The United States has never provided a great official collection of the sources of its na tional history comparable to those prepared by the European countries. This has been due in part to the particularism inherent in the Amer ican Federal system and in part to the fact that the American central government has been too much absorbed in the details of routine legisla tion to be able to concentrate its attention on the furthering of intellectual interests. The true American counterpart of the movement of collecting sources of national history, which was associated in Europe with the names of Pertz, Guizot, Nicolas, Hardy and Stubbs, is to be found in the rather pathetic attempt of Peter Force (1790-1868) to obtain adequate government support for his "American Archives," which were designed to constitute a complete collection of the sources of the his tory of the United States f rpm the period of discovery to the formation of the constitution. Its psychological and historical affinity with the European movement is clearly indicated by Force's statement of his aims. "The in which we have embarked is, emphatically, a national one; national in its scope and object, its end and aim." After a painful proc ess of protracted importuning, Force received a Federal appropriation which allowed him to begin publishing his "Archives" in 1837, but the government aid was soon withdrawn and the published material was but an insignificant frac tion of what it had been planned to include. Owing to the fact that American historical scholarship was then a generation behind that of Europe, Force was primarily a hard-work ing antinuarian compiler rather than a scholarly editor like Pertz, Waitz, Mignet, Guerard, Hardy or Stubbs, and the national loss from the cessation of his work was infinitely less than would have been occasioned by a discontinuance of the "Rolls Series," the aMonumenta" or the "Documents Inedits." The collections which have been made have been primarily the result of the enterprise of individuals, publishing companies and the historical societies of the several commonwealths. The process began with the publication of Jared Sparks' writings of Washington between 1834 and 1838. The most ambitious at tempt to make a thorough collection was the work of Mr. Hubert Howe Bancroft in the last half of the 19th century, in his gathering of the sources of the history of the Pacific States. Un fortunately, he did not follow the example of Stein and secure the aid of a Pertz, but trusted to his own untrained guidance the execution of the project, with the result that the work lacked in critical scholarship and careful edit ing. An incomparably more scholarly work was the co-operative history of the colonization of America, edited by Justin Winsor, but, though this contained much source material, it was primarily a narrative work giving a critical re view of the sources rather than including them. Parallel with this movement went the publica tion of source material by the various common wealths in the vast collections of colonial rec ords and archives, but in the great majority of cases these collections were prepared by eru dite antiquarians rather than by men trained as critical historical editors, and there was no uniformity in the methods employed. Some of these state collections have, however, been of a very high order, the most notable being, perhaps, the extensive series dealing with the exploration and settlement of the middle West by Reuben G. Thwaites of Wisconsin. Another mode of collecting sources was exhibited in the editions of the messages and papers of the presidents and the writings of the chief states men by numerous scholars, which have varied widely in quality, reaching the highest level in W. C. Ford's 'Writings of Washington' ; Gail lard Hunt's 'Writings of James Madison' and P. L. Ford's 'Writings of Jefferson.' The United States has not been lacking in editorial ability of the highest order, for in Worthington C. Ford, James Franklin Jameson, Paul ter Ford and Gaillard Hunt are to be found 11 equals of Pertz, Waltz, Guizot or Stubbs. The great defect has been the lack of concerted planning and continued and adequte govern ment aid. Promising beginnings in the right direction are to be seen in W. C. Ford's edi tion of the of the Continental Con gress' and the scholarly products of the Car negie Institution under Dr. Jameson's direc tion. John Bassett Moore has labored with almost Benedictine patience and productivity in the preparation of his monumental series dealing with the documentary history of diplo macy. There also should be mentioned the mon umental collection of sources dealing with the history of labor in America which has been prepared by Professor Commons and his asso ciates. Miss Adelaide Hasse has begun an in valuable series of volumes describing and classi fying the sources for American economic and social history which are available in the public documents of the various commonwealths. On the whole, however, the United States has been incomparably delinquent in the thorough and scholarly collection of the sources of its na tional history, and it cannot seek refuge be hind any assertion that this has been due to a lack of rabid nationalistic emotions.
If this country has not kept abreast of Eu ropean development in the editorial aspect of national historiography, it can lay claim to hav ing produced historians enthused with as ardent a patriotism as fired a Treitschke, a Michelet or a Froude. Nationalism in American historiog raphy has, naturally, centred mainly about the romantic period of colonization and the strug gle for American independence, and American historians have surrounded this period with the halo given to the early national history of Ger many and France by Johannes Muller and Chateaubriand. The chief figure in the crea tion of this national epic of migration and de liverance was George Bancroft, whose early years fell in that period of national bumptious ness and florid democracy in the ((thirties" and ((forties.* To Bancroft, the history of the formation of the American Republic was no modest secular achievement of ordinary mor tals, but a veritable fErieid in which Augustus was replaced by Washington and which ex hibited in its succession of scenes move ment of the divine power which gives unity to the universe, and order and connection to events.* His history of the United States
through the period of the Federal Constitutional Convention represented the process of coloniza tion as the flight of brave spirits from oppres sion, characterized the American Revolution as a crusade of wholly virtuous and disinterested patriots in behalf of the liberties of civilized hu manity, described the American constitution as the creation of a group of unique mental giants, never before equalled and not to be matched at any later epoch, and regarded their work as even more notable than its makers. The pa thetic inaccuracy of all of his major premises can only be appreciated by a careful perusal of the scholarly treatment of the same topics by Beer, Van Tyne, M. C. Tyler, Osgood, Alvord, Andrews, Fisher, Farrand and Beard, and the damage done to proper perspective in American history by his works has been almost incalcula ble and irreparable. The myth was perpetuated in Palfrey's long Puritan apology and was repeated in a less vigorous form in Mr. Lodge's discussion of the English colonies in America. From his pride in American exploits in behalf of liberty and democracy, Motley was encour aged to study the analogous movement among the Dutch, when they rebelled against Spanish and established a republic. Francis man, turning from the Anglo-Saxon pho bia of Bancroft, first gave full credit to the work of France in colonizing the New World. He found that the record of heroism had not been wholly monopolized by the English and German colonists. While Parkman had turned his attention to the French in the North and West, William H. Prescott found his theme in the conquest and colonization of Central and South America by the Spanish, and in a bril liant description of the splendor of the native American civilizations of Mexico and Peru. Mahan, enthused by the exploits of the small American navy in the wars of the Revolution and 1812, was encouraged to make a study of the influence of naval supremacy upon the his tory of the past. Few works have been more influential in stimulating the disastrous growth of modern armaments. The period of cement ing the national union through the efforts of the Federalists was glorified in the works of Hil dreth and John Church Hamilton, and the bless ings of the gpure° democracy of the Jacksonian epoch were set forth in the essays and addresses of Bancroft, who believed that he detected the very of God?' in the acclaim of Jackson's followers. Roosevelt described the process of American expansion westward with the buoy ant and ill-concealed pride of an admirer of the West and an ardent patriot and national im perialist. Von Hoist beheld in the struggle over slavery one more great episode in that eternal conflict between righteousness and iniquity. Professor Burgess saw in the suc cess of the North in the Civil War, not only a justification of his own nationalistic political philosophy, but also a sure manifestation of Teutonic genius in the field of political unifica tion and organization. On the whole, however, by the time that the achievements of the Civil War and Reconstruction periods had come to be subjects for historical analysis the objective scholarship of the critical and erudite school had begun to prevail and the "American passed, to be preserved only in the school texts of succeeding generations. The task of rationalizing the "Bancroftian and adapt ing it to the prevailing tendencies of the latter part of the 19th century fell to the philos opher-historian, John Fiske (1842-1901). By his amiable Spencerian rationalism and his eulogy of the rise of the middle class he best summed up the prevailing spirit of the educated Americans of his time, and by his lively and attractive style and his primary concern with the period of discovery, colonization and revo lution he attracted a following which probably entitled him to the position of the popular national historian of the last generation. He was the prophet of the new era in the interpre tation of Anglo-American relations which re placed the Puritan and American epic of Ban croft by an account of the rise and triumph of the middle class in both England and America— "an epic of the English-speaking He was as fully convinced as Bur gess of the supreme political capacity of the Teutonic branch of the He held that the first instance of self-government in recorded history was to be seen in the Teutonic village-community, which was an "inheritance from pre-historic Aryan antiquity' and he be lieved that "American history descends in un broken continuity from the days when stout Arminius in the forests of northern Germany successfully defied the might of imperial Rome.* Fiske, however, stressed the element of liberty as the surest criterion of political capacity rather than the aspect of order and authority which found favor with Burgess. England under Gladstone seemed far better adapted than Germany under Bismarck for furnishing an edifying example of the attainment of com plete political liberty, and the then popular theory of a wholly Teutonic England was an ethnic argument in favor of such an under taking. Therefore, instead of conducting the muse of liberty directly from the "German forest to the Federal Constitutional Convention of 1787, Fiske arranged a detour in her migration to the new world which would guide her to America by the way of the "Glorious Revolution of 1688? in which, as the work of the English "bourgeoisie? "freedom both political and religious was established on so firm a foundation as never again to be shaken, never again with impunity to be threatened, so long as the language of Locke and Milton and Sydney shall remain a living speech on the lips of men? Working hand in hand with George Otto Trevelyan, he tried to show how the American Revolution was but the perfect fulfilment of the spirit of 1688.