Francis Parkman's Oration "Romance in America"

Abstract

ON August 28, 1844,1 the twenty-one-year-old Francis Parkman delivered a commencement oration on the occasion of his graduation from Harvard. The original manuscript, lodged among his papers in the Harvard College Library and unknown to present-day historians, is in Parkman's, handwriting, signed F. Parkman, August '44. Romance in America, as Parkman called the oration, reveals for us the springs from which his later work flowed, providing us with new insight into the romantic concept of history held by one of our greatest historians. Indeed, Parkman's later multivolumed masterpiece France and England in North America is, in many respects, a projection of the ideas that so, fascinated Parkman in these early undergraduate days. Certainly Parkman's, interests crystallized remarkably early in his career, so that the reading of his college days was of real value to him in his literary work. As he himself noted, in a letter written many years later, a literary career early suggested itself as combining his two boyhood loves: love of the forest and of books.2 What is known of Parkman's academic career supports, his own contention that he was a lover of books. For his scholastic record at Harvard, which was excellent though not brilliant,3 masks the fact that the prescribed curriculum was only a minor part of his program of study.4 From his, early reading lists and correspondence it is apparent that he carried. on a secondary pro; gram of reading in literature, ethnology, and history, with particular emphasis on the romantic themes of Fran;ois Rene de Chateaubriand, Jules Michelet, Sir Walter Scott, and James Fenimore Cooper, all of which readied him for his own literary works