The Diary appeared to offer verbatim accounts, penned by a long-time Washington insider, of behind-the-scenes discussions at the very highest levels during the greatest crisis the country had yet faced.
[3] Douglas, the leading Northern Democrat who defeated Lincoln in 1858 to retain his Senate seat but who then lost to him in the 1860 presidential election, reached out to his former antagonist as the crisis deepened.
Although his long public career as governor and senator from New York earned him a somewhat undeserved reputation for stigmatizing the South, Seward attempted during the secession winter to find a middle ground that would preserve the peace and hold the Union together.
From its first paragraph to its last, The Diary of a Public Man recounts the twists and turns as two successive presidents, the repudiated James Buchanan and the untested Lincoln, attempted to figure out what to do about Fort Sumter, the besieged federal fortress located on an artificial island at the mouth of Charleston harbor, South Carolina.
Jacques Barzun and Henry F. Graff’s influential reference work, The Modern Researcher, singles out the Diary for presenting the "most gigantic" problem of uncertain authorship in American historical writing.
Historian Frank Maloy Anderson, after spending years in detective work, concluded in 1948 that lobbyist Sam Ward (1814–1884) wrote the Diary, but that its contents were substantially concocted.
Crofts paired with statistician David Holmes to use stylometry, the statistical analysis of literary style, which delivers a verdict that reinforces the case for Hurlbert.
[6][7] Acclaimed as "the most brilliant talent of the New York press" and "the only artist among American journalists", Hurlbert successfully perpetrated one of the most difficult feats of historical license.
His alleged Diary suggested that Northern Democrats, conservative Republicans, and Southern Unionists had acted more responsibly in early 1861 than extreme men on either side, who blindly stumbled into the abyss.
It parallels the work of Mary Chesnut, the observant South Carolinian who transformed skeletal notations made during wartime into something far more polished long after the fact.