Beautiful life of Frances E. Willard, a memorial volume, The

Front matter

The Beautiful Life

OF

By ANNA A.GORDON

PART II The Commemorative Services — New York City; Churchville

N. Y. ; Willard Hall, Chicago; Evanston; Rose Hill Cemetery .......... 299

ILLUSTRATIONS

Frances E. Willard.

Photograph — Miss Willard, London, 1893.

Rev. Samuel Willard.

Miss Willard’s Birthplace, Oberlin Residence, Forest Home. School Buildings and Woman’s College.

Churches — Cpiurchville — Ogden — Janesville — Evanston. Katharine A. Jackson.

“My Four.”

Anna A. Gordon.

General Offices of the National W. C. T. U.

The Temple.

Willard Fountain.

Marble Bust, by Anne Whitney.

The General Officers of the World’s W. C. T. U.

Miss Willard in Her “Den.”

The Polyglot Petition.

St. Courageous, Her Daughter Frances and Anna A. Gordon.

Miss Willard, London.

Interior Views, Eastnor Castle, England.

Miss Willard in “Tpie Cottage,” Reigate, England.

Group Photograph — Rest Cottage, Catskills Cottage, Eastnor Castle, Reigate Cottage.

A Group of Armenians, Marseilles, France, 1896.

Hill Homestead — Willard Home.

Photograph Group — From Childhood to Present Time.

The Empire Hotel, New York City.

Katharine Willard Baldwin.

Miss Willard’s Successor as President of the National W. C. T. U. Miss Willard’s Successor as President of the World’s W. C. T. U. Platform of Willard Hall, February 23, 1898.

Mrs. Mary B. Willard and Her Daughter, Mary.

Namesakes.

Preface

THE sending forth of a Memorial Volume at the loving insistence of the General Officers of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union is a sad and sacred privilege intrusted to me because for twenty-one years God gave me that which was my highest joy, the opportunity to share the most toilsome period of Frances E. Willard’s sublime and heroic life. It is brought out thus early to meet an immediate demand and is published by the Woman’s Temperance Publishing Association, the official Publishing House of the National Woman’s Christian Temperance Union.

I could not have undertaken the work without the approval and sympathetic co-operation of Lady Henry Somerset, that loyal and great-hearted friend, who by the law of kinship among great souls was closely united to Miss Willard in endeavor, achievement and ideals. The generous assistance of two of Chicago’s leading clergymen, Dr. Frank W. Gunsaulus and Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis, is also gratefully acknowledged, together with suggestions and contributions from many valued friends.

Since the volume must be devoted in large part to character sketches, tributes, and a description of the commemorative services, it is evident that anything beyond an outline biography ii

PREFACE.

would be impossible; but we believe this picture of Miss Willard’s remarkable and winsome personality will deepen in the hearts of the people she loved, the desire to hold aloft her white banner of purity and peace, patriotism and prohibition, the protection of the home and the redemption of humanity.

Among Miss Willard’s treasures long and carefully guarded, I have found a little book bearing the title, “Memoir of Nathan Dickerman, ” probably the first memorial biography on which her childish eyes rested. On the fly leaf is written: “Read on the long, lonesome Sundays at Forest Home in my childhood. I remember a delicate, exquisite odor that adhered to the book from its relation somewhere with a sweet and pervasive perfume so that I early got the notion of fragrance and religion as inseparable. ”

Truly, “pure religion and undefiled” is inseparable from the fragrance of Frances Willard’s life. Strong, courageous, indomitable, yet a fair sweet flower “whose petals and whose perfume expand so far that we are all enfolded and sheltered in its tenderness and beauty.”

Chicago, March io, 1898.

INTRODUCTORY

BY

Xa&g Ibenrg Somerset

CABLE has come asking me to send an introduction to A the memorial biography that is being prepared of the greatest woman philanthropist of our generation. I do not hesitate at the use of this word “greatest.” I know that time alone can prove the worth of any work, and that only down the perspective of the years are we able to gauge the comparative importance of the human lives that have made history; but I am persuaded that, when the annals of the nineteenth century are written, when the record of the modern movement that has metamorphosed the position of woman comes to be told, Frances Willard’s name will stand pre-eminent as the one who saw with a keen prophetic eye ahead of her time, who realized the dangers, who steered clear of the rocks and shoals that beset any great change, and who furnished the women, not only of a great continent but the world over, with a just realization of their rightful position, and with that safe-guarding gospel, “Womanliness first — afterward what you will.” The Temperance cause was the open door through which she entered into her service for the world. The defense of woman, her uplift, her education for the widening way, was the task she set herself to accomplish. But to no special Cause did Frances Willard belong, her life was the property of Humanity; and I believe that there was not one single cry that could rise from the world, not one single wrong that could be redressed, not one “wail of weakness” of any kind that did not find an immediate echo in her heart, that did not call her to rise and go forth in that chivalric strength and gentleness which have clad her as with a holy panoply in the battle of life. To us who knew her childlike simple spirit, her keen intellect, her power of sympathy, the hospitable width of her mind, her unerring vision of the truth, it seems as though no words could ever paint the woman as she was, and only time will tell the world all she has accomplished. But this I dare to prophesy, that as the years go by, and the history of the New World comes to be read by those who desire to know the builders that reared a civilization so great and so strong, the name of Frances Willard will stand by the side of Lincoln, Wendell Phillips and Garrison.

The personal grief of her going is as yet too deep and the wound too sore to make it possible for me at this early date to write all that is in my mind about the woman who was so near and dear a friend; but as she has done me the honor of leaving me her literary executor in conjunction with her faithful and loved Anna Gordon, I send these few words of introduction to a memorial of the inspired life that has meant so much to the women of the world.

For years her name has been a household word among all those who work for the uplift of Humanity in England; and I well remember the day when I first received a letter of encouragement and cheer from her, words so sisterly and sympathetic that it seemed as though a new light had shined in the darkness and difficulty of our Temperance reform. In that letter she sent me a little knot of white ribbon, and all these years that little bow has been pinned into my Bible. It came as a promise of the most beautiful friendship that ever blessed any life.

In 1891 I saw her in the fullness of her power at the great Boston Convention, and as I think of her then, it seems to me that no other will ever fill the place that she has left vacant, for to no other could be given that rare combination of power and perfect gentleness, of playful humor and tender pathos, that strange mixture of reserve with an almost childlike confidence, and above all that sublime spirituality that always made you feel how near she was to the invisible, how lightly the mantle of the material lay upon her.

INTRODUCTORY i5

She came to us in England in the summer of 1892, bowed with grief at the loss of the mother who had been the strong staff of her life, who had upheld her through her work, cheered her in her discouragements, pointed her onward in her days of weariness.

I think I have never known a human soul feel sorrow so acutely as did this daughter, when for a while a cloud hid that mother from her sight. It was like the grieving of a little child that holds out its hands in the dark and feels in vain for the accustomed clasp that sent it happily to sleep. She was welcomed in this country as I suppose no philanthropist has been welcomed in our time. The vast meeting that was organized to greet her at Exeter Hall was the most representative that has ever assembled in that historic building; and certainly no more varied gathering of philanthropists could be brought together with one object than met there that day. On the platform sat members of parliament, dignitaries of our own church, and temperance leaders from the Roman Catholic Church, leaders of the Labor movement and of the Salvation Army, and delegations from the Methodist, Baptist and Congregational Churches and the Society of Friends. The chief Jewish rabbi sent a congratulatory letter and signed the address of welcome, which was also signed by hundreds of local branches of the British Women’s Temperance Association.

“What went ye out for to see ? ” was the question that one asked one’s self as that frail form stood in the midst of the vast assembly. A woman called of God, a woman who preached Christ in politics, Christ in the home, the equality of the purity of men and women, the liberation of the oppressed, the destruction of legalized wrong, the upbuilding of all that was great in home, in government, and in the nation. And she who had gone forth without money and without influence, but with an untarnished name, a clear brain, an indomitable will, and a God-given inspiration, had in her twenty years of work gathered round her, not the sympathies of her own land only, but the admiration and good will of the whole English-speaking race. The time she spent in England was a triumphal procession, and greetings awaited her in i6 every city of importance throughout the whole of Great Britain and Ireland. The Synod Hall in Edinburgh, the historic temperance town of Preston, Dublin and Glasgow, vast assemblies in the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, packed audiences in Liverpool and Birmingham — all vied to do her honor; and wherever she went, her clear, incisive thought, the pathos and power of her words, and perhaps most of all the sweet, gentle woman won the heart as well as the intellect of all who met to greet her and assembled to hear her. There was no trait in Miss Willard’s character that v/as more prominent than her generous power of help. If an idea came to her, she had no thought but to share it with her fellow-workers. Anything that she had said was common property, anything that she could write might bear another’s signature; to help, to help — this was her only thought; for she was inspired by a love which “ seeketh not her own,” but that gave of the treasure that had been poured into her life as freely as the sunshine ripens and blesses the world.

‘ ‘ I saw a saint — how cans’ t thou tell that he Thou sawest was a saint?

I saw one like to Christ so luminously By patient deeds of love, his mortal taint Seemed made his groundwork for humility.

‘ ‘ And when he marked me downcast utterly,

Where foul I sat and faint,

Then more than ever Christ-like kindled he ;

And welcomed me as I had been a saint,

Tenderly stooping low to comfort me.

“Christ bade him, ‘Do thou likewise.’ Wherefore he Waxed zealous to acquaint His soul with sin and sorrow, if so be He might retrieve some latent saint :

‘ Lo, I, with the child God hath given to me !’ ”

= — Christina Rossetti ,

REV. SAMUEL WILLARD

PASTOR OF THE OLD SOUTH CHURCH, BOSTON. BORN, 1639

MISS WILLARD’S BIRTHPLACE.

Churchville, N. Y.

THE WILLARD RESIDENCE. “FOREST HOME.'

Oberlin, Ohio. Janesville, Wis.

Chapter I Ancestral Gifts

WPIEN Macaulay was shown the vast clustering vines in Hampton Court, with trunk like unto a tree, he expressed a wish to behold the mother root- in Spain from which the scion was cut. Similarly, we confess to an eager desire to trace the ancestral forces that are united in every son and daughter of genius. No great soul appears suddenly. The foothills slope upward toward the mountain-minded man. Mental and moral capital are treasures invested for us by our forefathers. Nature takes the grandsire’s ability and puts it out at compound interest for the grandson. Plato says: “The child is a charioteer, driving two steeds up the long, ripe hill; one steed is white, representing our best impulses; one steed is dark, standing for our worst passions. ” Who gave these steeds their colors ? ‘ ‘ Our fathers, ”

Plato replies, and the child may not change one hair white or black. Oliver Wendell Holmes would have us think that the child’s value to society is determined one hundred years before its birth. Back of Harriet Beecher Stowe was a father who was at once a moral hero and an intellectual giant, and a mother who ga.ve to the strong Beecher type its rich, warm, glowing tones. Ralph Waldo Emerson had back of him seven generations of scholars. A great river like the Nile or Mississippi has power to bear up fleets of war and fleets of peace, because the storms of a thousand summers and the snows of a thousand winters have lent it depth and power. And the measure of greatness in a man or woman is determined by the intellectual streams and the moral tides flowing down from the ancestral hills and emptying into the

human soul.

i8

In every great soul, however, there is an unexplored remainder that must be referred to God alone. The secret of greatness is in part ancestral, but chiefly divine. God breathes it. When the explorer has traced the river Nile back to the initial lakes, he has still fallen short of the sources of that mighty stream. Above him, in the distant clouds, are the secret and invisible sources that fill the springs and crowd the water on in massy flow. And having traced every great soul back to the traits of distant ancestors, we find that the source of genius is in that holy of holies where dwell clouds and thick darkness. For in the last analysis genius is an unread riddle. It is God who baptizes the hero or heroine with a divine afflatus, girds the man and woman for the life task, and sends them forth with faculties like unto the prophet’s sword, ‘ ‘ all dipped in heaven. ”

Miss Willard’s father, Josiah Flint Willard, born in Wheelock, Vermont, and her mother, Mary Thompson Hill Willard, a native of Danville in the same State, fell heir to all the best qualities that have ripened upon the rich soil of New England, and they in turn bequeathed their united treasure to the daughter, whom they trained for her career as teacher, author, orator, philanthropist and social reformer.

Major Simon Willard, of Horsmonden, Kent, the first Willard to settle in the New World in 1634, was one of the founders of Concord, Massachusetts, afterward famous as the home of Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau and the Alcotts, and as the literary center of New England. Major Willard was a Puritan who took for his intellectual motto, “Truth for authority, not authority for truth.” The early history of Massachusetts is full of allusions to his many and varied services in an official capacity, all reflecting high honor upon his character as a man of integrity, ability and energy. “He was early called into positions of public trust, disciplined by the teachings of toil, deprivation and varied experience, and had the confidence and affection of an enlightened community throughout all the emergencies of a new State. ” Among the immediate descendants of this rugged and righteous ancestor are

ANCESTRAL GIFTS two presidents of Harvard University, also Rev. Samuel Willard, pastor of the Old South Church, Boston, who opposed the hanging of the witches, and Solomon Willard, of Quincy, Massachusetts, the architect of Bunker Hill Monument, who refused pay for his services, of whom Edward Everett said, “His chief characteristic was that he wanted to do everything for everybody for nothing.” Miss Willard’s great grandfather, Rev. Elijah Willard, was for forty years pastor of a church in Dublin, near Keene, New Hampshire, and served as chaplain throughout the Revolutionary War. Miss Willard loved to tell the following droll story of his powers as a peacemaker. A member of his church had called another “an old skinflint, ” whereupon accusation was brought by the offended party. When the authorities of the church were sitting in council on this grave piece of indecorum, Elder Willard suggested, in his character of presiding officer, that they should look in the dictionary and see what a “skinflint” was. This met with great favor. But lo, and behold! there was no such word in the book referred to. The Elder then said, that inasmuch as there was no definition there given, he would appeal to the brother who had used the word to give the definition. This was done, the brother replying,

‘ ‘ Why, Elder, what I meant was that Brother is a down-

right clever sort of a man.” It is shrewdly suspected that Elder Willard prearranged this reconciliation, dictionary and all.

Miss Willard’s father was a man elegant in person, of charming manners, devoutly religious, gifted with a fine mind, an inflexible will, and unusual powers of thought and speech. His daughter Frances further describes him as “thoroughly intellectual, an insatiable reader, and a man possessing exceedingly fine taste.” Miss Willard’s mother, Mary Thompson Hill, came of a singularly gifted family and one greatly blessed of God. Her grandfather Hill was a man of self-sacrificing integrity. “When, early in his career, he had become security for a friend who failed, men of good conscience came to him, urging that a man’s family was ‘ a preferred creditor ’ in all business relations, and that he should refuse to give up all he had to satisfy another man’s creditors. But he was a man of clean hands — swearing to his own hurt and changing not. He only answered, ‘ It is the nature of a bondsman when the principal fails to stand in the gap.’ And he stood in the gap, losing all his fortune rather than fail to be true to the implied promise of his bond.”

In Mrs. Willard’s maternal grandfather, Nathaniel Thompson, of Durham, New Hampshire, we find the moral courage that characterized our fearless reformer. He was once a guest at a dinner where everyone drank the health of the tyrant whom Americans were fighting, each saying as glasses were clinked, ‘ ‘ King George’s health and it shall go round,” when the young hero, Nathaniel, startled the disloyal Tories by crying out, “ Washington s health and it shall go round, ” and was nothing daunted, though driven from the room and in danger of his life. Her father, John Hill, was a kind of moral Hercules. Long before Garrison and Phillips, Channing and Beecher had meditated their attack through voice and pen upon slavery, this youth made himself known in his community as an uncompromising foe of the slave market and the horrors of the cotton field. Oft in hours of retrospection did Miss Willard relate to her listening friends an incident in her grandfather’s career that interprets the quality of his mind and heart. One spring he employed a colored youth to help in the task of sheep-shearing. The young African was the first of his people to find his way into that neighborhood, and his appearance at church or upon the streets of the village created a profound sensation. But John Plill took the young man to his home and brought him to his table. Just before the family assembled for the evening meal one of his daughters went to her father with a private request. ‘ ‘ Sister Abigail, ” she said, ‘ * has a very poor appetite and cannot relish her food at the table with that colored man; can he wait ? ” “No,” replied the father, “but she can.” John Hill was a man of great courage and decision, widely known for his democratic principles and his deep interest in all those agencies that were fitted to develop the intellectual and moral forces of the community, while his wife, gentle Polly Thompson, possessing a character described

ANCESTRAL GIFTS as “almost angelic,” was equally well known for her zeal for school, college and church.

Scientists tell us that climate affects character; that the children of ease and abundance in the tropics are the children of lassitude and laziness, without tools, without books, without home, church or school; while civilization follows the belt of the snowdrift, and in the rigorous warfare with those elements named winter, adversity, poverty, struggle, man develops self-reliance, hardihood, courage — develops instruments also for intellectual culture and moral wealth. And certain it is that the oak and rock of the New England hills seem to have repeated themselves in the iron will and the unyielding courage of the Willard family. Their very name means ‘ ‘ one who wills, ” and this doubtless explains the family motto, “ Gaudet patientia duris ” (patience rejoices in hardships).

Born of such parents, blessed with such gifts of nature and nurture, God trained Frances Willard for her life-task and made her ready to help the pilgrim hosts with their sorrows, sufferings and sins.

CHAPTER II a£)T was a rarely endowed home into which Frances Elizabeth Willard was born September 28th, 1839, in Churchville, - New York; a home sheltered from adverse chance to soul or body by the father’s strength of heart and arm and will; with the mother-climate warm within, winning out and fostering all wholesome developments — a richly nurtured child-garden, where the sturdy small plants struck deep root and spread wide leafage to the air, catching every drop of pure knowledge and every beam of home-love falling within its rays. Here the “rosy-white flower of the child’s consciousness unfolded its five-starred cup to the bending blue above.”

Baby Frances talked before she could walk, “speaking quite wisely at fourteen months,” but not until she was two years of age did her little feet begin their pilgrimage in obedience to the dictates of that electric brain and humanity-loving heart.

Sixty years ago was almost the time of the hegira from the East. The rough line of the pioneers, the sappers and miners of civilization, had finished their task, and made clear paths through the wilderness and the woods. Then everywhere, from cultured and thoughtful homes in the East, the exodus began, no longer going forth by individuals, man by man, each fighting for his own hand, but by families, friendly and allied. The future would bring new outward conditions, but they carried with them the means and appliances. Indeed they were in themselves, in aptitude and skill of heart, mind and hand, the mature human harvest of all the fullness of the past — that human harvest which is at once the summing up of the old and the seed of the new.

In this onward march it was fitting that the Willards should have their place. Reared amid the loveliest surroundings, royal Americans in heart and mind, members of the old stone church, which bore the simple name, “The church of God in Ogden,” and recognized no lines of doctrinal difference in worship and life, but united on the ground of acknowledgment of the Lord and His Word and a life of loving obedience thereto, it was no wonder that in the providence of God these two were sent out as choice and chosen seed for the new lands of the West.

Their first journey overland from Church ville, New York, terminated at Oberlin, Ohio, where five years of student life at the college were invested by these discerning parents, who had both been successful teachers in the Empire State.

Here the beloved sister Mary was born, and here the older children, Oliver and Frances, received in awe and love the early impress of the ideas of religion and scholarship. The ardent desire for learning which had hitherto led the parents on as by a pillar of fire changed to the threatening cloud of the father’s failing health, which imperatively demanded, so the physicians said, the free air of the open West and the simplest farming exercise.

In the spring of 1846 we find them again following westward. Three of the quaint, roomy, white-hooded prairie schooners, which were then the common feature of Western highways, carried the intrepid family. The father led the way. The little son, ambitious of manhood, with gravely assumed responsibility guided the strong and gentle horses which pulled the second vehicle over the smooth prairie miles or the jouncing corduroy lengths that bridged inconvenient morasses. The mother, with her baby girls perched safely beside her in the fine seat father’s old-fashioned desk made when it was properly pillowed, brought up the rear.

They passed through Chicago, then chiefly notable as a place in vast need of improvement, and continuing their three weeks’ journey, save the Sunday “ rests, ” which were strictly observed, came at length to the banks of the beautiful Rock River, near Janesville, Wisconsin, about fourteen miles from Beloit. Here they stopped. To the west was the winding river, serene and broad, with its spacious outlook to the setting sun. To the east, the illimitable prairie, to be for ages green with the springing wheat, yellow with the ripening grain, and every morning glorified in all its level miles by the streaming light and abundant promise of the sun at its rising. To right and left the wooded hills, like softly sheltering arms, gathered protectingly around. What more perfect place for a home-nest to be ?

Miss Willard has often pictured to us the simple dwelling that was soon erected on this charming site, “Forest Home,” a picturesque cottage, with rambling roof, gables, dormer-windows, little porches, crannies, and out-of-the-way nooks. ‘ ‘ The bluffs, so characteristic of Wisconsin, rose about it on the rierht and left. Groves of oak and hickory were on either hand; a miniature forest of evergreens almost concealed the cottage from the view of passers-by; the Virginia creeper twined at will around the pillars of the piazza and over the parlor windows, while its rival, the Michigan rose, clambered over the trellis and balustrade to the roof. The air was laden with the perfume of flowers. Through the thick and luxuriant growth of shrubbery were paths which strayed off aimlessly, tempting the feet of the curious down their mysterious aisles. ” Here for twelve happy years these three children lived an idyllic life of love and labor, play and study and prayer.

Happy the mother who could say of her child, she was ‘ ‘ affectionate, confiding, intuitive, precocious, original. She early manifested an exceeding fondness for books. She believed in herself and in her teachers. Her bias toward certain studies and pursuits was very marked. Even in the privacy of her own room she was often in an ecstasy of aspiration. She strongly repelled occupations not to her taste, but was eager to grapple with principles, philosophies and philanthropies, and unwearyingly industrious along her favorite lines.”

Happy the daughter who could say of her mother: “ My

mother held that nature’s standard ought to be restored, and that the measure of each human being’s endowment was the only reasonable measure of that human being’s sphere. She had small patience with artificial diagrams placed before women by the dim tates of society in which the boundaries of their especial ‘ sphere ’ were marked out for them, and one of her favorite phrases was,

‘ Let a girl grow as a tree grows — according to its own sweet will. ’ She looked at the mysteries of human progress from the angle of vision made by the eyes of both the man and the woman, and foresaw that the mingling of justice and mercy in the great decisions that affected society would give deliverance from political corruption and governmental one-sidedness.”

The opportunities that came to the children at Forest Home were opportunities to be useful; to read, to study, to work with their hands, to love each other, to reverence nature and nature’s God. The visitors at first were chiefly the chipmunks and birds, change of season and turn of day. Before the days when Froebel’s name became familiar to the tongue, this mother, as good mothers always have done, lived with her children. ‘ ‘ I had many ambitions, ” she said, “but I disappeared from the world that I might reappear at some future day in my children.” They made believe the country was a city; they organized a club with as many rules as a parliamentary manual and printed a newspaper of which Frances was the editor, to say nothing of “breaking the calf” to circus antics. In all this childish activity the mother was aider and abettor, and we have never learned that she discouraged that marvelous novel of adventure, four hundred pages long, written by the aspiring Frances as she sat in the top of her favorite old oak, where she guarded herself from all intruders (!) by fastening to the tree a board with these words printed upon it in large letters:

THE EAGLE’S NEST — BEWARE.

While the mother certainly fostered every characteristic impulse of the more daring, firmer-handed Frances, she did not fail to note, encourage and assist the growth of Mary’s quieter genius, and reward its achievements also with love and approbation. “ I do not know which of us she loved the more. I do not think the question ever occurred to us. Each had her own heaven in our mother’s heart,” said Frances, years afterward, when the name of Mary and the life motto she gave to Frances with her latest breath, “Tell everybody to be good,” had been carved for many a year on the headstone at Rose Hill. “We were content, and oh, how we loved one another ! ”