Home > American History Through Literature > History

History was crucial to American attempts at self-definition, as members of the revolutionary generation and their antebellum descendants themselves recognized. History could provide models and guidance for citizens of the new nation, they believed, while simultaneously creating a sense of shared experience that could strengthen tenuous national bonds. Thus emphasizing the functional character of history, these historians embraced the traditional view of history as, in Henry St. John Bolingbroke's famous words, "philosophy teaching by example." For these historians, the purpose of history was to instill virtue in their readers by providing them with moral examples to imitate or avoid.

Revealing the popularity and importance of history in the early nineteenth century, the number of historical works that were published in this period rose from 26 in the first decade of the century to 158 in the 1830s. The creation of institutions devoted to the preservation of history in this period also reflected and furthered the growing interest in history. The Massachusetts Historical Society, founded in 1791, was the first historical society established in the United States, and by 1860, 111 historical societies had been established throughout the nation. Recognizing the importance of primary documents to the writing of history, these societies collected and preserved historical manuscripts. In their concern with preserving and publishing primary documents, historians revealed their allegiance to the critical methods of scholarship that were then developing in Germany, which emphasized the importance of truth and accuracy and based truth on a critical analysis of primary sources.

Even while Americans used history to promote nationalism, the writing of history became increasingly sectionalized in this period, as New England historians came to dominate the field. Forty-eight percent of the historians writing in the period between 1800 and 1860 came from New England, and half of these historians were from Massachusetts. As part of what has been termed the "Brahmin" elite, these historians offered a vision of America and its past that represented the interests of the New England elite. Writing before history had become a professionalized discipline, these historians believed that history was supposed to be the vocation of gentlemen amateurs. Thus most of them did not make a living from historical writing; they were either independently wealthy or supported themselves by pursuing other occupations in addition to history.

As David Levin has demonstrated, historians in this period viewed history as Romantic art. Influenced by Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832), the leading Romantic historians in this period—William Hickling Prescott, George Bancroft, John Lothrop Motley, and Francis Parkman—saw themselves as literary artists and sought to convey a sense of drama and immediacy in their historical works just as Scott had in his historical novels. Using metaphors of painting and portraiture to describe their work, they believed the historian's goal was to enable readers to visualize the past as though it were a painting rather than simply cataloging facts. For this reason they employed a vivid descriptive style that re-created historical scenes and events in graphic detail. Such an approach required the exercise of the imagination by the historian and demanded an emotional investment in his or her topic. Only in this way could the historian engage the emotions of readers and transport them back in time, enabling them to relive the vital experience of the past. And so nineteenth-century American historians assigned to history varied and sometimes conflicting purposes, at once emphasizing the social function of history and displaying a genuine concern with truth and at the same time viewing history as both philosophy and art.

JARED SPARKS

The appointment of Jared Sparks (1789–1866) to the McLean Chair in Ancient and Modern History at Harvard—the first chair in modern nonecclesiastical history in the United States—in 1839 revealed both the growing importance of history in this period and Sparks's stature within the field. Thus he revealed the complex relationship between the nationalist purposes of antebellum historians and their concern with truth and accuracy. From humble origins, Sparks began his career as a Unitarian minister, leaving the ministry in 1823 to pursue his literary and historical interests. In 1834 Sparks published the first volume of his Library of American Biography (1834–1848), a series of popular biographies about prominent figures in American history, edited by him. In addition to Sparks himself, contributors to this series included well-known intellectual and political figures in his time, such as Francis Bowen and John Gorham Palfrey. In the preface to the first volume, Sparks affirmed his belief in the moral function of history, declaring that the office of biography was to combine "entertainment with instruction" (1:iv). To Sparks, the didactic function of biography was inseparable from its nationalist function, for, by providing his readers with moral examples to imitate or avoid, he hoped these biographies would instill the kind of civic virtue and concern for the public good necessary for the preservation of the Republic.

Sparks also published and edited the writings of Revolutionary-era figures such as Benjamin Franklin and Gouverneur Morris, the best known of which was his Writings of George Washington (1834–1837)—a multivolume collection of Washington's papers that also included a biography of Washington by Sparks. In his emphasis on biography, Sparks revealed the importance and popularity of biography as a genre of history in this period. And in his concern with collecting and publishing primary sources, Sparks revealed his commitment to critical methods of scholarship. Yet in his treatment of Washington's writings, Sparks revealed how his nationalist purposes limited his scholarly integrity, as he changed or omitted passages in Washington's letters to preserve his dignity. In addition to correcting grammatical errors, he changed slang expressions used by Washington, such as "Old Put" to "General Putnam" and "but a flea-bite at present" to "totally inadequate to our demands at this time," to make Washington seem more dignified (Stevens, p. 308).

GEORGE BANCROFT AND AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM

Sharing Sparks's belief in the nationalist function of history, George Bancroft (1800–1891) brought together these nationalist purposes with a Romantic conception of history as a form of literary art. Born in Massachusetts, Bancroft was one of the first Americans to do graduate work in Germany, and he brought back the influence of both German idealism and German critical scholarship to the United States. In 1831 the publication of an article supporting President Andrew Jackson's attack on the Bank of the United States brought Bancroft to political prominence and marked the beginning of his career as a leading figure in the Massachusetts Democratic Party.

Bancroft's rise to political eminence coincided with his emergence as a historian. With the publication of the first volume of his History of the United States in 1834, Bancroft immediately established his reputation as one of the nation's leading historians. Bancroft followed this volume with nine other volumes at irregular intervals, with the last volume appearing in 1874. The most comprehensive account of American history to that point, Bancroft's work achieved a commanding influence over nineteenth-century American historical writing. Bancroft's history was so popular and influential because of its ability to articulate and crystallize the basic assumptions of American exceptionalist ideology, namely the belief that the United States had a special destiny to embody and carry out democratic principles. While for this reason modern scholars have often attributed to him a mythic and uncritically celebratory view of the nation's past, Bancroft was actually a more sophisticated historian than these scholars have acknowledged, and his work combined a fervent nationalism with a cosmopolitan perspective. Very much aware of the international context for American developments, Bancroft's extensive research included both colonial and European archival sources, and he in fact devoted much of his discussion to European events.

Bancroft could take such a broad view of American history because he embraced a teleological perspective that treated the colonial past and indeed all of human history as having a design and purpose leading inexorably up to the Revolution. In Bancroft's words, "prepared by glorious forerunners," the Revolution "grew naturally and necessarily out of the series of past events by the formative principle of a living belief" (7:23). Bancroft believed the Revolution was inevitable because it had been decreed by the "grand design of Providence" (7:23). In his belief that America's historical development fulfilled a divine purpose and his belief that the Revolution represented a turning point in human history, Bancroft articulated two of the central assumptions of American exceptionalism. The Revolution was, for Bancroft, a turning point because it had brought about the realization of America's destiny to advance the cause of liberty. Structuring his analysis around the development of liberty in America, Bancroft dated this development back to the Reformation and began his history with the colonial era. Bancroft emphasized the role of the New England Puritans in developing and transplanting the principles of democracy and liberty to America, for, as he put it, Puritanism was "religion struggling for the People" (1:500).

This account of the origins of liberty served political and social purposes. An ardent Jacksonian, Bancroft gave historical legitimacy to the democratic principles he espoused by tracing their roots in the past. Bancroft's emphasis on the Puritan contribution to democracy reflected his own sectional loyalties: by locating the roots of democracy in New England, Bancroft asserted the primacy of his own region in American development and defined the nation in terms of New England. At the same time Bancroft's history also served nationalist purposes. Recognizing that Puritanism was just one of the many strands that contributed to American independence, Bancroft gave credit to victims of Puritan persecution, like Roger Williams, and to William Penn and the settlers of Virginia for instituting the principles of liberty in their respective regions. Bancroft thus sought to instill national unity by giving each section a role in the advance of democracy. The other major theme of Bancroft's history was the development of union in America.

With the Revolution, Bancroft believed, America had embarked on a process of continual progress. While the principles of the Revolution did not require a dramatic change in the nation's social or political system, the vitality of the principles themselves made them a source of continual renovation and reform for Bancroft. In his belief that the nation could remain indefinitely in a state of revolution without undergoing fundamental change, Bancroft summed up the exceptionalist vision of America as a nation that was exempt from the normal processes of historical change and decay. In this vision, by virtue of its closeness to nature, the United States could remain in a state of perpetual innocence and simplicity, untouched by the social forces that had corrupted the Old World.

WILLIAM HICKLING PRESCOTT

While their nationalist purposes made U.S. history a natural subject of study for antebellum historians, they also took an interest in other areas of history. One of the leading Romantic historians, William Hickling Prescott (1796–1859), for example, focused on the history of Spain and its conquest of the New World. Born into a wealthy Boston family, Prescott published his first historical work, History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic, in 1837. This history immediately achieved critical and popular acclaim, and Prescott's reputation would only grow with his subsequent books—History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843) and History of the Conquest of Peru (1847). While the subject matter for his histories differed from that of Bancroft and Sparks, Prescott shared many of their assumptions about the nature and purpose of history. Thus in his most highly regarded work, the Conquest of Mexico, Prescott took Bancroft's view of history as the inevitable march of progress into his interpretation of the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs. For Prescott, the historian could fulfill his or her moral purpose only by identifying the larger principles of progress at work in the events he or she described, for these principles would provide the standards by which to judge historical actors. Identifying these principles was important for the historian's aesthetic purposes as well. Firmly committed to the Romantic view of history as literary art, Prescott viewed his Conquest of Mexico as an "epic in prose" (Levin, p. 164). He thus sought to give dramatic unity to his history by structuring his narrative around the conflict between the "civilization" of the Spanish conquerors and the "semi-civilization" of the Aztecs, culminating in the inevitable defeat of the Aztecs by the Spanish. For Prescott, the contrast between the leaders of these two groups—the decisive and resolute Hernán Cortés and the weak and vacillating Montezuma—embodied the differences between the Spanish and the Aztecs and revealed why the Spanish victory was inevitable and necessary for progress.

JOHN LOTHROP MOTLEY

Prescott in turn influenced the other major Romantic historian of this period, John Lothrop Motley (1814–1877), and with Prescott's death in 1859, Motley became the nation's leading historian of Europe. But whereas Prescott had focused on Spanish history, Motley turned his attention to Dutch history. With the publication of The Rise of the Dutch Republic in 1856, Motley immediately achieved wide popular and critical acclaim, and he followed this work with other studies of Dutch history—The History of the United Netherlands (1860–1867) and The Life and Death of John of Barneveld (1874). Highly praised by American and European historians in his time, The Rise of the Dutch Republic was Motley's most influential work and became a best-seller in both the United States and Britain. Like Prescott, Motley structured his narrative around the struggle between the forces of progress and their opponents. Taking for his subject the Dutch rebellion against Philip II of Spain, Motley, however, identified the Dutch with progress and the Spanish with decline and reaction. More specifically, because Motley, like Bancroft, equated progress with the advancement of liberty, he depicted the conflict between the Spanish and the Dutch as one between liberty and tyranny. And like Bancroft, Motley emphasized the role of Providence in the advance of progress, portraying progress as the inevitable realization of divine will. While this work did not possess the same dramatic unity as Prescott's, Motley in his own way sought to achieve the ideal of history as Romantic art through the excitement and emotion of his prose and through his ability to create vivid and dramatic characters.

WOMEN AND THE WRITING OF HISTORY: ELIZABETH ELLET

Although women were for the most part excluded from this circle of historians, women did engage in the writing of history in this period. As Nina Baym has demonstrated, women wrote about history in many different genres, including conventional narrative histories, historical novels, travel writings, plays, and poetry. Probably the best-known female historian from this period was Elizabeth Ellet (c. 1812–1877). A prolific author who wrote on a wide variety of topics, ranging from American history to original poetry and literary criticism, Ellet published her first major historical work, Women of the American Revolution, a three-volume collective biography of women in the Revolution, between 1848 and 1850. At a time when the ideology of domesticity excluded women from the public world of historical writing and politics, Ellet challenged conventional assumptions about women's domestic roles not only by writing history herself but also by showing women's contributions to the public realm during the Revolution. Ellet's Domestic History of the American Revolution (1850) went further and challenged conventional definitions of history, which emphasized political and military events, by arguing for the importance of studying the history of everyday social life—in which women played a major part—during the Revolution. Yet Ellet would only go so far in subverting conventional gender roles. Even while urging the need to recognize women's contributions to political events like the Revolution, Ellet still reinforced the association of women with the domestic sphere by emphasizing the domestic character of those contributions and identifying women with the realm of sentiment and emotion.

CHALLENGES TO ROMANTIC HISTORY: RICHARD HILDRETH

Although the Romantic nationalism of Bancroft and Motley prevailed in the nineteenth century, this style of history did not go unchallenged. One of the best-known dissenters from the Romantic style of history was Richard Hildreth (1807–1865). From the same cultural milieu as his fellow New England historians, Hildreth combined historical writing with a career as an antislavery reformer and philosopher. Hildreth published the first three volumes of his History of the United States in 1849, followed by three more volumes in 1851 and 1852, which continued the History up to 1821. In contrast to the Romantic style of his contemporaries, Hildreth wrote in a dry, colorless style that listed facts and events in an unemotional way, occasionally relieved by the ironic humor and vivid prose of his caustic declamations against human bigotry and hypocrisy. Hildreth expressed his desire to challenge patriotic myths about American history in his preface, where he declared that his purpose was "to present for once, on the historic stage, the founders of our American nation unbedaubed with patriotic rouge" (1:iii). Hence Hildreth ridiculed the conventional patriotic view of the Puritans as exponents of liberty, arguing instead that bigotry and intolerance defined Puritanism. In Hildreth's view, rather than a direct outgrowth of Puritanism as Bancroft had claimed, liberty was primarily the product of forces in conflict with Puritan ideals, and the struggle and eventual triumph of these forces against a powerful Puritan theocracy served as major organizing themes for the first two volumes of his history. Hildreth's critical perspective on the Puritans reflected his skepticism about religion more generally. Influenced by utilitarian philosophy, Hildreth interpreted human history in purely secular terms and rejected the providential interpretation embraced by most of his contemporaries.

Hildreth was equally unconventional in his interpretation of the Revolution as an economic struggle to free the colonies from British commercial restrictions, for this interpretation challenged the patriotic view of the Revolution as a struggle for the abstract principle of liberty. And rather than celebrating the Revolution as a turning point in history, Hildreth pointed to its limits, criticizing the Revolution for its failure to realize the democratic principles it proclaimed, particularly with regard to slavery. While Hildreth's history did not achieve much popular success, this work was important as a precursor to the scientific ideal of objective truth that would develop later in the nineteenth century.

THE ART AND SCIENCE OF HISTORY: FRANCIS PARKMAN

Romantic and scientific history were not mutually exclusive, as Francis Parkman (1823–1893) revealed. Part of the Boston Brahmin elite like his Romantic predecessors, Parkman came from a wealthy and privileged background. Fascinated with the "wilderness," Parkman expressed his enthusiasm for the outdoors and for vigorous physical activity through his many hiking trips to remote wilderness regions. In these travels Parkman went to many of the places he discussed in his histories, enabling him to base his descriptions on firsthand experience. In 1846 Parkman traveled west in an expedition on the Oregon Trail, and his chronicle of this trip provided the basis for his first book, The California and Oregon Trail, published in 1849. Parkman's love of outdoor activity made the health problems he began to suffer in 1843 all the more of a constraint on his way of life. Suffering from headaches, insomnia, indigestion, arthritis, and partial blindness, Parkman often had to lie down in a darkened room without moving for days at a time. Despite his illness, Parkman managed to continue his work on history by having others read his sources aloud to him, by dictating his narrative to one of his assistants, and by setting up a wire mechanism to guide his pencil, which enabled him to do some writing in the dark.

As a result of these efforts, Parkman published his Pioneers of France in the New World, the first part of his seven-part study of the French and English conflict in North America, now known as France and England in North America, in 1865. Parkman completed this series in 1892 with the publication of his A Half Century of Conflict. The best known and most highly regarded volume in this series was Parkman's Montcalm and Wolfe, published in 1884, which brought the imperial conflict between France and England to a close by examining the French and Indian War and its outcome—the establishment of British colonial supremacy in North America. Like his predecessors, Parkman viewed himself as a literary artist and sought to make the past come to life for the reader through the use of the imagination. At the same time Parkman's extensive primary source research was consistent with the scientific ideal of objective truth that was emerging in his time. Parkman saw no conflict between his artistic purposes and his commitment to truth and scholarship. On the contrary, through extensive quotations from his primary sources and the accumulation of details drawn from these sources, Parkman was able to make the events he described seem more vivid and immediate to his audiences. Writing in a direct, vigorous style, Parkman sought to create a sense of drama in Montcalm and Wolfe by structuring his narrative around a series of oppositions—between England and France, old and new France, nature and civilization, effeminacy and manhood, and his two central characters, the Marquis de Montcalm and General James Wolfe. Associating nature with freedom and savagery, Parkman believed the English were ultimately able to prevail over the French because of their ability to balance the vigor of nature with the order of civilization. If for Parkman the French represented overrefined civilization, Native Americans at the other extreme embodied the chaotic savagery of nature. Rather than idealizing Native Americans as "noble savages," Parkman portrayed them as cruel and irrational barbarians who were doomed to be destroyed by the advance of civilization.

Yet if Parkman embraced Romantic ideals in his style of writing, his interpretation of history was darker and more pessimistic than that of his Romantic predecessors. Reflecting his own skepticism about religion, Parkman rejected his predecessors' belief in a providential design for history, barely mentioning Providence in his histories. So while he shared the Romantic fascination with nature, he did not see nature as a realm where the individual could commune with the divine as Romantic thinkers did. Instead, reflecting the influence of the evolutionist Charles Darwin, Parkman described nature as a realm defined by the struggle for existence. Parkman's view of nature as an amoral force, governed by fixed laws and indifferent to the fate of humanity, was part of a larger theory of causation that downplayed the individual's ability to control historical events. Parkman instead emphasized the power of larger forces beyond individual control and pointed to the role of petty and trivial occurrences in bringing about events of momentous significance. Thus Parkman did not think progress was inevitable. Deeply critical of the materialistic and democratic tendencies of his time, Parkman feared that, far from improving on their ancestors, his contemporaries had fallen away from the spirit of vigor and heroism that their predecessors had displayed in the colonial struggle against France. In this way Parkman's work at once represented the culmination of Romantic history and pointed to its demise. By the time of Parkman's death in 1893, American historians had increasingly turned away from the Romantic view of history as a literary art in favor of what they considered the more scientific ideal of objectivity, which equated truth with an unbiased account of the facts, detached from any social or political purpose.

See also History of the Conquest of Mexico; The Oregon Trail; Philosophy; Romanticism

Eileen Ka-May Cheng