Tom Chaffin > Quotes

“I cannot enjoy the present happiness, for anticipating the future; which is about as foolish as the dog who dropt the real bone for its’ shadow.”
― Tom Chaffin, Odyssey: Young Charles Darwin, The Beagle, and The Voyage that Changed the World

“Typifying the indelible impressions Lafayette left, the adult Walt Whitman would recall the hero’s 1825 passage through the Brooklyn of his youth.”
― Tom Chaffin, Revolutionary Brothers: Thomas Jefferson, the Marquis de Lafayette, and the Friendship that Helped Forge Two Nations

“The scheme my dear Marqs which you propose as a precedent, to encourage the emancipation of the black people of this country from the Bondage in wch they are held, is a striking evidence of the benevolence of your Heart.”
― Tom Chaffin, Revolutionary Brothers: Thomas Jefferson, the Marquis de Lafayette, and the Friendship that Helped Forge Two Nations

“Jefferson would live another two years, Lafayette another ten. But in fact, long before their reunion, the legends of both men had already been sculpted into marble.”
― Tom Chaffin, Revolutionary Brothers: Thomas Jefferson, the Marquis de Lafayette, and the Friendship that Helped Forge Two Nations

“In a virtuous government, and more especially in times like these, public offices are, what they should be, burdens to those appointed to them which it would be wrong to decline, though foreseen to bring with them intense labor and great private loss.”
― Tom Chaffin, Revolutionary Brothers: Thomas Jefferson, the Marquis de Lafayette, and the Friendship that Helped Forge Two Nations

“For the returning hero, however, such bonhomie could not mask a vexing truth: With the war over, a divisive regionalism now beset his adopted country.”
― Tom Chaffin, Revolutionary Brothers: Thomas Jefferson, the Marquis de Lafayette, and the Friendship that Helped Forge Two Nations

“One afternoon, while gazing down his intended line of travel, Frémont had spotted a solitary towering peak that appeared to be some fifty to sixty miles distant. Almost like an obelisk in its starkness, the peak seemed like a reasonable destination for the first leg of their foray across the Great Basin. After inducing a local Indian to go along as a guide, Frémont ordered Carson, Archambeault, and Maxwell to set out at night for the mountain. If they found water there, they were to build a signal fire; Frémont and the rest of the party would leave the next day and, after making a single camp in the desert, reach the mountain the following day. Carson’s party set out that night, and Frémont and his men followed the next afternoon. Frémont’s men, encamped on the desert on their first night away from the Great Salt Lake, built a fire to alert Carson’s party to their location. Near daybreak, they were awakened by the jangling of Archambeault’s spurs as he rode into camp with news that Frémont’s hunch had proven correct—the mountain did offer abundant water, grass, and wood. The party quickly broke camp and soon joined Carson and company at the foot of the mountain that Frémont named Pilot Peak—even today a conspicuous landmark along U.S. Interstate 80.”
― Tom Chaffin, Pathfinder: John Charles Frémont and the Course of American Empire