Francis Parkman

Francis Parkman (1823-1893) was the greatest of the Romantic historians of 19th century America, specializing on the history of Canada and colonial wars. Despite the handicap of poor health and weak eyesight, he displayed a total command of the sources and a brilliant writing style that engages the modern reader. Liberals strongly dislike Parkman's conservative tone

Historian

Parkman's The Oregon Trail (1849), based on traversing the actual trail, exemplifies how 19th-century eastern male readers observed western violence to purge themselves of femininity.

Parkman followed his sources faithfully in composing his lively, episodic narratives. He eulogized heroic pioneers who struggled to survive in American and Canadian forests. Parkman's heroes were upper-class Frenchmen and Anglo-Americans on whom he conferred courage and other special qualities that were essential to coping with North American wilderness. Parkman identified with such people and sought fame by depicting himself as someone who overcame adversity to write about historical events.

Before his health collapsed, Parkman was a vigorous traveler in love with the west. As he traveled westward on the Oregon Trail in 1846, Parkman closely observed the Native Americans he encountered along the way. As his writings, including The Oregon Trail (1849), suggest, his commentary to some extent reflects a desire to distinguish between white and Indian ways of life and culture; but, like many other writers who wrote about the westward journey, he used the experience to engage in a critique of Yankee mores. Parkman found himself attracted to many aspects of Native American life even as he maintained the ultimate superiority of white culture, and pondered the extent to which his experiences altered his perspective and led to his own adoption of some Native ways.

Parkman felt that specific behaviors were correlated with ethnicity, and that the most favored behavior was exhibited by Yankees of New England. The basis of this preferred behavior was self-restraint and acceptance of responsibility, which New England “brahmins” (leaders such as Parkman himself) were capable of to a degree unreachable in other communities because, he felt, other ethnic groups were not endowed by God with the requisite qualities. Thus, the native leader Pontiac, although seen as "brave," "commanding," and "magnanimous," was only pretending to possess these qualities.

New France

His seven volumes on New France represent the most comprehensive history of that French colony.

In The Jesuits in North America he praises the violent iroquois, allies of the British, for stopping French expansion and limiting the power of the Jesuits, thus opening the way for liberty and Republicanism in North America:

"Liberty may thank the Iroquois, that, by their insensate fury, the plans of her adversary were brought to nought, and a peril and a woe averted from her future. They ruined the [fur] trade which was the life-blood of New France; they stopped the current of her arteries, and made all her early years a misery and a terror. Not that they changed her destinies. The contest on this continent between Liberty and Absolutism was never doubtful; but the triumph of the one would have been dearly bought, and the downfall of the other incomplete. Populations formed in the ideas and habits of a feudal monarchy, and controlled by a hierarchy profoundly hostile to freedom of thought, would have remained a hindrance and a stumbling-block in the way of that majestic experiment of which America is the field. The Jesuits saw their hopes struck down; and their faith, though not shaken, was sorely tried. The Providence of God seemed in their eyes dark and inexplicable; but, from the stand-point of Liberty, that Providence is clear as the sun at noon. Meanwhile let those who have prevailed yield due honor to the defeated. Their virtues shine amidst the rubbish of error, like diamonds and gold in the gravel of the torrent.”

Parkman's books

• The Oregon trail: sketches of prairie and Rocky-mountain life‎ (1st ed. 1849; 1920 edition online) 479 pages full text online
• The Pioneers of France in the New World (1865) full text online
• The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century (1867) full text online
• La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (1869) full text online
• The Old Régime in Canada (1874) full text online
• Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV (1877) full text online
• A Half Century of Conflict (1892) full text online
• Montcalm and Wolfe: The French and Indian War. (1884), full text online
• David Levin, ed. Parkman: France and England in North America, (2 vol. Library of America, 1983)

Further reading

• Eccles, W. J. "The history of New France according to Francis Parkman," William and Mary Quarterly ((1961): 163–75, hostile attack by a rival
• Farnham, Charles Haight. A Life of Francis Parkman. (1900).
• Gale, Robert L. Francis Parkman (1973)
• Jacobs, Wilbur R. Francis Parkman, Historian as Hero: The Formative Years. (1991). 237 pp., standard scholarly study
• Wade, Mason. Francis Parkman, heroic historian (1942).
• Wish, Harvey. The American Historian: A Social-intellectual History of the Writing of the American Past (1960) ch 6 on Parkman.
• Additional Online Books Regarding Parkman