francis parkman: a brahmin among untouchables

Francis Parkman: A Brahmin among UntouchablesAuthor(s): Francis JenningsSource: The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 42, No. 3 (Jul., 1985), pp. 305-328Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and CultureStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1918930 .

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Francis Parkman: A Brahmin among Untouchables

Francis Jennings

R 5 ECENT republication by the Library of America of Francis Park- man's historical works prompts reconsideration of their value as history.1 As the histories had not gone out of print-Books in Print

lists several editions for scholars-publication by the Library of America is intended to revive Parkman for the general reading public. A question may therefore be raised: what is the merit of this intention? It is a heretical, almost sacrilegious, question to ask in the midst of general acclamation of the author and his works.

Reviewers of this new edition echo the praise lavished on Parkman from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. "This is our great national epic," writes Robert J. Taylor in the Boston Globe.2 In the New York Times C. Vann Woodward acknowledges that Parkman held strong biases but concludes that he was "touched with greatness. So were his writings." Woodward waves aside adverse criticism as merely fashionable.3 In the New York Review of Books William R. Taylor finds it "hard to explain the extraordinary power these histories still retain.... [W]e are caught up in them afresh."4 I am ruefully reminded that my article critical of Parkman, submitted to Ethnohistory in I959, was rejected because it was "beating a

Mr. Jennings is former director of the D'Arcy McNickle Center for the History of the American Indian at the Newberry Library. During i984-I985 he held a senior fellowship at the Institute of Early American History and Culture under a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. His essay is rewritten from a paper presented at the conference on "The 'Imperial' Iroquois" at the College of William and Mary, Mar. 30, I 984, cosponsored by the Institute of Early American History and Culture and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropo- logical Research, Inc.

1 Francis Parkman, France and England in North America, ed. David Levin, 2

vols. (New York, i983). Citations of Parkman's works in this article are to the New Library edition (Boston, i909) (because I own and have annotated it). I give the full title and date of original publication with the first mention of each work; thereafter I refer to each work by short title only. The New Library edition appears to be identical with the Centenary edition issued in I922.

2 Boston Globe, July 24, i983, 66. 3 "Obsessed with the Conquest of a Continent," New York Times Book Review,

July 3, i983, 3, i8. Woodward's article was condensed from a speech he made at the Smithsonian Institution.

4 "Repossessing America," New York Review of Books, XXX (Oct. I3, i983), 35.



30o6 W IIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

dead horse."5 It was rejected also, peremptorily, by the American Histori- cal Review and, after due process, by the Mississippi Valley Historical Review. It was a very brash and probably not very good article for a pipsqueak beginner to thrust forward, and I filed it away. But there were reasons for it, and they are as pressing as ever. Whatever Parkman's virtues as a literary spellbinder, he wrote bad history-bad because his "facts" cannot be relied on and are sometimes fabricated, because his method depends heavily on deception, and because his biases are poison.

In a general way these assertions can be supported by reference to histories by a small group of scholars, myself among them, who have independently been rewriting Parkman's subjects and whose spadework has been necessary to expose the falseness of his assumptions. It is past time, however, to show that Parkman kept up the appearance of validity in those assumptions by slanting, distorting, and misquoting his sources. Fairness requires that the examination should be confined to textual analysis based on what Parkman could have known, better yet on what he demonstrably did know. This article, after showing how Parkman has been praised especially for accuracy and reliability, will demonstrate falsehood (rather than mere error) in examples from the histories. It will turn then to explication of Parkman's preconceptions. The discussion is not "balanced" because its subject is not: Parkman's violations of truthful reporting do not permit an impartial approach. The article is objective, however, in the sense that it reports verifiable data.

The few voices raised against Parkman's biases have been overwhelmed by the general chorus of lavish panegyric. In the standard Literary History of the United States (I946) Eric F. Goldman wrote that "Parkman's whole method may be accurately summarized as an attempt to bring back the past just as it was."6 This judgment concurred with respectable opinion of both earlier and more recent dates. Justin Winsor, in i894, was sure that "honesty of citation [was] one of the things that Parkman stood for."7 Julius H. Ward valued Parkman's histories as "the noblest monument of intellectual effort in American literature"; in i876 he attributed their glory to a conscientious "fidelity to nature and actual facts."8 William Dean Howells (i874) suggested that Parkman's work "need not be done over again."9 In the twentieth century George M. Wrong wrote in the Canadian Historical Review (I923) that "one may almost say that Parkman

5Erminie Wheeler-Voegelin to Francis Jennings, June 29, I959. 6 Goldman in Robert E. Spiller et al., eds., Literary History of the United States,

rev. ed. (New York, I95 537. 7 Winsor, "Francis Parkman," Atlantic Monthly, LXXIII (I894), 662-663. 8 Ward, "Francis Parkman," McClure's Magazine, II (i893), I97, and "Mr.

Francis Parkman's Histories," International Review, III (i876), 509. Ward believed it "difficult, if not impossible, to find a single careless or misplaced or inaccurate word in the twelve volumes [Parkman] has given to the world" ("Francis Parkman and His Work," Forum, XVI [i893], 424).

9 Howells, "Mr. Parkman's Histories," Atlantic Monthly, XXXIV (I874), 6io.



FRANCIS PARKMAN 307

never makes a mistake, certainly never a glaring one."10 Vernon Louis Parrington, never noted for being soft on New Englanders, asserted in I927 that "the Brahmin mind has contributed to American letters no more brilliant work than came from the pen of Francis Parkman."11 When Mason Wade edited Parkman's journals in I947, he commented that "much later research and investigation has disproved only a detail or two" of the histories.12 Always the stress falls on Parkman's reliability as well as his literary mastery, as in the comment of Lawrence Henry Gipson (1 967) that Parkman's "plan" called for "the use of vast numbers of original documents," which he cited "with accuracy in the footnotes."'13 Samuel Eliot Morison, in his widely circulated Oxford History of the American People (i965), insisted that Parkman's works were "distinguished by scrupulous accuracy."'14 We have already sampled reactions of reviewers in i983.

Can such weighty authorities all be wrong? On the evidence, they are- and their error has been a sore bane to the profession of history in the United States. Evidence follows.

My first published article, "A Vanishing Indian: Francis Parkman versus His Sources," showed by comparison of texts how Parkman altered the journals of Christian Frederick Post to make the Delaware Indians seem to be irrationally-savagely-threatening Post's life, whereas the journals described how those Indians defended Post against the machinations of Frenchmen among them.15 The feat was accomplished by carefully plotted misquotation. The article need not be repeated at length; one example will do. In the following quotation from Post's journal, the italicized words are what Parkman averred was the full quotation. Read the italics, skipping the intervening matter, and you have Parkman's version, which he put between quotation marks without any sign of omitted matter. Then read the full passage and observe the change in effect.

It is a troublesome cross and heavy yoke to draw this people. They can punish and squeeze a body's heart to the utmost. I suspect the reason they kept me here so long was by instigation of the French. I remember somebody told me, that the French told them to keep me twelve days longer, for that they were afraid I should get back too soon and give

lo Wrong, "Francis Parkman," Canadian Historical Review, IV (I 923), 294. 11 Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought: An Interpretation of American

Literaturefrom the Beginnings to 1920, 2 vols. (New York, I 954 [orig. publ. I 927]), II, 43I. Parrington made his judgment despite his foreword's disclaimer that he had "not wished to evaluate reputations or weigh literary merits" (II, v).

12 Mason Wade, ed., The Journals of Francis Parkman (New York, I947), I, ix. 13 Gipson, The Triumphant Empire ... Part III: Historiography, The British

Empire before the American Revolution, XIII (New York, i967), 355. 14 Morison, The Oxford History of the American People (New York, I 965), 78 I.

15 Francis P. Jennings, "A Vanishing Indian: Francis Parkman versus His Sources," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, LXXXVII (1 963), 306- 323.



3o8 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

information to the General [Gen. John Forbes, campaigning against Fort Duquesne, to whom Post did report at the first opportunity]. My heart has been very heavy here, because they kept me to no purpose. The Lord knows how they have been counselling about my life; but they did not know who was my protector and deliverer; I believe my Lord has been too strong against them; my enemies have done what lies in their power.

8th-We prepared for our journey on the morning, and made ourselves ready. There came some together and examined me about what I had wrote yesterday. I told them, I wondered what need they had to concern themselves about my writing. They said if they knew I had wrote about the prisoners, they would not let me go out of the town. I told them what I writ was my duty to do. "Brothers: I tell you I am not afraid of you, if there were a thousand more. I have a good conscience before God and man. I tell you I have wrote nothing about the prisoners. [Not true.] I tell you, brothers, this is not good; there's a bad spirit in your hearts which breeds that jealousy; and it will keep you in fear that you will never get rest."'16

Parkman's editing for improved diction, a practice common in his day, is unimportant; but the deletion of everything relating to colonial prisoners among the Indians and to the French pressure changes materially the substance of Post's journal. It removes the Indians' reasons for suspicion and delay and thus contributes to a cumulative effect of irrationality obtained by similar tampering with other passages. It is impossible, therefore, to agree that Parkman's works were distinguished by scrupulous accuracy.

Justin Winsor observed in an early review that Parkman "sometimes disappoints the students who would track his movements."'17 True enough, and the reason is that he covered his tracks so well, sometimes by citing obscure references, sometimes by piling up citations in such confusion that no particular source can be identified for any specific remark, sometimes by tendentiously altering details in a quoted source, and at least once by citing a document that no one has ever been able to find. That vanished document was not a trifling matter. Parkman relied on it to prove that Ottawa chief Pontiac was the initiator and strategist of the multitribal uprising that since has borne Pontiac's name. As evidence of this major thesis of his Pontiac volumes, Parkman cited a "Ms. Letter, D'Abbadie to Neyon, I764."18 No one else is known to have seen this letter. Howard H. Peckham and Wilbur R. Jacobs, both of whom have

16 Ibid., 3 I4. The references are to Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe (i 884), 2 vols., II, I53-I54, and to Post's journals, as cited by Parkman in The Olden Time, ed. Neville B. Craig, 2 vols. (Pittsburgh, Pa., I846-I847), I, 98-I33.

17 Winsor, "Francis Parkman," Atlantic Monthly, LXXIII (I894), 664. 18 Parkman, The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War after the Conquest of

Canada (i85I), 2 vols., I, I95.



FRANCIS PARKMAN 309

spent much time in the Parkman papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society, searched in vain there and elsewhere. Peckham wanted to find the letter because "no contemporary British officer gave such an interpretation of the war." There were some "doubtful" statements in writing made long after the war but "no documentary evidence of a conspiracy headed by Pontiac."19 Indeed, as the histories by Peckham and Randolph C. Downes make clear, Pontiac was only one Indian leader among many before and during the outbreak.20 If anyone less sacrosanct than Parkman based a false thesis on such a will-o'-the-wisp, we would reasonably suspect fabrication.

Parkman wanted so badly to inflate Pontiac to heroic size that he presented the Ottawas attacking Braddock at Fort Duquesne "led on, it is said, by" Pontiac. About this, Peckham is acidic. "Where Parkman obtained this exclusive bit of information I have never been able to discover. Pontiac may have participated in the battle, but who ever said so?"21 It is a warning. That phrase, "it is said," is found often in Parkman's works.

Another instance of missing documentation occurs in Frontenac, but in this case the evidence can be found and as soon as it is seen we can perceive Parkman's reasons for failing to produce it. He was telling a story of savage bloodlust to justify New England's wars against the Indians of New Hampshire. Here is a brief extract: "[Maj. Richard] Waldron was eighty years old. He leaped from his bed, seized his sword, and drove back the assailants through two rooms; but as he turned to snatch his pistols, they stunned him by the blow of a hatchet, bound him in an armchair, and placed him on a table, where after torturing him they killed him with his own sword."22 Sources, when found, show that the Indians were serving justice in the only way possible to them, for Waldron had invited their people to a treaty conference thirteen years earlier, in time of peace, and by a ruse had seized the whole body, which numbered 400 persons, according to William Hubbard. Of these, 200 were sent off to Boston, where the council "adjudged seven or eight of them immediately to die," and the rest were sent as slaves to the West Indies.23 By suppressing

19 Peckham, Pontiac and the Indian Uprising (Princeton, N.J., I947), io8n- i i in; Jacobs, Dispossessing the American Indian: Indians and Whites on the Colonial Frontier (New York, I972), 84.

20 Peckham, Pontiacc; Downes, Council Fires on the Upper Ohio: A Narrative of Indian Affairs in the Upper Ohio Valley until 1795 (Pittsburgh, Pa., I940).

21 The quotation is from Peckham. In my edition of Parkman it reads as follows: "There were the Ottawas, led on, it is said, by the remarkable man whose name stands on the titlepage of this history" (Pontiac, I, I I4). Peckham, Pontiac, 44n, and "The Sources and Revisions of Parkman's Pontiac," Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, XXXVII (I943), 300-30I. In the article Peckham itemized "errors" of Parkman, including the alteration of the date on a source to make it "prove" an erroneous statement of fact (p. 300).

22 Parkman, Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV (i877), 235. 23 William Hubbard,"A Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New-



3IO WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

Waldron's provocation of the Indians and the sources that would show it, Parkman transformed his execution for an atrocity into the atrocity itself.

Two respected historians later reported the Waldron episodes but politely refrained from naming Parkman. Herbert L. Osgood twice commented on the Indians' motive for making Waldron "atone with his life" for "gross treachery" and "outrage."24J. A. Doyle went a bit farther and gave point to the historical importance of the Waldron incidents. Denouncing "any apologist of Massachusetts," Doyle wrote that "in no case before had an agreement been used as a screen for an attack," but from that time forward during the Eastern war "the savages seem to have violated their engagements with no feeling but cynical contempt for those whom they duped."25 This matter of central importance to Massachu- setts's relations with the northern Indians whom the French soon took into hostile alliance was dismissed by Parkman in one paragraph that converts black into white.

One of Parkman's main objectives in all his writings was to make Indians seem like brute beasts without power of reason; this is nowhere more evident than in Frontenac. He was as willing to misreport the French sources as the English, as can be seen by what he did to the narrative of the famous French trader and official Nicolas Perrot. Here is Parkman's comment: "In the Strait of Detroit there was another hunt, and another accident. In firing at a deer, an Indian wounded his own brother. On this the tribesmen of the wounded man proposed to kill the French, as being the occasion of the mischance."26 In such a case, no adjectives or epithets are required; the most untutored reader will infer that those Indians were more than a little strange. But it is not what Perrot wrote, which goes as follows: "When we arrived at the islands of the Detroit, they drove a herd

England, from Pascataqua to Pemmaquid," in The Present State of New-England ... (i677), (Bainbridge, N.Y., I972), 28. This is a separately paged second part in the book. More detail was given by Jeremy Belknap, the founder of the Massachusetts Historical Society, who commented in a note that his account was given "from the most authentic and credible tradition that could be obtained within the last sixteen years [prior to I784], from the posterity of those persons who were concerned in the affair" (The History of New-Hampshire, 3 vols. [ I 7 84, I 7 9 I, I 792], [New York, I970], I, 75-76). Belknap was cited approvingly by Parkman in other contexts. Subsequent to Parkman's publication, George Madison Bodge mentioned Wal- dron's seizure of the Indians and noted Belknap's description of the sham-battle ruse by which Waldron succeeded but concluded loftily that this sham battle "seems highly improbable" (Soldiers in King Philip's War. . . [Leominster, Mass., i896], 305-307). It is another instance of how authority substitutes itself for evidence.

24 Herbert L. Osgood, The American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, 3 vols. (New York, I904-I907), I, 573-574, and The American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century, 4 vols. (New York, I924-I925), I, 7 I.

25J. A. Doyle, English Colonies in America, 5 vols. (New York, I882-I907), III, i82.

26 Frontenac, II 7. Italics added.



FRANCIS PARKMAN 3II

of elk into the water; a young man who sat in the middle of a canoe, attempting to fire at them, broke the arm of his brother.... The young man actually died from his wound; and his brother lived only a short time after this, on account of the chagrin and sorrow that he felt. Notwithstand- ing, the Outaouas could not evade continuing their route." Two para- graphs later, Perrot noted that a Frenchman accidentally wounded one of the Ottawas and that "there were even some of them who were bold enough to say that they must fight against us, because we were already beginning to kill them."27 Perrot's Indians had reason to suspect those Frenchmen. Parkman made them irrational.

The necessary task of comparing texts so far includes Pontiac, Montcalm, and Frontenac. We turn now to Half-Century.28 During one of its many Indian wars, the province of Massachusetts Bay offered bounties of ?ioo each for Indian scalps. Bounty hunters responded, and a gang of them precipitated an episode called Lovewell's Fight. Parkman had two sources for this incident: Samuel Penhallow and Jeremy Belknap.29 Their attitudes toward Indians differed significantly. Belknap's text discloses a fair- minded writer who reported encroachments and provocations against the Indians as well as their violent responses. Penhallow was intent, as his subtitle avows, on exposing the Indians' "Continued Perfidy and Cruelty." Yet they agreed in substance on the facts of Lovewell's Fight, and Parkman altered what they agreed on.

Penhallow marched Capt. John Lovewell and his scalp-hunting company forty miles through the woods to Saco Pond, where Lovewell "saw an Indian on a point of Land." Fearing a snare, he and his men consulted together, then decided to go forward. "Upon this they proceeded and mortally wounded the Indian, who notwithstanding returned the Fire." Belknap's version was that "the Indian ... met them, and received theirfire, which he returned," and wounded Lovewell and another with small shot.30

27 Emma Helen Blair, ed., The Indian Tribes of the Upper Mississippi Valley and Region of the Great Lakes, as Described by Nicolas Perrot, French Commandant in the Northwest . . . , 2 vols. (Cleveland, Ohio, I9II-I9I2), I, 237-239. Parkman's Frontenac has been wholly superseded by W. J. Eccles, Frontenac: The Courtier Governor (Toronto, I959). Eccles hoped that "before too many years have passed, Parkman's works will be relegated to the same shelf as those of his contemporaries" ("The History of New France according to Francis Parkman," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Ser., XVIII [i96i], i63-I75, quotation on p. I75).

28 Parkman, A Half-Century of Conflict (I892), 2 vols. 29 Parkman used the i859 edition of Penhallow but did not cite an edition for

Belknap. Since he cited no pages for either in regard to the events discussed herein, I have used editions readily available. Samuel Penhallow, The History of the Wars of New-England with the Eastern Indians; or, A Narrative of Their Continued Perfidy and Cruelty . .. (I 726), ed. Edward Wheelock (Boston, I 924). For Belknap see n. 23 above.

30 Penhallow, History, II2-II3; Belknap, History of New-Hampshire, I, 2IO.

Italics added. Belknap visited the spot and talked to people who knew the local Indians. He refuted explicitly a "myth" that Lovewell's men had been decoyed.



3I2 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

No Indian on the warpath used small shot; this one had been hunting ducks. As the incident appears in these sources, it does not present a pretty picture. Here is a whole company of mercenaries sneaking up on a peaceful Indian, shooting at him, yet being such rotten marksmen that he survives to shoot back. It was entirely the wrong impression for Parkman's purposes, so he fabricated another Indian "coming towards them through the dense trees and bushes" who "no sooner saw them than he fired at the leading men," thus starting the hostilities.3' With this deft touch Parkman established simultaneously Indian guilt and Yankee honor.

But this was not enough. As the spot was a much-frequented fishing place, there were friends of the victim nearby, and the alarmed Indians rallied to do battle. Parkman embellished the scene with sound effects: "The Indians howled like wolves, yelled like enraged cougars, and made the forest ring with their whoops; while the whites replied with shouts and cheers."32 Quite a gentlemanly lot, these bounty hunters, in sharpest contrast to those beastly savages, and to make sure that this would be understood Parkman had earlier blessed them: "Lovewell and his men, it will be seen, were much like hunters of wolves, catamounts, or other dangerous beasts, except that the chase of this fierce and wily game demanded far more hardihood and skill."33

In Pioneers of New France Parkman so distorted his source in one exemplary passage that its author, Samuel de Champlain, would hardly have recognized the event described. To clarify the contrast, the following quotations in italics are Parkman's once more; those in roman type are Champlain's.34 Champlain's Algonquin and Montagnais allies had attacked a band of Mohawks in a barricaded "fort" and had been fought off. They waited for French help. Champlain wrote that as he and his men approached, the Indians "began to shout so loud that one could not have heard thunder." This remark was transformed in Parkman's pages: "A yell arose from hundreds of throats that outdid the wilderness voices whence its tones were borrowed-the whoop of the horned owl, the scream of the cougar, the howl of starved wolves on a winter night." We are thus warned at the outset that these Indians are bestial, even the Indians allied to Champlain. These howling allies were "like hounds around a wild boar, eager, clamorous, yet afraid to rush in."

Unable to see through the barricade, Champlain and his Frenchmen fired at random through its chinks, and he and a companion were wounded by arrows. (Champlain does not indicate that any other French- men suffered.) Three of the Indian allies were killed; fifty were wounded. "My wound did not hinder me, however, from doing my duty," Champlain continued, and added graciously that "our Indian allies also did theirs."

3' Half-Century, I, 26I-262. Italics added. 32 Ibid., 263. 33 Ibid., 260.

34 Parkman, Pioneers of France in the New World (i865), 362-366; H. P. Biggar, ed., The Works of Samuel de Champlain (Champlain Society, Publications, N.S., I-VI [Toronto, I922-I936]), II, I24-I34, hereafter cited as Works of Champlain.



FRANCIS PARKMAN 3I3

Champlain's ungrudging tribute was not in line with Parkman's purpose. In Parkman's pages, Champlain's Indians became "animated with unwonted valor." Champlain reported that the defending Mohawks were so startled and frightened by his firearms that, "thinking these shots to be irresistible, they would throw themselves upon the ground when they heard the report." It was a rational response to gunfire, but Parkman was not satisfied with rational Indians. His Mohawks, "wild with terror, leaped and writhed to dodge the shots which tore through their frail armor of twigs."35 Good sport there, but Champlain's drawing of the event shows those Mohawks fighting rather than leaping and writhing, and in Champlain's judgment "the enemy fought well."

Since Champlain's ammunition was running low, he saw that the barricade would have to be stormed. He had his Indian allies "take their shields, and covering themselves therewith, . . . come near enough" to pull down the barricade's supporting posts. "Meanwhile by means of our arquebuses, we should keep the enemy back." His drawing shows the positions clearly; the Indian allies are forward in the greatest hazard while the Frenchmen stand a little distance away. Parkman smudged the distinction: "the crowd ran to the barricade, dragged down the boughs or clambered over them." In reality, no Frenchman was in that "crowd."

French fur traders in four nearby vessels had heard the shooting. The men in one boat came to help Champlain, the unwonted valor of the others having not been animated. Champlain wrote that he "made our Indians cease breaking down the fort, so that the new-comers might have their share of the pleasure." They fired some volleys "before our Indians stormed the place as they had decided to do." The allies "approached the barricade as they had done before, having us on their flanks.... They behaved so well and so bravely, that, thanks to our volleys, they made an opening." Champlain then ordered a halt to the gunfire, and "some twenty or thirty, both Indians and whites, went in sword in hand, without meeting much resistance."

This was much too tame for Parkman, and it taught the wrong lessons about civilized heroism versus savage cowardice. He reshuffled the combatants' positions and numbers: "The French ceased their fire, and, followed by a smaller body of Indians, scaled the barricade on the farther side." (Why did he shift the assault to the farther side?) "Now, amid howlings, shouts, and screeches, the work was finished. Some of the Iroquois were cut down as they stood, hewing with their war-clubs, and foaming like slaughtered tigers." To make things worse, the translator of Champlain's volume injected racism into even the original document by using the word whites for Champlain's nous autres, "our others," that is, the Frenchmen.36

35 I am unable to account for this "twigs" phrase except as a rhetorical flourish. Champlain has the Iroquois barricade "made of strong trees, placed one upon the other, in a circle," and Parkman himself described it as "trees . . . piled into a circular breastwork, trunks, boughs, and matted foliage forming a strong defence" (Works of Champlain, II, I28; Pioneers, 364).

36 Works of Champlain, II, I33.




Many praises have been sung to Parkman's assiduousness in research, with much attention given to the masses of material he collected that are still available in the Massachusetts Historical Society. He boasted of these collections repeatedly, but it is notable from inspection of his books' citations that he actually used only a small fraction of those materials.37 He played favorites among his sources. His boast is simply not true, that "the statements of secondary writers have been accepted only when found to conform to the evidence of contemporaries, whose writings have been sifted and collated with the greatest care."38 Writers who shared his prejudices became authorities; those who did not were dismissed with epithet. Thus he attacked the Moravian missionary John Heckewelder as "simple minded" because Heckewelder related Delaware Indian traditions sympathetically and accurately,39 but he accepted as a reliable source the Reverend William Smith, provost of the College of Philadelphia, who could hardly put two sentences together without lying.40

Samuel Penhallow was one of Parkman's favorites. We have seen already how Parkman used Penhallow for Lovewell's Fight. Another episode from Penhallow provided Parkman with half a page of description wholly at odds with what is shown in a better source available to him if he had chosen to do the research. This was what Parkman called a raid by Caleb Lyman "with five friendly Indians" in I704.41 The very designation is misleading. Lyman merely accompanied a party of Mohegan Indians in so insignificant a capacity that the official report did not even name him. They were not "with" him; he was with them.42

The party trudged "above one hundred miles from any English Settle- ment," according to Penhallow. Parkman fudged that into "a long march

37Parkman, The Jesuits in North America (i867), vii, Frontenac, vi-vii, La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (I869), vii-ix, The Old Regime in Canada (I874), x-xii. "The papers copied for the present work in France alone exceed six thousand folio pages of manuscript, additional and supplementary to the 'Paris Documents' procured for the State of New York" (Montcalm, viii-ix). "The manuscript material collected for the preparation of the series now complete forms about seventy volumes, most of them folios" (Half-Century, I, vi). In Pioneers Parkman explained the discrepancy between his collections and his citations thus: "the amount of reading applied" to the composition of his books "is far greater than the citations represent, much of it being of a collateral and illustrative nature. ... [T]he minutest details of narrative or description rest on authentic documents or on personal observation" (p. xxix).

38 Half-Century, I, v. 39Jesuits, 75n-76n; Pontiac, I, 34n. For Heckewelder's general reliability,

allowing for the chronological imprecision of Indian tradition, see Francis Jen- nings, The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: The Covenant Chain Confederation of Indian Tribes with English Colonies from Its Beginnings to the Lancaster Treaty of 1744 (New York, i984).

40 See Francis Jennings, "Thomas Penn's Loyalty Oath," American Journal of Legal History, VIII (1 964), 303-3 I 3.

41 Penhallow, History, 20-23; Half-Century, I, 50. 42 See n. 43.



FRANCIS PARKMAN 3 I 5

into the forest," clearly because he did not wish the true extent of the distance to be revealed; he wanted the victims of the raiding party to be "warriors-bound, no doubt, against the frontier," and the distance of a hundred miles would have told against that implication. Penhallow quoted Caleb Lyman's account. In it, the raiding party "ran to the side of the Wigwam, and fired in upon them: And flinging down our Guns, we surrounded them with our Clubs and Hatchets, and knockt down several we met with." There was no resistance, only desperate efforts to flee- another detail suppressed by Parkman. Six scalps were taken back to Boston. Though the reward for a single enemy warrior's scalp at the time was ?ioo, the General Court paid only the sum total of ?2 I. Penhallow's grumble at "how poorly this bold Action, and great Service was rewarded" should have been signal enough that something had been left out of the Lyman-Penhallow account.

And so it had been. In the Winthrop Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society reposed a letter from Maj. William Whiting to Gov. Fitz-John Winthrop, June 20, I704, relating that Lyman's party consisted of five Mohegan Indians besides himself and that the leader of the party was the Mohegan chief. The wigwam they attacked contained nine persons in all. Two, of unspecified age and sex, escaped. Four men were killed, as was also "a lad of I4." A woman was captured and interrogated, then killed and scalped. These yielded the total of six scalps. The wigwam had held also a two-year-old infant whose scalp was not offered and whose fate was not mentioned.43 These were Parkman's "nine warriors-bound, no doubt, against the frontier."

All the reviewers agree that Parkman was a magnificent literary artist. Many of them have been eminent literary critics, but historians, too, have concurred. Frederick Jackson Turner thought Parkman "the greatest painter of historical pictures that this country-perhaps it is not too much to say, that any country-has produced."44 As an afterthought to lavish

43The letter was printed three years before Parkman published Half-Century, but the manuscript had been available many years earlier (The Winthrop Papers [Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections, 6th Ser., III (Boston, i889)], 226-

228, xv-xviii). It was reprinted later as an editorial note explaining why the Indians received such a small reward: The Acts and Resolves, Public and Private, of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay . . . , 2I vols. (Boston, i869-i922), VIII, 83, 403-

404, n. 54. The General Court's grant specified that "no Law Provides a Suitable Reward for the service of the Petitioner [Lyman]." The editor commented that the raiding party had failed to qualify under the provisions of the scalp bounty law- even for the men they killed, which raises more questions-but the amount allowed was intended to prevent the Mohegans from feeling cheated and withdrawing from the province's service. This material was not in print when Parkman wrote, though he could have found it in the manuscript archives if he had chosen to check on Penhallow's congenial account. It is highly questionable how much manuscript research Parkman actually did.

44 Turner, "Francis Parkman and His Work," Dial, XXV (i898), 45I.




praise, Turner concluded, "But his work will live because he was even greater as an artist than as a historian."45 Allowing for hyperbole and for variety of tastes, such judgments may be conceded. The matters at issue are the means and ends of Parkman's artistry. It was not art for art's sake. As some early reviewers commented, Parkman taught "lessons." Justin Winsor observed that he skillfully "made the course of events carry its own philosophy."46 John Fiske believed that "seldom ... will one find a book fuller of political wisdom" than Parkman's Old Regime. "The art consists in so handling the relations of cause and effect as to make them speak for themselves. These pages are alive with political philosophy, and teem with object lessons of extraordinary value."47 James Russell Lowell perceived that "Mr. Parkman never loses sight of those links of cause and effect, whether to be sought in political theory, religious belief, or mortal incompleteness, which give to the story of Man a moral, and reduce the fortuitous to the narrow limits where it properly belongs."48 My objection to this trait in Parkman is not to the historian as moralist, for all of us moralize in one way or another, overtly or covertly. Parkman's fault, besides the means he used, lay in the particular morals he chose to preach. Most of Parkman's reviewers note, for example, how he taught the inevitability of Indian defeat and extinction, and they approve.

Parkman's teaching was also justification. "The Indian is a true child of the forest and the desert," he pronounced. "The wastes and solitudes of nature are his congenial home. His haughty mind is imbued with the spirit of the wilderness, and the light of civilization falls on him with a blighting power."49 People imbued with the spirit of the wilderness could not hope to withstand the progress of civilization because wilderness was "savagery."50 By converting flesh-and-blood colonials and Indians into the abstractions of civilization locked in conflict with savagery, Parkman (and Turner after him) was able to endow the cosmic antagonists with whatever qualities were needed to demonstrate his "lessons." Factual evidence was irrelevant to the logic of such mythology.

In plain words, it was a justification for genocide, or what appeared as genocide, but to put it so bluntly would have shocked the sensibilities of Parkman's refined readers. A way had to be found for Europeans and their descendants to escape responsibility for the observable traumatic decline in Indian populations. Parkman cleared the way by making the Indians themselves responsible. By their savage natures, they were required to commit suicide. It was inevitable. (Sweet are the uses of inevitability to the propagandist.)51

45 Ibid.} 4 53- 46 Winsor, "Francis Parkman," Atlantic Monthly, LXXIII (i894), 663. 47 Fiske, "Francis Parkman," ibid., 672-67 3. 48 Lowell, "Francis Parkman," Century Magazine, XLV (i892), 45. 49 Pontiac, I, 3. 50Montcalm, II, 427. 51 Inevitability, predestination, and determinism are all the same thing said in



FRANCIS PARKMAN 3I7

In his first published history Parkman stated that his object was "to portray the American forest and the American Indian at the period when both received their final doom."52 It is a tribute to the power of mythical language that readers can still swallow that after flying over the vast woods of New England, not to speak of the Appalachians and Rockies. Indians had to die because of their inflexibility: "The Indian is hewn out of a rock. You can rarely change the form without destruction of the substance.... He will not learn the arts of civilization, and he and his forest must perish together."53 There, for Parkman, lay the critical difference between Indians and the ancestors of his own race: "We look with deep interest on the fate of this irreclaimable son of the wilderness, the child who will not be weaned from the breast of his rugged mother. And our interest increases when we discern in the unhappy wanderer the germs of heroic virtues mingled among his vices."54 Whether such tears were genuine or the crocodile variety is hard to say because the man may have been mesmerized by his own word magic, but the governing words are "must perish" and "irreclaimable." These are the stern dictations of prophecy, of faith, of dogma-not the observations of historical fact and process; and they are quite false to reality. The "vanishing" of the Indians of Parkman's day was the effect of catastrophic epidemics that had no more connection with wilderness than the Black Death had had in Europe; indeed, the Indians who had most chance to avoid the plagues introduced from Europe were those who kept the greatest distance from the bearers of pestilence.55

Parkman's propaganda served an immediate purpose as well as a general ideological objective. His justifications for attacks upon Indians were written during the protracted Indian wars of the United States in the trans- Mississippi West and while Anglo-Californians were slaughtering whole communities of Indians whose only fault was the possession of desirable lands.56 When it seemed to Parkman, late in life, that the army had largely

different contexts. They are all ways of pontificating dogma, whether religious, "'scientific," or whatever. For the bad effects of one manifestation on public policy see Brian W. Dippie, The Vanishing Indian: White Attitudes and U.S. Indian Policy (Middletown, Conn., i982).

52 Pontiac, I, x. 53 Ibid., 3. Italics added. 54 Ibid., 48. 55 See Henry F. Dobyns, "Estimating Aboriginal Population: An Appraisal of

Techniques with a New Hemispheric Estimate," Current Anthropology, VII (i966), 395-4i6, and Their Number Become Thinned. Native American Population Dynamics in Eastern North America (Knoxville, Tenn., i983); William M. Denevan, ed., The Native Population of the Americas in 1492 (Madison, Wis., I976); and William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, N.Y., I976). These are only a sampling of the large literature on American Indian population that has emerged in recent years.

56 See Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (New York, I970); Edward D. Castillo, "The Impact of Euro-




accomplished its task of suppressing Indian resistance, he eased his vituperation for a moment. He wrote a public letter advocating the displacement of the Indians "with the least possible hardship" because they had become "worth saving." Some mysterious power had canceled the inevitability of their demise. There were limits, however, to Parkman's impulse toward forgiveness, and they were carefully specified. Indepen- dence for the Indian was not to be considered. "We have taken away his hunting grounds, and in itself considered, the act was right, for a few hordes of savages cannot be permitted to hold in perpetual barbarism the land which might sustain a hundred millions of civilized men." In this letter Parkman acknowledged that the intractable savage had at last become capable of civilization, though the savagery could not be "wrought out of him in one generation or two." This miraculous transformation occurred because the Indians had "ceased to be formidable as enemies."57 But then came the massacre of the Sioux at Wounded Knee in i890,

reviving the need to excuse the inexcusable. Parkman's Half Century, his last book, published in I892, once more contained all the venomous pejoratives that he had attached to Indians and savagery throughout his work.

There can be no doubt that he knew exactly what he was doing. "With us the name of the savage is a byword of reproach," he remarked, and he flung the epithet again and again.58 A primitive Indian was "as savage in his religion as in his life."59"All savages, whatever may be their country, their color, or their lineage, are prone to treachery and deceit."60 Indians were not manly; they were "a murder-loving race."61 They had a "native thirst for blood and vengeance."62 Their bravery was merely "insensate fury."63 Their "ruling passions" were "ambition, revenge, envy, and jealousy"; the dignity of their public deliberation was achieved by self-mastery that was merely "shallow" because they were "trained to conceal passion, and not to subdue it."64

Parkman found these traits epitomized by the Iroquois, "the Indian of

American Exploration and Settlement," in Robert F. Heizer, ed., California, in William C. Sturtevant, ed., Handbook of North American Indians, VIII (Washing- ton, D.C., I978), 99-I27. Brown's book has been faulted for being one-sided on the "wrong" side; its factuality stands up.

57 "Francis Parkman on the Indians," Critic, N.S., V (i886), 248. The quoted phrase follows that written 50 years earlier by Albert Gallatin. "The natives have ceased to be an object of terror, and they are entirely at our mercy" ("A Synopsis of the Indian Tribes of North America. .. ," American Antiquarian Society, Archaeologia Americana: Transactions and Collections, II r 836], I 55).

58Pontiac, I, I66-I67. 59Jesuits, 87. 60Pontiac, 238. 61 Pioneers, I40. 62Pontiac, I, 2 II.

63Jesuits, 552. 64 Pontiac, I, 45-46.



FRANCIS PARKMAN 3I9

Indians," who stood paramount "among all the barbarous nations of the continent."65 He dismissed with contempt the political institutions of the Iroquois; their wisdom "was but the wisdom of savages." Decrying their "mad ambition," he conceded that "their sagacity is past denying,-it showed itself in many ways," only to nullify the compliment: "but it was not equal to a comprehension of their own situation and that of their race. ... [T]heir organization and their intelligence were merely the instruments of a blind frenzy, which impelled them to destroy those whom they might have made their allies in a common cause. "66

This was not a casual expression. He went on to declare that "it was not by their craft, nor by their organization,-which for military purposes was wretchedly feeble,-that this handful of savages gained a bloody suprema- cy. They carried all before them because they were animated throughout, as one man, by the same audacious pride and insatiable rage for conquest.... [T]hey owed their unity and vigor of action to the homicidal frenzy that urged them all alike."67 The malignancy of this language is matched by its multidimensional fallacy. Audacious pride and rage for conquest were certainly as prominent in French and English empires and colonies as among the Iroquois. Homicidal frenzy is common to all men at moments of life-and-death combat and to certain kinds of maniacs; otherwise it is only sensational hot air.

Repeatedly Parkman wrote that the Indians-all Indians-were "unstable as water" and generally "possessed of insensate rage."68 Repeatedly, also, he used terminology that identified Indians with beasts. The Indian allies of Canada's Count Frontenac were "this heterogeneous multitude ... like a vast menagerie of wild animals; and the lynx bristled at the wolf,

and the panther grinned fury at the bear, in spite of all his efforts to form them into a happy family under his paternal rule."69 Nature being demonic, its creatures were human only as apparitions; Indians had "the passions of a devil" and were "man, wolf, and devil, all in one."70 The brutes of Parkman's comparisons were always fierce predators. Indians were never compared to deer, for example. The rhetorical embarrassment of substituting a deer could not have been tolerated in such a sentence as this: "The soldiers took but one prisoner, whom they shot to death like a captive wolf."'71

He rationalized thus: "For the most part, a civilized white man can discover very few points of sympathy between his own nature and that of an Indian. With every disposition to do justice to their good qualities, he

65Jesuits, 36. 66 Ibid., 538. 67 Ibid., 539-540. 68 Samples in Half-Century: "unstable," I, 290, II, 205, 236; "homicidal fury," I,

278. 69 Frontenac, 423. 70 Half-Century, I, 2 go; La Salle, 2 2 8. 71Pontiac, II, 75.



320 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

must be conscious that an impassable gulf lies between him and his red brethren. Nay, so alien to himself do they appear, that, after breathing the air of the prairie for a few months or weeks, he begins to look upon them as a troublesome and dangerous species of wild beast."72 Parkman expressed that attitude in all his histories.

The preceding quotation is from The Oregon Trail, Parkman's account of his trip to the West as a youth. Though it attributes his feeling about Indians to his experiences among the Sioux on that journey, there is reason to believe that the adventure merely confirmed and strengthened preexisting attitudes. At the age of eighteen, on a holiday trip into the Maine woods, Parkman already viewed his Indian companion Jerome as he would see Indians thereafter; he described in his journal "the sinister look of the fellow's face, the diabolical size of his mouth, the snaky glittering of his deep-set eyes."73

It is not possible to weight the factors contributing to Parkman's hostility: the nervous disease torturing him even as a young man, the environment of Boston in his youth, his reading and education, or his generally dyspeptic attitude toward races, nationalities, religions, and social classes other than his own, as well as toward women. The term ethnocentrism embraces the range, but for confirming information one must inquire into particulars. Among these, race consciousness-identified as such by Parkman himself-stands out vividly.

Race was an all-purpose rationale. For Parkman it explained, among other things, the superiority of the British colonies to those of the French because the French were too prone to accept Indians in social and sexual intercourse. In Canada "there was much congeniality between the red man and the Canadian. Their harmony was seldom broken; and among the woods and wilds of the northern lakes roamed many a lawless half-breed, the mongrel offspring of the colonists of Detroit and the Indian squaws."74 Earlier in the same volume he remarked how "the restless, roving Canadians ... allied themselves to Indian women, and filled the woods with a mongrel race of bush-rangers."75 The British were superior to such depravity. "The borders of the English colonies displayed no such phenomena of mingling races.... The English fur-traders ... showed ... an ample alacrity to fling off the restraints of civilization; but though they

72 Parkman, The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life (1 849), 330-33 I.

73 Wade, ed., Parkman Journals, I, 79. 74 Pontiac, I, 223. Mongrel was one of Parkman's catchwords, as were also half-

breed and squaw. He used squaw almost always in preference to woman or girl. These phrases and many slurs on Mexicans as ignoble, brutish, and squalid appear frequently in Oregon Thail: 87, I 55, and passim. To Mexicans "the honorable title of 'whites' is by no means conceded" (ibid., 3I5).

75 Pontiac, I, 68. Half-breed was still in use in Montcalm (I, 59), but it had changed to hybrid in Half-Century (I, go). Squaw proliferated to the end (ibid., I, 245, 3 I4, 283).



FRANCIS PARKMAN 32 I

became barbarians, they did not become Indians; and scorn on the one side and hatred on the other still marked the intercourse of the hostile races."76 This was the proper way, and the difference was seemingly inherent in "racial" characters. Parkman paid no attention to divergent imperial policies. Louis XIV encouraged intermarriage on the assumption that he would thereby gain more Frenchmen under his rule, but English policy was conditioned by the memory of social experiments in the Irish plantations; Roanoke, Jamestown, Plymouth, and Massachusetts Bay enforced segregation for purposes of security. Nevertheless, whether or not Englishmen "became Indians," they certainly mingled their genes with those of Indians to the extent that tribal membership is nowadays defined in terms of fractions of "blood."77

Parkman conceded, "It may be that the difference in historical antecedents would alone explain the difference of character between the rival colonies," only to reject the explanation. "There are deeper causes, the influence of which went far to determine the antecedents themselves." What were these deeper causes? "The Germanic race, and especially the Anglo-Saxon branch of it, is peculiarly masculine, and therefore, peculiarly fitted for self-government. It submits its actions habitually to the guidance of reason, and has the judicial faculty of seeing both sides of a question. The French Celt is cast in a different mould.... He delights in abstractions and generalizations, cuts loose from unpleasing facts, and roams through an ocean of desires and theories."78 The hint is broad: the French were racially effeminate. It is not a slip: elsewhere he remarked that though Canada had caught France's corruptions, "she had caught nothing of its effeminacy."79

Race distinguished all peoples so that no historical rule could apply in the same way to all. Even such near neighbors, geographically and historically, as England and France produced quite different colonial

76 Pontiac, I, 83-84. 77 Segregation was enforced on English colonials as a matter of policy. It was not

something inherently "racial." See Nicholas Canny, "The Permissive Frontier: Social Control in English Settlements in Ireland and Virginia, I550-i650," in K. R. Andrews, N. P. Canny, and P.E.H. Hair, eds., The Westward Enterprise: English Activities in Ireland, the Atlantic, and America, 1480- I650 (Detroit, Mich., I 97 9), I 7-44. Jennifer S. H. Brown has distinguished in illuminating detail the effects of official pressure on Englishmen's attitudes toward synethnic children in Canada (Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country [Vancouver, B.C., ig80]). J. Leitch Wright, Jr., describes the emergence of "This 'New American' " in terms very different from Crevecoeur's (The Only Land They Knew: The Tragic Story of the American Indians in the Old South [New York, I 98 I], chap. io). For patterns of liaison in the American West see William R. Swagerty, "Marriage and Settlement Patterns of Rocky Mountain Trappers and Traders," Western Historical Quarterly, XI (I 980), I 59-i80. The political necessity to enforce segregation in America was older than slavery and Jim Crow.

78 Old Regime, 464-465. 79 Montcalm, I, 2 5.




offspring: New England represented "liberty"; New France "absolutism." "Each followed its natural laws of growth, and each came to its natural result.... New England was pre-eminently the land of material progress. ... We turn to New France, and all is reversed."80 This contrast between liberty and absolutism, which Parkman frequently invoked, was inherent in the natures of the peoples. "It is easy to ascribe [variations] to a difference of political and religious institutions; but the explanation does not cover the ground.... Freedom is for those who are fit for it; the rest will lose it, or turn it to corruption.'81 Freedom was not mere absence of restraint and had nothing in common with anarchy and license. True freedom, rational in essence, was the ability to perceive natural law and act in accord with it. This was not to be confused with living as a child of nature, like Indians. The secret of the superiority of English civilization was "rational and ordered liberty" and led to "that height and force of individual development which is the brain and heart of civilization."82

Progress was for the free, freedom was for those who were racially fit for it, and above all others the land of the fit was New England. "Under the hard and repellant surface of New England society lay the true foundation of a stable freedom,-conscience, reflection, faith, patience, and public spirit."83 However, when Parkman applied the Social Darwin- ian phrase "survival of the fittest" to Indians, the qualities specified for them were rather different from New England's virtues of fitness: "With the primitive Indian, the fittest was the hardiest, fiercest, most adroit, and most wily."84

Fitness was a matter of class as well as race. Throughout his life Parkman evinced an attitude of censorious contempt for the lower orders of society, even when he perceived them as racially similar to himself. "Is it not true," he asked in an early journal, "that the lower you descend in education and social position, the more vicious men become?" He could not understand what sympathies "any ordinary man of high education" could have with "the brutish clods who were my fellow passengers across the Alleghan- ies."85 On his journey to the Dakotas his guide was a lower-class French frontiersman with whom he had, as he believed, "hardly a feeling in common.... [B]etween him and me there was no other bond of sympathy than the slender and precarious one of a kindred race."86

Acceptance of a life of labor was contemptible rather than respectable.

80 Pioneers, xx-xxi. 81 Old Regime, 463. 82 Ibid., 468. 83 Ibid., 464. 84Montcalm, I, 2I7. 85 Wade, ed., Parkman Journals, II, 406, 408. These remarks were written in

i846. Earlier, in i842, Parkman sneered at inhabitants near Lake George as "a race of boors about as uncouth, mean, and stupid as the hogs they seem chiefly to delight in" (ibid., I, 53). So much for the hardy pioneers.

86Oregon Trail, 223.



FRANCIS PARKMAN 323

Parkman looked at the laborious farmers of colonial Pennsylvania and saw only "a swarm of German peasants . .. who for the most part were dull and ignorant boors, like some of their descendants."87 So much for the agricultural wizardry of the Pennsylvania Dutch. In the backbreaking toil of the frontiersmen and women celebrated by a thousand odes to the spirit of the pioneers, Parkman was blind to the creation of a great nation; his fastidious eye dwelt only on the untidy aspects of the scene that seemed to him "repulsive."188

The labor of the lower classes was necessary, but allowing them voices in their own government was "the source of all the dangers which threaten the United States."89 This remark in private correspondence was followed by published denunciation of the "hordes of native and foreign barbarians, all armed with the ballot." They were "an invasion of peasants . . , the barbarians of civilization that form the substratum of great industrial communities," debased "masses of imported ignorance and hereditary ineptitude."90 It is an interesting twist of thought: though civilization had conquered savagery in the wilderness, the struggle was not over because that sinister spirit of the wilderness was invading civic strongholds with the "barbarians of civilization."

Women, too, were unfit. Parkman battled against women's suffrage with arguments so fantastic that even an apologetic biographer acknowledged them to "wear a ludicrous enough air. "91 In Montcalm and Wolfe he blamed the carnage of the Seven Years' War on the "feminine pique, revenge, or vanity" of "two empresses and a concubine,"92 and he concluded that the victory of Frederick the Great had foiled "the rage of the two empresses and the vanity and spite of the concubine."93 This in the history reckoned as Parkman's masterpiece!

Women's "attractive though intricate" minds could be directed and controlled by men who studied the means, among whom the Jesuits, with their confessionals, were preeminent.94 "The sagacious fathers, mindful of every spring of influence, had deeply studied the mazes of feminine psychology, and then, as now, were favorite confessors of the fair."95 It would appear that the way to understanding women led through celibacy.

87Pontiac, II, 9 I.

88Montcalm, I, 347. 89 Wilbur R. Jacobs, ed., Letters of Francis Parkman, 2 vols. (Norman, Okla.,

i960), II, 69. 90 Francis Parkman, "The Failure of Universal Suffrage," North American Review,

CXXVII (i878), 2, 4, IO. 91 Howard Doughty, Francis Parkman (New York, i962), 33I. Parkman's

article on "The Woman Question" aroused rebuttal from Julia Ward Howe, T. W. Higginson, Lucy Stone, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Wendell Phillips (ibid.).

92 Montcalm, I, 365-366, 368. 93 Ibid., 424. 94 Jesuits, 29 !, 280; Old Regime, 4I7. 95 Pioneers, 307.




From the Jesuits' chaste intimacy came powerful female support for missions to the Indians, but with little credit to the devotees. "The pious flame, fanned by the Jesuits, spread through hall and boudoir, and fair votaries of the Loves and Graces found it a more grateful task to win heaven for the heathen than to merit it for themselves."96 Among Parkman's stylistic accomplishments was a mastery of slur.

The one constant running through these disparate hierarchical order- ings is moralistic: the rankings always imply virtue and good at the highest level, and vice and evil at the bottom. Even "the milder races" suffered from the bane of "effeminate vices." Always, however, Providence decreed that the good must emerge victorious from its titanic struggles with evil.97 "Acting at the source of life, instruments otherwise weak become mighty for good and evil, and men, lost elsewhere in the crowd, stand forth as agents of Destiny. In their toils, their sufferings, their conflicts, momentous questions were at stake, and issues vital to the future world,-the prevalence of races, the triumph of principles, health or disease, a blessing or a curse."98

Plainly enough, such rhetoric was the product of Parkman's imagination rather than research in all those hundreds of volumes of transcripts that he collected. Destiny is always clearest in hindsight, and those specified "issues" were imposed upon the data rather than drawn from empirical reality. Parkman's categories are hollow vessels in more than one sense. He "proved" his dicta by mutilation of evidence, devices of rhetoric, and smotheration of facts under abstractions. Besides these, he availed himself of the time-tested theological tool: spirit. In its happy incorporeal state, spirit can be made to do whatever one desires. Assertion alone establishes its existence; no one can disprove it. Parkman was not interested in Hegelian systematic exposition of spirit doctrine; his spirits were simply called on to perform miscellaneous tasks that would have daunted a researcher. His Indians have "the spirit of the wilderness" or "a spirit of conquest and havoc."99 Canadians have "a spirit of insubordination" but also "spiritual deference" and "hardy spirit"-all in one paragraph.100 Another paragraph gives New England "a democratic spirit" and Virginia's aristocracy "a bold spirit of independence."101 Pennsylvania is "feudal in form, and not in spirit; Virginia in spirit and not in form; New England in neither; and New York largely in both."'102 This is history from Delphi at its most oracular.

To what extent is it possible to distinguish between Parkman's precepts and his prejudices? It must be acknowledged that he consulted respected

96Ibid., 292. 97Jesuits, 552-553; Pontiac, I, 45. 98 Pioneers, xix. 99 Pontiac, I, 3; Half-Century, I, 278. 100 Montcahrn, I, 2 5-26. 101 Ibid., 32-33. 10 Ibd. 3 5 -



FRANCIS PARKMAN 32 5

contemporary scientists and that there was plenty of scientific sanction for rank-ordering races, sexes, and social classes. If he had not mangled the evidence of his own sources, one might forgive him for being taken in by the impressive trickery of Samuel George Morton, the Philadelphia physician who collected and measured skulls in order to distinguish the "moral" characteristics of races.103 Parkman was impressed by Morton's finding that the brains of "wild" Indians were excessively large in "the region of the animal propensities."'104 The work of Morton and his craniologist disciples demonstrates once again the old adage that there are lies, damn lies, and statistics. In the words of Harvard's historian of science Stephen Jay Gould, Morton "finagled" and "juggled" his numbers to prove his preconceptions. He presented his raw data of skull measure- ments honestly but manipulated them statistically quite otherwise.105 Morton's special importance in the background of Parkman's work lies in his famous reputation and his reliance on racial categorization, as shown especially by his finding that "the intellectual faculties" of American Indians "appear to be of a decidedly inferior cast when compared with those of the Caucasian or Mongolian races."'106 Caucasians had "the highest intellectual endowments," according to Morton, and American Indians were "averse to cultivation, and slow in acquiring knowledge; restless, revengeful, and fond of war."'107 In one form or another, all these notions found their way into Parkman's pages, and Morton's impact on Parkman's ideas was increased by Parkman's friendship with the archaeol- ogist Ephraim G. Squier, who admired Morton as the greatest of contemporary ethnologists and who himself became a founder of the American Ethnological Society.108

Anthropologists nowadays prefer, for obvious reasons, to pass over Morton's former designation as the founder of American anthropology;109

103 William Stanton, The Leopard's Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in America, 1815-59 (Chicago, 1960), 33-34.

104Jesuits, 32fn. 105Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York, i98i), 68-69. It is worth

recalling that racism can be supported intellectually only by misinformation. Cf. the UNESCO statements on race by social scientists, physical anthropologists, and geneticists in Ashley Montagu, Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, 4th ed. rev. (Cleveland, Ohio, i964), Appendix A.

106 Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, Mass., i98i), I 27.

107 Stanton, Leopard's Spots, 33. 108Ibid., 83, 99; Horsman, Race, I25; Doughty, Parkman, I45; Wade, ed.,

Parkman Journals, I, 365, n. I.

109 Nineteenth-century anthropology held race as its thematic concept. Franz Boas revolutionized the discipline in the 20th-century United States by rejecting race and racist ideology for which he substituted the culture concept now dominant. Anthropologists are now as embarrassed about the former eminence of Morton as historians should be about their praise of Parkman. See George W. Stocking, Jr., Race, Culture, and Evolution: Essays in the History of Anthropology




they award that honorable title instead to Lewis Henry Morgan, also an amateur, whose profession was corporation law. Morgan published his first book, The League of the Ho-di-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois, in I85 I, the same year that Parkman published his first history, The Conspiracy of Pontiac, but Parkman had already read Morgan's articles in the American Review for I847. The two men corresponded, and Parkman publicly praised Mor- gan's "invaluable addition to this department of knowledge,"110 but he picked over Morgan's materials with a jaundiced eye. In Jesuits, for example, some of Parkman's findings are almost a paraphrase of Morgan. "Where there was no property worthy the name, authority had no fulcrum and no hold." "Would the Iroquois, left undisturbed to work out their own destiny, ever have emerged from the savage state? Advanced as they were beyond most other American tribes, there is no indication whatever of a tendency to overpass the confines of a wild hunter and warrior life."111

Morgan shared many of the race conceptions common in his era1l2 but had a humanitarian side that impelled him to write his League "to encourage a kinder feeling towards the Indian" and to affirm that "too much cannot be said of the teachableness of the Indian, and of his aptitude to learn when subjected to systematic discipline."113 Parkman preferred Morton's view that Indians were racially inferior in intellect.

Morgan flatly denied Parkman's fundamental axiom that the Indian "will not learn the arts of civilization, and he and his forest must perish together."114 Emphasizing his rejection with italics, Morgan wrote: "The destiny of the Indian is extermination. This sentiment .., is ... founded upon erroneous views."115 Parkman responded generally with a note in

(New York, i968); Montagu, Man's Most Dangerous Myth, esp. chap. 2; and Alexander Lesser, "Boas, Franz," in David L. Sills, ed., International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, I7 vols. (New York, i968), II, 99-Iio. See also Francis Jennings, "A Growing Partnership: Historians, Anthropologists and American Indian History," Ethnohistory, XXIX (i982), 2I-34.

110 Morgan, League of the Ho-di-no-sau-nee, or Iroquois, intro. William N. Fenton (New York, i962 [orig. publ. Rochester, N.Y., i85I]); Pontiac, I, I4n.

"'Jesuits, 58, 59; cf. parallel passages in Morgan, League, 57, I4I, I43. Like Parkman, Morgan believed that "no people" had "more character, more civilization, more majesty of intellect, for achievements in legislation, science and learning, than our parent, Anglo-Saxon race" (ibid., I35). Oddly, Parkman had stressed Iroquois horticulture in his first history, but under Morgan's influence he later emphasized the dead-end quality of the "hunter state." In this respect, both men preferred theory over documented fact. Parkman's theory was Social Darwinism; Morgan's was cultural evolution. They converged because the Iro- quois as tillers of the soil fitted badly into Morgan's elaborate scheme. Pontiac, i 9, 26; Morgan, Ancient Society, or, Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization (New York, i877).

112 Cf. Jennings, Ambiguous Iroquois Empire, chap. 2. 113 Morgan, League, ix, 454. 114 Pontiac, I, 3. 115 Morgan, League, 45 7.



FRANCIS PARKMAN 327

Jesuits giving "emphatic testimony" to the value of Morgan's researches but "often differing widely from Mr. Morgan's [unspecified] conclu- sions. "116

Yet another "father of American ethnology" was Albert Gallatin, whose work was also consulted by Parkman. Gallatin denounced "allegations of superiority of race and destiny" as so many "pretences under which to disguise ambition, cupidity, or silly vanity."117 In the matter of race, Parkman thus had a choice of authorities. For interpretation he embraced Morton whose "science" was skulls rather than Indians; he rejected Morgan's cultural evolution that posited development of Indian culture by instruction; and he ignored the strictures against race of Gallatin, whose studies of Indian languages were the most comprehensive of their day. It seems fair to say that his selective use of his authorities' findings demonstrates the overriding power of his prejudices. Where choice exists, responsibility follows; Parkman's responsibility is magnified by his ma- nipulation and mutilation of source evidence.

For Parkman, race was more than a category of thought; it was an obsession. So obsessed was he with his ideas of racial division and inequality-and so indifferent to biology though he professed horticulture for a year on Harvard's faculty-that he distinguished even hybrid roses from those with "pure blood."'118 To be sure, he explained his meaning. From his avocation of gardening he drew lessons for history. Ruthlessness of selection and rejection would achieve triumphs in the culture of roses; he concluded therefore that the same principles would achieve beautifica- tion, enlargement, and strengthening of "all things living, in the world of mind or of matter." Similarly in his histories, Parkman identified the superior "bloods" of mankind and anathematized others as unfit to live. Yet his expressions of bias have been waved aside on such grounds as that they "usually occupy harmless nooks and corners where they cause little damage." Even more remarkable is the judgment that "in the total context of Parkman's histories, this frank taking of a stand is actually a technique of impartiality, disengaging the historical imagination from 'ideology,' so to speak, for its task of re-creation.'"19

In an age as devoted to scientific truth as was the nineteenth century, myths remained as functional as in any other era, but they were obliged to

116 Jesuits, 44n. 117 Gallatin is cited in Pontiac and Jesuits; see the indexes. He is quoted on race

in Reginald Horsman, "Scientific Racism and the American Indian in the Mid- Nineteenth Century," American Quarterly, XXVII (I975), i68. The quotation is from private correspondence, but it reflects an attitude fundamental to Gallatin's published scholarship. Cf. Gallatin, "Synopsis of the Indian Tribes," Am. Antiq. Soc., Archaeologia Americana, 11 (I836), I-422.

118 Professorship: Jacobs, ed., Parkman Letters, II, 47-48; roses: Parkman, The Book of Roses (Boston, i866), ioo. Italics in original.

119 Otis A. Pease, Parkman's History: The Historian as Literary Artist (New Haven, Conn., I953), 52; Doughty, Francis Parkman, 252.



3 28 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY

hide behind masks. Bards had passed out of regard as impractical fellows who made up idle tales, while the truths of science were so much more wondrous. But a bard was born in Boston and schooled at Harvard, and when he grew to his full powers he created the grand new epic myth called France and England in North America. In the manner of bards, Francis Parkman permitted neither logic nor truth to inhibit his epic. Invoking Providence, race, spirit, and the inevitability of progress, he sang the glories of his people and their most splendid prototypes, centered, not by chance, in Boston. The American reading public, reared on the doctrine that God had chosen well-born Americans to inherit the earth, had no trouble substituting terms so that their happy lot should be called inevitable instead of predestined; and, as science seemed to have conquered theology, they easily submitted to glory by race instead of grace.

A semi-invalid himself, Parkman was in no position to assist natural selection actively in choosing the fittest breed of men as he did roses; but as historian he set himself the task of distinguishing the superior strains of mankind from all the others unfit to thrive or even to live. The triumph of civilization and progress, the epic of heroic genocide, were in one aspect only the maturest flowering of this most un-Voltairean gardener.

Like the theologians whose ancient myth he adapted, Parkman sang an epic struggle between good and evil, salvation and perdition. In one form or another this myth exerted power for thousands of years, and still does. Parkman brought it down from the realm of poetry and theology, located it in North America, gave its actors the names of familiar men and women, buttressed its lessons with a tendentious selection of the biological and social science of his day, and affirmed that it was all historical fact. In forcing the evidence to fit the myth he did neither more nor less than the monkish brethren who scraped false doctrine from their parchment gospels to replace it with what they knew was truth. Devotees bend fact to faith and swear to its validity. Parkman's faith was a secular religion called Social Darwinism.120 It was and is an ideology in which the success of power proves its sanctity and the condition of the fallen demonstrates their ill worth. For a nation of ambivalent conquerors, its solace has been great.

But what kind of history is this? A standard worth thinking about was laid down by Frederick Jackson Turner: "It cannot be too strongly stated that whatever criticisms are to be made on Parkman's work must come chiefly from considerations of what the function of history really is, and of what are the true ideals of society."'121 By that standard, the adulation of Francis Parkman has implications not pleasant to contemplate.

120 Incomprehensibly, Parkman is missing from Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, i860-1915, rev. ed. (Boston, I955 [orig. publ. Philadelphia, I944]). Hofstadter chose to take up John Fiske as the historian representing the Social Darwinian strain of thought, but lightweight Fiske trumpeted his discipleship to Parkman. John Fiske, "Francis Parkman," Atlantic Monthly, LXXIII (i894), 664-674, which is almost identical to his "Introductory Essay," in The Works of Francis Parkman, Champlain ed., 20 vols. (Boston, i897- I898), I, xi-xli.

121 Turner, "Francis Parkman and His Work," Dial, XXV (i898), 453.

