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Chronicles of the Builders of the Commonwealth (1892)
Chronicles of the Builders of the Commonwealth - 1892 Author:Hubert Howe Bancroft Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 1844. His ancestry is traced in direct line to the Warrens who landed on these shores during the years of hardship when the pilgrim fathers were painfully laying... more » the foundation of the great republic. Few names occur more frequently in the earlier annals of the state, and to-day many of their descendants are still numbered among the leading families of New England. To this stock belonged, among other noted men, General Joseph Warren, the hero of Bunker hill. His father, Joseph S. Warren, was a well-to-do farmer, trader, and contractor, of the true New England type, shrewd, active, enterprising, and economical. At the age of nineteen he married, and of the five children born to him by his first wife, Francis was the eldest. Though himself a man of fair education, he considered that anything beyond a common-school course would be only a detriment to his children, preferring rather that his boys should be trained to habits of industry and self-denial, encouraging them to feats of strength and physical endurance, and giving more heed to their bodily than to their mental development. Above all things they must display nerve and courage, depending solely on their own efforts, and putting aside all childish timidity. "There was nothing," he constantly repeated, " that a farmers lad should not be able to do, and that without help from others." His wife, Cynthia E. Abbott, was a refined and sensitive woman of sound principles and superior culture, a church-member of the methodist persuasion, and one whose greatest care was the welfare of her children. Long before her death, which occurred from consumption, during Francis' childhood, her mind was continually fixed on their future; and speaking to them as one already on the threshold of another world, she gave such counsel as could not ...« less