An American Record

THE DIARY OF GEORGE TEMPLETON STRONG (4 vols.; 2,143 pp.)--Edited by Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas--Macmillan '($35).

In 1835 George Templeton Strong, a New York boy of 15, began a diary. In its first few years the diary recorded a gleeful account of student pranks at Columbia, a burlesque of its president's sermon on "The Moral Turpitude of Snow-Balling," a solemn discovery that Shelley's poetry was "rather humbuggical." By the time of Strong's death in 1875, the diary, with a massive total of 4.500,000 words, had become a solid record of 19th century life, a treasure house of Americana.

Diarist Strong belonged to a species of American now almost extinct. He was one of those solid, versatile squires who did their public duty even while suspecting public life, and clung fiercely to a creed of almost fanatical independence. He liked men who worked for themselves, and distrusted both Southern slave owner and Northern capitalist; neither, it seemed to him, could quite be a gentleman. He enjoyed comfort but disdained luxury, prided himself on literary cultivation yet squinted uneasily at intellectuals. He lived, or aspired to live, by the tone and manners of the Founding Fathers.

Unwashed Democracy. Strong's mind was not brilliant. He wrote bigoted gibes at almost every racial group, but with muscular directness he chronicled the feverish, unpredictable growth of New York. He reported political meetings, flicking a patrician's flinty adjective at the "unwashed democracy." He graphically described the famous crimes of his day, the publicity feats of P. T. Barnum. the burning of New York's Crystal Palace, the laying of the Atlantic Cable.

Even while running a busy law firm. Strong kept an attentive eye on the arts. His diary provides an informal cultural history of 19th century New York, written from the viewpoint of an enlightened conservative. It is crammed with shrewd comments on the music of Beethoven ("the Byron of Musicians") and Mozart ("the king of Melody"), brightened by impromptu reviews of Jenny Lind's singing ("marvelously executed") and Edwin Booth's acting ("carefully studied"). Strong found time to read the classics of his day as they appeared, and appraised them with instinctive good sense.

Old Fossil. Few of his contemporaries won his affection, fewer still his awe. President Buchanan he labeled "Old Pennsylvania Fossil." Andrew Jackson, he noted, had done the U.S. "more harm than any man who ever lived in it. unless it may have been Tom Jefferson." Boss Tweed he crowned "His Scoundrelism."

During the 1850's Strong denounced the Abolitionists and remained untroubled by the hanging of John Brown. Like many another Northerner, he rallied to Lincoln not because he hated slavery but because he loved the Union. He had hoped for compromise, but once he became convinced that the South meant to secede, his pages blazed with patriotic clamor and invective against the rebels.

During the Civil War Strong served on the Sanitary Commission, a volunteer agency which did notable work in caring for wounded men and reforming the Army's ramshackle medical system. Yet he found time to make almost daily entries in his diary, charting the fluctuations of battle and of Northern morale, worrying over the Northern leadership, berating profiteers and compromisers.

It is in the rich pages devoted to the war years that Strong's diary reaches its climax. His jeremiads against Northern politicians, his shrewd portraits of the hesitant McClellan, the mediocre Burnside and the tough-skinned Grant, his succinct and often masterful summaries of battles that had taken place a few days before--all these make his diary a major work of contemporary history.

Nothing in that diary is more moving than the record of Strong's slowly changing attitude toward Lincoln. At first, he mistrusted a presidential candidate whose main claim to office seemed "the fact that he split rails when he was a boy." Later he ranted against the evacuation of Fort Sumter: "The bird of our country is a debilitated chicken, disguised in eagle feathers." But once the war began in earnest, he was quick to sense Lincoln's rare qualities and wrote of him with affection.

Old Codger. When the Sanitary Commission visited Lincoln, Strong found him "a barbarian, Scythian, yahoo, or gorilla in respect of outside polish," but also a man of "evident integrity and simplicity of purpose." From this visit Strong brought back a fine Lincoln story. Strong had asked Lincoln to pardon an imprisoned man. The papers for a pardon, replied Lincoln, "must be referred to the Attorney-General, but I guess it will be all right, for me and the Attorney-General's very chicken-hearted."

Like Fenimore Cooper, Strong was something of the professional old codger, the cultured curmudgeon who stands in fierce, often prejudiced judgment on his age. At times, as when he declares Americans "the windiest people extant" and deplores the inclination of democracies to undervalue great men, he resembles Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America). And when he lambastes his native land for coarse materialism and imperialist forays ("Texas is annexed. I think I'll expatriate myself"), he anticipates Henry Adams. But what makes his diary good reading for Americans is its reflection of an individual mind which, for all its excesses and limitations, is unslackingly honest.

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