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The Diary of George Templeton Strong, Vol. 2: The Turbulent Fifties, 1850-1859
- GenresDiary
517 pages
First published January 1, 1952
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About the author
George Templeton Strong
42 books6 followersDate of Birth: 1820
Date of Death: July 22, 1875
George Templeton Strong was an American lawyer and diarist. His 2,250 page diary, discovered in the 1930s, provides a striking personal account of life in the 19th century, especially during the events of the American Civil War. Historian Paula Baker described him as "perhaps the northern equivalent of South Carolina's Mary Chesnut: quotable, opinionated, and a careful follower of events."
Date of Death: July 22, 1875
George Templeton Strong was an American lawyer and diarist. His 2,250 page diary, discovered in the 1930s, provides a striking personal account of life in the 19th century, especially during the events of the American Civil War. Historian Paula Baker described him as "perhaps the northern equivalent of South Carolina's Mary Chesnut: quotable, opinionated, and a careful follower of events."
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September 19, 2017
Another installment in the invaluable diaries of lawyer and NYC resident George Templeton Strong. And what a diary it is! A great deal is consumed with financial matters, musical performances, personal interactions, even domestic life as he raised children ("Went to bed with both my ears stuffed full of cotton, a precaution against the turmoil of that baby, which has got into one of the habits of the Noctivagous Mammalia, that, namely, of howling at night like the felinae, the great apes, jackals, hyenas, and wild dogs picturesquely described by travelers in tropical parts. The Psalmist speaks of the young lions roaring by night; he was a bachelor when he wrote that psalm, or he would have cited young babies as the better instance of habitual nocturnal ululation" [12/1/1851]).
But Strong has a broader view: he describes the progress of a cholera epidemic ("Malarious aromata rampage invisible through every street, and in the second-rate regions of the city, such as Cherry Street, poor old Greenwich Street, and so on, atmospheric poison and pungent foetor and gaseous filth cry aloud and spare not, and the wayfaring man inhales at every breath a pair of lungs full of vaporized decomposing gutter mud and rottenness" [6/20/1854]) and the return of yellow fever, as well as a nativist assault on hospitals for ailing immigrants ("A mob of screeching blackguards breaking into a hospital by night, dragging out men and women labouring under most formidable disease, and dropping them about the grounds while they proceeded to burn and destroy, is a sorry sight" [9/11/1858]).
Strong mentions the frequent fires ("Walked uptown this afternoon and inspected a quite splendid little conflagration in Elizabeth Street near Spring; two or three wooden shanties blazing and disgorging an incredible number of cubic feet of Irish humanity and filthy feather beds" [8/9/1854]), and he deplores the poverty he observes in New York City ("No one can walk the length of Broadway without meeting some hideous troop of ragged girls, from twelve years old down, brutalized already almost beyond redemption by premature vice, clad in the filthy refuse of the rag-picker's collections, obscene of speech, the stamp of childhood gone from their faces..." [7/7/1851]). But not even the vaunted rich were immune from concern: Strong chronicles a brief but frightening recession, the Panic of 1857 ("Will the banks stand it? I think not, and predict their downfall within ten days. People's faces in Wall Street look fearfully gaunt and desperate" [10/10/1857]).
Strong also reflects on the absurdity of the growing Spiritualist craze ("surely one of the most startling events that have occurred for centuries and one of the most significant" [11/26/1855]); he criticizes the evangelical renewal that would become the Third Great Awakening ("It is becoming daily more and more heated and morbid. Irreverence, presumption, indecency, and other symptoms of a mere epidemic religious fever multiply as the revival develops. ... what I heard seemed to me no doubt well meant, but the profane and mischievous babblings of blind, foolish, shallow, vulgar Pharisaism, trying to hide its 'I am holier than thou' under certain formulas of self-contempt; proud of its own admission that it is humble. The great object of the meeting seems to be to drug men up to a certain point of nervous excitement and keep them there" [3/24/1858]); and he discusses Mormonism amidst reports of the 'Utah War,' describing it as "this most beggarly of delusions" and denouncing "Brigham Young's horde of brutalized fanatics" [12/12/1857].
Strong speaks also of the excitement and then disappointment of the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable: "Yesterday's Herald said that the cable (or perhaps Cyrus W. Field, uncertain which) is undoubtedly the Angel in the Book of Revelation with one foot on sea and one foot on land, proclaiming that Time shall be no longer. Moderate people merely say that this is the greatest human achievement in history." In spite of his skepticism, he expects great things of human progress... "if the earth doesn't blow up or get foul of a comet and be not rebarbarized by Brigham Young or Red Republicanism" [8/10/1858].
But the big concern of his day that increasingly saturates the diary is a concern that the aftermath of the Kansas-Nebraska Act would tip the country into a civil war ("Never was the country in such a crazy state as just now. Civil war impending over Kansas..." [5/28/1856]; "...can civil war between North and South be postponed twenty years longer? I fear we, or our children, have got to pass through a ruinous revolutionary period of conflict between two social systems before the policy of the USA is finally settled. The struggle will be fearful when it comes, as it must sooner or later, for an amicable disunion and partition of territory is an impossibility" [7/2/1856]), a concern hardly helped by the Harper's Ferry insurrection by John Brown, whose trial Strong followed assiduously ("If the slaveholding interest were wise, it would exert itself to secure his conviction on some minor offense, inciting to a riot, or the like, and his punishment by flogging, imprisonment, and the pillory. I'm not sure the South can afford to hang him, though he plainly deserves it" [10/29/1859]).
Certainly, Strong could read the writing on the wall: "The pestilent little state of South Carolina, mad with metaphysics and self-conceit, gasconading itself day by day into greater wrath and keener sense of imaginary wrong, means to secede if the North elect Fremont. It may by its legislature declare itself an independent nation, November 15th, or it may back out a little later, if it can secure Georgia or Virginia as allies, by refusing to go into ballot for President and Vice-President, and forming a Southern Confederacy. If it stand alone, it is easily dealt with; a couple of frigates can blockade its ports, and it will be starved into submission in about two weeks, being as poor and weak as it is insolent and irrational. But should it find aid and comfort from the sympathy of other slave states, which is not an improbable thing, if it put itself forward as champion of 'Southern rights,' the situation becomes a grave one and admits of but two probable solutions: a long and fierce civil war, or what's worse, dissolution of the Union" [9/21/1856].
Strong himself nursed a distaste for abolitionism ("an Abolitionist ... is apt to be a mere talker and sophist" [12/4/1859]), confessing early on that he doesn't share their actual belief in the Declaration of Independence's statement that "all men were born free and equal", though he begrudgingly grants that, "if that be the conventional theory of our social institutions, we are entitled to enforce it and claim its benefits where its violation will do mischief" [5/22/1854]. Personally, he thinks slavery is "wrongly condemned, it seems to me" [6/8/1856], and says, "I still firmly believe that the relation of master and slave violates no moral law" [10/19/1856]. Yet he saves his greatest ire for Southern secessionism, grousing that "the reckless, insolent brutality of our Southern aristocrats may drive me into abolitionism yet" [5/22/1856], and writing condemnations like, "I believe civilization at the South is retrograde and that the Carolinas are decaying into barbarism" [5/28/1856].
By the close of the decade, Strong had concluded that the United States was now "a sick nation, and I fear it must be worse before it's better. The growing, vigorous North must sooner or later assert its right to equality with the stagnant, semi-barbarous South, and that assertion must bring on a struggle and convulsion. It must come" [12/22/1859].
We can all be glad Strong kept a diary of such darkening days. Absolutely worth reading in the twenty-first century.
But Strong has a broader view: he describes the progress of a cholera epidemic ("Malarious aromata rampage invisible through every street, and in the second-rate regions of the city, such as Cherry Street, poor old Greenwich Street, and so on, atmospheric poison and pungent foetor and gaseous filth cry aloud and spare not, and the wayfaring man inhales at every breath a pair of lungs full of vaporized decomposing gutter mud and rottenness" [6/20/1854]) and the return of yellow fever, as well as a nativist assault on hospitals for ailing immigrants ("A mob of screeching blackguards breaking into a hospital by night, dragging out men and women labouring under most formidable disease, and dropping them about the grounds while they proceeded to burn and destroy, is a sorry sight" [9/11/1858]).
Strong mentions the frequent fires ("Walked uptown this afternoon and inspected a quite splendid little conflagration in Elizabeth Street near Spring; two or three wooden shanties blazing and disgorging an incredible number of cubic feet of Irish humanity and filthy feather beds" [8/9/1854]), and he deplores the poverty he observes in New York City ("No one can walk the length of Broadway without meeting some hideous troop of ragged girls, from twelve years old down, brutalized already almost beyond redemption by premature vice, clad in the filthy refuse of the rag-picker's collections, obscene of speech, the stamp of childhood gone from their faces..." [7/7/1851]). But not even the vaunted rich were immune from concern: Strong chronicles a brief but frightening recession, the Panic of 1857 ("Will the banks stand it? I think not, and predict their downfall within ten days. People's faces in Wall Street look fearfully gaunt and desperate" [10/10/1857]).
Strong also reflects on the absurdity of the growing Spiritualist craze ("surely one of the most startling events that have occurred for centuries and one of the most significant" [11/26/1855]); he criticizes the evangelical renewal that would become the Third Great Awakening ("It is becoming daily more and more heated and morbid. Irreverence, presumption, indecency, and other symptoms of a mere epidemic religious fever multiply as the revival develops. ... what I heard seemed to me no doubt well meant, but the profane and mischievous babblings of blind, foolish, shallow, vulgar Pharisaism, trying to hide its 'I am holier than thou' under certain formulas of self-contempt; proud of its own admission that it is humble. The great object of the meeting seems to be to drug men up to a certain point of nervous excitement and keep them there" [3/24/1858]); and he discusses Mormonism amidst reports of the 'Utah War,' describing it as "this most beggarly of delusions" and denouncing "Brigham Young's horde of brutalized fanatics" [12/12/1857].
Strong speaks also of the excitement and then disappointment of the first trans-Atlantic telegraph cable: "Yesterday's Herald said that the cable (or perhaps Cyrus W. Field, uncertain which) is undoubtedly the Angel in the Book of Revelation with one foot on sea and one foot on land, proclaiming that Time shall be no longer. Moderate people merely say that this is the greatest human achievement in history." In spite of his skepticism, he expects great things of human progress... "if the earth doesn't blow up or get foul of a comet and be not rebarbarized by Brigham Young or Red Republicanism" [8/10/1858].
But the big concern of his day that increasingly saturates the diary is a concern that the aftermath of the Kansas-Nebraska Act would tip the country into a civil war ("Never was the country in such a crazy state as just now. Civil war impending over Kansas..." [5/28/1856]; "...can civil war between North and South be postponed twenty years longer? I fear we, or our children, have got to pass through a ruinous revolutionary period of conflict between two social systems before the policy of the USA is finally settled. The struggle will be fearful when it comes, as it must sooner or later, for an amicable disunion and partition of territory is an impossibility" [7/2/1856]), a concern hardly helped by the Harper's Ferry insurrection by John Brown, whose trial Strong followed assiduously ("If the slaveholding interest were wise, it would exert itself to secure his conviction on some minor offense, inciting to a riot, or the like, and his punishment by flogging, imprisonment, and the pillory. I'm not sure the South can afford to hang him, though he plainly deserves it" [10/29/1859]).
Certainly, Strong could read the writing on the wall: "The pestilent little state of South Carolina, mad with metaphysics and self-conceit, gasconading itself day by day into greater wrath and keener sense of imaginary wrong, means to secede if the North elect Fremont. It may by its legislature declare itself an independent nation, November 15th, or it may back out a little later, if it can secure Georgia or Virginia as allies, by refusing to go into ballot for President and Vice-President, and forming a Southern Confederacy. If it stand alone, it is easily dealt with; a couple of frigates can blockade its ports, and it will be starved into submission in about two weeks, being as poor and weak as it is insolent and irrational. But should it find aid and comfort from the sympathy of other slave states, which is not an improbable thing, if it put itself forward as champion of 'Southern rights,' the situation becomes a grave one and admits of but two probable solutions: a long and fierce civil war, or what's worse, dissolution of the Union" [9/21/1856].
Strong himself nursed a distaste for abolitionism ("an Abolitionist ... is apt to be a mere talker and sophist" [12/4/1859]), confessing early on that he doesn't share their actual belief in the Declaration of Independence's statement that "all men were born free and equal", though he begrudgingly grants that, "if that be the conventional theory of our social institutions, we are entitled to enforce it and claim its benefits where its violation will do mischief" [5/22/1854]. Personally, he thinks slavery is "wrongly condemned, it seems to me" [6/8/1856], and says, "I still firmly believe that the relation of master and slave violates no moral law" [10/19/1856]. Yet he saves his greatest ire for Southern secessionism, grousing that "the reckless, insolent brutality of our Southern aristocrats may drive me into abolitionism yet" [5/22/1856], and writing condemnations like, "I believe civilization at the South is retrograde and that the Carolinas are decaying into barbarism" [5/28/1856].
By the close of the decade, Strong had concluded that the United States was now "a sick nation, and I fear it must be worse before it's better. The growing, vigorous North must sooner or later assert its right to equality with the stagnant, semi-barbarous South, and that assertion must bring on a struggle and convulsion. It must come" [12/22/1859].
We can all be glad Strong kept a diary of such darkening days. Absolutely worth reading in the twenty-first century.
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