George Templeton Strong: Civil War Diaries (LOA #396)

A CLASSIC OF CIVIL WAR HISTORY: The Civil War comes alive in this fully restored, 900-page selected edition of the diaries of one of its keenest observers.

Based on the original manuscripts, this new annotated edition vividly captures the impact of the nation's worst conflict on the Northern home front.

George Templeton Strong (1820–1875) was perhaps the most trenchant civilian observer of the experience of the Civil War in the North. His diary, alternating between despair and exultation and punctuated by crises and explosive episodes, unfolds like a brilliant historical novel. Strong was particularly attuned to the shifting moods in the North, to what he called “the great mass of selfishness, frivolity, invincible prejudice and indifference to national life” that hampered the Union war effort. 

His eyewitness accounts—whether of the 1863 Draft Riots, field hospitals teeming with wounded men, or his meetings with leaders such as Grant and Lincoln—are remarkably vivid and suffused with novelistic detail. And while Strong’s reflections on the war and the political situation are valuable because they often reflect “the pulse of public opinion” in the North, as the historian James M. McPherson writes, they also reveal the singular intelligence of an extraordinary writer whose views—above all toward President Lincoln—evolved over the course of the war.

Carefully selected and rigorously faithful to Strong’s handwritten diaries, this Library of America edition presents an entirely new transcription of Strong’s text, superseding the only previous version, published in 1952 and now long out of print.