George W. Julian

George W. Julian was an American lawyer, abolitionist, politician, and memoirist prominent in the Free Soil movement and Radical Republican reform. An Indiana legislator before entering Congress, he served in the United States House first as a Free Soiler and later as a Republican. Julian pressed for emancipation, Black military service, confiscation of rebel property, and homestead legislation, while sometimes criticizing Abraham Lincoln’s caution. Political Recollections records his public life from 1840 through 1872 and preserves an eyewitness account of the House vote that approved the Thirteenth Amendment in January 1865. Its complete bibliographic title is Political Recollections, 1840 to 1872, and the memoir appeared in 1884. Julian combines personal testimony with arguments about antislavery politics, party realignment, and Reconstruction. He later broke with Republican leadership and supported several reform movements. Because he participated directly in the conflicts he describes, his recollections serve both as partisan autobiography and as a primary source on nineteenth-century American political change.