The Abbé J. A. Maurault’s Histoire des Abénakis depuis 1605 jusqu’à nos jours, Quebec, 1866, covers portions of the wars of Canada in which those Indians took part.
The American Annals of Dr. Abiel Holmes was published in Cambridge (Mass.) in 1805. It is a book still to inspire confidence, and “the first authoritative work from an American pen which covered the whole field of American history.”[1613] Libraries in America were then scant, but the annalist traced where he could his facts to original sources, and when he issued his second edition, in 1829, its revision and continuation showed how he had availed himself of the stores of the Ebeling and other collections which in the interval had enriched the libraries of Harvard College and Boston. Grahame[1614] gives the book no more than just praise when he calls it perhaps “the most excellent chronological digest that any nation has ever possessed.”
The history of the colonies, which formed an introduction to Marshall’s Life of Washington, was republished in Philadelphia in 1824, as History of the Colonies planted by the English on the Continent of North America to the commencement of that war which terminated in their independence.
JAMES GRAHAME.
After the engraving in the Boston ed. of his History.
James Grahame was a Scotchman, born in 1790, an advocate at the Scottish bar, and a writer for the reviews. By his religious and political training he had the spirit of the Covenanters and the ideas of a republican. In 1824 he began to think of writing the history of the United States, and soon after entered upon the work, the progress of which a journal kept by him, and now in the library of Harvard College, records. In Feb., 1827, the first two volumes, bringing the story down to the period of the English revolution, were published,[1615] and met with neglect from the chief English reviews. As he went on he had access to the material which George Chalmers had collected. He finished the work in Dec., 1829; but before he published these closing sections a considerate notice of the earlier two volumes appeared in January, 1831, in the North American Review, the first considerable recognition which he had received. It encouraged him in the more careful revision of the later volumes, which he was now engaged upon, and in Jan., 1836, they were published.[1616] His health prevented his continuing his studies into the period of the American Revolution. In 1837 Mr. Bancroft had in his History (ii. 64) animadverted on the term “baseness,” which Grahame in his earliest volumes had applied to John Clarke, who had procured for Rhode Island its charter of 1663, charging Grahame with having invented the allegations which induced him to be so severe on Clarke. Mr. Robert Walsh and Mr. Grahame himself repelled the insinuation in The New York American, and a later edition of Mr. Bancroft’s volume changed the expression from “invention” to “unwarranted misapprehension,” and Mr. Grahame subsequently withdrew the term “baseness,” which had offended the local pride of the Rhode Islanders, and wrote “with a suppleness of adroit servility.” It is not apparent that either historian sacrificed much of his original intention. Josiah Quincy defends Grahame’s view in a note to his memoir of the historian prefixed to the Boston edition of his History, in which Grahame had said he was incapable of such dishonesty as Bancroft had charged upon him. Bancroft wrote in March, 1846, a letter to the Boston Courier, calling the retort of Grahame a “groundless attack,” and charging Quincy, who had edited the new edition of Grahame, with giving publicity to Grahame’s personal criminations. Quincy replied in a pamphlet, The Memory of the late James Grahame, Historian, vindicated from the charges of Detraction and Calumny, preferred against him by Mr. George Bancroft, and the Conduct of Mr. Bancroft towards that Historian stated and exposed, in which use was also made of material furnished by the Grahame family, and thought to implicate Mr. Bancroft in literary jealousy of his rival.[1617] Grahame was not better satisfied with the view which Mr. Quincy had taken of the character of the Mathers in his History of Harvard University. “The Mathers are very dear to me,” Grahame wrote to Quincy, “and you attack them with a severity the more painful to me that I am unable to demur to its justice. I would fain think that you do not make sufficient allowance for the spirit of their times.” This difference, however, did not disturb the literary amenities of their relations; and Grahame, in 1839, demurred against Walsh’s proposition to republish his History in Philadelphia, for fear he might be seeming to seek a rivalry with Mr. Bancroft on his own soil. Three years later, July 3, 1842, Mr. Grahame died, leaving behind him a corrected and enlarged copy of his History. Subsequently this copy was sent by his family for deposit in the library of Harvard College, and from it, under the main supervision of Josiah Quincy, but with the friendly countenance of Judge Story and of Messrs. James Savage, Jared Sparks, and William H. Prescott, an American edition of The History of the United States of North America, from the Plantation of the British Colonies till their Assumption of National Independence, in four volumes, was published in Boston in 1845, accompanied by an engraved portrait after Healy.
Excluding Parkman’s series of histories, upon which it is not necessary to enlarge here after the constant use made of them in the critical parts of the present volume, the most considerable English work to be compared with his is Major George Warburton’s Conquest of Canada, edited by Eliot Warburton, and published in London in two volumes in 1849, and reprinted in New York in 1850. He surveys the whole course of Canadian history, but was content with its printed sources, as they were accessible forty years ago.
Among the other general American historians it is enough to mention in addition Bancroft,[1618] Hildreth,[1619] and Gay;[1620] and among the English, Smollett,[1621] who had little but the published despatches, as they reached England at the time, and Mahon (Stanhope), who availed himself of more deliberate research, but his field did not admit of great enlargement.[1622] The Exodus of the Western Nations, by Viscount Bury, is not wholly satisfactory in its treatment of authorities.[1623]
Henry Cabot Lodge’s Short History of the English Colonies (N. Y., 1881) has for its main purpose a presentation of the social and institutional condition of the English colonies at the period of the Stamp Act Congress in 1765; and the condensed sketches of the earlier history of each colony, which he has introduced, were imposed on the general plan, rather unadvisedly, to fill the requirements of the title. He says of these chapters: “They make no pretence to original research, but are merely my own presentation of facts, which ought to be familiar to every one.”