The History of New-Hampshire: Jeremy Belknap as Literary Craftsman

Abstract

J EREMY Belknap, patriot parson and New England historian, died June of I798. Although the sermon given by the Reverend John Thornton Kirkland, later to be a Harvard president, displayed the usual number of platitudes, its closing words were much to the point: the Republic of had lost an accomplished Scholar and Writer, whose writings would live long as readers of piety and taste, and lovers of historical truth existed the world.' As minister Dover or Boston it is doubtful that Belknap shone for zeal or philosophy-he goes almost unmentioned the annals of American theology. It is rather as eminent citizen of our early republic of letters that Belknap makes his chief bid for lasting fame. Of course, he was no Prescott or Motley; yet there is some justice John Spencer Bassett's opinion that in a more favorable age or environment he would have developed into a leading light of literature. 2 It was 1772 that Belknap began his twenty years' labor on a work that may now pretty clearly be seen as a milestone American historiography-the three volumes of his History of New-Hampshire.3 The idea of the History may perhaps be dated a decade or so earlier. Sometime between I758 and 1762, while a student at Harvard, young Jeremiah (his taste for style had not yet changed it to Jeremy) had begun to keep a journal: Quotidiana Miscellanea, he called it, and onto its pages he copied portions of his reading. One extract from the preface to Laurence Echard's Roman