There the precocious sixteen-year-old came under the influence of his half brother, Stephen Augustus Hurlbut, an aspiring lawyer and politician who was over a decade William's senior.
Stephen—who later moved to Illinois, became an ally of Abraham Lincoln’s, and served as a Union general during the Civil War—was attempting in the early 1840s to carve out a niche in Charleston society.
His personal charm, his gifts as a linguist, and his ability of “acquiring knowledge as if by magic” enabled him to pass easily as “a Frenchman in France, an Italian in Italy, [and] a Spaniard in Spanish countries.”[6] He served a brief stint as a Unitarian minister in Salem, Massachusetts, where he was said to be “extremely popular and very much admired as a preacher.”[7] An intellectual and social prodigy, Hurlbert wrote with flair and found that he could make a good living with his pen.
There he promptly displayed “those talents for which he became remarkable”—“quickness of perception, vividness of ideas, brilliancy of style,” and the “great art” of “writing for the press.”[8] His “style and scholarship” were easily recognized and instantly “attracted attention.” He was “au courant with the transpiring of events abroad and at home;” he had historical perspective; and he was “extremely ready” with “rapid comment” when writing against a deadline about late-breaking news.
Hurlbert, who feared that the election of a Republican president would create dangerous repercussions in the South, favored Stephen A. Douglas, Lincoln’s Democratic rival.
He, Marble, and two other talented journalists, Ivory Chamberlain and David Goodman Croly, made the World the most influential Democratic newspaper in the city and a kingmaker in national politics.
In Benson’s view, Hurlbert had a gift for capturing the cadences of “human speech.” His style had “sweep and dash.” His “alliterative phrases” and “rich fund of expression” enabled him to make “the gravest and heaviest” political subjects come instantly alive.
Benson admitted that he disliked Hurlbert's politics: The historian of the American press will have to say that while the slave was lifting his shackled hands to the North, and the land was agitated with a great moral and political question; while the men of justice and benevolence were sweating with the task of emancipation, and our armies were in the bleeding shock of battle, the most brilliant talent of the New York press was used to persifle the liberators of the slave and the chief saviours of the Republic.
With “cold irony and princely disdain” but always in “the best of humor,” Hurlbert satirized the “moral element” that occupied such a central position in American and English culture.
In early 1883, Gould threatened to sell the World, but Hurlbert asked for a reprieve while attempting to put it “on a paying basis.” He fired many editors and reporters, but did not succeed for long in staving off the inevitable.
It claimed to offer verbatim accounts of secret conversations between a long-time Washington insider and Stephen A. Douglas, William H. Seward, and Abraham Lincoln himself—among others—in the desperate weeks just before the start of the Civil War.
Frank Maloy Anderson, writing in 1948, concluded that Gilded Age lobbyist Sam Ward (1814–1884) wrote the Diary, but that its contents were substantially concocted.
Crofts also paired with statistician David Holmes to use stylometry, the statistical analysis of literary style, which delivers a verdict that reinforces the case for Hurlbert.
It contains precise details regarding the struggle to shape Lincoln's cabinet, the composition of his inaugural address, and the secret negotiations between Seward and anti-secession leaders in Virginia.
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.
[17] Just as Hurlbert was surreptitiously creating the Diary, he also spearheaded the campaign to move a 3,500-year-old obelisk, “Cleopatra's Needle,” from the Egyptian port of Alexandria to New York City's Central Park, where it stands today on Greywecke Knoll, not far from the Metropolitan Museum of Art.