Professionally, he was a lawyer and he helped run a relief agency for sick and wounded soldiers during the American Civil War. But insofar as George Templeton Strong (1820–1875) is remembered today, it is as a diarist: “the greatest diarist”, as one United States history magazine has called him.
He was a man of “Strong” opinions, in more ways than one. And modelling himself on Samuel Pepys, he recorded these almost daily for 40 years, from the age of 15.
Like Pepys (whose diary lasted a mere decade), he never published them during his lifetime, so his writings were uninhibited by public or legal opinion.
That in part explains why the four volumes that finally made it into print in 1952 are considered one of the most valuable accounts of America’s civil war years of 1861 to 1865, especially – albeit filtered through the jaundiced eye of a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant New Yorker.
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It may also explain, if not excuse, his frequent contemptuous references to the Irish, then arriving on the shores of Manhattan in large numbers. A running theme throughout, it reached heights of apoplexy during the “Draft Riots” of July 1863.
That, it’s fair to say, was not a high point in the history of the Hibernian diaspora. Poor New Yorkers in general, but the Irish in particular, had been enraged by a law that made all men of fighting age liable to conscription, except the rich, who could legally pay a substitute $300 to take their place.
Combined with the usual wartime rise in living costs and fear of low-wage competition from the same African-Americans they were helping liberate, it provoked several days of fierce rioting.
Some of the violence was Irish on Irish (the police were mostly emigrants). But the main targets were black people, many of whom were killed or injured, with thousands displaced.
Here, in his entry for July 13th, 1863, Strong describes one mob: “A posse of perhaps 500, certainly less than one thousand, of the lowest Irish day labourers. Every brute in the drove was pure Celtic – hod-carrier and loafer.”
As for their wives and mothers: “The fury of the low Irish women in that region was noteworthy. Stalwart young vixens and withered old hags were swarming everywhere, all cursing the bloody draft and egging on their men to mischief.”
A week later, Strong was declaring himself “sorry to find that England is right about the lower class of Irish. They are brutal, base, cruel, cowards, and as insolent as base”.
He went on: “No wonder St Patrick drove all the venomous vermin out of Ireland! Its biped mammalia supply that island its full average share of creatures that crawl and eat dirt and poison every community they infest. Vipers were superfluous. But my own theory is that St Patrick’s campaign against the snakes is a Popish delusion. They perished of biting the Irish people.”
By the end of that week, he was speculating about the revival of “Know-Nothingism”, the nativist political movement.
He concluded, however: “A mere anti-Hibernian party would have no foundation on principle … and would lead to no lasting result, I fear. For myself, personally, I would like to see war made on Irish scum as in 1688.”
In fairness, Strong’s xenophobia was not confined to people from Ireland. He was an almost equal-opportunities insulter of ethnic minorities. The same American Heritage magazine that (in 1988) called him “the greatest diarist” summed up the broad-mindedness of his hatreds:
“His antipathies … make up an enormous and various list. They include the Irish – usually described as filthy, bestial and drunken – and any of the Mediterranean immigrants. ‘A dirty Irishman is bad enough’, the 18-year-old diarist noted in 1838, ‘but he’s nothing comparable to a nasty French or Italian loafer’," it stated.
“The French speak a ‘dirty dialect’ and Paris is ‘a maleficent blowhole of poisonous gas’. ‘We certainly do not want these bloodthirsty little blackmuzzled Cubans as fellow citizens’, he exclaims in 1873, and he is glad that the Latin requirement will keep the ‘little scrubs (German Jew boys mostly)’ out of the Columbia law school.
“Add to this list spiritualists, abolitionists (until 1860), organ grinders, Yankees (with significant exceptions), politicians, mosquitoes, Unitarians, Southerners, Democrats and transcendentalists together with assorted ‘spooneys’, ‘loafers’, ‘blackguards’ and ‘snobs’ (Strong’s favorite epithets of abuse) and you have a fair sample of his dislikes.”
But even with all its abuse, historians such as the one who wrote that article value the vividness and detail of Strong’s portrait of mid-19th century America at war, recorded sometimes at his own expense.
We also know from the diaries, for example, that inflation applied even to the cost of draft-dodging. A year after the riots, in August 1864, Strong records how he had bought a substitute of “a big ‘Dutch’ boy of 20 or thereabouts, for the moderate consideration of $1,100”.
That “moderate” was a joke, clearly. But he justified the high price by a temporary illness that made it a risk to leave his draft status unsettled. Having expensively escaped the lottery, he lamented: “Thus do we approach the almshouse at an accelerating rate of speed.”
