Gossip, 1885: George S. Boutwell Writes Home About Washington Politics

Brian Bixby

Recently, I had the delightful opportunity to read some letters that hadn’t been seen in at least eighty years. The letters were full of interesting political stories from the Washington, D.C. of the 1880s. And

Photograph of George S. Boutwell by Matthew Brady.

they were written by a man whose political career helped shape the nation during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

The man’s name is George S. Boutwell (1818–1905). Haven’t heard of him? You should have. If you pay income taxes, you can thank Boutwell, who was the first commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service in 1862. He then went on to Congress, where he helped write the Fourteenth Amendment, guaranteeing citizenship to the former slaves. After serving as a member of the House committee to impeach President Andrew Johnson in 1868, he went on to become President Grant’s secretary of the treasury, where he helped break the Gold Ring, a currency conspiracy, in 1869.

After he lost reelection to the U.S. Senate in 1877, Boutwell and his family returned home to Groton, to the house he had built in 1851 when he was governor of Massachusetts. However, Boutwell continued to spend much of the year in Washington, where he practiced patent law and international law. His daughter Georgianna missed living in Washington, and constantly wrote to her father for news of her friends and political gossip. And he obliged, frequently: fifty-one times in 1885 alone.