George Bancroft (October 3, 1800 -- January
17, 1891), was a Secretary of the Navy,
Secretary of War and a foreign diplomat
for the United States. But he is best known
as the historian who wrote the ten-volume
History of the United States, a
documentary of the American people and its
government and history.
Bancroft was born in Worcester,
Massachusetts. His father, Aaron Bancroft,
was a Unitarian minister, and had served
as a soldier on the American side in the
Revolutionary War. Bancroft was educated
initially at the Exeter Academy, a
prep school in Exeter, New Hampshire,
and then at Harvard University. He
then commenced graduate studies in Europe at
Heidelberg, Gottingen, and Berlin.
While in Berlin, he studied history under
the German historian
Arnold Hermann Ludwig Heeren, and he
developed an appreciation for historical
scholarship and the need for historical
interpretation based upon
primary historical documents
and accounts. His work in Gottingen would
lead him to his life's work, a study of the
history of the United States.
He returned to the U.S. in 1822, and entered
the clergy as his father wanted. However, he
made for a poor preacher, particularly since
he was mainly a humanist in thinking. He
started working as a tutor at Harvard, but
again found this unsatisfactory, mainly because
of his philosophical differences with the
University. As a result of this, he founded a
new school, the Round Hill School in
Northampton, Massachusetts in 1823.
Several other Harvard graduates participated
in its founding and early history, including
the librarian Joseph Green Cogswell, and
the astronomer Benjamin Pierce. The Round
Hill School had a very rigorous curriculum
for young boys, equivalent to modern
high school, and was one of the first in
the United States to concentrate on students
between elementary and middle school education,
and more formal university and prep school
education. Quite an accomplishment for someone
who was only 23 at the time.
Bancroft began his literary work while managing
his school. His earliest works were on classical
studies, including a new edition and translation
of Heeren's History of the states of
antiquity, regarding the ancient Greek
democracies. He also turned his interest in
history towards analyzing the history of the
United States, a nation less than fifty years
old at that time. One of his earliest articles
on American History, in 1831, was more a
political tract than history -- a criticism of
the Bank of the United States -- and one which
ran contrary to his Federalist family heritage.
After this, Bancroft switched allegiance from
the Federalists to the Democrats, and remained
one for the remainder of his life. His article
on the constitutionality of the Bank was followed
by more scholarly work, including his History
of the colonization of the United States,
which covered the history of what would become
the United States to 1748; eventually, this
became the first volume of the larger History
of the United States. The book was first
published in 1834, when he was only 33 years old.
He continued to release new volumes at irregular
intervals throughout his life, with the final,
ten-volume set published in 1882. It is
because of this work that Bancroft was considered
one of the best historians of the United States
during the nineteenth century.
He also entered politics and government
service (as a Democrat) shortly after his work
on the Bank of the United States appeared;
he was elected to the Massachusetts
legislature, and nominated for the
Massachusetts Secretary of State, though
he refused both offices. He was then
appointed to head the Port Authority of
Boston by President Martin Van Buren.
In 1844, he ran for Governor as a Democrat,
but was defeated by George Nixon Briggs.
After this loss, James K. Polk appointed
Bancroft the Secretary of the Navy. Though
Bancroft only remained in this position for
a little over a year, he founded the
United States Naval Academy at Annapolis.
He also gave the order for the US Navy to
seize Mexican ports in California at the
opening of the Mexican-American War, and
after being (briefly) appointed the interim
Secretary of War, ordered Zachary Taylor
into Mexico. Following his time as Secretary,
he served as part of our diplomatic corps in
London, before leaving public service (for
the first time) in 1849. However, he
remained well-known and well-respected among
historians and government officials alike. He
was asked by Congress to write and deliver
the official eulogy for Abraham Lincoln,
following Lincoln's assassination in 1865.
Despite being a Democrat (Lincoln was a
Republican), Bancroft was staunchly
anti-slavery and pro-Union (as his love of
American History would suggest), and he
supported Lincoln and the Union cause during
the Civil War. He delivered Lincoln's
eulogy before Congress in February of 1866,
ten months after Lincoln was killed. However,
this wasn't Bancroft's first eulogy of a
President -- he also eulogized Andrew Jackson
in 1845.
He later re-entered public service, serving as a
diplomat to the German government in Berlin from
1867 to 1874. During his tenure in Berlin, he
served as the American representative in the
dispute between Great Britain and the United
States over the San Juan Islands on the west
coast of the United States. The dispute had
been simmering since 1846, and had nearly come
to blows over (of all things) the killing of a
pig in 1859. A temporary compromise was
agreed to where both the United States and the
British would settle on the island. But in
1872, their arbiter, Emperor William I of
Germany, ruled in favor of the U.S., granting the
San Juan Islands to the United States.
After Bancroft's (final) retirement from government
service he continued his studies of American
history, including the publication of his complete
History of the United States in 1882. He was
later elected the president of the newly-created
American Historical Association, a scholarly
association devoted to the history of our country.
He held the post from 1885 to 1886, and
remained on the board until he died. He died in
Washington, D.C. in January of 1891, but was
buried in his birthplace of Worcester, Massachusetts.
In honor of Bancroft's service to the Navy and to
the country, the United States Navy named several
ships after him. The most recent of these was
the ballistic missile submarine
USS George Bancroft (SSBN 643), which served
as part of the United States nuclear deterrent
from 1966 to 1993. It has since been decommissioned,
and its sail is exhibited at the St. Mary's Submarine
Museum in Georgia.
http://www.2020site.org/literature/george_bancroft.html
http://www.theaha.org/info/AHA_History/gbancroft.htm
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Acropolis/5148/bancroft_george_on_abraham_lincoln.html
http://wwwshs1.bham.wednet.edu/curric/socst/wa/pig.htm
http://www.encyclopedia.com/articles/01072.html
Encyclopedia Britannica