What do we mean when we describe someone as a “good citizen”? At the end of The Age of Innocence (1920), Edith Wharton skips forward from her 1870s setting to give us an early-twentieth-century glimpse of her protagonist Newland Archer. He’s now fifty-seven, though Wharton is so deliberately fuzzy about dates that it’s impossible to say just when he was born or to settle on a year for these last pages. The book’s references to real-world events don’t provide anything like a consistent timeline, but he’s apparently in his middle or late twenties when the novel opens “on a January evening of the early seventies,” old enough to have already had a grown-up love affair and to have established himself in the law. He is maybe old enough to have fought in the Civil War, a war that in this novel Wharton doesn’t mention at all. Still, in those later decades he has indeed become what the men and women of his day “were beginning to call ‘a good citizen.’… For many years past, every new movement, philanthropic, municipal, or artistic, had taken account of his opinion and wanted his name.” He has helped to reorganize the Metropolitan Museum and to build the New York Public Library. Founding a “school for crippled children,” setting up a chamber music society, starting the Grolier Club—the man seems as if born to become a trustee.

It has been a richer life than “the narrow groove of money-making, sport and society” for which his generation was raised, and in Wharton’s eyes that sense of civic responsibility makes Archer a new kind of man. But I’m not so sure she’s right about that. It wasn’t new. Her parents’ house was on West 23rd Street, just past where the Flatiron Building now stands, and only a few blocks away, on East 21st and the north side of Gramercy Park, there lived a longtime family acquaintance named George Templeton Strong. Born in 1820, he too was a lawyer and spent much of his professional life on Wall Street, working in an atmosphere of rents, real estate, and red tape that recalls the world of Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853). He represented banks and insurance companies and drew up the will for the woman New York society knew as “the Mrs. Astor.” He was also a long-serving vestry man at Trinity Church, on the board of Columbia College and one of the founders of its law school, an early supporter of the New York Philharmonic, a member—like Archer—of the Century Association, and in 1863, at the height of the Civil War, an organizer of the Union League Club of New York. Membership there had political as well as social requirements. Much of the city’s governing and financial elite saw the profits in cotton and wanted to make a deal with the Confederacy; they would let the seceding slave states go and get back to business as usual. The Union League, in contrast, was for those who could demonstrate their commitment to the national cause, and its clubhouse quickly became a place to get the latest news from the Southern battlefields.

The Union League was an outgrowth of Strong’s actual war work, the work that really did make him a good citizen. He could run a meeting, and he could also be trusted with other people’s money. In 1861 he was asked to become the treasurer of the United States Sanitary Commission, a New York–based relief organization that over the next four years raised up to $25 million in the currency of the day for war-related medical supplies and personnel. Some of its efforts concerned sanitation itself, with inspections to ensure the proper digging of latrines in camps and the adequate ventilation of disease-ridden wards. Much more went into the purchase and provision of bandages, clothing, food—“curried cabbage” for scurvy—and drugs. The commission also hired doctors and nurses, financed entire hospitals, some of them on ships, and then nursing homes for disabled soldiers: anything that the army’s overstretched medical service might need.

The members of its executive committee were all unpaid volunteers—Frederick Law Olmsted was another of them—but for more than four years they met almost daily in New York, along with frequent trips to Washington, and Strong went to the front lines in Virginia and Maryland as well. He was at the Antietam battlefield immediately after the fighting ended, with the money to fund whatever the surgeons needed. And the commission also had its own battles with the army, whose medical corps was all too apt to function on the basis of seniority rather than competence. Lincoln trusted the commission; his bullheaded war secretary Edwin Stanton did not and at times looked ready to shut it down. But it lasted until the conflict’s end and stands as a forerunner of the American Red Cross.

That was Strong’s war, that skillful management of money, but at the start of the fighting he was also drilling in Manhattan with a volunteer unit. His eyesight would have kept him from being an effective soldier, though after the draft began in 1863 he found himself in the “shady” business of hunting for a paid substitute in case his name was called. He got “a big ‘Dutch’ boy of 20 or thereabouts,” and offered at least double the going rate. We know this because for the entirety of his adult life he kept a diary, whose thousands of manuscript pages are now in the collections of the New York Historical. Its entries are often self-critical, but Strong was too confident, too sure of his place in the world, to be deeply introspective. Instead he looks outward, at the news of the day: reports about the level of street crime or ships missing at sea, accounts of musical performances, Dickensian tales of tumbledown buildings, and later the war itself.

The diary has never been published in its entirety, but Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas edited a four-volume selection in the 1950s whose third book covers roughly the same period as Geoff Wisner’s new Library of America edition. Nevins and Thomas both begin and end earlier, closing just after Lincoln’s assassination but including Strong’s full and suspenseful account of the 1860 presidential campaign. Wisner’s selection starts only a few days before the election but runs to the end of 1865, when Strong already saw that Reconstruction wasn’t going to go as well as he had hoped and that the white South was doing its damnedest to restore something as close to slavery as possible. It offers a more detailed record of the war, but at the expense of some passages about other parts of Strong’s life that suggest why he’s such an intriguing figure for anyone trying to understand the nineteenth-century city, the old New York that Wharton both loved and fled.

I must have heard of Strong while watching the initial 1990 broadcast of Ken Burns’s The Civil War, in which some passages from his diary were read in suitably patrician tones by George Plimpton. But it didn’t stick, it was just one of many names I hadn’t known before, and it registered only when I read the Library of America’s The Civil War: The First Year Told by Those Who Lived It (2011). Three pieces from his diary were reprinted there, with more in the later installments of that four-volume series, and though he was far from the battlefield what immediately struck me was the quick vivacity of his prose. The second of those excerpts concerned the beginning of the war, with the Confederacy’s attack on Fort Sumter in Charleston’s harbor—not the cannon fire but rather the atmosphere of rumor, confusion, alarm, and at times exhilaration in which Strong’s New York tried to follow the news. Here he is, in Wisner’s edition, on April 12, 1861, a Friday:

War has begun—unless my Extra Herald lies—

….Walked up town with Gouv: Ogden & that wooden headed Dunscomb. The streets were vocal with newsboys—“Extry-a-Herald! Got the Bombardment of Fort Sumter!!”

We concluded it was probably a sell and that we would not be sold, & declined all invitations to purchase for about four blocks. But we could not stand it longer—I sacrificed sixpence & read the news to Ogden—& that galvanized pumpkin Mr D. by the light of a corner gas lamp.

Poor Dunscomb is identified as one William E. in the index; he apparently served with Strong at Trinity Church, and a later entry describes him as “prosing [on] at the zero point of absolute stolidity.” The guns had opened at 4:30 that morning, and the word had reached New York by telegram; bulletins from the eastern battlefields arrived quickly throughout the war, sometimes so quickly that the first reports had to be corrected by later blasts of Morse code. With Sumter the news was accurate enough, though Strong also wrote that he could “hardly hope that the Rebels have been so foolish & thoughtless as to take the initiative in Civil War & bring matters to a Crisis.”

Two days later came definitive news of the fort’s surrender, and Strong told himself that now the North’s backbone and resolve had been strengthened, that it was finally time to call the bluff of a region given to “brag & lying.” Surely the South couldn’t really want a war? He thought Lincoln’s call for troops must inevitably make the whole idea of the Confederacy crumble, and he believed that in any case Virginia would stay with the Union. It didn’t, and on May 4 he already had to write differently: the new “levies are very raw—the rebel commanders have the energy & freshness that belongs to revolutionary leaders. I have a foreboding that the campaign will begin with defeat and disaster.”

So it proved. A few months later, on Friday, July 19, he noted that “we are all waiting breathlessly for news” from a place called Bull Run. He summarizes the initial bulletins—a skirmish, an artillery exchange—but it is all “sketchy & vague,” and he worries that there is no official word at all, even as the papers release extra after extra. Strong didn’t plan for his diary to see print, but he knows that he’s writing for posterity, recording a series of great events as they happen. He knows that there’s a value in capturing the moment-by-moment trickle of information, even as his lawyer’s skepticism makes him distrust anything he hears. “May be so—maybe not,” he writes after reading a Sunday extra about a gunboat encounter near Memphis, and some version of those words appears over and over again in his work. After those first reports from Bull Run he went up to Connecticut for the weekend, and on the morning of Monday, July 22, took the train back to New York. At Stamford he hopped out to grab the latest just-delivered newspaper. Good news, a Union victory, with the enemy falling back from the battlefield in a way that “seems beyond question.” Perhaps too good, and Strong almost immediately found himself expecting “a coldwater douche…before night in the shape of less comfortable intelligence.” Which is exactly what he got, the news of defeat and disaster indeed, “routed—beaten—whipped.”

Strong was right about the war’s early campaigns, and despite his mistakes about Sumter he was usually right about the course of the struggle itself. Just after Lincoln’s election he predicted that disunion would require a “strong government,” one more centralized and powerful than ever before, and that victory in any subsequent civil war would eventually fall to whatever “party…God give[s] a great general.” At the beginning of the war, as he wrote near its end, the South’s generals had been in “deadliest earnest” while “some of ours…were not in earnest at all.”

By 1864, however, the Union army had been “educated & trained by bitter experience,” and he understood that victory depended not merely on the might of Northern industry but on the strategic imagination of its commanders. November 16, 1864:

The air is full of rumors that Sherman has made a grand movement from Atlanta. Nobody knows what or whither. They are severally contradicted, but I shall not be surprised if something important has in fact created them.

Only what? Because Sherman then cut his lines of communication, and it was weeks before anyone in Strong’s world knew anything for sure. Even Grant claimed ignorance; the best the diarist could do was record a few “gleams of light…from Rebel newspapers” and hope that silence didn’t mean disaster.

Still, what worried him above all was the possibility of a premature victory. If a decisive battle came too soon, if the South sued for peace before its total defeat on the battlefield, then the “Constitutional rights claimed for Southern institutions” would be left in place. Slavery would endure, and so whatever its cost in blood the war had to grind on until its cause was abolished, lest it would all need to be done over again. That, however, was a position it took Strong some time to reach, for what he was not always right about was slavery itself. In 1850 he thought that slaveholding was “no sin,” even while arguing that the “policy of upholding the institution, is a very different affair.” He distrusted the abolitionists and thought their reasoning was “false, foolish, [and] wicked”; at the end of the decade he wrote that John Brown “plainly deserves” the gallows but hoped that a Virginia court would find some way of not making him a martyr.

Yet the war changed and even radicalized him. Lincoln’s election sparked such a hysterical response from the slaveholding states that it made him wonder if perhaps the abolitionists were right. Maybe slavery really was just “tyranny & robbery” and its supporters nothing more than a “club of thieves.” In many ways he moved with the president himself, and in January 1863 he welcomed the Emancipation Proclamation as a great act of “Repentance & Restitution.” He carefully followed the progress of the Union’s first regiments of Black soldiers, and on an 1864 visit to the Virginia front he noted down Grant’s judgment: “The black troops fight well—& make no prisoners. ‘Don’t know how it is—we have made no enquiry.’” Strong never lost the feeling that he was saying something “rather reckless & audacious” whenever he called himself an abolitionist, but that was what he became, and he admired Lincoln’s second inaugural address as “most fresh & real & unconventional…. I would give a good deal to know what estimate will be put on it ten—or fifty—years hence.”

Nothing about the war so outraged him as those moments when it came to New York. The most dangerous of them was in November 1864, when a group of Confederate saboteurs crossed down from Canada and tried to set fire to the city’s hotels. But the most troubling were the draft riots of July 1863. Street gangs of Irish immigrants, allied with and encouraged by the Democratic machine of Tammany Hall, used the newly instituted military draft as an excuse for an attack on the city’s Black residents. An orphanage for Black children was burned down, along with two churches; there has never been an accurate count of the dead, and troops had to be pulled from the post-Gettysburg pursuit of Robert E. Lee to restore order. Strong’s account of the riots provides one of the most extended bits of narrative in the entirety of his diary. On July 13 a crowd gathered in front of a few Lexington Avenue tenement buildings, and to his eyes

the rabble was perfectly homogeneous. Every brute in the drove was pure Keltic—hod-carrier or loafer…. Nobody could tell why these houses were singled out. Some said a drafting officer lived in one of them, others that a damaged policeman had taken refuge there. The mob was in no hurry: they had no need to be: there was no one to molest them or make them afraid.

Rumor once more, the hum and buzz of speculation. That was what the city lived on, and throughout the riot’s long hours Strong wondered at the weakness and delay of the government response; clearly someone favored an attack on the federal authorities, but who?

The other thing his account of the riots provides is a clear statement of his prejudices. Loafer and brute: he had all the anti-Irish bias of his class and also continued to use racial epithets even as his belief in abolition grew. Yet the most frequent targets of his invective were white Southerners. He saw the South as a region without any sense of true honor, but then “why should we be surprised?” Strong knew about the sexual practices of many Southern slave owners and thought that little but treason could be expected from men who “flog their women, & sell their children.”

In the 1850s Strong tried hashish, went to picture galleries, read new books—Stowe’s Dred, Thackeray’s Henry Esmond—and above all listened to music. He was so assiduous a concertgoer that the musicologist Vera Brodsky Lawrence used his diary as her starting point in Strong on Music, her three-volume history of New York’s midcentury musical life. All that makes me doubt some of the choices Wisner has made in his edition. Nevins and Thomas give full weight to the range of Strong’s cultural interests, Wisner almost none, and his textual note does little to explain why. I recognize the limitations of space, and recognize too that the demands of Strong’s war work gave him less time to listen or to read. But comparing the two editions shows what’s missing. Nevins and Thomas include an entry for October 25, 1862, that begins with Strong noting an afternoon spent at a Philharmonic rehearsal of Beethoven’s Second Symphony,

one of the two that I know little if at all. I think I had never heard it. Expected little, but it turns out to be a very noble symphony, and for one hour I forgot all about the war and the Sanitary Commission, and was conscious of nothing but the marvelous web of melodic harmony and pungent orchestral color that was slowly unfolding.

And that evening he went on to a French opera in an “ill-ventilated little theatre.” Wisner provides no entry at all for that date, and elsewhere he cuts back on Strong’s record of the city’s gossip; the result makes the writer a less interesting man than he was in that earlier edition.

Either version of the diary will, however, serve to answer a question. “The real war will never get in the books.” So Walt Whitman wrote in the reworked passages from his own journal that he called Specimen Days (1882), in which he offered his testament to the suffering of those years, his record of his work as a volunteer in the Union hospitals around Washington. Some of those facilities must have benefited from Strong’s efforts as well, though it’s likely that the two never met or even heard of each other. They were almost exact contemporaries, but their New Yorks were very different places, and Strong’s death in 1875 came just at the start of the poet’s rise to late-life fame. Probably they wouldn’t have liked each other. They had almost nothing in common beyond their shared admiration for Lincoln, which came immediately for Whitman and for Strong grew by the month, after he put off his finicky dislike of the president’s spoken grammar. Nevertheless his diary stands as one response to the question raised by Whitman’s claim: Just how will the war get into the books?

One way to look at that statement is to recognize the inadequacy of language, any language, to the representation of war’s physical sensations, to blood, terror, and bullet-ripped flesh. Another is historically specific: the conventions of nineteenth-century fiction and poetry simply weren’t up to it, not in an age when people admired “The Charge of the Light Brigade.” Antietam and Gettysburg led to nothing like Wilfred Owen’s “Strange Meeting” or “Dulce et Decorum Est.” That limited sense has the paradoxical effect of making Whitman’s claim more interesting and goes a long way toward explaining the peculiar nature of the Civil War’s literary production. For the finest contemporary writing about the war lies in works that in the poet’s time and long after were not meant “for the books,” and indeed were not usually considered literature at all—in speeches and journalism, and especially in letters and diaries.

That was the argument Edmund Wilson made over sixty years ago in Patriotic Gore (1962). I think it still stands, though I’d want to update it; for one thing, Wilson gives no place to the impassioned wartime writing of Frederick Douglass. He barely touches on Whitman and doesn’t mention Strong, even though the Nevins and Thomas edition was available as he wrote. His preferred diarists are all Confederate women, above all the grande dame Mary Chesnut, who wrote from both her South Carolina plantation and the soi-disant capital of Richmond. Her work was published after her death as A Diary from Dixie (1905), but scholars have shown how carefully she molded and revised it in the years after the war; readers now usually turn instead to C. Vann Woodward’s Mary Chesnut’s Civil War (1981), which interleaves that early published version with the often franker pages she left in manuscript.

Wilson looked to diaries for their immediacy, their act of witness both to the times and to the writer’s individual character. They seemed to offer not realism but reality itself, and yet their prose depends on a paradox. We want a diary to be artless, untouched by formal constraints, by the shaping pressure of a plot, its observations the work of the moment. But such pages are only readable if the person writing already has a kind of art—the art, the skill, the native gift, of being interesting. Chesnut did, and yet I like her 1905 version a little less as a diary now that I know how it was put together. With Strong there is no such issue. His journal was the habit of a lifetime, a daily compulsion, and he almost never returned to what he had written. A Diary from Dixie provides the illusion of spontaneity. Strong’s is spontaneity itself, and it suggests something close to an unmediated life, one scribbled down in uncertainty, as it happens and without his knowing how it might all turn out, whether he’s describing a battle, a child’s illness, or the war itself.

The most important Civil War diarists, both North and South, were noncombatants. That’s not surprising. They had the leisure to pick up a pen and didn’t have to struggle as much as a soldier might with the conventions of representation. Some of Strong’s passages are dull: yet another meeting of the Sanitary Commission, with a list of who was present. On most days he simply describes what he’s done, and so there are his regular trips to Wall Street, a dinner at Delmonico’s, or an evening at the Union League; moments of exasperation with his colleagues; worry when his wife, Ellen, goes south as a nurse on a hospital ship; and always an attempt to sift some truth about the war out of what people say in the streets or the clubs. He gives us not only the sense of an enduring crisis but also the feeling of an ongoing quotidian life, the kind of thing that even the best novelists must struggle to achieve.

That’s what good diaries do. That’s what makes them so absorbing, and even the odd bit of dullness serves to ground them in the world. Strong was ever shrewd and often bitterly scathing about others, hot-tempered on the page in a way he probably couldn’t be in person, and until he met Lincoln he had no great belief in anyone’s individual eminence. He had moments of private dissent from the orthodoxies of his class but stayed always just inside them, and for every line I’ve quoted from this representative man I could find a dozen more that seem as acute in their record of the Union’s great cause.

“For one hour I forgot all about the war.” He rarely did. It was “the one great subject of my hopes & fears,” and at its end he felt that he could barely recognize himself from the sudden absence of that long-accustomed anxiety. Afterward he fell back into his “common routine,” Trinity and Columbia, the law and music, too. He remained the very model of a good citizen, and he kept his fascination with each day’s news. The Sanitary Commission saved an untold number of lives, and its fundraising made people at home believe that it was their fight as well. Strong’s work on its behalf gave him a place in the history of his times that lies beyond the record he kept of it. Yet his diary is why he’s remembered. It is the North’s best record of the struggle’s daily passions and woes, and essential reading for any student of the Civil War.