Benjamnin F. Butler, Butler's Book: Autobiography and Personal Reminiscences of Major-General Benjamin Butler

[44] But against it she struggled with wisdom and vigor, and with some success. My Uncle Benjamin took charge of my brother in his younger years, and so long as he lived looked after him. My mother and my younger sister went to live for a period with my Uncle William and my grandmother on my father's side. They owned and carried on a small farm in Nottingham, New Hampshire.

It is proper, however, that something should be said of that mother, whom I love, honor, and revere beyond any other person ever on earth. Her father and mother were Scotch Presbyterians. My grandfather, Richard Ellison, when a young man, had fought at the battle of Boyne Water for King William, and had received some reward which enabled him and his wife to come to America. He joined the colony about Londonderry, New Hampshire, and took up a farm at Northfield, on the Pemigewassett, or main branch of the Merrimack River. Here he had several children, the youngest of whom was my mother. He and his family removed to Canada about the time of my mother's marriage. They were respectable and honorable people, and were certainly long lived, for my mother's sister lived to exceed the age of one hundred and four years.

I, at four years of age, was thought to be a puny child,--probably the results of my mother's anxieties and fears for my father during his absence. Quiet, gentle, and eager to learn, I was taught my letters by my mother and given a slight advance in the spelling-book. In the summer I was sent away to school at Nottingham Square. This was quite two miles away from our home, especially as the last half of the distance was up a very steep hill, on which the Vermont traders in the winter, going down to Portsmouth with their sleighs heavily loaded with produce, sometimes had to double up their teams. I attended that school for six weeks, and learned to read with but little difficulty. I remained at home during the autumn, and then it was that our shoemaker gave me the book of all books for a boy, “Robinson Crusoe.” The question was not whether I wanted to read it, but whether I could be kept from reading it, so as to do the little matters that I ought to do, and was able to do, called in New Hampshire nomenclature, “chores.” My mother, laying aside her labors which were quite necessary for our support, taught and explained the book to me with great pains.