John Stevens Cabot Abbott

Background

John Stevens Cabot Abbott was born on September 18, 1805 in Brunswick, Maine, United States. He was the son of Jacob Abbot 2nd and Betsey Abbot, and brother of Gorham Dummer Abbot and Jacob Abbott. Jacob and John added a "t" to the family name.

The Abbot household represented the best and gentlest tradition of New England Puritanism.

Education

Abbott received his schooling at Hallowell and Portland Academies, and entered Bowdoin College in the class of 1825, which included Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. He then for three years pursued a theological course at Andover Seminary, graduating in 1829.

Career

Abbott served for a year as principal of the academy in Amherst, Massachussets and and was engaged also in the establishment of Sunday-schools along the southern shore of Cape Cod.

In 1829 he entered upon his first pastorate, in Worcester, Massachussets, where he was ordained January 28, 1830. He held pastorates, successively, at the Central Calvinistic Church, Worcester (1829-1834); the Eliot Congregational Church, Roxbury (1835-1841); and the First Congregational Church, Nantucket (1841-1843). A restless energy unfitted him for long-continued service in one place; it appeared also in his type of pulpit oratory--strongly evangelistic, little philosophical, but well supplied with historical illustrations and aiming chiefly at practical piety.

His career as an author had begun, in 1833, with the publication of The Mother at Home, or the Principles of Maternal Duty Familiarly Illustrated, a compilation of a series of lectures before the mothers' association of his parish.

In 1843 Gorham D. Abbot, with the cooperation of Jacob and Charles, founded a seminary for young ladies in New York City. It was called by various titles--usually "Abbott's Institution". In December they were joined by John S. C. Abbott, who devoted himself chiefly to the affairs of this school for the next eight or ten years of his life.

In 1853 he returned to Brunswick, to educate his son at Bowdoin, and to make use of the college library in completing his life of Napoleon, which was appearing in Harper's Magazine (1851-1854) and was achieving for that periodical its initial success. The book, The History of Napoleon Bonaparte, was published in 1855 and enjoyed an enormous popularity, though it was also the most severely censured of his writings. It is marked by extravagant eulogy of Napoleon, whom Abbott portrays as "more than a hero, more than an Emperor, " and again as "a man to whose name alone is attached inexhaustible admiration and imperishable remembrance. " This strain of hero-worship, characteristic of Abbott's enthusiastic temperament, antagonized many American editors and critics, --among them, Horace Greeley and Charles A. Dana; it was even hinted that he had been bribed by French gold.

Returning to the active ministry in 1861, Abbott held for five years the pastorate of the Howe Street Church, New Haven, Connecticut. Meantime he continued with great energy his course of historical writing and publication. Of the numerous works which followed the life of Napoleon, the best-known were: The Empire of Austria (1859), The Empire of Russia (1860), and other. In search of material, Abbott made two trips to France (the first before 1859, and the second in 1867), where he came into friendly relations with the Emperor Napoleon III.

Although his principal effort was put into his European histories, he wrote copiously in other fields, --American history, biography, ethics, religion, popular science, and juvenile literature. Of his ethical works, The Mother at Home had a very considerable vogue both in the United States and in Europe, where it was translated into many languages; and Practical Christianity (1862) also was widely read. A didactic purpose is hardly less pervasive in the histories.

His last literary work, a series called Pioneers and Patriots of America, was written at Fair Haven, Connecticut, where he was minister of the Second Church. In this his last pastorate (1870-1874), his health began to fail, and after a prolonged illness he died, at Fair Haven, in his seventy-second year.

Achievements

• Abbott was a prominent writer of books on Christian ethics, and of popular histories. He is best known as the author of the widely popular History of Napoleon Bonaparte. Also among his principal works are: History of the Civil War in America (1863-1866), and The History of Frederick II, Called Frederick the Great (1871).

Works

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  • The History of the Civil War in America.2 Vols.

    (The History of the civil War in America; comprising a ful...)

  • The Empire of Russia: From the Remotest Periods to the Present Time

    (This work has been selected by scholars as being cultural...)

  • Napoleon Bonaparte

    ( ReadHowYouWant publishes a wide variety of best selling...)

  • Captain William Kidd, and Others of the Pirates or Buccaneers Who Ravaged the Seas, the Islands, and the Continents of America Two Hundred Years Ago

    (This Elibron Classics edition is a facsimile reprint of a...)

  • Maria Antoinette - Makers of History (Perfect Library)

    ("Maria Antoinette - Makers of History" from John Stevens ...)

  • Daniel Boone the Pioneer of Kentucky

    (This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of th...)

  • The history of Prussia

    (Fascinating account of the Rise of the Prussian Empire. T...)

  • Daniel Boone (Perfect Library)

    ("Daniel Boone" from John Stevens Cabot Abbott. American h...)

  • The Adventures of the Chevalier De La Salle and His Companions, in Their Explorations of the Prairies, Forests, Lakes, and Rivers, of the New World, and ... the Savage Tribes, Two Hundred Years Ago
  • Captain William Kidd and Others of the Pirates or Buccaneers

Views

Quotations: "I have written fifty-four volumes. In every one it has been my endeavor to make the inhabitants of this sad world more brotherly, --better and wiser. "

"Mothers have as powerful an influence over the welfare of future generations as all other earthly causes combined. "

"He who loathes war, and will do everything in his power to avert it, but who will, in the last extremity, encounter its perils, from love of country and of home--who is willing to sacrifice himself and all that is dear to him in life, to promote the well-being of his fellow-man, will ever receive a worthy homage. "

"War is science of destruction. "

"If war has its chivalry and its pageantry, it has also its hideousness and its demoniac woe. Bullets respect not beauty. They tear out the eye, and shatter the jaw, and rend the cheek. "

Connections

On August 17, 1830 Abbott was married to Jane Williams Bourne of New Bedford, Massachussets.

Father:

Jacob Abbot 2nd

Mother:

Betsey Abbot

Spouse:

Jane Williams (Bourne) Abbott

Brother:

Gorham Dummer Abbot

Brother:

Jacob Abbott

Daughter:

Harriett Vaughan (Abbott) Ladd

Son :

Gorham Dummer Abbott

Son :

John Bourne Abbott