A Secession Crisis Enigma

My fifth book, A Secession Crisis Enigma: William Henry Hurlbert and “The Diary of a Public Man” (Louisiana State University Press, April 2010) offers a fresh contribution to my field of specialization, the political crisis that led to war. “The Diary of a Public Man,” published anonymously in several installments in the North American Review in 1879, claimed to offer verbatim accounts of secret conversations with Abraham Lincoln, William H. Seward, and Stephen A. Douglas—among others—in the desperate weeks just before the start of the Civil War. Despite repeated attempts to decipher the Diary, historians never have been able to pinpoint its author or determine its authenticity. A Secession Crisis Enigma solves these longstanding mysteries. It identifies the author, unravels the intriguing story behind the Diary, and deftly establishes its contents as largely genuine.

The Diary was not a diary at all but a memoir, probably written shortly before it appeared in print. The mastermind who created it, New York journalist William Henry Hurlbert (1827–1895), successfully perpetrated one of the most difficult feats of historical license—he pretended to have been a diarist who never existed. But Hurlbert’s work was far from fictional. Time after time, the Diary introduces material virtually impossible to fabricate along with previously concealed information that was corroborated only after its publication. The Diary bristles with precise details regarding the struggle to shape Lincoln’s cabinet and the composition of his inaugural address. A Secession Crisis Enigma, which includes a full text of the Diary in an appendix, offers a bold new perspective on the frantic scramble to reverse southern secession while avoiding the abyss of war. Hurlbert, a long-forgotten eccentric genius, emerges vividly here. Part detective story, part biography, and part a detailed narrative of events in early 1861, this book presents a compelling answer to an enduring mystery and brings “The Diary of a Public Man” back into the historical lexicon.

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Reviews of A Secession Crisis Enigma

"Dan Crofts must have had a wonderful time researching and writing this book. How could it not be fun to solve what Jacques Barzun and Henry Graf called “the ‘most gigantic’ problem of uncertain authorship in American historical writing”?" —Charles B. Dew in Civil War Book Review

“A Secession Crisis Enigma introduces to modern readers a compelling nineteenth-century historical literary mystery, once celebrated but now long forgotten, unraveled in these pages by a master historian. In command of a vast array of sources that he weighs and sifts with uncanny precision, Daniel Crofts brings to life again a talented rogue of journalistic genius, William Henry Hurlbert.”—Nelson D. Lankford, author of Cry Havoc! The Crooked Road to Civil War, 1861

“Dan Crofts’s new book adds to his high standing as an historian of disunion. The volume gives more credibility to that mixture of fact and fancy, ‘The Diary of a Public Man,’ and more visibility to its fantastic likely author, William Henry Hurlbert. The doubled effect heightens the color and uncertainty of the epic secession moment.”—William W. Freehling, author of The Road to Disunion: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854–1861

“Daniel W. Crofts has finally solved a mystery that has bedeviled historians for well over a century. With a clear and engaging style and incisive analysis he illuminates the origins and nature of the anonymous “diary” whose insider stories generations of scholars have mined for valuable information even as they decried it as a fraud. As well as being captivating reading in its own right, this book is essential for anyone – scholar or otherwise – interested in the dramatic national crisis that culminated in civil war.”—Russell McClintock, author of Lincoln and the Decision for War: The Northern Response to Secession

“Daniel Crofts takes on an intriguing historiographical mystery with which scholars have wrestled for decades and solves it quite convincingly. . . Most significantly, he offers fresh insights into the crucial series of decisions that ultimately led to war in 1861—the crisis surrounding Fort Sumter.” —John C. Inscoe, Tennessee Historical Quarterly