Henry Howe was a farmer, schoolteacher, and Methodist circuit rider who moved his family by covered wagon to Fairview in Harrison Country, Missouri, before the Civil War. The elder Howe built a church on his Missouri land and continued to preach and ride circuit, sometimes taking Ed with him on these crusades against sin. Henry Howe was an outspoken abolitionist at a time when such a stand in Missouri invited personal danger; he was tried and acquitted for inciting rebellion among the slaves. In his autobiography,
Plain People (1929), Howe remembered his father as a hard, stern parent who showed his son no affection and berated him for not producing enough for the family. "One of my recollections is of his saying that I had been an expense to him until I was seven years old." Whippings from his father were common until Howe was thirteen, by which time he was working on his own as a printer.
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