The first major biography of the statesman who fought for racial and economic equality alongside Presidents Lincoln and Grant.

During his seven-decade career in public life, George Sewall Boutwell, the son of a Massachusetts farming family of modest means, was a key figure in the politics of racial and economic equity and the principled use of American power abroad. From 1840 to 1905, Boutwell was at the center of efforts to abolish slavery, establish the Republican Party, facilitate President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and frame the civil rights–focused Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. He helped lay the foundations of the modern American economy with President Grant, investigated white terrorism in Mississippi in the 1870s, and opposed American imperialism following the Spanish-American War alongside Andrew Carnegie, Mark Twain, and Booker T. Washington.

The first major biography of an important public figure who has long been hiding in plain sight, Boutwell is as much a history of nineteenth-century century US politics as it is a critique of the failures of governance during a turbulent and formative period in American history.