By Jeffrey Boutwell
During his
seven-decade career in public life, 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 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 Author
Jeffrey Boutwell is a writer, historian, and science policy specialist whose
forty-year career spanned journalism, government, and international scientific
research. He lives in Maryland. Jeffrey and George share a common ancestor, the
indentured servant James Boutwell, who emigrated in 1632 from England to Salem,
Massachusetts.
ISBN 978-1324074267,
W. W. Norton & Company, © 2025, Hardcover, 368 Pages, Photographs, Illustrations,
End Notes & Index. $39.99. To Purchase the book click HERE.
