every clause a hinge between the republic that was and the one being forged in blood
when Pasadena rose gardens and Hollywood Boulevard marquees were still the stuff of mailed wonder
his abolitionist thunder softened into the civic countenance of a republic now tasked with remembering what it had survived
rendered in the grave engraver's hand reserved for men whose decisions were measured in regiments and graves
where four centuries after Columbus the republic dressed its industrial muscle in Beaux-Arts plaster and called the result a New World
Colonel Frank P. Blair, First Regiment Missouri Volunteers, 1861 Frame Style:Verdigris Frame every clause a hinge betweenColonel Frank P. Blair, First Regiment Missouri Volunteers, 1861. A border state commander rendered in the early ink of the war, when Missouri's loyalty was a knife's edge and Blair's regiment was the Union's wager that St. Louis would not slip south. About the Source Bella Frye sources artifacts from the great American historical archive the Library of Congress, the National Archives, regional historical societies, and the lithographic publishers