The Life of John Ledyard, the American Traveller: Comprising Selections from His Journals and Correspondence
(Originally published in 1828, Jared Sparks' biography of ...)
Originally published in 1828, Jared Sparks' biography of John Ledyard is the most important source on the life of the explorer who has come to be referred to as "America's MarcoPolo."
The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 of 2: Commander-in-Chief of the American Armies, and First President of the United States: To Which Are Added, ... Papers Relating to His Habits Opinions
(Excerpt from The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 of 2: ...)
Excerpt from The Life of George Washington, Vol. 2 of 2: Commander-in-Chief of the American Armies, and First President of the United States: To Which Are Added, His Diaries and Speeches; And Various Miscellaneous Papers Relating to His Habits Opinions
IT being known that the choice of the people had fallen on General Washington for President, he made preparations to begin the duties of the office as soon as his election should be notified to him by the proper authority. The 4th of March was assigned as the day for the meeting of Congress, but a quorum did not come together till a month later. The votes of the electors were then Opened and counted; and~a Special messenger was dispatched to Mount Vernon with a letter from the President of the Senate to General Washington, conveying Official intelligence Of his election. John Adams was at the same time declared to be chosen vice-president of the United States. Two days after receiving the notification, Washington left home for New York, which was then the seat Of Congress.
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The Great Awakening. A History of the Revival of Religion in the Time of Edwards and Whitefield
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This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
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The Writings Of George Washington: Being His Correspondence, Addresses, Messages, And Other Papers, Official And Private, Selected And Published From The Original Manuscripts, Volume 2
(This work has been selected by scholars as being cultural...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Correspondence of the American Revolution: Being Letters of Eminent men to George Washington, From the Time of his Taking Command of the Army to the end of his Presidency
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This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work.
This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Memoirs of the Life and Travels of John Ledyard: From His Journals and Correspondence
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This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work.
As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
The Life of Gouverneur Morris, Vol. 3 of 3: With Selections From His Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from The Life of Gouverneur Morris, Vol. 3 of 3: ...)
Excerpt from The Life of Gouverneur Morris, Vol. 3 of 3: With Selections From His Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers
Your letters Of the fourth and sixteenth Of June give me some intelligence respecting public affairs, and also Of your' family and my other friends. Accept my thanks for that at tention, and make to them my affectionate remembrances.
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This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
Jared Sparks was an American editor and historian. He is remembered for being an American publisher and editor of the North American Review, biographer, and president of Harvard College.
Background
Jared was born on May 10, 1789 in Willington, Connecticut, United States to Eleanor Orcutt, daughter of a substantial farmer. The date is found in his own "Biographical Memoranda". In the baptismal records of the First Church of Willington, the minister wrote "Jared son of by Elinor Orcut July 1789, " but crossed out "son of" and wrote "born" in the blank space.
On December 24 of the same year Eleanor Orcutt married Joseph Sparks, a young Willington farmer, and subsequently bore him nine children. Local tradition has it that Joseph was Jared's father. His maternal grandmother was something of a poet and local prophetess, and his mother a reader of history and philosophy; hence we have sufficient biological explanation of the boy's talents, without recourse to other theories of his paternity.
Education
Before his sixth birthday, Jared was taken in charge by a childless uncle and aunt; and the next winter he had his first schooling. With the temporarily adopted parents, he emigrated to Camden, Washington County, New York, in 1800. Jared spent so much time helping his shiftless uncle, that little opportunity was found for schooling; he remembered reading Guthrie's geography while feeding logs into a saw-mill, and being greatly interested in Franklin's Autobiography. Returning to his parents at Willington in 1805, he so quickly exhausted the resources of the local schools as to be known as "the genius. " The young boy became keenly interested in astronomy, and observed the comet of 1807 with a homemade cross-staff.
At twenty, he began the study of mathematics and Latin with the minister at Willington, the Rev. Hubbell Loomis, paying in part by shingling the parson's barn. Another nearby minister, the Rev. Abiel Abbot, was so favorably impressed with Jared as to obtain him a scholarship at the Phillips Exeter Academy, whither the young man repaired on foot. After two happy and fruitful years there, he entered Harvard College in 1811.
Although several years older than his classmates, and forced to work his way, Sparks was a social as well as a scholastic success.
During the two years 1817-19, Sparks served as science tutor at Harvard while studying at the Harvard Divinity School.
Career
In order to earn money he served during sophomore year as a private tutor at Havre de Grace, Maryland, where he witnessed the plundering of the town by Admiral Cockburn's expedition. His employer wished him to establish a private school; but he returned to Harvard, joined the Phi Beta Kappa, won the Bowdoin prize with an essay on Newton which was regarded as setting a new high mark for undergraduate work, and delivered a commencement part at his graduation in 1815.
During the two years 1817-19 for a short period he was editing the North American Review. On completing his studies and taking a master's degree, the young man received three offers: a comfortable parish in Boston, a professorship at a small college, and the pulpit of the First Independent Church (Unitarian) of Baltimore.
The ministry was never more than a steppingstone for Sparks: in April 1823, greatly to the regret of his congregation, he resigned. It so happened that Edward Everett, editor of the North American Review, was at odds with the "association of gentlemen" who owned it. Sparks first proposed to move the Review to Philadelphia, and let Everett start a rival periodical in Boston; but Everett's restless ambition turned elsewhere. Sparks then purchased the Review on credit for about $10, 000, and edited it for six years, when he sold it for almost double the amount.
Under his vigorous management the North American shook off the dilettante flavor of its youth, and became an equal to the great English and French reviews, remarkable for the quality and range, both geographical and intellectual, of its articles. The editor even subscribed to South American newspapers, and learned Spanish in order to keep his readers in touch with Latin-American affairs; and he was constantly thinking up desirable subjects for articles, and getting them written.
Sparks became a leading social and literary figure in the Boston group that revolved about Prescott, Ticknor, the Eliots, and the Everetts; and The Life of John Ledyard (1828), republished in England, and soon translated into German, gave him an independent literary reputation.
In the meantime Sparks had begun what was destined to be his greatest life work, the publication of the writings of George Washington. Justice Bushrod Washington, the owner of the Washington manuscripts, was won over by an offer to share the profits, through the friendly mediation of Chief Justice Marshall, who also consented to take an equal share, twenty-five percent, with the owner (Bassett, post, p. 80).
In January 1827, Sparks found himself alone at Mount Vernon with the manuscripts. An examination of them extending over three months showed that years would be required for the undertaking; and with the owner's consent, Sparks carried off the entire collection, eight large boxes, picking up on the way to Boston a box of diplomatic correspondence from the Department of State, and the Gates manuscripts from the New York Historical Society. Not content with these, he searched or caused to be searched public and private archives for material, questioned survivors of the Revolution, visited and mapped historic sites.
In 1830, for instance, he followed Arnold's route to Quebec. The first of the twelve volumes of The Writings of George Washington to be published (vol. II) appeared in 1834 and the last (vol. I, containing the biography) in 1837.
In the meantime Sparks had become so enthusiastic over the literary possibilities of the Revolutionary period, as to begin and partially to complete several parallel publications. These included The Life of Gouverneur Morris, The Works of Benjamin Franklin, The Library of American Biography, to which he himself contributed several lives, and The Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution.
In order to obtain material for this last work he visited Europe in 1828-29, and spent several months copying documents in the archives of England and France, which he was probably the first American to enter.
From 1837 to 1840 Sparks served on the Massachusetts Board of Education; but he took slight interest in politics and held no other public office. Only by knowing the paucity and poverty of printed material on the American Revolution before 1830 can one realize the debt that American history owes to Sparks. All his work except that on the Diplomatic Correspondence was done on his own responsibility, and at his own risk, without subsidies or grants or a wealthy patron. The result proved that Sparks knew his public.
These formidable sets of printed letters and documents sold to such an extent as to make a handsome profit for all concerned; and they were a boon to students and writers of history for the next fifty years. Yet Sparks's editorial methods were very bad; for he treated historical documents as if they had been articles or reviews submitted to the North American, using the editorial blue pencil freely.
Observing that Washington in his old age completely rewrote his early letters, Sparks felt obliged to touch up later letters when they appeared to need it; and usually he had only the rough draft, not the letter actually sent, to work from. The harsh and hasty criticism of men and measures, in which the harassed General sometimes indulged, especially those that might arouse sectional animosities, Sparks thought best to gloss over or omit; but no sectional bias was shown in the omissions. Similarly, a strong secession passage was deleted from a letter of Gouverneur Morris, published in the critical year 1832.
With Lord Aberdeen, who gained him access to the Public Record Office, Sparks had a gentleman's understanding that nothing would be published from that source tending to revive angry feelings between the two countries; and the same reticence was applied to documents from the French archives that might injure the traditional friendship. It was customary, in his day, to edit very freely the letters of literary and historical figures before publication; and neither the English nor the American public had acquired a taste for seeing their heroes in the buff.
Thus, in editing The Works of Benjamin Franklin, Sparks omitted the famous definition of chastity, and all other matters of the sort. But Sparks's carelessness respecting the Washington manuscripts is inexcusable. When George Corbin Washington, Justice Washington's heir, sold the "public" papers of the General to the United States, he allowed Sparks to keep "a few autographs" of the "private" papers, and from these Sparks tore out and gave away leaves to friends who desired a specimen of the great man's handwriting.
In 1838 he was offered the Whig nomination for Congress from that district. This he declined in favor of the McLean Professorship of Ancient and Modern History at Harvard, with a salary of $2, 000; he had earlier declined the Alford Professorship of Philosophy. His first course, on the American Revolution, began in March 1839.
Sparks organized a department of history, using young graduates of no special training to teach the younger students out of textbooks, while he lectured to the upper classes and to law students, mostly on American, but occasionally on Greek, history.
On returning to America he did much lyceum and other public lecturing, at New York and elsewhere, when not in residence at Cambridge. The stenographic reports of one of these courses, in the New York Herald, November 8 - December 19, 1841, show that Sparks without sacrificing dignity was a lively and entertaining lecturer.
On February 1, 1849, Sparks was chosen by the governing boards, president of Harvard University. His election was welcomed by the students as a return to the "Augustan Age" of Kirkland after the asperities of the Quincy and the inanities of the Everett administrations. Quite unexpectedly, Sparks attacked the elective system of studies in his inaugural address, which Professor Longfellow considered "very substantial, but retrograde. "
His object appears to have been to substitute definite alternative programs for indiscriminate groupings of course units; but the result was reaction toward the rigidly prescribed course, with recitation sections determined by alphabet rather than proficiency, that had prevailed at Harvard before the reforms associated with George Ticknor.
Although he encouraged a greater use of lectures in instruction, notably in the case of Louis Agassiz and of two young scholars, Josiah P. Cooke and Francis J. Child, who owed their first professorial appointments to him, the McLean chair of history remained vacant; Professor Sparks's promising historical program became President Sparks's first victim.
The Harvard Observatory, the only research unit of the University at that time, was furthered by his influence, and he had the satisfaction of seeing its new plant completed. Sparks was unhappy in the presidential office. By delegating petty disciplinary duties to a lower official he had hoped to find leisure for literary pursuits; and he did manage to finish his Correspondence of the American Revolution and to reply vigorously to Lord Mahon's strictures on his editorial methods.
But new duties arose to fill up the time saved; and, fearing to become completely bogged in administrative routine, he resigned early in 1853. Except for a year in Europe (1857 - 58) where he was much entertained, and had the pleasure of meeting David Livingstone, and reviving the African dreams of his youth, Sparks passed the remainder of his life quietly at Cambridge. For ten years he continued to collect material for his projected history of the Revolution, but nothing was written. Time slipped away rapidly and pleasantly with old friends and new, summer travels with wife and children, and answering the questions of correspondents.
He died of pneumonia at Cambridge on March 14, 1866.
(Excerpt from The Life of Gouverneur Morris, Vol. 3 of 3: ...)
Religion
Although brought up a Calvinist, he yielded to the Unitarian influences at Harvard. Educated at Phillips Exeter Academy and Harvard College, Sparks served as minister of the First Independent Church (Unitarian) from 1819 to 1823.
Views
Sparks believed that patriotism obliged him, when editing source materials, to omit passages likely to cause international ill will, and he sometimes embellished what the Founding Fathers had actually written.
He made omissions without indicating them, standardized spelling and capitalization, and undertook to improve Washington's English. These methods are partly explained by Sparks's editorial experience, partly by his sense of social responsibility. He approached history as a gentleman in the "era of good feeling, " rather than a scientific historian, resolved to tell the truth however unpalatable. He wished to spare the feelings of great men's descendants, and of those who lent him documents.
Quotations:
“It may be a misfortune, that an enlightened public opinion has not led to the establishment of Colleges of the higher order for the education of females, and the time may come when their claims will be more justly valued, and when a wider intelligence and a more liberal spirit will provide for this deficiency. ”
Membership
In 1825 Sparks was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and in 1827 a member of the American Antiquarian Society.
Personality
Sparks’s easygoing ways and “distinguished manners” (Samuel Eliot Morison) inspired more students from the South to come to Harvard.
Jared Sparks loved people, his zest for improvement was combined with delightful social qualities, and in whatever community he found himself, from earliest youth, he took a leading part and made devoted friends.
The portraits of him by Rembrandt Peale (1826), Gilbert Stuart (1828), and Thomas Sully (1831), show him to have been remarkably handsome, with dark curly hair, brown eyes, and a Roman nose; robust in physique; and having the general air of an intelligent and alert aristocrat. His tastes, however, remained simple; he made no concealment of his humble origin, and kept in touch with childhood friends.
He seems to have impressed rather than interested the students; and although we find him lecturing on "the nature of historical evidence, and the rules of historical composition, " he trained no disciples, and his professorship proved to be a false dawn for modern history in American universities.
Interests
He was also a pioneer purchaser and collector of manuscript Americana.
Connections
On October 16, 1832, he married Frances Anne Allen of Hyde Park, New York, and brought her to live in the historic Craigie House at Cambridge. She died in 1835. On May 21 he married an heiress twenty years his junior, Mary Crowninshield Silsbee, daughter of Senator Nathaniel Silsbee of Salem, and brought her to live in a large house near the College Yard.