William Henry Hurlbert

William Henry Hurlbert (July 3, 1827—September 4, 1895) was an American journalist and author of “The Diary of a Public Man,” published in the North American Review in 1879. His responsibility for the Diary—once dubbed the “most gigantic” problem of uncertain authorship in American historical writing—was carefully concealed and has only recently been established.

Hurlbert was born in Charleston, South Carolina. His father, Martin Luther Hurlbert, a Unitarian minister and schoolmaster from Massachusetts, resettled in South Carolina in 1812 and lived there for most of the next two decades. The elder Hurlbut remained a self-conscious Yankee who nonetheless owned slaves. Hurlbert’s mother, Margaret Ashburner Morford Hurlbut, his father’s second wife, was a native of Princeton, New Jersey. Hurlbert’s parents moved to Philadelphia in 1831, where his father founded a successful school.

Fragmentary evidence suggests that Hurlbert’s childhood was difficult and intense. The gifted son plainly was his father’s star pupil, adept in rhetoric, foreign languages, and classical literature. One may surmise that he was pushed to excel. His subsequent decision to change the way he spelled the family name may have distanced him from an overly demanding paterfamilias.

Martin Luther Hurlbut died unexpectedly in 1843. William and his mother and sisters promptly returned to South Carolina. There the precocious sixteen-year-old came under the influence of his half brother, Stephen Augustus Hurlbut, an aspiring lawyer and politician who was over a decade William’s senior. Stephen—who later moved to Illinois, became an ally of Abraham Lincoln’s, and served as a Union general during the Civil War—was attempting in the early 1840s to carve out a niche in Charleston society. He persuaded William to study for the Unitarian ministry.

When Hurlbert enrolled at Harvard College in 1845, he had spent his most recent two years in Charleston and was regarded as a Southerner. He earned an undergraduate degree in 1847 and a divinity degree in 1849. Following college he traveled extensively in Europe. His personal charm, his gifts as a linguist, and his ability of “acquiring knowledge as if by magic” enabled him to pass easily as “a Frenchman in France, an Italian in Italy, [and] a Spaniard in Spanish countries.” He served a brief stint as a Unitarian minister in Salem, Massachusetts, where he was said to be “extremely popular and very much admired as a preacher.”

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