dedicated a volume of poems to President Kirkland, “with respect and
affection,” as to his “early benefactor and friend,” yet we have the
testimony of George Ticknor (in Miss Ticknor’s Life of J. G. Cogswell)
that Bancroft was “thwarted in every movement by the President.” Mr.
Ticknor was himself a professor in the college, and though his view
may not have been dispassionate, he must have had the opportunity of
knowledge. His statement is rendered more probable by the fact that he
records a similar discontent in the case of Professor J. G. Cogswell, who
was certainly a man of conciliatory temperament. By Ticknor’s account,
Mr. Cogswell, who had been arranging the Harvard College Library and
preparing the catalogue, was quite unappreciated by the Corporation, and
though Ticknor urged both him and Bancroft to stay, they were resolved
to leave, even if their proposed school came to nothing. The school
in question was the once famous “Round Hill” at Northampton, in which
enterprise Cogswell, then thirty-six, and Bancroft, then twenty-three,
embarked in 1823. The latter had already preached several sermons, and
seemed to be feeling about for his career; but it now appeared as if he
had found it.
In embarking, however, he warbled a sort of swan-song at the close of
his academical life, and published in September, 1823, a small volume of
eighty pages, printed at the University Press, Cambridge, and entitled
“Poems by George Bancroft. Cambridge: Hilliard & Metcalf.” Some of these
were written in Switzerland, some in Italy, some, after his return home,
at Worcester; but almost all were European in theme, and neither better
nor worse than the average of such poems by young men of twenty or
thereabouts. The first, called “Expectation,” is the most noticeable, for
it contains an autobiographical glimpse of this young academical Childe
Harold setting forth on his pilgrimage:—
“’Twas in the season when the sun
More darkly tinges spring’s fair brow,
And laughing fields had just begun
The summer’s golden hues to show.
Earth still with flowers was richly dight,
And the last rose in gardens glowed;
In heaven’s blue tent the sun was bright,
And western winds with fragrance flowed;
’Twas then a youth bade home adieu;
And hope was young and life was new,
When first he seized the pilgrim’s wand
To roam the far, the foreign land.
“There lives the marble, wrought by art.
That clime the youth would gain; he braves
The ocean’s fury, and his heart
Leaps in him, like the sunny waves
That bear him onward; and the light
Of hope within his bosom beams,
Like the phosphoric ray at night
That round the prow so cheerly gleams.
But still his eye would backward turn,
And still his bosom warmly burn,
As towards new worlds he ’gan to roam,
With love for Freedom’s Western home.”
This is the opening poem; the closing words of the book, at the end of
the final “Pictures of Rome,” are in a distinctly patriotic strain:—
“Farewell to Rome; how lovely in distress;
How sweet her gloom; how proud her wilderness!
Farewell to all that won my youthful heart,
And waked fond longings after fame. We part.
The weary pilgrim to his home returns;
For Freedom’s air, for Western climes he burns;
Where dwell the brave, the generous, and the free,
O! there is Rome; no other Rome for me.”
It was in order to train these young children of the Republic—“the brave,
the generous, and the free”—that Bancroft entered upon the “Round Hill”
enterprise.
This celebrated school belonged to that class of undertakings which are
so successful as to ruin their projectors. It began in a modest way;
nothing could be more sensible than the “Prospectus,”—a pamphlet of
twenty pages, issued at Cambridge, June 20, 1823. In this there is a
clear delineation of the defects then existing in American schools; and
a modest promise is given that, aided by the European experience of the
two founders, something like a French _collège_ or a German _gymnasium_
might be created. There were to be not more than twenty pupils, who were
to be from nine to twelve on entering. A fine estate was secured at
Northampton, and pupils soon came in.
Then followed for several years what was at least a very happy family.
The school was to be in many respects on the German plan: farm life,
friendly companionship, ten-mile rambles through the woods with the
teachers, and an annual walking tour in the same company. All instruction
was to be thorough; there was to be no direct emulation, and no flogging.
There remain good delineations of the school in the memoirs of Dr.
Cogswell, and in a paper by the late T. G. Appleton, one of the pupils.
It is also described by Duke Bernard of Saxe-Weimar in his “Travels.”
The material of the school was certainly fortunate. Many men afterwards
noted in various ways had their early training there: J. L. Motley,
H. W. Bellows, R. T. S. Lowell, F. Schroeder, Ellery Channing, G. E.
Ellis, Theodore Sedgwick, George C. Shattuck, S. G. Ward, R. G. Shaw, N.
B. Shurtleff, George Gibbs, Philip Kearney, R. G. Harper. At a dinner
given to Dr. Cogswell in 1864, the most profuse expressions of grateful
reminiscence were showered upon Mr. Bancroft, though he was then in
Europe. The prime object of the school, as stated by Mr. Ticknor, was
“to teach _more thoroughly_ than has ever been taught among us.” How far
this was accomplished can only be surmised; what is certain is that the
boys enjoyed themselves. They were admirably healthy, not having a case
of illness for sixteen months, and they were happy. When we say that,
among other delights, the boys had a large piece of land where they had a
boy-village of their own, a village known as Cronyville, a village where
each boy erected his own shanty and built his own chimney, where he could
roast apples and potatoes on a winter evening and call the neighbors
in,—when each boy had such absolute felicity as this, with none to molest
him or make him afraid, there is no wonder that the “old boys” were ready
to feast their kindly pedagogues forty years later.
But to spread barracks for boys and crony villages over the delightful
hills of Northampton demanded something more than kindliness; it needed
much administrative skill and some money. Neither Cogswell nor Bancroft
was a man of fortune. Instead of twenty boys, they had at one time one
hundred and twenty-seven, nearly fifty of whom had to be kept through
the summer vacation. They had many Southern pupils and, as an apparent
consequence, many bad debts, Mr. Cogswell estimating a loss of two
thousand dollars from this cause in a single year; and sometimes they had
to travel southward to dun delinquent parents. The result of it all was
that Bancroft abandoned the enterprise after seven years, in the summer
of 1830; while Cogswell, who held on two years longer, retired with
health greatly impaired and a financial loss of twenty thousand dollars.
Thus ended the Round Hill School.
While at Round Hill, Mr. Bancroft prepared some text-books for his
pupils, translating Heeren’s “Politics of Ancient Greece” (1824) and
Jacobs’s Latin Reader (1825),—the latter going through several editions.
His first article in the “North American Review,” then the leading
literary journal in the United States, appeared in October, 1823, and
was a notice of Schiller’s “Minor Poems,” with many translations.
From this time forward he wrote in almost every volume, but always on
classical or German themes, until in January, 1831, he took up “The
Bank of the United States,” and a few years later (October, 1835), “The
Documentary History of the Revolution.” These indicated the progress
of his historical studies, which had also begun at Round Hill, and
took form at last in his great history. The design of this monumental
work was as deliberate as Gibbon’s, and almost as vast; and the author
lived, like Gibbon, to see it accomplished. The first volume appeared in
1834, the second in 1837, the third in 1840, the fourth in 1852, and so
onward. Between these volumes was interspersed a variety of minor essays,
some of which were collected in a volume of “Literary and Historical
Miscellanies,” published in 1855. Bancroft also published, as a separate
work, a “History of the Formation of the Constitution of the United
States” (1882).
While at Northampton, he was an ardent Democrat of the most theoretic
and philosophic type, and he very wisely sought to acquaint himself
with the practical side of public affairs. In 1826 he gave an address
at Northampton, defining his position and sympathies; in 1830 he was
elected to the Legislature, but declined to take his seat, and the next
year refused a nomination to the Senate. In 1835 he drew up an address
to the people of Massachusetts, made many speeches and prepared various
sets of resolutions, was flattered, traduced, caricatured. From 1838 to
1841 he was Collector of the Port of Boston; in 1844 he was Democratic
candidate for Governor of Massachusetts, but was defeated,—George N.
Briggs being his successful antagonist,—although he received more votes
than any Democratic candidate before him. In 1845 he was Secretary of
the Navy under President Polk. In all these executive positions he may
be said to have achieved success. It was, for instance, during his term
of office that the Naval Academy was established at Annapolis; it was he
who gave the first order to take possession of California; and he who,
while acting for a month as Secretary of War, gave the order to General
Taylor to march into Texas, thus ultimately leading to the annexation
of that state. This, however, identified him with a transaction justly
censurable, and indeed his whole political career occurred during the
most questionable period of Democratic subserviency to the slave power,
and that weakness was never openly—perhaps never sincerely—resisted by
him. This left a reproach upon his earlier political career which has,
however, been effaced by his literary life and his honorable career as a
diplomatist. In 1846 he was transferred from the Cabinet to the post of
Minister Plenipotentiary to Great Britain, where he contrived to combine
historical researches with public functions. In 1849 he returned to
this country—a Whig administration having been elected—and took up his
residence in New York. In February, 1866, he was selected by Congress to
pronounce a eulogy on President Lincoln, and in the following year he was
appointed Minister to Prussia, being afterwards successively accredited
to the North German Confederation and the German Empire. In these
positions he succeeded in effecting some important treaty provisions in
respect to the rights of naturalized German citizens residing in Germany.
He was recalled at his own request in 1874, and thenceforward resided in
Washington in the winter, and at Newport, Rhode Island, in summer.
Dividing his life between these two abodes, he passed his later years
in a sort of existence more common in Europe than here,—the well-earned
dignity of the scholar who has also been, in his day, a man of affairs,
and who is yet too energetic to repose upon his laurels or waste much
time upon merely enjoying the meed of fame he has won. In both his winter
and summer abodes he had something of the flattering position of First
Citizen; he was free of all sets, an honored member of all circles. His
manners were often mentioned as “courtly,” but they never quite rose to
the level of either of the two classes of manner described by Tennyson:—
“Kind nature is the best, those manners next
That fit us like a nature second-hand;
Which are indeed the manners of the great.”
Neither of these descriptions exactly fitted Mr. Bancroft; his manners
were really of the composite sort, and curiously suggestive of the
different phases of his life. They were like that wonderful Japanese
lacquer-work, made up of twenty or thirty different coats or films,
usually laid on by several different workmen. There was at the foundation
the somewhat formal and literal manner of the scholar, almost of the
pedagogue: then one caught a glimpse of an executive, official style,
that seemed to date from the period when he ordered California to be
occupied; and over all there was a varnish of worldly courtesy, enhanced
by an evident pleasure in being admired, and broken by an occasional
outburst of rather blunt sincerity.
But he matured and mellowed well; his social life at Washington was
more satisfactory to himself and others than that he led in New York;
he had voluntarily transplanted himself to a community which, with all
its faults and crudities, sets intellect above wealth, and readily
conceded the highest place to a man like Bancroft. Foreign ministers
came accredited to him as well as to the government; he was the friend
of every successive administration, and had as many guests as he cared
to see at his modest Sunday evening receptions. There he greeted every
one cordially, aided by a wife amply gifted in the amenities. He was kind
to everybody, and remembered the father or grandfather of anybody who
had any such ancestors whom it was desirable to mention. In summer, at
Newport, it was the same; his residence was like that described by his
imagination in one of his own early poems—
“Where heaven lends her loveliest scene,
A softened air, a sky serene,
Along the shore where smiles the sea.”
Unlike most Newport “cottages,” his house was within sight of the ocean;
between it and the sea lay the garden, and the “rose in Kenmure’s cap”
in the Scottish ballad was not a characteristic more invariable than the
same flower in Mr. Bancroft’s hand or buttonhole. His form was familiar,
too, on Bellevue Avenue, taking as regularly as any old-fashioned
Englishman his daily horseback exercise. At the same time he was one of
the few men who were capable, even in Newport, of doing daily the day’s
work; he rose fabulously early in the morning, and kept a secretary or
two always employed. Since John Quincy Adams, there has not been among us
such an example of laborious, self-exacting, seemingly inexhaustible old
age; and, unlike Adams, Mr. Bancroft kept his social side always fresh
and active, and did not have, like the venerable ex-President, to force
himself out in the evening in order “to learn the art of conversation.”
This combination, with his monumental literary work, will keep his memory
secure. It will possibly outlive that of many men of greater inspiration,
loftier aims, and sublimer qualities.
Mr. Bancroft, as an historian, combined some of the greatest merits and
some of the profoundest defects ever united in a single author. His
merits are obvious enough. He had great enthusiasm for his subject. He
was profoundly imbued with that democratic spirit without which the
history of the United States cannot be justly written. He has the graphic
quality so wanting in Hildreth, and the piquancy whose absence makes
Prescott too smooth. He has a style essentially picturesque, whatever
may be its faults. The reader is compelled to admit that his resources
in the way of preparation are inexhaustible, and that his command
of them is astounding. One must follow him minutely, for instance,
through the history of the War for Independence, to appreciate in full
the consummate grasp of a mind which can deploy military events in a
narrative as a general deploys brigades in a field. Add to this the
capacity for occasional maxims to the highest degree profound and lucid,
in the way of political philosophy, and you certainly combine in one man
some of the greatest qualities of the historian.
Against this are to be set very grave faults. In his earlier editions
there was an habitual pomposity and inflation of style which the sterner
taste of his later years has so modified that we must now condone it.
The same heroic revision has cut off many tame and commonplace remarks
as trite as those virtuous truisms by which second-rate actors bring
down the applause of the galleries at cheap theatres. Many needless
philosophical digressions have shared the same fate. But many faults
remain. There is, in the first place, that error so common with the
graphic school of historians,—the exaggerated estimate of manuscript or
fragmentary material at the expense of what is printed and permanent.
In many departments of history this dependence is inevitable; but,
unfortunately, Mr. Bancroft was not, except in the very earliest volumes
of his history, dealing with such departments. The loose and mythical
period of our history really ends with Captain John Smith. From the
moment when the Pilgrims landed, the main facts of American history are
to be found recorded in a series of carefully prepared documents, made
by men to whom the pen was familiar, and who were exceedingly methodical
in all their ways. The same is true of all the struggles which led to
the Revolution, and of all those which followed. They were the work of
honest-minded Anglo-Saxon men who, if they issued so much as a street
hand-bill, said just what they meant, and meant precisely what they
said. To fill the gaps in this solid documentary chain is, no doubt,
desirable,—to fill them by every passing rumor, every suggestion of a
French agent’s busy brain; but to substitute this inferior matter for
the firmer basis is wrong. Much of the graphic quality of Mr. Bancroft’s
writing is obtained by this means, and this portends, in certain
directions, a future shrinkage and diminution in his fame.
A fault far more serious than this is one which Mr. Bancroft shared
with his historical contemporaries, but in which he far exceeded any
of them,—an utter ignoring of the very meaning and significance of a
quotation-mark. Others of that day sinned. The long controversy between
Jared Sparks and Lord Mahon grew out of this,—from the liberties taken
by Sparks in editing Washington’s letters. Professor Edward T. Channing
did the same thing in quoting the racy diaries of his grandfather,
William Ellery, and substituting, for instance, in a passage cited as
original, “We refreshed ourselves with meat and drink,” for the far
racier “We refreshed our Stomachs with Beefsteaks and Grogg.” Hildreth,
in quoting from the “Madison Papers,” did the same, for the sake not of
propriety, but of convenience; even Frothingham made important omissions
and variations, without indicating them, in quoting Hooke’s remarkable
sermon, “New England’s Teares.” But Bancroft is the chief of sinners in
this respect; when he quotes a contemporary document or letter, it is
absolutely impossible to tell, without careful verifying, whether what
he gives us between the quotation-marks is precisely what should be
there, or whether it is a compilation, rearrangement, selection, or even
a series of mere paraphrases of his own. It would be easy to illustrate
this abundantly, especially from the Stamp Act volume; but a single
instance will suffice.
When, in 1684, an English fleet sailed into Boston harbor, ostensibly on
its way to attack the Dutch settlements on the Hudson, it left behind
a royal commission, against whose mission of interference the colonial
authorities at once protested, and they issued a paper, as one historian
has said, “in words so clear and dignified as to give a foretaste of
the Revolutionary state papers that were to follow a century later.” If
ever there was a document in our pre-Revolutionary history that ought
to be quoted precisely as it was written, or not at all, it was this
remonstrance. It thus begins in Bancroft’s version, and the words have
often been cited by others. He says of the colony of Massachusetts:
“Preparing a remonstrance, not against deeds of tyranny, but the
menace of tyranny, not against actual wrong, but against a principle
of wrong, on the 25th of October, it thus addressed King Charles II.”
The alleged address is then given, apparently in full, and then follows
the remark, “The spirit of the people corresponded with this address.”
It will hardly be believed that there never was any such address, and
that no such document was ever in existence as that so formally cited
here. Yet any one who will compare Bancroft’s draft with the original
in the Records of Massachusetts (volume iv, part 2, pages 168-169) will
be instantly convinced of this. Bancroft has simply taken phrases and
sentences here and there from a long document and rearranged, combined,
and, in some cases, actually paraphrased them in his own way. Logically
and rhetorically the work is his own. The colonial authorities adopted
their own way of composition, and he adopted his. In some sentences we
have Bancroft, not Endicott; the nineteenth century, not the seventeenth.
Whether the transformation is an improvement or not is not the question;
the thing cited is not the original. An accurate historian would no more
have issued such a restatement under the shelter of quotation-marks than
an accurate theologian would have rewritten the Ten Commandments and read
his improved edition from the pulpit. And it is a curious fact that while
Mr. Bancroft has amended so much else in his later editions, he has left
this passage untouched, and still implies an adherence to the tradition
that this is the way to write history.
It is also to be noted that the evil is doubled when this practice is
combined with the other habit, already mentioned, of relying largely
upon manuscript authorities. If an historian garbles, paraphrases,
and rearranges when he is dealing with matter accessible to all, how
much greater the peril when he is dealing with what is in written
documents held under his own lock and key. It is not necessary to allege
intentional perversion, but we are, at the very least, absolutely at
the mercy of an inaccurate habit of mind. The importance of this point
is directly manifested on opening the leaves of Mr. Bancroft’s last
and perhaps most valuable book, “The History of the Constitution.” The
most important part of this book consists, by concession of all, in the
vast mass of selections from the private correspondence of the period:
for instance, of M. Otto, the French Ambassador. We do not hesitate to
say that, if tried by the standard of Mr. Bancroft’s previous literary
methods, this mass of correspondence, though valuable as suggestion, is
worthless as authority. Until it has been carefully collated and compared
with the originals, we do not know that a paragraph or a sentence of
it is left as the author wrote it; the system of paraphrase previously
exhibited throws the shadow of doubt over all. No person can safely cite
one of these letters in testimony; no person knows whether any particular
statement contained in it comes to us in the words of its supposed author
or of Mr. Bancroft. It is no answer to say that this loose method was the
method of certain Greek historians; if Thucydides composed speeches for
his heroes, it was at least known that he prepared them, and there was
not the standing falsehood of a quotation-mark.
A drawback quite as serious is to be found in this, that Mr. Bancroft’s
extraordinary labors in old age were not usually devoted to revising
the grounds of his own earlier judgments, but to perfecting his own
style of expression, and to weaving in additional facts at those points
which especially interested him. Professor Agassiz used to say that
the greatest labor of the student of biology came from the enormous
difficulty of keeping up with current publications and the proceedings of
societies; a man could carry on his own observations, but he could not
venture to publish them without knowing all the latest statements made
by other observers. Mr. Bancroft had to encounter the same obstacle in
his historical work, and it must be owned that he sometimes ignored it.
Absorbed in his own great stores of material, he often let the work of
others go unobserved. It would be easy to multiply instances. Thus, the
controversies about Verrazzano’s explorations were conveniently settled
by omitting his name altogether; there was no revision of the brief early
statement that the Norse sagas were “mythological,” certainly one of the
least appropriate adjectives that could have been selected; Mr. Bancroft
never even read—up to within a few years of his death, at any rate—the
important monographs of Varnhagen in respect to Amerigo Vespucci; he
did not keep up with the publications of the historical societies.
Laboriously revising his whole history in 1876, and almost rewriting it
for the edition of 1884, he allowed the labors of younger investigators
to go on around him unobserved. The consequence is that much light has
been let in upon American history in directions where he has not so much
as a window; and there are points where his knowledge, vast as it is,
will be found to have been already superseded. In this view, that cannot
be asserted of him which the late English historian, Mr. J. R. Green,
proudly and justly claimed for himself: “I know what men will say of
me—he died learning.” But Mr. Bancroft at least died laboring, and in the
harness.