William Hickling Prescott

American historian

• Born: May 4, 1796
• Birthplace: Salem, Massachusetts
• Died: January 28, 1859
• Place of death: Boston, Massachusetts

One of the first great American historians, Prescott proved that historical writing could achieve the permanence of literature. He introduced to American historiography all the methods of modern scholarship and remains the most distinguished historian in the English language of sixteenth century Spain and Spanish America.

Early Life

William Hickling Prescott was the son of William Prescott, a lawyer and judge who prospered in investments in industry, real estate, and the India trade. His paternal grandfather was Colonel William Prescott, the hero of the Battle of Bunker Hill. Prescott’s mother, Catherine Greene Hickling, was the daughter of another wealthy New England family. Prescott attended private schools in Salem and another in Boston when the family moved there in 1808. At Harvard, he suffered an injury to his left eye during a boyish fracas in the dining hall, which led to a lifetime of trouble with his eyesight. This event is the basis of the myth that he achieved literary fame in spite of blindness. Actually, he was never totally blind, but his eyesight and his general health were poor throughout his life.

When he was graduated from Harvard in 1814, Prescott’s study of the law in preparation for joining his father’s firm was cut short by impaired vision and rheumatic pains, and his parents sent him abroad for his health, first to the Azores, where his maternal grandfather was the American consul. He returned to Boston in 1817, after two years in England, France, and Italy, convinced that he would never be able to practice law. During the winter of 1817-1818, he was confined to a darkened room, where his sister read to him while he wrestled with the question of what career to pursue.

Prescott’s first published work, an article on Lord Byron, appeared in the North American Review in 1821. By this time, he was determined to be a man of letters, a career made possible by the readers and secretaries whom he could afford to employ. In 1820, he married Susan Amory, the daughter of a wealthy Boston merchant, and he embarked on the systematic study of European literature. During the next nine years, he continued to publish essays on a variety of literary subjects while studying Italian and Spanish literature.

Life’s Work

Prescott’s study of the literature of Spain led to his determination to write a history of the reign of the fifteenth century monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella. Doubly isolated from documentary sources by his poor eyesight and his distance from Spanish libraries but blessed with sufficient wealth, Prescott employed full-time secretaries to read to him and to take dictation, and his many contacts in European libraries made possible a form of research that was remarkably complete, considering his difficulties.

Prescott’s friends in Europe found and made copies of often obscure documentary sources, and his remarkable memory gave him the ability to keep a large amount of historical information in mind as he organized his subject. History of the Reign of Ferdinand and Isabella the Catholic (1838), the result of eight years of writing, was, for a historical work, a remarkable success, both in the United States and in England. Though later historians have charged that Prescott ignored the ordinary people of Spain in concentrating on the life of the Spanish court, it must be remembered that it was politics, diplomacy, and war, not “common life,” that furnished subjects for historians in Prescott’s time. This first work reveals high standards of objectivity, it is thoroughly documented, and Spanish historians have always considered it a basic contribution to fifteenth century historiography. All this is even more remarkable for being the achievement of a self-trained historian.

Prescott’s success with his first book encouraged him to embark on the writing of the two works for which he is most famous, his accounts of the destruction of the Aztec and Inca empires by the conquistadors of Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro. History of the Conquest of Mexico (1843) produced for Prescott a remarkable number of honors, including memberships in various historical societies in the United States and in Europe, honorary degrees, and, most significant, a membership in the Royal Academy of History in Madrid.

The book on Mexico, which has been issued in two hundred editions and has been his most translated book, is considered by most students of Prescott to be his masterpiece, admired particularly for its graceful style and overall design. It is a supreme example of the work of the first great generation of American historians—Prescott, Francis Parkman, and John Lothrop Motley—who, being unburdened by any philosophy of history, subordinated deep analyses of social background and lengthy explanations of the causes of events to simple narrative history written for both the edification and entertainment of the reader.

History of the Conquest of Peru (1847) was written in two years. The speed of its composition is an indication of the success of Prescott’s mastery of the subject of sixteenth century Spain, his methods of research, and particularly the remarkable network of friends he had established in Spanish libraries. This work has not enjoyed the scholarly respect that History of the Conquest of Mexico has achieved, but this is less because of failing powers in its author than of the subject itself: Prescott found much less to admire in Pizarro than he had found in Cortés.

In 1850, he traveled in Europe, where he was a great social success and where, among other honors, he received a doctorate from Oxford University. The first two volumes of his fourth work, History of the Reign of Philip the Second, King of Spain , were published in 1855, and the final, third volume appeared in December, 1858, only a month before his death on January 28, 1859. This is the least of his four major works, probably because of the bad health that plagued him while he was writing it but also because he found so little to admire in his subject.

Prescott’s four historical works are his primary claim to fame as a historian and man of letters. He also published “The Life of Charles V After His Abdication” (1856) as a supplement to William Robertson’s The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles the Fifth (1769), and what he called “some of my periodical trumpery” appeared as Biographical and Critical Miscellanies in 1845.

In spite of his physical ailments, Prescott’s private life was serene. He was the father of four children, he enjoyed a wide circle of personal and professional friends, and he maintained a comfortable rhythm of the seasons as he worked in his library in Boston in the winter and spent his summers at Nahant or at the ancestral Prescott farm.

Prescott was in many ways a typical Boston Brahmin, a Unitarian in religion, a Federalist in politics and later a Whig, and a man with strong social concerns for his community and a belief that wealth confers obligations on the wealthy. Early in life, he was influential in the establishment in Massachusetts of an institution for the care of the blind, and he supported the Boston Atheneum all of his life. He earned the respect of many Mexican and Spanish friends by opposing the Mexican War and the Pierce administration’s designs on Cuba, and like most New England intellectuals, he opposed the Fugitive Slave Law and voted for John C. Frémont in 1856. He was a complex man who, in spite of his physical impairment, enjoyed social activity and gracious living, and he was a frequent help to other writers and researchers, but his ambition as a historian and man of letters triumphed over the double burden of ill health and social position while his wealth made possible research that no other American of his time could have achieved.

Significance

William Hickling Prescott combined thorough research and literary gifts to produce historical works that must be considered contributions both to historical knowledge and to American literature. Though he concentrated on the colorful aspects of his subjects and ignored the more prosaic and mundane life of common people, he produced remarkable examples of narrative and helped to raise historical writing in the United States from the often parochial concerns of his predecessors while avoiding the dullness that characterizes much of the admittedly fuller social and economic histories of later generations of historians.

The fact that Prescott’s work is eminently readable has obscured his importance as the first American historian to employ modern methods of historical research, an achievement that is even more remarkable when one takes account of the fact that he was completely self-trained and that he was burdened with ill health all of his life. Furthermore, at a time when American literary and historical interests, in the aftermath of revolution and nation-building, were almost inevitably turned inward, he made American readers conscious of cultures beyond their borders while helping to give American literature an international reputation.

Bibliography

Charvat, William, and Michael Kraus, eds. William Hickling Prescott: Representative Selections. New York: American Book, 1943. This selection of passages from Prescott’s writing is supplemented by a brief account of his life and discussions of his literary style and the philosophical and political premises of his work.

Darnell, Donald G. William Hickling Prescott. Boston: Twayne, 1975. Primarily concerned with Prescott as a man of letters, Darnell provides a brief account of his life, a balanced assessment of his achievement as a historian, and lengthy examinations of each of his four major works.

Gardiner, C. Harvey. William Hickling Prescott: A Biography. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1969. The definitive biography by the most distinguished Prescott scholar, based on a thorough knowledge of primary sources and not likely to be superseded. A balanced assessment of Prescott’s achievement as a historian and man of letters and a full treatment of his complex personality and private life.

Levin, David. History as Romantic Art: Bancroft, Prescott, Motley, and Parkman. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1959. A study of the first generation of American historians, their romanticism, and its effects on their writing, which Levin often considers unfortunate. His assessments of Prescott should be checked against Gardiner’s.

Ogden, Rollo. William Hickling Prescott. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904. Apparently intended to supplement George Ticknor’s biography, it devotes more attention to Prescott as a person and takes greater account of his private papers. The best biography before Gardiner’s.

Peck, Harry Thurston. William Hickling Prescott. New York: Macmillan, 1905. A brief biography that makes no use of primary sources but includes a useful discussion of Prescott’s literary style.

Prescott, William Hickling. The Literary Memoranda of William Hickling Prescott. Edited by C. Harvey Gardiner. 2 vols. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1961. A collection of Prescott’s private papers, which provide essential insight into his methods as a writer and researcher.

Ticknor, George. Life of William Hickling Prescott. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1863. Ticknor, himself the author of a major history of Spanish literature, knew Prescott intimately, but his biography provides no insight into his subject’s personality and little of his social and intellectual background. Includes useful appendixes on the history of the Prescott family.

Wertheimer, Eric. Imagined Empires: Incas, Aztecs, and the New World of American Literature, 1771-1876. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Examines the writings of Prescott and other historians and authors who wrote about Latin America. Wertheimer maintains that early Americans took a great interest in South American civilizations, and this interest reflected the emerging role of the United States as an empire in the New World.

Williams, Stanley T. The Spanish Background of American Literature. 2 vols. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1955. Includes a chapter on Prescott and provides insights into the sources of nineteenth century American interest in Spain and Spanish America.