Anyone who has read any of my books knows that I believe in quoting the subject. If you want to know about William Henry Seward, the best sources are Seward’s letters and speeches and memoirs. One must also find material about Seward, of course, to provide third-party perspective. But in my view a biography should allow the reader to hear the subject not just the biographer.
Clarence Thompson 1900-1925
My grandmother, Dudley Casteel Thompson Stahr, 1902-1986, was married twice, first in 1922 to Clarence Thompson, 1900-1925, and then in 1930 to my grandfather, Roland Stahr, 1901-1969. I knew vaguely that my grandmother had been “married before her marriage” but did not know much about Clarence Thompson until the past few days.
George Edwin Rogers 1872 to 1959
My family is donating its family papers to Chapman University. These are not just papers of my mother, my father and myself. They are papers of my grandparents: Burgess Dempster, Nell McBroom Dempster, Roland Stahr, and Dudley Casteel Stahr. And they are in some cases papers of my great-grandparents, including my namesake Walter Casteel and my adoptive great-grandfather George Edwin Rogers. There are some letters from others in the Rogers family, notably his father, George E. Rogers, born about 1853 and died about 1936. And there are letters from many many others: friends, family, in some cases total strangers.
Chase on Democracy
From time to time, in the course of my research, I find something that Chase wrote that no prior scholar has found. often these are rather routine letters, but sometimes they are really interesting and important. Today, thanks to my researcher at Brown University, Molly McCarthy, I found such a source: a Fourth of July speech from 1829. Chase did not give it as a speech—the event was rained out—but he printed it as an essay in a local paper—the Washington Chronicle for July 11, 1829. I will quote some bits in the relevant chapter, but the whole thing is interesting, and I wanted to share it. Here it is, with some notes and comments after the text.
Haleakela
For years my brother and I had talked about the possibility of cycling in Maui, where one can cycle from sea level to more than 10,000 feet in less than 40 miles. At some point in 2014, we said “you know, if we are ever going to do that, we should perhaps get going.” In August 2015, we did it. It was a great day, perhaps the greatest athletic day of my life. For some reason I have not posted about it here. So I am taking an email that I sent a few days after the event, editing it lightly, and posting it now.
Antislavery and Homelessness
Last night I heard Kathy Izard speak about her book, The Hundred Story Home, and her quest to end homelessness.
The book, in a sense, starts with another book, Same Kind of Different as Me, by Ron Hall and Denver Moore. That book describes how Ron Hall befriended Denver Moore, took him into his home, and thus helped him change from a homeless person to a normal person. Izard invited Hall and Moore to her hometown of Charlotte, North Carolina, to speak at a fundraiser for their soup kitchen ministry. Izard gave Moore a tour of the soup kitchen, but he was not impressed, asking at the end of the tour “where are the beds?” When she started to explain that they were a soup kitchen, not a homeless shelter, he asked her whether it made sense to help people during the day and then lock them out at night. And he challenged her to dosomething about the problem.
Chase and the Press
My friend Harold Holzer has written a great book, Lincoln and the Press. I could write a book about Chase and the press, starting with how as a young boy he found and read a set of old Federalist newspapers, to teach himself politics. When Chase first arrived in Cincinnati, as a young lawyer, he did not have much legal work, so he wrote articles for the papers, articles which he carefully cut and pasted into a scrapbook.
Mea Culpa
A few years ago, in my Seward book, I wrote the following about the presidential campaign of 1860: “Some Republican leaders, such as Edward Bates of Missouri, refused to give speeches at all; others such as Salmon Chase of Ohio gave one or two speeches; but Seward traveled thousands of miles and gave dozens of speeches.”
I was right about Seward but wrong about Chase.
Crimes of Heliogabalus
I read a lot of history books for my research: I have on the kitchen table right now a volume of the history of the Supreme Court, about 1500 pages, not light reading. So, when I go upstairs in the evening, and read for pleasure, I often read historical fiction.
Most often I read about the nineteenth or twentieth centuries, novels such as the Hornblower novels of Forester or the WWII novels of Alan Furst. But occasionally I venture farther afield, as in The Medicus Codex by Cy Stein, set in Rome in the third century AD.
Three Days, Three Speeches
Next week I will be giving three speeches about three different men on three successive days.
On Wednesday evening I will be at the Smiley Library in Redlands, California, to talk about William Henry Seward. I spoke with this group a few months back about Stanton, for some reason I never spoke with them about Seward when the Seward book was first released. They had a cancelation and asked if I could fill in with Seward. Since I need to spend time at the library anyway, to research the Chase book, it is not a big problem.