Jeffrey H. Boutwell - Author, Historian & Speaker

George S. Boutwell

George S. Boutwell is the most consequential American political figure you've never heard of. During his career from 1839 to 1905, he was Governor of Massachusetts, served in the U.S. House and Senate, was Treasury Secretary for Ulysses Grant and Commissioner of Internal Revenue for Abraham Lincoln, helped create the Republican Party in the 1850s, and challenged the efforts of Presidents McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt to annex the Philippines in 1900 following the Spanish-American war. He was instrumental in framing the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, initiating the impeachment of Andrew Johnson, and investigating white vigilante violence against Blacks in Mississippi in the 1870s. For seven decades, George Boutwell sought to "redeem America's promise" through racial equality, economic equity, and the humane use of American power abroad.

...the most consequential American political figure you've never heard of...

Kirkus Reviews calls BOUTWELL a "spirited biography" and "welcome introduction" to an overlooked figure in 19th-century American history.

Richly contextualized and painstakingly researched, BOUTWELL is a classic political biography, a powerful and timely reminder that while personality may win the day, character makes a legacy.

Megan Marshall

Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Margaret Fuller: A New American Life

Boutwell the man was a hero, and BOUTWELL the book is a revelation, a gripping tale of how Americans struggled to make the promise of equality into something more than mere words.

Kermit Roosevelt

Author of The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story

A militant opponent of slavery, racial discrimination, and imperial overreach, George Boutwell has been neglected by historians but, thanks to this book, is no longer consigned to the shadowy sidelines of history.

Michael Burlingame

Prize-winning author of the two-volume Abraham Lincoln: A Life

Taking readers from the antebellum era through the Civil War, into Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, BOUTWELL provides an insider’s view of the pivotal moments that laid the groundwork for modern America.

Jonathan W. White

Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize-winning author of A House Built By Slaves: African American Visitors to the Lincoln White House

A thoroughly absorbing cultural biography of… a man who did what he could to create a better, more equitable America.

Robert S. Levine

Author of The Failed Promise: Reconstruction, Frederick Douglass, and the Impeachment of Andrew Johnson

George S. Boutwell emerges from these pages as an effective political leader, a dedicated and creative public servant, and, above all, a steadfast paladin of freedom, equality, and democracy.

Charles W. Calhoun

Author of The Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant

Farmer, governor, congressman, senator, and cabinet member George Boutwell deserves to be remembered, flaws and all, as one of America’s greatest champions of human rights.

Edward Achorn

Author of The Lincoln Miracle: Inside the Republican Convention That Changed History

George Boutwell, one of the central political characters of his age, whose story charts the whole arc of the party of Lincoln, is at last brought vividly and brilliantly back to life – with vital lessons for our time about what it takes to defend democracy.

Sidney Blumenthal

Author of All the Powers of Earth: The Political Life of Abraham Lincoln, 1856-1860

Jeffrey Boutwell

Jeffrey Boutwell is a writer, historian, and science policy specialist living in Columbia, Maryland, after a 40-year career in journalism, government and with international scientific research organizations. He has written and spoken widely on issues ranging from nuclear weapons arms control to Middle East peace to environmental degradation and conflict. He's passionate about Shakespeare, Alpine skiing, improving US-Cuba relations, and road trips in his Mini Cooper. Jeffrey and George share a common ancestor, the indentured servant James Boutwell who emigrated in 1632 from England to Salem, Mass.

Despite living in Maryland, Jeffrey insists

he's still a Red Sox fan, honest!