Brian Bixby

George S. Boutwell’s letters to his daughter Georgianna, “Georgie,” were not just devoted to politics. He wrote about the other cares of his life, whether inquiring about the asparagus on his farm at home or apologizing to Georgie for not writing on her birthday. And he wrote about his career. Boutwell was one of the few specialists in international law, such as it was in those days, and was several times

The Boutwell House, Groton, Massachusetts.

retained by foreign governments to act as their agent in American legal and political matters. In 1885 Boutwell was litigating a case of piracy!

The story began all the way back in 1861, when a ship flying a French flag with a captain named Latellier docked in Port Liberté, Haiti. Haitian authorities were suspicious, and rightly so. The ship was American, and the captain’s name wasn’t Latellier, but Antonio Pelletier. More importantly, he had bought the ship to engage in the slave trade, as late as 1861 with the Civil War beginning! The Haitians seized his ship, convicted Pelletier of piracy and slave trading, and sentenced him to death. But his sentence was commuted to a prison term.

The case might have ended there, but Pelletier escaped to the United States a few years later. Angered by his treatment, he requested that the U.S. State Department help him recover $2,500,000 in damages for what he called a miscarriage of justice. There being no international law courts with jurisdiction, the State Department came to an agreement with the Republic of Haiti in 1884 to have a recently retired Supreme Court Justice, William Strong, serve as arbitrator. Boutwell became involved because the Republic of Haiti retained him and the French diplomat Charles A. de Chambrun as their agents in the case.

When William Strong opened the hearings, Boutwell’s opening statement portrayed Pelletier as a liar who had previously engaged in the slave trade and had outfitted his ship for that purpose. Pelletier ducked out of the hearing after listening to Boutwell for no more than half an hour, and was found dead three days later. Yet the hearings continued; the death of the plaintiff was not enough to stop the proceedings of justice. In fact, the hearings ran on for a year. At the end, ex-Justice Strong’s verdict was an anticlimax. He held that while Pelletier’s ship had been outfitted for slave trading, it had engaged in neither slave trading nor piracy. However, Strong rejected most of Pelletier’s claims for damages, awarding him only $57,250 for his imprisonment.

Once they heard the judgment, the Haitian Government, no doubt with Boutwell’s help, protested that any American demand for the Haitians to pay damages to a known slave trader, in 1885, was improper and bad policy. And in a final, ludicrous note, ex-Justice Strong agreed with the Haitian protest! So the State Department agreed to officially relinquish the claim. And with Pelletier dead, the matter came to a close.

Boutwell went home for the summer after the Pelletier case concluded. There he had to manage the shaky finances of his farm, while consoling Georgie for losing her seat on the school committee earlier that year. But he went back to Washington in October, working on patent law cases, and enjoying the spectacle of Democrats fighting among themselves. Of the latter, he remarked to Georgie, “Democrats, with their slouched hats, are common in more senses than one.”

Boutwell often said he had never desired political office, and never really sought it. Yet I couldn’t help reading his letters to Georgianna from 1885 and think that his frequent political observations revealed a man who was still tempted by high office. Perhaps his wife Sarah, who hated Washington, thought so, too. In a letter she wrote to Boutwell back in 1882, on yet another occasion when he was working in Washington, she observed, “A man who holds a public office makes a sacrifice of his independence of thought & actions if nothing more.”

George S. Boutwell died in Groton in 1905, aged eighty-seven. His wife Sarah had died two years earlier. Georgie became the keeper of the family papers after her father’s death. She left the house to the Groton Historical Society when she died in 1933. But no trace of Boutwell’s personal letters remained. People assumed they had been lost or destroyed.

In the year 2000, volunteers were cleaning out the attic of the Boutwell House, which had been plagued by squirrels getting in. One of the volunteers found an old, dusty trunk and opened it up. And there were letters. Hundreds of personal letters between Boutwell and his family! They were all tied up with ribbons, with notes in Georgie’s handwriting about what was in each parcel. And none had been opened in all the years since her death.

That’s how we know Boutwell wrote fifty-one letters to Georgie in 1885. They were in one of those parcels, which was opened for the first time a few months ago. Who knows what other stories are in the many parcels that have yet to be opened?

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.

Boutwell’s 1885 letters to “My dear Georgie” are a wonderfully anecdotal history of Washington politics. Since 1884 had been an election year, 1885 began with a season of parties as the new president and Congress came to the city. There were so many, Boutwell told Georgie, that he’d decided to go to no more than one at each house!

Not everyone showed similar restraint. Among the fabulous Field brothers of Stockbridge, Massachusetts—each of whom became famous in his own right—was Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field (1816–1899). Field was a Democrat and weak on civil rights, which made him and Boutwell political enemies. Yet, in a letter from January 16, Boutwell mentions that Field greeted him warmly and was in “high, friendly spirits.” Boutwell, who had once run on the Temperance Party ticket, euphemistically attributed Field’s unusual geniality to having “dined” too much.

One mustn’t think Boutwell a complete killjoy. He did ask Georgie in February to pack up and send his billiard cue to him!

I’m pretty sure Georgie was in favor of women’s suffrage, since she actually ran for office and won a seat on the town’s school committee. But I’ve never been able to find out her father’s opinion. And he hedged his language even in his letters. He wrote to Georgie about how he had attended two church services on January 25. The minister at the morning service spoke out against suffrage, which was daring of him, because Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the famous suffragist, was in the audience, and loudly confronted the minister after the service. Boutwell snidely noted that her response was “more intelligible than elegant.”

But before you judge Boutwell, you should know that he thought it unfair that opponents of women’s suffrage were still using the lurid “free love” reputation of Victoria Woodhull against the movement, even though Woodhull had left the country in 1877. And that evening Boutwell went to a service at the Universalist Church conducted by Rev. Olympia Brown. There’s another name you probably don’t know, but should. Brown (1835–1926) was the first woman in the United States to graduate from a theological school and to be ordained. And she was firmly in favor of a woman’s right to vote. No doubt her sermon reflected her sentiments. As an aside, I must note that unlike Elizabeth Cady Stanton or Susan B. Anthony, Brown would live long enough to see women obtain the right to vote and to cast a ballot in a national election.

In the 1884 elections the Democrats had won the presidency for the first time since the Civil War and maintained control of the House of Representatives, leaving the Republicans with only the Senate. Boutwell was not happy about this, and looked constantly for signs that the Democrats were breaking up along factional lines. On May 15, he told Georgie that the Democrats would break up over patronage for federal offices. In November, he was hoping the scandal over Attorney General Augustus H. Garland’s involvement in a telephone company and associated litigation would bring the administration down. Boutwell would hope in vain, at least until the election of 1888, when Republicans reclaimed the House of Representatives and the presidency.

At least he was not like those people he mentioned who were still hoping even in January of 1885 that the Republican candidate James G. Blaine might still win the Electoral College. In the same vein, Boutwell thought the Republican defeat was why outgoing President Chester A. Arthur looked depressed just after relinquishing office, not realizing that Arthur was suffering from a serious illness that would lead to his death before the end of the next year.

Next: Boutwell tangles with a slave trader!

Brian Bixby received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst for his study of Shakers and tourism. His childhood hobby of coin collecting developed into an interest in the history of money, which led him to George S. Boutwell's role in the currency controversies of the 1870s. That and Brian grew up only a mile away from the Boutwell House.