Jared Sparks Research Articles

Original/Copy

Original/Copy Alea Henle KEY WORDS original, copy, print, replication, reproduction, reprint, manuscript, facsimile, material text, transcription, Jared Sparks, William Hill, Ebenezer Hazard Original and copy appear to be simple concepts. At first blush, copies refer to the multiple reproduced derivations of an original, presumed to be singular and to command a higher value. With respect to texts in an age of print and mass reproduction, however, the relationship between originals and copies became more complicated. The industrial revolution contributed to the multiplication of ways to copy material texts, including engravings, daguerreotypes, and printed replicas. As copies proliferated, in any given instance, people attributed higher value to originals or copies. In contrast to what one might think, copies could be, and were, intentional improvements over originals. Commonsense assumptions about the superiority of the original over its copies may be traced to Enlightenment hierarchies of the arts. Early in the eighteenth century, the pioneering English art theorist Jonathan Richardson presented the terms as part of a hierarchical procession from nature wherein an “original is the Eccho of the Voice of Nature, a Coppy is the Eccho of that Eccho.” Richardson’s presumption was that original works based on nature were automatically inferior. Copies of originals, then, were that much more removed from their natural ideal. This attitude existed among Americans as well. Eighteenth-century American autograph collectors, for instance, preferred manuscript signatures to printed facsimiles. In 1784 the pioneering historical editor Ebenezer Hazard recommended that his fellow historian Jeremy Belknap present Washington with a copy of Belknap’s history of New Hampshire, as “it will produce a letter from him in his own handwriting which will be worth preserving,” implicitly emphasizing the importance of a material text with as close as possible a connection to Washington.1 [End Page 728] In the world of material texts, however, differences in the copy were not always degradations. On the contrary, the differences introduced by copies were often intentional and frequently considered improvements. The Declaration of Independence offers an important example. The text achieved artifact status through reproductions particularly in facsimile format, though the manuscript inspiration for the facsimiles was largely overlooked and neglected for over a century. Ironically, the calligraphic Declaration currently venerated was itself a copy commissioned two weeks after the proclamation’s dissemination in print—after the New York Provincial Assembly allowed its delegates to vote in its favor. The calligraphic version differed from the print original in several respects; notably, the earlier printed “A Declaration” became “The Unanimous Declaration.” Fifty-six members of Congress signed the calligraphic version, but the printed version carried only three typographic signatures: John Hancock and Charles Thomson as president and secretary, and John Dunbar the printer. Although neither Thomson nor Dunbar signed the calligraphic Declaration, at least one scholar has noted an argument could be made to consider them as signers.2 Early American written culture also included extensive practices in which the lines between original and copy were blurred. Letter writers sometimes created multiple versions of letters, one to send and a draft or copy kept loose or in a letterbook. Inasmuch as multiple versions survive and contain differences, it is impossible to determine the “original” version, and modern historical editors grapple with the matter of which to include. Explorers, scientists, and government officials likewise kept field notes used to create official reports and narratives; the former documented original impressions but the latter could also be construed as original. Meriwether Lewis and [End Page 729] William Clark sent official reports back to President Jefferson in Washington, but Clark also sent copies, possibly drafts, to his brother Jonathan. Individuals also created commonplace books wholly or in part of copied materials; the contents might be copied, but each book as a whole potentially constituted an original reflecting its creator. People circulated essays, sermons, letters, and other materials through manuscript copies and in print. Newspaper and periodical editors exchanged issues and included copied articles in their publications, as editors rarely applied for copyright, which facilitated the practice. Many printed volumes were whole reprints of earlier editions out of copyright or contained extensive excerpts from other works.3 An incident in the life and work of Jared Sparks...

Educating Tocqueville: Jared Sparks, the Boston Whigs, and Democracy in America

Educating TocquevilleJared Sparks, the Boston Whigs, and Democracy in America Guy Aiken (bio) Without Jared Sparks and the Boston Whigs, we might not have Democracy in America (DIA). In Boston in late September and early October 1831, Tocqueville’s interviews with New World elites––former Federalists and National Republicans who would soon establish the Whig Party in America––put the Old World aristocrat in mind of Rousseau’s “habits of the heart.”1 And New England native Jared Sparks (1789–1866) suggested to Tocqueville two of DIA’s “driving ideas”: the tyranny of the majority and the seminal importance of the New England town for American democracy.2 At the time, Sparks was pioneering documentary history in America by editing and publishing the papers of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Gouverneur Morris, and other leaders of the American Revolution. Yet Sparks was also a clergyman whose ordination in 1819 was memorable as the occasion on which William Ellery Channing preached his foundational sermon Unitarian Christianity. Sparks had been chaplain to the U.S. House of Representatives in the early 1820s and then editor of America’s most renowned journal of letters, the North American Review, from 1823 to 1830. Sparks would go on to become America’s first professional academic historian when his alma mater Harvard appointed him McLean Professor of Ancient and Modern History in 1839. A decade later he would follow Edward Everett as Harvard’s president, an office he held until early 1853.3 [End Page 169] When Tocqueville was in America there was hardly a more reliable source on all things American than Jared Sparks.4 He was Tocqueville’s most valuable informant, and he epitomized the impact of the Boston Whigs on Tocqueville’s thought.5 In early 1832 he mailed Tocqueville and Beaumont a detailed memoir on the New England town just before the two Frenchmen embarked for their trip back to Europe. Tocqueville’s debt to Sparks in Volume I, Part I, Chapter 5 (I.1.5) of DIA is well known, but not in any detail. The first part of this essay will flesh out just what Tocqueville owed Sparks for this part of DIA. Yet Sparks’s influence reaches further into Tocqueville’s work than just this single chapter. First of all, the “tyranny of the majority” has a chapter in DIA all its own. And in his memoir and in his interviews with the two French aristocrats, Sparks also emphasized the need to begin at the beginning when studying American democracy; the impact of inheritance law on western migration; democracy’s reliance on education; and the uniformity of the laws. All of these ideas either originated with, or were affirmed by, Sparks. Part two of this essay will assess the full extent of Sparks’s impact on DIA. After a brief interlude on religion, the third part of this essay will examine Sparks’s political thought and his disagreement with Tocqueville over the “tyranny of the majority.” Sparks likely learned his contractualism, and his defense of majority rule, from Locke. Looking at Locke reveals the probable source of Sparks’s political philosophy and of his argument against Tocqueville’s “tyranny of the majority”––an idea that irritated many American readers and that, of course, originated with Sparks himself.6 First Things First: Starting with the Town (DIA I.I.5) Before hearing from Sparks on the matter, Tocqueville had heard two of his other informants stress the importance of the New England town for American democracy. Harvard president Josiah Quincy III spoke of Massachusetts as “a collection of small republics,” and Massachusetts State Senator Francis C. Gray said that town democracy was what distinguished New England not only from Europe, but also from the rest of the United States. Yet Sparks brought the point home. “Nearly all societies, even in America, begin with government concentrated in a particular place and subsequently expand around that central point. But our ancestors founded towns [End Page 170] before there was a state.”7 Tocqueville must then have thought to himself, if I want to see American democracy in its simplest and purest form, I should look at the New England town. As he...

Educating Tocqueville. Jared Sparks, the Boston Whigs, and Democracy in America

Without Jared Sparks and the Boston Whigs, we might not have Democracy in America (DIA). In Boston in late September and early October 1831, Tocqueville’s interviews with New World elites—former Federalists and National Republicans who would soon establish the Whig Party in America—put the Old World aristocrat in mind of Rousseau’s “habits of the heart.”

‘Red Lines on Maps’ Revisited: The Role of Maps in Negotiating and Defending the 1842 Webster-Ashburton Treaty

ABSTRACT Daniel Webster said it was knowledge of the Sparks and Steuben maps (both apparently confirming British border claims) that brought the state of Maine to concur in his 1842 treaty settlement with Lord Ashburton. His statement is well known, but most historians have felt inhibited by lack of evidence from examining the way in which Webster used the maps in the negotiation and from assessing the true extent (and limits) of their influence. Using a wider range of sources, the present article seeks to remedy this lacuna through detailed analysis of the sequence of negotiation. It discusses the ‘Battle of the Maps’ that followed the revelation of their importance in securing the treaty's conclusion, the 1843 search in the Paris archives to which this impelled the British government, and the unearthing (in the Foreign Office) of the King George Map that enabled Sir Robert Peel to destroy Lord Palmerston's attack and conclude the controversy. The article also illustrates the propensity of participants to explain points by dashing off sketch maps, and it adds to the uncertainty as to the precise source from which Jared Sparks copied his ‘red line’ onto the map of Maine.

The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth: Nationalism and Impartiality in American Historical Writing, 1784-1860. By Eileen Ka-May Cheng. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008. viii, 368 pp. $44.95, ISBN 978-0-8203-3073-0.)

The first chapters of The Plain and Noble Garb of Truth trace the shifting boundaries between history and fiction, impartiality and advocacy, and identification and objectivity in careful analyses of a broad sampling of early American historians. Eileen Ka-May Cheng's argument revolves around the apparent paradox of impartiality. All important early American historians made claims to impartiality, no matter how partisan the histories they produced may now seem to be. Followers of Leopold von Ranke (who insisted on documentation), romantics who relied on sympathetic identification, and bowdlerizers like Jared Sparks all claimed to be impartial and therefore truthful. Those claims, Cheng demonstrates, were almost always hotly contested; she cites an impressive assortment of polemical reviews that point out the biases of these historians. Impartiality, then, emerges as a conflicted category, an aspiration maintained despite challenges from ascendant literary genres such as the novel, from a newly gendered readership that preferred more domestically centered stories, and from an increasingly capital-driven mass culture that was rapidly remaking the intellectual landscape and the public sphere in Europe and the United States.

Benjamin Franklin in Europe: electrician, academician, politician

Le canard est une trouvaille de Franklin, qui a invente le paratonnerre, le canard, et la republique. Balzac, in Alfred Owen Aldridge, Franklin and his French contemporaries (New York University Press, 1957), p. 95.I am pleased and honoured to be here tonight as the Royal Society's Wilkins

Coming to terms with democracy: Federalist intellectuals and the shaping of an American culture

Coming to Terms with Democracy: Federalist Intellectuals and the Shaping of an American Culture. By Marshall Foletta. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001. Pp x, 303. Illustrations. $45.00.) Marshall Foletta's Coming to Terms with Democracy considers cluster of young New England Federalists in the early decades of the nineteenth century who inherited from their fathers an eighteenth-century Federalist cultural, social, and intellectual worldview, but also Federalist political party that was not their fathers' Federalist Party. The disarray of the of the revolutionary generation allowed its successors to reevaluate and rethink their place in (44). This they did with energy, moral rigor, and absolute faith in their own standing and correctness. The that came into being with the War of 1812 and the debacle of the Hartford Convention was not the one young Federalists would have chosen. Their fathers had been admired, deferred to, and listened to. When they were rejected by more democratic population, many of these deposed statesmen of the demoralized national Federal Party withdrew in disgust. While historians disagree over whether actually died, it certainly struggled. The younger Federalists, however, refused to accept democratic-republican with which they could not sympathize. On the other hand, they would not resort to mere withdrawal. They recognized that definitions of leadership, deference, and an elite had changed (possibly in part because of Thomas Jefferson's election in 1801). They sought not simply to retain the ideology of the preceding generation, but to reshape that ideology in way that would both encompass the new classes in society and retain their traditional elite's prominence. Among this group of young Federalists were Edward Tyrell Channing, William Ellery Channing, Richard Henry Dana, Edward Everett, Jared Sparks, Theodore Lyman, George Ticknor, and William Tudor. These Federalist intellectuals met together in the parsonage of the Brattle Street Church (and, later, at George Ticknor's home), wrote essays, edited journal, and headed institutions that they hoped would carry Federalist culture and guarantee that it would be the dominant culture of the nation. These civic-minded men wanted place in the new social order and were prepared to revise and adapt their beliefs to obtain it. The also wanted to create a new voice for Federalism (21). To adapt meant to reconcile what perhaps ultimately was irreconcilable: progress and conservatism and individual ambition and social harmony (197). In fact, significant theme of Coming to Terms with Democracy is the attempt to fuse or reconcile dichotomies. Because it was not always possible to resolve antithetical goals, number of Foletta's formulations of them are in the form of on the one hand; but the other. The young men held fast to privilege, but they also took painful steps to liberate themselves from their fathers' errors. On the one hand, they wanted change; the other hand, they wanted much that their fathers had taught them. This left these thinkers with very selective rejection of their fathers' world (61). In matters of religion, for example, the young Boston Federalists eschewed Trinitarianism and orthodoxy and scorned the language of orthodox Calvinism. Looking in part to the epistemology and ethics of the Scottish Enlightenment, they settled upon Unitarianism. Such resolution allowed them to reject the dogma and rigidity of the past and at the same time maintain continuity with it. They retained the New England tradition of moral elitism (69), preserved the authoritative role of the clergy, and, perhaps most important, established their own position as new elite. …

Elizabeth Fries Lummis Ellet (1818-1877)

More than a century-and-a-half ago, Elizabeth F. Ellet began the process that scholars continue today of recovering and recording the lives and contributions of women. One of the best-known writers of her day, Ellet published prolifically in a wide variety of genres. In part because she refused to follow expected roles for women, she became embroiled in public battles with prominent literary men, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Rufus W. Griswold. Consequently, despite her pioneering work as a precursor of feminist scholarship, Ellet has been cited by twentieth-century literary critics primarily in negative terms. However, Ellet was a major participant in the nineteenth-century literary scene and continues to be acknowledged by historians for her valuable early methodology in recovering women's history. Elizabeth Fries Lummis was born in Sodus Point, New York, in October 1818 to a well-to-do physician, William Nixon Lummis, and Sarah Maxwell Lummis. [1] Educated at a female seminary at Aurora, New York, Ellet began writing poetry in her early teens. Her first book, published when she was sixteen and entitled Poems, Translated and Original (1835), collected her own poems, many previously published, with some she had translated from French, Italian, German, and Spanish. The volume also included Ellet's tragedy in five acts, Teresa Contarini, which had a successful run in New York and some smaller cities. At the age of seventeen, Ellet married and moved to South Carolina where her husband, William H. Ellet, accepted academic appointments at Columbia College and South Carolina College. Even before her marriage, Ellet had contributed to a number of periodicals, includeing Knickerbocker, Ontario Repository, Lady's Book, and American Monthly. After moving to the South, she began publishing in regional publications such as Southern Literary Journal and Monthly Magazine and Southern Literary Messenger, but she continued her work for established national periodicals and contributed to prestigious new magazines and newspapers, most notably Democratic Review, New Yorker, Harper's, and Union Magazine. [2] Early contributions were primarily poetry and translations and criticism of Italian and German writers, making use of her early interest and fluency in languages. In the late twentieth century, as scholars recovered and revalued the contributions of earlier women, one great irony was that most references to Elizabeth Ellet were based primarily on the words of her male rivals, Edgar Allan Poe and Rufus Wilmot Griswold. Nearly all attention given Ellet depicts her as a villain in battles with these celebrated men, calling her a trouble maker, maligner, and scandal maker (Bayless); she was assumed to have taken action based on either jealousy or a taste for scandal-mongering (Moss). [3] The readiness with which these men's accounts have been accepted is surprising because Ellet had such highly respected companions in these conflicts-Margaret Fuller, Ann S. Stephens, and Anne C. Lynch (Botta). In addition, she had many longtime, highly esteemed friends, including Lydia Sigourney, Sarah Josepha Hale, and Jared Sparks, a noted historian whose advice she sought in writing The Women of the American Revolution. Ellet's battle with Poe began amidst gossip about the Poe-Osgood liaison. Edgar Allan Poe and Frances Osgood, both married to others, began an extended literary flirtation in the pages of the Broadway Journal, which Poe was editing at the time. [4] The couple also regularly attended events and social gatherings together. Ellet, professing concern for Osgood, claimed to have been shown incriminating letters from Osgood to Poe by Poe's wife Virginia. Her account was corroborated by the actions of Anne Lynch (Botta), author and hostess of New York's best known literary salon, and by Margaret Fuller, who, with Osgood's permission, visited the Poe household to retrieve the letters that might harm Osgood's reputation. …

Every Generation Is an "Independant Nation": Colonization, Miscegenation, and the Fate of Jefferson's Children

T THOMAS Jefferson never acknowledged his mixed-race children with Sally Hemings. Little evidence of any kind exists about how he thought or felt about those children. But Jefferson did have a great deal to say about demoralizing implications of miscegenational relationships for Virginia's master class. His well-known concern, bordering on obsession, with generational sovereignty also suggests that he was sensitive to fate of his unacknowledged children with Hemings. I propose to reconsider Jefferson's life-long advocacy of African colonization for clues about how he might have understood history of his unacknowledged shadow family. By I824, when in a letter to Jared Sparks, editor of North American Review, Jefferson offered fullest exposition of his thinking about emancipation and expatriation of American slaves, his idiosyncratic approach was of little interest or relevance to movers and shakers in American Colonization Society (ACS).1 But this fascinating letter does speak, obliquely, to crucially important private as well as public issues. Jefferson's ideas about colonization were first developed in an amendment to A Bill concerning Slaves that he drafted when he was a member of committee charged with revising Virginia's laws in I779. Although, as Jefferson recalled, committee endorsed the principles of amendment-the freedom of all born after a certain day, and deportation at a proper age-the amendment was never submitted to General Assembly because the public mind would not yet bear proposition.2

Who Killed Lucretia Davidson? or, Poetry in the Domestic-Tutelary Complex

Who Killed Lucretia Davidson? or, Poetry in the Domestic-Tutelary Complex Mary Loeffelholz (bio) In 1837, twelve years after her subject’s death at age seventeen from tuberculosis, popular novelist Catherine Sedgwick contributed a long biographical sketch of the poet Lucretia Maria Davidson to Jared Sparks’ Library of American Biography. Sedgwick’s biographical essay consolidated the reputation Lucretia Davidson had earlier won with her small posthumous collection, Amir Khan and Other Poems, assembled at the instigation of Lucretia’s mother Margaret, edited by academician Samuel B. Morse, and published in 1829. Thus sponsored chiefly by women, Lucretia Davidson’s posthumous career as a poet had also, as Cheryl Walker has put it, a number of contemporary “male midwives,” 1 Washington Irving and Robert Southey conspicuously among them. A few years later, Mrs. Margaret Miller Davidson would draw on similar forms of authorization—this time with Washington Irving supplying Sedgwick’s place as introductory biographer—in assembling and publishing the Poetical Remains of still another daughter, Margaret Miller Davidson, who also died of tuberculosis in her teens. The combined Remains of both sisters, together with Sedgwick’s and Irving’s biographies, were issued in a handsome new two-volume companion edition in 1841. Lucretia Davidson’s Remains sold well enough to circulate for several decades, in translations as well as in new American editions. 2 In 1843, finally, Mrs. Davidson completed the family portrait when she “appear[ed] for the first time before the public” in her own person, with Selections from the Writings of Mrs. Davidson, introduced again by Miss Sedgwick, who justified Mrs. Davidson’s discarding “the diffidence natural to a recluse and delicate woman” by referring to those readers “who have expressed a curiosity to know more of the mind whose holiest and brightest emanations were infused into those rare sisters, who seem hardly to have touched our world on their passage to Heaven.” 3 The combined 1841 Remains attracted the notice of Edgar Allen Poe, who damned them with faint praise and used them as a stick with which to beat on the Davidsons’ promoters. 4 Even Poe’s ambivalent notice, however, had to concede that those promoters had been effective; indeed, that is half his grievance as well as half his fascination with the Davidson sisters. By the time Poe [End Page 271] reviewed the composite Remains in 1841, he was well and ironically aware that “Lucretia Davidson” was a family enterprise, a cottage industry, a fulminating discursive formation, as well as the proper name of a dead girl. If, in his famous dictum, “the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world,” what seems to have intrigued Poe in the Davidson sisters—young, white, upper-middle-class, consumptive, dead, thus by convention beautiful, and “poetical” both as subjects and objects—was at least in part the cultural machinery brought to the making of this “poetical.” His review of Margaret Miller Davidson’s Remains opens with an account of her elder sister’s making as a poet: “The name of Lucretia Davidson is familiar to all readers of Poetry. Dying at the early age of seventeen, she has been rendered famous not less, and certainly not more, by her own precocious genius than by three memorable biographies,” those of Morse, Sedgwick, and Southey. The name and death of Lucretia authorize the appearance of her sister Margaret Miller, whose name and remains in their turn implicate yet another woman, the other Margaret Miller Davidson. “Few books,” Poe says of Margaret’s Remains, “have interested us more profoundly”: Yet the interest does not appertain solely to Margaret. ‘In fact, the narrative,’ says Mr. Irving, ‘will be found almost as illustrative of the character of the mother as of the child; they were singularly identified in taste, feeling, and pursuit; tenderly entwined together by maternal and filial affection, they reflected an inexpressibly touching grace and interest upon each other by this holy relationship, and, to my mind, it would be marring one of the most beautiful and affecting groups in modern literature to sunder them.’ In these words the biographer conveys no more than a just idea of the exquisite loveliness of the...

Editing a Historical Manuscript: Jared Sparks, Douglas Southall Freeman, and the Battle of Brandywine

W l rHEN Douglas Southall Freeman accused Jared Sparks of ''gross falsification in editing,1 he was only the latest in a long line of scholars to condemn the nineteenth-century historian. Sparks's editorial methods had been under attack since the 1850s, when he was charged with publishing no part of the correspondence [of George Washington] precisely as Washington wrote it.2 Sparks was indeed guilty of changing Old Put to read General Putnam,' and 'but a flea-bite to 'totally inadequate,' among other alterations, as well as silently omitting many passages entirely.3 Sparks retorted that such changes were necessary to correct 'obvious slips of the pen, occasional inaccuracies of expression, and manifest faults of grammar'' in letters often written hastily and not for publication; the omissions within letters were in keeping with his announced principle of publishing 'only a selection of the writings.4 Motives aside, Sparks's defense amounted to an admission of guilt, and a permanent cloud settled over his scholarly reputa-

Inventors of the Promised Land (review)

362CIVIL WAR HISTORY It is here that one might find fault with Smart's Introduction. While constantly referring to Reid as "radical," Smart never defines the term. Nor does Reid. Thus, the sophisticated reader will have little difficulty noting the radical point of view; the person with less background will. The Introduction also suffers from too little biographical information on Reid, especially after 1865. It seems only fair to let the reader know that Reid's views became more and more conservative. As C. Vann Woodward has pointed out in his introduction to Reid's After the War: A Tour of the Southern States, 1865-1866, by 1870 Reid was "deploring the rash efforts of radicals in behalf of the Negro and sympathizing deeply with the bitter Southern resentment" (p. xx). Smart's Introduction also raises questions about his sample selection process. He notes that all "Agate" dispatches in the Reid Collection were checked against the articles in the Gazette. Were there any differences between what was written and what was printed? Were there any articles written but not printed? If so, why? The Notes preceding the various sections are of marginal value. On important subjects such as "The Struggle for the Negro" and "Reconstruction"—where Reid's radical leanings could be pointed out and put into perspective—there are scant three or four-sentence introductions. This lack of perspective pervades the book. In many instances, Reid will make a reference to some event or situation and the reader is left dangling because no explanation has been included. For example, in one dispatch he refers to Lincoln's "letter to Greeley" in the National Intelligencer (Vol. I, 215). Surely a brief footnote is in order explaining that this was in response to Greeley's controversial "Prayer of Twenty Millions" letter to the President. The weak Introduction and Notes, and the absence of explanatory footnotes, detract from the usefulness of the book. But, the student and historian will find Reid's dispatches lucid, accurate, colorful and relevant. The broad spectrum of subjects treated makes the book a valuable tool for research, not just for reports on military engagements, but particularly for the volatile political atmosphere in Washington. Reid's dispatches clearly present the radical point of view, but they are tempered with common sense and nascent journalistic objectivity. Fredric F. Endres Kent State University Inventors of the Promised Land. By Lawrence J. Friedman. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975. Pp. xviii, 344. $15.00.) In his first book, The White Savage (1970), Lawrence Friedman examined the racial attitudes of six prominent post-bellum southern book reviews363 whites and concluded that the entire white South remained as antiblack after the Civil War as it had been before it. All white southerners allegedly needed to keep blacks subordinate to gain psychological relief from the nervousness, competition, and repression plaguing urbanizing, industrializing America. That these six persons themselves differed over racial questions, that they admittedly may have become "racists" for unrelated "therapeutic reasons" (p. 70), that their collective positions hardly represented the entire white South, and that racism obviously flourished in the less urbanized and industrialized ante-bellum South Friedman simply ignored. His second book is, alas, as perplexing if as provocative as his first, and for the same reasons: dogmatic assertions about the attitudes of whole populations supported by insufficient evidence drawn from an insufficient number of persons. In brief, he contends that neither victory in the American Revolution nor approval of the Constitution created "a viable nation" (p. xiii). Rather, there persisted concern over the fragility of this unusually large and socially and culturally diverse Republic. Leading Americans consequently sought means to instill identification with and loyalty to the new nation. By 1840 they had succeeded, but at a considerable price: the steady diminution of America's earlier "cosmopolitanism and tolerance" (p. xiii) and the closing of the Promised Land to all but white males. The "inventors" of this redefined utopia included, most notably, historian David Ramsay; linguist Noah Webster; novelist Charles Brockden Brown; George Washington hagiographers Mason Weems and Jared Sparks; feminists Mercy Warren, Elizabeth Chandler, and Sarah Hale; American Colonization Society activists Robert Finley and Ralph Randolph Gurley; and educators...

The Paradox of American Economic Growth

ROM the beginning of their national life Americans have shared a belief in the uniqueness and superiority of their society compared to that of Western Europe, or for that matter, anywhere else. From Jared Sparks and George Bancroft to Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles Beard, and Allan Nevins, American historians have seen their task as explaining the basis for American success in the activities to which they particularly turned their attention.' Earlier writers attributed this success to Calvinistic morality, democracy, and vigor, and later historians and social scientists added the benefits of migration and cooperation forced by new settlement. For America after the 1830s, historians have emphasized also great resources, technological ingenuity, and hence an extraordinary rate of economic growth. The older generation of business and economic historians almost unconsciously took off from the premise that America was uniquely suited to rational business and market-oriented decisions and that such decisions produced a rate of economic growth that other nations exceeded only occasionally and under special conditions. Underlying this approach was also the assumption that increasing gross national product (GNP) per capita was a positive good that increased the sum of human happiness. In 1940, Australian economist Colin Clark questioned the traditional dogma of extraordinary American growth in the twentieth century, but the few American economists who read him carefully discounted his conclusions because his terminal year reflected the continuing depression that was troubling the United States more than most other industrial nations. It was not until the 1960s, when Simon Kuznets, Robert E. Gallman, Edward F. Denison, and others began to publish the results of many years of care-

American Historical Editors before Jared Sparks: "they will plant a forest..."

HE history of American historical editing from slight beginnings in the early eighteenth century into the first quarter of the nineteenth may be said to end with the advent of Jared Sparks. His work after i825 points toward a new era in accessibility of historical sources and in scholarship based upon them. Because he occupied an eminent and transitional position in this development, he became a controversial figure in his own day, refuting his critics but suffering a sullied reputation which professional historians during the next century, with few exceptions, confirmed without research and therefore without reservations

Jared Sparks, Robert Peel and the State Paper Office

Jared Sparks, Robert Peel and the State Paper Office

William Hickling Prescott: Launching a Bark

The indecision which plagued Prescott regarding the advisability of publishing the massive manuscript on which he had labored a decade yielded to a decisively vigorous, though little known, presentation of that work to the American reading public.The manuscript of the History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic, concluded by Prescott in mid-1836, passed, in succeeding months, through the hands of one friendly critic after another. First to subject the long opus to critical evaluation was William Howard Gardiner, a foremost figure in the inner circle of Prescott's Boston neighbors and literary friends. Next it went to editor-historian Jared Sparks, then situated in Cambridge. Reflectively reading and, as circumstances permitted, occasionally visiting Prescott to discuss the manuscript with him, Sparks never had reason to retract the judgment he pronounced on February 24, 1837 in a brief note which closed with the succinct assertion, “The book will be sucessful,—bought, read and praised.” With the spring of 1837 the itinerant manuscript passed into the hands of the scholarly-minded city solicitor of Boston, John Pickering, but before that reader could be heard from, Prescott was actively facing the publication problem on another front.

Charles Stearns Wheeler: Emerson's "Good Grecian"

friends of Emerson is Charles Steamrns Wheeler. Very little has been written about him although from 1836 to 1842 he worked closely with Emerson on numerous editorial jobs, was foreign correspondent to the Dial, caused Alfred Tennyson to break his nine-year silence in 1842, and probably gave Thoreau the inspiration for going to Walden. Wheeler was born in Lincoln, Massachusetts, three and a half miles from Concord, in 1816. With Thoreau he attended Phineas Alien's Concord Academy and entered Harvard, with Thoreau as his roommate, in 1833. At Harvard he made an excellent scholastic record, graduating with second honors in 1837. Among his student friends were Samuel Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, Jones Very, John Weiss, and Thoreau. Conscientious, indefatigable, and badly in need of money, Wheeler performed numerous jobs outside his curricular duties. During his last two years at Harvard he earned six hundred dollars by teaching, copying, editing, and index-making. He helped Jared Sparks with several volumes of the Library of American Biography, and his editorial work led to his close association with Emerson.1 When in 1838 Jones Very suffered a nervous collapse and had to be taken to an asylum, Wheeler took his place as Tutor in Greek.2 At first he had much difficulty in managing the students. They broke out the windows to his room and were disorderly in numerous ways. Wheeler's friends thought that his trouble was caused by his having to take over the Greek class so

The Utopian College of Jared Sparks

The Utopian College of Jared Sparks

Hawthorne and Literary Nationalism

mHE MOST obvious literary influence on Hawthorne is the I work of Sir Walter Scott. Scott's influence on Hawthorne, in all its main aspects, has been recognized since G. E. Woodberry's Nathaniel Hawthorne.1 We now realize, too, that Hawthorne's early practice conforms to a critical demand that American materials be treated in the manner of Scott. Scott's work had a great influence on American literary theory in general, because combined significantly with the patriotic nationalism of American writers and, as G. Harrison Orians has said, converted the demand for nationalism into a quest for Scott-like ingredients in American life.2 By I825 the success of this quest was apparent.3 Hawthorne started out in his treatment of historical materials very much as current literary theory prescribed, but he developed away from and modified the theory which had directed his early work. To overlook the influence of current literary theory and fashion upon Hawthorne is to attribute to him an unwarranted isolation; to overlook the individuality of the treatment he gave quite ordinary materials is to miss something of his greatness as an artist. It is the purpose of this note to review the connections between Hawthorne's work and the contemnorarv desire for na1 See G. E. Woodberry, NTathaniel Hawthorne (Boston, I902), pp. I25-I26; G. H. Orians, and Hawthorne's Fanshawe, New England Quarterly, XI, 388-394 (June, I938). There is ample evidence of Hawthorne's intimate acquaintance with Scott's work. See Jurian Hawthorne, Hawthorne and His Wife (Boston, i885), I, io5, II, 269; G. P. Lathrop, A Study of Hawthorne (Boston, I876), p. io8, Appendix, pp. 34I, 343; James T. Fields, Yesterdays with Authors (Boston, I879), pp. IoI-Io2; Hawthorne's Works, Riverside ed., VII, passim, VIII, 263-274, 504-508, and passim. 2The Romance Ferment after Waverley, American Literature, III, 409 (Jan., I932). 'Jared Sparks, in an I825 review of ten American novels published within a year, says that he finds it expedient first to settle . . . the peculiarities of the Waverley pattern, of which most of the ten novels are acknowledged copies. He makes an excellent statement of the appeal the imitation of Scott had for his time: . . . the actors in these works have not only a human, but a national, and often a provincial character. . . . The subject of manners and customs is, moreover, one of general interest, and as an adherence to these serves to give individuality to the characters in these narratives, is so far an improvement on the practice of the older novels, and advantageous to the writer. See North American Review, XXI, 78-I04 (July, I825).