George S Boutwell: Redeeming America’s Promise

Jeffrey H. Boutwell, Ph.D., giving an online presentation for the Groton History Center on February 28, 2021.

A key figure in American politics from 1840 to 1905, George S. Boutwell sought to ‘redeem America’s promise’ of racial equality, economic equity, and a humane foreign policy, issues that today reverberate in divisive debates over Black Lives Matter, wealth inequality, and the uses and abuses of American power abroad. As Massachusetts Governor, Representative and Senator, as well as Commissioner of Internal Revenue for Abraham Lincoln and Secretary of the Treasury for Ulysses Grant, he helped frame and enact the Fourteenth and Fifteenth civil rights amendments, investigate civil rights abuses in Mississippi, and lay the foundation of the modern American economy. At age 80, he was selected as President of the Anti-Imperialist League to work with Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, William James and others to oppose American annexation of the Philippines.

A resident of Groton from 1991 to 1995, Jeffrey Boutwell had a thirty-year career focusing on nuclear weapons arms control and other international security issues for the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, which received the 1995 Nobel Peace Prize during his tenure. He’s the author of The German Nuclear Dilemma and numerous other books and articles and has a Ph.D. in political science from M.I.T. He started writing his biography of George S. at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020 and looks forward to having it published in 2022 as “Redeeming America’s Promise: George S. Boutwell and the Politics of Race, Money and Power, 1818-1905.”