The Grand Army of the Republic

 

If your male ancestor came to Kansas in the late 19th Century, he was likely a Union Veteran.  Over half of the 30,000 eligible men in the young state of Kansas volunteered for the Union Army, one of the highest volunteer rates in the nation.  After the war, many from other states took advantage of the Homestead Act, which gave Union Veterans one year's credit toward the required five years necessary to prove up a homestead claim for each year of Union service.

Many of those Union Veterans joined the GAR, the Grand Army of the Republic.  Founded in 1866, it was a nation-wide fraternal organization with over 500 posts registered in Kansas by the turn of the century, the combined number of members in Kansas totaling more than 20,000.

They promoted parades, patriotic education, and lobbied for veterans' pensions.  In our local communities we can see many GAR markers on the cemetery graves on Memorial Day.  As years passed, membership in the GAR declined, and the last Kansas GAR post disbanded in 1943.

Perhaps because the Civil War was fought in the South, the tradition of remembering the Civil War has remained stronger there.  Movies, like "Gone With the Wind," have depicted heroic soldiers in Gray.  The 150th Anniversary of the Civil War in 2011 was far more celebrated in the South, with remembrances of all kinds, than in the North.

Yet, it was the North and the Union Army that preserved the United States of America.  Soldiers serve at the command of their officers, and in response to decisions made by the leaders who took them into war.  It is only natural that families honor their own soldiers for the role they were required by others to play.  But, it is important that we remember that Lincoln's Army saved the Union.

P.S.  I am teaching an Osher class on November 1st.  The title of my class is "Three Powerful Women of the Populist Movement," and the class is virtual, from 10 o'clock to 11:30.  I know that some of you have taken my classes in the past, and I hope to see some familiar and some new faces for this class.  With the background of  all the things that were happening in the late 1800s, I focus on three important women!  You can visit University of Kansas Osher classes to learn more.

Advice from Henry Ward Beecher

Every young man would do well to remember that all successful business stands on the foundation of morality.  Henry Ward Beecher

 

Inside Isaac's journal was a lengthy newspaper clipping which described how to keep a journal.  The author of the article was Henry Ward Beecher, a Congregationalist minister, social reformer, and abolitionist.  Today his sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, is probably better known, for she is the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, whom Abraham Lincoln addressed as 'the lady who started this war,' when they met.  However, during his life, Harriet's brother Henry was also widely known.

 

Henry had his own encounter with Lincoln, who heard him preach.  Beecher advanced the Union cause on a speaking tour through England during the Civil War, and when the flag was again raised over Fort Sumter near the end of the Civil War, he was the primary speaker.  Beecher lived in a time when eloquent preachers could become celebrities, drawing crowds to their services and becoming acquainted with other well known people.  After hearing Rev. Beecher preach, Mark Twain described his performance as "sawing his arms in the air, howling sarcasms this way and that, discharging rockets of poetry and exploding mines of eloquence, halting now and then to stamp his foot three times in succession to emphasize a point."  Even if Twain was guilty of his well-known exaggerations, Beecher must have been a forceful speaker.  Using his celebrity to speak out for causes, Beecher supported women's suffrage, temperance, and Darwin's theory of evolution.

 

The pastor of Plymouth Congregational Church in faraway Brooklyn, New York had a significant role in early Kansas.  Before the Civil War, Beecher raised money for the early settlers in Kansas and Nebraska who were willing to oppose slavery, using the money he raised to buy them rifles.  Consequently, the guns acquired the nickname of "Beecher's Bibles."

 

Hold yourself responsible for a higher standard than anybody expects of you.  Never excuse yourself.  Henry Ward Beecher

 

Even the scandal involving accusations of improprieties with a female member of his church, the wife of his friend, did not extinguish Beecher's celebrity.  The Plymouth Church Board of Inquiry exonerated Beecher but excommunicated the woman's husband, and a second Board of Inquiry two years later excommunicated the woman as well.

 

Whether Isaac was aware of the scandal is unknown, but he respected Beecher's opinion well enough to have clipped an article written by Beecher from the newspaper to save in his journal.  Beecher counseled against filling a personal journal with feelings and opinions, recommending that a journal should be a record of specific events--of weather, people seen that day, and how time was spent.  The clipping in Isaac's journal is undated, but Beecher's advice would indicate that the opinions and emotions of a young man shared in Isaac's journal entries of 1870-71 were before he read Beecher's newspaper column, and the entries of 1884-1891 when the journal resumed were influenced by Beecher's advice to stick to facts.

 

Journaling may have been a Werner family tradition.  His twin brother Henry Beckley Werner also kept a diary, which was donated to Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania by Henry's son, Charles Hain Werner.  The diary entries may be read at http://library.albright.edu/casc.  It was very interesting for me to compare entries from 1871 from both twin brothers' journals, particularly the entries about brother Henry Werner's travels to Virginia.

 

Even after Henry Ward Beecher's death in 1887, his advice was available to people, as can be seen from the advertisement taken from the County Capital newspaper to which Isaac subscribed.  Posthumously, Beecher was still dispensing advice on "courtship, early marriages, church work, choir music, women and housekeeping."  Frankly, I wonder what Rev. Beecher had to say about housekeeping!  The very thought of Henry Ward Beecher delivering his opinion to women readers of the Ladies Home Journal on the subject of housekeeping calls to mind Rev. Beecher's own words. 

 

A person without a sense of humor is like a wagon without springs.  It's jolted by every pebble on the road.  Henry Ward Beecher



Isaac's Childhood Church

Isaac's childhood church is older than this nation. The first steps taken toward the erection of a church were in 1730 on land donated by George Hain. It was customary in those times to call the church by the name of the man donating the land, so Hain's Church it became, although the proper name was St. John's Reformed Church. The site of Hain's Church was a high hill, said to be the highest point in Lebanon Valley.

About thirty years after the first church was erected, a second church built of stone was erected in 1766. The American colonies were still ruled by Great Britain, and a stone plaque over the doorway read (translated from the German to English): "All who here go out and in / Should obey God and the King." The patriotic members of the church obliterated the word "King" when America fought to gain its independence.

In 1844, the year of Isaac and his twin brother Henry's births, the church was remodeled and the stone was plastered, the exterior painted to resemble brick, and in 1851 a belfry was added. In 1878, the year Isaac homesteaded in Kansas, the third church building was erected as a southern extension to the 1766 building. Today's beautiful red brick church with its towering steeple and its history told on the weathered gravestones of the surrounding cemetery still sits proudly on the hill donated by George Hain.

When we timidly entered the church we were welcomed by the staff, willing to help me with my research despite my interrupting their work and my failure to arrange our visit in advance. The 1816 History of St. John's (Hain's) Church they shared with me was a researcher's dream, with an entire chapter on the Werner Family. It also contained the baptismal records of Isaac and his siblings, records of Revolutionary War & Civil War Soldiers Buried at Hain's Church, the death record of Isaac's father William, and many other valuable chapters. As I continued my research, I found something even more amazing. I asked if there were any Werner members of the present church, and they introduced me to James Werner, Isaac's first cousin four times removed.

James came to the church and shared with me family pictures and letters, including several from Isaac's nephew Charles sent to his father Henry B. Werner, Isaac's twin brother. Included among these family treasures was the drawing of William & Rebecca's stone house, which I previously posted on November 4, 2011 in the post "Isaac's Birth & Childhood." Unbelievably, James even had a picture of Isaac's twin brother, Henry. I do not know if they were identical or fraternal twins, but that picture may be as close as I can come to knowing what Isaac looked like! James' generosity in sharing family documents was incredible, as was the kindness of the Hain's Church staff.

Isaac's Birth & Childhood

On the 23rd of May, 1844, twin boys were born to William and Rebecca Werner, the couple's first children. Just over two months later, on August 4th, the baby boys were baptized at St. John's (Hain's) Reformed Church in Lower Heidelberg, Berks County, Pennsylvania. One of the boys was named Henry Beckley Werner; the other boy was named Isaac Beckley Werner, both boys having been given their mother's maiden name as their middle name. The church in which the babies were baptized was the center of their community, built on a hill said to be the highest point in Lebanon Valley.

The boys' parents had married in November of 1842, when William was forty-one years old and Rebecca twenty-five. The year the twins were born, William built a two-story limestone house for his family on the fifty-two acre farm he owned. In 1855, with two surviving daughters added to the family (one daughter having died as an infant), William hired a surveyor to plat a town on twenty-two acres of his farm. He used family names for the streets--William, Werner, Rebecca, Beckley, and Reber, his mother's maiden name. It is believed that part of the consideration for granting the Lebanon Valley Railroad passage through the platted town was requiring that the depot built by the railroad be called Wernersville.

Isaac and his siblings grew up in a community with many aunts, uncles and cousins living nearby. Schooling for children had been provided by the Hain's Church in earlier years, but when Isaac and his brother were five years old, Lower Heidelberg erected its first public school building. In 1861, Isaac and Henry were seventeen years old and still attending school, offering some indication of the importance their parents placed on giving their children a good education. The teacher, Francis Trout Hoover, taught seventy-two students, the youngest age 4 and the oldest age 17. Over three decades later, Isaac's old teacher published a book titled, Enemies in the Rear, or a Golden Circle Squared, about a community modeled after Wernersville. The plot of Hoover's novel involved a secret society of draft resisters during the Civil War, and locals said of the book that it was probably based on two-thirds fact and one-third fiction. Historians agree that there was organized draft resistance in that region of Pennsylvania. Neither young Isaac nor Henry served during the Civil War, but Werner cousins did fight to preserve the Union.

Isaac's father William died on June 13, 1865, and Isaac left soon after with an older cousin who had been a Union soldier during the Civil War. Eventually both cousins ended up in Rossville, Illinois. By 1878 Isaac was homesteading in Kansas. No record was found to indicate that Isaac ever returned to his home of Wernersville after leaving in about 1865.

Richard Bach wrote: "The simplist questions are the most profound. Where were you born? Where is your home? Where are you going? What are you doing? Think about these once in a while and watch your answers change." Isaac Werner knew where he was born. At different times during his life he changed locations and occupations, and sometimes imagined moving on, even after he seemed to have settled on the Kansas plains, so his answers to the last two questions Bach suggested would definitely have changed. What I cannot know is how he would have answered the second question--Where was Isaac's home? Was it back in Pennsylvania where he was born and raised, or was it in Rossville where he kept for many years the lots he had bought, or was his heart on the Kansas prairie where he had staked his claim and built a beautiful farm of which he was deservedly proud?

What I do know is that Isaac was an intriguing man. He read widely about history, the Bible, the arts, philosophy, engineering, law and business; when he could not find equipment to do the job for which it was purchased he modified it or invented something better; when he learned of the illness of a neighbor boy, he intervened and probably saved the boy's life; when he observed the world around him he recognized its changing nature and photographed the present to preserve it.

It is always beneficial to start at the beginning, so I have included this post of Isaac's beginnings to help you appreciate the posts about him which will follow.