Ancestry and Early Life

Among those who fought in the second war against Great Britain was one Adam Warner, who was born in Virginia, and whose father was Christofel Warner. In this period of our national history a great tide of emigration from the Atlantic States was spreading itself over what is now the Middle West. Adam Warner seemed to catch the spirit of the times, and accordingly, in 1815, he set out with his family for the new country beyond the Alleghanies. He settled in Stark County, Ohio, where, about the year 1845, he died, at ninety-three years of age (a history of Williams County, Ohio, says ninety-eight, and that he had a sister who lived to the advanced age of one hundred and three). It is probable that before moving west Adam Warner lived for a while in Frederick County, Maryland, for there is where his son David was born, June 6, 1803.

David Warner, after moving to Stark County, was married, in 1823, to Leah Dierdorf,* who was born in York County, Pennsylvania, February 6, 1805. In 1830 he moved to Wayne County, Ohio, and a little later to Portage County, then back to Wayne County in 1836, to a place then called Bristol, where he kept a tavern for eight years. Of the parentage of David and Leah Warner, at their humble abode at Bristol, on June 25, 1842, amid the environment of tavern life, was born Daniel S. Warner, destined to be one of the principal instruments in God’s hands to produce a shaking in the ranks of spiritual Israel, and to lead the hosts of the Lord back to Zion from their wanderings in the wilderness of denominationalism.

The children of David and Leah, in order, were as follows: Adam, Lewis, Joseph, John, Daniel, and Samantha. John died at the age of twenty, leaving but the five children. All are now deceased. A granddaughter says that the family was Pennsylvania German. Evidently the mother was. The father, as already noted, was a Virginian.

It was the misfortune of Daniel S. to be frail, sickly, and to a great extent unappreciated, from his very birth. His lungs were weak and he was denied that stock of vitality with which every child has the right to begin life. Intoxicants were freely used in those days, and David Warner had fallen an easy prey to intemperance. If the affliction of this infant may not be ascribed to paternal indiscretion, possibly inebriety, it is not because such instances were uncommon. Into how many homes has the demon of strong drink entered to bring sorrow to the wife and mother and to curse the unborn with the blight of its baneful effects! In this case, at any rate, the father was rough, and inconsiderate of his offspring. While he exercised toward his family a degree of temporal care, it seemed that the very frailty of this child, which should have awakened compassion, met only his frown and disfavor. In later years Daniel, in reflecting on the circumstances attending his birth and childhood, wrote the following lines, which are a part of his poem on Innocence:

Conceived in sin, to sorrow born,
Unwelcome here on earth,
The shadows of a life forlorn
Filing gloomy o’er my birth.

A mother’s heart oppressed with grief,
A father’s wicked spleen,
Who cursed my faint and gasping breath,
Combine to paint the scene.

But life held on its tender thread,
Days unexpected grew
To weeks, and still he lived—
Why, Heaven only knew.

He lived, though life was bitter gain,
His youth a flood of tears,
His body doomed to cruel pain,
His mind to nervous fears.

In contrast with this paternal attitude, however, was the constancy of a truehearted mother. Blessed with this and endowed with indelible memories of a mother’s devotion, what child growing up to cope with life’s obstacles may not, after all, hold a chance of succeeding, however handicapped otherwise? If ever any planting bears fruit in the human breast, or becomes a latent force tending to guide one steadily through life’s dangerous rapids, it is that of a mother’s love. Especially is this true of the love of a Christian mother, coupled with her prayers.

Mrs. Warner was an excellent woman. Her patient and gentle bearing under disturbing conditions, her disposition to make the best of disappointment and discouragement, left an impress, not only upon the family, but upon the neighborhood. Her kindness is referred to in two other stanzas of the poem “Innocence”:

If angels blessed his thorny path,
It may be said in truth,
But two e’er showed their smiling face
In all his suffering youth.

One was his mother, ever kind,
A blessed providence;
The other, pure and lovely friend,
Was angel Innocence.

It has been true generally that great men have first had great mothers. But what is a mother’s greatness, after all, but simple, unalloyed, Christian motherliness?

I should have become an atheist but for one recollection, and that was the memory of the time when my departed mother used to take my little hand in hers and cause me on my knees to say, “Our Father which art in heaven.”* (Matthew 6:9; Luke 11:2)

—John Randolph

“All I am, all I hope to be, I owe to my angel mother—blessings on her memory! I remember my mother’s prayers. They have always followed me. They clung to me all my life.”

—Abraham Lincoln

If my mother could rise in the dead of the night and pray for my recovery from sickness, my life must be worth something. I then and there resolved to prove myself worthy of my mother’s prayers.

—James Garfield

It is to my mother that I owe everything. If I am Thy child, O my God, it is because Thou gavest me such a mother. If I prefer the truth to all things, it is the fruit of my mother’s teachings. If I did not perish long ago in sin and misery, it is because of the long and faithful years which she pleaded for me. What comparison is there between the honor I paid her and her slavery for me?

—St. Augustine

One more tribute. In his book Bible Proofs of the Second Work of Grace, published in 1880, Daniel S. Warner places the following dedicatory note: “To the sacred memory of my sainted mother, whose tender affections were the only solace in my suffering childhood, and whose never-failing love, and whose pure and innocent life were the only stars that shone in the darkness of my youth, this volume is respectfully dedicated by the author.”

From Wayne County, David Warner brought his family, in 1843, to a farm of 140 acres near New Washington, Crawford County, Ohio. The house, built partly of logs, stood three-fourths of a mile southwest of the village. It was here that Daniel spent his childhood. Of this period he writes:

It seemed the special pleasure of
Another certain one
To quite demolish everything
He set his heart upon;

To chafe his spirit, and extort
The flow of bitter tears
Out of a soft and pensive heart,
Through all his tender years.

He never knew that “Father” was
A sweet, endearing name;
Its very mention was a dread,
His life’s most deadly bane.

The demon of intemp’rance there
Infused the wrath of hell,
And most upon this sickly head
The storm of fury fell.

Like chickens when the mother bird
Gives signal of a foe,
The little peeps are quickly hushed,
All chicks are lying low,

So, when returning from the town,
The dreaded steps we heard,
All ran and quickly settled down,
And not a lip was stirred.

Oh, horrors of the liquor fiend!
We’ve seen thy hell on earth;
Thy serpent coils around us twined,
The moment of our birth.

O Rum! Thy red, infernal flame—
I witness to the truth—
Filled all my mother’s cup with pain,
And swallowed up my youth.

The Warner family, though clever, straightforward, and strictly honest, were but a simple rural folk and not inclined to religion. That such a bright spiritual light as was afterward exhibited in Daniel could come from such a family is one of the puzzling questions of blood relation. Was it that in the family blood there was latent quality which in his case only was near enough to the surface to he called into action and developed by higher influence? Or should it be said that he represents a variation in the strain, such as is sometimes seen in biological observation? If the latter, the mystery remains; for why do such things occur? Aside from natural phenomena, we believe that Brother Warner was a “chosen vessel” unto the Lord. He possessed such a combination of qualities as made him capable of high development in the divine graces. He was a Christian whom perhaps none other ever lived who was more reverent, spiritual, and devoted; and God had a special work for him.

In his boyhood Daniel early displayed a gift of entertainment and of public speaking. The school in his district was ungraded. On occasions of entertainment, such as the last day of school, after the younger children had spoken their “pieces” and the program began to grow monotonous, a call would be made for Dan Warner. Then he would take the floor and soon would have them convulsing with merriment. Mischievousness and clownishness were traits. The trouble he sometimes caused the teacher was frequently such that the latter could not locate it nor determine just who was to blame. When he would be stood on the floor he would soon have others with him. On one occasion he did something for which he was sentenced to a scourging. When he appeared at school the next morning he was prepared for this contingency by having on two or three coats. He was, however, bright in his studies and in a general way sociable and well liked.

The community in which he lived was strongly democratic in politics. His father, a staunch Democrat, actually had a degree of pride in his boy when the latter would make stump speeches during a campaign. It was natural for Dan to mount a store box on the street or anywhere and address a crowd on the issues of the day. In later years, however, when he became a minister and his oratorical abilities were directed in the channel of preaching the gospel, his father was not pleased.

Among the sports in which he indulged was coon hunting. On finding a coon tree at night he and his companion would cover themselves with a coon robe and lie under the tree until morning. He got to be rather wild, and took particular delight in the dance, but never indulged in the lowest forms of sin.

These are but brevities of his boyhood career. It is difficult to prepare an account of this part of his life that would be to any considerable degree full. One accident, by which he was maimed for life, should here be noted. He attempted to remove a bunch of grass that had clogged the sickle of a mowing-machine. As he was in this act the team started and the ends of two of his fingers, the middle ones of the left hand, were suddenly clipped off. Fortunately the loss of these members did not hinder him in writing, nor was it a disfigurement usually noticed in his preaching.

There was one more move for the David Warner family, and this was to Williams County, Ohio, the northwest corner of the State, where, in Bridgewater Township, about four miles north of the town of Montpelier, farm life was resumed. Here the parents spent the rest of their lives. The removal to this place was made in 1863, during the Civil War. Joseph Warner was drafted for the army. Being a man of a family, he desired to arrange for a substitute. For this Daniel offered himself, and accordingly became a private in Company C, 195th Regiment, Ohio Infantry. Little is known of his army experience. It is said that he found favor with the captain and was made his clerk, or secretary. At the close of his term he was honorably discharged.

While living in Williams County, the occupation of teaching school appealed to him, and for several terms he was an instructor of the young in matters of common-school education. He was now in his early twenties. But here we shall close this chapter, and introduce him in our next in a different aspect.