Historian and Statistician Collaborate to Unspool Civil War Enigma

With his latest work, TCNJ history professor Daniel Crofts teamed up with statistics professor David Holmes to solve a great literary mystery and reopen a window onto the grave national political breakdown that tore apart the Union.

Crofts’ book, A Secession Crisis Enigma, investigates “The Diary of a Public Man.” Published anonymously in 1879, the Diary apparently recounted secret conversations with incoming president Abraham Lincoln and other key public figures on the eve of the Civil War. Historians have long struggled to identify the author of the Diary and to determine its authenticity.

Holmes is an expert in “stylometry,” the statistical analysis of literary style. He corroborated Crofts’ suspicion that the purported Diary’s author was William Henry Hurlbert, a talented but unconventional journalist. Holmes and Crofts have a joint paper accepted for publication in the journal Literary and Linguistic Computing and Holmes will also be presenting their work at the Digital Humanities conference in London this July.

Crofts also determined that the purported Diary was instead a memoir. But the memoir-cum-diary rests on strong factual foundations, so the information it contains should be taken seriously.

A Secession Crisis Enigma provides a riveting glimpse of antebellum America at its tipping point. It offers fresh insight into Lincoln’s struggle to shape his cabinet and message as southern secession loomed.

“As well as being captivating reading in its own right, this book is essential for anyone—scholar or otherwise—interested in the dramatic national crisis that culminated in civil war,” historian Russell McClintock commented.

According to Crofts, the quest to crack this literary enigma began when an undergraduate history major, Ryan Christiansen, decided to dig into the mystery shrouding the Diary.

“His enthusiasm provided me with a memorable reminder of why teaching can be so much fun,” Crofts writes in his afterword. It was Christiansen who first realized that Hurlbert must be the elusive diarist.

Holmes enlisted the aid of four undergraduate statistics students—Carol Antenna, Kelliann Brennan, John Rutledge, and Satwinder Thind—who each gave valuable assistance in acquiring comparative texts and preparing them for machine-readable analysis.

A Secession Crisis Enigma was released by the Louisiana State University Press on April 15.

For more information about this book, visit http://danielwcrofts.com/secession.html