Francis Parkman

Francis Parkman (1823-1893), American historian, brilliantly narrated the Anglo-French conflict for control of North America in a great multivolume work.

Francis Parkman was born to wealth in Boston, Mass., on Sept. 16, 1823. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he had the advantage of study with the historian Jared Sparks, who gave Parkman his first reading list on the "Old French War." Through letters of introduction to other scholars, Sparks eased the young man's path.

While still a sophomore (he graduated in 1844), Parkman planned a history of the "Old French War" which would end with England's conquest of Canada. An older contemporary historian, George Bancroft, who had gone over some of the ground later traversed by Parkman, provided a framework for his more gifted successor. James Fenimore Cooper's "Leather-Stocking Tales" and Sir Walter Scott's "Waverley Novels" were spurs to Parkman's ambition to write a great history on a North American theme. An accolade from qualified judges would still the doubts of his father and win the applause of Englishmen who derided American cultural achievements.

Firsthand Research

For Parkman, books, teachers, and archives were not enough. His untiring zeal for perfection demanded onsite inspection of the contested region in America. In the summer of 1845, on a trip westward, he gathered information from old settlers, talked with Indians, and studied the topography of the region near Detroit. The next year Parkman went farther west to see Indians in their native state, unchanged by contact with white civilization. This, he said, was a necessary part of training for his lifework. His experiences in the wilderness gave Parkman color and texture for much of his subsequent writing. The immediate result was his classic, The Oregon Trail (1849).

Parkman's health, never robust, worsened after his trip westward. Partial blindness and severe headaches almost made an invalid of him. To aid his writing he used a frame constructed like a gridiron, and with it he composed The Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851). At first he could manage only six lines a day. With improved health he worked faster. Aid was offered by Catherine S. Bigelow, whom he married in 1850 and who acted as his amanuensis. Parkman was forever battling illness, terming it the "Enemy." He was a sociable man, his friends Boston's intellectual élite, his correspondents widely dispersed scholars. Despite chronic illness he conveyed the impression of a strong, big-boned Yankee.

His Great Work

Parkman hoped to start work on the beginnings of the Anglo-French struggle immediately after Pontiac. But ill health delayed The Pioneers of France in the New World until 1865. He had, however, already written large parts of other volumes in his projected series. The Jesuits in North America (1867) paid tribute to the courage and martyrdom of the Catholic missionaries. In La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (1869; revised 1879) the French explorer is the heroic figure, caught in tragic circumstances yet facing frightening odds with immense courage.

The theme of The Old Regime in Canada (1874) was France's attempt to tighten its hold on its American colony and its eventual failure. Parkman, like other historians of the romantic school, was less interested in the slow process of establishing a civilization than in its unusual, colorful incidents. In this volume, however, he came close to later social historians with such chapters as "Marriage and Population" and "Trade and Industry, " which were skillfully interwoven with his narrative.

Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV (1877) celebrated the greatest man ever to represent his country in the New World. Parkman's masterpiece, Montcalm and Wolfe (1884), was acclaimed the finest in the series. With this judgment the author himself agreed. He was unsure of how to fill the chronological gap between Frontenac and Montcalm and Wolfe, but he managed to do so with A Half Century of Conflict (1892). The absence of a central character around whom to spin his narrative deprived this final volume in the series of the dramatic interest that enlivened its predecessors.

Parkman's rapport with his aristocratic heroes, cast in a medieval mold, stemmed from his own political beliefs. He preferred a conservative republic, with restricted suffrage, where, he said, "intelligence and character and not numbers hold the reins of power." The pageantry of war fascinated him; the military instincts, he thought, were always "strongest in the strongest and richest nature."

Scholarly Opinion

In his own time Parkman was criticized for unsympathetic treatment of Indians and for alleged bias against Catholicism. Historians have charged him with neglect of social forces which they felt were as important as dominant leaders in directing the course of history. He also failed to consider the role of sea power in the conflict between England and France. However, unstinted admiration is given to his brilliant artistry in maintaining the pace of his narrative.

Though details of Parkman's great work have been altered by later writers, the main structure still stands. What historian Henry Adams wrote to Parkman when Montcalm and Wolfe was published has remained the verdict of admiring readers: With your previous books, said Adams, it "puts you in the front rank of living English historians." Parkman died in Jamaica Plain, Mass., on Nov. 8, 1893.

Further Reading

Letters of Francis Parkman, edited by Wilbur R. Jacobs (2 vols., 1960), which has a good short biography, is particularly revealing of Parkman's thoughts. Representative Selections, edited by Wilbur L. Schramm (1938), excellent on Parkman's milieu, politics, and theory of historical writing, contains selections from his writings. Biographies are Charles Haight Farnham, Life of Parkman (1900); Henry Dwight Sedgwick, Francis Parkman (1904); and Mason Wade, Francis Parkman: Heroic Historian (1942).

The quality of Parkman's work is examined in Otis A. Pease, Parkman's History (1953); David Levin, History as Romantic Art (1959); and Howard Doughty, Francis Parkman (1962). A chapter on Parkman by Joe Patterson Smith is in American Historiography, edited by William T. Hutchinson (1937), and in Michael Kraus, The Writing of American History (1953). Parkman is discussed in a study of the revolution in ideals and outlooks brought about by the Civil War: George M. Fredrickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (1965).

Additional Sources

Doughty, Howard, Francis Parkman, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983, 1982.

Jacobs, Wilbur R., Francis Parkman, historian as hero: the formative years, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1991. □

Parkman, Francis (1823–93), member of a prominent Boston family, graduated from Harvard (1844), having already indicated his interest in frontier life through excursions to the northern woods to study Indian life. After a European trip (1843–44), he attended Harvard Law School (LL.B., 1846), although he never applied for admission to the bar. In 1846 he set out from St. Louis on a journey to Wyoming, with the dual purpose of studying Indian life and improving his frail health. He observed frontiersmen and Indians at first hand, and gained valuable information, but his strenuous exercise led to a complete breakdown rather than recovery. Incapable of writing, he dictated to his cousin and companion, Quincy A. Shaw, his account of the journey, which he entitled The Oregon Trail (1849).

Parkman continued to suffer from a complete exhaustion and derangement of his nervous system, a mental condition prohibiting concentration, and an extreme weakness of the eyes. Although he was frequently unable to compose more than six lines a day, had to hire others to read and write for him, and employed a special instrument enabling him to write without looking at his manuscript, he nevertheless began in 1848 his History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851), the first of a long series of histories of the French and English struggle for colonial America. His only novel is the semi‐autobiographical Vassall Morton (1856). A new nervous crisis caused him to seek cures in European travel (1858–59) and in an interest in horticulture, which resulted in The Book of Roses (1866) and his later appointment as Harvard professor of horticulture (1871).

By sheer will power, he forced himself to return to his historical project. The series concerning the conflict for domination in the New World includes seven separate works: Pioneers of France in the New World (1865), concerned with the struggle between French Huguenots and Spanish Catholics for Florida, and the history of Champlain; The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century (1867), telling of the struggle to Christianize the Indians, and the Iroquois victory over the converted tribes (c. 1670); La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (1869), originally published as The Discovery of the Great West, dealing with La Salle's attempts to colonize the Mississippi Valley; The Old Regime in Canada (1874), showing the French feudal dominion of Acadia, the problems of the missionaries, and the faults of autocratic rule; Count Frontenac and New France Under Louis XIV (1877), depicting Frontenac as the hero who alone attempted to maintain France's untenable position; Montcalm and Wolfe (1884), dealing with the Seven Years' War in America, and the dramatic conclusion of French influence with the defeat of Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham; and A Half‐Century of Conflict (1892), concerned with border warfare and the siege of Louisburg in the years 1700–1741, between Frontenac's government and the final downfall of France's colonial empire. The series was written in historical sequence, except for the last two works, and the History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac, which describes events following those of Montcalm and Wolfe.

Parkman depicted history in terms of the two forces of progress and reaction, represented respectively by England and France. He saw the former as ordered democracy, the latter as dictated military despotism, but, placing his faith in neither, admitted in The Old Regime what was everywhere implicit: “My political faith lies between two vicious extremes, democracy and absolute authority… I do not object to a good constitutional monarchy, but prefer a conservative republic…” As he was a believer in a middle‐of‐the‐road policy for government, likewise in his approach to history he combined Scott's romantic attitude with the scientific method of German scholarship, to create work both accurate as history and important as literature. His lost Journals were printed in 1948 and his Letters in 1960.

Parkman, Francis (1823–1893), historian.The son of a prominent Unitarian minister of Boston, he read widely in his father's library. At Boston's Chauncy Place School he drilled in Greek, Latin, and mathematics. Parkman became a skilled linguist, and at Harvard, from which he graduated in 1844, he completed requirements for a law degree. In his last year of college he toured Europe, gaining firsthand contact with French culture and the Catholic church. In 1846, he embarked on an expedition to the West, following the Oregon Trail as far as Fort Laramie, Wyoming, to study Plains Indian culture and thereby better understand the seventeenth‐century Iroquois. His Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky‐Mountain Life appeared in 1849.

Parkman's History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851) combined comparative ethnological and ethnohistorical research with documentary evidence to analyze and describe the history of Anglo‐French rivalry in North America and Indian affairs. This launched his life's project, a vast eight‐volume history of France and England in North America until 1763, published between 1850 and 1892. Expanding on Pontiac's main themes, the series included histories of the pioneers; the Jesuits; La Salle; Frontenac, the energetic seventeenth‐century governor of New France; and the Seven Years' War.

In a novelistic style, Parkman portrayed the struggle between France and England as a heroic contest between rival civilizations with wilderness as a modifying force. Plagued by partial blindness, arthritis, and mental disorders, Parkman was a heroic figure himself, overcoming what he called his “enemy‐illness” to complete a masterly narrative. Some part of his own struggle was undoubtedly projected into his writings.
See also French Settlements in North America; Historiography, American; Indian History and Culture: From 1500 to 1800; Indian History and Culture: From 1800 to 1900; Indian History and Culture: The Indian in Popular Culture; Pontiac; Roman Catholicism; Unitarianism and Universalism.

Bibliography

Wilbur R. Jacobs, ed., The Letters of Francis Parkman, 2 vols., 1960.
Edward C. Atwater , The Lifelong Sickness of Francis Parkman, Bulletin of the History of Medicine 41 (1967): 413–439.
Wilbur R. Jacobs , Francis Parkman, Historian as Hero: The Formative Years, 1991.

Wilbur R. Jacobs

Francis Parkman 1823-93, American historian, b. Boston. In 1846, Parkman started a journey along the Oregon Trail to improve his health and study the Native Americans. On his return to Boston he collapsed physically and moved to Brattleboro, Vt. There Parkman dictated to his cousin The Oregon Trail, published in book form as The California and Oregon Trail (1849); the shorter title was resumed in later editions. Despite ill health, he labored on his History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851) and wrote an unsuccessful novel, Vassall Morton (1856). Following a trip to Paris in 1858 to seek medical aid, he was for several years unable to continue his historical researches. He took up the study of horticulture and became an expert in the field. In 1866, The Book of Roses was published, and from 1871 to 1872 he was professor of horticulture at Harvard. He eventually resumed his studies of the history of Canada and the early Northwest, publishing Pioneers of France in the New World (1865), The Discovery of the Great West (1869; 11th and later editions pub. as La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West ), The Old Régime in Canada (1874), Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV (1877), Montcalm and Wolfe (1884), and A Half-Century of Conflict (1892). Parkman served for a time as overseer of Harvard and later as a fellow of the Harvard Corp. (1875-88). He was a founder of the Archaeological Institute of America (1879) and was president of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society (1875-78). Parkman's superior literary gifts, combined with his careful historical research, gained him wide contemporary prominence. His work showed both anti-Catholic and antidemocratic prejudices, but it usually managed to combine accuracy and vigor of expression. There are several editions of Parkman's complete works. His journals were edited by Mason Wade (1947) and his letters by Wilbur R. Jacobs (1960).

Bibliography: See biographies and studies by C. H. Farnham (1901, repr. 1969), H. O. Sedgwick (1904), M. Wade (1942), O. A. Pease (1953, repr. 1968), and R. L. Gale (1974).

Parkman, Francis (1823–93), American historian, travelled in Europe, then journeyed out to Wyoming to study Indian life, giving an account of his journey in The Oregon Trail (1849). His history of the struggle of the English and French for dominion in North America was published in a series of studies, beginning with his History of the Conspiracy of the Pontiac (1851) and continuing through several volumes, concluding with A Half-Century of Conflict (1892).

Parkman, Francis (1823–93) US historian. His masterpiece is France and England in North America (8 vol 1865–84), one of the greatest works on North American history. He carried out extensive research in the field, one result of which was his classic The Oregon Trail (1849).