Last Friday, author and historian Jeffrey Boutwell delivered a talk in the Visual Art Center’s Beam Classroom on one of the hidden figures in American history: George Boutwell. In his talk, titled “George Boutwell: Redeeming America’s Promise,” Jeffrey Boutwell explained his distant relative’s deep involvement in many of the United States’ key moments, spanning seven decades.

Even though they are related and both came from New England farming families, Jeffrey Boutwell was not aware of George Boutwell’s existence until he was in his 30s.

Buthaina Shukri, Jeffery Boutwell’s wife, commented on the genesis of his book, “Boutwell: Radical Republican & Champion of Democracy.”

“Jeffrey was told later in life that there was an illustrious ancestor in the family history. He didn’t know anything about this guy. So Covid-19 hits … and people have more time on their hands. And he says, ‘You know that essay I wanted to write for my family … I think I’ll write that essay.’ After breakfast one day, he says, ‘I’m going to go back down and work on the book.’ And I said, ‘The book?’ He said, ‘Yeah, I’ve laid out 18 chapters,’” Shukri said.

George Boutwell, throughout his 65 years of public life, was involved with the presidencies of Lincoln, Johnson, Grant and Theodore Roosevelt in various capacities. He also gained a wide range of expertise from domestic policy to law to finance, updating the U.S. legal code during Hayes’ presidency despite never having attended law school.

George Boutwell attended the 1860 convention in Chicago that helped nominate Lincoln for the presidency. He served on the congressional committees in 1866, 1867 and 1868 that wrote the 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution, along with the impeachment committee in the House of Representatives that brought the Articles of Impeachment against Andrew Johnson in 1869.

Between 1869 and 1873, George Boutwell served as Secretary of Treasury for Ulysses S. Grant.

One of George Boutwell’s most significant moments was his speech in the Great War Rally in the summer of 1862, where he declared that the American Civil War was about slavery, rather than the Union. As the second speaker in line, he got widespread press coverage.

“When [George Boutwell] gets up, he misses no words, saying we shall never crush the rebellion until we crush slavery. That’s what he’d been saying before the Civil War. That’s what he said at the World Peace Conference. That’s what he’s saying now,” Jeffrey Boutwell said. Well, that’s quite a revolutionary thing to say in the summer of 1862. Because even Lincoln’s not even saying that [yet]. The war, still in that summer of 1862, is talking about preserving the Union. It’s not about freeing slaves. It’s not about Black equality. It’s only bringing the Union back together, because that’s all that northern whites, or most northern whites, would tolerate … They didn’t want this to be a crusade for Black equality or Black voting rights. But George was an outlier in that respect.”

Later in his life, George Boutwell was also part of the anti-war movement, opposing Theodore Roosevelt’s move to annex the Philippines.

“He’s 80 years old when the Spanish-American War breaks out. People like William James and Andrew Carnegie and Mark Twain and others [came] to George to be the president of the Anti-Imperialist League in 1898, America’s first major public anti-war movement against the opposition and annexation of the Philippines,” Jeffrey Boutwell said. “George served as the president of that for seven years until he died in 1905.”

Despite his achievements, George Boutwell remained relatively unknown to the general public, with Jeffrey Boutwell’s editor explaining to him that he was an “unknown author writing on an unknown subject.” Why was this the case? Jeffrey Boutwell explained that this was a combination of his modest personality and the fact that George Boutwell had been on the “losing side of history.”

“[First, the] Johnson impeachment for many years was viewed as these radical Republicans trying to rewrite American politics by throwing the elected president out of office. It was not kindly seen … up until the 1950s, 60s, 70s … Second, the Grant administration. I mentioned how Grant was excoriated by Boston elites … So George suffered by association,” Boutwell said. “[Third], [his] anti-imperialist campaign, as I mentioned, especially when Teddy Roosevelt came into office … George and William James and Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie were just seen as kind of these old men from the 1800s who were trying to deny America’s manifest destiny on the world stage.”

Attendee Hank Bartholomew ’30 commented on the lecture.

“I was really excited by the fact that Boutwell is someone who hadn’t been talked about, but now finally is,” Batholomew said. “I think that’s really inspiring that these kinds of narratives are finally being brought out, and I think that it is really cool that we’re hearing the stories that we haven’t heard before.”

Hank Bartholomew ’30 is a member of the Bowdoin Orient.