Francis Parkman

American historian

• Born: September 16, 1823
• Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts
• Died: November 8, 1893
• Place of death: Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts

The greatest of the nineteenth century American patrician historians, Parkman combined extensive research with an unparalleled literary artistry that continues to excite the imagination of modern readers. For many years, his seven-part series France and England in North America was regarded as the definitive history of the three-sided struggle among the Indians, French, and English for dominion over the continent.

Early Life

Francis Parkman was the son of Francis and Caroline (Hall) Parkman. His paternal grandfather had been one of Boston’s wealthiest merchants. His father was pastor of the Old North Church and a pillar of Boston’s Federalist-Unitarian establishment. On his mother’s side, he traced his ancestry to the Puritan John Cotton. Because of his fragile health, Parkman was sent at the age of eight to live on his maternal grandfather’s farm and attended school in nearby Medford.

Parkman returned to Boston at the age of thirteen, finished his preparatory work at the Chauncey Place School, and entered Harvard in 1840. He had acquired from his roamings on a stretch of untamed woodland at the edge of his grandfather’s farm a romantic attachment to nature in the wild. His reading of the novels of James Fenimore Cooper sparked his interest in Indians, “the American forest,” and the “Old French War.” He was temperamentally a compulsively intense personality, driven by “passion” and “tenacious eagerness.” During his sophomore year at Harvard, he appears to have decided upon what became his life’s work: to write the dual story of the conquest of the Indians by the French and English and their struggle in turn for mastery. “The theme,” he later recalled, “fascinated me, and I was haunted by wilderness images day and night.”

At Harvard, Parkman was active in student extracurricular affairs, serving as president of the Hasty Pudding Club. He received sufficiently respectable grades in his course work for selection to Phi Beta Kappa. He spent his summer vacations tramping and canoeing in the forests of northern New England and the adjacent parts of Canada. Parkman hoped—in vain, as events turned out—that a strenuous regimen of outdoor living would strengthen his sickness-prone physique. He simultaneously took the opportunity to begin collecting material for his planned history project, filling his notebook with measurements of forts, descriptions of battle sites, reminiscences of survivors, and names and addresses of people in possession of old letters.

In the autumn of 1843, Parkman suffered a nervous illness and temporarily left Harvard for a tour of Europe to recuperate. He returned in time to be graduated with his class in August, 1844. At his father’s behest, he went on to law school at Harvard. Although profiting from his exposure to the rules for the testing and use of evidence, he could not muster much enthusiasm for the law as such. His interests were primarily literary. His first appearance in print came in 1845, when he published in the Knickerbocker Magazine five sketches based upon his vacation trips. Although he was awarded his LL.B. in January, 1846, he never applied for admission to the bar.

After receiving his law degree, Parkman set out on what proved to be the formative experience of his life—a trip to the Western plains, partly in the hope of improving his health, partly to observe at firsthand Indian life. Camping for several weeks with a band of Lakota (Sioux), he immersed himself in their habits, customs, and ways of thinking. During those weeks he contracted a mysterious ailment that left him a broken man physically on his return to Boston in October, 1846.

Parkman’s eyesight was so impaired that he could barely read, and he suffered from a nervous condition that made him unable to concentrate for longer than brief spurts. He still managed to dictate to a cousin who had accompanied him an account of their adventures that was serialized as “The Oregon Trail” in the Knickerbocker Magazine over a two-year span beginning in February, 1847. The account came out in book form in 1849 under the title The California and Oregon Trail (the shorter title was resumed with the 1872 edition). Parkman’s experience with the Lakota shattered any illusions he may have gained from reading novels about the noble savage. “For the most part,” he underlined,

a civilized white man can discover very few points of sympathy between his own nature and that of an Indian. With every disposition to do justice to their good qualities, he must be conscious that an impassable gulf lies between him and his red brethren. Nay, so alien to himself do they appear, that, after breathing the air of the prairie for a few months or weeks, he begins to look upon them as a troublesome and dangerous species of wild beast.

Life’s Work

In 1848, Parkman began work on what became History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War After the Conquest of Canada (1851). He had a frame built of parallel wires to guide his hand while writing with his eyes closed in a dark room. For the most part, however, he relied upon others reading the source materials to him and transcribing his words. At first, his progress was painfully slow—the readings limited to a half-hour per sitting and his output averaging six lines a day. Gradually, however, he pushed himself to work for longer periods and successfully completed the two volumes within two and a half years.

Parkman’s new work dealt with the Indian uprising in 1763-1765 against English occupation of the Western territories after the French surrender. His purpose, he explained, was “to portray the American forest and the American Indian at the period when both received their final doom.” He divided his story into two distinct phases. During the first, the Indians triumphantly pushed the English back; in the second, the English turned the tide in a successful counterattack. Parkman’s portrayal of Pontiac as the central figure on the Indian side was effective drama but inaccurate history. Later scholars have found that Pontiac was simply one Indian chief among many. The work’s larger importance lies in how Parkman, in his introductory background chapters, sketched in outline the theme that he would develop more fully in his seven-part France and England in North America (1865-1892): the collision of rival cultures culminating in the English triumph on the Plains of Abraham in September, 1759.

History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War After the Conquest of Canada appeared in 1851. The first installment of France and England in North America, titled Pioneers of France in the New World, did not come out until 1865. The delay was partly a result of the amount of research involved. The major difficulty, however, was health problems and family tragedies that would have broken the spirit of a weaker personality.

On May 13, 1850, Parkman married Catherine Scollay Bigelow, the daughter of a Boston doctor. The couple had one son and two daughters. In 1853, however, he suffered a relapse in his nervous condition that forced him to give up his historical work temporarily. A man who always needed an interest, Parkman, during his enforced withdrawal from scholarship, wrote his only novel, Vassall Morton (1856). Its hero, reflecting Parkman’s own image of himself, is a high-spirited, outdoors-loving young man of high social position who succeeds in overcoming melodramatic trials and tribulations.

Parkman himself was unable to cope with his own personal crises at that time. The death of his son in 1857, followed by that of his wife within a year, precipitated a severe breakdown in 1858. Although these health problems kept him out of the fighting, the Civil War had a major influence on his approach to the rivalry between the French and the English in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a struggle, akin to the one under way in his own time, between “Liberty and Absolutism.”

Pioneers of France in the New World focuses on the founding of Quebec during the early seventeenth century under the leadership of Samuel de Champlain. The next volume in the series, The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century (1867), had as its major protagonists the Jesuit missionaries, such as Jean de Brébeuf, Charles Garnier, and Isaac Jogues, who tried to convert the Canadian Indians to Roman Catholicism. The third volume, which appeared in 1869 as The Discovery of the Great West, traces the explorations of Robert La Salle in the area of the Great Lakes and then down the Mississippi River and across what is now Texas and Arkansas during the 1670’s and 1680’s.

Parkman’s next two titles, The Old Régime in Canada (1874) and Count Frontenac and New France Under Louis XIV (1877), chronicle the political, social, and military history of New France during the last half of the seventeenth century. Their major theme is the corruption that came to pervade, and undermine, French colonial society despite the valiant, but unsuccessful, bid by Louis de Buade Frontenac to reverse the decay. Fearful lest he die before reaching the climax of his story, Parkman jumped ahead in the two volumes of Montcalm and Wolfe (1884) to deal with the final phase of the French-English struggle starting during the early 1750’s and culminating in the surrender of Canada in 1763. In 1892, he filled in the gap with the two-volume A Half-Century of Conflict , in which he dealt with the fifty years of intermittent conflict from Frontenac’s death in 1698 to the beginning of the French and Indian War during the 1750’s.

The work rested upon painstaking research in primary sources. Parkman even boasted that the “statements of secondary writers have been accepted only when found to conform to the evidence of contemporaries, whose writings have been sifted and collated with the greatest care.” He relied primarily upon the massive compilations of documents that had been published during the “documania” that had swept the United States in the aftermath of the War of 1812. At the same time, Parkman spent freely from the money he inherited from his father to purchase documents and have copies made of archival materials in this country and abroad. When formerly inaccessible La Salle documents became available, he rewrote The Discovery of the Great West to incorporate the new information. The revised version appeared in 1879 with the new title La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West .

Parkman never succumbed to the illusion of late nineteenth century scientific history that the facts spoke for themselves. “Faithfulness to the truth of history,” he emphasized,

involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them. He must himself be, as it were, a sharer or a spectator of the action he describes.

In pursuit of that goal, Parkman personally visited the sites about which he wrote. One of his major strengths was his feeling for the physical setting in which his story unfolded. His early writings occasionally suffered from labored prose and excessive detail. As time went on, however, his descriptions became terser, his imagery sharper. Parkman saw heroic leaders as the primary shapers of history. His own special forte was the delineation of personality. His technique was to build up a composite portrait by drawing upon his protagonist’s own words and the accounts by contemporaries before assaying the individual himself. His appraisal of Frontenac strikingly illustrates his mastery of character portrayal.

What perhaps may be least forgiven him is the barbarity of the warfare that he waged, and the cruelties that he permitted. He had seen too many towns sacked to be much subject to the scruples of modern humanitarianism; yet he was no whit more ruthless than his times and his surroundings, and some of his contemporaries find fault with him for not allowing more Indian captives to be tortured. Many surpassed him in cruelty, none equalled him in capacity and vigor. When civilized enemies were once within his power, he treated them, according to their degree, with a chivalrous courtesy, or a gentle kindness. If he was a hot and pertinacious foe, he was also a fast friend; and he excited love and hatred in about equal measure. His attitude toward public enemies was always proud and peremptory, yet his courage was guided by so clear a sagacity that he never was forced to recede from the position he had taken.

Notwithstanding such attempts at evenhandedness when dealing with individuals, Parkman shared the prejudices of his time and class. He was a vocal opponent of woman suffrage; his comments on what he called “the mazes of feminine psychology” were almost uniformly unflattering. No democrat, he made no secret of his contempt for society’s lower orders. He dismissed the hardworking German farmers of Pennsylvania as “a swarm of… peasants… who for the most part were dull and ignorant boors.” He was no more enamored of the poorer whites of colonial Virginia, considering them “of low origin,” “vicious,” and “as untaught as the warmest friend of popular ignorance could wish.”

Parkman saw universal manhood suffrage as “the source of all the dangers which threaten the United States”; he pictured the immigrants of his own time as “barbarians… masses of imported ignorance and hereditary ineptitude.” He was a social Darwinist before the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). When describing in The Oregon Trail the “cannibal warfare” he witnessed among fishes in a pond, he ridiculed the dreams by softhearted philanthropists of a peaceful millennium. From minnows to men, he philosophized, life was incessant conflict, and he had no doubt that the outcome of the struggle for North America among the Indians, French, and English accorded with the “law of the survival of the fittest.”

A thoroughgoing ethnocentrism marred Parkman’s historical outlook. He pictured the Indians as barbarous savages: treacherous, deceitful, “a murder-loving race” filled with “insensate fury” and animated by “homicidal frenzy.” “The Indians,” he wrote in a typical descriptive passage, “howled like wolves, yelled like enraged cougars.” Their white opponents “were much like the hunters of wolves, catamounts, and other dangerous beasts, except that the chase of this fierce and wily human game demanded far more hardihood and skill.” As he put the matter bluntly in an 1886 public letter that dealt with contemporary white-Indian relations, “a few hordes of savages cannot be permitted to hold in perpetual barbarism the land which might sustain a hundred millions of civilized men.”

Despite Parkman’s admiration for some individual Frenchmen, they were an inferior breed compared to Anglo-Saxons. “The Germanic race, and especially the Anglo-Saxon branch of it,” he wrote in his conclusion to The Old Régime in Canada,

is peculiarly masculine, and, therefore, peculiarly fitted for self-government. It submits its action habitually to the guidance of reason.… The French Celt is cast in a different mould… he is impatient of delay, is impelled always to extremes, and does not readily sacrifice a present inclination to an ultimate good.

The fact that the English won and the French lost was no accident.

The cause lies chiefly in the vast advantage drawn by England from the historical training of her people in habits of reflection, forecast, industry, and self-reliance,—a training which enabled them to adopt and maintain an invigorating system of self-rule, totally inapplicable to their rivals.

Despite the almost constant pain he suffered, Parkman did not surrender to invalidism. He had a wide circle of friends and carried on an extensive correspondence. He had an excellent sense of humor, and his writings are dotted with sharp quips. He never lost his love for the outdoors and continued his camping trips as much as his health permitted. He took up flower-growing as a hobby during the 1850’s, when incapacitated from pursuing his scholarly work, and grew so fascinated that the study of horticulture became a passion second only to history. His major achievement in this line was his development of a hybrid crimson lily named Lilium Parkmanni in his honor. His specialty, however, was roses, and his The Book of Roses (1866) was regarded for many years as the best guide to their cultivation.

Parkman served as a member of the Harvard Overseers (1868-1871 and 1874-1876) and as a fellow of the corporation (1875-1888), he was one of the founders of the Archeological Institute of America in 1879, and he played a leading role in the establishment of the American School of Classical Studies in Athens, Greece. Shortly after finishing A Half-Century of Conflict, he suffered an attack of pleurisy that proved almost fatal. He died November 8, 1893, of peritonitis at his home in Jamaica Plain (now part of Boston).

Significance

Commentators have differed about Parkman’s place in American historiography. There are those who put him with the literary historians of the romantic school such as John L. Motley, William Hickling Prescott, and George Bancroft. Others see him as a forerunner of the late nineteenth century scientific historians. In a sense, both views are correct: Parkman had a foot in both camps. He attracted an immense readership during his lifetime. His friend Henry Adams summed up the predominant contemporary appraisal when he rated Parkman “in the front rank of living English historians.”

At the same time, Parkman enjoyed a higher reputation among professional academic historians than any other of his fellow amateurs except possibly Adams himself. Those who dealt with the same period did not simply follow Parkman’s chronological framework but also relied heavily upon his work for information. One scholar went so far as to state that “Parkman never makes a mistake, certainly never a glaring one.” Even Vernon Louis Parrington in his Main Currents in American Thought (1927-1930) acknowledged that the “Brahmin mind has contributed to American letters no more brilliant work.” As late as 1953, the account in the standard Literary History of the United States (1948) concluded that “Parkman’s whole method may be accurately summarized as an attempt to bring back the past just as it was.”

During the late twentieth century, Parkman’s reputation suffered an eclipse. Judged by modern standards, he had major shortcomings as a historian. The French-English rivalry in the New World was only a minor aspect of the worldwide struggle under way between those powers, but Parkman largely failed to explore the dynamics of that broader conflict. Even as regards its North American phase, Parkman’s episodic, narrative approach focusing upon heroic personalities runs counter to the prevailing tendency to emphasize the role of larger social, economic, and cultural forces.

The heaviest attack on Parkman has come from ethnographers over his treatment of the Indians; he has even been accused of deliberately distorting evidence to put the Indians in the worst possible light. Such criticisms miss the point. As Frederick Jackson Turner rightly observed, Parkman was “the greatest painter of historical pictures that this country—perhaps it is not too much to say, that any country—has produced.” The chorus of praise greeting the 1983 republication of France and England in North America in the Library of America series attests Parkman’s “extraordinary power” as a literary artist. Notwithstanding its limitations, Parkman’s history constitutes what a reviewer of the new edition aptly called “our great national epic.”

Parkman’s Nonfiction Works

1849

• The California and Oregon Trail

1851

• History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War After the Conquest of Canada

1865

• Pioneers of France in the New World

1867

• The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century

1869

• The Discovery of the Great West (revised as La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West, 1879)

1874

• The Old Regime in Canada

1877

• Count Frontenac and New France Under Louis XIV

1884

• Montcalm and Wolfe

1892

• A Half-Century of Conflict

Bibliography

Doughty, Howard. Francis Parkman. New York: Macmillan, 1962. Although biographical in format, this work is primarily an appraisal of Parkman’s writings, focusing upon their literary and artistic qualities from the point of view of a layman rather than a professional historian.

Gale, Robert L. Francis Parkman. New York: Twayne, 1973. A rather pedestrian biographical survey followed by volume-by-volume summaries of the major works.

Jacobs, Wilbur R. Francis Parkman, Historian as Hero: The Formative Years. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991. An analysis of Parkman’s historiography, questioning if his work was truth or fiction, objective or colored by Parkman’s conservative Brahmin values.

Jennings, Francis. “Francis Parkman: A Brahmin Among Untouchables.” William and Mary Quarterly 42 (July, 1985): 305-328. An important attempt to debunk Parkman’s reputation for accuracy and impartiality by exposing his racism and his distortion of the evidence in order to place the Indians in the worst possible light.

Pease, Otis A. Parkman’s History: The Historian as Literary Artist. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953. A brief but perceptive analysis of “the preconceptions and interests” shaping Parkman’s historical approach.

Van Tassel, David D. Recording America’s Past: An Interpretation of the Development of Historical Studies in America, 1607-1884. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960. Places Parkman in the context of the development of historical scholarship in the United States.

Vitzthum, Richard C. The American Compromise: Theme and Method in the Histories of Bancroft, Parkman, and Adams. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974. Primarily an exercise in “literary criticism” based upon detailed textual explication.

Wade, Mason. Francis Parkman: Heroic Historian. New York: Viking Press, 1942. The fullest and most detailed biography, based upon thorough research of Parkman’s correspondence, journals, and notes. The work is marred only by the author’s tendency toward hagiography.