The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. NationNation, Carry Amelia
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The Use and Need of the Life of Carry A. Nation
Nation, Carry Amelia
Nation, Carry Amelia, 1846-1911; Social reformers -- United States -- Biography; Temperance -- United States
I was so ignorant I did not know that I owed a duty to myself to
avoid gloomy thoughts; did not know that a mother could entail a curse
on her offspring before it was born. Oh, the curse that comes through
heredity, and this liquor evil, a disease that entails more depravity on
children unborn, than all else, unless it be tobacco. There is an object
lesson taught in the Bible. The mother of Samson was told by an angel to
"drink neither wine nor strong drink" before her child was born, and not
to allow him to do so after he was born. God shows by this, that these
things are injurious. Mothers often make drunkards of their own children,
before they are born. My parents heard that Dr. Gloyd was drinking.
My father came down to visit us, and I went home with him. My
mother told me I must never go back to my husband again. I knew the
time was near at hand, when I would be helpless, with a drunken husband,
and no means of support. What could I do? I kept writing to
"Charlie," as I called him. He came to see me once; my mother treated
him as a stranger. He expressed much anxiety about my confinement in
September; got a party to agree to come for him at the time; but
my mother would not allow it. In six weeks after my little girl was
born, my mother sent my brother with me to Holden to get my trunk and
other things to bring them home. Her words to me were: "If you stay
in Holden, never return home again." My husband begged me to stay with
him; he said: "Pet, if you leave me, I will be a dead man in six months."
I wanted to stay with him, but dared not disobey my mother and be
thrown out of shelter, for I saw I could not depend on my husband. I
did not know then that drinking men were drugged men, diseased men.
His mother told me that when he was growing up to manhood, his father,
Harry Gloyd, was Justice of the Peace in Newport, Ohio, twelve years, and
that Charlie was so disgusted with the drink cases, that he would go in
a room and lock himself in, to get out of their hearing; that he never
touched a drop until he went in the army, the 118th regiment, Thomas L.
Young being the Colonel. Dr. Gloyd was a captain. In the society of these
officers he, for the first time, began to drink intoxicants. He was fighting
to free others from slavery, and he became a worse slave than those he
fought to free. In a little less than six months from the day my child
was born, I got a telegram telling of his death. His father died a few
months before he did, and mother Gloyd was left entirely alone.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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