"The Diary of a Public Man" Revealed

The Diary of a Public Man was first published in four installments in the North American Review in 1879.  It claimed to offer verbatim accounts, penned by a long-time Washington insider, of behind-the-scenes conversations with Abraham Lincoln, William H. Seward, and Stephen A. Douglas—among others—in the desperate weeks just before the start of the Civil War.  Although the NAR’s editor concealed the diarist’s identity and deleted the names of some persons mentioned in the text, the Diary has become part of the folklore of American historical writing.

As the secession crisis intensified, Lincoln appeared to welcome overtures from Douglas, who narrowly defeated him in the 1858 Senate race in Illinois but then lost to him in the 1860 presidential election.  Lincoln wanted to keep Northern Democrats “close to the Administration on the naked Union issue.”  Nothing better symbolized the fragile accord between the two former rivals than an incident reported by the diarist on inauguration day, March 4, 1861.  As Lincoln stood to begin speaking from the east front of the Capitol, he scarcely could find room for his hat on the “miserable little rickety table” that had been provided for the occasion.  Douglas reached forward, “took it with a smile and held it during the delivery of the address.”  This spontaneous gesture “was a trifling act, but a symbolical one, and not to be forgotten, and it attracted much attention all around me.”

The diarist and Douglas both pinned their hopes for a peaceful settlement on Seward, who emerged as Lincoln’s Secretary of State after having lost the Republican presidential nomination to him the year before.  Although his long public career as governor and senator from New York earned him a somewhat undeserved reputation for stigmatizing the South, Seward attempted during the secession winter to find a middle ground that would preserve the peace and hold the Union together.  He became, in the eyes of the diarist, “the one man in whose ability and moderation the conservative people at the North have most confidence.”

From its first paragraph to its last, the Diary recounts the twists and turns as two successive presidents, the repudiated James Buchanan and the untested Lincoln, attempted to figure out what to do about Fort Sumter, the besieged federal fortress located on an artificial island at the mouth of Charleston harbor, South Carolina.  The Diary conveys a strong sense of on-the-spot immediacy, reinforced by the diarist’s excellent ear.  He wrote as if he were seated next to the principals and holding an audio recorder.  Anyone who attempts to understand what was going through Lincoln’s mind as he took office and as he made the fateful decisions leading to war is bound to find the Diary intriguing.

I first read The Diary of a Public Man over three decades ago.  At the time, I was laying the groundwork for a book about three key Upper South states in early 1861—Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee—as they confronted the awful dilemma posed by the secession of the Lower South.  I was both intrigued and baffled by the Diary.  The author plainly knew a great deal about what was going on behind closed doors in Washington, D.C.  He accurately depicted the anxieties of those who feared war.  He also shared the widespread (and incorrect) assumption as of mid-March that Lincoln had decided against trying to hold Sumter.  But I knew that questions had been raised about the Diary’s authenticity.  I also knew that the diarist remained inscrutable.  Indeed, Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff’s influential reference work, The Modern Researcher, singled out the Diary for presenting the “most gigantic” problem of uncertain authorship in American historical writing.  Accordingly, I decided against using it.

More recently, however, I decided to give the Diary a closer look, to see whether its mysteries could be unlocked.  Ryan Christiansen, an undergraduate working with me at The College of New Jersey, first noticed that the writing in the Diary closely matched that of William Henry Hurlbert (1827-1895), a prominent New York City journalist.  The more Hurlbert we read, the more convinced we became that we had identified the surreptitious diarist.

It proved easy to study Hurlbert’s writing.  Between 1857 and 1883, he composed thousands of editorials and book reviews, first for the New York Times and then for the New York World.  Hurlbert brought his forceful, fluid style to bear on a wide range of topics—politics, international affairs, history, and literature.  In 1869 Eugene Benson published an incisive assessment of Hurlbert’s prose.  Benson noted that Hurlbert had a gift for capturing the cadences of “human speech.”  His writing had “sweep and dash.”  His “alliterative phrases” and “rich fund of expression” enabled him to make “the gravest and heaviest” political subjects come instantly alive.  “No man’s articles are more invariably recognized,” Benson reported.  Hurlbert’s skill as a writer was matched by “the elegant fluency of his conversation.”  Benson judged him “the only artist among American journalists.”

The Diary also reflected Hurlbert’s distinctive outlook, which was neither Northern nor Southern.  Sooner than most Americans, he realized that his native South Carolina was on a collision course with New England, where he studied and lived from the mid-1840s to the mid-1850s.  Although drawn for a time to the antislavery critique of the South, he had enough affinity with both sides to avoid becoming a partisan for either.  He sensed that both were mutually blind to the potential catastrophe that their antagonism was creating.  He never thought the war should have been fought, and he never accepted the idea that it could be justified by its outcome.  Hurlbert thereby swam against the dominant tide of postwar Northern public opinion.  His alleged Diary suggested that Northern Democrats, conservative Republicans, and Southern Unionists had acted more responsibly in early 1861 than extreme men on either side who blindly stumbled into the abyss.

A new analytical technique further corroborates the stylistic and attitudinal overlap between the Diary and Hurlbert’s writing.  David Holmes, a professional statistician and colleague of mine at The College of New Jersey, has subjected the Diary to stylometric scrutiny.  Stylometry, “the statistical analysis of literary style,” delivers a verdict that reinforces the case for Hurlbert.

The Diary, however, was not a diary.  It was a memoir, probably composed shortly before it appeared in print in 1879.  The word “Diary” was intentionally misleading.  Hurlbert successfully perpetrated one of the most difficult feats of historical license.  He pretended to have been a diarist who never existed, and he covered his tracks so well that he escaped detection.  He apparently picked up second- and third-hand versions of conversations that had taken place, though not in his presence.  And he wrote about them as if he had been a direct participant.

But Hurlbert’s work was far from fictional—aside from the fabricated hocus-pocus regarding a nonexistent diarist.  The Diary repeatedly introduces previously concealed information that was corroborated only after its publication.  It contains precise details regarding the struggle to shape Lincoln’s cabinet.  Its segments on the writing of Lincoln’s inaugural address include key information that was not then part of the public realm—most notably, the role played by Seward in persuading Lincoln to make last-minute revisions.  The diarist also shed light on Seward’s secret promise to leading Virginia Unionists in mid-March 1861 that Sumter soon would be evacuated.  Although there was no diarist, the substance of the Diary appears reliable. 

Modern jargon would call it a stretch to get The Diary of a Public Man back into the historical lexicon.  But that is where it belongs.  It parallels the work of Mary Chesnut, the observant South Carolinian who transformed skeletal notations made during wartime into something far more polished long after the fact.  Her seeming diary was a memoir, historian C. Vann Woodward concluded, but “the facts bear her out” and her writing has “enduring value.”  Much the same must be said for The Diary of a Public Man.