Who wrote the diary? Was it Sam Ward? Was it William Hurlbert? Was it really even a diary in the first place?

Historians had been asking these questions for nearly 150 years before two professors at the College, David Holmes and Dan Crofts, unraveled the mystery once and for all.

The text in question is what has come to be known as “The Diary of a Public Man,” first published anonymously in 1879 in the North American Review. The diary was written in 1860, just weeks prior to the outbreak of the Civil War. The diarist allegedly recounts secret conversations with Abraham Lincoln as well as a number of other key public figures on the eve of this historic conflict.

According to Crofts, professor of history at the College, the nearly 10-year quest to discover the true author of the enigmatic diary began when Ryan Christiansen, history major and alumni of the College decided to undertake the mystery of the diary in a seminar on the North-South sectional conflict and the coming of the Civil War in 2001.

It was then that Crofts enlisted the help of Holmes, a mathematics and statistics professor, who is an expert in the field of stylometry, or the statistical analysis of literary style. According to Holmes, just like people leave fingerprints behind on evidence, writers often leave “word prints.”

“Subconsciously we use lots of little words without thinking about them, words like the, and, all, but, by, and if you collect a large number of those words, 60, 70, or 80 of them and look up the rate in which those words are used, you can build up a print for a writer,” Holmes said.

So who is this mystery writer? In 1948 a historian identified Sam Ward as the diarist. However, according to Crofts’ and Holmes extensive research, the authorship of this legendary document can be traced back to William Hurlbert, a journalist writing during the antebellum period.

“Hurlbert was a longtime and very successful journalist who had a very distinctive writing style, once you become acquainted with the things he’s written, ‘The Diary of a Public Man’ just jumps off the page, he has a particular style that was much more clear-cut,” Crofts said.

Holmes research affirmed Crofts’ analysis of the text, although, Crofts’ analyses led him to an additional discovery — the diary was not a diary after all. The text in question was a memoir which was nonetheless built on a foundation of factual evidence.

According to Crofts, although the writer was likely not present for many of the conversations and events recorded in the memoir, “he had ways of finding out what was said behind closed doors,” Crofts said. “He had information on the shaping of Lincoln’s cabinet, writing of Lincoln’s inaugural speech and all kinds of interesting detail on the secret backdoor negotiations between William Seward and unionists in Richmond, Va.”

Crofts’s work over the past decade has coalesced in the writing of a book, “A Secession Crisis Enigma,” published last week.

According to Crofts, much can be learned about American history from this memoir.

“It brings to bear quite first-hand testimony about what the most important people in the country were thinking, what they were saying behind closed doors, in the weeks and months before war started. The war was arguably the greatest moment the greatest moment of truth in American history – Abraham Lincoln is one of the most written about people in American history, and there are three purported interviews with Lincoln – its juicy stuff,” Crofts said. “There is a much less sure of himself Lincoln than his modern admirers are inclined to depict – there is a sense of someone who was feeling their way through a terrible crisis, hoping for some peaceful resolution.”

Holmes and Crofts’s article “The Diary of a Public Man: A Case Study in Traditional and Non-Traditional Authorship Attribution” has been accepted for publication in the journal Literary and Linguistic Computing, Crofts said. Also, the article has been accepted as a conference paper for “Digital Humanities 2010” held at the University of London in July.