The Life of Mary Baker Eddy (Wilbur)/Chapter 01
THE LIFE OF
MARY BAKER EDDY
CHAPTER I
ANCESTRY AND GENEALOGY
Forty years after the close of the American Revolution Mary Baker was born in the town of Bow, New Hampshire. Her birthplace was a farmhouse in the midst of cultivated acres, situated on a crest of hills overlooking the broad valley of the Merrimac River. Bow was not a village, but a cluster of farms with a town government, and four or five district schools, centers of education and rural politics. There was a meeting-house, as the homely phrase of those days described the church edifice, but many of the God-fearing of the community attended divine worship either in the adjoining town of Pembroke, across the river, or in the neighboring city of Concord, the capital of the state, from which Bow is five miles distant.
Bow was a rural settlement, but it was not remote from the stirring forces of the life of its day. The men who owned its homesteads had been born in the heat of political struggle. Their mothers' birth-pangs coincided with those of a nation. They were born individualists and democrats. New Hampshire, a mountainous state, originally covered with dense forests, had presented to its settlers a stern struggle with nature. The grandsires of the men of this day had been forest clearers, woodsmen who had hewn down a wilderness of primeval pines over two hundred feet in height. Their sons had grown tall and sinewy like the trees they felled.
New Hampshire lay on the Canadian frontier and the French and Indian War had swept it. Its exposed settlements were constantly menaced by the Indians, and, during the wars with England, subject to descents from Canada. In those early days the sons of New Hampshire held back the red men from the less exposed colonies, themselves coming face to face with that treacherous warfare of the forests. This life of woodsman, mountaineer, and Indian fighter had produced a generation of physical giants. Intellectually these men had been well-nigh as vigorously exercised. The colonial settlement had been fraught with bitterest disputes over grants and regrants from England, and the surveying of those woodlands was made in the heat of contention. New Hampshire sent its delegates to the first Continental Congress, and two signatures stand for this state on that charter of American liberty, the Declaration of Independence. Two delegates represented her in the Federal Congress, and, ninth of the states in ratifying the Constitution, New Hampshire in a critical hour insured the success of the Union. Two New Hampshire regiments were at the battle of Bunker Hill. The battle of Bennington, that turned the scale of the war, was won by New Hampshire and Vermont troops under General Stark, who bore a commission from New Hampshire. All through the War of Independence New Hampshire's contingent to the army was liberal. When the war closed New Hampshire men returned to the duties of clearing farms, building schoolhouses, and worshiping God. Dartmouth College was founded in 1789; and soon the little red schoolhouses marked the cross-roads newly surveyed. There was a high average attendance at these district schools during the winter months and learning was prized in every home. Thus were men living, acting, and feeling in the early years of the nineteenth century in this particular community. Religion, schooling, politics, and every man his own master, the owner of his own land, made that early American life a throbbing, vital experience.
Men who counted in these communities could not be ignorant and unsocial. They were robust from contending with nature and savages, intensely patriotic and versed in statescraft, as they had but recently been evolving a constitution for the new world; religious, for they were reestablishing a church of Christ, suiting it to democracy where each man must meet God for himself; scholarly they were, too, in a large sense, for they read the best books of England and studied the journals of the day, jealously watching the Old World, that the New World of their dreams might not be found wanting in intellectual progress. These men founded colleges.
For six generations the Bakers had been in New England. Their history is exactly the history of the typical son of New Hampshire. They had swung the ax, carried the surveyor’s chain, shouldered the musket, fought off the savages, and taken part in government and the establishing of churches and schools. Mark Baker lived on his own farm, a tract of five hundred acres inherited with his brother James. His father was the largest taxpayer in the town. Mark Baker was a justice of the peace for his township, a deacon of the church, a school committeeman, and for many years chaplain of the state militia. His friends were the clergy, the lawyers of Concord and surrounding towns, a governor of his state, upon whose staff a son served. A future president of the United States was an occasional guest at his home. But his friends also were astute men of business, mill owners, builders, men destined to change the character of the state from agricultural to manufacturing.
The family life at Bow was not set in a deadly routine of depressing labor. To so conceive it is to fail to rise to the true viewpoint which shall help us to understand the character we are considering. There never was a time in history when a people were more alive and progressive than the Americans after the War of Independence. There was no neighborhood in America more admirably situated to reap the full benefit of that peculiar, intense, spiritual culture than was the town of Bow, five miles from the city of Concord. Franklin Pierce and Daniel Webster were reared under these identical conditions. Emerson and Hawthorne have declared the conditions admirable for developing genius.
Mary Baker Eddy’s ancestry can be traced clearly through six generations to the first Baker in America, her earliest emigrant ancestor being John Baker, who was freeman in Charlestown, Massachusetts, in 1634. The generations succeeding, eliminating all but the direct line, are Thomas, of Roxbury; a second Thomas, of Roxbury, who married Sarah Pike; Joseph, born 1714, deacon of the Congregational church, who held a captain’s commission. He was the surveyor of several towns in that part of the colony of New Hampshire which was claimed by Massachusetts, — among the rest, of Pembroke, where he afterwards settled. He married, 1739, Hannah Lovewell, only daughter of Captain John Lovewell. Hannah was born 1721, was heir to one third the estate of Captain Lovewell and inherited with her brothers the lands assigned to her distinguished father in Pembroke.
Captain Joseph Baker had a son Joseph, born 1740, who married Marion Moor McNeil, a descendant of the Scotch Covenanters. They settled in Bow. Their youngest son was Mark Baker, born 1785. He was the father of Mary Baker. So the generations run thus: Mary, Mark, Joseph, Joseph, Thomas, Thomas, John, — which takes the record back almost to Plymouth Rock.
An examination of the genealogy of the wives of the Bakers reveals that the influx was of good blood through the maternal strains. The Pikes of New England have an honorable and interesting genealogy. Hannah Lovewell, great-grandmother of Mary Baker and born just one century before her, transmits the courageous heart of her soldier father. Captain John Lovewell lost his life in a severe fight with the Indians at Pigwacket, now Fryeburg, Maine, an encounter so desperate that it is recorded in Colonial records and is known as Lovewell’s Fight. This Lovewell’s father was an ensign in Cromwell’s army and lived to the great age of one hundred and twenty years. Hannah Lovewell was one of the bravest women of the colonies.
Marion Moor McNeil, the paternal grandmother of Mary Baker, was a descendant of the McNeils of Edinburgh. Her father and mother, John McNeil and Marion Moor, came to America seeking religious liberty and bringing a rich store of memories and traditions. They possessed a heavy sword encased in a brass scabbard, with the inscription of an ancestor’s name that stated it had been bestowed by Sir William Wallace. General John McNeil of New Hampshire, who won distinction by leading a bayonet charge in the battle of Chippewa in the War of 1812, was a cousin of Marion McNeil Baker.[1]
Leaving the Baker genealogy for Mrs. Eddy’s maternal ancestry, in the same history of New Hampshire families it is stated that Mark Baker married Abigail Ambrose of Pembroke. She was the daughter of Deacon Nathaniel Ambrose, a man at once pious and public-spirited. He gave the money for the first Congregational church built in Pembroke. Mrs. Eddy’s mother and the grandmother of Hoke Smith, ex-governor of Georgia, and later, United States Senator from Georgia, were sisters. Governor Smith’s father wrote the following letter at the time of a public discussion of Mrs. Eddy’s family, a discussion which lacked a proper comprehension of the family’s standing in its community and its honorable connections. Mr. Smith sent the letter to the Committee on Publication of The Mother Church, which allows this reprint:
I have known the Rev. Mary Baker Eddy from childhood. She is my first cousin. Her mother was my mother's younger sister. She [Mary Baker Eddy] was always a beloved visitor in our home. We corresponded for several years while I was in college; the correspondence ended with my regret. I have always admired my cousin's sincerity and devotion to good works. Her brother Albert was one of the ablest lawyers of New Hampshire; but Mary was deemed the most scholarly member of her family. She has always held a sacred place in my heart. It gives me great pleasure to find that God is always protecting her.
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This is the McNeil connection. I shall not trace it beyond America.
Fannie McNeil, niece of Franklin Pierce, afterwards wife of Judge Potter of
Washington, was a daughter of that General John McNeil. She claimed a
cousinship with Mary Baker Eddy. This Fannie McNeil, who during Pierce’s
administration frequently relieved his invalid wife of social duties as mistress
of the White House, traced as she supposed the McNeil line to which she
belonged directly to Sir John McNeil of Edinburgh. She adopted the McNeil
crest for her coat of arms. Mrs. Eddy visited her in Washington in 1880.
Together they made a journey to the grave of General McNeil. They
thoroughly discussed the McNeil family history, the bravery of its fighting heroes,
the deep religious conviction of its covenanting faith. Mrs. Eddy recalled her
grandmother’s influence upon her whole life, an influence which shall presently
be indicated. She therefore adopted with her cousin, Fannie McNeil, the
McNeil crest and coat of arms. She adopted it for sentiment and affection.
Its motto could not have better expressed the traits of character transmitted
through a long line to her. It is: Vincere aut Mori. The crest was carved in
the mahogany of the lintel above the inner vestibule entrance of her beautiful
home on Commonwealth avenue, Boston, where she resided before her retirement
to Pleasant View. She also used the crest as a seal and expressed her
pleasure in the sentiment of the Scotch strain by having the coat of arms
embroidered on white silk and hung in her library.
But a sudden denial to her rights so to enjoy this connection with the Scotch McNeils came through a Scottish descendant of the McNeils living in Aberdeen. Whereupon Mrs. Eddy had a thorough investigation of her genealogy made and being unable to establish the accuracy of Fannie McNeil’s genealogical claims, upon which she had hitherto rested, she requested that all biographers refrain from connecting her with the Rt. Honorable Sir John McNeil, G.C.B., of Edinburgh, sometime ambassador to Persia. It is therefore sufficient to state that Mary Baker Eddy’s great-grandparents were McNeils; that General John McNeil, the American hero, was her grandmother’s cousin.