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 threshing-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.

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 fashioned 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 class as those other eminent farmers,--Washington, 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 Washington 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-Irish! 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 tittle of a covenant which many of them had signed with their blood.

At the height of this conflict, about 300,000 of these Scotch Covenanters left their ravaged country and set out in a fleet of little vessels for the north of Ireland. Here they settled in the barren and boggy province of Ulster, and presto! in the course of two generations Ulster became the most prosperous, moral, and intelligent section of the British empire. Its people were, beyond a doubt, the best educated masses of that period, either in Great Britain or anywhere else. They were the most skilful of farmers. They wove woollen cloth and the finest of linen. They built schools and churches and factories. But in 1698, the English Parliament, jealous of such progressiveness, passed laws against their manufacturing, and Ulster was overrun, as Scotland had been, with the police and the soldiery of England.

The Scotch-Irish fought, of course, even against such odds. They had never learned how to submit. But as the devastation of Ulster continued, they resolved to do as their great-grandfathers had done,--emigrate to a new country. They had heard good reports of America, through several of their leaders who had been banished there by the British government. So they packed up their movable property, and set out across the wide uncharted Atlantic Ocean in an exodus for liberty of industry and liberty of conscience.

By the year 1776 there were more than 500,000 of the Scotch-Irish in this country. They went first across the Alleghanies, into the new lands of western Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, and Texas. Beyond all question, they were the hardiest and ablest founders of the republic. They dissolved the rule of the Cavaliers in Virginia; and in the little hamlet of Mecklenburg they planned the first defiance of Great Britain and struck the key-note of the Revolution. They gave Washington thirty-nine of his generals, three out of four members of his cabinet, and three out of five judges of the first Supreme Court.

Of all classes of settlers in the thirteen colonies, they were the best prepared and most willing for the struggle with England, for the reason that they had begun to fight for liberty two hundred and fifty years before the battle of Bunker Hill. They were not amateurs in the work of revolution. They were veterans. And so, because they were pioneers and patriots by nature and inheritance, the Scotch-Irish became, in the words of John Fiske, "the main strength of our American democracy."

Naturally, they were pathfinders in industry as well as in the matter of self-government, as many of them had been manufacturers in Ireland. "Thousands of the best manufacturers and weavers in Ulster went to seek their bread in America," writes Froude, "and they carried their art and their tools with them." In one instance, by the failure of the woollen trade, 20,000 of them were driven to the United States. As might have been expected, these Scotch-Irish Americans have produced not only five of our Presidents, but also such merchants as A. T. Stewart; such publishers as Harper, Bonner, Scribner, and McClurg; and such inventors as Joseph Henry, Morse, Fulton, and McCormick. They were possibly the first large body of people who had ever been driven from manufacturing into farming; and it was not at all surprising, therefore, that the new profession of making farm machinery should have been born upon a Scotch-Irish farm.

As for Cyrus H. McCormick, he represented the fourth generation of American McCormicks. His great-grandfather, Thomas McCormick, quit Ulster in the troublous days of 1735. He was a soldier at Londonderry; and later became noted as an Indian fighter in Pennsylvania. His son Robert, who moved south to Virginia, carried a rifle for American independence at the battle of Guilford Court-house, North Carolina, in 1781. He was a farmer and weaver by occupation, a typical Ulsterman, whose farm was a busy workshop of invention and manufacturing.

On his mother's side, too, Cyrus McCormick had behind him a line of battling Scotch-Irish. She was the daughter of a Virginian farmer named Patrick Hall, one of whose forefathers had been driven out of Armagh by the massacre of 1641. Patrick Hall was the leader of the old-school Presbyterians in his region of Virginia. So rigid was he in his loyalty to the faith of the Covenanters, that once when a new minister came to preach in the little kirk, and lined out a Watts hymn instead of a psalm of David, Patrick Hall picked up his hat and strode out, followed by a goodly part of the congregation. He at once built upon his own farm a new church of limestone, in which no such levity as hymn-singing was permitted.

Cyrus McCormick's mother inherited her father's strength of character, without his severity. She was a thorough Celt, impulsive, free-spoken, and highly imaginative. Judging from the stories about her that are remembered in the neighborhood, it is evident that she was a woman of exceptional quality of mind. She was not as studious as her husband, but quicker and more ambitious. As a girl, she had been strikingly handsome, with a tall and commanding figure. She was saving and shrewd, with the Scotch-Irish passion for "getting ahead." She allowed no idle moments in the home. If the children were dressed before breakfast was ready, out they went to cut wood or weed the garden. She knew the profession of housekeeping in all its old-fashioned complexity; and she worked at it from dawn to starlight, with no rest except the relief of flitting from one task to another.

"Mrs. McCormick came riding by our farm one day," said an aged neighbor, "at a time when my father and mother were hurrying to save some hay from a coming rain-storm. 'If you don't hurry up you'll be too late,' she said; and then tying her horse to the fence she picked up a rake and helped with the hay until it was all in the barn. That's the kind of woman she was,--always full of energy and ready to help."

But Mrs. McCormick was much more than industrious. She had a fine pride in the ownership of beautiful things,--flowers and handsome clothes and silverware and mahogany furniture. Her flock of peacocks was one of the sights of the county; and in her later life, when she was for ten years the sole manager of the farm, she was accustomed to drive about in a wonderful carriage with folding steps, drawn by prancing horses and driven by a stately colored coachman,--an equipage of so much style and grandeur that it is still remembered by the neighbors. "She loved to drive fast," said one old lady; "and I was much impressed as a little girl with the startling way in which her horses would come clattering and dancing up to the door."

Thus there was in the McCormick home the spiritual and imaginative element that was vital to the development of a man whose whole life was a battle against the prejudices and "impossibilities" of the world. Cyrus McCormick was predestined, we may legitimately say, by the conditions of his birth, to accomplish his great work. From his father he had a specific training as an inventor; from his mother he had executive ability and ambition; from his Scotch-Irish ancestry he had the dogged tenacity that defied defeat; and from the wheat-fields that environed his home came the call for the Reaper, to lighten the heavy drudgery of the harvest.