Boutwell: Radical Republican and Champion of Democracy by Jeffrey Boutwell
Boutwell: Radical Republican and Champion of Democracy
During his seven-decade career in public life, the Brookline-born Massachusetts governor and US Congressman, 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 Adams, 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.
About the Speakers
Jeffrey Boutwell is a writer, historian, and public policy specialist whose forty-year career spanned journalism, government, and international scientific research and cooperation. He has written widely on issues relating to nuclear weapons arms control, European politics, Middle East security issues, and environmental degradation and civil conflict. He has a Ph.D. in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a B.A. in history from Yale University, and he worked for many years at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Mass. Jeffrey grew up in Winchester and Concord, Mass., and now lives with his wife, Buthaina Shukri, in Columbia, Maryland. He and George Boutwell share a common ancestor, the indentured servant James Boutwell, who emigrated from England to Salem, Mass. in 1632.
Thomas A. Horrocks is an independent scholar and Editor-in-Chief of The Lincoln Herald, a leading scholarly journal devoted to Lincoln and his times. He received a doctorate in history from the University of Pennsylvania and spent 30 years working as a library administrator, including positions at Harvard and Brown University. In addition to his library management career, Dr. Horrocks has taught at Harvard University Extension School and has authored, edited, and co-edited eight books, primarily on American political history, with an emphasis on Abraham Lincoln and his time, including Lincoln’s Campaign Biographies (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014) and The Annotated Lincoln (Harvard University Press, 2016). This year, the Baker Street Irregular Press published A West Wind: How America and Americans Influenced the Sherlockian Canon, which Tom co-edited. The book includes a chapter by Tom on Abraham Lincoln and Sherlock Holmes. He is currently working on a book on Abraham Lincoln in 50 Objects.