Strong’s social commentary is one of the backbones of the volume, a valuable compendium of what a man of a specific class, race, time, and place thought about the events happening in his country but not, except peripherally, in his town. This commentary invariably comes filtered through a rather long list of prejudices, many of which are hardly surprising coming from a well-connected professional man in mid-nineteenth-century Manhattan. And as the late Library of America cofounder Daniel Aaron noted, Strong’s “antipathies . . . make up an enormous and various list.” In addition to his distaste for the Irish (which comes through with particular venom during his discussion of the Draft Riots of 1863) and virtually all Mediterranean immigrants, he has it out for “spiritualists, abolitionists (until 1860), organ grinders, Yankees (with significant exceptions), politicians, mosquitoes, Unitarians, Southerners, Democrats, and transcendentalists.” At least he knew what he didn’t like.
Unlike Walt Whitman’s populist embrace of the teeming masses, expressed in his accounts of his own Civil War experiences as a volunteer nurse, Strong can’t even contemplate a trip to Coney Island (“infested with it’s [sic] summer crowd of human scum”) without wrinkling his nose. This snobbery is not confined to the faceless masses, but even manifests itself during his several meetings with Abraham Lincoln—a man who earns Strong’s political sympathies and grudging respect, but for whom he cannot conceal a deep distaste. “He is a barbarian,” he writes about the president, “Scythian – Yahoo – or Gorilla, in respect of outside polish . . . but a most sensible straightforward honest old codger. . . His evident integrity and simplicity of purpose would compensate for worse grammar than his, & for even more intense provincialism and rusticity.”
What saves this congenital conservative is his penchant for self-reflection and his willingness to at least partially revise his views. What really changed him was the war itself. Involved as Strong was in numerous civil pursuits, the outbreak of hostilities granted him permission to focus his wandering attention on a single worthy task, his work with the Sanitary Commission. This narrowing of purpose mirrored, for Strong, that of his nation. In his characteristic stance of irony toward all, he deplored the antebellum culture of not only the South but his home half of the country as well. While those below the Mason-Dixon line were vulgar and barbaric, his fellow Northerners were soulless, financially-obsessed zombies and the only true remedy he saw for this state of affairs was a massive bloodletting.