Ohio History Journal

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72 OHIO HISTORY

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-