Francis Preston Blair was born at Abingdon, Va., on April 12, 1791, was editor of the Jackson Democratic paper, the Globe, from 1830 to 1845, and died Oct 19, 1876. I found this book written with a sprightly style and really enjoyed it. Francis Preston Blair was a confidant of Jackson and Lincoln, and the father of Montgomery Blair (Lincoln's Postmaster-General till the fall of 1864) and of Francis Preston "Frank" Blair, Jr., who served in the House of Representatives and the Senate from Missouri and was a Civil War general and, with Thomas Hart Benton, is Missouri's representative in Statutory Hall in Washington. Francis Preston Blair, Sr., was among the earliest Republicans, but reverted to the Democratic Party after the Civil War ended. His life was an extraordinary one, lived thru momentous years, and this is a good book to read. It is not overly scholarly--footnotes are not copious and there is no bibliography as such, but the author is clearly at home in the period (he has done a biography of Benton, and discussed it with John F. Kennedy, Benton being a figure in Kennedy's Profiles of Courage), and tells the story well. The period the subject's life covered is a period of high drama and one that has alwys been a source of fascination for me.