Historians have long debated what motivated the Republican Party during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Was the party of Lincoln committed to abolishing slavery and advancing Black civil rights on moral grounds, or were these achievements the result of wartime contingency and political necessity? In Boutwell, author Jeffrey Boutwell offers a compelling answer through the life of an often-overlooked reformer, statesman, and intellectual from Massachusetts, George S. Boutwell. For Boutwell, America’s founding ideals of individual liberty, equality, and republican self-government were fundamentally incompatible with slavery and any system that created unequal classes of citizens. His belief in human equality—and conviction that republicanism was the engine of human and societal progress—unified his seven-decade career as an abolitionist, politician, and anti-imperialist crusader. Rather than resolve the tension between idealism and political necessity, Boutwell’s life reveals how the two were deeply intertwined in his advocacy for a republic based on freedom and opportunity for all Americans.
Described as “the most consequential public figure Americans have never heard of” (4), George Boutwell rose from self-taught Massachusetts farmer to a national figure whose convictions led him to help organize the Republican Party, stand with Lincoln in the cause of emancipation, confront southern white supremacists alongside U.S. Grant during Reconstruction, and oppose American imperialism at the turn of the century—even when doing so meant breaking with his own party. Like Lincoln, Boutwell believed upward mobility was the defining feature of American society and that education, coupled with a government committed to individual liberty, offered all Americans the opportunity to improve their condition. For Boutwell, slavery was anathema to his idealistic faith in societal progress. Though he served as a Democratic legislator and governor in the 1840s and early 1850s, Boutwell ultimately left the party as it fractured over the issue of slavery’s expansion, finding in the emerging Republican coalition a political home where moral principle could be joined with national purpose.
Boutwell’s industriousness during the Civil War and Reconstruction exemplified his fight to “redeem the promise of America as an equitable, multiracial society” (3). A founding member of Massachusetts’s Republican Party, Boutwell co-authored Lincoln’s national platform in 1860 and threw himself into the work of organizing Massachusetts regiments and running a massive federal bureaucracy as revenue commissioner. An outspoken advocate for emancipation, Boutwell celebrated Union victory as the triumph of republican self-government over a slaveholding aristocracy; he considered Black citizenship and suffrage essential for securing the war’s egalitarian promise. Serving in the U.S. House, Grant’s cabinet, and the U.S. Senate, he helped to write and to introduce the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, supported Grant’s use of force against Southern white supremacists, and led an investigatory committee on racial violence in Mississippi in 1876. However, Boutwell’s principled stand for racial equality earned him a reputation as a radical on race in a country eager to leave the war’s unresolved issues behind.
As the United States blurred the line between an antimilitarist republic and a conquering empire in the late nineteenth century—going to war with Spain over Cuba and occupying the Philippines—the moral clarity that had animated George Boutwell’s generation seemed increasingly out of place. While Boutwell compared the subjugation of the Philippines and the denial of American citizenship to its inhabitants to a “replay of the Reconstruction struggle in the 1860s and 1870s” (262), most of his contemporaries, including fellow Republicans, celebrated America’s emergence as a global power. In this new imperial age, Boutwell was caricatured as a relic: a tedious moralist, an old Radical out of step with the times.
Rather than treating ideology as a mask for self-interest, this biography invites readers to take its subject’s ideological commitments seriously. From breaking with the Democratic Party over slavery to leaving the Republican Party late in life over imperialism, George Boutwell was guided by his belief that the Union was a moral project grounded in universal rights, not merely a political abstraction. This conviction informed his abolitionist sentiments, his unwavering support for Reconstruction, and his anti-imperialist activism. Even when protesting imperialism meant urging African Americans to vote for the very Southern Democrats who overthrew Reconstruction, Boutwell remained, as ever, committed to principle over party. In highlighting his underappreciated career, Boutwell goes beyond rescuing a historical figure from obscurity; it seeks to understand its subject on his terms—as a man defined by a lifelong effort to align America’s present with its professed ideals.
Heath M. Anderson is a doctoral candidate in the Department of History at Mississippi State University.
