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When we next find him, it is on the eve of battle when an accidental wound in the right arm disabled him for further service. He then returned to the home farm, and during a summer of subdued activity fell in love with a young Quakeress of the vicinity. The girl found his suit acceptable, but her shrewd father was not so easily moved. At first he objected to the union, for the young man was too much handicapped by lack of worldly possessions, by his sisters, still minors, and by his disabled condition. In reply to the objection of the old man, the young suitor is recorded as saying, "Never mind, I'll own more land than thee ever did, before I die"-a promise which he made good. The paternal objection must have been shortly overruled, for the church records give the date of his marriage with the Quakeress as January, 1779. No uncertainty shrouds the ancestry of this woman whom he made his wife. She came of a respected English family, which, however, having imbibed principles too broadly democratic to be tolerated in that country, had been compelled to seek shelter in the New World. Here it had quickly taken root and through thrift and industry had acquired material possessions which placed it in the front provincial ranks. Its best possession, however, was that uncompromising rectitude which forms the backbone of our nation and which invariably has made for intelligence and ability in its offspring.

The eldest son of this union was the respected farmer referred to in the beginning of this article. In the family Bible is a carefully preserved record of the five daughters and two sons born of this union, but no mention is made of the older son, born of the other union, whose name, had the whole truth been told, would have headed the list of his father's children. Of this illegitimate son, no family Bible ever held the record, and his existence would certainly have been allowed to pass unnoticed, had it not chanced that his great-great-grand-daughter was placed in a home for feeble-minded, where she was long studied and watched before an attempt was made to unravel the thread of her past history. When once undertaken, it was traced back to the mountain hut, where it might have rested, had it not been found that the degenerate man bore the full name of the Revolutionary hero, married as the records show in 1779. Persistent search revealed the fact that several persons still living had always known of the blood relationship of the two brothers, whose lives were in such striking contrast to one another, and that they retained a vivid impression of the strange doings and disorderly ways of these wild people of the woods. For it will surprise no one to learn that the degenerate family has always been a complex problem, inheriting and preserving from its normal ancestor strong and attractive personal characteristics along with the low mental and moral endowment from the subnormal side, thus from its complexity impressing itself deeply upon the community. This strange mixture shows itself even to the sixth generation.

As the above recorded facts were being dug from records it began to seem a singular coincidence that these two brothers, here singled out for comparison, should have been born so near the time of the promulgation of that basic principle of our democracy that "All men are created equal" -- and both of them, in a way, the direct outcome of those forces that made its establishment possible. It was as if to epitomize in them and in their descendants the necessity for drafting such a social context for this great doctrine as will make it, with each generation, more nearly true.