"Your father is a brainy man,
but Isaiah was the abler of the, two. And he was physically the
most perfect man I ever saw in my life." Isaiah and my father
taught school together at a place or two, and Isaiah was
supposed to be especially skillful at composing dialogues and
teaching the then much-sought art of it. He studied law on his
own, while teaching school by himself after Marmaduke had got to
the University, took the bar examinations, and was licensed to
practice shortly before he volunteered for the Confederate Army.
I believe he started in as second lieutenant but he was finally
brevetted to a captaincy at Gettysburg, only a day or so before
he was "shot through the heart" on that field. I have seen the
letter from his commanding officer announcing this to the
family. I have a "Yankee" horse-pistol and holster which Isaiah
brought back from some earlier battlefield.
William Thomas Robins was
fatally wounded in the battle of Chancellorsville. He was just
twenty-one.
The third son in the war, John
Madison, was severely wounded at least once, but survived and
moved to Illinois, Missouri, and eventually to California. He
died in San Diego. My father once took what there then was of
the family (one boy, Henry) to Missouri to see Uncle Mad and his
folks, and my mother long kept up a familiar correspondence with
his wife, "Sister Nettie." Uncle Mad's letters were always
homesick for North Carolina. He never got over it. He had left
because the state was desperately poor after the war. Like other
Southern soldiers, he probably needed more disability-pension
money than he was able to get from his bankrupt home-state. I am
not sure that he got any, for the state was late in coming to
it. He did a lot of moving around and never really prospered. At
one time he sold sewing machines.
He had two sons, Marmaduke and
Lee. Lee died young and both of them died single. I had some
correspondence with Duke some twenty-five years, ago, as did my
brother Duke. At that time he was a merchant and secretary of
the Chamber of Commerce at McCall, Idaho, and presently he died
there. On our Western trip in 1951, my wife and I drove up to
McCall to talk to some of his old friends.
Of the three sisters of my
father besides Aunt Massah Trogdon, Sally died young, Charity
married Uncle Dick Curtis and lived just long enough for me to
recall seeing her once. Esther lived with the Curtises and
stayed on after her sister's death, by this time not at all
pretty and in particular with weak, squinty eyes. I have often
wondered if Vitamin A and D pills would have done as much for
her, and especially for her eyes, as they did for me and mine
when I discovered them in mid-life. I have often said that those
pills amounted to a religious conversion with me. And I stick to
it. They have taught me how deep a materialistic foundation we
have, although of course "there is room at the top" and our
conscious and moral efforts add something. So I can't help
wondering about poor squinty "Aunt Hessie."
I used often to visit the
Curtis farm and stay a week or two. They had the first flock of
guineas I ever saw, raised sorghum cane, drove five miles to a
grist mill for flour and meal (we Asheboro people did that too
), and cooked at an open fire-place and made real corn-pone by
whelming a pot on the hot hearthstone and heaping with embers.
They usually sat down to a meal with just one dish in the center
of the table, but always with plenty of bread and butter and
sorghum on the side. It was primitive all right; or it was
after-the-war Southern poverty unable to make progress fast and
raise the standard of living.
The Curtis farm, near Gray's
Chapel, was bought by my father in 1857, as a place on which to
settle his aging parents and the girls. During the war, he
bought them a slave or two, the first in the family since quite
a while at least. The first of these Negroes very soon, and no
doubt very properly from his point of view, ran away or took to
the "underground." The second, whose name was Mac, stood by
until the war's end, and was a real help. The idea in buying a
slave for that small farm was that with John Robins past work,
with three boys in the army, and with Marmaduke busied
elsewhere, something with pants on was needed around the farm. I
mean something that was allowed to wear pants in those days.
I do not have much to report
about my Grandfather, John Robins; but it is difficult to dodge
the impression that for one reason or another he was not much of
a success. He certainly never moved in the literary world even
to the extent that his Father, Daniel, had done. He farmed it
and moved from Randolph to Guilford and back, buying this little
fifty acres and that, and never bettering himself. The last move
he made on his own was to the new cotton mill at Cedar Falls,
where the girls went to work in the mill, or "factory" as they
called it then. It was at this time or earlier that my father
was making some money by cutting letters on tombstones for
people. And he and Isaiah were doing quite a lot of
school-teaching from this time on. You didn't need much
preparation for that. My guess is that father was around
twenty-one by the time of the Cedar Falls move.
My brother Henry, who has read
the first draft of these recollections and notes, gives the
following about New Salem days, which go a considerable distance
back of the Cedar Falls period:
"I have more than once heard
M. S. R. mention that the first book he ever bought was
purchased with the proceeds of chestnuts he gathered in the
woods and took to New Salem. At that time the woods in that
section contained chestnut trees perhaps as numerous as oak.
Swine running at large ate the nuts to such an extent that the
chestnuts did not reproduce themselves in the woods. Chestnut
timber was valued highly and preferred for the old-fashioned
rail fences which were then numerous. The book bought was the
Malte-Brun Geography and Atlas which I have here at the office.
In the front it bears the following entry:
'Marmaduke S. Robins, his
book, bought at Chamness and Woodses Store, Price 1.25 cents,
this the 27 of Jan., 1841.'
He was then thirteen and a
half years old.
Returning to Cedar Falls:
Running a store there was a good citizen by the name of Henry B.
Elliott, who presently offered and urged upon Marmaduke a loan
to help him go to Chapel Hill. I have heard my father say that
he had been in school just twenty-one months in all (of course
he meant as a pupil, not teacher) when he started for Chapel
Hill on foot or by somebody's wagon, where he took the entrance
examinations and was admitted, I believe with some conditions,
to the Sophomore Class.
He used to tell how he felt at
a loss in his first Greek class at the University, in
competition in particular with the two Bingham brothers (one of
them father of the recent ambassador to Great Britain), and with
others who had enjoyed the advantage of the best private schools
in the state. But after a time and with great difficulty he
found out the name of the superior Greek grammar they were
always quoting in class to the professor's satisfaction (I think
it was Gesenius), managed at length to obtain a copy, and after
that moved up alongside them. At graduation he tied for the
Valedictory with Joseph Buckner Killibrew, of Tennessee. I saw
Killibrew and my father meet at a reunion of their class the
class of 1856 — their forty-fifth anniversary it probably was.
In a way I have been led ahead
of my story. The point was that for one reason or another John
Robins did not or could not do very much for his children by way
of giving them advantages. And so they had few advantages, and
had to make their own way. My mother at least saw nothing much
in John Robins but a pretty rough old countryman. Of course she
knew him only in his old age.
Records are few in Randolph,
and outside the small group of my father's descendants. there
are left in North Carolina or elsewhere only these relatives on
the Robins side whose relationship is definitely known and
fixed: first, Sarah Lambert's three offspring: daughter
Massah, long a good teacher in the Asheboro high school, now
retired; son Bunyan, who runs a printing shop in Asheboro, and
his family; the descendants of another son, Mahlon who has died.
And secondly: Mrs. Ryder, of Ann Arbor, Michigan, if she is
still living, her children, and various relatives of hers that
are listed by Sarah Lambert.
And now to turn squarely to my
father, Marmaduke Swaim Robins, born August 31, 1827, died June
27, 1905. Graduating at Chapel Hill in the class of '56, he had
already studied law under Judge Battle of that place
sufficiently to pass the tests and be licensed to practice in
the county courts on December 30 of the same year. However he
had debts to pay, and four years of teaching school intervened
before he fully took up legal practice.
His college standing in
mathematics had been such as to bring him at this period an
offer to join the staff of the "Nautical Almanac " printed in
Cambridge, Mass., alongside Harvard University. I believe he
felt that accepting this offer would further certain interests
he had developed in astronomy as well as mathematics. He wished
to accept, and if he had done so our story would be different in
respects unimaginable. But he had engaged himself to teach a
country school, at Middleton Academy, near Franklinville, in
Randolph, and the school trustees refused to let him off the
bargain. He felt bound to them, and nothing was more sacred to
him than his pledged word. He came that near beating me to
Harvard.
Among his personal
possessions, kept in an old bureau in a back room, there lay all
during the years I was growing up, two sets of instruments for
making mathematical or surveyor's drawings, and three brass
telescopes. The longest of these last stretched out to about
three feet. I have it now and occasionally train it on the lake
towards Mt. Washington, but they make better lenses now. I have
often wondered if these instruments were romantic symbols or
actual vestiges. of an early ambition which died a sort of hard
death, underneath a sense of duty. But he studied law too at the
University, at the same time as mathematics.
Isaiah Robins was his
assistant at Middleton and Science Hill, one or both. Then M.S.R.
taught for two years at "Little" Washington, N. C. He took the
necessary oath for entering upon the practice of law in the
county courts in February 1858, but was not licensed in the
Superior Courts until December 1860. From that time on he was
out of teaching and fully immersed in the law — and politics.
His first law office was in the yard at the Curtis farm. It is
where I used to sleep when there on a vacation. Probably about
the time he entered practice in earnest he moved his office to
Asheboro. There he presently formed a partnership with Samuel S.
Jackson, son-in-law of Jonathan Worth, who in the war period
became treasurer of North Carolina and governor in 1865. When
Jonathan Worth, himself a lawyer, went to Raleigh to live, he
left a lot of his office business to the firm of Jackson and
Robins, which of course gave the firm quite a boost. He advised
a correspondent of his that Jackson and Robins were both good
lawyers. My information is that Jackson was the good mixer of
the two and that he preferred the office end of the business,
willingly leaving the rough-arid-tumble of the court room to his
partner.
When M.S.R. was running for
the legislature in 1862, Governor Worth (this of course was
before he was governor.) wrote to A. M. Tomlinson, of upper
Randolph : "I know of no citizen of the county superior to
Robins in intelligence, judgment and acquirements—and I know no
man anywhere more honorable and upright."
Sam Jackson did not long survive the Civil War, and then M.S.R.
went on alone, without taking another partner, until my older
brother joined him in 1903. Fifty-one years ago that was; and
Henry is still at it and going strong on top of our father's
forty-five years. I guess that is the nearest thing to a real
tradition anywhere in the family so far.
I am unable to fit together
all the variety of things that occupied my father during the
Civil War. I have somewhere heard that at the beginning of it
there was an informal family council at which it was agreed that
Marmaduke, being the one of the boys established in life, was
the one to stay home and take care of the paternal family and
the spinster sisters. He was in the legislature, House of
Representatives, in 1862. For a time he was private secretary to
North Carolina's famous war-governor, Zebulon Baird Vance. He
may have known Vance at Chapel Hill, a boy from the mountain
back-country who made good. M.S.R. was for a time editor of the
Raleigh Conservative, an important paper over the state. At the
very wind-up of the Confederacy, he was treasurer of the state
Literary Fund, which represented the beginnings of public
education in North Carolina. I have heard him tell of being on
the official train, shuttling between Goldsboro and Greensboro
in the effort to dodge General Sherman, trying to take care of
the aforesaid fund and learning to play chess. That game he
always had a fondness for, but latterly found it over-strenuous,
the same as I do.
Also at some late period
during the war which I do not know how to fit in, he was a
captain in the Home Guard and had the rather thankless and
ticklish job of rounding up deserters in Randolph and returning
them to the army. Many Randolph people were not in sympathy with
the war. Some of them were Quakers. There were few if any large
slave-plantations in Randolph, and many people felt that the war
was the plantation people's fight. The county has been
notoriously Republican in its normal status ever since the Civil
War, and the facts I am now recounting may have something to do
with that. I surprised a Connecticut-Yankee writer at Chapel
Hill last winter by telling him that certain counties in North
Carolina, instancing Randolph, had always been normally
Republican and still were. Randolph has a complete or nearly
complete set of Republican office-holders at this moment. Well,
sympathy with the war was not a marked sentiment in the old
county. There used to be a rail fence alongside the road between
Asheboro and Franklinville at which my father would sometimes
point his buggy whip and tell that a deserter once shot at him
from behind that fence. Maybe only to scare him off! They said
he was fearless in walking up to the door of a wanted man, that
he did his duty without fear of consequences. I don't know about
the fear, but I imagine he got an early start doing his duty as
he saw it.
After the war, as during it,
he was Whig or Conservative in politics over against Radical,
until that distinction turned into Democrat versus Republican.
Then over a long stretch of years he and Dr. John Milton Worth,
brother of the Governor, and Zebedee Rush, were active
Democratic leaders in the county and familiar representatives in
both branches of the legislature. Governor Worth had died in
1869.
I think I may say that over
most of the last quarter of the century he was the leading
lawyer in the county, besides having considerable practice in
Moore, Montgomery and Stanly. At least George S. Bradshaw,
another lawyer and also long clerk of the court, once told me
that there was a time when my father was attorney for every
executor and administrator in the county, no other lawyer having
a look-in. Mr. Bradshaw attributed this to two causes: one, that
everybody trusted Marmaduke Robins's honesty and his knowledge
of the law, and the other that he never learned to charge for
his services. In fact, said Mr. Bradshaw, his fees were so small
that it was extremely hard on other lawyers. My father realized
and often stressed the point of how painfully the average farmer
earned his dollar. He had been through the poverty mill and had
been given a set by it, as the family came to know very well
indeed. With him, in spending money, it was everything for
necessity or for the education of his boys, but nothing for
luxury or appearance; and his ideas of luxury were
old-fashioned. At Chapel Hill, we were taught to keep those
expenses down.
On July 24, 1878, when he was
over fifty years old, he married Annie Eliza Moring, born
November 9, 1853, eldest daughter of William Henry Moring, Sr.
Mother had one brother, W. H., Jr., and two sisters. These
provide a lot of Asheboro and scattered relatives, so I will
briefly set up the sketch. Uncle Will Moring had four daughters:
Agnes who married John Porter; Edith, Henry Craven; Marion,
Sulon Stedman; and Annie, Kemp Alexander. Mother's sister Ida
married Alex Coffin, father of Will and Oscar Coffin, of the
first Mrs. Frank Page, and of Bess Coffin. Aunt Mag (Margaret)
married John Anderson and Blanche McGlohon (Mrs. Don McGlohon)
is their only child.
