On a summer day in 1862, a government employee named George Boutwell took the podium in front of the U.S. Capitol before 10,000 people. He was one of 10 speakers that day in the Great War Meeting, a rally aimed at boosting Northern morale.
The Union was losing the war. The rebels had once again forced the army to retreat. The wounded and sick filled Washington’s makeshift hospitals. Fathers, brothers, wives came to the city to claim the bodies of their dead. Meanwhile, newspapers reported the Lincoln administration in disarray, with quarreling and finger pointing among generals and the cabinet.
George Boutwell
In his speech that day, Boutwell gave the Union a reason–the reason–for fighting. It was something President Lincoln couldn’t say, at least yet: The war was about ending slavery.
“We shall never crush the rebellion until we crush slavery,” Boutwell said. “Treason is the fruit of slavery.”
Boutwell, a staunch abolitionist, had just assumed the obscure job of U.S. revenue commissioner. If the rally organizers had intended his speech to test public support for emancipation, they got what they wanted.
Pro-administration newspapers praised Boutwell’s call to end slavery. The crowd cheered and cried its support. “It was a stirring and able off-hand effort,” reported the Boston Evening Transcript.
In that speech, George Boutwell redefined the Civil War, according to Jeffrey Boutwell in his new book, “Boutwell: Radical Republican and Champion of Democracy.”
George Boutwell
Boutwell’s biography brings to light an overlooked player on the historical stage. During his 65 years in public office, George Boutwell shaped civil rights legislation, managed the currency at a crucial time in the U.S. economy and led the fight against annexation of the Philippines. He was a friend and foe to presidents: a strong ally of Lincoln and Grant, the arch-enemy of Andrew Johnson and an implacable critic of McKinley and Roosevelt.
But historians had pretty much forgotten him until now. You could argue he was on the wrong side of history. Or just ahead of his time.
Jeffrey Boutwell
Jeffery Boutwell shares a common ancestor with George: the indentured servant James Boutwell, who came to Massachusetts in 1632. Jeffrey grew up vaguely aware of his relative. He’d served as Massachusetts’ youngest governor in the 19th century and Ulysses S. Grant’s Treasury Secretary.
But it wasn’t until he was in his 30s and 40s that Jeffrey Boutwell began to pay attention to George. In retirement, he decided to write an essay, 60 pages or so, about him. Finally, he realized George Boutwell’s significance and his courage. So, he decided to write a book.
George Boutwell, Civil Rights Leader
Born in Brookline, Mass., in 1818, George Boutwell grew up on his family farm in Lunenburg, 50 miles to the north and west of his birthplace. At 17 he left school and moved to Groton, Mass., to work in a store. The town would profoundly influence his views on race and justice.
Groton, Mass., in the 1880s
Margaret Fuller, who stood at the epicenter of the Transcendentalist movement, lived in Groton. The town was a hotbed of abolitionism, and Boutwell heard Frederick Douglass speak there.
He began to study law and in 1841 won election to the Massachusetts General Court. Boutwell established his anti-slavery credentials early on. He supported the right of petition, in concert with John Quincy Adams, and he voted to end the ban on interracial marriage.
At 33, he won the election for Massachusetts governor as a Democrat. He served two one-year terms. But he got disgusted with the Democratic Party’s embrace of slavery and left to organize the Republican Party in Massachusetts.
Young Boutwell
After he decided against running for a third term, he studied law, immersed himself in local politics and went to a Chicago as a delegate to the Republican national convention. In 1862, President Lincoln gave him an enormous challenge when he named him the first commissioner of Internal Revenue.
Congress had passed new taxes to pay for the war effort, but Boutwell had only three employees to collect the revenue. In addtion to hiring and training 3,000 employees, he had to wipe out corruption and eliminate war profiteering.
Though a desk job, it had as much if not more impact on the Civil War than battlefield victories. The Union could withstand military defeats better than the devaluation of its currency.
Hugh McCulloch, comptroller of the currency in 1863, wrote that more hard and difficult work was done in one year in the Bureau of Internal Revenue than was done in the whole Treasury Department from the establishment of the government.
Andrew Johnson’s Arch-Enemy
Boutwell liked lawmaking better than administering revenue collectors, and he won election to Congress in 1863. When the war ended, he championed citizenship and voting rights for Black people. Boutwell went so far as to advocate school integration, which critics considered radical in the extreme.
Boutwell cowrote the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which extends citizenship, due process and equal protection under the law to Black Americans. He also cowrote the 15th Amendment, which grants voting rights to Black men. And he did his best to prevent Andrew Johnson from dismantling the Northern victory over slavery.
Andrew Johnson
Upon his inauguration as Lincoln’s vice president, Andrew Johnson had delivered a long, drunken and incoherent speech. It foretold the tenor of his presidency. After Lincoln’s assassination, Johnson, a racist southerner, began to restore white supremacy in the South. He ignored Congress and turned a blind eye to the murder and disenfranchisement of Black southerners.
Boutwell led the drive to impeach Johnson for executive overreach. He not only failed, but he went down in history as a partisan radical.
Johnson impeachment managers
Seated L-R: Benjamin Butler, Thaddeus Stevens, Thomas Williams, John Bingham;
Standing L-R: James F. Wilson, Boutwell, John A. Logan
Treasury Secretary
When Ulysses S. Grant succeeded Johnson, he appointed George Boutwell as Treasury Secretary. Boutwell’s careful management of the currency contributed to the tremendous expansion of the U.S. economy after the Civil War.
The government had floated greenbacks to pay for the war. Boutwell slowly bought them back with gold. By taking paper money out of circulation, he restored U.S. credit with overseas trading partners and held down inflation.
A greenback
As Treasury Secretary, Boutwell had charge of the Secret Service. The agency’s mission included infiltrating and disrupting the Ku Klux Klan, then terrorizing Black people in the South. As a friend and ally of President Grant, Boutwell could do even more to try to protect Blacks. He did it in a coach ride from the Treasury Department to the Capitol.
Grant’s presidency faced headwinds, not the least of which was Reconstruction fatigue. Grant tired of accusations that he acted like a military dictator in the South. When a bill came up before Congress to strengthen enforcement of the 14th amendment – known as the KKK Act, Grant wavered in his support of it.
Perhaps the president wanted his spine stiffened. Grant invited Boutwell to ride over with him to the Capitol. Inside the building, Grant wrote a message to Congress, asking for passage of the bill. It did, and, in the short term, helped disrupt and disband the Klan.
Mississippi Ku Klux Klan
Back in Congress
In 1875, Democrats in Mississippi wrested control of state government through violent attacks on Black voters and Union supporters.
Boutwell had returned to lawmaking, having won election to the Senate in 1873. He chaired a special committee to investigate the violence, intimidation and ballot stuffing used to suppress the Black vote. In a 2,000-page report, the committee described how Democrats had systematically disenfranchised Black Mississippians, reducing them to serfdom.
George Boutwell, anti-imperialist
Boutwell turned to his law practice after he lost the 1877 race for re-election to the Senate. He served for a time as a legal representative for the Kingdom of Hawaii, opposing its acquisition by the United States.
In retirement, he did not view the conflict with Spain as a “splendid little war” but as imperialistic overreach. He grew disillusioned with the Republican Party under President William McKinley and his attempt to annex the Philippines.
Mark Twain’s proposal for a U.S.-controlled Philippine flag
Boutwell joined industrialist Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain and W.E.B. Dubois in opposing U.S. imperialism under Teddy Roosevelt. The conquest of brown people overseas appalled him as much as the enslavement of Black people in the southern United States. He founded and served as president of the Anti-Imperialism League.
Boutwell clung to his moral compass throughout his life. As Jeffrey Boutwell noted, he “helped reformulate the concepts of citizenship, voting and equality before the law as necessary pillars of representative democracy in a multiracial society, whether in America or its overseas possessions.”
Why Ignored?
So why do we know about people like Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens and not George Boutwell?
For one thing, explains Jeffrey Boutwell, his relative was a flinty Yankee who didn’t promote himself.
Secondly, he did not belong to Boston’s Brahmin class. People like Henry Adams and arch-imperialist Henry Cabot Lodge disdained him as a poorly educated farmer.
Finally, argues Jeffrey Boutwell, the South for over a century managed to rewrite the history of Reconstruction. Southern writers and historians spread the canard that Yankee carpetbaggers came to loot and plunder what was left of the South. As part of that story, they paint the impeachment of Andrew Johnson as an unjust persecution by radical republicans. Even John F. Kennedy, in his book “Profiles in Courage,” lauded Sen. Edmund Ross of Kansas who cast the deciding vote that saved Johnson’s presidency.
But over the past 20 years are so, historians have taken a new look at the Johnson presidency. Some have concluded he deserved impeachment because of his incredible executive overreach. And Ross was no profile in courage—he was actively soliciting bribes to vote for Johnson, wrote Jeffrey Boutwell.
George Boutwell was the courageous one, in the eyes of his relative and of historian Benjamin Quarles. Jeffrey Boutwell quotes Quarles in lauding George Boutwell for his indefatigable support for Black suffrage and education.
[F]ew Congressmen in the [1860s] had a greater interest in the welfare of the Negro than Boutwell…long before Radicalism had solidified into a coherent formula, Boutwell had shown a high degree of courage by voicing his views on the Negro.
Images: Lithograph of Groton By http://maps.bpl.org – Groton, Mass.Uploaded by tm, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=27808283. Boutwell House: By Daderot – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18394405.
However, the penny loafer went beyond New England, both in the manufacture and in the wearing. Such nonpreppies as James Dean, Elvis Presley, David Hockney and Elton John wore penny loafers (the latter chose a two-toned version from Prada).
