First Historian

When the sailship Belle reached Manhattan in the summer of 1822, it set ashore the pride of Harvard -22-year-old George Bancroft, fresh from conversations with Goethe, Byron and Humboldt, bursting with the fruits of three years' theological study in Germany. But welcoming members of Harvard's divinity school started back in alarm when, instead of the prim, austere youth of three years before, there stepped ashore a lisping, velveteen-trousered popinjay who clasped Harvard's dean in a Continental embrace and bussed him soundly on both cheeks. At that embarrassing moment none could foresee that in the next 69 years the popinjay would become:

P: Founder of the U.S. Naval Academy (while Secretary of the Navy under President Polk) and author of drastic Navy reforms;

P: Acting Secretary of War, who signed the order that sent General Taylor across the Texas border and precipitated war with Mexico in 1845

P: U.S. Minister to the Court of St. James's, later to the Court of Prussia ("the ideal American minister," said Bis marck);

P: The diplomat who was largely responsible for settling one of the 19th Century's thorniest Anglo-American problems: the Oregon boundary dispute;

P: The first major American historian, who spent more than 40 years writing and revising a ten-volume History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent and earned over $100,000 from it.

Author Nye's erudite, close-packed, readable biography is the first written about Bancroft since 1910. It revives the memory of a man who, though now almost as forgotten as his History, did much to shape U.S. thinking about America. Collisions with Men. With the encouragement of Thomas Jefferson, young Bancroft cofounded a boys' school, Round Hill at Northampton, Mass. But the unsympathetic response of his pupils, expressed in a steady stream of spitballs, discouraged him."I sigh," said he,"that my early manhood should be employed in restraining the petulance ... of children, when I am conscious of sufficient courage to sustain collisions with men." When he left Round Hill in 1831, ambitious George Bancroft had decided that "in New Eng land there were but two ways to attain eminence -- to make history or to write it." He began to do both.

Abolitionists soon found Bancroft in valuable--"a rising star on the horizon," said young Emerson. And when he set to work on his History, theologians and nationalists were delighted to find that "Bancroft wrote the history of America as if it were the history of the Kingdom of Heaven." He believed, then and always, that his country was "a divinely inspired state" brought into being by God as an example to mankind. Within a year of publication, the first volume of Bancroft's History had made its way into one-third of the homes of New England.

The American Destiny. Historian Bancroft viewed the reforms of Jacksonian democracy as particularly providential. His resulting rise in politics proved a boon to his scholarly crusade. Abroad, he was allowed to comb Britain's state papers for documents concerning early American history. The French, Dutch, Prussian and Spanish Departments of State opened their secret files to him; his copyists toiled throughout Europe. He worked with incredible industry: 17 hours a day was commonplace. His library floor in New York was almost submerged in mountainous piles of notes, cross references and thousands of letters from historians the world over. He was an amazingly well-informed man, but conveniently ignored many facts that did not jibe with his prejudices. His vision of American destiny inspired tens of thousands of readers. A lover of roses, he also intro duced to the U.S. (from France) its most famous rose: the "American Beauty."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.