George D. Prentice gained his journalistic fame in Kentucky: as first editor of the Louisville Daily Journal, putative inventor of the newspaper paragraph, wielder of pistol and bowie knife, poet and patron of the arts. He also received much blame for the Know-Nothing violence on "Bloody Monday," election day in 1855, and much credit for keeping the commonwealth in the Union during the Civil War.

But George Dennison Prentice was a genuine Yankee, born in Connecticut on 18 December 1802 and reared on the farm of his parents, Rufus and Sarah Stanton Prentice. By his own account he was something of a child prodigy. With tutoring by his mother, he was reading the Bible at age three and was enrolled in school shortly before his fourth birthday. Later he was tutored by a clergyman who had studied at Yale and by his early teens knew grammar, mathematics. Latin, and Greek. Prentice...