John Spencer Bassett

“ As a historian Sparks is to be measured by the American Biography, the best work of the kind then prepared. Even here his chief service was as an editor; for he wrote comparatively few of the individual sketches. Those he did write, however, were well done. His greatest editorial achievement was the Washington, an epoch-making work. It set a new standard of scholarship, founded upon accurate and broad knowledge, for American students of history. Edward Everett spoke truly when he said of it in The North American Review: “The American press has produced no work of higher value.” ”

“ Then a generation followed during which the colonies grew in wealth and refinement. A leisure class was developed, the struggles of the assemblies against the king's prerogative gradually caused the formation of colony parties with colony ideals and aspirations, and in due time men appeared who undertook to tell the stories of colony development. These men belong to the later colonial period. In reflection and the power of dealing with materials, they are superior to the mere depicters of episodes. If their works are less readable, it must be remembered that their tasks are more difficult. ”

“ No modern scientific historian could speak better. If Prince lacked literary ability, the want was made up in his strict sense of accuracy; and we should remember that it is rare that the world has a man who is endowed with both characteristics.
Both Hubbard and Prince were ministers and wrote with a full sense of the importance of the churches in the New England life. Their outlook was biased, although not intentionally so. From them we turn at the very close of the colonial period to a New England historian as free from this influence as Colden or William Smith. ”

“ Turning from Virginia [2] we shall not find any considerable early historian in another colony outside of New England. So far as the region south of the Hudson is concerned idealism in regard to planting colonies exhausted itself with the splendid dreams of Raleigh, Hakluyt, and Edward Sandys. Lord Baltimore and Penn, it is true, attempted to revive it in Maryland and Pennsylvania, but their colonists did not respond to their efforts. These colonies were settled by as practical a class of farmers and traders as those who brought the river bottoms of Virginia under the sway of King Tobacco. ”

“ New England did not have the only Indian wars in America, but she alone had worthy historians of them. The struggles of 1622 and 1642 in Virginia, the Tuscarora War in North Carolina, and the Yemassee War in South Carolina, to say nothing of the wars of the Iroquois in New York, were as worthy of historical description as the struggle known as King Philip's War in New England, but they found no pen to describe them for the contemporary public. Bacon's rebellion in Virginia was well narrated for posterity, but the narratives long remained in manuscript ”

“ Morse was probably indebted to Hazard and Belknap for the impetus that set him to writing. The latter complained that it was only Morse who could make money out of what he wrote.
When Morse published his thin work, two other men, Jared Sparks and Peter Force, were planning much greater enterprises. One was a New England man, a Harvard graduate, a minister of accepted standing, and a member of the most select literary circle of Boston. The other was a self-taught printer’s boy who became publisher and editor, with a passion for collecting. Each served well the cause of historical research. ”

“ Force has had no successor, probably because his example raised up such a large school of local collectors and compilers that there has been no room for one vast treasure. The work he did not do has been carried on by many workers and has resulted in many restricted collections. Force played a large part in awakening the interest of this group; and in doing so he contributed much to the progress of American historical scholarship in the last fifty years, its latest and most fruitful period. ”

“ To preserve the influence of the early doctrines he wrote Wonder-Working Providences of Zion's Saviour in New England, published in 1654. We read it today to learn to what degrees of credulity the early New Englanders went in their acceptance of the power of the supernatural over human affairs. To the author and his contemporaries the book was plain history, a record of the actualities of life. The chief merit of the Providences for those who rightly value a human document is that it is a picture of early Puritan life as seen by an average man. ”

“ Like the early Virginia historians, Bradford and Winthrop were English-bred. Their culture was English and it was superior to that which the succeeding generation, born in America, could be expected to have. Two historians, however, Captain Edward Johnson and Nathaniel Morton, stand between them and the historians who are of purely American birth and training. Both were born in England, but they arrived in Massachusetts at such an early age that they were colony-trained to all intents and purposes. ”

“ Emerson said of the History: “It is noble matter, and I am heartily glad to have it nobly treated.” Bancroft is less than a quarter of a century dead, and these beautiful laurels are already withered. A new age has accepted other standards than his. 17
Bancroft, our first historian who had studied in Germany, was well known at home and abroad as a hard student and a man of great learning. The abundant foot-notes in the first volumes of his history show how freely he used the sources in foreign languages. His experience in Germany led him to admire German scholarship in all its phases. ”

“ In 1794 came Volume II, most of it given up to the records of the New England Confederation. The two volumes did not pay expenses, and the editor, absorbed in business, lost interest in their continuation. Judged by what he published merely, Hazard had only a moderate influence on history in the United States. It is as the first collector and editor of documents after the Revolution that we must estimate him. He had the notion, shared by Sparks and Force in a later period, that it is possible to present the history of a people in a collection of documents. ”

“ They were poor men become rich, or well-born men become materialistic, and it was only after many years that any of the forms of culture appeared among them. One of these forms was literature, but it was ever a plant of spindling growth.
The first historian in Virginia, the first in the British colonies, was Captain John Smith. He was twenty-seven years old and a soldier of fortune when he landed at Jamestown in 1607. He was a member of the council, and the council was lawmaker, executive, and judge under the authority of the Company which sent the colony out. ”

“ It says little about any other colony than that over which the writer ruled, and the form is not that of history proper. Yet it is a valuable record of the life of the time, and presents good expositions of most of the problems of the early colony. While it is not written in so interesting a style as Bradford's book, it is in a fair diary manner, rarely becoming tedious to a reader who has the taste for the fine points of a contemporary document. It is Puritan in a liberal sense. Some New England writers can never forget their peculiar type of religion ”

“ Prince's devotion to history is recognized in the name of the Prince Society, of Boston, one of the most honoured of American historical organizations. The result of his efforts at writing history was a Chronological History of New England, in the Form of Annals, the first volume of which appeared in 1736. It began with the creation of man on the sixth day and proceeded rapidly to the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth. ”

“ At this time Bancroft had begun to support the Democratic party. He was accused of doing it to obtain Federal office, but the charge was not substantiated. He was ever a defender of the doctrine of equality held by Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln. In America he saw organized democracy which was to make humanity happy: to write its history became his hope. In 1834 appeared the first volume of his History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent. ”

“ A distinct place must be reserved for Daniel Gookin, a Virginia Puritan who moved to Massachusetts to escape the persecutions of Governor Berkeley. He was made superintendent of Indians in his new home and showed a humane and intelligent interest in the natives that entitles him to rank with John Eliot. The retaliation of the whites in Philip's War grieved him sorely, but the tide of wrath was so strong that his protests only made him unpopular. ”

“ For the same magazine Belknap also wrote a series of satirical letters dealing with the early history of New England. They were published in a separate volume called The Foresters (1792) , enlarged in an edition of 1796. Belknap died suddenly, in the midst of literary schemes, in 1798. He was the best American historian of his day, and the most zealous in preserving historical memorials.
Probably Belknap’s greatest service was his efforts in founding the Massachusetts Historical Society. While he had valuable aid from other men, he was the force that brought these others together ”

“ In 1780 George Chalmers published his Political Annals of the Present United Colonies, followed in 1782 by another work called Introduction to the History of the Revolt of the American Colonies. Chalmers was an able writer and gave at least continuity to his subject. He was, however, strongly British in sympathy, and his work was not esteemed in the United States. It stimulated more than one American to write what he considered a true history of the rise and progress of the Revolutionary struggle. ”

“ Coming in connection with the first great work of editing in the field of American history, it attracted wide attention, and fixed in the minds of scholars the necessity of accurate reproduction of documents. It should be said for Sparks that many others of his time thought that an editor ought to correct the letters he reproduced. Exact reproduction, however, had become the rule with the best editors.
§ 18. Force. Peter Force was born in New Jersey in 1790. When very small he accompanied his father to New York, where, after a short term at school, he became a printer’s boy. ”

“ What Bradford's History is to Plymouth, John Winthrop's journal is to the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The author, more than any other man, was the founder of the colony. He was an earnest Puritan, a supporter of the ideas of Hampden and Pym, and by natural ability he was a leader of men. He left Cambridge before graduation, married at seventeen, became a justice of the peace at eighteen, and was soon a man of note in his shire, Suffolk, where he was lord of the manor of Groton. ”

“ The war and the numerous avocations consequent upon it, have thrown every man’s mind into such an unsettled and confused state that but few can think steadily upon any subject. They hear of useful designs, they give you all the encouragement which can be derived from the warmest approbation of your plan, they will even promise you assistance. ”

“ The French Revolution came upon an old and well-developed society, kept down by outworn social ideals, and when it had passed the shackles were broken. In the United States an immature society was relieved of the power that had hitherto done no more than impose irritating checks on its development. ”

“ Sparks. Jared Sparks was born at Willington, Connecticut, in 1789. His youth was clouded by misfortune, but his intellectual ability brought him into notice, and friends sent him to college. He took a high rank at Harvard, where he was looked upon as a man of great promise. A residence of four years in the South as a Unitarian minister in Baltimore gave Sparks a national feeling and probably stimulated his interest in national history. In 1823 he returned to Boston to be the editor of The North American Review. ”

“ In 1853 he issued The Correspondence of the American Revolution, a series of letters to Washington in four volumes.
Sparks’s letters are full of his greater plan, and he recurred to the idea again and again until he was an old man, but he did not carry out his purpose. In fact, Sparks suffered an eclipse about 1840. After that date he did little besides editing the second series of the American Biography and writing several pamphlets and addresses. From 1838 to 1849 he was professor of history at Harvard, but the conditions were such that he had more than half his time for writing. ”

“ President Arthur once said that the President is “permitted to accept the invitations of members of the cabinet, supreme court judges, and—Mr. George Bancroft.”
Bancroft was born in Massachusetts in 1800 and died in Washington in 1891. Having graduated from Harvard in 1817, he went to Göttingen on funds subscribed by Harvard and its friends. Back in America in 1822 with a doctor’s degree, he settled for a year at Harvard as tutor in Greek. He brought home from Europe many affectations of manner and such marked eccentricities that his influence at Harvard was undermined ”

“ Johnson was interested in the planting of churches, the life of the towns, and the affairs of ordinary people, and it has been well said that while he “shows little precision in anything but his creed; yet his book is one of the most curious that an inquirer into the manners and institutions of our fathers can peruse.” [3]
Nathaniel Morton was a trusted nephew of Governor Bradford and became secretary of the Plymouth colony. Possessed of fair ability, he was long a man of note and a preserver of Pljonouth tradition. ”