Historical Essays

Part 1

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HISTORICAL ESSAYS

BY JAMES FORD RHODES, LL.D., D.Litt.

Author of the History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850 to the Final Restoration of Home Rule at the South in 1877

New York THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1909

All rights reserved

Copyright, 1909, By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published December, 1909.

Norwood Press J. S. Cushing Co.--Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

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's Magazine, and of the Century Magazine for leave to reprint the articles which have already appeared in their periodicals.

Boston, November, 1909.

CONTENTS

I. History 1 President's Inaugural Address, American Historical Association, Boston, December 27, 1899; printed in the Atlantic Monthly of February, 1900.

II. Concerning the Writing of History 25 Address delivered at the Meeting of the American Historical Association in Detroit, December, 1900.

III. The Profession of Historian 47 Lecture read before the History Club of Harvard University, April 27, 1908, and at Yale, Columbia, and Western Reserve Universities.

IV. Newspapers as Historical Sources 81 A Paper read before the American Historical Association in Washington on December 29, 1908; printed in the Atlantic Monthly of May, 1909.

V. Speech prepared for the Commencement Dinner at Harvard University, June 26, 1901. (Not delivered) 99

VI. Edward Gibbon 105 Lecture read at Harvard University, April 6, 1908, and printed in Scribner's Magazine of June, 1909.

VII. Samuel Rawson Gardiner 141 A Paper read before the Massachusetts Historical Society at the March Meeting of 1902, and printed in the Atlantic Monthly of May, 1902.

VIII. William E. H. Lecky 151 A Paper read before the Massachusetts Historical Society at the November Meeting of 1903.

IX. Sir Spencer Walpole 159 A Paper read before the Massachusetts Historical Society at the November Meeting of 1907.

X. John Richard Green 169 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.

XI. Edward L. Pierce 175 A Paper read before the Massachusetts Historical Society at the October Meeting of 1897.

XII. Jacob D. Cox 183 A Paper read before the Massachusetts Historical Society at the October Meeting of 1900.

XIII. Edward Gaylord Bourne 189 A Paper read before the Massachusetts Historical Society at the March Meeting of 1908.

XIV. The Presidential Office 201 An Essay printed in Scribner's Magazine of February, 1903.

Part 2

XV. A Review of President Hayes's Administration 243 Address delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University, on October 8, 1908; printed in the Century Magazine for October, 1909.

XVI. Edwin Lawrence Godkin 265 Lecture read at Harvard University, April 13, 1908; printed in the Atlantic Monthly for September, 1908.

XVII. Who Burned Columbia? 299 A Paper read before the Massachusetts Historical Society at the November Meeting of 1901, and printed in the American Historical Review of April, 1902.

XVIII. A New Estimate of Cromwell 315 A Paper read before the Massachusetts Historical Society at the January Meeting of 1898, and printed in the Atlantic Monthly of June, 1898.

Index 325

HISTORY

President's Inaugural Address, American Historical Association, Boston, December 27, 1899; printed in the Atlantic Monthly of February, 1900.

HISTORICAL ESSAYS

HISTORY

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 the chance that a fresh treatment may present the commonplaces in some different combination, and augment for the moment an interest which is perennial.

Holding a brief for history as do I your representative, let me at once concede that it is not the highest form of intellectual endeavor; let us at once agree that it were better that all the histories ever written were burned than for the world to lose Homer and Shakespeare. Yet as it is generally true that an advocate rarely admits anything without qualification, I should not be loyal to my client did I not urge that Shakespeare was historian as well as poet. We all prefer his Antony and Cleopatra and Julius Cæsar to the Lives in North's Plutarch which furnished him his materials. The history is in substance as true as Plutarch, the dramatic force greater; the language is better than that of Sir Thomas North, who himself did a remarkable piece of work when he gave his country a classic by Englishing a French version of the stories of the Greek. It is true as Macaulay wrote, the historical plays of Shakespeare have superseded history. When we think of Henry V, it is of Prince Hal, the boon companion of Falstaff, who spent his youth in brawl and riot, and then became a sober and duty-loving king; and our idea of Richard III. is a deceitful, dissembling, cruel wretch who knew no touch of pity, a bloody tyrant who knew no law of God or man.

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. How interesting it would be to have his opinion on universal suffrage, and on a House of Parliament where Thersites is listened to as patiently as the king of men!"

We may also concede that, in the realm of intellectual endeavor, the natural and physical sciences should have the precedence of history. The present is more important than the past, and those sciences which contribute to our comfort, place within the reach of the laborer and mechanic as common necessaries what would have been the highest luxury to the Roman emperor or to the king of the Middle Ages, contribute to health and the preservation of life, and by the development of railroads make possible such a gathering as this,--these sciences, we cheerfully admit, outrank our modest enterprise, which, in the words of Herodotus, is "to preserve from decay the remembrance of what men have done." It may be true, as a geologist once said, in extolling his study at the expense of the humanities, "Rocks do not lie, although men do;" yet, on the other hand, the historic sense, which during our century has diffused itself widely, has invaded the domain of physical science. If you are unfortunate enough to be ill, and consult a doctor, he expatiates on the history of your disease. It was once my duty to attend the Commencement exercises of a technical school, when one of the graduates had a thesis on bridges. As he began by telling how they were built in Julius Cæsar's time, and tracing at some length the development of the art during the period of the material prosperity of the Roman Empire, he had little time and space left to consider their construction at the present day. One of the most brilliant surgeons I ever knew, the originator of a number of important surgical methods, who, being physician as well, was remarkable in his expedients for saving life when called to counsel in grave and apparently hopeless cases, desired to write a book embodying his discoveries and devices, but said that the feeling was strong within him that he must begin his work with an account of medicine in Egypt, and trace its development down to our own time. As he was a busy man in his profession, he lacked the leisure to make the preliminary historical study, and his book was never written. Men of affairs, who, taking "the present time by the top," are looked upon as devoted to the physical and mechanical sciences, continually pay tribute to our art. President Garfield, on his deathbed, asked one of his most trusted Cabinet advisers, in words that become pathetic as one thinks of the opportunities destroyed by the assassin's bullet, "Shall I live in history?" A clever politician, who knew more of ward meetings, caucuses, and the machinery of conventions than he did of history books, and who was earnest for the renomination of President Arthur in 1884, said to me, in the way of clinching his argument, "That administration will live in history." So it was, according to Amyot, in the olden time. "Whensoever," he wrote, "the right sage and virtuous Emperor of Rome, Alexander Severus, was to consult of any matter of great importance, whether it concerned war or government, he always called such to counsel as were reported to be well seen in histories." "What," demanded Cicero of Atticus, "will history say of me six hundred years hence?"

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