Francis Parkman

Front matter

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Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I. Achievement 1

II. Ancestry 12

Chapter I

There is a fine passage in Bunyan which describes the fighting courage of the Puritan type: —

Then said Great-heart to Mr. Valiant-for- Truth, " Thou hast worthily behaved thyself ; let me see thy sword." So he showed it to him.

When he had taken it in his hand, and looked thereon a while, he said, " Ha ! it is a right Jerusalem blade."

Valiant. It is so. Let a man have one of these blades, with a hand to wield it and skill to use it, and he may venture upon an angel with it. He need not fear its holding, if he can but tell how to lay on. Its edge will never blunt.

Great-heart. But you fought a great while. I wonder you was not weary.

Valiant. I fought till my sword did cleave to my hand ; and then they were joined together as if a sword grew out of my arm, and when the blood ran through my fingers, then I fought with most courage.

Great-heart. Thou hast done well. . . .

Mr. Great-heart was delighted in him (for he loved one greatly that he found to be a man of his hands).

Parkman was such another Valiant-for-Truth, and with the right Jerusalem blade of character fought his victorious way. Silent in pain, patient in accomplishment, modest in victory, gentle in bearing, and yet determined to grimness, he proved himself lawful heir of the best Puritan traits. The name Puritan he disliked, but however much he might wish he could not escape his moral ancestry. He inherited not the accidental beliefs of the Puritans, but their attitude toward life, their disposition and inherent bent. " Not happiness but achievement " was his watchword. Cut off by race and temperament from those light, sunny, skeptical, feminine moods that belong to other bloods, his nature was concentrated in the pith of his race. With head erect, jaw fixed, shoulders square, he was the image of New England's best. He had New England's difficulty of self-expression, he was not without traces of her inflexibility of mind, and he was endowed, more than the measure of his race, with a proud, shy tenderness.

Nature would have made a soldier of him, but in Fortune's hugger-mugger allotment of parts, it fell to him to grasp the pen instead of the sword ; his name is not written upon fort and battlefield, but it is inseparably united with the story of the first great epoch in the history of North America.

In the field of history Parkman's name stands as high, perhaps higher, than that of any other American. John Fiske, a student of the historians of Europe and America, says : " Into the making of a historian there should enter something of the philosopher, something of the naturalist, something of the poet. In Parkman this rare union of qualities was realized in a greater degree than in any other American historian. Indeed, I doubt if the nineteenth century can show in any part of the world another historian quite his equal in respect to such a union. . . . It is only the historian who is also philosopher and artist that can thus deal in block with the great and complex life of a whole society. The requisite combination is realized only in certain rare and high types of mind, and there has been no more brilliant illustration of it than Parkman's volumes afford." And he adds, speaking of Parkman's whole history: "Strong in its individuality, like to nothing else, it clearly belongs, I think, among the world's few masterpieces of the highest rank, along with the works of Herodotus, Thucydides, and Gibbon."

A writer in the " Spectator," reviewing an English edition of Parkman's works, says: "Francis Parkman long since won an honorable place among the classic historians of the world, and it is with the greatest cordiality that we welcome the present reprint of his works. Now, at last, we have a library edition which we may put by the side of Gibbon and Michelet, of Livy and Taine. For Francis Parkman need not fear the most august society; he has the true genius of history in him, — the genius which knows how to wed accuracy with romance." Goldwin Smith compares him with Tacitus. Professor Albert Bushnell Hart says : " Francis Parkman is the greatest of all the writers who have ever made America their theme or have written as American scholars, and his greatness depends upon three qualities rarely brought together in one man ; he was a matchless investigator, a man of the most unflinching tenacity, and somehow he knew how to write so that men loved to read him."

These are enthusiastic praises, and Mr. Fiske, who had a warm heart and a fine capacity for friendship, might be thought to have spoken from a May morning mood, the English reviewer might be deemed over-grateful to Parkman after reviewing other historians, Goldwin Smith enthusiastic from love of Canada, Professor Hart from love of Harvard ; but such conjectures fail, for these men make but the mouthpiece of the common voice. The boy who in the course of nature reads Parkman after Cooper and the Waverley novels finishes "Pontiac" or "Montcalm and Wolfe" with a "By Jove, that's bully!" The temperate person of uncertain age says, " What an admirable piece of work ! how true, how just! would that our fiction had half the charm of such history ! " The student rejoices in the accuracy, the impartiality, the wise correctness of this history.

It is for scholars, however, to decide whether Parkman is as great as Thucydides and Gibbon ; the very suggestion is more than enough honor for any other historian ; it is for readers to determine if his books are as agreeable as Michelet or Livy ; the biographer can but show whether the historian has been loyal to his task, — whether he has studied, explored, reconnoitred in all those places where he might ferret out knowledge of his subject; for in such loyalty lies not only the historian's honor, but also what benefit men may derive from history.

In considering the merits of a historian, heed must be paid to the subject of the history, the theme must be looked at ; a little man minces up to a little subject, a strong man strides up to a great subject. No story of Martha's Vineyard, of Dorking, or Tarascon could deserve the title of a great history. Parkman chose worthily, sagaciously seeing clearly where other men had only peered. His subject is universally acknowledged to be a great subject. It is the history of Canada, it is the history of the United States as well. The events which he recounts are the great prologue to the drama of the American Revolution ; they are the slow factors which begot sentiments of mutual dependence among bickering colonies, and finally, forcing them to confederate, enabled them to break the ties that held them to Great Britain and to found a new nation. Incidentally, as a story of two nations of different stocks, Parkman's history involves the contrast between two political systems, — one where a single man holds the power of the state, the other where the general body of citizens possess it ; likewise it involves the contrast between two great religious systems, Roman Catholicism and Teutonic Protestantism. The English- French conflict was the struggle between two sets of ideas — one derived from Rome, the other from Germany — for domination on the continent of North America. In Europe those discordant ideas had set up their respective boundaries ; in the New World they fought not for boundaries, but for all or nothing. The importance of this struggle Parkman was perhaps the first fully to realize. So great a theme imposed a grave duty.

Parkman's self-training and self-education, in order to fulfill this duty, make the most interesting part of his life. To be sure, as a historian of past time, he had in some respects unrivaled opportunities. When Froude described Elizabethan buccaneers and Freeman the Normans of the Conquest, they were constrained to use that constructive sense which out of manuscripts, stones, and bones must create living men ; but Parkman was able to live in the past, as it were, to use eyes and ears instead of his imagination. Indians, French Canadians, and American frontiersmen are his dramatis personal. Fortunately for him, Indians are singularly persistent in ancestral ways, singularly incapable of adaptation to altered modes of life. What the Iroquois and the Algonkins of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were, such were the Snakes and the Dakotas of 1846. Likewise the French Canadian, in less degree, is rigid and obstinate ; the habitant follows his father's footsteps with the fidelity of instinct, what he learned to do as a boy he does as a man, and unless he emigrate, he remains the same from generation to generation. Were it not for assaults from the outer world, his gun, his plough, his boat would remain as they were in Frontenac's time ; so would his gayety and his politeness. In 1842 the frontiersman, also, on the borders of Vermont and Maine, was not greatly changed from his predecessors of a century before. Those were still the days before the great Irish immigration ; the frontiersmen whom Parkman met in his undergraduate days were Yankees, handling gun and axe very much as their forefathers had done, theological, independent, lanky, ready, rough, unmannerly. So, too, in the days of Parkman's roamings, the woods on the borders of Lake George and of Lake Champlain, the forests of pine, spruce, oak, and maple, between the White Mountains and the St. Lawrence, had not changed since the French and Indian wars. Here fortune favored him. Paris of the second empire was not like the Paris of Henri IV, London of Queen Victoria was not the London of Charles II ; but in Parkman's boyhood great tracts of the American forest were changed only in so far as old trees had fallen to decay and young shoots had grown up to take their places.

All these dramatis personce — the Indian, the Canadian, the frontiersman, the forest — could be studied in the life, and in these respects Parkman had great advantages over other historians. These advantages he used to the full, and this little book will, in great measure, consist merely of Parkman's own accounts of these studies afield. But the peculiar praise due to Parkman is that he determined, while still a lad, not merely to write a history of the French and English war, but to be thorough in his preparation. Thoroughness ordinarily means alcoves, green shades, spectacles ; with Parkman it meant not merely such " emasculate scholarship," but also hardening the muscles, aiming the rifle, riding bareback, in order to qualify the student to undertake his outdoor studies.

Fully aware of the greatness of his undertaking, ready and eager to submit to whatever schooling should best educate him, Parkman judged that history should be written with a view to being read. However accurate, however profound it be, if it remain on the shelf, whether of the bookshop or public library, it is a failure.

Parkman, too, was deeply impressed with the beauty, the color, the romance of our North American history ; he believed that beauty, color, romance are not mere trappings and holiday decorations of history, but integral parts, and that to omit them is to be false to fact. To some men this world, both present and past, looks dry, dull, autumnal ; to Parkman it blossomed with the bloom of spring, and he knew that, in order to gather and preserve that beauty in little black printed letters, art was necessary, and that art means training. Therefore he set himself to work to become a master of art in prose, just as he worked to become a master of art with his rifle. His diaries are sketches and studies in narrative, his reading aimed at the same end ; until after long years by this patient labor he was able to produce those " glorious " and " shining " pages which, not for Mr. John Fiske alone, fill "the most brilliant and fascinating books that have been written since the days of Herodotus."

By these means, by the simple method of faithful fulfillment of his duty, Parkman accomplished his great task. " The path of duty was the path of glory," and to those who are primarily concerned with history and literature, the process of his preparation will be the most interesting period of his life ; but to those who prefer manhood to history, and fortitude to fame, who are zealous for American character, to them the most brilliant parts of Parkman's story are the periods of enforced idleness. In boyhood he had some physical weakness, and throughout his life from undergraduate days till his death, there is one long record of physical ills, pausing but continuing again inexorable, of lameness that forbade walking, of almost complete blindness that forbade seeing, of insomnia that banished sleep, of pain that stopped the impatient brain.

Intense of purpose, impetuous in pursuit, intolerant of idleness, effeminacy, and indifference, emphatic in belief, dependent on himself alone, pleasant to his acquaintance, beloved by his friends, he fought his way through fifty years of achievement, a worthy comrade to those great figures in his histories whom he has lifted to fame and honor.

Chapter II Ancestry

Indomitable resolution was the chief trait in Francis Parkman. It may be somewhat fanciful to trace a single trait up the male line through eight generations, but in Parkman's case there is satisfaction in finding that this ascent takes us to Devonshire, the breeding place of indomitable spirit. Parkman's last English ancestor was William Parkman of Sidmouth, Devon, of whom we know little, yet at least that he was born and bred in Elizabethan England, in the same shire that begot Raleigh, Drake, Gilbert, Hawkins, and other freebooting buccaneers, and that he was entitled to a birthright of will and courage. William's son Elias emigrated to Massachusetts Bay prior to 1633; there he married, and begot a line of descendants, over whom — worthy people with Old Testament names — we may lightly skip to the fourth generation from the Devonshire ancestor. In that generation the twelfth child, Ebenezer, is well known by reason of a journal which he kept for many years. He graduated at Harvard College in 1721, at the

ANCESTRY 13

age of eighteen, and three years later was elected town minister of Westborough, Massachusetts. He continued his ministry in this little town for fifty-eight years, until his death. His published journal begins abruptly on February 13, 1737, about two years after his first wife's death. The minister's second attempt at wooing is recorded thus : —

Feb. 17. Capt Foot & Sister Elizabeth & M™ Mary Tilestone took a ride with me in a double slay at evening to Capt. Robert Sharp's at Brookline, & Br r Elias came to us upon my horse, after supper there. At 10 o'clock they returned in y e slay but I tarried. N. B. The discovery of my Inclinations to Capt Sharp & to Mm. By y eir urgent Persuasions I tarried and lodged there. N. B. M r _ 3 Susannah Sharp. [Mistress Susannah was twenty-one years old.] . . .

March 3 d . Towards night I rode over to Roxbury. N. B. I proceeded to Capt Sharp's. By Capt Sharp's strong Solicitation I tarried all night. N. B. Mrs Susan not very willing to think of going so far in y e Country as Westborough, &c &c &c. . . .

March 4. I returned P. M. from Town & went again to Capt Sharp's. N. B. Capt Sharp & Mm. gone to the Funeral of a Relation at Roxbury. I tarried whilst the Capt and his spouse came home. Arguments which be fruitless with Mrs Susan. I returned to Father Champney's between 8 and 9 in y e Evening.

[This rebuff was received philosophically.]

March. 18. Eve at D r . Gott's. M r _ 8 Gott had been very ill, but is recovering. Mrs Hannah Brech with her, but I spent my time with y e men. [Mistress Hannah was twenty-one years old and was a younger sister of Mrs. Gott.] . . .

March. 19. A. M. To Dr. Gott's, but a short space with Mrs Hannah. At my Request, she had (she assured me) burnt my Letters, Poems, etc . . .

March 25. I rode to Marl b [Marlborough]. Spent ye afternoon at D r Gott's — was at ye Coll.'s, [certain friends] but returned to Dr's. M* Hovey there with a Bass Viol. N. B. M r _ 8 H h B k at ye Dr's still. Our conversation of a piece with what it used to be. I mark her admirable Conduct, her Prudence and wisdom, her good manners and her distinguishing Respectfulness to me w c [which] accompany her Denyals. After it grew late in y e Even'g, I rode home to Westb., through the Dark and the Dirt but cheerfully and comfortably (comparatively). . . .

April. 1. At Eve, I was at Dr. Gotts, Mrs

H h was thought to be gone up to Mr

Week's or Capt Williams, with design to lodge there, but she returned to ye Doctor's. And she gave me her Company till it was very late. Her Conversation was very Friendly, and with divers expressions of Singular and Peculiar Regard.

Memoranda, Oscul : But she cannot yield to being a step mother. — I lodged there, and with g rt Satisfaction & Composure.

The two were married in September and lived very contentedly, yet an entry on the anniversary

ANCESTRY 15

of his first wife's death, forty-three years afterwards, betrays the fact that she was his real love.

The records of this diary, brief and matter-offact as they are, bring a vivid picture of the simple, frugal country life of the time. The minister's salary was eked out, or perhaps wholly paid, by the labor and the gifts of his congregation. For instance, in October, the month after his marriage, occur the entries : —

6. Young men came to gather my corn. Set y m to work. . . .

About 18 or 20 hands husked out all my Corn. N. B. in my absence Winter Apples gathered in. . . .

7. M* John Pratt brought home my cyder which he had made. . . .

12. M* Lock came & carried in Corn. . . .

13. At evening Br r Hicks helped in more Corn. . . .

14. Jon 11 Rogers got in Pumpkins, & ye remainder of y e Corn. . . .

15. Noah How helped in with Turnips & some of y e Potatoes. . . .

In this Westborougk minister we have a typical instance of the moral and intellectual life of New England in that awkward age of transition preceding the Revolutionary War, during which Massachusetts and its fellow settlements were passing from boyhood to manhood. Here were still the narrow horizon, the scant intellectual resources, and the tough conservatism of Puritan days, but also that rigid sentiment of duty and that desire to do well and to make the most of granted opportunities, which have made New England what she has been. Francis Parkman and his great-grandfather, with the differences appropriate to their generations, held in common this belief, that life is man's opportunity to try his mettle, to measure himself against adverse forces, and to determine whether he or they be the stronger and more resolute. The minister's intellectual life was limited, but not willfully limited. He endeavored to acquaint himself with a wider range of thought than ordinarily found its way into Westborough. On the 13th of July, 1779, is this entry : —

M r Adams has brought home to me at length Sir W m Temple. He has led me also into an Exchange of a number of Books viz. For Voetius 3 vols, I have D T . Stanhope's Thomas a Kempis D r Calamy, of Vows : Horneck's crucified Jesus, & D T . Goodman's Old Religion. For Mons r Boileau's 2 d vol and Mat Prior's Works 2 vols, I have D r Hammond's Annotations in large Folio. For the Lay Monastery, I have Herman Prudence, & Three Select Pieces of M r Thos. Shepherd. For Comin's Real Christian, unbound, I gave him at his proposal a Pound of Sugar. He presented me a Pamphlet, D T . Gibson on y e Sinfulness of Neglecting and profaning the Lord's

ANCESTRY 17

Day. N. B. I returned him Drexilius on Eternity.

The Kev. Ebenezer Parkraan died in his eightieth year. His successor in our story is Samuel Parkman, his son, a prosperous merchant and prominent citizen of Boston. He began life a poor boy — his father's purse was too light to pay college fees ; " he did his own lugging," as he said in his opulent age, and when he came to die left a large property, a portion of which enabled our historian to devote his life to a non-money-getting pursuit.

Several of Samuel's brothers displayed their New England spirit: William, at the age of seventeen, served in a Massachusetts regiment during the French war, keeping a diary, — a family trait ; Breck, a minute-man, marched from Westborough to Lexington on the 19th of April, 1775 ; a third brother also served in the Continental Army.

Samuel's son Francis, father of the historian, was born in 1788, and graduated at Harvard College in 1807. Destined for the pulpit, he studied theology under William Ellery Channing, and, in obedience to the moral law which then prevailed in Boston, became a Unitarian. He took to his grandfather's calling, and in 1813 was ordained pastor of the New North Church, where he remained throughout his active life, and

IS FRANCIS PARKMAN

until bis son Francis had grown to manhood. He was a kind, benevolent man. esteemed an eloquent preacher with •• a special gift in prayer," and took a prominent place among his fellow clergy. For thirty years he was one of the overseers of Harvard College, and presented a sum of money towards the endowment of the Parkman Professorship of Theology. His conversation was well spiced with wit and humor ; anecdotes of his high spirits in talk are still remembered. He possessed a tenacious conservatism, and yet in spite of this their common trait. he was very unlike his more serious son. and did not sympathize with his literary ambition. Notwithstanding their differences and fundamental lack of sympathy, he v 1 father, and did his duty as he saw it towards his son. To him a noble eulogy has been paid. •• he was particularly kind to the unattractive." His fa

pen and hospitable, and mai note in their day were entertained there. Happy memories long lingered on of u that bless Bowdoin Square house an .liant inmates

. . . that spacious, hospitable mansion g: by ■ household into which it was an unspea". i privilege for a child to have been born."

Francis Parkman resembled his mother more than his father. She was a tender, loving, dutiful, unselfish woman, a creat favorite in the lar^e fami whose interest in Etta iid Ml often

travel beyond the thr - s h I ] of her home : too, was : Puritan stock, having escended

ter, reserve, sin*] ■ certain sk

humor. Frank was like her in many ways, and

tie :lAer lie ::--■ :_iv z:;-r= :if exyr-fssion ;: _:s :'j;e VfJ.v^r like iifrs. .

Eliz.s, mi J-im Eliot: Ml frrknaan had .vis; an older child. Sarah, by an earlier marriage.

Chapter III Boyhood

Francis Parkman, the historian, was born September 16, 1823, in a house on a little street which runs across the northern slope of Beacon Hill, then known as Somerset Place, now Allston Street. The Rev. Mr. Parkman lived there until Frank was six or seven years old, when he moved to a larger house, No. 1 Green Street. Town life was not suited to the boy ; his health was delicate, and his woodland nature, unsatisfied with the resources of his father's yard, rebelled against the cramping streets and alleys of the city. He went to Medford to live with his mother's father, Mr. Nathaniel Hall, who, having retired from business, kept a farm about a mile from the village. Frank, as day-scholar, attended a boardingschool for boys and girls kept by Mr. John Angier, a graduate of Harvard College. Others liked the school but Frank did not, and since with boys as well as with men learning waits upon liking, he learned little ; but he was constant in his attendance at another school, adapted to his disposition and well equipped to teach him the

BOYHOOD 21

beginnings of that knowledge which was to make him famous, — the school of the woods. At the distance of a few rods from Mr. Hall's farm lay the Middlesex Fells, a capital wilderness. This tract of six or seven square miles, of rocky, barren soil, retained no marks of certain ancient and vain attempts at cultivation except some old apple-trees and tumble-down stone walls. It had ponds, — one, half a mile across ; a hill hundreds of feet high ; heaths, glens, dales, crags ; thickets full of trees too big to clasp, jungles of underbrush ; rotten stumps to be smashed by a battleaxe ; thick moss to drive a spear into ; mud to smear new clothes from head to foot ; glorious varieties of dirt, and all the riches of a wilderness. In this great school and playground the boy spent all the time he could save from Mr. Angier, gathering birds' eggs, setting traps for squirrels and woodchucks, catching snakes, or creeping on his belly with bow and arrow to get a shot at a robin, which, in spite of the utmost ingenuity of approach, by some chance, miraculous in the hunter's eyes, almost always succeeded in flying away unharmed. These days of rambling through this trackless forest were among the happiest of his life ; he always liked to look back upon them. No doubt they owe a part of their joyous colors to the black background of Mr. Angier's school. In spite of a pure and honest purpose of play, the roamings in Middlesex Fells provided Frank with some knowledge ; here he began to make a collection of minerals, which gradually grew until in course of time it became worthy to be presented to the Harvard Natural History Society ; here he hacked, picked, and plucked trees and flowers till he found to his surprise that he had learned a little botany ; here he acquired a love of plants which in later days, when ill health chained him to a garden chair, opened to him the vegetable kingdom ; here he picked up, by tail and hind legs, newts, frogs, pollywogs; and made close acquaintance with all kinds of little living creatures.

Now things there are that, upon him who sees, A strong vocation lay ; and strains there are That whoso hears shall hear for evermore.

So, in these early days, one may discover the bent of Parkman's mind towards the forest ; here, to quote his words, " he became enamoured of the woods," and plainly showed that inclination towards outdoor schooling and self -instruction in nature to which he gave loose rein in college.

After four years at Medford Frank went back to Boston to live with his parents. In spite of active life in the country, his body was not robust, and perhaps physical inability to join in athletic games was the cause that turned the

BOYHOOD 23

boy's attention to the indoor diversion of chemistry. There was a shed at the rear of the house which his father converted into a laboratory, and here Frank shut himself up too steadily for the good of his health, and devoted himself to chemical experiments. In his fragmentary autobiography he says that he accomplished nothing beyond poisoning himself with noxious gases and scorching his skin with explosions ; but probably he did well enough, his years considered, for his masterful disposition always determined to have the upper hand in a grapple with any study to which he turned. He impressed his comrades with respect for his skill, and succeeded in making an electrical machine with which he administered shocks to sundry rash boys and girls. He also entertained himself and his friends with lectures, duly announced by printed bills.

In the autobiography an extreme seriousness, begotten in great part by long illness, seems to have cast a shadow backward over his youth, or at least to have left the man somewhat oblivious, or careless, of the lightheadedness of his boyhood, which, in fact, had its fair share of gayety. The records of his childhood indicate jollity and happiness ; and he would have been most ready to acknowledge this and render thanks, but in his little memoir his mind was fixed upon the lessons which others might learn from his life, and therefore he passed by those details which in that view were irrelevant. For instance, at the age of thirteen, Frank and his companions turned the loft of a barn behind the house into a theatre. They were the scene-painters, costumers, and in part, perhaps, playwrights, as well as the company of players. Sometimes, in moments of greater ambition, they borrowed costumes from a theatre. Here is a copy of a play-bill, printed by one of the company : —