Section 43:  Raising Boys; Temperance

The boys were growing up and running wild. I had nothing for them to do but drive the cows to pasture. They went to school, but the summer when I was busy, they ran with the town boys and I could not look after them good deal of the time. I thought Rob would be better on a farm learning to work and hardening his muscle, and when he was about eleven years old he and George Lathy went down to the valley and Rob stayed with his Uncle Oliver and George, who was several years older, worked for my brother Robert on the farm. I don't suppose Rob worked very much, but he learned to plow and work on the farm with his Cousin James D. Campbell, and then he was a great deal with my sister and Mother and it was a good place to be and he had a good influence around him. He was there three or four summers and I think one winter and until he had to be sent away to school.

He had commenced a classical course in the winters he was at home and then went down to Port Royal in Juniata County to an academy under the care of my old classmate, David Wilson, where he remained a year or so and then went to Allegheny College at Meadville. I also sent John Keese Summer down to his Uncle James Oliver's where he worked a little on the farm. I then or soon afterwards sent him to Phillips Academy at Andover, Massachusetts, where he remained a year.

The trouble with boys is to get them trained to industry and steady habits and to depend on themselves. Generally those raised to bone labor and are poor make the most successful scholars, and there are few boys or men who have no regular work who do not fall into bad habits. It don't require extraordinary talents to make good men -- it is industry that leads to success in life.

The boys both showed some aptitude for mathematics. Rob, I think, has more than usual talent for mechanical engineering and perhaps ought to have been a mechanic, and in certain mechanical work would have been successful, and his mind runs in that direction.

I don't believe I had much skill in training boys -- I know I never whipped either of them unless I was in a bad humor, and that is the time I should not have done so; but if I waited, it always seemed like cold-blooded cruelty to switch a boy half a day or a whole night after the offense was committed, and I rarely if ever did it. My children were all affectionate and obedient when I was with them, and behind my back the boys, I guess, were no worse than others; and I now say that I don't think I ever needed to chastize [sic] a child I raised -- I could easily control them without it, and a quiet talk always had a better effect than a whipping.

I suppose I had not enough of patience with my children and therefore was not a success for a model parent. Rob always wanted me to tell him stories, and when the little fellow asked too many questions which he nearly always did, I would order him to bed or shut him up with cross words. I was then often busy or my mind occupied and sometimes vexed with matters of practice or business, and I was not as amiable in my family as I ought to have been. But I always took a pride and pleasure in providing for and giving my children the advantages of an education and never begrudged the money spent in qualifying them for usefulness in life.

I married late in life and perhaps was not by nature as domestic in my disposition as many men, but I took a great deal of pleasure in my family and enjoyed taking my boys with me to the woods and to hunt, as much as most men, and they soon became as fond of it as I was. I trusted them with the shot gun when they were quite young and I was sometimes uneasy for fear they would injure themselves, but they happened to get along without being hurt and as they grew up became expert hunters of small game. I am now wearing a pair of boots made of the skin of the first and only deer John K. ever shot. He killed it when living in the valley on the back mountain, and had the hide tanned over there.

The training of the girls, and while young of the boys, was left very largely to their mother, and they owe a great deal more to her than to me, and I have no doubt all will testify that her regimen and government was much more mild than mine; but I don't think our rule was specially tyrannical or that their home, while they remained members of the family, was not pleasant.

In a small village like ours, boys from ten to fifteen will run with other boys and soon learn all the mischief that is practiced by the worst in the town and this cannot be avoided, and the most I tried to do was to keep mine at home at night and this was pretty hard to do; and they soon learned to use tobacco. I tried to keep them from it but as I used it myself they followed example rather than precept. When I was a boy at home on the farm, my Father kept whiskey in the house and we had it in the harvest field till about 1829 or 1830, and I learned to take my "nip" with the older hands and liked it. I believe I had an appetite for it till I was eighteen, but after that I seemed to care nothing about it, and although I occasionally drank some in company afterwards, I never acquired a taste for it, and when I began to have children in the house I banished all intoxicating drinks and I have been a tee-totaller for some thirty-five years, and whatever sins I have to answer for I never clouded my brain or injured my constitution by intoxicating drinks, and I have used whatever influence I have had against intemperance and advocated total abstinence. I say this in no boastful spirit, but I desire to leave on record the convictions of my life -- that intemperance is the giant evils [sic] of our land and I sincerely hope none of those inheriting my name and blood will ever be found indulging in this disgracing habit; and the only safe and true rule is to never taste stimulating drinks as a beverage, for all drunkards were moderate drinkers before they became drunken sots. My solemn charge to all my descendants is to be sober, honest and truthful men and women, and it will brighten and smooth your pathway through life.

The human system is a complicated piece of machinery, and every stimulant causes an unnatural tension of the nerves and the recoil leaves the whole man weaker and more depraved mentally, morally and physically, and if persisted in the strongest become weak and worthless and die a wreck as has been proven in a thousand instances. A healthy man ought to, and sometimes does, live a hundred years, but it is not the man of intemperate habits.