Chapter 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[11] Bancroft was twice married. His second wife was Mrs.
Elisabeth (Davis) Bliss.

[12] For an account of the privileges he enjoyed in making his
collections see _Winsor’s Narrative and Critical History of
America_, vol. viii, p. 477.

[13] W. M. Sloane.

[14] T. W. Higginson in ‘The Nation,’ January, 1891.

[15] Bancroft’s characteristics as a young man are admirably
brought out in the recently printed selection from his
letters and journals, edited by M. A. DeWolfe Howe.
‘Scribner’s Magazine,’ September and October, 1905.

[16] Two volumes of the original edition correspond to one volume
of the ‘author’s last revision,’ 1883–85.

[17] In the ‘last revision’ Epoch Four is divided into unequal
parts and the titles are reworded: Epoch first, ‘Britain
overthrows the European colonial system,’ 1748–63; Epoch
second, ‘Britain estranges America,’ 1763–74; Epoch third,
‘America takes up arms for self-defence and arrives at
independence,’ 1774–76; Epoch fourth, ‘America in alliance
with France,’ 1776--80; Epoch fifth, ‘The People of America
take their equal station among the powers of the earth,’ 1780
to December, 1782.

[18] J. F. Jameson speaks of Bancroft’s ‘tendency to
conventionalize, to compose his American populations of
highly virtuous Noah’s-ark men.’ _History of Historical
Writing in America_, 1891, p. 108.

V

_William Hickling Prescott_

REFERENCES:

=George Ticknor=: _Life of William Hickling Prescott_, 1864.

=Rollo Ogden=: _William Hickling Prescott_, ‘American Men of
Letters,’ 1904.

=H. T. Peck=: _William Hickling Prescott_, ‘English Men of
Letters,’ 1905.