Francis Parkman Jr.

Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History

6 min readSep 16, 2022

Today is the 199th anniversary of the birth of Francis Parkman Jr. (16 September 1823–08 November 1893), who was born on this date in 1823.

Every account of Parkman notes that Parkman was a Boston Brahmin who went west and experienced (according to the particular account), a culture shock, or a revelation, or disappointment, or something else. For example, Peter Charles Hoffer in his The Historians’ Paradox: The Study of History in Our Time wrote of him:

“Francis Parkman generalized about northeastern Indians partly on the basis of his experiences with the Plains Indians he met as a Harvard undergraduate years before be began writing his magisterial France and England in America. He was also, as a Boston Brahmin, a tried and true Anglophile.” (p. 193)

Here I am reminded of Hayden White’s Metahistory, in which White notes that the mode of emplotment of a history can vary despite the historical content, and indeed the mode of emplotment of Parkman’s going west could be that of drama, tragedy, or comedy, depending upon how a later historian might choose to write up his predecessor Parkman’s journey.

For most subsequent American historians, the proper mode of emplotment to relate the history of Parkman’s histories was that of drama, and sometimes high drama. No one disputes that Parkman was among the most eminent of nineteenth century American historians. Allen Nevins drives this point home by using Parkman as a symbol of traditionalism in history:

“In proportion as history took a scientific coloration, employed mechanistic or evolutionary terms, and abandoned its old preoccupation with individual act and motive, it lost much of its serviceability to democratic needs. In proportion as it turned from Prescott and Parkman, Macaulay and Froude, to the new approaches represented by Buckle, Renan, and Burckhardt (I still speak of changes a century ago), its significance to the ordinary citizen paled.”

Recent invocations of Parkman take on a darker tint, and the mode of emplotment is tragic (or even, one might say, philippic, though that was not one of White’s categories of historical emplotment). In an article from 1985 Francis Jennings quotes Parkman as follows:

“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 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.”

Jennings then goes on to say of Parkman:

“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’.”

“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.”

Parkman made his reputation as an historian with The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky-Mountain Life (1847), noted above, but this was to be merely a prelude to his major work, the multi-volume France and England in North America (1865–1892), also noted above. One could say, a bit tendentiously perhaps, that Parkman depicted the Clash of Civilizations — that is to say, the clash of English civilization with French civilization — in the New World. And this battle of English and French civilization in the New World took place against the background of the wilderness of North America, and its Indian denizens, whom for Parkman represented savagery and the absence of civilization. Not surprisingly, this attitude has come in for much criticism in recent years.

Today the histories that are being written tell the story of the conflict between the ways of Europeans and the ways of the native Americans, as this is what draws our interest, but in the context of the history being written in Parkman’s time, history was, by definition, an account of the doings of societies with written records, and the peoples of North America had not developed written records when the Europeans arrived. Today we accept that histories can be reconstructed after the fact of peoples who wrote no histories of their own, but even this is a construction of a civilization that originally produced history and would like to see every society and every people have a history of their own.

Parkman begins his monumental history with this simple but powerful observation: “It is the nature of great events to obscure the great events that came before them.” American historians have focused on the heroic story of the foundations of the Republic and the building of a new nation, and so have obscured the great events that can before this, but Parkman wanted to dig into the prehistory of the Republic, that is the task of his work. And the whole of Parkman’s France and England in America ends with this observation looking to the future, which was the aforementioned origins and development of the American Republic:

“The disunited colonies became the United States. The string of discordant communities along the Atlantic coast has grown to a mighty people, joined in a union which the earthquake of civil war served only to compact and consolidate. Those who in the weakness of their dissensions needed help from England against the savage on their borders have become a nation that may defy every foe but that most dangerous of all foes, herself, destined to a majestic future if she will shun the excess and perversion of the principles that made her great, prate less about the enemies of the past and strive more against the enemies of the present, resist the mob and the demagogue as she resisted Parliament and King, rally her powers from the race for gold and the delirium of prosperity to make firm the foundations on which that prosperity rests, and turn some fair proportion of her vast mental forces to other objects than material progress and the game of party politics. She has tamed the savage continent, peopled the solitude, gathered wealth untold, waxed potent, imposing, redoubtable; and now it remains for her to prove, if she can, that the rule of the masses is consistent with the highest growth of the individual; that democracy can give the world a civilization as mature and pregnant, ideas as energetic and vitalizing, and types of manhood as lofty and strong, as any of the systems which it boasts to supplant.”

It still remains for the US to prove, or to disprove, that the society it created, and which it has repeated altered in the course of subsequent events, can be consistent with the highest growth of the individual and whether it can give the world a civilization as mature and as pregnant as those civilizations that it has supplanted as a consequence of this material successes.

Further Resources

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Francis Parkman - Wikipedia