Bancroft, George b. October 3, l800;Worcester, Massachusetts d. January 17, l89l;Washington, D.C.
Father of American history who received his university education at the University of Gottingen and who was appointed minister to the Kingdom of Prussia/German Empire from 1867 to 1874.
His father, Aaron Bancroft, a Unitarian minister, had fought in the Revolutionary War and later wrote a popular and often reprinted Life of Washington (1807). His mother, Lucretia Chandler, was born on Gardiner’s Island, across from New London, Connecticut. This family could trace their ancestry back to Puritans who had come to New England in 1652. Bancroft initially embraced this heritage by “prepping” at Phillips Exeter Academy, and entering Harvard at age thirteen. After graduating from Harvard in 1817, he went on to study for a divinity degree, and money was raised to send him to the University of Gottingen, where he studied theology, languages (Arabic, Hebrew, and Aramaic Greek), the antiquities of Greece and Rome, and a survey of Greek philosophy from 1818 to 1820. He took an MA and earned a PhD. This was the start of his lifelong dedication to academic work. He selected history as a special area for study under August Heeren, his philosophy professor, and learned the idea of scientific history, based upon primary sources and unified in focus. Although his university training was not different from that of the handful of earlier American students, Bancroft distinguished his education in that he created a context by visiting leading European intellectuals. From 1821 to 1822 he toured Europe and met Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher and Georg Friedrich Wilhelm Hegel in Berlin; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in Weimar; Alexander von Humboldt, Marquis de Lafayette, Albert Gallatin, and Washington Irving in Paris; and Lord Byron in Italy.
Upon his return to Worcester, Bancroft experimented in applying this training to a career. He spent a year tutoring students at Harvard, presenting guest sermons and exploring the life of a minister.
In the end, he decided against becoming a minister and shifted over to a teaching career. Bancroft took over a private school but eventually gave up teaching. His translation of Heeren’s The Politics of Ancient Greece (1824) into English indicated his high level of proficiency in German. In 1827, he married Sarah Dwight in Boston (she died in 1837; Elizabeth Bliss was his second wife, from 1838 to 1886) and became involved in politics. In 1830, he was elected to the Massachusetts General Court (the legislature), but he refused to serve. About this time he began researching the colonial period and frequently published historically oriented but politically focused articles in the North American Review.He received popular success and critical acclaim with the 1834 publication of the first volume of his History of the United States from the Discovery of the American Continent. Using abundant footnotes and foreign sources, he perfected a polished style of narrative synthesis, which soon won him the title of Father of American History. He succeeded in applying the German idea of scientific history and combined it with the “hidden” influence of Teutonic folkways on the English settlement of the eastern coast of North America. He created elaborate vignettes of individuals that showed their own viewpoint but also incorporated moral judgments from the enlightened view of the 1830s. Bancroft placed a highly normative value upon the “progress” of colonization while dealing with slavery as part of Western civilization. His working assumption was that the importance of an individual’s character, for both villains and heroes, rested upon free will, responsibility, and culpability. Bancroft utilized the New England clerical tradition by always looking for the role of Providence in causing historical change.
From his German university training, Bancroft believed that history was an empirical science because it was based upon exact observation of facts. These “facts” created an explanation of causation, and since general laws were assumed to exist, history was based upon truth that was harmonious, just, and permanent.
Bancroft fused this historical understanding with the Transcendental belief in God’s Providence overruling individual mistakes. Moreover, events were organically connected to earlier decisions so the proto-democratic institutions of colonial America resembled the earlier Teutonic folkways and included personal freedom, a free press, and popular sovereignty. American independence from the British Empire followed the ultimate criteria: acceptance of the “common mind,” moderation, activity, and lack of ambition. It is not surprising that Leopold von Ranke praised Bancroft’s work as the best history ever written from the democratic point of view.Bancroft financed his multivolume series of books (10 volumes, 1834-1874) through his career as a politician. He was named to the lucrative patronage post of collector of the Port of Boston for the years 1838 to 1840. The writing of his major work therefore paralleled his political ca- reer—there was a twelve-year hiatus, from 1840 to 1852, before other volumes appeared. During this time he was defeated as the Democratic candidate for the governor of Massachusetts in 1844 but was named secretary of the navy (1845-1846) and helped to establish the Naval Academy. When he was named U. S. minister to Great Britain (1846-1849), Bancroft spent this time assiduously collecting primary documents not only in London but also in Paris and Madrid. This research appeared in volumes 4, 5, and 6 in the decade of the 1850s, but volume 7 (1858) contained no citations at all! Volume 8 came out just before the beginning of the Civil War.
Bancroft became a War Democrat who abhorred slavery but still remained true to the party of Andrew Jackson. After the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, Bancroft wrote the speech that Vice President Andrew Johnson delivered, and Bancroft was eventually appointed U.S. minister to the Kingdom of Prussia in 1867. The next seven years that he spent in Berlin were the happiest of his entire career.
His early friendship with German scholars provided a sense of homecoming to his appointment, and he was received like an honorary German American. He became intimate friends with German politicians such as Otto von Bismark and Helmut von Moltke; at the same time he was on equal footing with the historians Theodor Mommsen and Leopold von Ranke. He celebrated his fiftieth anniversary of receiving his doctorate from the University of Gottingen at an impressive Jubilaeum at the university and received an honorary LLD. Bancroft also was accepted into the Mittwochs-Gesellschaft fur Wissenschaftliche Unterhaltung, which was limited to sixteen living intellectuals. In 1868 he received diplomatic status by the North German Confederation, and became involved in the issue of naturalization. He negotiated treaties with the kingdoms, duchies, and free cities of the confederation. This led to the first international recognition of the principle of the right of expatriation for emigrants (Bancroft Treaty).Upon returning to the United States in 1874, he retired from public life to devote himself to historical research. He had scoured the Prussian archives and used his ambassador post as a basis for securing primary documents from throughout Europe. He busied himself with using primary documents to complete volume 10, the final one in the set, and then revising the ten into six volumes for a Centennial Edition in 1876, “The Author’s Last Revision.” In this edition he corrected mistakes, added new information, and made stylistic elisions. Bancroft accepted the presidency of the fledgling American Historical Association in 1886 and remained active up to the few months preceding his death. With his death, most academics felt that the last truly national figure had died.
William Roba
See also American Students at German Universities; Encyclopaedia Americana; Everett, Edward; German Unification (1871); Gottingen, University of; Humboldt, Alexander von; Transcendentalism
References and Further Reading
Howe, M. A. de Wolfe. The Life and Letters of George Bancroft. 2 vols. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, 1908.
Nye, Russell B. George Bancroft: Brahmin Rebel. New York: A. A. Knopf, 1944.