stood out mostly for his inefficacious thirst for learning. He had wide-ranging interests in literature, theology, and political theory, and Clarence and his brothers and sisters were raised in a home crammed with books and ideas. “How my father managed to buy the books I cannot tell,” Darrow wrote. “Neither by nature nor by training had he any business ability or any faculty for getting money.”
Amirus would study at four colleges and acquire two postsecondary degrees, but he never became more than a shopkeeper.
“Nature had some grudge against my father,” Darrow recalled. “Day after day and year after year he was compelled to walk the short and narrow path … while his mind was roving over scenes of great battles, decayed empires, dead languages and the starry heavens above … To his dying day, he lived in a walking trance.”
Amirus was a disciple of Thomas Jefferson and savored the works of the atheist pamphleteer Tom Paine, the heretical David Hume, the infidel Volney’s ruminations on natural law, and the writings of the French libertarian and skewer of religious orthodoxy, Voltaire. He read, as well, from the evolutionists Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. His love for scholarship and disputatious nature appear to have cost Amirus his faith, for he never did practice as a minister of the Lord. He became a freethinker, one of a class of American rationalists who put no faith in organized religion, or in a Supreme Being who ordered the lives of men. “He began to doubt. He doubted Hell, and he even questioned Heaven and God,” Darrow remembered. Amirus forsook the pulpit, acquired a degree from Cleveland University, then chose to practice his father’s craft, making furniture in tiny Farmdale, Ohio.
Amirus and the wide-eyed Emily, who was five or six years younger than her husband, labored as well at the happy business of procreation. After Everett and Channing came Mary, and a baby boy who died in infancy; then Clarence and Hubert and Herman and Jennie.8 When Clarence Seward Darrow arrived in the world on that spring morning in 1857, Amirus was still naming sons after his heroes. Everett and Channing had been christened after prominent Unitarian leaders; William Seward was a militant abolitionist, a lawyer, a U.S. senator, and former governor of New York.
Seward was an “agitator,” known for his defense of immigrants and fugitive blacks and for his pioneering use of the insanity defense. In 1846, he showed moral—even physical—courage when he defied the local mobs and agreed to represent William Freeman, a deranged black man who had invaded the home of a prosperous farmer and murdered the man and his pregnant wife, infant daughter, and mother-in-law. The case was political strychnine, but “a higher law and a louder voice called him to the defense of the demented, forsaken wretch,” wrote Seward’s biographer in 1853, in a volume that no doubt had a place in Amirus Darrow’s library. Seward hired medical experts and carried the defense through the courts. “And all this for whom? For a Negro!—the poorest and lowest of his degraded caste,” one commentator wrote.
“I am not the prisoner’s lawyer—I am the lawyer for society, for mankind,” Seward told the jurors, in a closing argument whose format and fire would be matched by his namesake in years ahead. “The color of the prisoner’s skin, and the form of his features, are not impressed upon the spiritual immortal mind which works beneath … He is still your brother, and mine.”
Such was the hero whom Amirus honored, and hoped his son would emulate.9
Everett recalled that Amirus “took a prominent part in the antislavery agitation.” And in Darrow’s accounts of his boyhood, he recalls his father speaking admiringly of men like John Brown, Frederick Douglass, and Wendell Phillips, and writes of how members of the abolitionist “army,” when passing through town, would “make my father’s home their stopping place.” In his later years, Darrow told people that his father had helped shelter runaway slaves.10
Three of Clarence’s uncles served in the Union Army in the Civil War—one was wounded, another survived captivity—but Amirus did not join them. He was well past forty, and had that growing brood to support. In 1864, Amirus enrolled at the University of Michigan to study law, but he failed to complete his studies and returned to Ohio. He moved his family a few miles to Kinsman where, on the main road leading north from town, Amirus invested in a furniture store, set up a barnlike “machine shop” to make cabinets, chairs,