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.

George Templeton Strong (1820–1875) was a New York City lawyer prominent in civic affairs, including long service as a vestryman at Trinity Episcopal Church and as a trustee of his alma mater, Columbia College. During the Civil War he served as treasurer of the United States Sanitary Commission, and in 1863 co-founded New York’s Union League Club. Starting at age 15, he kept a lifelong diary that runs to some 2,250 pages. When first published in a four-volume abridged edition in 1952 it was acclaimed for its vivid observations of nineteenth-century Manhattan and its literary merit, drawing comparisons to celebrated diarists such as Samuel Pepys.

Geoff Wisner, editor, is the editor of, most recently, A Year of Birds: Writings on Birds from the Journal of Henry David Thoreau. His other edited books include Thoreau’s Wildflowers and Thoreau’s Animals. He is the author of A Basket of Leaves: 99 Books That Capture the Spirit of Africa. He earned a degree in English and American Literature from Harvard University, and has written for the Boston Globe, Christian Science Monitor, and the Wall Street Journal.