June 22, 2023
Fact vs. Fiction
In her novel Unsheltered, Barbara Kingsolver uses several real-life 19th century figures from the New Jersey town of Vineland as part of her plot, including town founder Charles K. Landis and newspaper publisher Uri Carruth, the man shot by Landis in 1875. But the real-life versions of these two figures are quite different from how they have been portrayed in the historical fiction of the novel.
There are more than a few liberties taken with the historical Charles Landis’s life in Unsheltered. He was never a “captain” in any capacity and was never referred to by that title. In its review of the book, the Winnipeg Free Press characterized the Landis of the novel as a “despot mayor,” but Vineland’s founder never ran for or served as mayor of this or any other town he established. In fact, he never assumed any political position.
As for the book’s depiction of him as, in the words of The Guardian, “a land developer bent on building a self-sufficient Christian colony,” the real-life Landis was indeed a land developer, but his religious practices in his family’s Methodist faith and, later, in his wife’s observance of Catholicism, was never a consistent or necessary facet of his life. And while it was Landis’s decision to establish Vineland as a dry town, the law remained in effect throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries because the townspeople continually voted in its favor in the 1800s and well after Landis’s death in 1900.
The notion that Landis would repossess farmland he sold to residents the moment their crops failed would have led to the demise of the real Vineland or any actual town that favored such practice. Instead, Landis helped agriculturally inclined newcomers by providing an affordable plan for those interested in relocating there so that Vineland became as successful as an agrarian community as it was a manufacturing center.
As for newspapers, Landis did have connections with the Vineland Weekly, one of many such publications in the town at the time, but he never owned, operated or controlled such an enterprise. The Independent, which began showing signs of discontent with him in print from 1868, became the only outspoken opponent in the field, particularly by the time Uri Carruth took ownership. But the novel’s depiction of the editor using his publication for a noble crusade against oppression was more accurately an exercise in relentless harassment in real life.
Below are excerpts from my biography of Charles Landis concerning the campaign Carruth conducted in print for several years in the hope, as he confided to an employee, that the persecution would result in Vineland’s founder buying him out so that he and his family could leave the area.
Carruth and his family arrived in Vineland in 1868. Carruth became partners with William G. Smith in a printing business called Carruth and Smith, located on Landis Avenue near the railroad station and Landis’s home and office. According to an invoice from the enterprise, the company was still in existence as of June 29, 1871, but the following month the partners would buy The Independent. By August 2, 1871, Carruth had become the sole owner and editor and seemed to meet with the approval of the town’s “Independent Party,” an aggregate of those who apparently opposed the town founder.
It was reported in the New York Times that Landis and Carruth had a falling out over an undisclosed matter; however, it appears that The Independent’s editor needed little provocation to use his new acquisition as a means of persecuting the town founder’s business ventures, speeches, articles, ideas, appearances, principles, lifestyle and opinions. Temperance was, of course, taken to task along with other components of Vineland’s makeup. Landis was branded a dictator and it was the obligation of the paper to take him down…
For the next several years The Independent was filled weekly with a number of articles, columns and editorials by Carruth condemning Landis. Some were without a byline, others used pseudonyms. Typical of his approach is an April 10, 1872 editorial in which he casts Landis as a prince dispensing benevolence when the mood strikes him: “You knew you could make no headway against the Prince. You talk of running for office! What insanity! No! No! You have missed your figure there and are reaping the reward of your impudence…Why not follow the noble example of your brother editors and fawn and truckle to your Lawful Prince? See how they have waxed fat and grown lusty on the rich morsels of fat that have fallen from the Prince’s table…He may in his great goodness grant you his conditional pardon, and in pity for your unhappy state, even bestow upon you a few of those rich acres on the outskirts of the city of Landisville so you may once more sit in thankfulness beneath the shadow of your own vine and fig tree. But never, oh! Never again dare to oppose the Prince! If ye do, ye shall surely be cast out.”
In the same issue, Carruth delivers another barrage at Landis for having written about the shade tree policy and maintaining what Carruth calls “brush land” that prevents the planting of trees in front of Landis’s house.
In the April 24, 1872 issue, Carruth reports that Landis will devote his time to crushing The Independent by getting patrons to stop buying the newspaper. By now Landis had begun defending himself by writing articles for the Vineland Weekly, and each of his contributions were attacked by Carruth as well. A story, “The Way to Get Rid of an Unscrupulous Land-Shark,” appears in The Independent as a not-too-carefully-disguised and unflattering tale of Landis as Patrick Killkenny, or Patrick K. At one point, after he is besieged by a mob and attack dogs, Killkenny takes refuge in a tree and announces his intentions to colonize an area, coax farmers and mechanics to work there and establish stipulations like temperance to attract the sober and the moral, until he is told, “dry up you old idiot,” by one member of the mob…
Over the next two years, as the dissolution of Landis’s marriage continued, the attacks failed to subside, even during 1874 when Landis spent most of the year abroad to conduct business and remove himself from the anxiety caused by his wife and the press. Upon his return, Landis would discover his personal life a part of The Independent’s columns…
On the morning of March 19, 1875, Landis and Clara breakfasted together and this was when she decided to show her husband an article clearly written by Carruth and published in the March 18 edition of The Independent. It would prove to be Landis’s breaking point.
The article read: “A prominent Vinelander sat down by the side of his loving wife on the sofa and looked up at her eyes, and called her a duck, and a birdie, and rabbit and all the other endearing names. Then he told her he wanted she should learn the use of a revolver, so that in his absence, she could protect their home and silverware, and defend the honor of Vineland.
“Then he went off and bought an elegant seven-shooter and a nice target.
“Then he set up the target at one end of the parlor and gave her a first lesson in shooting. Then he told her he wanted she should practice every day. Then he went away for a week. When he returned he found the revolver on the other side of the looking-glass; the parlor door resembled a bad case of smallpox, and the furniture looked as if it had been indulging in wrestle with a Burlington County hail storm. Did he walk up to his wife and sicken her with all the endearing names of all the birds and four-footed beasts? Not much! He marched out into the street in his shirt sleeves; with but one boot on and that patch over the big toe.
“Then he went galloping up and down telling every man he met, confidentially, that his wife was crazy. Then he went on and tried to get her into a private Insane Asylum: yes he did, the wretch.”
Later that day, Landis stated, “My wife handed that to me this morning, and reproached me with being the cause of it. But God knows, I was not. There is not a word of truth in that. I went to Europe to get away from this thing – but it has followed me there…” While Clara was apparently quick to accuse her husband of revealing private matters, one of Landis’s employees later testified that his employer had confided in him prior to the March 18 article that Clara was “apt to talk respecting his conduct, measures, etc. with outside parties” and that “Mr. Landis…believed it to be a fact that his wife made known their private affairs.”
Photos of Landis and Carruth courtesy of the Vineland Historical and Antiquarian Society.
Epistrophe 
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