and Anna Schwartz absolved Boutwell of any duplicity in masking his intentions to reduce the role of silver in the American economy, writing that“ an early commitment to gold would have been preferable to the uneasy compromise” of allowing a reintroduction of the domestic use of silver coin.
Another distinguishing feature of the 1870s was widespread corruption involving Congress, the business community and Grant administration officials. The era is known for sweetheart deals and kickbacks involving, among others, the Union Pacific Railroad( the Crédit Mobilier scandal), whiskey distillers( the Whiskey Ring) and cabinet member William Belknap and his wife Carrie, who engineered fraudulent contracts at Native American trading posts. It is true that President Grant was far too trusting of the Civil War colleagues he had appointed to office, but the President himself was never implicated personally. The same was true for Boutwell, who in cases involving Treasury subordinates often initiated investigations himself, as with kickbacks at the New York Custom House in 1872.
Boutwell also participated in political dissembling when he thought it necessary. As Revenue Commissioner in 1862, he had overseen the implementation of a progressive income tax, which mainly affected well-to-do Americans. A decade later, when Boutwell was Treasury Secretary, the“ moneyed interests” that Charles Francis Adams had written about were lobbying to repeal the income tax. Boutwell opposed such a move, warning that relieving the wealthy of paying the income tax would place an unfair burden on farmers and laborers, who were paying the lion’ s share of the tariffs and duties collected on foodstuffs and essential goods and services.
Congress was set to act on the issue in the spring of 1871 when Boutwell delayed releasing a report on robust government revenues that would have made it easier to eliminate the income tax. When he finally did release the report, he admitted to Secretary of State Hamilton Fish and other cabinet colleagues that the state of the nation’ s finances would likely support“ a repeal of the income tax, if there were time for Congress to act, but there is not.” Repeal of the income tax had to wait until 1872, and it wasn’ t until 40 years later, in 1913, that the nation’ s income tax was reinstated with ratification of the 16th Amendment.
Boutwell’ s cat-and-mouse game within the Grant cabinet was symbolic of his lifelong support for American farmers, laborers and small businessmen. Having grown up in a farming family in central Massachusetts, followed by several years working in and then owning a dry goods store in Groton, MA, Boutwell’ s sympathies lay far more with the working man than with the Boston Brahmins of Beacon Hill, who often lampooned him for not having attended high school, much less college.
This was the case above all with the writings of Henry Adams, whose classic book, The Education of Henry Adams, helped set in stone an anti-Grant and anti- Boutwell bias that lasted well into the 20th century. It has only been in the last several decades that new historical accounts of the Grant presidency, and Boutwell’ s role in it— by authors such as Ron Chernow, Charles Calhoun and many others— have produced far more balanced, and positive, treatments of that era.
Boutwell’ s significance as a major American public figure has also risen with new histories of the Reconstruction period following the Civil War and his role in writing the all-important 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution. Debates today over concepts of birthright citizenship and“ equal protection of the laws” can be traced back to Boutwell’ s work on the Judiciary Committee of the US House of Representatives in the late 1860s. Later, as a US senator during the second Grant administration from 1873 to 1877, Boutwell chaired a select committee that investigated white supremacist violence in Mississippi that initiated the Jim Crow era of second-class citizenship for the country’ s Black citizens that would last well into the 20th century.
When he died in 1905, Boutwell was still active in public affairs as president of the Anti-Imperialist League, working with Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie to oppose Teddy Roosevelt’ s annexation and military occupation of the Philippines. Given his 65 years of public service, whether as steward of the nation’ s economy working with Presidents Lincoln and Grant, or defender of constitutional protections for all Americans, George Boutwell, son of a modest Massachusetts farming family, has too long been hiding in plain sight.
Jeffrey Boutwell, PhD, had a four-decade career in the fields of international science, security and nuclear weapons arms control. He is a distant relation of George Boutwell and the author of Boutwell: Radical Republican and Champion of Democracy, published by W. W. Norton in 2025. He worked for many years at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, MA, and received his PhD in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Governor Boutwell House in Groton, MA is home to the Groton History Center and is open to the public.
Sources
Adams, Henry.“ The New York Gold Conspiracy.” Westminster Review( American Edition). October 1870.
Boutwell, George S. Reminiscences of Sixty Years in Public Affairs. Greenwood Press. 1968.
Boutwell, George S. The Tax-Payer’ s Manual: Containing the Entire Internal Revenue Laws, etc. Little, Brown, and Company. 1866.( Reprinted by William S. Hein & Company. 2021.)
Boutwell, Jeffrey. Boutwell: Radical Republican and Champion of Democracy. W. W. Norton. 2025.
Calhoun, Charles W. The Presidency of Ulysses S. Grant. University Press of Kansas. 2017.
Foner, Eric. The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution. W. W. Norton. 2019.
Lowenstein, Roger. Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War. Penguin Press. 2022.
Ratner, Sidney. American Taxation: Its History as a Social Force in Democracy. W. W. Norton. 1942.
Scott, Pamela. Fortress of Finance: The United States Treasury Building. Treasury Historical Association. 2010.
Unger, Irwin. The Greenback Era: A Social and Political History of American Finance, 1865 – 1879. Princeton University Press. 1964.
Weisman, Steven R. The Great Tax Wars: Lincoln-Teddy Roosevelt-Wilson: How the Income Tax Transformed America. Simon & Schuster. 2004.
White, Richard. The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865 – 1896. Oxford University Press. 2017.
Wineapple, Brenda. The Impeachers: The Trial of Andrew Johnson and the Dream of a Just Nation. Random House. 2019.
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