EUGENE SCHUYLER,THE ONLY DIPLOMATIST

Eugene Schuyler (1840–1890), little known today, was America’s best-qualified diplomat, one of its first PhDs, and a friend of Tolstoy, translator of Turgenev, and biographer of Peter the Great. Schuyler spent a decade in Russia; his first book describes a nine-month trip through Central Asia which Russia was then subjugating. Schuyler’s subsequent reports from Bulgaria on Turkish atrocities helped to make Bulgaria the modern world’s first “fashionable cause.” Schuyler was American minister to Greece, Romania, and Serbia, but was refused confirmation as the State Department’s number two because of his frank criticism of a former secretary of state. He died after some months as diplomatic agent in Egypt.