George Bancroft

American historian

• Born: October 3, 1800
• Birthplace: Worcester, Massachusetts
• Died: January 17, 1891
• Place of death: Washington, D.C.

Contributing greatly to both scholarly and popular thought in the nineteenth century United States, George Bancroft explained the transformation of the British colonies into the United States in terms of the growth and development of liberty, democracy, and nationalism.

Early Life

George Bancroft was born on October 3, 1800, in Worcester, Massachusetts. He was the eighth of thirteen children produced by the union of Aaron Bancroft and Lucretia Chandler, both of whom came from old-stock New England families. Lucretia Chandler, the daughter of Judge John Chandler, known as “Tory John” because he had opposed independence, was a good-natured and spirited woman, unlettered, but devoted to her husband and children. Aaron Bancroft was a struggling Congregational minister who played a leading role in the early Unitarian movement. Devoted to education as the basis for personal and social reform, he introduced young George to the classics, emphasized the virtues of self-discipline and obedience, and passed on to his offspring the conviction that humankind is essentially good, but not without sin, and flawed by ignorance and misunderstanding.

Bancroft attended Phillips Exeter Academy, entered Harvard College at thirteen, and became a favorite of President John Thornton Kirkland. Moral philosophy dominated the Harvard curriculum at that time, and like his father before him, Bancroft found that particular mixture of Lockean rationalism and Scottish common sense captivating. It clearly categorized knowledge, stressed the importance of faith as well as reason, and acknowledged divine law as the driving force of the universe. In fact, moral philosophy provided the intellectual and theological perspective that would stay with Bancroft all of his life.

After taking his A.B. degree in 1817, Bancroft continued at Harvard for another year as a graduate student in divinity before continuing his education at the University of Göttingen in Germany. He was encouraged to go to Göttingen by Edward Everett, Joseph Green Cogswell, and George Ticknor, three young Harvard teachers who had done graduate work there and confirmed its reputation as the leading university in Europe. Thanks to President Kirkland, Bancroft got financial support from Harvard and began his studies at Göttingen in the fall of 1818.

Over the next two years, Bancroft rose early and studied late, immersed himself in German literature, and took courses in philosophy, biblical criticism, and history from some of the leading scholars in Europe. His hard work allowed him to take the grueling doctoral examinations early. In September, 1820, he successfully defended his thesis and was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and Master of Arts. After six more months of study at the University of Berlin, Bancroft traveled Europe and the British Isles for the next year. He met and talked with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, George Gordon, Lord Byron, the Marquis de Lafayette, and Alexander von Humboldt, to mention the most prominent personages whom he sought out. Bancroft grew up, both intellectually and psychologically, during his four years in Europe.

When he returned to the United States in 1822, Bancroft was still considering either teaching or preaching. He was an engaging young man, known for his social grace and dignified bearing. He was shorter than average and slight in build, rather handsome, and distinguished by clear-cut facial features that included a prominent nose, strikingly alert eyes, and carefully trimmed hair and beard. Some of his former Harvard teachers were put off by his foreign manners, his suggested reforms for the college, and his pompous request that he be given a professorship. President Kirkland remained a faithful ally, however, and secured for him an appointment as tutor in Greek. Though the opportunity hardly offered him the status he had had in mind, Bancroft decided to make the most of it. He added new rigor to his Greek courses and drove his students to the brink of rebellion, though they reportedly were far ahead of other Greek students.

During the year of his rather unsuccessful tutorship, Bancroft also tried his hand at preaching in various churches on several occasions. He seems to have pleased few people with his sermons, not even his father, and certainly not himself. In early 1823, disheartened by his failure to reform Harvard and by the resistance of the students, Bancroft joined with Joseph Cogswell to set up the Round Hill School for Boys at Northampton. For the next eight years, he labored to adapt the educational methods of the German gymnasium to the United States. Round Hill was ahead of its time and widely praised, but it had financial problems, and Bancroft, the primary teacher, contributed to them with his demanding academic standards and less than cordial relations with students. In 1831, he sold his interest in Round Hill to Cogswell and put classroom teaching behind him.

Bancroft married Sarah Dwight in 1827. Her family was involved in various business enterprises in Springfield, Massachusetts, and Bancroft became an agent for the Dwight banking interests. To the chagrin of his young wife, who stayed home and often felt neglected, he traveled much of the time on business. He also embarked upon a literary career.

Bancroft’s first published work had been a pedestrian volume of poetry (Poems, 1823), whose existence he later found embarrassing. While teaching at Round Hill, he translated several German works on Latin and Greek grammar and three volumes of history by Arnold H. L. Heeren, one of the distinguished professors who had taught him at Göttingen. Under the encouragement of editor Jared Sparks, he became a regular contributor of book reviews and essays on finance, politics, and scholarly topics to the North American Review. Sparks was much involved in collecting documents and writing history and may well have influenced Bancroft to embark upon his own work in American history.

Bancroft was ambitious—so much so that Lillian Handlin, one of his biographers, maintains that he was rather insensitive toward his first wife and never very sympathetic toward his children. Sickly and morose, Sarah Bancroft died in 1837, shortly after the death of an infant daughter. Thereafter, relations between Bancroft and his three surviving children—Louise, John, and George—were seldom harmonious and often very strained.

Life’s Work

While achieving a measure of success in business, Bancroft became even more committed to the notion that a man of letters could and should play an important part in improving society. That conviction increasingly shaped his political involvement and scholarly ambitions. In an oration that he delivered on July 4, 1826, at Northampton, Bancroft had made it clear that he was a Jeffersonian Democrat, favoring the dispersion of property and the removal of voting restrictions. His views were in sympathy with the emerging Jacksonian Party.

Writing in the North American Review in 1831, Bancroft analyzed the National Bank in terms that pleased Jacksonians and shocked his Whig associates. His Harvard friends as well as the Dwights were almost solidly against Andrew Jackson, and Massachusetts itself was completely dominated by the Whigs. The Jacksonians in the state were badly divided, as Bancroft himself found out when the Northampton Workingmen nominated him for the General Court but failed to line up the other elements of the fragmented Democratic coalition in the election of 1834. Viciously attacked by the Whigs in the press and distrusted by many Jacksonians, Bancroft got few votes. Nevertheless, he was attracted to politics, and Jacksonian leaders recognized his talents and cultivated him.

Rebuffed politically, Bancroft experienced considerable scholarly acclaim in 1834 with the publication of the first volume of his history of the United States. He may have acquired an interest in history from his father, who had written a modestly successful popular biography of George Washington years before. At Göttingen, he studied history under Hereen. While at Round Hill, he had worked up an outline of American history for a proposed world history course at Round Hill.

By the early 1830’s, Bancroft had decided that there was a real need for a “critical history” of the United States and believed himself superbly equipped to write it. The first volume, which carried development of the American colonies to 1650, was popular with both the literary critics and the general public. “You have written a work that will last while the memory of America lasts,” wrote Edward Everett, still a good friend despite diverging politics. It was a classic, Everett continued, “full of learning, information, common sense, and philosophy; full of taste and eloquence; full of life and power.” Ralph Waldo Emerson was equally complimentary, writing that the grandeur of the work made him weep. Emerson proclaimed it “the most valuable and splendid piece of historical composition, not only in English, but in any tongue.”

Heady praise indeed, calculated to encourage the masterful young scholar, and it did. Two other volumes, the second published in 1837 and the third in 1840, followed the development of the colonies to 1748. The central theme was clear enough. From the beginning of English settlement, the United States had progressively expanded the twin realms of economic and political liberty. Indeed, political and economic monopoly gave way to the rise of representative politics and free enterprise economics in colonial America. According to Bancroft, this burgeoning freedom nurtured an emerging American nationality. It was a grand and inspiring story, and Bancroft told it with an eloquence and appreciation for drama that appealed not only to Emerson but also to thousands of his countrymen disturbed by growing sectional tensions that threatened national unity during the 1830’s. By 1841, his annual income from sales of the three volumes reached $4,350. Bancroft was almost unique among scholars; he made scholarship pay, and pay handsomely.

Political success came upon the heels of scholarly recognition. In 1837, as a reward for Bancroft’s efforts on behalf of the Democratic Party in Massachusetts, President Martin Van Buren appointed the budding historian collector of the Port of Boston, a most important patronage position. Over the next few years, Bancroft emerged as the leader of the Democratic Party in Massachusetts and edited its leading newspaper. He was the Democratic nominee for governor in 1844, and though he lost that election, his efforts on behalf of James K. Polk secured for him a place in the new president’s cabinet as secretary of the Navy (1845-1846).

While serving in that position, Bancroft endorsed Polk’s expansionist plans and the Mexican War, tied promotion in the Navy more to merit than to seniority, and founded the Naval Academy at Annapolis. What he wanted most, however, was a diplomatic assignment, and Polk obligingly appointed him ambassador to England in 1846, where he served for the next two years and relished every minute. He moved in the highest political and literary circles, gained access to collections of documents in both England and France, and made friends with the English historians Thomas Macaulay, Henry Milman, and Henry Hallam and the French historians François Guizot and Louis Adolphe Thiers. He hired clerks to copy significant documents and undoubtedly had more information available to him than any previous American historian. His tenure as minister to the Court of St. James certainly enriched subsequent volumes of his history of the United States.

Returning to the United States in 1849, Bancroft decided to make his home in cosmopolitan New York. In 1838, a year after his first wife died, he had remarried, taking as his second wife Mrs. Elizabeth (Davis) Bliss, a Boston widow with two sons of her own. Her first husband had been a law partner of Daniel Webster. She was bright, witty, and urbane; Bancroft found her the perfect mate and reveled in their marriage. He and his three children, however, remained on less than cordial terms, despite the efforts of Elizabeth to heal the breach.

From 1849 to 1867, Bancroft devoted himself to writing his history and participating in the intellectual and social life of New York City and Newport, Rhode Island, where he maintained a summer home. He wrote six more volumes that brought his History of the United States to the year 1782. These volumes recounted American nationalism being forged by the fires of protest and revolution. They were quite popular and sold well, though the critics were less laudatory than before. Bancroft provoked a minor storm when he dared to question the military decisions of certain American generals in the revolution; the descendants of the generals responded with vehemence in what became known as the War of the Grandfathers.

Much more troubling to him was the talk of nullification and secession that increasingly threatened the nation by the late 1840’s. Bancroft took refuge in his work as the nation drifted toward civil war. As a politician and as a historian, he showed little concern regarding slavery, though he privately deplored the peculiar institution and the threat it posed to the Union. Once the war began, though still a states’ rights Democrat, Bancroft came to appreciate Abraham Lincoln’s leadership, subsequently advised President Andrew Johnson during Reconstruction, and was rewarded by appointment as ambassador to Prussia, where he served from 1867 to 1874. Once again, he took advantage of diplomatic service to search for American materials in European archives. He became an ardent supporter of Prince Otto von Bismarck and German unification and made friends with Leopold von Ranke and other German scholars. His public statement praising the Germans during the Franco-Prussian War enraged the French, but President Ulysses S. Grant retained him as ambassador to Germany because of his intimacy with Bismarck and the Prussian elite.

Returning to the United States in 1874, Bancroft lived the remainder of his life in Washington, D.C., usually spending the summers in Newport. That same year, he finished the tenth volume of his history, focusing on the closing years of the American Revolution. Two years later, he published the “Centenary Edition” of his History of the United States in six volumes. In 1882, he brought out two volumes entitled History of the Formation of the Constitution of the United States of America , apparently inspired by recent Supreme Court decisions that, in his opinion, violated the principles of the nation’s Founders. Interestingly, he portrayed the Constitution as enshrining democratic ideas that ought not to be tampered with either by the Supreme Court or by legislative majorities.

Bancroft’s last published work was a biography, Martin Van Buren to the End of His Political Career (1889), which he had begun during the early 1840’s but put aside when Van Buren did not run in 1844. During his last years, Bancroft, still as charming and urbane as ever and wearing a flowing white beard, was the acknowledged patriarch of Washington literary and social circles. After his wife died in 1886, a daughter of his eldest son, George, stayed with him for a few years, and he then lived with his youngest son, John Chandler Bancroft. He died in Washington, D.C., in January, 1891.

Significance

Upon his death, George Bancroft was eulogized as the “Father of American History.” His contribution was truly profound. It is sometimes forgotten that Bancroft pioneered the collection of American documents from foreign archives. He joined Jared Sparks and Peter Force in collecting and encouraging others to preserve early American documents scattered throughout the United States. In 1869, Bancroft estimated that he had spent between $50,000 and $75,000 in paying copyists, collecting, and researching. By the time of his death, that figure was well over $100,000. As a diplomat in England and later Germany, he had unparalleled access to both public and private archives in Europe and exploited his privileges to the fullest; his several hundred volumes of collected documents, located now in the New York Public Library, bear eloquent testimony to his industry. Whatever his shortcomings as a historian, Bancroft recognized that the sources were all important, and he must be credited with doing much to make sure that subsequent generations would have access to them.

Bancroft believed that his writing of American history accurately reflected the sources. He was not a little offended when the great von Ranke told him that “his history” was the best ever written from the democratic point of view. The fact is, though, that Bancroft projected his own patriotism and politics into his interpretation of American history. As J. Franklin Jameson put it, Bancroft voted for Jackson throughout his historical writing. He also had a tendency to quote material rather loosely, leaving himself open to the charge of manipulating the sources. By the time of his death, academic historians were dismissing his work as simply not adequate in terms of the canons of critical scholarship.

Bancroft was zealous, not dishonest, and his shortcomings were no worse than those of most other gentlemanly scholars of his day. Like his peers, he slighted economics and social factors, emphasizing instead politics, military affairs, and religion. Despite his knowledge of the English sources, he virtually neglected the British point of view of the American Revolution and constantly equated Catholicism with corruption and tyranny.

During the late twentieth century, Bancroft’s writings have not been widely read because of his unabashed nationalism. Much of his basic interpretation has been retained, however, by scholars of the so-called Consensus School of American history, and that interpretation, though considerably more complex than Bancroft’s limited point of view, still dominates American historiography.

Bancroft did more than simply write history. He explained American nationalism in terms of heroic deeds, economic and political freedom, and the inevitable triumph of goodness and justice over abusive tyranny. His popular history reinforced a national mythology that brought comfort to nineteenth century Americans stunned by civil war, the Industrial Revolution, and political turmoil. He found a unity of purpose and experience in early American history that continues to appeal to the pluralistic United States. George Bancroft’s legacy has proven to be a lasting one. He shaped the past in terms of the dreams and aspirations of his generation. If any historian deserves to be called the Herodotus of the American people, Bancroft is surely the one.

Bibliography

Bassett, John Spencer. The Middle Group of American Historians. New York: Macmillan. Reprint. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1966. A fine study of the nineteenth century historians known loosely as the Patriotic School, with special emphasis on leading figures such as Jeremy Belknap, George Bancroft, Jared Sparks, William Hickling Prescott, John Lothrop Motley, and Peter Force. Critical of Bancroft’s methods and political bias, it is excellent for placing his life and work in its cultural context. Credits Bancroft for his literary style and ability to reflect the nationalistic aspirations of his generation of Americans.

Bush, Harold K., Jr. “Re-inventing the Puritan Fathers: George Bancroft, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Birth of Endicott’s Ghost.” ATQ 9, no. 2 (June, 1995): 31. Describes Bancroft’s attempts to establish historical opinion about the Puritans.

Handlin, Lilian. George Bancroft: The Intellectual as Democrat. New York: Harper & Row, 1984. The most recent and perhaps best biography of Bancroft in terms of integrating his personality, scholarship, and politics. Emphasis is given to the influence of moral philosophy in his thinking and writing. Challenges the notion that either German Romanticism or egalitarian politics primarily influenced his work.

Hoffer, Peter Charles. Liberty or Order: Two Views of American History from the Revolutionary Crisis to the Early Works of George Bancroft and Wendell Phillips. New York: Garland, 1988. Analyzes the consistent theme of liberty versus order in the work of eighteenth and nineteenth century historians, including Bancroft.

Howe, M. A. DeWolf. The Life and Letters of George Bancroft. 2 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908. The authorized biography of Bancroft, this work is exceptionally detailed, filled with extensive quotations from his correspondence. Bancroft literally speaks for himself here. Not analytical, but tells much about the man and his time.

Kraus, Michael. The Writing of American History. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953. Dated for historical trends after the 1950’s, this remains one of the best historiographical works ever written. It judiciously evaluates Bancroft as a historian and places him in relationship to other nineteenth century historians. Very good for the broad perspective.

Leeman, William P. “George Bancroft’s Great Legacy.” Naval History 14, no. 5 (October, 2001): 48. Recounts Bancroft’s successful attempt to create the U.S. Naval Academy.

Nye, Russel B. George Bancroft: Brahmin Rebel. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945. Beautifully written biography that focuses on the intellectual forces that shaped Bancroft as a historian. It portrays him as a political rebel yet part of the mainstream of New England thought, very much in the Emersonian tradition and significantly influenced by German Romanticism. Although modified by Handlin’s research, this is in many ways the most insightful biography of Bancroft.

Vitzthum, Richard C. The American Compromise: Theme and Method in the Histories of Bancroft, Parkman, and Adams. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1974. A fascinating study that relates Bancroft and his work to the efforts of two other popular nineteenth century historians. Vitzthum claims the three were guided by the belief that Americans were driven by the struggle between separatist forces and unifying forces; very nationalistic, they viewed progress in terms of union and a strong central government.

Wood, Kirk. “George Bancroft.” In American Historians, 1607-1865. Vol. 30 in Dictionary of Literary Biography, edited by Clyde Wilson. Detroit: Gale Research, 1984. A concise but analytical study of Bancroft as a historian and the differing views scholars have taken of him. Wood summarizes Bancroft’s history and explains it in terms of the quest for American nationality and union before the Civil War.