Waiting on news from nearby
Leroy Donald wrote a column for this newspaper called “Everybody’s Business.” The title came to mind when I read a letter from Mary W.W. Ashley to her friend Maria Toncray Watkins. When Watkins’ letter of April 13, 1829, arrived in Little Rock almost a month after Watkins mailed it from Shelbyville, Ky., “there was a quite a squad of those most interested in your welfare present” at Ashley’s house.
“Robert Watkins and his family, Jane Woodruff, Eliza Henderson, and Aunt Ellis were all with me,” Ashley wrote, “and all so impatient to hear from you that they would not permit me to read to myself so I read [out loud] for the benefit of the company.”
Mary W.W. Ashley’s husband, Chester, would come to own the largest urban slave force in the state, so enslaved people were no doubt present as well when Mary Ashley read Maria Watkins’ letter aloud.
Mary Ashley’s reply to Watkins also has a party-line quality, as she left space for someone named Jane Langhorn to add her hello to Watkins, and William Woodruff, by his own account, broke the letter’s seal 11 days later to add updates.
The letter is part of the John Netherland Heiskell historical collection held by the Center for Arkansas History and Culture—formerly the UALR archive—and accessible in the research room of the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, not far from where Mary Ashley lived.
Heiskell (1872-1972) must have taken decades gathering the collection, which consists of 21 boxes of small manuscripts (short writings) spanning three centuries and is separate from Heiskell’s personal papers.
Maria Toncray was born in Williamsport, Md., in 1793, and married Isaac Watkins in Shelbyville, Ky., in 1815. The couple settled in Little Rock in 1821, the year that both the territorial government and the Arkansas Gazette moved there. In her 1969 history of the Gazette, Margaret Ross characterizes Little Rock in 1821 as an “embryonic town” of “only a few crude cabins and perhaps half a dozen families,” where “the best of the broad streets shown on the plat were nothing more than paths through the woods.”
According to Charles Bolton’s “Arkansas 1800-1860: Remote and Restless,” Maria Toncray Watkins called Arkansas “a wilderness of sorrows” and Little Rock a village where “the Sound of the Gospel of Jesus is not heard.” (Her brother Silas Toncray would help to fix that by founding a Baptist church in Little Rock in 1824.)
Given the difficulty of travel, it seems likely that Watkins’ 1829 trip to Kentucky to visit relations and old friends was her first outside the Arkansas territory since her arrival.
“[Sincerely] did we all feel for you,” Mary Ashley wrote of the little audience present for the reading of Watkins’ letter, on hearing of “your awkward, distressing situation on first going ahead,” but “we all felt as if we could love the French … you mentioned for their politeness to you.” It seems likely that the French in question were at Arkansas Post, which Watkins would have passed in route to the Mississippi River via the Arkansas River.
Watkins would have traveled up the Mississippi as far as Cairo, Ill., then up the Ohio to Louisville, where Ashley’s reply indicates she was received by friends. Watkins had been widowed a little over a year at the time of her trip, and remarks from Ashley and Woodruff indicate that her daughter Mary Eliza and son George Claiborne were traveling with her.
“We have had considerable sickness in town since you left us,” Mary Ashley wrote her friend, and a Mrs. McSwiney had lost her “lovely interesting daughter.” Meanwhile, it appears that many inhabitants of Little Rock were preoccupied with waiting. They waited for the arrival of William Savin Fulton, newly appointed by Andrew Jackson to become the secretary of the territory (replacing Robert Crittenden) and to act as governor during the absence of John Pope.
They also waited for the birth of Mrs. Toncray’s baby (while neither Ashley nor Woodruff gave her first name, Mrs. Toncray must have been the wife of Watkins’ brother Silas). Ashley was anticipating her own trip to Missouri to see friends and relations, and wrote “I calculate to be cheated out of the frolic.” She had hoped to be present for the birth of the baby but feared she would be leaving town too soon.
In his postscript of May 22, 1829, Woodruff playfully blames his wife, Jane, for accidentally “delaying this letter over one mail.” Woodruff had broken the seal and added his postscript to “tell you that the frolic is over with Mrs. Toncray, and [she] became the mother of another fine son and [both] were doing well last evening when I was up there. I presume that all is going on well, or I should probably [have] heard ere this (7 o’clock AM).”
While people in territorial Arkansas had to wait almost unbearable lengths of time to hear news from a few hundred miles away, news within a town such as Little Rock traveled extremely fast. In the letter from Mary W.W. Ashley and William Woodruff to Maria Toncray Watkins, we discover a tightly knit little town given to much polite gossip. The portrait is familiar.
The Woodruff-Crittenden rivalry is a subject for another column or 10, but Woodruff did report in his postscript that “Judge Fulton” (William Savin Fulton) had arrived, along with his wife Matilda and two children. “He is a plain, unassuming man,” Woodruff wrote, “I hope well acceptable to the people.”
He added “There is none of that haughty pomposity which I, at least, have always remarked in our Ex-Secretary Crittenden.”
While working on this column, I visited with Ian Beard as he set type in the reproduction of the Woodruff print shop at the Historic Arkansas Museum. Beard provided some helpful spatial and social context, but any mistakes above are my own.