Bancroft as a Historian
In the Critical and Political Essays of Severn Teackle Wallis, in his day the leader of the Maryland bar, is a severe arraignment of Bancroft as a historian. Mr. Wallis charges the author of the “History of the United States” with such trespasses as “misstatement, omission, garbling, perversion, and suppression;” the indictment is sustained, and the conviction is complete. A single paragraph will serve as a specimen of his vigor.
“Every one who knows anything of our revolutionary history is aware of the feeling which from time to time was manifested in the Continental Army against some of the troops and officers from New England. The attempts of modern historians and lecturers in that quarter to conceal the traces and evade the justice of this feeling are equally notorious. The controversy between Lord Mahon and Mr. Sparks is familiar to our readers. Those who have taken the pains to read what Washington did actually think and write upon the subject will remember how often, in the bitterness and sadness of despair, and with the fierce indignation of his own burning and unselfish patriotism, he denounced the trading spirit, the littleness, the cowardice, the mean cabals and interests by which the troops in question so frequently imperilled the great cause. In the face of facts so generally known and incontestable, we confess our amazement at finding, on page 335 of the volume of his history now under review, the broad statement by Mr. Bancroft that ‘it was on the militia of these (the New England) States, that Washington placed his chief reliance.’ Nor is this inconceivable assertion guarded by qualifications of any sort, as to time, or place, or occasion. On the contrary, it is coupled with an observation ascribed to the British commander-in-chief, that the New England militia, ’when brought into action, were the most persevering of any in all North America,’—the purpose of combining the two statements being, of course, to perpetuate it as a historical fact, attested by the heads of both armies, that the troops from New England were the right arm of the one and the terror of the other. It is the misfortune of criticism that its decorum has no language by which falsifications of the sort can be properly characterized. Happily, on the other hand, it is but seldom called to expose anything so gross. Mr. Bancroft did himself infinite injustice by not adding to it at once, that John Adams was the unswerving friend and stay of Washington in the dark hours of doubt; that the Declaration of Independence was signed in Boston, and the sword of Cornwallis surrendered on Bunker Hill.”