Summer Author Series
Author Jeffrey H. Boutwell, Ph.D. | Boutwell: Radical Republican and Champion of Democracy
Join us in the Scudder Family Center for Civic Engagement at the JFK Hyannis Museum for an enlightening discussion with Jeffrey H. Boutwell, Ph.D., author, historian, and speaker, as he discusses his book “Boutwell: Radical Republican and Champion of Democracy – a Biography of George S. Boutwell“. This book is the first major biography of the statesman who fought for racial and economic equality alongside Presidents Lincoln and Grant.
Boutwell writes about an ancestor, George S. Boutwell . . . the most consequential American political figure you’ve never heard of . . . Governor of Massachusetts, a member of Congress, Treasury Secretary for Ulysses S. Grant and Commissioner of Internal Revenue for Abraham Lincoln, he helped create the Republican Party in the 1850s. 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.
Don’t miss this opportunity to gain insight into a defining era of Save American history and the man who helped shape it.
Book signing to follow the event.
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About the Book
During his seven-decade career in public life, George Sewall Boutwell sought to “redeem America’s promise” of racial equality, economic equity, and the principled use of American power abroad. From 1840 to 1905, Boutwell was at the center of efforts to abolish slavery, establish the Republican Party, assist President Lincoln in funding the Union war effort, facilitate Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, impeach President Andrew Johnson, and frame and enact the Fourteenth and Fifteenth civil rights amendments. He helped lay the foundations of the modern American economy with President Grant, investigated white terrorism in Mississippi in the 1870s, and opposed American imperialism following the Spanish-American War alongside Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, and Booker T. Washington. The son of a Massachusetts farming family of modest means, George Boutwell would do battle during his career with American political royalty, including Henry Cabot Lodge and Teddy Roosevelt.
The first major biography of an important public figure who has long been hiding in plain sight, Boutwell is as much a history of nineteenth-century US politics as it is a critique of the failures of governance during a turbulent and formative period in American history.
About the Author
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.