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 28th, 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 28th in the year
1859.
