William Henry Trescot was "really the father of the writing of diplomatic history in the United States," according to Samuel Flagg Bemis and Grace Gardner Griffin in their 1935 Guide to the Diplomatic History of the United States . He is better remembered as acting secretary of state on the eve of the Civil War, as a eulogist of the Confederacy, as a prose stylist, and foremost as a top State Department negotiator after Reconstruction--"one of the most accomplished diplomats in our history," according to David Saville Muzzey, biographer of James G. Blaine. Diplomacy, like diplomatic history, attracted him because of the subtlety, clarity, and sophistication it demanded and his style exemplified. Another aspect of its appeal, as he explained to Sen. James Henry Hammond in 1858, was "the intense throbbing life of a great capital--the grace of that exquisite refinement which belongs only to the combination of culture, wealth...