A Secession Crisis Enigma: William Henry Hurlbert and the Diary of a Public ManThe Diary of a Public Man, published anonymously in several installments in the North American Review in 1879, claimed to offer verbatim accounts of secret conversations with Abraham Lincoln, William H. Seward, and Stephen A. Douglas among others in the desperate weeks just before the start of the Civil War. Despite repeated attempts to decipher the Diary, historians never have been able to pinpoint its author or determine its authenticity. In A