William Hickling Prescott

I am not really one who frequently writes about historical anniversaries, particularly death anniversaries, but a coincidence invites me to do so now.  For I just discovered in my chance reading that William Hickling Prescott died precisely 161 years before the day I am writing this essay.  Prescott, born in 1796, was a great man and a great writer.  He has been described as the first serious or scholarly American historian, and his writings had great influence in the development of American historiography.  But before talking about Prescott it would be well to mention two other slightly younger contemporaries who also helped put American history writing on the map.

John Lothrop Motley (1814-1877) is most famous for his multi-volume Rise of the Dutch Republic.  Should that title in and of itself not send shivers down your spine, I suggest you set aside a week of your life to read Motley, a master of the gorgeous periodic sentence, a kind of Yankee version of Thomas Babbington Macauley, the great British Whig historian.  It is true that though very learned he never wholly mastered the Dutch language, for which he was criticized by some pettifogging Dutch Dry-as-Dusts.   But on his way to the bank he might laughingly have anticipated Hilaire Belloc in saying; “When I am dead, I hope it may be said—his sins were scarlet, but his books were read.”  Because they were: the books I mean.  I have no first-hand knowledge of the sins.

The third in the American historical triumvirate is Francis Parkman (1823-1893), author of the amazing studies of the contest between the British and the French in North America.  Parkman was perhaps the greatest of the three, and he dealt quite explicitly with American themes.  He was also a brilliant writer of English prose.  While his great achievement was undoubtedly France and England in North America, his first book, The Oregon Trail (1847) is one of the most extraordinary debuts in American literary history.  But it was Prescott who died on January 28^th, and to him I must now return.

It took a certain temperament enabled by certain circumstances to be an historian in America two hundred years ago: you had to be affluent.  All three of these men were New Englanders, all three were Harvard graduates, and all three had private means that allowed them to pursue the Muse.  All serious English language history had been written by Englishmen like Gibbon and Hume.  Carlyle had published The French Revolution in 1837, the same year as Emerson’s prophetic lecture on “The American Scholar.”  American history before Prescott consisted mainly of puff pieces like Parson Weems’s Life of George Washington with its cherry tree fable.  Washington Irving was more serious, but still really a popularizer.

The world of Prescott’s youth was one of extraordinary upheaval on both sides of the Atlantic.  He was born only twenty years after Bunker Hill, where his grandfather had commanded the American guerillas.  Robespierre had mounted the scaffold only two years before he was born.  And revolution was by no means a thing of the past.  In the real time of his early years the vast Iberian-American Empires were breaking up into independent republics.  Following the pattern of numerous Spanish colonies Brazil, which occupies half the landmass of South America, proclaimed its independence from Portugal in 1822, the year after Prescott had definitively committed to his historian’s vocation.

Herein Prescott was to find his great subject—essentially the rise and fall of the Spanish Empire.  But he faced two difficulties, beginning with a personal liability that would stop most scholars before they even began.  He was for most of his life legally blind.  He was born with iffy eyesight.  Then he had gone up to Harvard at the age of fifteen, still a boy, and as you know, boys will be boys.  In a food fight in the college dining hall a chunk of coarse bread hurled with force hit him in the eye, blinding him.  This anecdote tells you something about the Yankee upper crust in terms both of deportment and baked goods.  Even the “good” eye was affected.  He never enjoyed thereafter more than partial and blurry vision even in bright sunlight.  To work by candle-light was impossible; and nearly total blindness descended on him precisely when he began serious work.

He knew that the historian depended upon original documentary sources.  The problem of not being able to see them was secondary, however, to the problem of not having them to see in the first place.  Historians depended upon a large international army of professional copyists—since replaced by printed editions, Xerox machines, and the Internet.  Sometimes they could actually buy the originals.  Prescott did travel to Europe, his modest personal fortune becoming a permanent research grant.  Then there was the awkward fact that the documents he needed were often written not in Latin (no problem) but in antique forms of Spanish, a language he did not yet know well even in its contemporary form.  So he immersed himself in that tongue and became highly proficient.  But he needed a native Castilian reader, and none was to be found on Beacon Hill.  The best he could do was a literate but impecunious monoglot Anglophone whom he taught, after a fashion, to pronounce the words of Spanish texts totally meaningless to the reader but at least partially comprehensible to the auditor: hour after hour, indeed month after month, of old legal formularies, royal edicts, and commercial accounts—all of which he stored nearly supernaturally in an amazing memory.  He wrote using carbon paper and an elaborately constructed board with lines marked off by wires.  Thus did America’s first great historian write his masterful History of Ferdinand and Isabella, followed by the History of the Conquest of Mexico and the Conquest of Peru. 

Written history has its styles, which are themselves unsurprisingly “historically conditioned.”   A modern school history text does not read as though it were written by Xenophon.  Contemporary academic historians can be critical of the grand but limited designs of their nineteenth-century predecessors, who tended to write about kings and queens and armies and battles to the neglect of social conditions and the lives of the vast number of ordinary people.  This is a valid criticism, even if I must point out that there weren’t many kings or queens on the Oregon Trail

But around the year 1900, at a time when the homes of educated and even modestly affluent Americans were likely to have an actual “library” room, publishing elegant multi-volume sets of Prescott, Motley, and Parkman was a thriving and profitable business.  The relics are still to be seen in dusty back rooms of old bookshops, at church rummage sales, and in eBay listings; and they still make great reading.  I hope before I die to see one or two of Prescott’s books in the Library of America.  Parkman already has two fat volumes, and Barbara Tuchman—another popular historical writer who knew how to bring out the story in history—is there.

William Hickling Prescott, born two hundred and twenty-four years ago, died on January 28^th in the year 1859.