George Templeton Strong

• 1. Introduction

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  George Templeton Strong was fifteen years old on the 5th of October 1835, when he began a diary in New York City. He kept it going almost every day for nearly forty years. The finished work runs to 2,250 pages. Its author was a lawyer and an amateur musician who never held a significant civic office and never had special influence. Yet historians now read him closely, and film audiences have heard his words. What did this private citizen choose to record, and why does anyone still read him?

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• 2. Franklin Street Beginnings

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  At 50 Franklin Street in New York City, George Templeton Strong was born on the 26th of January 1820. He received his early schooling at Columbia Grammar School, which is now called Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School. In 1838 he graduated from Columbia College with high honors, and he served as president of the Philolexian Society.

  That same year he joined his father's law practice. The business later became Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft, and today it is described as the nation's oldest operating law firm.

  In 1853 Columbia College elected Strong a trustee. He also served for many years as a vestryman at Trinity Church on Wall Street, a prominent Episcopal congregation. The wedding that anchored his private life came ten years after his graduation, at Grace Church.

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• 3. A Musical Household

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  On the 15th of May 1848, Strong married Ellen Ruggles at Grace Church in New York. Ellen was a gifted amateur singer and the daughter of Samuel B. Ruggles. The couple went on to have three children.

  Music filled the family's life, and both husband and wife performed as amateurs. Strong served as president of the New York Philharmonic Society for several years.

  Their son, also named George Templeton Strong, lived from 1856 to 1948 and became a noted Romantic composer and painter. The younger Strong was estranged from his father at an early age. In the late nineteenth century he moved to Switzerland, where he did most of his work. He is nevertheless generally considered an American artist.

  The Civil War would soon call on both of the elder Strongs in ways that had little to do with music.

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• 4. Sanitary Commission Years

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  Among the wartime organizations Strong helped found was the United States Sanitary Commission. Its purpose was to ease the suffering of wounded soldiers during the American Civil War. Strong served as its treasurer and sat on its executive committee throughout the conflict. Historians credit him with distinguished service there.

  He also helped start the Union League Club of New York. The club pledged to "cultivate a profound national devotion." It offered a route for bringing white and Black Southerners into the Republican Party.

  Strong paid for a Union Army regiment out of his own means. His wife Ellen served on a hospital ship. One kind of service, however, he arranged to avoid.

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• 5. Buying a Substitute

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  The Enrollment Act of 1863 contained a section that let a drafted man pay $300 for a substitute to serve in his place. Strong took advantage of that provision and so avoided military service.

  In 1863 the sum was a healthy one, but it did not stay the going rate. By 1864 Strong paid $1,100, more than three times as much. The man who took his place was, in Strong's words, a "big 'Dutch' boy of about twenty." Strong called him his "alter ego."

  That payment sits inside a much longer record, begun nearly thirty years earlier.

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• 6. A Careful Follower

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  The historian Paula Baker has called Strong "perhaps the northern equivalent of South Carolina's Mary Chesnut: quotable, opinionated, and a careful follower of events." Chesnut kept a famous diary from the Confederate side. Strong played a parallel role for the North.

  His pages cover 1835 to 1875. They follow the turbulent years leading up to the American Civil War and the war itself. They continue into the corrupt and turbulent years in New York after it.

  Strong was a well-placed civic leader, very well known in New York City. The record is plain, though, that he never occupied any significant civic position and had no special influence. His value lies in watching closely, not in steering events.

  He died on the 21st of July 1875, and the diary's long afterlife began only later.

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• 7. Afterlife of the Diary

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  Sometime in the 1930s, Strong's diary was discovered. It now rests in the collections of the New-York Historical Society.

  In 1990 excerpts reached a huge audience through Ken Burns's documentary The Civil War. Ric Burns's New York: A Documentary Film also drew on the diary, with the writer George Plimpton reading Strong's words.

  In 1952 extensive selections were published in four volumes. Those volumes remain of interest to historians of New York City, as well as to bibliographic collectors.

  In January 2026 the Library of America published a new one-volume annotated edition. It focuses on the Civil War-period entries, giving today's listener a fresh way into the diary's war years.

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