THE PIONEER WORK OF JARED SPARKS

I

When a German professor begins a new course of lectures, his inaugural sometimes resembles the first work of a Turkish Sultan. He proceeds to put out of the way as many rivals as possible. This oriental method of clearing the field characterizes too many of our American literary enterprises, editorial and biographical. A spirit of destructive criticism has affected in recent years some of our American scholars, who, in the battle of books, see their own way to glory over the bodies of the wounded, and who tarry only to treat the dead with indignity. Such conduct is unworthy of our age. The first duty of a modern critic is to recognize the services which his predecessors have actually rendered. In such recognition he should estimate men and books by relative rather than by absolute standards. What folly it would be for Americans now reviewing a completed century in the history of Ohio to condemn the work of the pioneers, to ridicule log-huts, and to scoff at rudimentary laws! Such foundations were the beginning of all that now is in the great Northwest.

In judging the work of Jared Sparks, the modern critic should be no less fair and honest than is the common man in judging the work of his ancestors, who have a right to be viewed in the light and circumstances of their times. In a careful review of the life and literary labors of Jared Sparks, the writer, who now has in temporary keeping the private papers of this historian, has reached the conviction that this man's work should be regarded with honor and veneration as that of an historical pioneer. This is a true point of view which the younger generation of students of American history should take and hold. Without the preliminary labors of Jared Sparks, who was the first professor of history that Harvard College ever had, the present interest and enthusiasm for historical studies would not have been so early awakened. He was the first academic lecturer upon American history, and his manuscript lectures, now before me, are open pages of original research undertaken in days. before historical investigation was dreamed of in other American colleges. These are the days when men are writing of American statesmen, but Sparks began that kind of work in his contributions. to American biography, from which the present generation of literary men, in slippered ease," will continue to appropriate facts and mate

rials, as did Washington Irving from Sparks' Life and Writings of Washington, without sufficient recognition of the original pioneer. Sparks' collection of the letters of Washington and of his correspondents remains to this day one of the chief original sources of the history of the revolu tionary and early constitutional periods. The first investigations in history at the Johns Hopkins University in 1876 were based upon the labors of Sparks. His work was itself originally made possible by the relation of Baltimore to the city of Washington.

It would be interesting to trace Sparks' career as a Unitarian clergyman, as a chaplain of Congress, collator of Washington's manuscripts, biographer, historian, editor and owner of the North American Review, professor and president of Harvard College; but, in this connection, the writer would merely indicate what students owe to the labors of this historical pioneer. He traveled through this country from north to south again and again, collecting historical manuscripts. He visited every state capital in the Old Thirteen and explored their archives. He interviewed, wherever he could find them, survivors of the Revolution and of Washington's administration. Sparks' manuscript journals are full of interesting reminiscences and recorded conversations with Jefferson, Madison, and other great men, which will one day be published. There is the fullest evidence of the infinite pains taken by Jared Sparks to collect original and authentic materials for American history. He spent a year in the state paper offices of London and Paris examining manuscripts bearing upon the history of the American Revolution and obtaining authentic copies of important documents. The manuscript collection of original materials for American diplomatic history made by Jared Sparks and now the property of Harvard College has been recently calendared by Mr. Justin Winsor, in a bulletin issued by the Harvard College library. This collection is in itself a lasting monument to Sparks' industry and conscientious devotion to historical truth.

II

The recent criticisms of Mr. Sparks' method of editing the writings of Washington, and Lord Mahon's early charges, which were either withdrawn or gradually modified, originated in a total misunderstanding of certain important facts in Sparks' editorial situation. (1) There were already in existence different texts of Washington's own letters. In a private letter to Mr. J. Carson Brevoort, Mr. Sparks thus explains the fact: "It was Washington's habit first to write a draft of a letter, and in transcribing it he frequently altered words and phrases without inserting the alterations

in the draft. These changes are almost always merely verbal, without affecting the sense or the substance. The drafts were laid aside and copied from time to time into the letter-books. Hence the copies preserved by him differ in these particulars from the originals sent to his correspondents. Instances of this kind occur in a very large number of Washington's familiar letters. In his official correspondence there is generally an exact correspondence between the copies in the letter-books and the originals." In collecting the private correspondence of Washington, Sparks was often driven to the use of the letter-books, although he always used the revised letters that were actually sent when he was so fortunate as to recover them or to get copies.

(2) Washington's letter-books were themselves copies of original first drafts, and Sparks found in many cases that the work was evidently that of "incompetent or very careless transcribers." He says: "Gross blunders constantly occur, which not infrequently destroy the sense, and which never could have existed in the original drafts." The editor of Washington's writing was, in short, in much the same situation as were the early editors of ancient texts, which had been badly corrupted by monkish copyists. Like these editors Sparks attempted certain conjectures, a course not without its dangers but one which German philologians have followed down to the present day.

Mr. Sparks distinctly says that he allowed his sense of editorial duty "to extend only to verbal and grammatical mistakes or inaccuracies, maintaining a scrupulous caution that the author's meaning and purpose should thereby in no degree be changed or affected." Mr. Sparks felt that, as editor, he was conscientiously bound to present Washington's unrevised letters, copied by careless hands and never originally intended for publication, in at least such form as the obvious sense and construction demanded. He may have erred upon the side of making Washington more of a grammarian and a better speller than he really was; but the situation required some discretion. It seemed unjust to make Washington responsible for the manifest sins of a copyist. No modern literary man would like to be judged for the sins of his type-writer or of a short-hand reporter.

(3) Mr. Sparks felt himself justified in some revision of Washington's rough drafts by the example set by Washington himself, who, for future publication or historical use, had begun to retouch his own official correspondence during the period of the French war and the American Revolution. Copies of this correspondence had been kept on loose sheets roughly stitched together. Washington revised the whole mass, making

numerous changes, erasures, and interlineations in almost every letter, and caused the whole to be copied into bound volumes. What was Sparks to do in this editorial predicament? An attempt to restore the original text before Washington began to correct it would have led to endless embarrassments and perplexities. Loyalty to Washington's own good judgment of what he meant to say led Mr. Sparks to give the great truthteller the benefit of his own authority. And yet the letters sent out by Washington during the above periods of correspondence certainly differed in many verbal respects from the copies which he had revised with his own hand. Mr. Sparks had no means of recovering and collating all these letters, although he well knew that they might be discovered in after-time and reveal striking discrepancies as compared with Washington's own revised version. This is precisely what has happened in various instances in these critical modern days. It is but fair to Mr. Sparks to say that he anticipated such discoveries, and clearly explained the facts for which he is now held responsible. Mr. Sparks made the best he could of an embarrassing editorial situation. If there is any blame to be attached to the revision of Washington's letters, it is quite as much the fault of Washington himself as of his conscientious editor.

(4) Mr. Sparks was severely criticised by Lord Mahon for alleged additions and omissions in his treatment of Washington's writings. The former charge Lord Mahon speedily withdrew, for, in the one case in point, Sparks was able to show that the alleged “addition" was actually to be found in Washington's original letter to Joseph Reed and had been carelessly omitted by the transcriber in preparing the text of the same for the Life of Reed which Lord Mahon used as a standard of comparison. The charge of omissions from Washington's text Lord Mahon continued to maintain, although he was altogether wrong as to Mr. Sparks' motives, as could be shown in every specific detail. Here again has arisen an utter misconception of Sparks' editorial situation. He had undertaken to edit in twelve volumes a convenient and popular collection of Washington's more important writings. He had materials enough for forty volumes, but no editor or publisher in the world would have dared in those days to undertake such an encyclopædic edition. Guizot reduced Sparks' Washington by discreet elimination to six volumes, and the German Von Raumer, equally wise in his generation, reduced the work to two volumes. A London editor thought two volumes of Washington's writing quite enough for a British public. Mr. Sparks knew exactly what he was doing for his countrymen. He says: "I am certainly safe in saying that more than two-thirds of the whole collection of manuscripts were necessarily

omitted, in consequence of the limited extent to which it was proposed to carry the work." Mr. Sparks had no idea that what he saw fit to omit would be lost to the world. He even suggested that "such of the large mass of papers still unprinted as have any interest for the public would be brought out at some future time."

In his choice of materials Mr. Sparks was guided by a few simple principles which he himself describes in his preface. He endeavored to select such things as had a permanent historical value, and such as illustrated the personal character of Washington. Much of the latter's correspondence was full of mere repetitions, for Washington sometimes had occasion to write to different persons upon the same subject. Mr. Sparks tried. always to select the best letter of a series, and to supplement it by judicious selections from other letters without giving re-statements of the very same ideas. In every case where Lord Mahon charged Mr. Sparks with omissions from specific letters, it can be shown that parallel passages are to be found elsewhere and within a few pages. In fact Lord Mahon was finally so well satisfied with Mr. Sparks' explanations that the two men came to a cordial understanding, and the English historian entertained the American with the most distinguished courtesy upon his final visit to England in 1857.

Modern methods of editorial work are becoming more and more exacting, but it is perfectly true that during the four years' progress of the writings of Washington through the press, no friendly or unfriendly critic ever suggested that the editorial principles of Mr. Sparks, clearly and frankly stated in his preface, were in any way incorrect or defective. As Mr. Sparks himself afterward said, "It must be evident that I could have no other motive than that of executing the work in such a manner as would be approved by an enlightened public opinion." It is by this relative but ever progressive standard of judgment that we must estimate the pioneer work of Jared Sparks.

In a paper read before the American Historical Association, at its meeting in Boston, Judge Mellen Chamberlain, of the Boston Public Library, has pronounced the following just verdict concerning the services. of Jared Sparks to American history: "Sparks was a careful investigator, as any one finds who enters fields which he has reaped with expectation of profitable gleaning; but if to learn his methods and to catch his spirit, no time so spent ought to be regarded as time lost. An American in every fibre of his constitution, Sparks believed in the justice of the Revolutionary cause, and was loyal to the memory of those whose lives he wrote; but he never exalted his heroes by belittling their associates, or