlight.

Darker, always darker turns the hemp as it rushes upward: scarce
darker as to the stemless stalks which are hidden now; but darker
in the tops. Yet here two shades of greenness: the male plants
paler, smaller, maturing earlier, dying first; the females darker,
taller, living longer, more luxuriant of foliage and flowering
heads.

A hundred days from the sowing, and those flowering heads have come
forth with their mass of leaves and bloom and earliest fruits,
elastic, swaying six, ten, twelve feet from the ground and ripe for
cutting. A hundred days reckoning from the last of March or the
last of April, so that it is July, it is August. And now, borne far
through the steaming air floats an odor, balsamic, startling: the
odor of those plumes and stalks and blossoms from which is exuding
freely the narcotic resin of the great nettle. The nostril expands
quickly, the lungs swell out deeply to draw it in: fragrance once
known in childhood, ever in the memory afterward and able to bring
back to the wanderer homesick thoughts of midsummer days in the
shadowy, many-toned woods, over into which is blown the smell of
the hemp-fields.

Who apparently could number the acres of these in the days gone by?
A land of hemp, ready for the cutting! The oats heavy-headed,
rustling, have turned to gold and been stacked in the stubble or
stored in the lofts of white, bursting barns. The heavy-headed,
rustling wheat has turned to gold and been stacked in the stubble
or sent through the whirling thresher. The barley and the rye are
garnered and gone, the landscape has many bare and open spaces. But
separating these everywhere, rise the fields of Indian corn now in
blade and tassel; and--more valuable than all else that has been
sown and harvested or remains to be--everywhere the impenetrable
thickets of the hemp.

Impenetrable! For close together stand the stalks, making common
cause for soil and light, each but one of many, the fibre being
better when so grown--as is also the fibre of men. Impenetrable
and therefore weedless; for no plant life can flourish there, nor
animal nor bird. Scarce a beetle runs bewilderingly through those
forbidding colossal solitudes. The field-sparrow will flutter away
from pollen-bearing to pollen-receiving top, trying to beguile you
from its nest hidden near the edge. The crow and the blackbird will
seem to love it, having a keen eye for the cutworm, its only enemy.
The quail does love it, not for itself, but for its protection,
leading her brood into its labyrinths out of the dusty road when
danger draws near. Best of all winged creatures it is loved by the
iris-eyed, burnish-breasted, murmuring doves, already beginning to
gather in the deadened tree-tops with crops eager for the seed.
Well remembered also by the long-flight passenger pigeon, coming
into the land for the mast. Best of all wild things whose safety
lies not in the wing but in the foot, it is loved by the hare for
its young, for refuge. Those lithe, velvety, summer-thin bodies!
Observe carefully the tops of the still hemp: are they slightly
shaken? Among the bases of those stalks a cotton-tail is threading
its way inward beyond reach of its pursuer. Are they shaken
violently, parted clean and wide to right and left? It is the path
of the dog following the hot scent--ever baffled.

A hundred days to lift out of those tiny seed these powerful
stalks, hollow, hairy, covered with their tough fibre,--that
strength of cables when the big ships are tugged at by the joined
fury of wind and ocean. And now some morning at the corner of the
field stand the black men with hooks and whetstones. The hook, a
keen, straight blade, bent at right angles to the handle two feet
from the hand. Let these men be the strongest; no weakling can
handle the hemp from seed to seed again. A heart, the doors and
walls of which are in perfect order, through which flows freely the
full stream of a healthy man's red blood; lungs deep, clear, easily
filled, easily emptied; a body that can bend and twist and be
straightened again in ceaseless rhythmical movement; limbs
tireless; the very spirit of primeval man conquering primeval
nature--all these go into the cutting of the hemp. The leader
strides to the edge, and throwing forward his left arm, along which
the muscles play, he grasps as much as it will embrace, bends the
stalks over, and with his right hand draws the blade through them
an inch or more from the ground. When he has gathered his armful,
he turns and flings it down behind him, so that it lies spread out,
covering when fallen the same space it filled while standing. And
so he crosses the broad acres, and so each of the big black
followers, stepping one by one to a place behind him, until the
long, wavering, whitish green swaths of the prostrate hemp lie
shimmering across the fields. Strongest now is the smell of it,
impregnating the clothing of the men, spreading far throughout the
air.

So it lies a week or more drying, dying, till the sap is out of the
stalks, till leaves and blossoms and earliest ripened or un-ripened
fruits wither and drop off, giving back to the soil the nourishment
they have drawn from it; the whole top being thus otherwise wasted--
that part of the hemp which every year the dreamy millions of the
Orient still consume in quantities beyond human computation, and
for the love of which the very history of this plant is lost in the
antiquity of India and Persia, its home--land of narcotics and
desires and dreams.

Then the rakers with enormous wooden rakes; they draw the stalks
into bundles, tying each with the hemp itself. Following the
binders, move the wagon-beds or slides, gathering the bundles and
carrying them to where, huge, flat, and round, the stacks begin to
rise. At last these are well built; the gates of the field are
closed or the bars put up; wagons and laborers are gone; the brown
fields stand deserted.

One day something is gone from earth and sky: Autumn has come,
season of scales and balances, when the Earth, brought to judgment
for its fruits, says, "I have done what I could--now let me rest!"

Fall!--and everywhere the sights and sounds of falling. In the
woods, through the cool silvery air, the leaves, so indispensable
once, so useless now. Bright day after bright day, dripping night
after dripping night, the never-ending filtering or gusty fall of
leaves. The fall of walnuts, dropping from bare boughs with muffled
boom into the deep grass. The fall of the hickory-nut, rattling
noisily down through the scaly limbs and scattering its hulls among
the stones of the brook below.

The fall of buckeyes, rolling like balls of mahogany into the
little dust paths made by sheep in the hot months when they had
sought those roofs of leaves. The fall of acorns, leaping out of
their matted, green cups as they strike the rooty earth. The fall
of red haw, persimmon, and pawpaw, and the odorous wild plum in its
valley thickets. The fall of all seeds whatsoever of the forest,
now made ripe in their high places and sent back to the ground,
there to be folded in against the time when they shall arise again
as the living generations; the homing, downward flight of the seeds
in the many-colored woods all over the quiet land.

In the fields, too, the sights and sounds of falling, the fall of
the standing fatness. The silent fall of the tobacco, to be hung
head downward in fragrant sheds and barns. The felling whack of the
corn-knife and the rustling of the blades, as the workman gathers
within his arm the top-heavy stalks and presses them into the
bulging shock. The fall of pumpkins into the slow-drawn wagons, the
shaded side of them still white with the morning rime. In the
orchards, the fall of apples shaken thunderously down, and the
piling of these in sprawling heaps near the cider mills. In the
vineyards the fall of sugaring grapes into the baskets and the
bearing of them to the winepress in the cool sunshine, where there
is the late droning of bees about the sweet pomace.

But of all that the earth has yielded with or without the farmer's
help, of all that he can call his own within the limits of his
land, nothing pleases him better than those still, brown fields
where the shapely stacks stand amid the deadened trees. Two months
have passed, the workmen are at it again. The stacks are torn down,
the bundles scattered, the hemp spread out as once before. There to
lie till it shall be dew-retted or rotted; there to suffer freeze
and thaw, chill rains, locking frosts and loosening snows--all the
action of the elements--until the gums holding together the
filaments of the fibre rot out and dissolve, until the bast be
separated from the woody portion of the stalk, and the stalk itself
be decayed and easily broken.

Some day you walk across the spread hemp, your foot goes through at
each step, you stoop and taking several stalks, snap them readily
in your fingers. The ends stick out clean apart; and lo! hanging
between them, there it is at last--a festoon of wet, coarse, dark
gray riband, wealth of the hemp, sail of the wild Scythian
centuries before Horace ever sang of him, sail of the Roman, dress
of the Saxon and Celt, dress of the Kentucky pioneer.

The rakers reappear at intervals of dry weather, and draw the hemp
into armfuls and set it up in shocks of convenient size, wide
flared at the bottom, well pressed in and bound at the top, so that
the slanting sides may catch the drying sun and the sturdy base
resist the strong winds. And now the fields are as the dark brown
camps of armies--each shock a soldier's tent. Yet not dark always;
at times snow-covered; and then the white tents gleam for miles in
the winter sunshine--the snow-white tents of the camping hemp.

Throughout the winter and on into early spring, as days may be warm
or the hemp dry, the breaking continues. At each nightfall, cleaned
and baled, it is hauled on wagon-beds or slides to the barns or the
hemphouses, where it is weighed for the work and wages of the day.

Last of all, the brakes having been taken from the field, some
night--dear sport for the lads!--takes place the burning of the
"hempherds," thus returning their elements to the soil. To kindle a
handful of tow and fling it as a firebrand into one of those masses
of tinder; to see the flames spread and the sparks rush like swarms
of red bees skyward through the smoke into the awful abysses of the
night; to run from gray heap to gray heap, igniting the long line
of signal fires, until the whole earth seems a conflagration and
the heavens are as rosy as at morn; to look far away and descry on
the horizon an array of answering lights; not in one direction
only, but leagues away, to see the fainter ever fainter glow of
burning hempherds--this, too, is one of the experiences, one of the
memories.

And now along the turnpikes the great loaded creaking wagons pass
slowly to the towns, bearing the hemp to the factories, thence to
be scattered over land and sea. Some day, when the winds of March
are dying down, the sower enters the field and begins where he
began twelve months before.

A round year of the earth's changes enters into the creation of the
hemp. The planet has described its vast orbit ere it be grown and
finished. All seasons are its servitors; all contradictions and
extremes of nature meet in its making. The vernal patience of the
warming soil; the long, fierce arrows of the summer heat, the long,
silvery arrows of the summer rain; autumn's dead skies and sobbing
winds; winter's sternest, all-tightening frosts. Of none but strong
virtues is it the sum. Sickness or infirmity it knows not. It will
have a mother young and vigorous, or none; an old or weak or
exhausted soil cannot produce it. It will endure no roof of shade,
basking only in the eye of the fatherly sun, and demanding the
whole sky for the walls of its nursery.

Ah! type, too, of our life, which also is earth-sown, earth-rooted;
which must struggle upward, be cut down, rotted and broken, ere the
separation take place between our dross and our worth--poor
perishable shard and immortal fibre. Oh, the mystery, the mystery
of that growth from the casting of the soul as a seed into the dark
earth, until the time when, led through all natural changes and
cleansed of weakness, it is borne from the fields of its nativity
for the long service.




I


The century just past had not begun the race of its many-footed
years when a neighborhood of Kentucky pioneers, settled throughout
the green valleys of the silvery Elkhorn, built a church in the
wilderness, and constituted themselves a worshipping association.
For some time peace of one sort prevailed among them, if no peace
of any other sort was procurable around. But by and by there arose
sectarian quarrels with other backwoods folk who also wished to
worship God in Kentucky, and hot personal disputes among the
members--as is the eternal law. So that the church grew as grow
infusorians and certain worms,--by fissure, by periodical
splittings and breakings to pieces, each spontaneous division
becoming a new organism. The first church, however, for all that it
split off and cast off, seemed to lose nothing of its vitality or
fighting qualities spiritual and physical (the strenuous life in
those days!); and there came a time when it took offence at one
particular man in its membership on account of the liberality of
his religious opinions. This settler, an old Indian fighter whose
vast estate lay about halfway between the church and the nearest
village, had built himself a good brick house in the Virginian
style; and it was his pleasure and his custom to ask travelling
preachers to rest under his roof as they rode hither and thither
throughout the wilderness--Zion's weather-beaten, solitary scouts.

While giving entertainment to man and beast, if a Sunday came
round, he would further invite his guest, no matter what kind of
faith the vessel held, if it only held any faith, to ride with him
through the woods and preach to his brethren. This was the front of
his offending. For since he seemed brother to men of every creed,
they charged that he was no longer of THEIR faith (the only true
one). They considered his case, and notified him that it was their
duty under God to expel him.

After the sermon one Sunday morning of summer the scene took place.
They had asked what he had to say, and silence had followed. Not
far from the church doors the bright Elkhorn (now nearly dry) swept
past in its stately shimmering flood. The rush of the water over
the stopped mill-wheel, that earliest woodland music of
civilization, sounded loud amid the suspense and the stillness.

He rose slowly from his seat on the bench in front of the pulpit--
for he was a deacon--and turned squarely at them; speechless just
then, for he was choking with rage.

"My brethren," he said at length slowly, for he would not speak
until he had himself under control, "I think we all remember what
it is to be persecuted for religion's sake. Long before we came
together in Spottsylvania County, Virginia, and organized ourselves
into a church and travelled as a church over the mountains into
this wilderness, worshipping by the way, we knew what it was to be
persecuted. Some of us were sent to jail for preaching the Gospel
and kept there; we preached to the people through the bars of our
dungeons. Mobs were collected outside to drown our voices; we
preached the louder and some jeered, but some felt sorry and began
to serve God. They burned matches and pods of red pepper to choke
us; they hired strolls to beat drums that we might not be heard for
the din. Some of us knew what it was to have live snakes thrown
into our assemblages while at worship; or nests of live hornets. Or
to have a crowd rush into the church with farming tools and whips
and clubs. Or to see a gun levelled at one of us in the pulpit, and
to be dispersed with firearms. Harder than any of these things to
stand, we have known what it is to be slandered. But no single man
of us, thank God, ever stopped for these things or for anything.

Thirty years and more this lasted, until we and all such as we
found a friend in Patrick Henry. Now, we hear that by statute all
religious believers in Virginia have been made equal as respects
the rights and favors of the law.

"But you know it was partly to escape intolerable tyranny that we
left our mother country and travelled a path paved with suffering
and lined with death into this wilderness. For in this virgin land
we thought we should be free to worship God according to our
consciences."

"Since we arrived you know what our life has been,--how we have
fought and toiled and suffered all things together. You recall how
lately it was that when we met in the woods for worship,--having no
church and no seats,--we men listened and sang and prayed with our
rifles on our shoulders."

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