George Templeton Strong, the lauded diarist often likened to a nineteenth-century American Samuel Pepys, was born in New York City on January 26, 1820. A graduate of Columbia College, Strong became involved in his father’s law firm—known today as Cadwalader, Wickersham, & Taft—as a real estate attorney. In 1848, he married Ellen Ruggles, with whom he had three children. An amateur musician, Strong became president of the New York Philharmonic Society and served as a trustee of Columbia College; he was also a vestryman at Trinity Church in lower Manhattan and helped found both the Union League Club of New York and the United States Sanitary Commission. During the Civil War, Strong funded a Union Army regiment and worked closely with the Sanitary Commission as treasurer and a member of its executive committee. Kept since the age of fifteen, Strong’s diary—now in the collection of the New York Historical—stands as a remarkable civilian record of the war in the North and was extensively quoted in Ken Burns’s acclaimed 1990 PBS series The Civil War. Strong continued his diary until his death on July 21, 1875.
“He was . . . a vivid writer, a shrewd judge of men with a novelist’s eye for detail, and a man with a rare willingness to alter his opinions when facts intervened.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Let it be said quickly that Strong left a record of mid-century New York that is unequaled, a record so sharp, so detailed, that any reader must conclude: ‘This was New York.’”—The New York Times
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