Part 8

A great historian Hutchinson certainly was not, and, under the most favourable outward conditions, could not have been. He had the fundamental virtues of a great historian--love of truth, love of justice, diligence, the ability to master details and to narrate them with accuracy. Even in the exercise of these fundamental virtues, however, no historian in Hutchinson’s circumstances could fail to be hampered by the enormous preoccupation of official business, or to have his judgment warped and coloured by the prepossessions of his own political career. While Hutchinson was, indeed, a miracle of industry, it was only a small part of his industry that he was free to devote to historical research. However sincere may have been his purpose to tell the truth and to be fair to all, the literary product of such research was inevitably weakened, as can now be abundantly shown, by many serious oversights and by many glaring misrepresentations, apparently through his failure to make a thorough use of important sources of information then accessible to him, such as colonial pamphlets, colonial newspapers, the manuscripts of his own ancestors and of the Mathers, and especially the General Court records of the province in which he played so great a part. As to the rarer intellectual and spiritual endowments of a great historian,--breadth of vision, breadth of sympathy, the historic imagination, and the power of style,--these Hutchinson almost entirely lacked. That he had not the gift of historical divination, the vision and the faculty divine to see the inward meaning of men and events, and to express that meaning in gracious, noble, and fascinating speech--Hutchinson was himself partly conscious.

His first volume seems to have been written under a consciousness that his subject was provincial, and even of a local interest altogether circumscribed. In the second volume, one perceives a more cheery and confident tone, due, probably, to the prompt recognition which his labours had then received not only in Massachusetts but in England. In the third volume are to be observed signs of increasing ease in composition, a more flowing and copious style, not a few felicities of expression. That, in all these volumes, he intended to tell the truth, and to practise fairness, is also plain; to say that he did not entirely succeed, is to say that he was human. Of course, the supreme test of historical fairness was reached when he came to the writing of his third volume,--which was, in fact, the history not only of his contemporaries but of himself, and of himself in deep and angry disagreement with many of them. It is much to his praise to say that, throughout this third volume, the prevailing tone is calm, moderate, just, with only occasional efforts at pleading his own cause, with only occasional flickers of personal or political enmity. But no one should approach the reading of Hutchinson’s _History of Massachusetts Bay_ with the expectation of finding in it either brilliant writing or an entertaining story. From beginning to end, there are few passages that can be called even salient--but almost everywhere an even flow of statesmanlike narrative; severe in form; rather dull, probably, to all who have not the preparation of a previous interest in the matters discussed; but always pertinent, vigorous, and full of pith. Notwithstanding Hutchinson’s modest opinion of his own ability in the drawing of historical portraits, it is probable that in such portraits of distinguished characters, both among his contemporaries and among his predecessors, the general reader will be likely to find himself the most interested.

_Samuel Peters._--Somewhere in the debatable land between history, fiction, and burlesque, there wanders a notorious book, first published anonymously in London in 1781, and entitled _A General History of Connecticut_. Though the authorship of this book was never acknowledged by the man who wrote it, there is no doubt that it was the work of Samuel Peters, an Anglican clergyman and a Loyalist, a man of commanding personal presence, uncommon intellectual resources, powerful will, and ill-balanced character. He opposed with frank and bitter aggressiveness the Revolutionary politics then rampant. He sailed for England in October, 1774. There he abode until his return to America in 1805. During the five or six years immediately following his arrival in England, he seems to have had congenial employment in composing his _General History of Connecticut_, as a means apparently of wreaking an undying vengeance upon the sober little commonwealth in which he was born and from which he had been ignominiously cast out. The result of this long labour of hate was a production, calling itself historical, which was characterised by a contemporary English journal--_The Monthly Review_--as having “so many marks of party spleen and idle credulity” as to be “altogether unworthy of the public attention.” In spite, however, of such censure both then and since then, this alleged _History_ has had, now for more than a hundred years, not only a vast amount of public attention, but very considerable success in a form that seems to have been dear to its author’s heart--that of spreading through the English-speaking world a multitude of ludicrous impressions to the dishonour of the people of whom it treats. It cannot be denied that for such a service it was most admirably framed; since its grotesque fabrications in disparagement of a community of Puritan dissenters seem to have proved a convenient quarry for ready-made calumnies upon that sort of people there and elsewhere.

_Jonathan Carver._--In the year 1763, at the close of that famous war which resulted in the acquisition of Canada by the English, there was in New England an enterprising young American soldier, named Jonathan Carver, stranded as it were amid the threatened inanities of peace and civilisation, and confronting a prospect that was for him altogether insipid through its lack of adventure, and especially of barbaric restlessness and discomfort. “I began to consider,” so he wrote a few years afterward, “having rendered my country some services during the war, how I might continue still serviceable, and contribute, as much as lay in my power, to make that vast acquisition of territory gained by Great Britain in North America, advantageous to it. To this purpose, I determined to explore the most unknown parts of them.” The project thus clearly wrought out in 1763 by this obscure provincial captain in New England anticipated by forty years the American statesmanship which, under President Jefferson, sent Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to penetrate the passes of the Rocky Mountains and to pitch their tents by the mouth of the Columbia River; even as it anticipated by a hundred years the Canadian statesmanship which, under Sir John Macdonald, has in our time beaten out an iron way across the continent at its greatest breadth.

It seems to have taken Carver about three years to complete his preparations for the tremendous enterprise which then inspired him. Not until June, 1766,--in the political lull occasioned by the repeal of the Stamp Act--was he able to start. After passing Albany, he plunged at once into the wilderness which then stretched its rough dominion over the uncomputed spaces to the western sea. In June, 1768, he began his journey homeward. In the October following, he reached Boston, “having,” as he says, “been absent from it on this expedition two years and five months, and during that time travelled near seven thousand miles. From thence, as soon as I had properly digested my journal and charts, I set out for England, to communicate the discoveries I had made, and to render them beneficial to the kingdom.” In 1778, nine years after his arrival there, he succeeded in bringing out his noble and fascinating book of _Travels through the Interior Parts of North America_. It was in consequence of the publication, soon after his death, in the year 1780, of the tale of Carver’s career as an explorer in America, and especially of the struggles and the miseries he encountered as an American man of letters in London, that, for the relief in future of deserving men of letters there, the foundation was laid for that munificent endowment, now so celebrated under the name of “The Royal Literary Fund.” His best monument is his book. As a contribution to the history of inland discovery upon this continent, and especially to our materials for true and precise information concerning the “manners, customs, religion, and language of the Indians,” Carver’s book of _Travels_ is of unsurpassed value. Besides its worth for instruction, is its worth for delight; we have no other “Indian book” more captivating than this. Here is the charm of a sincere, powerful, and gentle personality--the charm of novel and significant facts, of noble ideas, of humane sentiments, all uttered in English well-ordered and pure. In evidence, also, of the European celebrity acquired by his book, may be cited the fact that it seems to have had a strong fascination for Schiller, as, indeed, might have been expected; and Carver’s report of a harangue by a Nadowessian chief over the dead body of one of their great warriors--being itself a piece of true poetry in prose--was turned into verse by the German poet, and became famous as his _Nadowessiers Totenlied_,--a dirge which pleased Goethe so much that he declared it to be among the best of Schiller’s poems in that vein, and wished that his friend had written a dozen such.[2]

_St. John Crèvecœur_.--In 1782, there was published in London an American book written with a sweetness of tone and, likewise, with a literary grace and a power of fascination then quite unexpected from the western side of the Atlantic. It presented itself to the public behind this ample title-page:--“Letters from an American Farmer, describing certain provincial situations, manners, and customs, not generally known, and conveying some idea of the late and present interior circumstances of the British Colonies in North America: written for the information of a friend in England, by J. Hector St. John, a farmer in Pennsylvania.” The name of the author as thus given upon his title-page, was not his name in full, but only the baptismal portion of it. By omitting from the book his surname, which was Crèvecœur, he had chosen to disguise to the English public the fact--which could hardly have added to his welcome among them--that though he was an American, he was not an English American, but a French one,--having been born in Normandy, and of a noble family there, in 1731. While really an American farmer, Crèvecœur was a man of education, of refinement, of varied experience in the world. When but a lad of sixteen, he had removed from France to England; when but twenty-three, he had emigrated to America.

As an account of the American colonies, this book makes no pretension either to system or to completeness; and yet it does attain to a sort of breadth of treatment by seizing upon certain representative traits of the three great groups of colonies,--the northern, the middle, and the southern. There are in this book two distinct notes--one of great peace, another of great pain. The earlier and larger portion of the book gives forth this note of peace: it is a prose pastoral of life in the New World, as that life must have revealed itself to a well-appointed American farmer of poetic and optimistic temper, in the final stage of our colonial era, and just before the influx of the riot and bitterness of the great disruption. This note of peace holds undisturbed through the first half of the book, and more. Not until, in the latter half of it, the author comes to describe slavery in the Far South, likewise the harsh relations between the colonists and the Indians, finally the outbreak of the tempest of civil war, does his book give out its second note--the note of pain. By its inclusion of these sombre and agonising aspects of life in America, the book gains, as is most obvious, both in authenticity and literary strength. It is not hard to understand why, at such a time, a book like this should soon have made its way into the languages of Europe, particularly those of France, Germany, and Holland; nor why it should have fascinated multitudes of readers in all parts of the Continent, even beguiling many of them--too many of them, perhaps--to try their fortunes in that blithe and hospitable portion of the planet where the struggle for existence seemed almost a thing unknown. In England, likewise, the book won for itself, as was natural, a wide and a gracious consideration; its praises lasted among English men of letters as long, at least, as until the time of Hazlitt and Charles Lamb; while its idealised treatment of rural life in America wrought quite traceable effects upon the imagination of Campbell, Byron, Southey, and Coleridge, and furnished not a few materials for such captivating and airy schemes of literary colonisation in America as that of “Pantisocracy.”

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

I. THE HISTORIANS

=Early Dearth of Good Writers.=--Among the consciously useful forms of literature there is none in which, by common consent, American men of letters have so uniformly distinguished themselves as in history. Bradford and Winthrop in the seventeenth century are as conspicuous among their countrymen and as respectable before the world as Prescott and Parkman in the nineteenth. Prince and Stith are as minutely conscientious--and almost as dull--as the most scientific of modern students; and Hutchinson, when judged by the prevailing standards of his own times, will be found not less diligent or judicious than Adams and Rhodes are thought to-day. Indeed, there is in our literature but one period destitute of historians of merit, and that period falls in the years immediately after the Revolution, precisely in the years when we should most expect historical writing to flourish; for those last years of the eighteenth century seem, as we look back upon them, to be full of encouragement for national pride. In 1781, Lord Cornwallis had surrendered at Yorktown. In 1783, King George acknowledged the independence of his rebellious subjects in America. Under a constitution since renowned, they soon instituted for themselves a federal government upon a continental scale. The prediction of Jefferson’s Declaration seemed to be justified. The United States were ready “to assume among the powers of the earth that separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them.”

Popular revolutions such as this have often been followed by a period of great literary fruitfulness, particularly in history. So it proved in Holland, in France, in Italy. But in America nothing of the sort occurred. The twenty-five years after Yorktown, barren in literature of every kind, are exceptionally devoid of historical writers who deal with large subjects in a large way. There were, of course, narratives of the war by participants and panegyrists. Such were David Ramsay’s “History of the American Revolution” (1789), Mrs. Mercy Warren’s “Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution” (1805), and the “History of the American Revolution” which appeared in 1819 under the name of Paul Allen. But none of these works shows largeness of view, and none is distinguished by literary qualities. They serve a good purpose, however, in reflecting the feeling of the Revolution. This is particularly true of Mrs. Warren’s book. She was a sister of James Otis, whose argument against the writs of assistance in 1761 marks the beginning of the Revolutionary agitation, and the wife of General Joseph Warren, who fell on Bunker Hill; and her intimacy with these and other New England patriots lends a certain representative value to her forgotten discursiveness. A similar value attaches also to the more readable, but not less bitter “Life of James Otis, containing Notices of Contemporary Characters and Events,” written by William Tudor; likewise, though in a less degree, to several other early biographies of Revolutionary worthies, among which the most weighty is the “Life of George Washington,” in five volumes (1804-1807), based upon his original papers and compiled by his fellow-Virginian John Marshall, afterwards famous as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. For students of American history, this is a useful book, such as a man of Marshall’s ability could not fail to produce when dealing with subjects with which he was thoroughly familiar and in which he was deeply interested. But it is hastily written, far too long, and, save for its partisanship, altogether colourless. Nevertheless, it occupies a relatively high rank among its coevals, for, taken all in all, American writers on national history in the years 1780-1820 are few and weak.

_Causes of this Inferiority._--In explanation of this circumstance various conjectures have been advanced. Indubitably, the proscription of the Loyalists after the war deprived the thirteen States of wealth and intelligence which might otherwise have afforded to American literature an American support. But the effect upon letters of that social loss is easily exaggerated. The promptness with which serious English books were reprinted in America, even in the years when, as Goodrich discovered, it was “positively injurious to the commercial credit of a bookseller to undertake American works,” proves sufficiently that a reading public still remained. Another reason why, in the earlier years of our national life, there were few historians, may be found in the exaggerated value which most Americans then set upon certain abstract and therefore absolute theories in politics. Among the leaders of the Anti-Federalist or Democratic party, especially, a sort of political orthodoxy grew up. Theirs became a party with a creed, but without a programme. In the Southern States, they developed, in defence of their principles, an extensive literature of political and economic theory, far surpassing in variety of argument, subtlety of reasoning, and clearness of exposition anything that the North could show. But throughout it all, they appealed for support to the unchanging text of written constitutions, or to the immemorial prescriptions of natural law; upon history they looked as a tedious tale of ignorance and error. The Federalists, on the other hand, like the Whigs and the Republicans who succeeded them, were a party rather of measures than of principles. For their practical aims, a knowledge of human experience was serviceable. They inclined, therefore, to historical studies, and it is in New England, where their hold had been strongest, that the most significant of American historians at length appear. But even the stoutest Federalist among the contemporaries of Jefferson could discern in the recent experience of the nation at large little to stimulate patriotic ardour. In the estimation of men as yet unaccustomed to “think continentally,” the new government had brought few blessings: its burdens seemed innumerable. Taxes were high. Money was bad, and scarce as well. The Revolution had loosened the bonds of traditional authority, and internal disorder was rife. The mutual obligations assumed by England and by the United States at the Peace of 1783 were disregarded on both sides; and a new treaty, whose stipulations the vast majority of Americans deemed humiliating to themselves and dishonourable towards their French allies, served chiefly to prolong internal dissensions by introducing as an unwelcome issue in American politics the conflicting sympathies of the Federalists with England and of the Democrats with France. What wonder, then, that those who concerned themselves with the history of America at all turned from the Union to their several States, each of which, in their view, had been made separately sovereign by the events of the Revolution. Their temper is well expressed by the title of David Ramsay’s “History of the Revolution of South Carolina from a British Province to an Independent State” (1785). Ramsay’s “South Carolina” was soon followed by Belknap’s “New Hampshire” (1784-92), Proud’s “Pennsylvania” (1797), Minot’s “Continuation of the History [Hutchinson’s] of Massachusetts” (1798), Burke’s “Virginia” (1804), Williamson’s “North Carolina” (1812), and Trumbull’s “Connecticut” (1818). Among these books, Belknap’s justly holds the highest rank. Its style is vigorous and flexible, and in the opinion of de Tocqueville, “the reader of Belknap will find more general ideas and more strength of thought than are to be met with in other American historians” of the same period.

_Washington Irving._--The life of Washington Irving as a man of letters is followed elsewhere in this volume; but no account of American historical writers, however slight, can omit his name. In the more laborious paths of the historian’s vocation he seldom walked. Research was foreign to his temperament, and in his histories references to authorities are few. He makes no pretence of disclosing new facts, or even of suggesting new theories concerning facts already known. But “the picturesque distances of earth’s space and the romantic remoteness of history” kindled his imagination, and his travels, which were extended for an American of his day, produced enduring results in a series of books dealing with the countries, and in part with the history of the countries, which he visited. One reason for his assuming the duties, not over-serious, of an _attaché_ of the American legation in Madrid was Minister Everett’s suggestion that he make an English version of the matter relating to America in Navarrete’s work on the voyages and discoveries of the Spanish at the end of the fifteenth century, which had then been recently published. This project presently expanded into Irving’s “Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, to which are added Those of his Companions” (1828). It was followed in the next year by “The Conquest of Granada,” and in 1832 by “Tales of the Alhambra.” Returning to America, Irving travelled extensively west of the Mississippi, and presently published his “Astoria” (1836) and “The Adventures of Captain Bonneville” (1837). Of these books, which, with an unimportant “Life of Mahomet and his Successors” (1849) and a five-volume “Life of Washington” (1855-59), constitute Irving’s historical writings, the “Columbus” is justly the most esteemed. It gained for its author the gold medal of the Royal Society of Literature and the Oxford degree of D.C.L. And not without reason, for it embodies, in a skilful narrative, not merely the substance of Navarrete’s documents, which Irving rendered with fidelity into excellent English, but also the results of other studies which were, for him, exceptionally thorough. Modern criticism has been very busy with the life of Columbus since Irving wrote. The narratives of Ferdinand Columbus and of Las Casas, upon which he largely relied, have been somewhat discredited, and the character of the discoverer himself has not altogether escaped. Nor can it be denied that Irving’s lively fancy led him to embellish his account of certain dramatic passages in the life of Columbus with details which, while not improbable in themselves, are unsupported by documentary or other direct evidence. But the attempt of some subsequent writers, and notably of Irving’s countryman Winsor, to discredit him on that account has been carried beyond reason. Irving’s narrative of facts in the “Columbus” is conscientiously based upon primary sources; and his judgments, though occasionally over-indulgent of his hero, are in general sound. Columbus may not have been in all respects such a man as Irving represents him, but it is, at least, ennobling for the reader to believe that he was such a man.