"THE GREAT JOY OF SERVING OTHERS"

Reflections on William Henry Letterman and Charles Page Thomas Moore Founders of Phi Kappa Psi
By Kent Christopher Owen, Indiana Beta 58 The distance from Canonsburg, Pennsylvania to Duffau, Texas is scarcely worth measuring. It connects a shabby, worn town in the coal-seamed hills south of Pittsburgh to a dusty, wind-blown place not even on the map, a hundred miles southwest of Fort Worth, a place the railroad never quite reached. Canonsburg keeps only the site of Jefferson College. From 1802 until its merger with Washington College in 1865, Jefferson was a respected institution, attracting students from the South, Ohio and Pennsylvania, and the Middle West. The College buildings have long since burned to the ground, leaving behind the modest frame and brick houses that climb the hills above the old campus. There is little left anymore except a sense of loss and regret. What links Canonsburg to Duffau is the span of a mans life. It was neither long nor greatly eventful, not a life that by famous deeds made itself known to history. The man who was born in Canonsburg on August 12, 1832, and died in Duffau on May 23, 1881, led a life without high office, wealth, power, acclaim, or worldly success. Yet it was the life of a man who mattered, who counted for something of lasting importance: William Henry Letterman, co-founder of the Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity. The relationship of Letterman's family to Canonsburg and Jefferson College is important to an understanding of his background. His mother's father, Craig Ritchie, was among the town's early settlers", a prosperous businessman of Scots Presbyterian descent and in 1795 one of the eight founding trustees of Canonsburg Academy, the log school that was the forerunner of the College. A man of property and standing, Ritchie was a leading citizen, a sometime hero (at least, a noted Indian fighter), and for many years treasurer of the Jefferson College board of trustees. His daughter Anna married a physician, Dr. Jonathan Leather- man (the sons were later to change the name to Letterman), who, as a civic leader in his own right, served as a trustee of the college from 1820 until his untimely death in 1844, when the youngest son, William Henry, was twelve. Another Ritchie daughter, Margaret, married Andrew Wylie, a memorable if difficult educator, who had become president of Jefferson in 1811 at the age of 23, two years after his own graduation. In 1816 Wylie resigned from Jefferson to take the presidency of Washington College, which he held until 1828 when he accepted an invitation to become the first president of Indiana
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College (which in 1838 became Indiana University). Andrew and Margaret Ritchie Wylie took up residence in Bloomington in the hardscrabble hinterlands of southern Indiana but looked on their life among the Hoosiers as a kind of Babylonian captivity, regarding Washington County, Pennsylvania and its two college towns as their real home. It is of interest that the roll of Pennsylvania Alpha lists Andrew J. Wylie 1857, and Pennsylvania Delta Robert D. Wylie 1860 and Samuel S. Wylie 1866, presumably the Wylies' great-nephews, sons of his nephew, Craig Wylie. William Henry Letterman was schooled at the College's preparatory department, Jefferson Academy, and then followed to the College his older brothers, Jonathan Jr. and Craig Ritchie, both of whom were graduated in the class of 1845. One of the oldest colleges west of the Alleghenies, Jefferson persisted until 1865 when it merged with Washington College. From then on, the institution was known as Washington and Jefferson, its officers, trustees, faculty, and students combined at a single site in the town of Washington about ten miles south from Canonsburg on the banks of Chartiers Creek and, more important, on the well-traveled National Pike. To this day, Phi Kappa Psi and Phi Gamma Delta, founded at Jefferson in 1848, preserve in Canonsburg the log school building in which the college's founder, the Reverend John McMillan, taught. The formidable pioneer educator was the mentor, patient, and great friend of Dr. Jonathan Leatherman and his family, and he lived to rejoice over the birth of the six Leatherman sons and daughters. It is a striking coincidence that Phi Kappa Psi was founded 100 years after McMillan's birth in 1752. In a sense, he was the Fraternity's godfather. Willie Letterman, as his family and friends ca1led him, grew up in comfortable circumstances, which were reduced by the early death of his physician-father. Dr. Letterman and his wife held a position of respect and high standing in the town, and their home fostered the values of learning, culture, and character in the Letterman children. When Willie entered Jefferson College just down the hill from the family home, he continued to live with his widowed mother. His course of study was the liberal arts standard of the nineteenth century: classics, mathematics, philosophy, history, and especially the sciences because he intended to follow his late father's profession. Willie turned out to be a competent rather than highly proficient student. He may have taken up a number of intellectual interests that attracted his curiosity, neglecting the more orthodox Jefferson curriculum, which may have seemed rather stodgy and confining. Among his fellow students he made his mark as a forceful orator, an amusing companion, and a scholar of versatile if unconventional ability. Those who knew him as a young man describe him as strikingly handsome with refined, leanly modeled features, a trim, well set physique, and, at more than six feet in height, an imposing bearing. In his portraits there is a subdued, almost pensive look, as if his eyes held a certain sadness. There seems to be a dignity issuing from a natural reserve, an inclination to
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withhold something of himself. His manner was good-humored but hardly effusive, correct but not pompous, at once kindly and manly. His manners were often admired as courtly without being stilted or dandified, a gentle- man without exception among men and women alike. Here then was a man whose appearance commanded trust and respect, suggesting, not displaying his inner strength. At Jefferson, Letterman kept his distance from the two fraternities that had chapters there, declining their invitations, even from the one of which his older brother, Jonathan, was a member. Perhaps he found them wanting in the sense of honor, gentlemanly conduct, and high purpose he meant to uphold; perhaps he found the company of their members coarse, rowdy, or simply uncongenial. Whatever his misgivings, he held true to his standards until he could bring them to life in a fraternity of his own making. During the winter of 1851-52, typhoid swept through Canonsburg and Jefferson College, laying low many students and teachers as well as townspeople. Willie Letterman volunteered to attend the stricken, and his college friend, Charles Page Thomas Moore, of Mason County, Virginia, did the same. Disregarding any danger to themselves, Letterman and Moore worked together through the long days and nights. They carried out the grueling, humbling tasks of nursing the sick, cheering the dispirited, and giving whatever comfort and help they could. In the midst of these common labors, it must have come to them that here was the basis for a brotherhood surpassing anything that either had yet discovered. Truly, Letterman and Moore had known "the great joy of serving others." Through concern for the well-being of their neighbors, they had risen above self-seeking, putting their abilities to use in the service of those whose needs were greater. When the outbreak subsided, the two resolved to transform the lessons of their recent experience into something tangible and lasting. What came to them was the founding of a fraternity, a new order that would unite men of honor and good will in the principled attainment of high purposes. On the evening of February 19, 1852, Charley Moore walked up the hill to the Letterman home at 246 North Central Avenue, expecting to meet Willie and a few other students who seemed to share their intentions. Letterman and Moore went upstairs to await their visitors, but no one else arrived on that wintry night. After an hour or so, when it was apparent no one else would come, Willie and Charley went ahead without them, quite in character for two young men who had taken the initiative of nursing others back to health. So vivid was the idea of what they intended, they decided to form not merely a society at Jefferson College, but a fraternity that would grow to include good men of like principles at colleges throughout America. Even though some of their fellows had let them down on that February evening" Letterman and Moore were confident that Phi Kappa Psi, The Friends Association of Honor, was no romantic illusion born of excessive enthusiasm. In Charles Page Thomas Moore, Willie Letterman had found a friend whose background, temperament, and interests both complemented and contrasted with his own. Born in Greenbrier
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County, Virginia, on February 8, 1831, to Thomas and Augusta Delphia Page Moore, he was the son of gentry, who, after the death of his parents, was brought up by a paternal uncle on a riverine estate in Mason County. After schooling in Pike County, Ohio and at Marshall Academy in what is now Huntington, West Virginia, Moore entered Jefferson College with the intention of becoming an attorney. Charley Moore was high-spirited, energetic, and full of fun. Warm-hearted and generous, he drew others him with an openness, a robust sense of humor, and a disarming spontaneity that made him a stimulating and charming companion. His desire to please was never toadying, but arose from his genuine concern for others. Even in later life, for all his high honors and worldly success, Moore kept his innate dignity unmarred by self-importance. Despite his lineage, he was thoroughly democratic in all his relations, gregarious~ and cordial without false bonhomie. Charley Moore was that rare fellow, the immediately likeable man, free of meanness and pettiness. Against the tall, lean, dark-hued, reserved appearance of Letterman, Moore was a less impressive sight: short, stocky, brown-haired, fair-skinned, thick-featured, buoyant, and brighteyed. While Letterman had "marvelous power" as in orator, striking off fluent and forceful phrases, Moore was essentially a story-teller and an engaging conversationalist, alight with a lively wit and rollicking comic sense. Moore also had some talent as a writer, which he put to use as the editor of a country newspaper and in the legal decisions he composed as a judge. Letterman wrote correct, polished, plain-dealing prose less reliant on the rhetorical flourishes Moore often used to advantage. Neither was a slouch at skillful expression. Although Letterman's scientific abilities led him to medicine and geology, he also possessed a poetic, romantic cast of mind that matched his chivalrous manners and aristocratic presence. Ironically, it was Moore, the country squire, who was the serious-minded, dutiful scholar. Throughout a long and busy life he kept up his extensive reading in literature, history, and philosophy, balancing gracefully the active and contemplative elements of his being. Each man was in his own way an intensely interesting person without a trace of baseness or rancor. Yet neither was a prig -- remarkable in an age when many otherwise good men were self-consciously righteous. Indeed, it was clear that Letterman and Moore had little sympathy for those earnest collegians to whom the odor of piety clung too mustily. It was all very well to profess one's devotion to the godly life; leading it was another matter entirely. Both men had evidently seen enough of hypocrisy and sanctimony to steer clear of it. What mattered was how truly a man lived in keeping with his principles, a private matter with larger, often public consequences. Hence they were careful to make only those claims on a man's honor that he could be reasonably expected to fulfill. Their aim, after all, was manliness, not saintliness. The next year as soon as Phi Kappa Psi had struggled to its feet, Moore transferred to Union College in New York state, leaving Letterman to preside over their small band of brothers. Moore went on from there to law school at the University o Virginia where he succeeded in
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forming Virginia Alpha, the second chapter of the Fraternity. In 1853, Letterman entered Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia, entrusting the future of Phi Kappa Psi to the Van Meter brothers, Hal Gillette, Ruston Kennedy, S.C.Dodds, and ten others, foremost of whom was Thomas Cochran Campbell. Letterman completed his medical course in 1856 and took his residency at the Western Chemical Infirmary in Philadelphia, his internship spent at the Pennsylvania Hospital. Through many connections, Letterman was brought up to feel binding attachments to the town and college, which from their origins his family had loyally served. It must have been with deep regret, but also with a sense of relief, that after his graduation he left Canonsburg, his home and family, putting behind him circumstances that may at once have been comforting and constraining. Whatever his feelings, Letterman thereafter became a wanderer, settling down for a while, but then moving on to strengthen his health and in pursuit of his lifes work, seemingly in quest of a lasting home he may never have found again. After attending clinics in Berlin and Vienna, he returned to Pennsylvania to practice for two years and then moved to Baltimore. During his Maryland years the Civil War shattered the nation and placed Letterman in an ambiguous position that surely tried his loyalties and principles. Although he served the Union Army in Baltimore as a civilian surgeon under contract during part of the war, he was reportedly not wholly committed to the Northern cause. In the words of one of his oldest friends, Samuel J. Niccolls, D.D., Penn. A. 1853, "Letherman [the original spelling of the name} sympathized with the South in the Civil War. The last time I saw him was in Boston, where he was arranging for the establishment of some reduction works for copper ores, to be used for the benefit of the Confederate Army. He told me how he had got across the border, and how he expected to get back again to the heart of the Confederacy." This testimony has not been directly contradicted, although his widow, Laura Slaughter Letterman, was granted a federal pension for his war service after his death in 1881. His older brother,. Jonathan Jr., distinguished himself as medical director of the federal Army of the Potomac, revolutionizing battlefield medical practices through the use of ambulances and field hospitals. But William Letterman always had a mind of his own, and because many Jefferson students were allied with the South, including almost a third of his chapter brothers, the Southern cause would have been made plain to him. Despite his western Pennsylvania birth and upbringing, he was greatly influenced by the chivalric traditions of honor, which he may have thought preserved in the socia1 order exemplified by the Southern gentlemen he knew and respected. It is probably impossible to determine the extent of his involvement on behalf of the Confederacy if in fact there is any truth at all to that story -- but it is clear that he faithfully discharged his professional duties as a physician and surgeon, and remained a noncombatant throughout the conflict. Moore, too, was placed in a difficult position because of his own loyalties and principles.
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He supported the separation of West Virginia from "The Old Dominion," whose proud son he had always been. Although with this new allegiance he supported the Union in the Civil War, Moore was a steadfast Jeffersonian Democrat who had served as prosecuting attorney of Mason County until war was declared. In effect, Moore then became a leading member of the loyal opposition, upholding the Union but dissenting from many policies of the Republican administration. This, of course, must have aroused suspicion and the enmity of zealots, as it did against countless Northern Democrats, who remained loyal to the Union as well as to the party of Jefferson and Jackson. After the war Letterman continued his practice in Baltimore for a few more years. Gradually, geology, more a passion than an avocation with him, came to occupy much of his time. He made many trips to West Virginia to look for coal and iron deposits, often buying tracts for mining companies in the East. From his field work he compiled studies and presented scientific papers, which provided detailed descriptions and analyses of West Virginia's huge mineral formations. In the spring of 1871 he left Baltimore to set up practice at Cotton Hill in Fayette County, West Virginia, southeast of Charleston, where he could also pursue geological research. Another, more ominous reason hastened the change: He knew he had inherited the weak heart condition that had brought the lives of his father and brother to an end in early middle age, that he had to escape the daily strains of city life. In his first year at Cotton Hill, Letterman grieved deeply over the death of his mother and the loss of his home in Canonsburg. Once again he was within range of Moore, who had been elected to the West Virginia Supreme Court in Charleston, and the two renewed their old friendship with great warmth and affection. In his sorrow he asked to be baptized and then confirmed in the Presbyterian Church. Letterman was nearly forty when he formally became a Christian, having withstood the urgings of his own family and the more insistent pressures of his hometown and college. As in so many concerns that bore on his personal integrity, Letterman could not bring himself to do or say a thing, merely because it was conventional or expedient. It was a matter of principle to profess his faith, only when he was at last able to affirm the tenets of Christianity. Moore, by the way, gave no sign of having ever undergone a similar spiritual struggle. All his life he was a broad-church Episcopalian, sustained by "the middle way" and the Book of Common Prayer. The straightforwardness of his faith may have accounted in some measure for the serenity of his later years as well as for the buoyancy of his youth and manhood. In any event, Moore was seemingly spared the dark night of the soul," which Letterman suffered until he came to peace with his Creator. Cotton Hill brought another momentous change in Lettermans life because it was there he met Miss Laura Slaughter of Prairie Home, Missouri, who had come to visit her maternal grandparents. At the age of forty-three, after an extended courtship, Letterman married Miss Slaughter in her parents' home. The date was September 28, 1875; within two months, his heart growing weaker, he closed his practice at Cotton Hill and settled with his wife at Prairie Home.
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By the spring of 1878, he knew he must seek a better climate and a better setting in which to exercise his abilities. Deciding that Texas was the place to look, Letterman spent two months in search of a promising location and came upon Duffau in Erath County, where there were mineral wells and the railroad was supposed to be built. That November Letterman brought his wife and baby daughter by hired carriage to what he hoped would soon turn into a boom town. He set about organizing county and district medical associations, secured a certificate from the board of medical examiners, and helped to establish a Masonic lodge. Obviously, Letterman intended to be a force for progress in the Duffau, Texas that was to be. Laura Slaughter Letterman gave birth to a son, William Gordon, and the familys prospects grew brighter. Then in the spring of 1881 Letterman's heart condition worsened. He was advised to travel to the Gulf of Mexico so that the warm salt-sea air could restore him to good health. His older brother Ritchie came to Duffau to drive him there in a covered wagon in which he could lie down to rest throughout the 400-mile ride. Mrs. Letterman, young Laura, and the baby, William, rode along in a buggy, his companions on a family journey taken as a desperate remedy. Within a week they were forced to turn back to Duffau because Letterman was failing quickly. At home on May 23, 1881, Dr. William Henry Letterman died of heart failure and was buried in the graveyard at Duffau. He was not yet forty-nine years old. His widow "sold a riding pony, which her husband had given her, and had a monument placed at his grave." Mrs. Letterman and her children soon left Duffau forever, going back to her parents' home in Missouri. All they left behind was a lone grave. In many ways, the story of William Henry Letterman is sad; in some ways, tragic, for it recounts the struggles of a gifted man of great promise who failed to achieve the heights expected of him. Hampered by a heart not strong enough to sustain his questing spirit, Letterman worked faithfully at his profession and research in big cities and in towns so obscure their names are nearly lost. He gained no extraordinary prominence among his medical colleagues, wrote no scientific works of enduring importance, exercised no remarkable power or influence on the world at large, left his family no fortune. By the hard standards the world uses to measure mens lives, he might be called a failure. Yet by the principles of the Fraternity that Letterman and Moore founded, he deserves to be recognized as illustriously successful. Indeed, if the idea of success, especially in America, has any moral significance, it must contain much more than money, power, and fame. Lettermans success is of a different order. He chose to invest his personal resources intelligence, skill, sensibility, compassion, generosity, courage, imagination, devotion in the lives of his family, friends, patients, colleagues, and neighbors; in the institutions, organizations, and communities that he served. Such an investment produced little material gain for himself. But in the chronicles of Phi Kappa Psi, it has produced priceless benefits for thousands of men a legacy of riches whose worth exceeds all measure. In this sense Lettermans life was a triumph.
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Moores life was more generously favored by good fortune. Although his mother died before he was two and his father when he was thirteen, his paternal uncle, Colonel George Moore, brought him up in privileged circumstances in which wealth was evident but not ostentatious. Col. Moore and his wife gave young Charley, their much-loved foster son, a home alive with tenderness, generosity, and warmth. Although he was reared to accept the public responsibilities his position called for, Moore tempered the justice he dispensed with mercy. No matter how magisterial he came to look with bald head, ruffled chin-whiskers, and portly dignity, he kept his bright-eyed, amused, wondering gaze as an expression of his abundantly affectionate nature. As heir to his uncles large estate, Moore retired to River View in Mason County, West Virginia, when he was fifty after eleven years on the States Supreme Court. He had won the position without opposition and the endorsement of both parties, impressive evidence of the respect the people of West Virginia felt for him. In his professional career as attorney, prosecutor, and judge, Moore had earned a distinguished reputation for his wisdom, fairness, and compassion. His private life was equally happy, for he and his wife, the former Urilla Kline of Maryland, had four daughters, three of whom survived to live long lives. From his mansion overlooking the Ohio River, the old gentleman could enjoy the comforts of prosperity, the joys of family life, and the pleasures of his scholarly pursuits. Until his death at the age of seventy-three on July 10, 1904, he was a man remarkably blessed with the good things of life. Judge Moore was buried at the Bruce Chapel graveyard, Gallipolis Ferry, West Virginia, near the home that had sustained him for sixty years. His life was, to be sure, a great success in the eyes of the world. But it was far more than that, for it achieved a unity of active and contemplative elements that in turn produced both peace and harmony. For Phi Kappa Psi, Moore established its second chapter at the University of Virginia and thereafter kept an alert and vigorous interest in the Fraternitys later development, ever ready to advise his brothers, old and young alike, on how best to achieve their purposes. To the end, he stressed his counsel of 1853: Good men or none! Moore lived to celebrate the semicentennial anniversary in 1902, knowing as a certainty the society he and Letterman began had indeed flourished. He gave it the gift of his ebullient personality, the integrity of his character, his spirit of enterprise and vitality. In his life and person, Charles Page Thomas Moore imparted to Phi Kappa Psi the great joy that comes of serving others. Still it is difficult to define what Letterman gave to the Fraternity. There is no sure way of telling the exact elements of form or content or style he may have created for later generations. Perhaps it was his own initiative to care for the sick that set in motion the events that led to the founding. Perhaps it was his vision of what a true fraternity could stand for and how it should conduct itself that unified the original, oddly assorted band of brothers. Perhaps it was his strength of character, his resilience and steadfastness that roused his brothers to overcome hardship, weariness, and failure.
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Whatever it was Letterman put into Phi Kappa Psi, it could have no greater effect than his own example. From the ordinary experiences of his life, in times of joy and sorrow, of good fortune and adversity, Letterman shaped a luminous meaning: the ultimate value of personal integrity, moral responsibility, and manly honor. Thus as he ennobled himself, he ennobled Phi Kappa Psi, granting his brothers the privilege and the obligation of upholding The Noble Fraternity. As he honored himself, he honored her. In the end the country graveyard at Duffau makes a good place for him. Even to find it requires an effort. One must have a purpose for going there, some reason that causes one to act out of deep feeling and serious reflection. No one intrudes out of mere curiosity; the dignity and the privacy of the dead go undisturbed, unviolated. A journey to Duffau is a pilgrimage and should always be so. An occasion for reverence and gratitude. It is enough to understand that in this plain and quiet place lies William Henry Letterman, like his friend Charles Page Thomas Moore, a man, a gentleman, and our brother. Originally published in THE SHIELD of Phi Kappa Psi, Summer 1986, and revised thereafter.