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



Finding Isaac's Journal

When I learned that my deceased cousin had owned a homesteader's journal, I began asking questions, starting at the museum to which Cousin Lucille had bequeathed many of her possessions.  Unfortunately, no one seemed to know anything about the journal, but I was invited to look through the unsorted boxes of my cousin's possessions stored in the basement of the museum.  Like many small town museums, the Lucille M. Hall Museum depends on volunteers, and I felt selfish searching for the journal when it was obvious that they needed help sorting.  I made a compromise with my conscience.  As I began opening boxes, I sorted contents and identified pictures that I recognized, but I chose boxes that looked like they might contain the missing journal.  When the last two volunteers came down into the basement where I was sorting to let me know they were leaving for the day, they told me I was welcome to stay and continue looking.  I wasn't too keen on staying alone in the basement of an old building whose creaking and dripping sounds were not familiar to me.  I left with them.

The next day, a volunteer had gone into the storeroom where I had been working and had opened the box next to the one I was sorting.  It was the last box on the shelf, and inside was Isaac's Journal.  If I had stayed to work only a few minutes longer, I would have found it.  The important thing, however, was that the journal had been found--and what a discovery it was!

 

Each day from August of 1884 to June of 1891, Isaac wrote in this large, leather-bound journal, two inches thick, pages ten inches wide by fifteen and a half inches tall, containing 480 pages--the kind of legal journal in which records at the court house are kept.  In the front pages of the journal are entries from 1870 and 1871, when Isaac was a young druggist in Rossville, Illinois.  With no explanation for a 13 year interruption, the journal resumes during Isaac's years as a homesteader in Stafford County, Kansas.  Knowing that I wanted to use the journal for research, the museum board allowed me to take it home to do the work.                                                                                                                             

In order to organize and index all of the information the journal contained, I quickly realized I needed to transcribe it.  Isaac's penmanship is actually quite good, but he filled the pages from edge to edge in a fairly small script, and at my best, I was able to type only about one page every forty-five minutes.  I wasn't sure I could complete such a project.  After two weeks, I called one of the board members and told her what I was trying to do.  She said not to worry about how long it was taking, since without my inquiry, the journal might have gone undiscovered for months or even years.  The task of transcribing took me eleven months, involving one crashed laptop and a trip to my optometrist!                               

Mark Twain wrote in Innocents Abroad:  "At certain periods it becomes the dearest ambition of a man to keep a faithful record of his performances in a book; and he dashes at his work with an enthusiasm that imposes on him the notion that keeping a journal is the veriest pastime in the world, and the pleasantest."  Twain goes on to say that such enthusiasm only lasts about twenty-one days; however, Isaac's commitment lasted far longer, and it is a historical treasure.  The front page identifies the Journal as "Vol. 5th."  Sadly, the whereabouts of volumes 1-4 are unknown.

The writing done in 1870-1871 is that of a young man--full of ideas, opinions, and personal feelings.  When the journal writing resumes in 1884, the entries are of a more practical nature--the weather, his crops, labor done and done for him by others, economic matters, community events, and political activities.  Isaac seems to have been influenced in his changed style by a newspaper column authored by Henry Ward Beecher, which Isaac clipped and glued in the journal.  Beecher disapproved of confessional journal keeping, offering instead the following advice: "One may trace from day to day the mere facts of personal history, the proceedings of the farm, or the books read, visits made or received, the events in society, the conversations with men of mark, the facts of the weather, the seasons, the aspects of nature, and, in short, a journal for knowledge, in distinction from feeling, might be kept with great profit."  Isaac adhered to this advice for six years, preserving a record of prairie life and social struggles.

Isaac lived in an exciting time, but he kept his Journal for himself, written in sentence fragments and containing names familiar to him but a mystery to today's reader.  I decided to bring this historical place and time, with Isaac at its center, alive for readers!  Even while I was transcribing and indexing the Journal, further research began.

[Henry Ward Beecher (1813-1887) was the brother of Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin.]