HOLMAN, JESSE LYNCH: 1784-1842.
Jesse Lynch Holman , Indiana Territorial Legislator, Territorial, State and Federal judge, Baptist elder and public-spirited citizen, apparently holds another, unpublicized, distinction:
He must have been Indiana's first resident novelist.
He was the son of Henry Holeman (the son, Jesse Lynch, omitted the "e" from the name), a Virginian who had come to Kentucky in 1776 and who had been in the thick of the Indian warfare which plagued the settlers of the Bluegrass and the Kentucky River valley for twenty years. The Holeman name appears in connection with many of the engagements in the stockades of the Kentuckians and Henry Holeman is said to have been killed by the Indians in 1789 while attempting to run supplies to a blockhouse in which his wife, the former Jane Gordon, and their children were besieged.
There were fourteen children in the Holeman family (Jane Gordon Holeman being Henry Holeman's third wife) and Jesse Lynch Holman was one of the younger. He was born near Danville, Ky., in 1784.
Times were hard for all westerners in the period and the Holemans, though some of the family were men and women at the time of the father's death, had great difficulty in making ends meet. However, Jesse Lynch Holman managed to get an education of sorts and began to teach subscription schools while still only a boy. He began to preach occasionally, also–a practice he continued throughout his life. He is supposed to have read law under the guidance of Henry Clay in Lexington shortly after 1800: whether or not this was the case, he was admitted to the Kentucky bar on Sept. 2, 1805.
He practiced at New Castle, Henry County, Ky. (a town laid out by his famous cousin, George Holman, whose captivity by the Indians is described by Sandford Cox in his Recollections of the Early Settlement of the Wabash Falley), in Port William (now Carrollton ) and later at Frankfort . At Port William he met Elizabeth Masterson and they were married in 1810, after he had settled in Frankfort .
It was in this same year that Holman's novel was published. The title page reads The Prisoners of Niagara, or Errors of Education. d New Novel, Founded on Fact. By Jessee [sic] L. Holman, a Native of Kentucky … and it is a duodecimo of 357 pages, very poorly printed by William Gerard, in Frankfort, Ky.
Holman must, at first, have had a considerable regard for the work, for he named one of his daughters "Emerine" after the heroine. Later in his life he is reputed to have become convinced, according to Blake –The Holmans of Veraestau, "… that the morals of the book were not suitable for the minds of young people and he attempted to buy up and destroy the entire edition." More likely, it would appear, Holman's desire to destroy the work may have been the result of the understandable horror with which a middle-aged judge, of position and dignity, would look upon a piece of over-florid dramatic writing indiscreetly committed to page: 152[View Page 152] print by him in his youth: such feelings have prompted similar actions before and since.
In his address "To the Reader" Holman says: "When this 'airy trifle' was presented to the public, the author was conscious it contained a sufficiency of errors to amuse the attention of the critic; but when he examined the printed copy, owing to his absence while the work was at press, the difficulty of the manuscript, and various other causes, there are more errors in the impression than he expected. This circumstance, together with the consideration, that the paper is inferior to what he intended, induces him in justice to release from their obligations, all those friends who have been so polite as to subscribe for the work. The binding will now be different from the first propositions, and every person is at liberty to purchase the book as it is." And there appear to have been, indeed, errors enough, including the misspelling of the author's first name on the title page!
Of the story itself Blake reports "… The book deals much with Virginia and the western country during the time of the American Revolution, with Indians, hairbreadth escapes and other dramatic incidents. ' The Errors of Education' portion of the title is accounted for by the training of the hero in Richmond, Va.; 'The Prisoners of Niagara' is explained by the fact that Fort Niagara plays an important part in the story. The entire novel is told by the hero in the first person and undoubtedly represents much that Holman heard from the lips of his father. Perhaps the actual episodes are from his father's life, as he was a Virginian who migrated to Kentucky . The style of the novel is somewhat Byronic–very intense, passionate, often extremely sentimental. The spirit is that of adventure, love of freedom, hatred of slavery, and opposition to drunkenness and all forms of immorality."
These conclusions may very well be questioned: the assumption that Holman's father, who came to Kentucky in 1776, could have had Revolutionary War service, least of all in the remotest connection with Fort Niagara, seems doubtful indeed. It is also difficult to imagine Jesse Holman gathering in his first four years any great body of reminiscence from a father who died before Jesse's fifth year began.
Whatever the merits of the work, it is a novel; and it unquestionably made Jesse Lynch Holman a novelist: when, the year after its publication, he came to Indiana to reside for the rest of his life, he apparently became Indiana 's first novelist.
In the course of his later life Jesse Lynch Holman wrote much verse. Some of it was published in the ephemeral newspapers which were blooming and wilting week by week in the Southern Indiana river towns but little can be accurately identified. He also wrote two long narrative poems relating to Indians and Indian legends which are preserved in manuscript in the Holman family papers.
To resume Holman's biography: in 1811 he left Frankfort for Indiana . Chances are that he had had many a long look at the bluffs on the Indiana side of the Ohio while he was practicing law–and courting–in Port William, at the point where the Kentucky River joins the Ohio. While Port William–Carrollton of today–is as beautifully situated as a town might be, the Indiana hills still present an interesting prospect across the Ohio, and in 1810, very nearly uninhabited, they attracted many another ambitious young Kentuckian.
In 1811 the Holmans went upstream to a place near the present site of the town of Aurora where Holman –possibly with the assistance of Judge Richard M. Masterson, his father-in-law and a man of considerable property–had bought a piece of land. They took Elizabeth's slaves with them but when they arrived at the new home site the slaves were freed in accordance with Holman's conviction that the somewhat ambiguous phraseology of the Ordinance of 1787 did actually prohibit slavery already in existence: a conviction on which, as judge, Holman later helped to pass conclusive judgment from the bench, in the case of Col. Hyacinth Lasselle's mulatto wench, Polly.
The Holmans followed the customary practice of the comfortably well-off emigrant–providing themselves with a log cabin to live in during the construction of a brick house, for which they had selected a beautiful site, high on a hill over the Ohio. After the Virginia- Kentucky custom, they named it in the classical manner –VER for spring; AEST for AESTUS, summer; AU for AUTUMNUS, autumn–there was to be no winter in that home, they decided.
From the very year of his arrival, Holman was engaged in public service: had he not been a man of strong character who was unwilling to vary in the slightest part of a degree from what he believed to be the proper course, he might have enjoyed a career in the executive branch of government as well as the judicial. As it was he had, at one time or another, ambition toward elective offices but he could not make the necessary concessions: his career was almost entirely by appointment, and he left a reputation behind him, when he died in 1842, which seldom accrues to governors, senators and the like.
In 1811 Governor William Henry Harrison appointed him Prosecuting Attorney for Dearborn page: 153[View Page 153] County (fact of the matter is that in Dearborn's small share of Indiana Territory's 25,000 people there was not much accredited competition for the post) and he acquitted himself well.
In 1814 he was a member of the Territorial Legislature and, in the same year, was appointed Presiding Judge of the Second Judicial District. ("President" these presiding judges were called by their fellow citizens, and their importance being what it was, and the ashes of the recently-burned Washington being so far away, they carried honor enough almost to warrant the title).
In 1816 Holman was appointed judge of the Third Circuit and served as a presidential elector for the new State of Indiana . The same year he was appointed judge of the Indiana State Supreme Court for a sevenyear term and, at the end of that, was reappointed for another seven years.
After the second term came the election of Governor James Brown Ray–a megalomaniac whose like was not to be seen again in North America until the rise of Huey Long–and the axe fell on all appointed officers. (It was Governor Ray who rode to the Falls of Fall Creek where the "Indian Murderers" were in process of being hung and Jaccording to William Wesley Woollen's Biographical and Historical Sketches of Early Indiana –waited until the youngest, and most obviously feeble-minded of the trio was on the gallows to dash up on a charger, rein in before the culprit and declaim, "There are but two powers known to the law that can save you from hanging by the neck until you are dead; one is the Great God of the Universe, the other is J. Brown Ray, Governor of the State of Indiana …")
Holman retired to Veraestau, more respected than ever because of his fall at the hands of Ray. He renewed his license to practice law, devoted even more time to the Baptist Church and the Sunday School movement in which he was a national leader, served as county superintendent of schools and bided his time.
In 1834 he was ordained to the ministry; he aided and encouraged that truly great man of God, Isaac McCoy, in his mission to the Indiana and Michigan Indians. He had already helped to guide the organization of Indiana College (now University) and he was now one of the founders of Franklin College and a founder of the Historical Society of Indiana.
But his judicial career was not yet ended; in fact, his greatest honor came when, on March 29, 1836, his appointment as Federal District Judge of Indiana was confirmed by a Senate which, politically, should have been hostile to him. He continued in office until his death.
Jesse Holman's life ended, as he would have wished, at his beloved Veraestau on March 28, 1842, in his fifty-eighth year. Oliver H. Smith, a writer not too easily moved to sentiment, says of him, in his Early Indiana Trials and Sketches: "… Jesse Lynch Holman … a good lawyer and one of the most just and conscientious men I ever knew."
Information from Blake–The Holmans of Veraestau; Cox–Recollections of the Early Settlement of the Wabash Valley; Smith–Early Indiana Trials and Sketches; and Woollen–Biographical and Historical Sketches of Early Indiana.
- The Prisoners of Niagara, or, Errors of Education. A New
Novel, Founded on Fact. By Jessee [sic] L. Holman, a Native of
Kentucky. Frankfort, Ky., 1810.
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