The Diary of a Public Man was first published anonymously in the North American Review

North American Review

The North American Review was the first literary magazine in the United States. Founded in Boston in 1815 by journalist Nathan Hale and others, it was published continuously until 1940, when publication was suspended due to J. H. Smyth, who had purchased the magazine, being unmasked as a Japanese...

in 1879. The purported Diary’s entries are dated between December 28, 1860, and March 15, 1861, the desperate weeks just before the start of the Civil War. The Diary appeared to offer verbatim accounts, penned by a long-time Washington insider, of behind-the-scenes discussions at the very highest levels during the greatest crisis the country had yet faced. Its pithy quotations attributed to the key principals—Stephen A. Douglas

Stephen A. Douglas

Stephen Arnold Douglas was an American politician from the western state of Illinois, and was the Northern Democratic Party nominee for President in 1860. He lost to the Republican Party's candidate, Abraham Lincoln, whom he had defeated two years earlier in a Senate contest following a famed...

, William H. Seward

William H. Seward

William Henry Seward, Sr. was the 12th Governor of New York, United States Senator and the United States Secretary of State under Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson...

, and especially Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was the 16th President of the United States, serving from March 1861 until his assassination in April 1865. He successfully led his country through a great constitutional, military and moral crisis – the American Civil War – preserving the Union, while ending slavery, and...

—have become part of the folklore of American historical writing.

Contents of the Diary

Douglas, the leading Northern Democrat who narrowly defeated Lincoln in 1858 to retain his Senate seat but who then lost to him in the 1860 presidential election, reached out to his former antagonist as the crisis deepened. Lincoln, who wanted to keep Northern Democrats "close to the Administration on the naked Union issue", proved receptive. Nothing better symbolized the rapport between the two Illinois rivals than an incident reported by the diarist on inauguration day. As Lincoln prepared to speak, 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 in 1860. 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 of a Public Man recounts the twists and turns as two successive presidents, the repudiated James Buchanan

James Buchanan

James Buchanan, Jr. was the 15th President of the United States . He is the only president from Pennsylvania, the only president who remained a lifelong bachelor and the last to be born in the 18th century....

 and the untested Lincoln, attempted to figure out what to do about Fort Sumter

Fort Sumter

Fort Sumter is a Third System masonry coastal fortification located in Charleston Harbor, South Carolina. The fort is best known as the site upon which the shots initiating the American Civil War were fired, at the Battle of Fort Sumter.- Construction :...

, 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.

Controversy

But two key questions hang over the Diary. Who wrote it? And was it genuine? The editor of the North American Review concealed the identity of its author, and historians have found it difficult to crack the secret. Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff’s influential reference work, The Modern Researcher, singles out the Diary for presenting the "most gigantic" problem of uncertain authorship in American historical writing. In part because the diarist has remained elusive, the Diary has become suspect. Historian Frank Maloy Anderson, writing in 1948, concluded that Gilded Age lobbyist Sam Ward (1814–1884) wrote the Diary, but that its contents were substantially concocted.

Historian Daniel W. Crofts recently reopened the Diary to fresh scrutiny and concluded that it was not a diary, but a memoir, probably written shortly before it appeared in print in 1879. The word "Diary" was intentionally misleading. Crofts established that its author was New York journalist William Henry Hurlbert

William Henry Hurlbert

William Henry Hurlbert was an American journalist and author of “The Diary of a Public Man,” published in the North American Review in 1879...

 (1827–1895), based on striking parallels between the Diary and Hurlbert's distinctive writing style. Crofts paired with statistician David Holmes to use stylometry, the statistical analysis of literary style, which delivers a verdict that reinforces the case for Hurlbert. Acclaimed as "the most brilliant talent of the New York press" and "the only artist among American journalists", 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.

But Crofts also contends that that 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 Fort Sumter soon would be evacuated. Although there was no diarist, the substance of the Diary appears reliable.

The Diary 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 of the sectional conflict to avoid becoming a partisan for either. He sensed that both sides were mutually blind to the potential catastrophe that their antagonism was creating.

Hurlbert remained conflicted after the war started. He wanted the Union preserved, but he feared that prolonged fighting would so embitter the two sides as to make reunion impossible. He opposed emancipation on grounds that it would prompt the South to fight longer and harder. When the war finally ended, he favored a rapid restoration of the Southern states to the Union. He never thought the war should have been fought, and he never accepted the idea that it could be justified by its outcome. He 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.

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

C. Vann Woodward

Comer Vann Woodward was a preeminent American historian focusing primarily on the American South and race relations. He was considered, along with Richard Hofstadter and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., to be one of the most influential historians of the postwar era, 1940s-1970s, both by scholars and by...

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.