BOUTWELL

Spirited biography of “the most consequential public figure Americans have never heard of.”

Born to a Massachusetts farming family, George Sewall Boutwell rose from library board member to the state’s youngest governor. A convert to the new Republican Party, he helped draft its platform in 1860 and championed Abraham Lincoln as its presidential candidate. As his biographer and distant cousin observes, Boutwell was highly influential but also possessed no apparent desire for self-promotion; he was “pure Yankee: reserved, correct in his relations with others, at times morally smug.” Working against him, too, was a tendency to orate far longer than audiences cared to endure. Still, Boutwell served for years as a staunch supporter first of abolition and then of Reconstruction, a “radical Republican” who considered the Emancipation Proclamation “the most important American event of history.” Confronting a postwar Congress that was soft on civil rights issues, Boutwell and his colleagues pushed the Fourteenth Amendment through, though without the guaranteed right to vote, “given that white northerners were not yet ready for Black civil or political equality, many out of a fear that this would lead to social equality.” Yet Boutwell labored on, leading the charge to impeach Andrew Johnson and, as president of the Anti-­Imperialist League alongside such notable members as Mark Twain, Andrew Carnegie, and Booker T. Washington, contesting William McKinley’s and Theodore Roosevelt’s interventionism. The younger Boutwell ranges widely without taking the focus off his kinsman, writing well and sometimes indignantly of matters such as the “Lost Cause” myth promulgated by the defeated Confederacy and—of timely concern today—of his relative’s belief that “putting too much power into the hands of state governments had been a fundamental flaw of the original Constitution.”

A welcome introduction to a consequential but overlooked figure in 19th-century American history.