Scott Kase

A Nation Apart Scott Kase

By his late-seventies, John Paul Stephenson had set out to record his own observations on the American Civil War. The topic impassioned him, and he wrote about it in extensive detail. Through lengthy research and analysis, he formed his own understanding of how the war came to pass. But Stephenson succumbed to cancer in September 1994, and his project died with him. Twenty-two years later, his grandson found the writings in a family file cabinet. Straightway, Scott Kase had at his fingertips an heirloom treasure trove of ten jam-packed notebooks and a wealth of information on the War Between the States. Kase quickly seized control of the mission and planned a clear path for its resolution (not unlike battlewise Ulysses S. Grant did in 1864 as lieutenant general of the Union States Army). Within these pages, Stephenson's forgotten writing project comes to life. It's the result of a painstaking yet gratifying process that connected a grandson together with his grandfather to examine why 620,000 Americans once had to die to save our divided nation.