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Tracking Down “The Public Man”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 October 2012

Daniel W. Crofts
Daniel W. Crofts*
Affiliation:
The College of New Jersey
*
crofts@tcnj.edu
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Extract

What, one might ask, is The Diary of a Public Man, and why should subscribers to The Journal of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era want to know about it? The diary purportedly dates from the tension-filled weeks preceding the outbreak of the Civil War, but it was first published in a popular magazine in 1879. Its appearance then suggested that somebody thought it would attract an audience of Gilded Age readers, which indeed happened. Their curiosity was intensified because the diary's publisher concealed the identity of its author. We now know why the alleged diarist had to be cloaked in anonymity—the supposed prewar diary actually was written shortly before its publication, long into the postwar era. Most outrageously, the diarist proves to have been an imaginary construct—not a real person.

Type
Two Studies in Gilded Age Biography
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 11 , Issue 4 , October 2012 , pp. 497 - 517
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 2012

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References

1 Daniel W. Crofts, “The Blair Bill and the Elections Bill: The Congressional Aftermath to Reconstruction” (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1968). Also Crofts, Daniel W., “The Black Response to the Blair Education Bill,” Journal of Southern History 37 (Feb. 1971): 41–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Crofts, “The Warner-Foraker Amendment to the Hepburn Bill: Friend or Foe of Jim Crow?” Journal of Southern History 39 (Aug. 1973): 341–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Potter, David M., Lincoln and His Party in the Secession Crisis (New Haven, 1942)Google Scholar. The original version has twice been reprinted, first in 1962 by Yale University Press with a new preface by Potter. This was the book I bought in 1973. In 1995 the Louisiana State University Press reprinted the 1962 edition, which included Potter's preface from that edition, along with a new preface by me.

3 Genovese, Eugene, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York, 1965)Google Scholar.

4 Foner, Eric, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York, 1970)Google Scholar.

5 Of course we still remember Tennessee's Andrew Johnson, but principally for his postwar role as Lincoln's ill-fated successor. There is no way to know Johnson without encountering his outspoken East Tennessee rival (but Secession Crisis collaborator), William G. Brownlow, probably the most vituperative newspaper editor in the United States in an era when vituperation often was part of the job description. North Carolina's Holden also was a skilled vituperator.

6 Crofts, Daniel W., Reluctant Confederates: Upper South Unionists in the Secession Crisis (Chapel Hill, 1989)Google Scholar.

7 “The Diary of a Public Man: Unpublished Passages of the Secret History of the American Civil War,” North American Review, Aug. 1879, 125–40Google Scholar; Sept. 1879, 259–73; Oct. 1879, 375–88; Nov. 1879, 484–96. The full text of the diary is appended to Crofts, Daniel W., A Secession Crisis Enigma: William Henry Hurlbert and “The Diary of a Public Man” (Baton Rouge, 2010), 217–71Google Scholar. Subsequent diary references are keyed to this book.

8 Crofts, Secession Crisis Enigma, 222, 231, 254.

9 Crofts, Secession Crisis Enigma, 244, 262, 266, 270.

10 Ibid., 90–93.

11 Anderson, Frank Maloy, The Mystery of “A Public Man”: A Historical Detective Story (Minneapolis, 1948)Google Scholar.

12 Ibid., 140–67.

13 Ibid., 169, 178.

14 Ibid., 68–123, quotation on 84.

15 Potter, David M., review of Anderson, The Mystery of “A Public Man,” in Mississippi Valley Historical Review 36 (Sept. 1949): 324–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Potter, “Preface to the 1962 Edition,” Lincoln and His Party, xxxvi.

16 Barzun, Jacques and Graff, Henry F., The Modern Researcher, 4th. ed. (San Diego, 1985), 135–36Google Scholar.

17 Ward's columns originally were published between January and April 1861 in Porter's Spirit of the Times, a New York weekly, and likely were written because he needed money. They were assembled as a book: Collins, Carvel, ed., Sam Ward in the Gold Rush (Stanford, CA, 1949), 62–64, 84, 143, 159–60Google Scholar. See also Samuel Ward to Julia Ward Howe, Feb. 7, 1852, in Elliott, Maud Howe, Uncle Sam Ward and His Circle (New York, 1938), 426–32Google Scholar.

18 Crofts, Secession Crisis Enigma, 21–24.

19 Ibid., 24–27.

20 Anderson, The Mystery of “A Public Man”, 134–35, 169–70.

21 Crofts, Secession Crisis Enigma, 27–29; Holmes, David I. and Crofts, Daniel W., “The Diary of a Public Man: A Case Study in Traditional and Non-Traditional Authorship Attribution,” Literary and Linguistic Computing 25 (June 2010): 179–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22 Anderson, The Mystery of “A Public Man”, 169.

23 Potter, David M., review of Bullard, ed., The Diary of a Public Man, in Journal of Southern History 13 (Feb. 1947): 118–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, Cheerful Yesterdays (Boston, 1898), 107Google Scholar.

25 Kingsley, Charles, Two Years Ago (Cambridge, 1857)Google Scholar; Winthrop, Theodore, Cecil Dreeme (Boston, 1862)Google Scholar; Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, Malbone: An Oldport Romance (Boston, 1869)Google Scholar; Crofts, Secession Crisis Enigma, 34–63.

26 McJimsey, George T., Genteel Partisan: Manton Marble, 1834–1917 (Ames, IA, 1971), 95–96, 178–81Google Scholar.

27 Benson, Eugene, “W. H. Hurlbut,” The Galaxy 7 (Jan. 1869): 30–34Google Scholar.

28 D'Alton, Martina, The New York Obelisk, or, How Cleopatra's Needle Came to New York and What Happened When It Got Here (New York, 1993)Google Scholar; Schama, Simon, Landscape and Memory (New York, 1995), 284–89, 376–78Google Scholar; Crofts, Secession Crisis Enigma, 175–79. Obelisks were the rage in 1879; that same year construction resumed on the Washington Monument, which had stood incomplete since 1858 at only one-third of its projected height.

29 Sandweiss, Martha A., Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line (New York, 2009), 117–21Google Scholar; Crofts, Secession Crisis Enigma, 130–31.

30 William Henry Hurlbert to Thomas F. Bayard, Nov. 8, 10, 1879; Sam Ward to Bayard, June 20, Aug. 27, 1879, Mar. 5, 1880, Thomas F. Bayard Papers, Library of Congress.

31 Morgan, H. Wayne, From Hayes to McKinley: National Party Politics, 1877–1896 (Syracuse, 1969), 57–121Google Scholar, esp. 79–80 on Bayard. The ultimate Democratic nominee, Winfield Scott Hancock, had commanded the Second Corps of the Army of the Potomac at Gettysburg.

32 New York World, Feb. 17, 26, 28, Mar. 1, 2, 1880.

33 Fraud, intimidation, and violence tarnished the 1878 elections in the South, and Democrats in Congress followed this sorry spectacle by trying to gut all federal authority over the elections process. Republicans made Democratic unwillingness to accept the results of the war a central element of their 1880 campaign. Calhoun, Charles W., Conceiving a New Republic: The Republican Party and the Southern Question, 1869–1900 (Lawrence, KS, 2006), 156–86Google Scholar.

34 Crofts, Secession Crisis Enigma, 189–95, 205. The exemplary study of post-Civil War historical memory is Blight, David, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA, 2001)Google Scholar.

35 Barzun and Graff, The Modern Researcher, 135–36.

36 Crofts, Secession Crisis Enigma, 13–14, 208.

37 Donald, David, Charles Sumner and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 1960), 365–66, 383Google Scholar; Donald, Lincoln (New York, 1995), 282–83Google Scholar; Crofts, Secession Crisis Enigma, 105–13, 239–40, 244–46, 254.

38 Goodwin, Doris Kearns, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln (New York, 2005), 317, 327–28, 809–10Google Scholar; Crofts, Secession Crisis Enigma, 105–13, 244–46, 253–55. Goodwin appears unaware of the diary's controversial status.

39 Schama, Simon, Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations) (New York, 1991), 320, 325Google Scholar.

40 Woodward, C. Vann, ed., Mary Chesnut's Civil War (New Haven, 1981)Google Scholar; Crawford, Martin, ed., William Howard Russell's Civil War: Private Diary and Letters, 1861–1862 (Athens, GA, 1992)Google Scholar. Mary Chesnut, the observant South Carolinian, transformed skeletal notations made during wartime into something far more polished long after the fact. The renowned British journalist, William H. Russell, published My Diary North and South in 1863, but it was “a narrative reconstruction based upon the correspondent's notebooks and reports” rather than an actual diary (William Howard Russell's Civil War, vii–viii). Civil War soldiers sometimes attempted to come to grips with what they had experienced by creating memoirs that appeared to be diaries.