Library Collections: Document: Full Text

The same is true of his five full-blood brothers and sisters who attained manhood and womanhood. Among their three hundred and fifty descendants are many who have entered our large cities, where they are to be found as doctors, lawyers, ministers, merchants, pharmacists, bankers, manufacturers, teachers; still others have become pioneers in the West, while those who have remained in the country are land-owners, farmers, blacksmiths, undertakers, store-keepers and mill owners, always capable and industrious, abreast of the problems of life, which they meet with the intelligence of normal citizens.

But whence, it may well be asked, this astonishing difference in the characters of these two branches, springing, on the paternal side, from the same source?

Reason will at once decide that this difference must be found in the women who became the mothers of the respective lines, and in the subtle subjective forces that brought about and accompanied each mating.

Fortunately, church and family records, local tradition, our nation's history even, can aid in finding an answer to the question, Who and what were these two women ? And under what circumstances did each enter into the life of her husband?

The early records of the province where these events took place tell us that in 1774 "a simultaneous blaze of indignation from North to South, broke out at the tidings of arbitrary acts of the British Government perpetrated against the port of Boston. Measures were at once taken for organizing the various counties into a combination of the friends of liberty who should insure promptitude and unity of action throughout the province." On Sunday, September 23, 1775, at precisely four o'clock, the news of the Battle of Lexington "carried by express riders reached the chambers of the New York Committee of Safety and thence the stirring news spread on to Princeton and Philadelphia, spreading like wild-fire over all the neighboring counties. Meetings were called and resolutions adopted for regulating the militia of the colony."

By spring of the following year, companies had been organized and stationed at the various strategic points. To one of these on the "King's Highway" connecting two important trade centers came in April, 1776, a youth not yet twenty-one, who had lost his father five years before. He had been reared by his mother with four "spinster sisters" on a farm of some two hundred acres, situated about five miles away, that had come to them in direct line, part of an original purchase made in 1734 by their paternal great-grandfather. This ancestor was of sturdy English dissenting stock that had always been sober, industrious, and God-fearing. The young soldier inherited these qualities, but having been so early deprived of a father's care, and so suddenly plunged into the relaxed atmosphere of camp life, succumbed to excesses unknown in the annals of his family. Ready he was to answer his country's call and to fight when the time came, but in the various monthly tours which he served there were plenty of off-duty times when the fires of patriotism burned lower than the other fires within him. Even to-day the remains of numerous old taverns scattered along the road, still called the "King's Highway," attest the ancestral thirst which called them into being. That our young friend frequently found means to quench his own thirst is not to be doubted, and it is equally certain that among the wayward girls who frequented these taverns was one, a native in the locality, who attracted the soldier, now in the full swing of re-action from the restraint of his well-ordered home. This girl it was who became the mother of him who subsequently built his hut on the mountain-side scarcely two miles distant. She, in accordance with an instinct that has been followed by her descendants for generations, gave to the child the full name of its father, thus making his identity known.

Of this girl, history has nothing and tradition very little to tell. That she attained an advanced age is learned from her great-granddaughter, who remembers that her mother "lived with the old woman after she had become completely imbecile and that she often told of how difficult it was to care for her." She lived in a log cabin back in the woods, and at one period, late in life, had passed as the wife of an old soldier, who belonged to a good family, but was of striking peculiarity. At his death she failed to receive his pension, since it could not be proved that she was his lawful wife. She died about 1842. Of her name or ancestry no trace can be found to-day. Her son, who seems to have been her only child, did not live long with his mother, but was bound out with a well-to-do farmer of the vicinity. There is no evidence that the father ever at any time recognized either the mother or her child, although he could not have remained ignorant of the latter's existence nor of the name which the lad bore. The shifting fortunes of a soldier's life did not permit him to remain long in one locality and he probably was changed long before the child was born.