Boutwell: Radical Republican and Champion of Democracy
During his seven-decade career in public life, George Sewall Boutwell sought to "redeem America's promise" of racial equality, economic equity, and the principled use of American power abroad. From 1840 to 1905, Boutwell was at the center of efforts to abolish slavery, establish the Republican Party, assist President Lincoln in funding the Union war effort, facilitate Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, impeach President Andrew Johnson, and frame and enact the Fourteenth and Fifteenth civil rights amendments. He helped lay the foundations of the modern American economy with President Grant, investigated white terrorism in Mississippi in the 1870s, and opposed American imperialism following the Spanish-American War alongside Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, and Booker T. Washington. The son of a Massachusetts farming family of modest means, George Boutwell would do battle during his career with American political royalty, including Henry Cabot Lodge and Teddy Roosevelt.
The first major biography of an important public figure who has long been hiding in plain sight, Boutwell is as much a history of nineteenth-century US politics as it is a critique of the failures of governance during a turbulent and formative period in American history.
Earn by promoting books
Earn money by sharing your favorite books through our Affiliate program.
Become an affiliate
George Boutwell, one of the central political characters of his age, whose story charts the whole arc of the party of Lincoln, is at last brought vividly and brilliantly back to life--with vital lessons for our time about what it takes to defend democracy.--Sidney Blumenthal, author of The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln
Jeffrey Boutwell's deep dive into family letters, newspapers, historical archives, and contemporary accounts . . . makes a powerful case that farmer, governor, congressman, senator, and cabinet member George Boutwell deserves to be remembered, flaws and all, as one of America's greatest champions of human rights.--Edward Achorn, author of Every Drop of Blood: The Momentous Second Inauguration of Abraham Lincoln
In Jeffrey Boutwell's capable hands, the nearly forgotten nineteenth-century Massachusetts politician George Boutwell emerges as an Emersonian Representative Man . . . a self-made man of conscience. Richly contextualized and painstakingly researched, Boutwell is a classic political biography, a powerful and timely reminder that while personality may win the day, character makes a legacy.--Megan Marshall, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life
Taking readers from the antebellum era through the Civil War, into Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, Boutwell provides an insider's view of the pivotal moments that laid the groundwork for modern America.--Jonathan W. White, author of A House Built by Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House
Boutwell the man was a hero, and Boutwell the book is a revelation, a gripping tale of how Americans struggled to make the promise of equality into something more than mere words.--Kermit Roosevelt, author of The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America's Story
