HE CALLED Abraham Lincoln a baboon.

He attacked Jefferson Davis as a liar and an egotist who had "alienated the hearts of the people by his stubborn follies."

He wrote that former president Millard Filmore had "a heart as cold as stone" and that all Filmore's ideas "centre, begin, and end, in himself."

And he created quite a stir as the new U.S. minister in Sardinia when he wrote that the whole country smelled of garlic, and that "the people are nowhere as good as ours. The women are uglier; the men have fewer ideas."

Meet John Moncure Daniel, a native of Stafford County, a journalist of immense influence during the Civil War, and a man of both strong opinions and a knack for expressing them.

As you might expect, those opinions often got him into trouble, and he fought as many as nine duels during his short life. Daniel died from tuberculosis at age 39 in Richmond in late March 1865, just days before the fall of the Confederate capital.

Daniel is the subject of a new biography, "Pen of Fire," by Peter Bridges (Kent State University Press. 272 pages. $28).

The book portrays a man of brilliance and wit who was driven by ambition and, to a great extent, his belief in white supremacy.

"Sometimes while working on the book, I wondered what I would have thought of Daniel if I had met him in person," said Bridges, a 70-year-old retired diplomat who lives in Arlington.

"I don't think I would have liked him. But I think I grew to understand him.

"I tried to give him credit for his good qualities. [Historian] Douglas Freeman called him a misanthrope, but he really wasn't. He had strong hatreds, but he also had a lot of friends and he left strong memories with those friends."

Tom Moncure, a Stafford County historian and a descendant of Daniel, helped Bridges with local background information for the book.