72 OHIO
HISTORY
ALBERT SHAW'S OHIO
YOUTH
1. William B. Hesseltine and Rex G.
Fisher, eds., Trimmers, Trucklers & Tempo-
rizers: Notes of Murat Halstead from
the Political Conventions of 1856 (Madison,
Wis., 1961), v-xiv; Frank Monaghan,
"Murat Halstead," in Dictionary of American
Biography, VIII,
163; Royal Cortissoz, The Life of Whitelaw Reid (New York, 1921),
I, 3-14, 20-41; Oscar W. Firkins, William
Dean Howells: A Study (New York, 1963),
3-28; William Leon Halstead, The
Story of the Halsteads of the United States (Ann
Arbor, Mich., 1934), 97-101. Reid went
to college in Oxford, and Howells lived for a
time in Hamilton, both in Butler County.
2. Halstead, who lived from September 2,
1829, to July 2, 1908, began in journalism
in 1851 and did not enter
semi-retirement until 1902. Halstead's reports of the 1860
conventions are in William B.
Hesseltine, ed., Three Against Lincoln: Murat Halstead
Reports the Caucuses of 1860 (Baton Rouge, La., 1960). Brief mentions of Halstead
and a lengthy discussion of the
post-Civil War era in journalism are in Frank Luther
Mott, American Journalism: A History,
1690-1960 (New York, 1962), 371, 380, 411-477,
510. Henry Watterson, "Marse
Henry": An Autobiography (New York, 1919), I, 236-
267, and Earle Dudley Ross, The Liberal Republican
Movement (New York, 1919) cover
that political episode.
3. The Review of Reviews had been
founded in London at the beginning of 1890 by
the English journalist William T. Stead.
Later in that year he arranged for a New
York firm to reprint and distribute
copies of the Review in the United States. In
December he hired Shaw to publish this
edition and to make it more appealing by
adding some distinctively American
material at the expense of the less interesting copy
from England. The first issue appeared
in April 1891. Printed matter on the history
of the Review of Reviews is very
scarce. The best is in Frank Luther Mott, A History
of American Magazines, 1885-1905 (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), 657-664. Worth consulting
on Shaw are Erman J. Ridgway, "Magazine
Makers," Everybody's Magazine, XXVI
(1912), 53, 56; Edward Mott Wooley,
"The Men and Women Who Make Our Mediums:
Dr. Albert Shaw," Advertising
and Selling, February 21, 1920, pp. 7-12; and the
obituary in the American Historical Review, LIII
(1947), 220-221. Greater detail on
Shaw as an editor will be contained in
the author's doctoral dissertation in progress.
4. W. L. Halstead's Story of the
Halsteads is a meticulous genealogical study of that
family.
5. Halstead, Story of the Halsteads, 53,
70-79, 97-101. The spelling of the family
name, Halstead, was changed to Holstead
by Henry. The children of John and Ruth
again employed the original form,
Halstead. Murat Halstead was a grandson and Albert
Shaw a great-grandson of this pair.
6. Most of the account of Shaw's youth
to follow comes from an unpublished auto-
biography simply entitled "The Ohio
Manuscript" and dated 1941. A copy, kindly given
me by Albert Shaw, Jr., is in my
possession. I have numbered the pages consecutively
within each chapter and shall refer to
them in that way.
The story of Shaw's parents' life down
to the move to Ohio is given in the Ohio
Manuscript, chap. 7, pp. 2-5, 18-20. For
Susan Fisher Shaw's ancestry see Philip Fisher,
The Fisher Genealogy: Record of the
Descendants of Joshua, Anthony and Cornelius
Fisher, of Dedham, Mass., 1636-1640 (Everett, Mass., 1898), 6-10, 17-21, 32-33, 51-52,
75, 112-113, 188-189, 287, 378. Little
is known of the Shaw lineage other than that
Hezekiah Shaw had come from the vicinity
of York, Pennsylvania, and that his father
had been active in support of the
Revolution, which Shaw notes in his Ohio Manu-
script, chap. 1, p. 12. Hezekiah Shaw
himself, however, does get a good bit of atten-
tion in the Ohio Manuscript, chap. 4,
pp. 14-26.
7. Shaw, Ohio Manuscript, chap. 6, p. 4,
chap. 12, pp. 4-6, chap. 13, pp. 13-14, 42-44.
See Murat Halstead's "Paddy's Run
Papers," which appeared in the Cincinnati Com-
mercial Gazette from May 4 to August 16, 1895, for a charmingly written
description
of Paddy's Run in a previous generation.
8. Shaw, Ohio Manuscript, chap. 13, pp.
42-43; James E. Campbell, Butler County
in the Civil War (Hamilton, Ohio, 1915), 6-7.
9. Halstead, Story of the Halsteads, 97;
Shaw, Ohio Manuscript, chap. 13, pp. 41-43;
Albert Shaw, unpublished "Preface
to Life of Halstead," 8-9, Shaw Manuscripts, New
York Public Library. Hezekiah Shaw died
in 1860 at his doctor son's home.
10. Shaw to Murat Halstead, February 18,
1901. Shaw Letterbooks, Shaw Manu-
scripts. In his Ohio Manuscript
occasional words only dimly illuminate Shaw's first
years. He jumped from his parents' move
to Ohio to his own tenth year.
11. Shaw, Ohio Manuscript, chap. 8, p.
1, chap. 13, pp. 13-14, 27-37, 53; interview
with Albert Shaw, Jr., May 10, 1962;
property inventory recorded in the Butler County
Courthouse, Hamilton.
12. Her spirit was one of morality
rather than of bitter sectarianism. So was the
town's. All major Protestant
denominations were readily accepted into the local Con-