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fire, as shadows rippled across his face, seemed to have no ready reply.
     
    REQUIESCAT IN PACE is the simple legend chiseled beneath the name winslow elias slade and the dates 14 december 1831–1 june 1906 on the Slade family mausoleum in the older part of the Princeton Cemetery, near the very heart of Princeton. It was said that the distressed gentleman, shortly before his death, left instructions with his family that he wished the somber inscription Pain Was My Portion would be engraved on his tomb; but that his son Augustus forbade it.
    “We have had enough of pain, we Slades,” Augustus allegedly declared, “and now we are prepared for peace .”
    This was at a time when the Crosswicks Curse, or, as it is sometimes called, the Crosswicks Horror, had at last lifted from Princeton, and peace of a kind had been restored.
    I realize, the reader may be wondering: how could Reverend Winslow Slade, so beloved and revered a Princeton citizen, the only man from whom Woodrow Wilson sought advice and solace, have come to so despairing an end? How is this possible?
    All I have are the myriad facts I have been able to unearth and assemble, that point to a plausible explanation: the reader will have to draw his or her own conclusions, perhaps.
    At the time of our present narrative in March 1905, when Woodrow Wilson sought him out surreptitiously, Winslow Slade retained much of his commanding presence—that blend of authority, manly dignity, compassion, and Christian forbearance noted by his many admirers. No doubt these qualities were inherited with his blood: for Winslow’s ancestry may be traced on his father’s side to those religiously persecuted and religiously driven Puritans who sought freedom from the tyranny of the Church of England in the late 1600s; and on his mother’s side, to Scots-English immigrants in the early 1700s to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who soon acquired a measure of affluence through trade with England. Within two generations, a number of Slades had migrated from New England to the Philadelphia / Trenton area, as, in religious terms, they had migrated from the rigidity of belief of old-style Puritanism to the somewhat more liberal Presbyterianism of the day, tinged with Calvinist determinism as it was; these were compassionate Christians who sided with those who opposed the execution of Quakers as heretics, a Puritan obsession. Sometime later, in the Battle of Princeton of 1777, General Elias Slade famously distinguished himself, alongside his compatriot Lieutenant Colonel Aaron Burr, Jr. (Elias Slade, only thirty-two at the time of his death, had boldly surrendered his powerful positions in both the Royal Governor’s Council and the Supreme Court of the Crown Colony in order to support George Washington in the revolutionary movement—a rebellion by no means so clear-cut in the 1770s nor so seemingly inevitable as it appears to us today in our history textbooks. And what an irony it is that Aaron Burr, Jr., a hero in some quarters in his own time, has been relegated to a disreputable position scarcely more elevated than that of his former compatriot Benedict Arnold!)
    It was a general characteristic of the Philadelphia / Trenton branch of the Slade family, judging by their portraits, that the men possessed unusually intense eyes, though deep-set in their sculpted-looking faces; the Slade nose tended to be long, narrow, Roman and somewhat pinched at the tip. In his youth and well into old age, Winslow Slade was considered a handsome man: above average in height, with a head of prematurely silver hair, and straight dark brows, and a studied and somber manner enlivened by a ready and sympathetic smile—in the eyes of some detractors, a too-ready and too-sympathetic smile.
    For it was Winslow Slade’s eccentric notion, he would try to embody Christian behavior in his daily—hourly!—life. In this, he often tried the patience of those close to him, still more, those who were associated with him