Diary from March 4, 1861, to November 12, 1862

In the spring of 1861, as the nation lurched toward civil war, a Polish count and political exile named Adam Gurowski began keeping a diary that would become one of the most vivid, acid-tongued accounts of early Civil War Washington. Recently arrived in America after fleeing Russian oppression, Gurowski brought a European's wary eye to the fumbling Union response to secession. He had access to the capital's political salons, and he used that access mercilessly. His portrait of Abraham Lincoln as a man who 'oscillated' between wisdom and timidity, his contempt for a Cabinet he considered mediocre, his prediction that the war would be long and bloody and 'reminiscent of the French Revolution' all come alive in these pages. Gurowski was an abolitionist who despaired that the fight against slavery moved with agonizing slowness, and his diary captures the haut-bourgeois anxiety of Washington as the young republic faced its greatest crisis. This is history from the inside: partisan, prescient, and unapologetically personal.