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[p v]PREFACE
[p v]PREFACE
In offering to the public this volume of Essays, all but two of which have been read at various places on different occasions, I am aware that there is some repetition in ideas and illustrations, but, as the dates of their delivery and previous publication are indicated, I am letting them stand substantially as they were written and delivered. I am indebted to my son, Daniel P. Rhodes, for a literary revision of these Essays; and I have to thank the editors of the Atlantic Monthly , of Scribner’
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[p ix]HISTORY
[p ix]HISTORY
President’s Inaugural Address, American Historical Association, Boston, December 27, 1899; printed in the Atlantic Monthly of February, 1900. My theme is history. It is an old subject, which has been discoursed about since Herodotus, and I should be vain indeed if I flattered myself that I could say aught new concerning the methods of writing it, when this has for so long a period engaged the minds of so many gifted men. Yet to a sympathetic audience, to people who love history, there is always
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HISTORY1
HISTORY1
The Achilles of Homer was a very living personage to Alexander. How happy he was, said the great general, when he visited Troy, “in having while he lived so faithful a friend, and when he was dead so famous a poet to proclaim his actions”! In our century, as more in consonance with society under the régime of contract, when force has largely given, pay to craft, we feel in greater sympathy with Ulysses; “The one person I would like to have met and talked with,” Froude used to say, “was Ulysses.
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[p27]CONCERNING THE WRITING OF HISTORY
[p27]CONCERNING THE WRITING OF HISTORY
This same principle in the art of authorship may be applied to the art of writing history. “Follow your own star,” said Emerson, “and it will lead you to that which none other can attain. Imitation is suicide. You must take yourself for better or worse as your own portion.” Any one who is bent upon writing history, may be sure that there is in him some originality, that he can add something to the knowledge of some period. Let him give himself to meditation, to searching out what epoch and what
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[p47]THE PROFESSION OF HISTORIAN
[p47]THE PROFESSION OF HISTORIAN
Lecture read before the History Club of Harvard University, April 27, 1908, and at Yale, Columbia, and Western Reserve Universities. I am assuming that among my audience there are some students who aspire to become historians. To these especially my discourse is addressed. It is not to be expected that I should speak positively and in detail on matters of education. Nevertheless, a man of sixty who has devoted the better part of his life to reading, observation, and reflection must have gained,
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[p49]THE PROFESSION OF HISTORIAN
[p49]THE PROFESSION OF HISTORIAN
My other instance is Balzac. In reading him for pleasure, as you read Dickens and Thackeray, you are absorbing an exact and fruitful knowledge of French society of the Restoration and of Louis Philippe. Moreover you are still pursuing your study of human character under one of the acute critics of the nineteenth century. Balzac has always seemed to me peculiarly French, his characters belong essentially to Paris or to the provinces. I associate Eugénie Grandet with Saumur in the Touraine and Cés
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[p83]NEWSPAPERS AS HISTORICAL SOURCES
[p83]NEWSPAPERS AS HISTORICAL SOURCES
But this does not concern the historian. He does not make his materials. He has to take them as they are. It would undoubtedly render his task easier if all men spoke and wrote everywhere with accuracy and sincerity; but his work would lose much of its interest. Take the newspaper for what it is, a hasty gatherer of facts, a hurried commentator on the same, and it may well constitute a part of historical evidence. When, in 1887, I began the critical study of the History of the United States from
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[p99]SPEECH PREPARED FOR THE COMMENCEMENT DINNER AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY
[p99]SPEECH PREPARED FOR THE COMMENCEMENT DINNER AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY
June 26, 1901 (not delivered)....
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[p101]SPEECH PREPARED FOR THE COMMENCEMENT DINNER AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY
[p101]SPEECH PREPARED FOR THE COMMENCEMENT DINNER AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY
Thanking heartily the governing boards of Harvard College for the honor conferred upon me, I shall say, on this my first admission to the circle of the Harvard alumni, a word on the University as it appears to one whose work has lain outside of it. The spirit of the academy in general and especially of this University impels men to get to the bottom of things, to strive after exact knowledge; and this spirit permeates my own study of history in a remarkable degree. “The first of all Gospels is t
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[p105]EDWARD GIBBON
[p105]EDWARD GIBBON
Lecture read at Harvard University, April 6, 1908, and printed in Scribner’s Magazine , June, 1909....
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[p107] EDWARD GIBBON
[p107] EDWARD GIBBON
Although the idea was conceived when Gibbon was twenty-seven, he was thirty-one before he set himself seriously at work to study his material. At thirty-six he began the [p 109 ] composition, and he was thirty-nine, when, in February, 1776, the first quarto volume was published. The history had an immediate success. “My book,” he wrote, “was on every table and almost on every toilette; the historian was crowned by the taste or fashion of the day.” 3 The first edition was exhausted in a few days,
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[p143]SAMUEL RAWSON GARDINER
[p143]SAMUEL RAWSON GARDINER
I know not which is the more remarkable, the learning, accuracy, and diligence of the man, or withal his modesty. [p 145 ] With his great store of knowledge, the very truthfulness of his soul impels him to be forward in admitting his own mistakes. Lowell said in 1878 that Darwin was “almost the only perfectly disinterested lover of truth” he had ever encountered. Had Lowell known the historian as we know him, he would have placed Gardiner upon the same elevation. In the preface to the revised te
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[p151]WILLIAM E. H. LECKY
[p151]WILLIAM E. H. LECKY
A paper read before the Massachusetts Historical Society at the November meeting of 1903....
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[p153]WILLIAM E. H. LECKY
[p153]WILLIAM E. H. LECKY
Amazement was the feeling of the reading world on learning that the author of the History of Rationalism was only twenty-seven, and the writer of the History of European Morals only thirty-one. The sentiment was that a prodigy of learning had appeared, and a perusal of these works now renders comprehensible the contemporary astonishment. The Morals (published in 1869) is the better book of the two, and, if I may judge from my own personal experience, it may be read with delight when young, and r
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[p159]SIR SPENCER WALPOLE
[p159]SIR SPENCER WALPOLE
A paper read before the Massachusetts Historical Society at the November meeting of 1907....
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[p161]SIR SPENCER WALPOLE
[p161]SIR SPENCER WALPOLE
Sir Spencer Walpole was an excellent historian and industrious writer. His first important work, entitled “The History of England from 1815,” was published at intervals from 1878 to 1886; the first installment appeared when he was thirty-nine years old. This in six volumes carried the history to 1858 in an interesting, accurate, and impartial narrative. Four of the five chapters of the first volume are entitled “The Material Condition of England in 1815,” “Society in England,” “Opinion in 1815,”
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[p169]JOHN RICHARD GREEN
[p169]JOHN RICHARD GREEN
Address at a gathering of historians on June 5, 1909, to mark the placing of a tablet in the inner quadrangle of Jesus College, Oxford, to the memory of John Richard Green....
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[p171]JOHN RICHARD GREEN
[p171]JOHN RICHARD GREEN
I wish indeed that I had the tongues of men and of angels to express the admiration of the reading public of America for the History of John Richard Green. I suppose that he has had more readers in our country than any other historian except Macaulay, and he has shaped the opinions of men who read, more than any writers of history except those whom John Morley called the great born men of letters,—Gibbon, Macaulay, and Carlyle. I think it is the earlier volumes rather than the last volume of his
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[p175]EDWARD L. PIERCE
[p175]EDWARD L. PIERCE
A paper read before the Massachusetts Historical Society at the October meeting of 1897....
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[p177]EDWARD L. PIERCE
[p177]EDWARD L. PIERCE
I shall first speak of Mr. Pierce as an author. His Life of Sumner it seems to me is an excellent biography, and the third and fourth volumes of it are an important contribution to the history of our country. Any one who has gone through the original material of the period he embraces must be struck not only with the picture of Sumner, but with the skill of the biographer in the use of his data to present a general historical view. The injunction of Cicero, “Choose with discretion out of the ple
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[p185]JACOB D. COX
[p185]JACOB D. COX
While governor, he said in a private conversation that he had come to the conclusion “that so large bodies of black men and white as were in presence in the Southern States never could share political power, and that the insistence upon it on the part of the colored people would lead to their ruin.” President Grant appointed General Cox Secretary of the Interior, and he remained for nearly two years in the Cabinet. James Russell Lowell, on a visit to Washington in 1870, gave expression to the fe
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[p189]EDWARD GAYLORD BOURNE
[p189]EDWARD GAYLORD BOURNE
A paper read before the Massachusetts Historical Society at the March meeting of 1908....
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[p191]EDWARD GAYLORD BOURNE
[p191]EDWARD GAYLORD BOURNE
When an associate dies who was not yet forty-eight years old, whom most of us knew as a strong enduring man, who was capable of an immense amount of intellectual work, it is a real calamity,—a calamity which in this case History mourns, as Edward Gaylord Bourne was an excellent teacher and a thorough historical scholar. The physical details of any illness are apt to be repulsive, but the malady in Bourne’s case was somehow so bound up in his life that an inquiry into it comes from no morbid curi
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[p201]THE PRESIDENTIAL OFFICE
[p201]THE PRESIDENTIAL OFFICE
Printed in Scribner’s Magazine , of February, 1903....
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[p203]THE PRESIDENTIAL OFFICE
[p203]THE PRESIDENTIAL OFFICE
It is a pertinent suggestion of Mr. Bryce’s that the members of the Convention must have been thinking of their presiding officer, George Washington, as the first man who would exercise the powers of the executive office they were creating. So it turned out. Never did a country begin a new enterprise with so wise a ruler. An admirable polity had been adopted, but much depended upon getting it to work, and the man who was selected to start the government was the man of all men for the task. Histo
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[p245]A REVIEW OF PRESIDENT HAYES’S ADMINISTRATION
[p245]A REVIEW OF PRESIDENT HAYES’S ADMINISTRATION
His inaugural address confirmed this impression. He spoke with dignity and sympathy of the disputed Presidency, promised a liberal policy toward the Southern states, and declared that a reform in our civil service was a “paramount necessity.” He chose for his Cabinet men in sympathy with his high ideals. William M. Evarts, the Secretary of State, was one of the ablest lawyers in the country. He had been one of the leading counsel in the [p 247 ] defense of President Johnson in the impeachment tr
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[p265]EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
[p265]EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
Lecture read at Harvard University, April 13, 1908; printed in the Atlantic Monthly for September, 1908....
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[p267]EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
[p267]EDWIN LAWRENCE GODKIN
While the farmer of the Western Reserve and Lowell are extreme types of clientèle, each represents fairly well the peculiar following of Greeley and of Godkin, which differed as much as did the personal traits of the two journalists. Godkin speaks of Greeley’s “odd attire, shambling gait, simple, good-natured and hopelessly peaceable face, and long yellow locks.” 4 His “old white hat and white coat,” which in New York were regarded as an affectation, counted with his following west of the Hudson
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[p301]WHO BURNED COLUMBIA?
[p301]WHO BURNED COLUMBIA?
Sherman, with his army of 60,000, left Savannah February 1, 1865, and reached the neighborhood of Columbia February 16. The next day Columbia was evacuated by the Confederates, occupied by troops of the fifteenth corps of the Federal army, and by the morning of the 18th either three fifths or two thirds of the town lay in ashes. The facts contained in these two sentences are almost the only ones undisputed. We shall consider this episode most curiously if we take first Sherman’s account, then Wa
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[p315]A NEW ESTIMATE OF CROMWELL
[p315]A NEW ESTIMATE OF CROMWELL
A paper read before the Massachusetts Historical Society at the January meeting of 1898, and printed in the Atlantic Monthly of June, 1898....
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[p317]A NEW ESTIMATE OF CROMWELL
[p317]A NEW ESTIMATE OF CROMWELL
The most notable contributions to the historical literature of England during the year 1897 are two volumes by Samuel R. Gardiner: the Oxford lectures, “Cromwell’s Place in History,” published in the spring; and the second volume of “History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate,” which appeared in the autumn. These present what is probably a new view of Cromwell. If one loves a country or an historic epoch, it is natural for the mind to seek a hero to represent it. We are fortunate in having Was
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