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: Radical Republican and Champion of Democracy (W.W. Norton & Company, 2025) 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.
Upcoming Author Interview
The books author Jeffrey Boutwell will join the Gilder Lehrman Institute‘s Book Breaks on Sunday, June 22, 2025 at 2 pm ET to discuss his book.
Jeffrey Boutwell is an author and public policy specialist. He shares a common ancestor with George S. Boutwell: the indentured servant James Boutwell, who emigrated from England in the seventeenth century.
You can register for the online Zoom event here.
Middle and high school students are encouraged to submit a question for our Book Breaks historians. If your question is chosen, it will be announced live on the program and you and your parent or teacher will each receive a $50 gift certificate to the Gilder Lehrman Gift Shop.
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