A Secession Crisis Enigma: William Henry Hurlbert and “The Diary of a Public Man.” by Daniel W. Crofts (review)

When this book arrived for review, my leisure reading was Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe mysteries—an appropriate choice, it turned out. Daniel W. Crofts has set out to solve one of the great mysteries of Civil War political history and brought to the task the tools of the historian and the detective, as well as the stylometrist. In 1879, the North American Review published “The Diary of a Public Man,” or “unpublished passages of the secret history of the American Civil War.” Intimately familiar with leading political figures of the time, the author remained anonymous, leaving readers and subsequent historians to ponder his identity and generating doubts that the diary was genuine. Frank Anderson, who devoted a large chunk of his scholarly career to solving this mystery, concluded that the author was Sam Ward, a writer and political insider. Unconvinced, Daniel Crofts sets out to solve the mystery once and for all.

In addition to his own great expertise in the coming of the Civil War as the author or editor of several works on the secession winter, Crofts turned to a colleague who employed stylometry, a method of analyzing literary style with statistics and computer programs, to determine that the diary was “seamless”—the work of one person (28). He compared the writings of several possible authors with “The Diary of a Public Man” to determine predilections toward alliteration and the use of modifiers, both to prove who wrote the diary and to eliminate possibilities.

Crofts believes Anderson missed the mark, albeit barely. Ward undoubtedly provided information to the author, who simply could not have been in all of the places and known all of the people central to the diary. The author, Crofts concludes, was Ward’s longtime friend and sometime enemy William Henry Hurlbert, who was similarly well wired politically and boasted a wealth of journalistic experience with, among others, the New York Times and the New York World. Indeed, that Hurlbert worked for a moderately conservative Republican daily and then a leading Democratic voice speaks to his skills as a writer and navigator of treacherous political waters—both requirements for completing the diary, as Crofts makes clear. The diary mentions or relies on politicians and journalists in Hurlbert’s orbit, much more so than those in Ward’s. It was written after the fact and brings together diverse sources, so its author needed to have literary talent of the kind Hurlbert demonstrated. Since the diarist takes a moderate position on most issues, Hurlbert fits the diary ideologically, thanks to his upbringing in the North and South and what his critics considered his general lack of principle on political issues.

Indeed, that lack of principle lies at the heart of Crofts’s fascinating dissection of Hurlbert’s life. One escapade took Hurlbert south during the Civil War and earned him a year’s residence in a Confederate prison, but suspicions arose that he had acted not out of journalistic curiosity, but to cast his lot with the rebels. Both before and after the war, his dalliances with a variety of women caused scandals that cost him friendships, money, job opportunities, and professional respect. Crofts weaves these threads of an unusual life into a cohesive whole to explain the manner of mind and man that could have written the diary.

Naturally, a few quibbles are in order. To call the Liberal Republicans and mugwumps “holier-than-thou” is punchy but simplistic, and Crofts’s depiction of William Henry Seward’s peace efforts during the secession winter could be more nuanced (79). In trying to reconstruct Hurlbert’s life, Crofts might have delved more deeply into the journalistic history to explain what made Hurlbert both unique and commonplace in his access to information and how he wrote about it. Many reporters in that era dealt regularly with the...