The Bishop's Boys (4 page)

Otterbein’s highly personal and emotionally charged approach struck directly at the heart of traditional Calvinism. He rejected predestination out of hand, emphasizing the importance of the individual conversion experience, a personal relationship with God, scripture, and the moral life as evidence of sanctification.

The Church of the United Brethren in Christ was established by a group of admiring and like-minded evangelical preachers meeting at Frederick, Maryland, in 1800. Before Otterbein’s death in 1813 the church remained little more than a loose amalgamation of congregations. Gradually, however, a church structure emerged. The first General Conference was held in 1815. Two years later the group adopted a Confession of Faith and a
Book of Discipline
. By 1830 the scores of frontier converts flocking into the circuit meetings in Kentucky, Ohio, and Indiana had diluted the original ethnic German flavor to the extent that English was adopted as the official language for preaching and church publications.

In theology and church polity the Brethren had general links to the Methodist, Mennonite, and German and Dutch Reformed traditions. The original pietistic strain remained very strong. Ritual was regarded as of so little importance that individual congregations were free to adopt any form of baptism or communion they chose.

The rapid growth of the church required the adoption of the first
governing Constitution at the General Conference of 1837. The original document proved so weak and unpopular, however, that it was replaced by a much stronger constitution only four years later.

The Constitution of 1841 reflected both the individualism and the democratic viewpoint common to so many of the frontier converts who now made up the bulk of the membership. It established a single clerical rank—presiding elder—to which fully ordained ministers were admitted. All basic decisions affecting the church were to be decided by vote at a quadrennial General Conference attended by clerical delegates representing the local conferences, or geographic subdivisions of the church. These local conferences met annually to set regional policy, ordain ministers, and conduct other business.

Five bishops, the sole governing authorities linking the congregations into administrative districts, were elected to a four-year term by the delegates to each General Conference. The notion of life tenure for bishops, as in the Methodist pattern, was anathema to a church dominated by frontier egalitarians.

The new Constitution also underscored a reform tradition that was already well established in the church. Good Brethren were exhorted to forswear alcohol, and unofficially encouraged to support the antislavery cause. Membership in the Masonic order, or any other secret society, was specifically forbidden. In that regard, they were in good company.

By the third decade of the nineteenth century, Freemasonry, which had been so popular with American and French revolutionary leaders, was widely regarded as an elitist cabal, its sole purpose to offer members an unfair preference in business, social, and political situations. The notion of a secret privileged brotherhood that cut across the lines of nation and religion struck the wrong chord in a country where it was believed that men and women ought to be able to rise in life solely on the basis of their own merits. Moreover, the Masonic Lodges, with their secret rituals, cabalistic symbols, and ceremonial garments, seemed almost sacrilegious to many evangelical Christians of the sort who founded the United Brethren Church.

The Brethren were not alone in their opposition to secretism. Anti-Masonic feeling functioned as an important organizing principle in American politics during the decade 1826–36. Thurlow Weed, William Henry Seward, and other rising young politicians used the issue to rally anti-Jacksonian support. Established leaders attached themselves to the movement as well. Ex-President John Quincy Adams, for
example, campaigned for the governorship of Massachusetts on the anti-Masonic ticket. After 1835, voters lost interest in the question of secret societies, but the issue remained very much alive among evangelical groups like the Brethren. Within the church, anti-Masonic sentiment was strongest in the West, where the original prohibition against secret societies in the Constitution of 1841 was repeatedly reaffirmed.

The church stand on such political and moral issues as alcohol, slavery, and secret societies was far more important to Milton Wright than any theological fine point. He represented a new generation: while committed to the essentials of pietism and a personal religion, he rejected much of the emotional fervor that had marked the church during the years of the great revivals. He would do his best to win souls for God, but he reserved his heart and his energy for the fight to lead men and women onto the path of righteousness here on earth.

Milton had chosen his course in life. Two years after joining the church he was licensed to exhort, or offer comment on scripture during services. He preached his first sermon on November 17, 1850; was admitted to the White River Conference, the local church governing body, in August 1853; and was regularly ordained as a minister three years later.

Milton would not earn a regular church salary until he was appointed a full circuit preacher. In the meantime, he continued to live at home and work his father’s fields. He began teaching in local schools in 1849 to earn additional money, and would continue to do so off and on for the next decade. In April 1852, the school examiners of Rush County certified him as a “gentleman of good moral character” qualified to teach orthography, English grammar, reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography in the common schools.
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Milton once remarked that he was “fond of science, fond of youth and children,” and had been “an enthusiastic lover” of the teaching profession “after experience had taught [me] the art of governance by mental and moral forces.”
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He would remember his successes with great pride—the backward children he had helped to catch up with their class, the poor student who went on to medical school, the wayward boys whom he had taught self-discipline.

He also put his teaching experience to use in raising his own children, each of whom was taught to read through the first McGuffey before they entered school, “except my daughter, whom my second son taught.” Many years later he became incensed at the techniques
employed at the Dayton elementary school: “My youngest grandson was turned over to me after a teacher had taught him to
guess
at words!” he complained. “It was a hard job to break him from
guessing
.”
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In 1853 Milton was appointed supervisor of the preparatory department at Hartsville College, a United Brethren institution. The position would also enable him to take a number of college courses, including Greek. But he became ill and could not return the following year. Although he never graduated from college, he took great pride in the honorary degree of doctor of divinity awarded many years later by Western College, another Brethren school.

Marriage was much on Milton’s mind during his year at Hartsville. The notion of family was so important to the young clergyman that he determined to exercise great care in selecting a wife, and cautioned his brother William to take a similar approach: “I would by all means advise you to marry just as soon as you find somebody you are sure you want to have for a companion. Don’t wait to get fixed only wait to find the
person
but
be sure
about that first.”
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Milton was not a man to allow his heart to govern his head. Back in Fayette County he had fallen “deeply in love” with the “uncommonly good looking” third daughter of neighbor Thomas Stephens, but had not proposed marriage because “I could never think she was the right one for me.” Perhaps not, but there had been some very deep feeling involved. Three quarters of a century later, in January 1916, Milton still remembered this girl he had “always much admired.” “Still do,” he concluded.
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Following the time-honored tradition of older brothers gone off to college, Milton filled his early letters home to William with news of his romantic prospects. “I live very well here,” he told his brother, “but alas! I can find my ‘lovely fair one’ nowhere.” He must have met Susan Koerner within a few weeks of sending that letter.

S
usan Catherine Koerner remains in the shadows of the Wright family. Unlike her husband, she did not keep a diary or leave extensive reminiscences behind. Only a few of her letters have survived. She died of tuberculosis on July 4, 1889, long before her sons became famous and reporters flocked to interview all the members of the family. Even Milton, the inveterate genealogist and record keeper, failed to document her background as fully as he did the myriad branches of his own family.

She was born near Hillsboro, in Loudon County, Virginia, on April 30, 1831, the fifth and last child of John and Catherine Koerner. Her father, John Gottlieb Koerner, was a native of Foerthen, near Schleitz, Saxony, who had emigrated to the United States in 1818 to avoid conscription. He worked as a carriage maker in Baltimore for a time before marrying Catherine Fry, the daughter of John Philip Fry (sometimes given as Fryer), an American-born farmer of Swiss extraction, on April 10, 1820.

The couple moved in with the bride’s parents on a seventy-acre farm in the lovely, rolling countryside three miles southeast of Hillsboro. Koerner continued to follow his trade, apparently operating a small carriage shop on the farm, as well as a forge in town.

Philip Fry’s will was recorded in the Loudon County Courthouse on March 27, 1824. The document was finally probated seven years later, in September 1831, a few months after Susan’s birth. This length of time, combined with a suit in chancery filed by John Koerner on his
wife’s behalf on December 12, 1831, suggests that there may have been some family difficulties relating to the will. In any case, John and Catherine sold the land to one William Brown on September 12, 1832, and set out for Union County, Indiana, where a number of relatives had already settled.
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They prospered in the new country. The sale of the Virginia farm had enabled them to buy 170 acres of good Indiana bottom land. When their grandson Orville visited the Koerner farm and workshop fifty years later, it resembled a small village, with twelve to fourteen buildings, including a carriage shop furnished with a foot-driven lathe.

Koerner was just the sort of man to delight an intelligent grandson. “He did not accept all that he heard or read,” Orville remembered with obvious admiration.

Koerner and his family had converted from Presbyterianism to the United Brethren faith soon after arriving in Indiana. He remained a prominent member of the church for over fifty years. His daughter Susan experienced conversion and joined the Brethren at the age of fourteen, in 1845.

Susan was very close to her father, and apparently spent a good deal of time in his carriage shop as a young girl. Her children remembered her as having considerable mechanical aptitude. She designed and built simple household appliances for herself and made toys, including a much-treasured sled, for her children. When the boys wanted mechanical advice or assistance, they came to their mother. Milton was one of those men who had difficulty driving a nail straight.

Wilbur and Orville had their mother to thank for their lifelong penchant for tinkering, and, ultimately, for their extraordinary ability to visualize the operation of mechanisms that had yet to be constructed. That ability, coupled with their fascination with technological problem solving, would carry them far.

Susan Wright (c. 1870), was a shy, quiet woman who loved to work with her hands.

Susan was a scholar as well. “Like myself,” Milton Wright reported with his usual modesty, “in school she excelled.” Her father sent her on to Hartsville College, a rare opportunity for a woman of that time and place. She studied literature and “came within three months of graduation.” But, according to Milton, she “was not ambitious for the degree.”
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The most striking feature of Susan’s personality was her painful shyness. Milton regarded it as an asset, and spoke with pride of her modesty and quiet demeanor. Her son Orville, who inherited the quality from her, saw the pain engendered by intense shyness. Just after her marriage, he once told his friend Jess Gilbert, Susan went to a strange grocery store. On being asked where the items should be delivered, she became so flustered that she could not recall her own name.
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