REFERENCES:
W. M. Sloane: ‘George Bancroft in Society, in Politics, in Letters,’ ‘The Century Magazine,’ January, 1887.
S. S. Green: ‘George Bancroft,’ Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society, April 29, 1891.
A. McF. Davis: ‘George Bancroft,’ Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, vol. xxvi, 1891.
I
HIS LIFE
The Bancrofts have been settled in America since 1632. Among the historian’s ancestors were men of marked traits of character. Bancroft’s grandfather, a farmer of Essex County, Massachusetts, had such a reputation for piety and judgment that he was called on to act as an umpire in the bitter dispute between Jonathan Edwards and his church at Northampton.
The father of the historian, Aaron Bancroft, a pioneer of American Unitarianism, was for fifty years pastor of the Second Church of Worcester. His distinguishing trait was ‘a deep-seated abhorrence of anything like mental slavery.’ He was an ardent student of American history and the author of an Essay on the Life of George Washington (1807), a popular book in its own day and well worth the reading in ours. George Bancroft thought ‘that his own inclination toward history was due very much to the influence of his father.’
There is a story (probably apocryphal) that in his youth Aaron Bancroft fought at Lexington and Bunker Hill. During Shays’s Rebellion, when the insurgent officers proposed to quarter themselves in private houses at Worcester, the minister guarded his own door and told a group of officers who approached that they were rebels, and that ‘they would obtain no entrance to his house but by violence.’ The officers immediately rode away.
George Bancroft was born at Worcester on October 3, 1800. He prepared for college at Phillips Academy, Exeter, New Hampshire, and was graduated at Harvard in 1817. Edward Everett, the newly appointed professor of Greek, who was then studying at Göttingen, urged President Kirkland to send some graduate of marked powers to Germany with a view to his preparing himself to teach at Harvard. The choice fell on Bancroft. He spent two years at Göttingen and obtained his doctorate. Among his professors were Heeren, Dissen, Eichhorn, and Blumenbach; Heeren’s influence was the most profound and the most lasting. His range of studies was wide, including, as it did, history, German literature, Greek philosophy, natural history, Scripture interpretation, Arabic, Syriac, and Persian.
From Göttingen, Bancroft went to Berlin, where he heard the lectures of Savigny, Schleiermacher, and Hegel, and made the acquaintance of Voss, W. von Humboldt, and F. A. Wolf. He had the fortune to meet Goethe once at Jena, and again at Weimar. After leaving Berlin he studied for a time at Heidelberg under Von Schlosser. In Paris he met Cousin, Constant, and A. von Humboldt. He travelled in Switzerland and Italy, and spent the winter of 1821–22 at Rome, where he made the acquaintance of Niebuhr and Bunsen. At Leghorn the following spring he was one of a party of Americans who gathered to meet Byron when the poet visited the ‘Constitution,’ the flagship of the American squadron. Bancroft afterwards called on Byron at Montenero, and was presented to the Countess Guiccioli.
In the fall of 1822 Bancroft became a tutor of Greek at Harvard. The following year he resigned his position, not to enter the ministry in accordance with his father’s wishes, but to become a schoolmaster. He joined his friend, Joseph G. Cogswell (the directing spirit in the enterprise), in founding a school for boys at Round Hill, Northampton. Emerson, then a youth of twenty, heard Bancroft preach at the ‘New South’ in Boston soon after his return from Germany, and was ‘delighted with his eloquence.’ ‘He needs a great deal of cutting and pruning, but we think him an infant Hercules.’ Emerson deplored Bancroft’s new departure, ‘because good schoolmasters are as plenty as whortleberries, but good ministers assuredly are not, and Bancroft might be one of the best.’
On the eve of leaving Cambridge, Bancroft published, under the title of Poems, a volume of correct if not inspired verse. At Northampton his literary activity found more sober expression in text-books, in papers for the ‘North American Review’ and Walsh’s ‘American Quarterly,’ and in a careful translation of Heeren’s Politics of Ancient Greece (1824). At the celebration of Independence Day at Northampton in 1826, Bancroft was the orator. He chanted the present glory of America, predicted a golden future, and declared his faith in a ‘determined uncompromising democracy.’ These notes were to be heard again and often in his great history.
Round Hill, though prosperous in many ways, was not a success financially, nor were the partners wholly congenial. After seven years Bancroft withdrew from the school and began writing the book on which his fame rests. In 1834 appeared the first volume of A History of the United States from the discovery of the American continent to the present time. The second volume was published in 1837, the third in 1840.
The historian removed to Springfield and became prominent in state politics. He was an ardent Democrat and a strong opponent of slavery. Elected without his knowledge to the legislature, he refused to take his seat; he also declined a nomination to the senate. It is said that he took this attitude with respect to office-holding out of deference to the feelings of his wife, Sarah (Dwight) Bancroft, who came of a prominent Whig family. Mrs. Bancroft died in 1837.[11] Appointed Collector of the Port of Boston by President Van Buren, Bancroft held the office from 1838 to 1841, and administered its affairs with a thoroughness theretofore unknown, and in a way incidentally to reflect great credit on the profession of letters.
In 1844 Bancroft was the Democratic candidate for governor of Massachusetts and polled a large vote, but was defeated by George N. Briggs. A year later he became Secretary of the Navy under President Polk. In the exercise of his duties he gave the order to take possession of California, and as acting Secretary of War the order to General Taylor to occupy Texas.
During his secretaryship Bancroft founded the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis. This he brought about not by asking Congress to authorize its establishment, but by so interpreting the powers granted him under the law that he was able to set in operation a school for the training of midshipmen and offer it to Congress for approval. Once the school was established and its usefulness proved, there was no difficulty in securing funds for adequate equipment. The Academy was formally opened on October 10, 1845.
From 1846 to 1849 Bancroft was minister to England. There were important diplomatic problems to be solved, but his triumphs were chiefly literary and social. He accumulated a rich store of documents, and on his return to America made his home in New York and devoted himself anew to the History.[12] The fourth volume appeared in 1852; the fifth in 1853; the sixth in 1854; the seventh in 1858; the eighth in 1860; the ninth in 1866; the tenth and concluding volume in 1874. His Literary and Historical Miscellanies appeared in 1855.
When the New York Historical Society celebrated the close of the first half-century of its existence (1854), Bancroft was the orator. His address on that occasion, ‘The Necessity, the Reality, and the Promise of the Progress of the Human Race,’ has been pronounced the best exposition of his historical creed.[13]
Bancroft was a strong Union man and during the Civil War acted with the Republican party. He declined a nomination to Congress from the eighth district of New York (October, 1862), on the ground that a multiplication of candidates would leave the result very much to chance; there should be a union, he urged, of all those ‘who feel deeply for their country in this her hour of peril.’ At the close of the war he was chosen to pronounce the eulogy on Lincoln before Congress (February, 1866).
President Johnson, in 1867, appointed Bancroft minister to Prussia. Later he was accredited to the North German Confederation, and in 1872, following current political changes, to the German Empire. He brought about that notable treaty whereby Germans who had become citizens of the United States were freed from allegiance to the land of their birth. Never before by a ‘formal act’ had the principle of ‘renunciation of citizenship at ‘the will of the individual been recognized.’ England followed Germany’s example and gave over her claim of indefeasible allegiance. Another diplomatic triumph was the settlement of the North-western boundary dispute. While in Germany Bancroft celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of his graduation at Göttingen. The University gave him an honorary degree, and congratulations were showered on him from scholars, statesmen, princes, and men of letters.
After nearly eight years of service Bancroft was recalled from the German mission at his own request. He lived in Washington during the winter months and spent the summers at Newport as had long been his habit. The work of his later years included two revisions of the History (1876 and 1884), a History of the Formation of the Constitution of the United States (1882), A Plea for the Constitution of the United States of America, wounded in the House of its Guardians (1886), and a sketch of the public life of Martin Van Buren (1889).
Bancroft died in Washington on January 17, 1891.
II
HIS CHARACTER
Bancroft’s character was fashioned on a large scale. His mental horizon was broad, his power to plan and carry out a vast undertaking was commensurate with the reach of his vision. There was little in his habit of thought to suggest the narrowness so often associated with the name of scholar. Yet he had the infinitely laborious powers of the mere scholar. He could toil with unflagging energy day by day or year by year.
The magisterial note in his historical writings is due not alone to the subject or to the literary manner, but also to the deliberate tenacity of purpose with which the historian wrought. Such a work is the product, not of feverish spasms of intellectual activity, but of even and steady effort.
Bancroft has been accused of a want of enthusiasm in receiving critical observations on his work. It is a question whether historians (more than philosophers) are wont to receive with rapture proofs that they are possibly in the wrong. Bancroft’s tone of controversy is perhaps less peculiar to himself than is commonly asserted. However, it must be kept in mind that he had a ‘strong nervous personality.’
Emerson described the greeting he had from Bancroft in London. When he presented himself at the minister’s door, ‘it was opened by Mr. Bancroft himself in the midst of servants whom that man of eager manners thrust aside, saying that he would open his own door for me. He was full of goodness and talk.’ Other accounts of him give an impression of much stateliness of manner tempered by affability. Still others convey the idea that he was always artificial, and sometimes playful with a playfulness that bordered on frivolity. A friend[14] professed to detect in Bancroft’s bearing marks of the man of letters, diplomat, politician, preacher and pedagogue, one trait superimposed on another. But the blend of characteristics was charming.[15]
III
THE WRITER
The charge brought against Bancroft of having embellished his themes with ‘cheap rhetoric’ is unjust. Rhetorical the historian undoubtedly was, but the rhetoric was not cheap. It had the merit of sincerity; it was the result of an honest effort to present important facts and comments in becoming garb.
In 1834 the style thought appropriate to historical writing was markedly oratorical. Historians addressed their readers. A pomp of expression, something almost liturgical, was held seemly if not indeed of last importance. Reading their works, one involuntarily calls up a vision of grave gentlemen in much-wrinkled frock-coats, making stilted gestures, and looking even more unreal than their statues which now terrify posterity. Bancroft was affected by the prevailing drift towards oratorical forms. At times one is tempted to exclaim: ‘This was not meant to be read but to be heard.’
Take for example this passage on Sebastian Cabot: ‘He lived to an extreme old age and loved his profession to the last; in the hour of death his wandering thoughts were upon the ocean. The discoverer of the territory of our country was one of the most extraordinary men of his age; there is deep cause for regret that time has spared so few memorials of his career. Himself incapable of jealousy, he did not escape detraction. He gave England a continent, and no one knows his burial place.’
Not to enter into the question whether this is good, or indifferent, or even bad writing, it is sufficient to note that the passage in question belongs to spoken discourse rather than to literature. It appeals to us, if at all, through the medium of the ear rather than the eye.
Take for another example the comparison of Puritan and Cavalier: Historians have loved to eulogize ‘the manners and virtues, the glory and the benefits of chivalry. Puritanism accomplished for mankind far more. If it had the sectarian crime of intolerance, chivalry had the vices of dissoluteness. The knights were brave from gallantry of spirit; the puritans from the fear of God. The knights were proud of loyalty, the puritans of liberty. The knights did homage to monarchs, in whose smile they beheld honor, whose rebuke was the wound of disgrace; the puritans, disdaining ceremony, would not bend the knee to the King of kings. The former valued courtesy; the latter justice. The former adorned society by graceful refinements; the latter founded national grandeur on universal education. The institutions of chivalry were subverted by the gradually increasing weight, and knowledge, and opulence, of the industrious classes; the puritans, relying on those classes, planted in their hearts the undying principles of democratic liberty.’
Passages such as these are often employed as a rhetorical flourish at the end of a chapter. They are analogous to what actors call ‘making a good exit.’ In Bancroft they constitute for pages together the prevailing rather than the exceptional form. The reader, whether conscious of it or not, is kept on a strain. At last he grows uncomfortable. He wishes the historian would cease to declaim, would come down from the rostrum, throw aside his academic robes, and be neighborly and familiar.
This History was so long in the writing that Bancroft’s style changed materially. The opinion prevails that his diction improved as the work proceeded, that the later volumes are uniformly less inflated, strained, and ‘eloquent’ than the earlier ones. It is true that he made innumerable revisions of the text. The changes were not always improvements. Sometimes in rewriting a sentence he made it less energetic. Strong expressions were softened. A plain old-fashioned word would be taken out; often it carried the whole phrase with it. Whether the literary or the historical sense dictated the change in question cannot always be determined.
Bancroft’s diction is manly and forceful, but it lacks natural grace and suppleness; it is flexible as chain armor is flexible, but not as is the human body. It may be doubted whether he is ever read for literary pleasure. Nevertheless, scattered through these twelve volumes are hundreds of passages well worth the study of those who enjoy an exhibition of mastery in the use of words.
IV
THE HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES
One does well to read Bancroft in the tall, wide-margined, and almost sumptuous volumes of the original editions. The page is open and inviting. Both text and notes have a personal flavor very diverting at times. There is no question as to the usefulness of an attractive page in works of this sort. Political histories should be made easy, not by picture-book methods, but by the legitimate arts of good printing.
The work is generously planned. Twelve octavo volumes are required to bring the narrative down to the ratification of the constitution.[16] Three volumes, comprising nearly fifteen hundred pages, are given to the Colonial period alone.
Bancroft announced his theory of historical writing in the preface of 1834. He was to be controlled always by ‘the principles of historical scepticism,’ and his narrative was to be drawn ‘from writings and sources which were contemporaries of the events that are described.’ Nothing commonly supposed to belong to American history was to be retained merely because it had been unchallenged by former historians.
The treatment, as shown in these volumes on the Colonial period, is in perfect accord with the author’s conception of the dignity of the subject. The matter is as stately as the manner. Bancroft writes history as a lord high chamberlain conducts a court function. He feels that during the ceremony of discovering a world and planting a nation there should be no unseemliness, certainly no laughter or disturbance.
The characters go through their evolutions like well-drilled courtiers. So stately are they as to appear scarce human. Homely and familiar traits are almost completely suppressed. The founders of America, as we see them looming in the pages of Bancroft, are not men but incarnate ideas. They are the embodiment of principles and virtues. Winthrop is enlightened conservatism, Vane is generous impetuosity, Roger Williams is liberty of conscience. Strive how we will to bring these men nearer, to make them tangible, the effort is not wholly successful. These figures of the past, like the characters of a morality-play, persist in remaining personified ideas.
As a reaction against ‘classical’ history comes history of the gossiping school. ‘Thanks to you,’ said Brunetière, welcoming Masson to the French Academy, ‘we now know the exact number of Napoleon’s shirts.’ Bancroft was not interested in the spindles and shoe-buckles of the Puritans. Many people are, but they must find elsewhere the gratification they seek. Whoever wishes at any time absolutely to escape anecdotage, homely detail, and piquant gossip, has it always in his power to do so; he can read Bancroft’s three volumes on the Colonial period and dwell among abstractions.
Even if not at this stage of his career the most human of writers, Bancroft is a comforting historian to return to, after having dwelt for a while with those who instruct us how low and mercenary in motive, how impervious to liberal ideas, were the men who planted English civilization in America. Historical iconoclasts all, they are frightfully convincing. Some of their arguments lose a degree of force as it dawns on the reader that Seventeenth-century men are being judged by Nineteenth-century standards. When Bancroft wrote, the habit of abusing the ancestors had not become deep-seated.
Turning from the Colonial period, the historian takes up the period of the American Revolution. Seven volumes are required for telling the story. The logical arrangement is by ‘epochs.’ They are four in number: ‘Overthrow of the European Colonial system,’ ‘How Great Britain estranged America,’ ‘America declares itself independent,’ ‘The Independence of America is acknowledged.’[17]
General histories must treat of many things, the doings of authorized and representative assemblies and the doings of the mob, skirmishes, battles by land and sea, diplomatic intrigues, party combinations, political and military plots, the characters of the actors in the historic drama, and the setting of the stage on which they played. While doing all parts of his task with workmanlike skill, a historian will be found to excel in this thing or in that. Bancroft’s accounts of military operations are always clear, energetic, and often extremely readable. He could not, like Irving, ‘render you a fearful battle in music,’ but he never made the mistake of supposing that he could. He had not the graphical power of Parkman, but he had enough for his purposes.
His character sketches of the men who figured in the struggles for American independence are among the best parts of his writing. The patriots and their friends in England and on the Continent are too uniformly creatures of light, but their opponents are not represented as necessarily creatures of darkness. If Bancroft could be more than fair to his own side, he was incapable of being wholly unfair to the other. His tendency is to regard human character as all of a piece, fixed rather than fluctuating. Men (politicians included) have been known to grow in virtue as they grow in years. Bancroft was over complacent in his attitude towards frenzied impromptu Revolutionary gatherings whose motives could not always have been so guiltlessly patriotic and disinterested as he represents them.[18] He was but little versed in the psychology of mobs.
Forceful at all points, Bancroft was singularly impressive in dealing with history as it is made in parliaments and conventions, in council chambers, cabinets, and courts of law. He was born to grapple with whole state paper offices. He knew the secret of subordinating a vast amount of detail to his main purpose. An important part of the American Revolution took place in Europe. Bancroft’s capital merit consists in his having brought the event into its largest relations. The story as he told it did not merely concern the uprising of a few petty quarrelsome colonies, it became an important chapter in the history of liberty. Not for an instant did he permit himself to lose sight of that ‘idea of continuity which gives vitality to history.’
It is wonderful how through these seven volumes everything bends to one idea; how it all becomes part of a demonstration, a detail in the history of that spirit which, acting through discontent, led first to local outbreak and resistance, then to concerted action and war, and finally to the birth of a new nation.
The crown of Bancroft’s work is the story of how the states parted with so much of their individuality as stood in the way of union, and then united. Two volumes would seem to afford room for full and leisurely treatment. But in fact the historian only accomplished his task by enormous compression. Often the substance of a speech had to be given in a sentence, and the deliberations of days in a few paragraphs. The marshalling of facts, the grasp of the subject in detail and as a whole, are extraordinary. Bancroft notes what forces led to union and what opposed it. He marks the shifting of public sentiment, the trembling of the balance, but he grants himself few privileges of the sort called literary. Seldom dramatic or picturesque in this portion of his narrative, he is at all times logically exact and magisterial.
* * * * *
There is a peculiar fitness in the word ‘monumental’ applied to Bancroft’s work. It has solidity, strength, durability, a massive and stately grandeur. It is a book which the modern reader finds it easy to neglect; but he puts it in his library and never fails to commend it to his friends, with a hypocritical expression of surprise at their not being better acquainted with it. The truth is, we are spoiled by more attractive historians. Macaulay, Froude, and Parkman have made us indolent, fond of verbal comforts and disinclined to effort. We demand not only to be instructed but to be vastly entertained at the same time. Bancroft certainly instructs; it would be difficult to prove that he also entertains.
His tone of confident eulogy is often condemned. On the whole, this is a merit rather than a fault. Doubtless he admired too uniformly and too much. Many writers have taken pleasure in showing that his admiration was misplaced. And thus a balance is kept. It is a fortunate thing for American literature that Bancroft’s vast work, destined to so wide an influence, and the fruit of such immense labor, should have been conceived and written in a generous and hopeful spirit. The English reviewer who on the appearance of the first volume praised the historian because he was ‘so fearlessly honest and impartial’ might also have praised him because he was so fearlessly optimistic. This too requires courage.