The little baby boy John's first American home was a log cabin and his cradle was made of part of a hollowed-out tree trunk. When he began noticing things from the doorway, his eyes took in a great space filled with a multitude of stumps, the dark and lonely forest, the new and strange fields of Indian corn, the tender green of spring, the gold of autumn, and the great white landscape of winter. When he was but three years old, Ohio became a state.
Remembering the witticism, so common a generation ago, that "some men are born great, and some are born in Ohio", we may believe that John Chambers came very near a double inheritance, though failing in but one share; for, to the end of his days, he boasted that he was by birth an Irishman.
Among his earliest playthings were the "buckeyes", or horse-chestnuts, from the particular tree, so plentiful in the new land. As the Bible was then, besides being in supreme honor as the Word of God, the one familiar volume, library, reference, and text-book, source of literary and intellectual recreation, John, as he learned to read, was as much delighted to find the popular name of "Ohio" in the Bible, as American tourists in Japan are, to hear the sound of this good State's name, in the Japanese for "good morning".[4]
[4] See I. Chronicles VI:5, about Bukki, the father of Uzzi.
In after years, in the freshness of his metropolitan fame, John Chambers visited several times his old home, the log cabin in which he grew up. The house is now a weather-boarded dwelling place, but in the wooden walls is still to be seen the little hollow place or alcove, where were kept[15] the decanters or glasses, containing cherry brandy and whiskey, which were so popular and in such general use in those early days before teetotalism, or prohibition or no license was known. During the war of 1812, this house was used as a recruiting station for volunteers, and here the young soldiers pledged their glass in token of their patriotism and comradeship. Against this phase of social life, the boy John set his face from the first.
William Chambers lived the life of a pioneer in the American forest. He gained his bread by tilling the soil, and a little ready money by burning the timber and leaching the potash out of the ashes, and by other industries common to the forest. Indian cooking was soon learned and the food of the red man became popular. In fact there are very few purely American dishes, which are not evolutions from the Indian originals. Sugar was plentiful from the maple trees, but salt was very costly and hard to get. By boring wells, brine was found from which good salt could be made.
Life on the frontier was necessarily rude in some points, especially in moral relations with the Indians. As pretty much all Irishmen are very fond of religion and whiskey and a bit of a fight, there were often rough scenes. William Chambers was a strong character and his hot temper was easily roused, but his wife, an equally strong character, but with finer strength, was cool-headed and made a good balance for her husband. She was a noted nurse and especially skillful in the sickroom. Hence she was often called upon for help by both friends and strangers in time of pain and misfortune. Malaria and homesickness were common woes. Devoutly pious, she trained up her children in the fear and love of God, and by them and even by later generations her memory is treasured.
The religion of these pioneers may have been narrow, but it was strong and deep. It was based on a first-hand knowl[16]edge of the English Bible. Even in his early life, as I remember Mr. Chambers saying, he revolted against bigotry and the kind of religion that was not rich in love to one's neighbor. These were psalm-singers and not hymn-using Christians, but the Methodist preachers and Christians of other sorts than Scotch-Irish Presbyterians were in the land. The boy John once heard an old gentleman say that he would as soon sit down to the Lord's Supper with a horse-thief, as with a man who sang Dr. Watts' version of the Psalms.
Little John also refused to touch liquor, for he saw the awful effects of its use, and grew to have a hatred of it. On one occasion, the little fellow rebuked a crowd of men, including his own father, for their drinking habits whereby the parent, William Chambers was greatly affected. "The heart of the child three years old is in the heart of the sage of sixty," as says the Japanese proverb, was true of John Chambers, the metropolitan preacher, but it was in childhood that God began to shape this bonnie bairn for a long life of usefulness. The boy in the Ohio forests was a hearty hater of all bickering and squabbling. He was often called upon to settle differences. He came to be known among neighbors and friends as "the little peacemaker." "The child is father to the man," and all his life John Chambers was mighty as a reconciler.
John Chambers's boyhood was thus spent in the wilderness in continuous hard work, by which he toughened his thews and kept his cheeks rosy, rising into brave, pure, and clean manhood. He took his part in the hard work of the farm, even to clearing the forest. He knew what it was to "lift up axes against thick trees." With his other brothers and sisters, he enjoyed life to the full. Politically, in this Jeffersonian era, his parents took the Democratic view of[17] things, so that their offspring had the spirit of democracy in their veins. All his life the intensely patriotic John followed the faith of his father, and was, as he called himself, a Constitutional State-Rights Democrat.
He was taught to read and write at home, but with that true instinct for education, which is inborn with Calvinists and the Scotch-Irishmen, his parents wished to have him better educated. They sent him, therefore, when he was but fifteen years of age, to Baltimore, where lived some of their relatives. A journey over the mountains in the early nineteenth century was like a trip to the Philippines in our days, but John gladly set out on horseback, with a party, in the spring of 1813, to the city on the Patapsco.
It seems that he had no special purpose of remaining permanently there, but Providence made his a stay of twelve years. After some experience at school, he decided to learn the jeweler's trade. Thus with business, and later with love, and then a call to the ministry, Baltimore was to be the city in which his mind was shaped, and which all his life was to him, socially, as magnet and star.
Patriotism, too, had something to do with making the Monumental City his home. It was war time, and the second struggle with Great Britain was on. As a municipality, the young city, but sixteen years old, had already become a famous place for the building of ships, the timber being floated down from the heart of New York state and from northern Pennsylvania, along the old line of Sullivan's march of 1779, by way of the Susquehanna River. Immediately on the declaration of war by Congress, a swarm of privateers sailed out of the Patapsco and Chesapeake to prey on Great Britain's commerce, especially in the West Indies. Hence the British government early decided that one of the first places to be occupied was Baltimore. The[18] stalwart youth from Ohio arrived in good time to hold a shovel and dig earth to throw up entrenchments, over which waved "The Star-Spangled Banner". He worked several days in the trenches. In September, 1814, the British forces made their attack under Col. Ross, a veteran under Sir John Moore and Wellington. Their commander was killed and the assault given up. The next day Admiral Cockburn's fleet bombarded Fort McHenry in vain. The attack from ship by water was as ignominious a failure as was the attempt by land. The happy result was the deliverance of the city and the birth of America's national song, "The Star-Spangled Banner". Francis Scott Key, detained against his will on the deck of the British man-of-war Minden, was an indignant spectator of the bombardment, but in the morning of September 14th, saw his country's flag "in full glory reflected ... on the stream". In 1876 a bronze statue to his memory was erected and Old Defenders' Day keeps alive the stirring memories of September 11th, 1813.