When a Nation Came of Age

BY GEOFFREY C. WARD

George Templeton Strong: Civil War Diaries

Edited by Geoff Wisner Library of America, 701 pages, $45

WHEN George Templeton Strong, a prominent Wall Street attorney, died at 55 in 1875, the New York Tribune’s obituary dutifully listed his gentlemanly contributions to the cultural life of his city. He’d been a Columbia College trustee, a Trinity Church vestryman, president of the Philharmonic Society, co-founder of the Union League Club. But overall, the writer added, Strong had led “a very quiet life,” and while his many friends remembered that his love of “elegant literature” had superseded his interest in the law, “he was not the author of any extensive literary work.”

It would be decades before anyone realized how wrong his friends had been. For 40 years, from the age of 15 until a few days before his death, Strong kept a journal—2,250 pages, well over 4 million words—that, according to the literary scholar Daniel Aaron, made him “the most readable and brilliant of . . . nineteenth-century American diarists.”

In 1952 Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas published a four-volume abridgment of his diaries. Now the Library of America has produced “George Templeton Strong: Civil War Diaries,” a much-expanded record of the years when Strong’s life was anything but quiet, expertly edited and annotated by Geoff Wisner.

When the war began, Strong was 41. He, his wife, Ellen Ruggles, and their three young sons occupied a handsome brownstone on East 21st Street, overlooking Gramercy Park. He harbored all the predictable prejudices of a man of his class and station: He deplored the mostly Irish immigrants who were transforming his city, and he thought abolitionists were troublemaking extremists. But he was also a vivid writer, a shrewd judge of men with a novelist’s eye for detail, and a man with a rare willingness to alter his opinions when facts intervened.

The attack on Fort Sumter in 1861 enraged him. Southern “slavebreeding” and “woman-flogging” interests, he wrote, had shown that the “Bird of our Country is a debilitated chicken disguised in Eagle feathers. We have never been a nation . . . only an aggregate of communities, ready to fall apart at the first serious shock & without a centre of vigorous National life to keep us together.”

He was by no means sure that what he called the “timid & mercenary” North could restore the Union, but he was determined to do all that he could for that cause. Believing himself too old and nearsighted to serve in uniform, Strong instead exhausted himself and much of his fortune serving without pay for four years as treasurer of the U.S. Sanitary Commission. Organized in June 1861 to preserve the health of Union troops, this was an enormous undertaking: 7,000 local affiliates, 500 agents, thousands of voluntary nurses (including Strong’s wife for a time), as well as hospitals, hospital ships and trains, field ambulances and millions of dollars’ worth of medicines and supplies. “It has become a ‘big thing,’ has the S.C.,” Strong wrote, “a considerable fact in the history of this People & of this War.” The U.S. Sanitary Commission was paid for by contributions from the public; it was also, at first, opposed by the hidebound Army Medical Department.

For the most part, Strong’s day-byday chronicle of the war’s ups and downs was based on behind-the-scenes

gossip and “extras” peddled by Manhattan newsboys. But whenever he traveled to the front to see how commission funds were being spent, he detailed everything he did and saw.

At Bull Run, he took the opportunity to gather up an armful of rebel letters: “Their spelling generally bad. Some of them more obscene & filthy than anything I ever read.”

After Antietam he visited a field hospital filled with “horrible congregations of wounded men . . . our men & rebel prisoners both—on straw, in their bloody stiffened clothes . . . some in barns & cowhouses some in the open air. It was fearful to see—Gustave Doré’s pictures embodied in shivering agonizing suppurating flesh & blood.”

During the siege of Petersburg, Strong set out for Gen. Ulysses Grant’s sprawling encampment at City Point, Va., where drought and Union wagon wheels had turned the surrounding cornfields into what he called “seas of impalpable dust.”

Every horse raises a convoluted cloud of ropy smoke, that comes up to his belly, & trails away behind him for half a mile. A drove of cattle or a mule train creates a fog so dense that in passing them this aftn our leaders were invisible. Tho’ our teamster knew the ground perfectly, he had to stop within a mile of City Point, on the boundless area of naked yellow dust, limited only by the circumambient haze, & traversed by wagon ruts in every direction, & ask which way City Point lay. Strong’s portraits of the men he met are cleareyed and candid. Initially admiring of Gen. George McClellan, he wearied of his stubborn reluctance to pursue the enemy: “McClellan’s repose is doubtless majestic,” he wrote in October 1862, a few weeks before Abraham Lincoln replaced McClellan with Maj. Gen. Ambrose Burnside as commander of the Army of the Potomac, “but if the couchant lion postpones his spring too long, people will begin wondering whether he is not a stuffed specimen after all.” Grant, on the other hand “talks like an earnest business-man— prompt clearheaded & decisive—& utters no bosh.”

Strong’s first impression of Lincoln was decidedly mixed. “He is lank and hardfeatured—among the ugliest White--men I have seen,” he wrote. “Decidedly plebeian, Superficially vulgar and a Snob. But not essentially. He seems to be clear headed and soundhearted—tho’ his laugh is the laugh of a Yahoo, with the wrinkling of the nose that suggests affinity with the Tapir & other pachyderms, and his grammar is weak.”

Strong came to see that Lincoln’s decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation would turn Union forces into armies of liberation. “The Nation may be sick unto speedy death & past help,” he wrote as the proclamation went into effect in January 1863, “but if so, [its] last great Act is one of Repentance & Restitution.” After Lincoln sanctioned the enlistment of black Americans, Strong and his fellow members of the Union League Club raised the 20th Colored Infantry Regiment, and on March 6, 1864, Strong proudly watched it “marching down Broadway, armed drilled truculent & elate.”

“The change of opinion on this Slavery question since 1860 is a great historical fact,” Strong had written a few days earlier, “comparable with the early progress of Christianity. . . . What a marvelous change it is... my little Lewis [his 3year-old son] singing after dinner . . . ‘John Brown’s body lies amodrin in the graves’ just as if it were the ‘Star-Spangled Banner.’ ” Strong had come to believe that emancipation was a “great & blessed revolution . . . due, in no small degree, to A. Lincoln’s sagacious policy” and a month after Lincoln’s assassination would predict that the martyred president would one day “stand in History beside Washington, perhaps higher.”

It was the afternoon of April 3, 1865—a dozen days before Lincoln’s death—when news that Richmond, Va. had finally fallen reached New York. Strong left his office and joined the jubilant throng outside where attorneys, brokers, bankers and clerks joined in singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” over and over again. “I think I shall never lose the impression made by this rude, many-voiced Chorale,” Strong wrote that evening.

It seemed a revelation of profound National feeling, underlying all our vulgarisms & corruptions, & vouchsafed to us in their very focus & centre, in Wall St. itself. I walked about on the outskirts of the crowd, shaking hands with everybody, congratulating & being congratulated by scores of men I hardly know even by sight. Men embraced & hugged each other— kissed each other—retreated into doorways to dry their eyes & came out again to flourish their hats & hurra. That winter, Strong took time to look back at the war and the role he’d played in it. “These four years have reduced me to something like pauperism,” he wrote. “But I am profoundly thankful for them nevertheless. They have given me—& my wife & my boys—a country worth living in & living for, & to be proud of.” Mr. Ward is a biographer, historian and scriptwriter. His latest book is “The American Revolution: An Intimate History,” the companion volume to the PBS series.