George Templeton Strong (lawyer)

George Templeton Strong (born January 26, 1820 in New York City ; died July 21, 1875 there ) was an American lawyer. His diaries, which were only published in 1952, are important for American literary and historical studies .

Life

George Templeton Strong

Strong was born in 1820 to an established New York lawyer. After completing his studies at Columbia College (1835–38), he began working as a lawyer in his father's office and was actively involved in the city's political, cultural and religious life in the years that followed. He held various honorary offices, including from 1853 he was one of the curators of Columbia College and was parish councilor of Trinity Church . When the Civil War broke out in 1861, he helped set up the United States Sanitary Commission , a humanitarian aid organization of the American government dedicated to caring for soldiers and war invalids. Despite being a government agency, the USSC relied on private donations for funding; As a volunteer treasurer, Strong was responsible for raising and managing millions. In 1863, Strong was one of the founders of the Union League Club of New York , a non-profit organization dedicated to strengthening the United States' unity in the face of the Civil War. After the war he worked again as a lawyer until he gave up his law firm in 1872 and became treasurer of Trinity Church. He died in New York in 1875.

He began to keep a diary in 1835 while studying at Columbia College. Over the next 40 years, he wrote down his observations on current affairs almost every day. His diaries are not only informative testimony to Strong's personal development, but also to contemporary cultural and political events. In the words of Daniel Aaron , Strong is “the most legible and brilliant of the American diary writers of the 19th century, (...) a kind of reticent novelist, a satirist and humorist of the highest order, and an attentive reporter in the Pepys tradition . His incomparable forty-year-long commentary on wars, scandals, books, concerts, fires, fads, uprisings, social events, politics and personalities reveals the 'small but unmistakable spark of genius' that defines the authentic diary writer. “ The years are of particular interest before and during the American Civil War, in which Strong's change from the conservative Whig , who welcomed Daniel Webster's defense speech on the Fugitive Slave Act as well as the execution of John Brown , to an opponent of slavery and a staunch advocate of US national unity can be traced. The decisive change in attitude took place in the months before the presidential election in 1860 ; In the entries of this time, Strong meticulously weighs the pros and cons of various political options until he finally brings himself to vote for the Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln , even at the expense of the impending civil war.

Strong's diaries were kept by his family until 1952 and were unknown to the public. They were only discovered in 1952 and published in a critical edition. Since then, they have often been consulted by the most varied of historians, as their anecdotal wealth of detail provides information about political and banal phenomena of the time; In particular, Strong's remarks about encounters with better known contemporaries are of interest to biographers. Excerpts from his diary were used in Ken Burns ' documentary The American Civil War and Ric Burns ' documentary New York: A Documentary Film .

literature

• Allan Nevins, Milton Halsey Thomas (eds.): The Diary of George Templeton Strong. 4 volumes. Macmillan Company, New York 1952.
• Daniel Aaron: The Unwritten War. American Writers and the Civil War . Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1973. pp. 21-24.