Library Collections: Document: Full Text

Elizabeth S. Kite
Field Worker New Jersey Training School For Backward and Feeble-Minded Vineland, N.J.

During the early days of the last century, two half brothers having had the same father but different mothers began their respective careers in one of our older states. Nothing could have been more widely divergent than the social standing, the mental endowment, the material possessions of the two brothers, who none the less in physical feature bore a striking resemblance to each other.

One of them, the inheritor of the homestead farm, whose broad acres overlooked a lordly river, was a man respected by all who knew him, intelligent, well married, with children who in themselves or in their descendants would cast nothing but honor upon the family name. The other, feeble-minded and morally repulsive, lived on a mountain-side in a hut built of rock fragments so loosely put together that more than once the roof slid from the walls. For a quarter of a century this hut existed as a hotbed of vice, the resort of the debauched youth of the neighborhood, and from its walls has come a race of degenerates which, out of a total of four hundred and eighty descendants, numbers in alms-house cases, in keepers of houses of prostitution, in inmates of reformatories and institutions for the feeble-minded, in criminals of various sorts and in feeble-minded not under state protection, 143 souls!

And yet the progenitor of this social evil gave in early manhood hopes of something better. The freshness of youth hid the degenerate tendency that was soon to assert itself. He married a young woman of decent family and the two together saved a few dollars with which they bought an acre and a half of uncleared ground. Here they built their hut and here began to appear, in quick succession, the offspring of the pair, who almost as quickly were bound out among the neighboring farms. Twice, during the next few years, the couple added to their initial plot of ground, for the county records show that once a half-acre was purchased for five dollars, and again two-thirds of an acre for eight dollars. From this date no gleam of ambition illumes the dark way the couple were going, and it was not long before the wife, poorly nourished, overworked, and scantily clad, succumbed to the inevitable, dying with the thirteenth child.

Left to himself the husband lived on, much as he had lived before -- avoiding work perhaps a little more effectively, drinking perhaps a little heavier. His wife's family had moved to Cincinnati, where they had prospered, and during her life-time offered to pay the price of transportation if the couple would join them, but this along with other inducements had been set aside by the husband, who had neither the mind nor the will to grasp the opportunity offered him. As time went on, the grosser elements of his nature gained ascendancy, which, added to habitual filth, made him a most repulsive person, so that he merited the name bestowed upon him of the "Old Horror." At election time he was a well-known figure. Then he would appear dressed in a suit of cast-off clothes given him for the occasion, very conscious of the ephemeral importance which his power as a citizen gave him. It was well known that his vote was the possession of any one who would give him a drink, and there was no lack of men ready to make the bargain. But with all this, his utter inoffensiveness, coupled with a genuinely kind heart, characteristic of the family, won for him a sort of protecting pity in the vicinity. Many an old farmer would allow him to sit on the porch and draw off, unnoticed, measure after measure of cider from the barrel which was always in evidence. When the old fellow had taken so much that he lost his balance and rolled off, the farmer would chuckle -- "Well, well, I do declare! Them steps of mine does need fixin'!" -- at which the simple-minded neighbor would gather himself together, really believing the steps had caused his fall!

After the death of their mother, three of this man's daughters subsequently known as "Old Mol," "Old Jane," and "Old Kate," came back to their father and either settled near or lived with him. It was then that the crude hut, hidden deep in the mountain thicket, became known in the neighborhood. Memories of the scandals that now and then leaked out, involving the names of sons of prominent citizens, are still in the minds of many living persons, although the perpetrators of the deeds have long since passed to their reward, leaving behind them a long train of descendants, many of whom now may be found among such water-logged humanity as settles at the bottom of our big cities, or remain in their native hills and continue to carry on the work of their progenitors.

How different the story of the other half-brother! In his case there is a clear normal line of intelligent citizens, who in their varied activities have constantly tended to increase the preserving force of our commonwealth, lifting its energies to an ever broadening outlook.

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The same is true of his five full-blood brothers and sisters who attained manhood and womanhood. Among their three hundred and fifty descendants are many who have entered our large cities, where they are to be found as doctors, lawyers, ministers, merchants, pharmacists, bankers, manufacturers, teachers; still others have become pioneers in the West, while those who have remained in the country are land-owners, farmers, blacksmiths, undertakers, store-keepers and mill owners, always capable and industrious, abreast of the problems of life, which they meet with the intelligence of normal citizens.

But whence, it may well be asked, this astonishing difference in the characters of these two branches, springing, on the paternal side, from the same source?

Reason will at once decide that this difference must be found in the women who became the mothers of the respective lines, and in the subtle subjective forces that brought about and accompanied each mating.

Fortunately, church and family records, local tradition, our nation's history even, can aid in finding an answer to the question, Who and what were these two women ? And under what circumstances did each enter into the life of her husband?

The early records of the province where these events took place tell us that in 1774 "a simultaneous blaze of indignation from North to South, broke out at the tidings of arbitrary acts of the British Government perpetrated against the port of Boston. Measures were at once taken for organizing the various counties into a combination of the friends of liberty who should insure promptitude and unity of action throughout the province." On Sunday, September 23, 1775, at precisely four o'clock, the news of the Battle of Lexington "carried by express riders reached the chambers of the New York Committee of Safety and thence the stirring news spread on to Princeton and Philadelphia, spreading like wild-fire over all the neighboring counties. Meetings were called and resolutions adopted for regulating the militia of the colony."

By spring of the following year, companies had been organized and stationed at the various strategic points. To one of these on the "King's Highway" connecting two important trade centers came in April, 1776, a youth not yet twenty-one, who had lost his father five years before. He had been reared by his mother with four "spinster sisters" on a farm of some two hundred acres, situated about five miles away, that had come to them in direct line, part of an original purchase made in 1734 by their paternal great-grandfather. This ancestor was of sturdy English dissenting stock that had always been sober, industrious, and God-fearing. The young soldier inherited these qualities, but having been so early deprived of a father's care, and so suddenly plunged into the relaxed atmosphere of camp life, succumbed to excesses unknown in the annals of his family. Ready he was to answer his country's call and to fight when the time came, but in the various monthly tours which he served there were plenty of off-duty times when the fires of patriotism burned lower than the other fires within him. Even to-day the remains of numerous old taverns scattered along the road, still called the "King's Highway," attest the ancestral thirst which called them into being. That our young friend frequently found means to quench his own thirst is not to be doubted, and it is equally certain that among the wayward girls who frequented these taverns was one, a native in the locality, who attracted the soldier, now in the full swing of re-action from the restraint of his well-ordered home. This girl it was who became the mother of him who subsequently built his hut on the mountain-side scarcely two miles distant. She, in accordance with an instinct that has been followed by her descendants for generations, gave to the child the full name of its father, thus making his identity known.

Of this girl, history has nothing and tradition very little to tell. That she attained an advanced age is learned from her great-granddaughter, who remembers that her mother "lived with the old woman after she had become completely imbecile and that she often told of how difficult it was to care for her." She lived in a log cabin back in the woods, and at one period, late in life, had passed as the wife of an old soldier, who belonged to a good family, but was of striking peculiarity. At his death she failed to receive his pension, since it could not be proved that she was his lawful wife. She died about 1842. Of her name or ancestry no trace can be found to-day. Her son, who seems to have been her only child, did not live long with his mother, but was bound out with a well-to-do farmer of the vicinity. There is no evidence that the father ever at any time recognized either the mother or her child, although he could not have remained ignorant of the latter's existence nor of the name which the lad bore. The shifting fortunes of a soldier's life did not permit him to remain long in one locality and he probably was changed long before the child was born.

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When we next find him, it is on the eve of battle when an accidental wound in the right arm disabled him for further service. He then returned to the home farm, and during a summer of subdued activity fell in love with a young Quakeress of the vicinity. The girl found his suit acceptable, but her shrewd father was not so easily moved. At first he objected to the union, for the young man was too much handicapped by lack of worldly possessions, by his sisters, still minors, and by his disabled condition. In reply to the objection of the old man, the young suitor is recorded as saying, "Never mind, I'll own more land than thee ever did, before I die"-a promise which he made good. The paternal objection must have been shortly overruled, for the church records give the date of his marriage with the Quakeress as January, 1779. No uncertainty shrouds the ancestry of this woman whom he made his wife. She came of a respected English family, which, however, having imbibed principles too broadly democratic to be tolerated in that country, had been compelled to seek shelter in the New World. Here it had quickly taken root and through thrift and industry had acquired material possessions which placed it in the front provincial ranks. Its best possession, however, was that uncompromising rectitude which forms the backbone of our nation and which invariably has made for intelligence and ability in its offspring.

The eldest son of this union was the respected farmer referred to in the beginning of this article. In the family Bible is a carefully preserved record of the five daughters and two sons born of this union, but no mention is made of the older son, born of the other union, whose name, had the whole truth been told, would have headed the list of his father's children. Of this illegitimate son, no family Bible ever held the record, and his existence would certainly have been allowed to pass unnoticed, had it not chanced that his great-great-grand-daughter was placed in a home for feeble-minded, where she was long studied and watched before an attempt was made to unravel the thread of her past history. When once undertaken, it was traced back to the mountain hut, where it might have rested, had it not been found that the degenerate man bore the full name of the Revolutionary hero, married as the records show in 1779. Persistent search revealed the fact that several persons still living had always known of the blood relationship of the two brothers, whose lives were in such striking contrast to one another, and that they retained a vivid impression of the strange doings and disorderly ways of these wild people of the woods. For it will surprise no one to learn that the degenerate family has always been a complex problem, inheriting and preserving from its normal ancestor strong and attractive personal characteristics along with the low mental and moral endowment from the subnormal side, thus from its complexity impressing itself deeply upon the community. This strange mixture shows itself even to the sixth generation.

As the above recorded facts were being dug from records it began to seem a singular coincidence that these two brothers, here singled out for comparison, should have been born so near the time of the promulgation of that basic principle of our democracy that "All men are created equal" -- and both of them, in a way, the direct outcome of those forces that made its establishment possible. It was as if to epitomize in them and in their descendants the necessity for drafting such a social context for this great doctrine as will make it, with each generation, more nearly true.