His insecurities were rooted in his sickly childhood and exacerbated by premature baldness, pockmarked skin, prominent nose and later, scarring from gunshot wounds.
Always frail and sickly, he was strong-willed enough to survive a gallstone operation performed in his seventeenth year, without anesthesia or antiseptics, on a bare wooden table in Danville, Kentucky.
I fancied the discontent of age and disease arose from his family disagreements: as he would have it that it did: really, you know, sir, it was in his sinking frame.
" Why, if the gods were cruel, they would have made me my mother's firstborn, and Doran her third. I am a bloodthirsty man, you see. And it is me you must contend with now, not my patient, prudent, and gouty brother" .