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



Are you one of 93 million descendants?

Isaac B. Werner had no descendants, but many homesteaders raised families.  Today it is estimated that 93 million people are descendants of homesteaders.  I am among that number, and perhaps many of you following my blog are too. 

This past weekend my husband and I attended the 57th Annual Willa Cather Spring Conference in Red Cloud, Nebraska, and I will be sharing that great American Writer and her hometown with you in future posts.  However, I mention our trip to Nebraska to share some side trips we took after the Conference.

The Homestead National Monument operated by the National Park Service is located near Beatrice, Nebraska, northeast of Red Cloud.  We enjoyed the drive through some of Nebraska's beautiful rural landscape and realized only when we arrived at the national park that it is the 150th Anniversary of the Homestead Act of 1862. 

Those of us who know the Great Plains region tend to think of homesteading as having occurred on the plains, overlooking the extent of America opened for settlement by homesteaders.  Upon arrival at the park site, visitors are immediately presented with the question:  "Do you live near a Homestead?"  A map shows that there were 30 homesteading states, although in 1862 when Abraham Lincoln signed the Homestead Act, not all of the territory had yet achieved statehood.  According to the park ranger who greeted us, Montana is the state with the largest homestead acreage, and Nebraska is the state with the largest percentage of its land having been homestead.  Kansas, where Isaac homesteaded, also has a great homesteading heritage.

As visitors approach the Heritage Center, the sidewalk parallels a wall showing the 30 homesteading states, with a box cut from each state's silhouette representing the proportion of that state's total area that was available for homesteading.  The photograph taken looking down a portion of the wall shows Nebraska at the far left, with Kansas next in the line of state silhouettes on the wall.

After an informative conversation with the ranger, we viewed the film and walked out just in time to see a Junior Ranger being sworn in.  It was great seeing how seriously the young man took the responsibilities he was assuming with his oath to learn about the prairie and help care for it and teach others to respect the land.  Notice particularly the tall Plexiglas tube on the left side of the photograph.  A bunch of prairie grass has been carefully extracted from the soil to show the blades of grass above the surface (above the top band on the tube) but also the length of the roots extending deeply into the soil.  Grass such as this formed the sod that homesteaders plowed to clear the land for cultivation of crops.  I will never again think that the common garden weeds that I pull have deep roots!

Isaac staked his claim in 1878, and it was not until 1886 that he finally bought a horse, having avoided the indebtedness necessary to purchase a horse until that year.  During his early years of farming, he traded his own labor in exchange for help from neighbors with horses and machinery to break the sod. This exchange of labor allowed him to break so little sod that much of his time was spent raising trees rather than planting fields.  Even when the sod was broken, he had to use hand tools for farming the ground.

The implements displayed near the homesteader's cabin on the grounds of the Heritage Center are those pulled by horses, mules, or oxen; however, at the Education Center the exhibit included man-powered implements like Isaac initially used.  When we arrived there, I spotted the sign directing visitors to that exhibit.  "Oh, look!" I exclaimed.  "This is where the farm implements are!"  I noticed two rangers exchanging perplexed expressions, and I said, "I suppose that is not something you usually hear from the women visiting your exhibits."  They laughed and nodded.  They had no idea that it was my time spent with Isaac that had caused my enthusiastic response to the opportunity to see the implements he used on his homestead.  In a future post I will share pictures of some of the implements I photographed.

Not only the Homestead National Monument has wonderful events planned throughout the summer commemorating the 150th Anniversary of the Homestead Act of 1862 but also the Nebraska Humanities Council is celebrating their state's homesteading legacy.  It is a great year to visit Nebraska, and when you do, be sure to include the Willa Cather Memorial Prairie and Willa's hometown of Red Cloud in your planning.  http://willacather.org/; http://nebraskahumanities.org/; and http://www.nps.gov/home/planyourvisit/150th-anniversary-of-the-homestead-act.htm.