Springfield Report

I am just back from a few days of research at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Illinois. My main purpose in going was to look at newspapers from Illinois from October 1854 and October 1858. In both of those months, Chase campaigned for Republicans in Illinois. 1854 was the anti-Nebraska election, when the…

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Seward’s Folly

I am speaking next Tuesday to the LA Civil War Roundtable about William Henry Seward. As I wrote the speech, I revisited the question of “Seward’s Folly.” In the book, which I published seven years ago, I said that although there were some critics of the Alaska purchase in 1867, none of them used the…

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Details, Details

As I write the Chase biography, I continue research, and interesting details emerge. I am working today on the chapter about 1856. I knew that Chase had dinner with Francis Blair and others in Washington on December 29, 1855, and I knew that Chase gave his inaugural address as governor in Columbus on January 14,…

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Salmon Chase Bank Lawyer

Many claim that, when he became secretary of the treasury, Chase did not know much about banks and banking. This is not true. From 1832 through 1843, Chase served as the solicitor in Cincinnati for the Second Bank of the United States. At the outset of this period, the Bank was the largest financial institution…

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Salmon Chase Liberty Man’s Creed

In a prior post I quoted from the Liberty Man’s Creed, first published by Chase in 1844. In this post I want to put up the whole document, because I find it so interesting, and because it has not been mentioned in prior biographies. Here it is, from the Cincinnati Weekly Herald and Philanthropist of…

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Chase on Adams, Jackson and Democracy

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…

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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. My father and…

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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…

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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…

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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.”…

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