Cyrus Hall McCormick Part 1

Cyrus Hall McCormick.

by Herbert Newton Ca.s.son.

INTRODUCTION

Whoever wishes to understand the making of the United States must read the life of Cyrus Hall McCormick. No other one man so truly represented the dawn of the industrial era,--the grapple of the pioneer with the crudities of a new country, the replacing of muscle with machinery, and the establishment of better ways and better times in farm and city alike. Beginning exactly one hundred years ago, the life of McCormick spanned the heroic period of our industrial advancement, when great things were done by great individuals. To know McCormick is to know what type of man it was who created the United States of the nineteenth century. And now that a new century has arrived, with a new type of business development, it may be especially instructive to review a life that was so structural and so fundamental.

As Professor Simon Newcomb has observed, "It is impressive to think how few men we should have had to remove from the earth during the past three centuries to have stopped the advance of our civilization." From this point of view, there are few, if any, who will appear to be more indispensable than McCormick. He was not brilliant. He was not picturesque. He was no caterer for fame or favor. But he was as necessary as bread. He fed his country as truly as Was.h.i.+ngton created it and Lincoln preserved it. He abolished our agricultural peasantry so effectively that we have had to import our muscle from foreign countries ever since. And he added an immense province to the new empire of mind over matter, the expansion of which has been and is now the highest and most important of all human endeavors.

As the master builder of the modern business of manufacturing farm machinery, McCormick set in motion so many forces of human betterment that the fruitfulness of his life can never be fully told. There are to-day in all countries more than one hundred thousand patents for inventions that were meant to lighten the labor of the farmer. And the cereal crop of the world has risen with incredible gains, until this year its value will be not far from ten thousand millions of dollars,--very nearly the equivalent of all the gold in coin and jewelry and bullion.

So, if there is not power and fascination in this story, it will be the fault of the story-teller, and not of his theme. The story itself is destined to be told and retold. It cannot be forgotten, because it is one of those rare life-histories that blazon out the peculiar genius of the nation under the stress of a new experience. As it is pa.s.sed on from generation to generation, it may finally be polished into an Epic of the Wheat,--the tale of Man's long wrestle with Famine, and how he won at last by creating a world-wide system for the production and distribution of the Bread.

H. N. C.

CHICAGO, _September 1, 1909_.

CHAPTER I

THE WORLD'S NEED OF A REAPER

Either by a very strange coincidence, or as a phenomenon of the instinct of self-preservation, the year 1809, which was marked by famine and tragedy in almost every quarter of the globe, was also a most prolific birthyear for men of genius. Into this year came Poe, Blackie, and Tennyson, the poet laureates of America, Scotland, and England; Chopin and Mendelssohn, the apostles of sweeter music; Lincoln, who kept the United States united; Baron Haussemann, the beautifier of Paris; Proudhon, the prophet of communism; Lord Houghton, who did much in science, and Darwin, who did most; FitzGerald, who made known the literature of Persia; Bonar, who wrote hymns; Kinglake, who wrote histories; Holmes, who wrote sentiment and humor; Gladstone, who enn.o.bled the politics of the British empire; and McCormick, who gave the world cheap bread, and whose life-story is now set before us in the following pages.

None of these eminent men, except Lincoln, began life in as remote and secluded a corner of the world as McCormick. His father's farm was at the northern edge of Rockbridge County, Virginia, in a long, thin strip of fairly fertile land that lay crumpled between the Blue Ridge on the east and the Alleghanies on the west. It was eighteen miles south of the nearest town of Staunton, and a hundred miles from the Atlantic coast.

The whole region was a quiet, industrious valley, whose only local tragedy had been an Indian ma.s.sacre in 1764, in which eighty white settlers had been put to death by a horde of savages.

The older men and women of 1809 could remember when wolf-heads were used as currency; and when the stocks and the ducking stool stood in the main street of Staunton. Also, they were fond of telling how the farmers of the valley, when they heard that the Revolution had begun in Ma.s.sachusetts, carted 137 barrels of flour to Frederick, one hundred miles north, and ordered it sent forthwith to the needy people of Boston. This grew to be one of the most popular tales of local history,--an epic of the patriots who fought for liberty, not with gunpowder but flour.

By 1809 the more severe hards.h.i.+ps of the pioneer days had been overcome.

Houses were still built of logs, but they were larger and better furnished. In the McCormick homestead, for instance, there was a parlor which had the dignity of mahogany furniture, and the luxury of books and a carpet. The next-door county of Augusta boasted of thirteen carriages and one hundred and two cut-gla.s.s decanters. And the chief sources of excitement had evolved from Indian raids and wolf-hunts into elections, lotteries, and litigation.

It was perhaps fortunate for the child McCormick that he was born in such an out-of-the-way nook, for the reason that in 1809 almost the whole civilized world was in a turmoil. In England mobs of unemployed men and women were either begging for bread or smas.h.i.+ng the new machines that had displaced them in the factories. In the Tyrol, sixty thousand peasants, who had revolted from the intolerable tyranny of the Bavarians, were being beaten into submission. In Servia, the Turks were striking down a rebellion by building a pyramid of thirty thousand Servian skulls,--a tragic pile which may still be seen midway between Belgrade and Stamboul. Sweden was being trampled under the feet of a Russian army; and the greater part of Holland, Austria, Germany, and Spain had been so scourged by the hosts of Napoleon as to be one vast shamble of misery and blood.

In the United States there was no war, but there certainly did exist an abnormal surplus of adversity. The young republic, which had fewer white citizens than the two cities of New York and Chicago possess to-day, was being terrorized in the West by the Indian Confederacy of Tec.u.mseh; and its flag had been flouted by England, France, and the Barbary pirates.

Its total revenue was much less than the value of last year's hay crop in Vermont. It was desperately poor, with its people housed for the most part in log cabins, clothed in homespun, and fed every winter on food that would cause a riot in any modern penitentiary.

There was no such thing known, except in dreams, as the use of machinery in the cultivation of the soil. The average farmer, in all civilized countries, believed that an iron plow would poison the soil. He planted his grain by the phases of the moon; kept his cows outside in winter; and was unaware that glanders was contagious. Joseph Jenks, of Lynn, had invented the scythe in 1655, "for the more speedy cutting of gra.s.se"; and a Scotchman had improved it into the grain cradle. But the greater part of the grain in all countries was, a century ago, being cut by the same little hand sickle that the Egyptians had used on the banks of the Nile and the Babylonians in the valley of the Euphrates.

The wise public men of that day knew how urgent was the need of better methods in farming. Fifteen years before, George Was.h.i.+ngton had said, "I know of no pursuit in which more real and important service can be rendered to any country than by improving its agriculture." But it was generally believed that the task was hopeless; and any effort to encourage inventors had hitherto been a failure. An English society, for instance, had offered a prize of one hundred and fifty dollars for a better method of reaping grain, and the only answer it received was from a traveller who had seen the Belgians reaping with a two-foot scythe and a cane; the cane was used to push the grain back before it was cut, so that more grain could be cut at a blow. As to whether or not he received the prize for this discovery is not recorded.

The city of New York in 1809 was not larger than the Des Moines of to-day, and not nearly so well built and prosperous. Two miles to the north of it, through swamps and forests, lay the clearing that is now known as Herald Square. There was no street railway, nor cooking range, nor petroleum, nor savings bank, nor friction match, nor steel plow, neither in New York nor anywhere else. And the one pride and boast of the city was Fulton's new steamboat, the _Clermont_, which could waddle to Albany and back, if all went well, in three days or possibly four.

As for social conditions, they were so hopelessly bad that few had the heart to improve them. The house that we call a "slum tenement" to-day would have made an average American hotel in 1809. Rudeness and rowdyism were the rule. Drunkenness was as common, and as little considered, as smoking is at the present time; there was no organized opposition to it of any kind, except one little temperance society at Saratoga. There were no sewers, and much of the water was drawn from putrid wells. Many faces were pitted with small-pox. Cholera and yellow jack or strange hunger-fevers cut wide swaths of death again and again among the helpless people. There was no science, of course, and no sanitation, and no medical knowledge except a medley of drastic measures which were apt to be as dangerous as the disease.

The desperate struggle to survive appears to have been so intense that there was little or no social sympathy. There was very little pity for the pauper,--he was auctioned off to be half starved by the lowest bidder; and for the criminal there was no feeling except the utmost repulsion and abhorrence. It was found, for instance, in 1809, that in the jail in New York there were seventy-two women, white and black, in one chairless, bedless room, all kept in order by a keeper with a whip, and fed like cattle from a tub of mush, some eating with spoons and some with cups and some with their unwashed hands. And the men's room of that jail, says this report, "is worse than the women's."

Also, in 1809, the chronic quant.i.ty of misery had been terribly augmented by the Embargo,--that most ruinous invention of President Jefferson, whereby American s.h.i.+ps were swept from the sea, with a loss to capital of twelve millions a year, and a loss to labor of thirty thousand places of employment. According to this amazing act of political folly, every market-boat sailing from New Jersey to New York--every sailboat or canoe--had to give bail to the federal government before it dared to leave the dock.

Whatever flimsy little structure of industry had been built up in thirty years of independence, was thrown prostrate by this Embargo. A hundred thousand men stood on the streets with helpless hands, begging for work or bread. The jails were jammed with debtors,--1,300 in New York alone.

The newspapers were overrun by bankruptcy notices. The coffee-houses were empty. The s.h.i.+ps lay mouldering at the docks. In those hand-to-mouth days there was no piled-up reserve of food or wealth,--no range of towering wheat-banks at every port; and the seaboard cities lay for a time as desolate as though they had been ravaged by a pestilence.

In that darkest year the hardscrabble little republic learned and remembered one of its most important lessons,--the fact that liberty and independence are not enough. Here it was, an absolutely free nation,--_the only free civilized country in the world_,--and yet as miserable and poor and hungry as though it were a mere province of a European empire. So, by degrees, there came a change in the American point of view,--a swing from politicalism to industrialism. The ma.s.s of the people were now surfeited with oratory and politics and war. They began to settle down to hard facts and hard work. Instead of declaiming about the rights of man, they began to build roads and weave cloth and organize stock companies. Slowly they came to realize that a second Revolution must be wrought,--a Revolution that would enable them to write a Declaration of Independence against Hunger and Hards.h.i.+p and Hand Labor.

Up to the year 1809 the chief topics of interest in American legislatures and grocery stores were the blockades, the Embargo, the treaties, the badness of Napoleon, the blunders of Jefferson, and the rudeness of England and France. But after that year the chief topics of interest came to be of a wholly different sort. They were such as the tariff, the currency, the building of factories and ca.n.a.ls, the opening of public lands, the problem of slavery, and the development of the West. The hardy, victorious little nation began to talk less and work more; and so by a natural evolution of thought the era of George Was.h.i.+ngton and Thomas Jefferson came to an end, and the era of Robert Fulton and Peter Cooper and Cyrus Hall McCormick was in its dawn.

From 1810 to 1820 there was a rush to the land. Twenty million acres were sold, in most cases for two dollars an acre. Thousands of men who had been sailors turned their backs on the sea and learned to till the soil. Town laborers, too, whose wages had been fifty cents a day, tramped westward along the Indian trails and seized upon sc.r.a.ps of land that lay ownerless. Nine out of ten Americans began to farm with the utmost energy and perseverance,--_but with what tools?_ With the wooden plow, the sickle, the scythe, and the flail, the same rude hand-labor tools that the nations of antiquity had tried to farm with,--the tools of failure and slavery and famine.

Such was the predicament of this republic for the first seventy-five years of its life. It could not develop beyond the struggle for food. It was chained to the bread-line. It could not feed itself. Not even nine-tenths of its people could produce enough grain to satisfy its hunger. Again and again, until 1858, wheat had to be imported by this nation of farmers. So, as we now look back over those basic years, from the summit of the twentieth century, we can see how timely an event it was that in the dark year 1809 the inventor of the Reaper was born.

CHAPTER II

THE McCORMICK HOME

IF we wish to solve the riddle of the Reaper,--to know why it was not invented in any of the older nations that rose to greatness and perished in so many instances for lack of bread,--we can find the key to the answer in the home and the ancestry of the McCormicks. We shall see that the family into which he was born represented in the highest degree that new species of farmer,--self-reliant, studious, enterprising, and inventive,--which was developed in the pioneer period of American history.

Robert McCormick, the father of Cyrus, was in his most prosperous days the owner of four farms, having in all 1,800 acres. But his acres were only one-half of his interests. He owned as well two grist-mills, two sawmills, a smelting-furnace, a distillery, and a blacksmith-shop. He did much more than till the soil. He hammered iron and shaped wood, and did both well, as those can testify who have seen an iron crane and walnut cabinet that were made by his hands. More than this, he invented new types of farm machinery,--a hemp-brake, a clover huller, a bellows, and a thres.h.i.+ng-machine.

The little log workshop still stands where Robert McCormick and his sons hammered and tinkered on rainy days. It is about twenty-four feet square, with an uneven floor, and a heavy door that was hung in place by home-made nails and home-made hinges. There was a forge on either side of the chimney, so that two men could work at the same time; and one small rusted anvil is all that now remains of its equipment.

[Ill.u.s.tration: OLD BLACKSMITH SHOP ON WALNUT GROVE FARM, VIRGINIA

In this shop the first practical reaping machine was built by Cyrus Hall McCormick in 1831]

As for the McCormick homestead itself, there were so many manufacturing activities in it that it was literally half a home and half a factory.

Shoes were cobbled, cotton, flax, and wool were spun into yarn, woven into cloth, and fas.h.i.+oned into clothes for the whole family. The stockings and mitts and caps were all home-made, and so was the cradle in which the eight children were rocked. What with the moulding of candles, and sewing of carpet-rags, and curing of hams, and boiling of soap, and drying of herbs, and stringing of apples, the McCormick home was practically a school of many trades for the people who lived under its roof.

Robert McCormick was an educated man. He was not at all like the poor serfs who tilled the soil of Europe. He belonged to the same general cla.s.s as those other eminent farmers,--Was.h.i.+ngton, Jefferson, Adams, Webster, and Clay. He was a reader of deep books and a student of astronomy. Lawyers and clergymen would frequently drive to his house to consult with him. And in mechanical pursuits he had an unusual degree of skill, having been born the son of a weaver and accustomed from babyhood to the use of machinery.

He was a gentle, reflective man, with a genius for self-reliance in any great or little emergency. When a new stone church was built, and he found that his pew was so dark that he could not see to read the hymns, he promptly cut a small window in the wall,--a peculiarity which is still pointed out to visitors. On another occasion, with this same spirit of resourcefulness, he drove the spectre of yellow fever from the home. This dreaded disease was gathering in a full harvest in the farm-houses of the county. It had cut down three of Mrs. McCormick's family,--her father, mother, and brother,--and had swung its fatal scythe toward the boy Cyrus, who was then five years of age. When the doctor was called, he insisted that the child should be bled. "But you bled all the others, and they died," said Robert McCormick quietly; "I'll have no more bleedings." No remedy for yellow fever, except bleeding, was known to the doctors of a century ago, so Robert McCormick at once invented a remedy. He devised a treatment of hot baths, hot teas, and bitter herbs; and Cyrus was rescued from the fever and restored to perfect health.

Such a man as Robert McCormick would have been practically impossible in any other country at that time. There, in that isolated hollow of the Virginian mountains, he was a citizen of a free country. His vote had helped to make Thomas Jefferson President. He was a proprietor, not a serf nor a tenant. He was not compelled to divide up every cord of wood and bushel of wheat with a king or a landlord. Whatever he earned was his own. He was an American; and thus, in the endless chain of cause and effect, we can trace the origin of the Reaper back, if we wish, to George Was.h.i.+ngton and Christopher Columbus.

The whole spirit of the young republic pushed towards the invention of labor-saving machinery,--towards replacing the hoe with the steel plow, the needle with the sewing-machine, the puddling-furnace with the Bessemer converter, the sickle with the Reaper. And it is fair to say that the social forces that represented the American spirit were focused to a remarkable degree in the home in which Cyrus H. McCormick had his birth and his education.

There was another contributing influence, too, in the making of McCormick,--the fact that the blood of his father and mother came to him in a pure strain of Scotch-Irish. It was this inheritance that endowed him with the tenacity and unconquerable resiliency that enabled him not only to invent a new machine, but to create a new industry and hold fast to it against all comers.

The Scotch-Iris.h.!.+ The full story of what the United States owes to this fire-hardened race has never yet been told,--it is a tale that will some day be expanded into a fascinating volume of American history. It is not possible to understand either the character or the success of McCormick without knowing the Scotch-Irish influences that shaped him.

The one man who did more to launch the Scotch-Irish on their conquering way, so it appears, was John Knox. This preacher-statesman, "who never feared the face of man," forced Queen Mary from her throne, and established self-government and a pure religion in Scotland, about seventy-five years after the discovery of America. This brought English armies down upon the Scotch, and for very nearly two centuries the struggle was bitter and desperate, the Scotch refusing to compromise or to bate one jot or t.i.ttle of a covenant which many of them had signed with their blood.