[p189]
EDWARD GAYLORD BOURNE
A paper read before the Massachusetts Historical Society at the March meeting of 1908.
[p191]
EDWARD GAYLORD BOURNE
When an associate dies who was not yet forty-eight years old, whom most of us knew as a strong enduring man, who was capable of an immense amount of intellectual work, it is a real calamity,—a calamity which in this case History mourns, as Edward Gaylord Bourne was an excellent teacher and a thorough historical scholar. The physical details of any illness are apt to be repulsive, but the malady in Bourne’s case was somehow so bound up in his life that an inquiry into it comes from no morbid curiosity. When ten years old he was attacked with tubercular disease of the hip, and for some weeks his life was despaired of; but he was saved by the loving care of his parents, receiving particular devotion from his father, who was a Congregational minister in charge of a parish in Connecticut. As the left leg had out-grown the other, Bourne was obliged to use crutches for three years, when his father took him to a specialist in Boston, and the result was that he was able to abandon crutches and in the end to get about by an appliance to adjust the lengths of the different legs, such as his friends were familiar with. Despite this disability he developed great physical strength, especially in the chest and arms, but his lameness prevented his accompanying his college companions on long tramps, so that the bicycle was for him a most welcome invention. He became expert in the use of it, riding on it down Pike’s Peak at the time of his visit to Colorado; and he performed a similar feat of endurance on another occasion when stopping with me at Jefferson in the White Mountains. Starting early in the morning, he traveled by rail to the [p192] terminus of the mountain railroad, went up Mount Washington on the railroad, and rode down the carriage road on his wheel to the Glen House, which ought to have been enough of fatigue and exertion for one day, but he then had about ten miles to make on his bicycle over a somewhat rough mountain road to reach Jefferson. Jefferson he did make, but not until after midnight.
During an acquaintance of over nineteen years with Bourne, I was always impressed with his physical strength and endurance; and I was therefore much surprised to learn, in a letter received from him last winter while I was in Rome, that his youthful malady had attacked him, that he was again on crutches and had been obliged to give up his work at Yale. In truth ever since the autumn of 1906 he has had a painful, hopeless struggle. He has had the benefit of all the resources of medicine and surgery, and he and his wife were buoyed up by hope until the last; but as the sequel of one of a series of operations death came to his relief on February 24.
Only less remarkable than his struggle for life and physical strength was his energy in acquiring an education. The sacrifices that parents in New England and the rest of the country make in order to send their boys to school and college is a common enough circumstance, but not always is the return so satisfactory as it was in the case of Edward Bourne, and his brother. Edward went to the Norwich Academy, where his studious disposition and diligent purpose gained him the favor of the principal. Thence to Yale, where he attracted the attention of Professor William G. Sumner, who became to him a guide and a friend. Until his senior year at Yale his favorite studies were Latin and Greek; and his brother, who was in his class, informs me that ever since his preparatory school days, it was his custom to read the [p193] whole of any author in hand as well as the part set for the class. During recitations he recalls seeing him again and again reading ahead in additional books of the author, keeping at the same time “a finger on the page where the class was translating, in order not to be caught off his guard.” In his senior year at Yale, under the influence of Professor Sumner, he became interested in economics and won the Cobden medal. After graduation he wrote his first historical book, “The History of the Surplus Revenue of 1837,” published in 1885 in Putnam’s “Questions of the Day” series. For this and his other graduate work his university later conferred upon him the degree of Ph.D. Since I have learned the story of his boyhood and youth, it is with peculiar appreciation that I read the dedication of this first book: “To my Father and Mother.” I may add in this connection that while pursuing his indefatigable labors for the support of his large family, his father’s sickness and death overtaxed his strength, and the breakdown followed.
At Yale during his graduate work he won the Foote scholarship; he was instructor in history there from 1886 to 1888, then took a similar position at Adelbert College, Cleveland, becoming Professor of History in 1890. This post he held until 1895, when he was called to Yale University as Professor of History, a position that he held at the time of his death.
Besides the doctor’s thesis, Bourne published two books, the first of which was “Essays in Historical Criticism,” one of the Yale bicentennial publications, the most notable essay in which is that on Marcus Whitman. A paper read at the Ann Arbor session of the American Historical meeting in Detroit and later published in the American Historical Review is here amplified into a long and exhaustive treatment of the subject. The original paper gained Bourne [p194] some celebrity and subjected him to some harsh criticism, both of which, I think, he thoroughly enjoyed. Feeling sure of his facts and ground, he delighted in his final word to support the contention which he had read with emphasis and pleasure to an attentive audience in one of the halls of the University of Michigan. The final paragraph sums up what he set out to prove with undoubted success:
That Marcus Whitman was a devoted and heroic missionary who braved every hardship and imperilled his life for the cause of Christian missions and Christian civilization in the far Northwest and finally died at his post, a sacrifice to the cause, will not be gainsaid. That he deserves grateful commemoration in Oregon and Washington is beyond dispute. But that he is a national figure in American history, or that he “saved” Oregon, must be rejected as a fiction [p. 100].
Bourne had a good knowledge of American history, and he specialized on the Discoveries period, to which he gave close and continuous attention. He was indebted to Professor Hart’s ambitious and excellent coöperative history, “The American Nation,” for the opportunity to obtain a hearing on his favorite subject. His “Spain in America,” his third published book, is the book of a scholar. While the conditions of his narrative allowed only forty-six pages to the story of Columbus, he had undoubtedly material enough well arranged and digested to fill the volume on this topic alone. I desire to quote a signal example of compression: