The Pledge_ A History of the Pledge of Allegiance - Jeffrey Owen Jones [22]
Self-educated though he was, David was a gifted preacher and was soon serving as pastor of two New York City churches. But after overseeing the establishment and construction of Hope Chapel, which later became Calvary Baptist Church on 57th Street in Manhattan, David suffered a health crisis—there is some evidence to suggest it was a nervous breakdown—and, at age forty-four, took refuge in his brother Frederick’s home upstate. He and his wife Eliza remained there for two years, until David grew strong enough to pastor a church in the nearby town of Arcadia, only to lose his wife to an illness.
Two years later, David married Lucy Ann Eells, fourteen years his junior, who had been a longtime friend of his first wife. He found another church, this one in Mount Morris, where Francis was born. Mount Morris sits near the northern end of the magnificent Letchworth gorge, which tourist brochures today call “the Little Grand Canyon.” The twenty-two-mile-long chasm was carved over aeons by the Genesee, one of the country’s few northward-flowing rivers, which drains into Lake Ontario, sixty-seven miles away. Francis’s family departed Mount Morris when he was a young boy, but it is reasonable to suppose that, even for a five-year-old, a glimpse of the chasm—its rocky cliffs, its waterfalls, its thick forests—would have left imprinted in his mind’s eye a landscape of grandeur and startling beauty. The young Francis may have been awed, too, by the raw power of the river, which regularly flooded the fields around Mount Morris and the town itself. (Today, a huge concrete dam, completed in 1952, helps control flooding.)
Unfortunately, within a few years of moving to Rome, just east of Seneca Falls, David died suddenly, of a stroke, at age fifty-eight. Francis was only nine years old. His uncle Rufus traveled from Northampton, Massachusetts, to help bury his brother, and the following Sunday mounted the pulpit of David’s church to read the sermon the late pastor had prepared.
Despite his father’s untimely death, young Frank excelled at the Rome Free Academy, the village’s first public school, and was a member of the school’s first graduating class—this at a time when there was great controversy over publicly funded schools, arguments that were still going on at the time of the Youth’s Companion sponsorship of the national Columbus Day event in 1892. Francis no doubt owed much of his love of public school, a hallmark of that quadricentennial celebration, to his experience at the Rome Free Academy, and he later helped found the school’s alumni association and served as its head.
It is tempting to speculate that for Francis Bellamy, fatherless from a young age, patriotism was in some way a surrogate, as the Greek root of the word suggests. Indeed, maybe anyone who gives themselves over to patriotic feeling is seeking a warm and protective parental embrace. In the case of Bellamy, the substitute-father theory might be plausible if patriotic activity had been an ongoing fixation for him, but in reality it wasn’t. He could wax patriotic at the drop of a hat, especially when talking about the Pledge, but he was not exceptionally demonstrative on the subject.
To the extent that he had father surrogates, they were individual mentors, beginning with his father’s successor as pastor of the Rome First Baptist Church. Francis was fifteen when the Reverend H. H. Peabody took over the pastorate in Rome. Peabody, an early adherent of Social Gospel belief, must have sowed a few seeds of dissent from mainstream religious notions within Francis’s mind, a theological bent reinforced at Rochester Theological Seminary,