WKU Libraries Blog

Ryan Monroe Robertson; Lattie (Robertson) Coombs

Through the mid-19th century, Ryan Monroe Robertson (1827-1883), a young merchant in Bowling Green and Woodburn, kept in touch with his friends and extended family in Tennessee, Alabama and Texas.  Cousins, siblings and their spouses wrote to him of births, deaths, life on the farm, and other everyday matters.  But a recurring topic was matrimony: who was achieving it, where they were finding it, and how the still-single might join the club.  The gossips, however, were not stereotypical husband-hungry women; rather, it was Robertson and the young men of his circle who were preoccupied with their chances of finding a mate.

It might have started on the day a phrenologist examined Robertson’s skull for clues to his personality and declared him to be “very fond of the Ladies.”  As he entered his mid-20s, he made no secret of his yearning for a wife.  “[Y]ou stat[e] in your letter that you wanted to mar[r]y and if I cou[l]d find any yo[u]ng lady that wanted to mar[r]y to send you,” wrote cousin Martha McWilliams from Alabama.  From Louisiana, his sister Ellen Skaggs encouraged him to come “down here to catch yo[u]ng girls fore there are as many girls as frogs.”

Robertson’s buddies were no less circumspect about their designs.  One was ready to try marriage to cure his health problems “provided that I can git some gally to believe the same way.”  “You may tell the young ladies of your acquaintance,” drooled Simpson County neighbor and friend Berry Whitesides, “that if any of them wishes to marry. . . I will be prepared to say to them in the language of the poet, ‘Pretty girl I want a wife.'”  In the meantime, there were always opportunities to dish about the romances of others.  Robertson heard from his cousin Sarah Malone that “Thomas [Hargroves] is still leaning up to cousin Adaline like a kitten to a hot rock.”  (Mr. Kitten and Miss Rock wed in 1852).

In 1858, Ryan Monroe Robertson finally tied the knot with Jane Elizabeth Potter of Bowling Green.  Soon, it was their children’s turn to contemplate matrimony.  But when their daughter Lattie married Phineas Hampton Coombs in 1892, one of her former beaus advised her to retire whatever lovey-dovey tactics she had used to bring “Hamp” to the altar.  “Please don’t act like newly married people,” he implored her.  She shouldn’t drop by her husband’s office three times a day, or cry if he missed dinner.  Above all, she shouldn’t be spooney.  Perhaps he was simply jealous as he watched one more “frog” leap out of the pond.

The Robertson letters are part of the Coombs Family Collection in the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives section of WKU’s Special Collections Library.   Click here to access a finding aid.  For other collections involving courtship and marriage, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

She was one of those “scribbling women” famously derided by Nathaniel Hawthorne–lady authors who, through idleness, creative yearnings, or economic necessity, inundated 19th-century publishers and popular magazine editors with their prose, poetry and articles.

Cornelia Stanley (Allen) Smith (b. 1839?) was a native of western New York who could trace her ancestry back to the Mayflower Pilgrims.  The wife of Philadelphia banker Alfred Smith, she was the mother of two young children by the mid-1860s.  For the next three decades, both personally and through literary agents, she submitted her poems, stories, and articles under the pen name “Clio Stanley” to publications such as the New York Weekly, The American Rural Home, the Chicago Ledger and the children’s magazine The Nursery.

Like authors everywhere, Smith endured a steady stream of rejections.  “The third installment of your story is just received, and is herewith respectfully returned, together with the portions preceding,” advised Moore’s Rural New Yorker.  “We regret to have to return your manuscript but it is quite unsuitable for our columns,” wrote another prospect.  While some of the rejections were fairly brusque, others offered an apology common to the trade.  “We are really so overstocked with manuscripts of all kinds that we have to decline everything that is sent in just now,” explained Saturday Night to Smith, by 1873 one of its longtime contributors.

Sometimes, however, “Clio Stanley” hit pay dirt.  “The two little poems sent to us are accepted for publication,” wrote Arthur’s Home Magazine, although the publication date was uncertain as there was “so much matter already in our hands.”  Moore’s Rural New Yorker paid $6 for her story “Linnet,” and The People’s Literary Companion remitted $15 for two stories, “Making Believe” and “Behind the Door.”  Sometimes her assignments were unsolicited.  A children’s publisher asked for an article to accompany a photo of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, and Saturday Night requested “one of your prettiest pieces of poetry” for its Valentine’s Day issue, an assignment that likely earned Smith about three dollars.

Editors’ letters to Cornelia Stanley (Allen) Smith are part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives collections of WKU’s Special Collections Library.  Click here to access a finding aid.  For other collections about authors, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.

It was an appeal to the voters of Kentucky’s Seventh Congressional District for the opportunity to represent them.  If elected, the candidate promised, “you shall have in Congress my most zealous and constant attention to your business,” the first priority being defence.  But the candidate was not asking to be sent to the nation’s capital, nor was he sounding the call to arms on behalf of the U.S.A.  Rather, Horatio   Washington Bruce (1830-1903) was seeking election to the first Congress of the Confederate States of America.

H. W. Bruce, candidate for Confederate Congress

Bruce, a Louisville attorney and former member of the Kentucky House of Representatives, had run unsuccessfully for the U. S. Congress before casting his lot with the Confederacy at the outbreak of the Civil War.  He attended two conventions held at Russellville in October and November 1861, where delegates drew up a resolution of secession and formed a provisional Confederate state government.  In the campaign for the first elected Congress, Bruce pledged himself to the “defence of our young, but glorious and gigantic Confederation of Southern States” and to making “final and eternal” its separation from “the Northern Abolition Despotism.”  His work, he promised, would focus on securing appropriate terms for peace and on establishing a boundary line between the resulting two governments–a demarcation in which, he promised, “I shall claim every foot of Southern soil.”

With an endorsement from the Louisville Courier, Bruce was elected in January, 1862 and reelected two years later.  Serving until the end of the war, he returned to Louisville, pardon in hand, to a life of law practice, teaching and judgeship.

A handbill setting out Horatio Washington Bruce’s appeal to the voters of Confederate Kentucky is part of the Manuscripts & Folklife Archives section of WKU’s Special Collections Library.  Click here to access a finding aid.  For more collections, search TopSCHOLAR and KenCat.