He arrived in Mobile just before my great-grandfather John was drafted into the Union Army. John could have bought his way out by paying a bounty of $300 to hire another man to go in his place. He said that he couldn't pay to put another man in harm's way (but, I suspect that, as a subsistance farmer in Maine, he didn't have the cash). The upshot was that he was drummed out of Quaker meeting, and served as a trainer and driver of oxen during the war. He came back to find that his wife (and mother of 10 kids) had died, so he married the widow of another soldier and had 4 more children with her, including my grandfather, who he named after the Methodist minister, John Wesley, partly out of spite that he was being shunned by the Quakers.