Herbert Levi Osgood: An American Scholar 9780231883528

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HERBERT LEVI OSGOOD

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS COLUMBIA

UNIVERSITY

N E W YORK

SALES AGENTS LONDON HUMPHREY

MILFORD

AMEN C O R N E R , E . C . SHANGHAI EDWARD

E V A N S & SONS,

LTD.

3 0 N O R T H SZECHUEN R O A D

HERBERT LEVI OSGOOD AN AMERICAN SCHOLAR

BT

DIXON RYAN FOX

jBtbtfttt COLUMBIA UNIXEHSJTY PRESS lötA Af

ti0ùfenh*d

COPYRIGHT, 1 9 8 4 , BT COLUMBIA

UNIVERSITY

Printed from type.

Published January, 1924.

PRIMTED THE

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P I I MPTOÄ

N O R W O O U

PRESS

MASS

PKE88 USA

TO

PROFESSOR OSGOOD'S STUDENTS THAT SUCCESSION O F EARNEST MEN AND WOMEN FROM FAB AND NEAR WHO KINDLED THEIR TORCHES AT HIS FLAME THIS LITTLE BOOK IS DEDICATED

. . . for historians ought to be precise, faithful, and unprejudiced, and neither interest nor fear, haired nor affection, should make them swerve from the way of truth, whose mother is history, the rival of time, the depositary of great actions, the witness of the past, example to the present, and monitor to the future.—Don Quixote, chapter 9.

NOTE The publication of this short biography was suggested by certain of Professor Osgood's former students, and its cost has been sustained by donations from a number of them, together with the generous aid of the Columbia University Press. In the same spirit the manuscript was typed and retyped by Miss Mary A. Reilly, officesecretary of the history department. It was read and helpfully criticized by several of my colleagues at the University. It is, therefore, on the part of all concerned, a tribute to the memory of a scholar who did much for young historians as well as for the history of the United States. D. R. F. COLUMBIA

UNIVERSITY,

January 1, 1028.

0

CONTENTS PAGE I . YOUTH

13

I I . APPRENTICESHIP

25

I I I . T H E TEACHEB

86

I V . T H E STUDY OF O U B ORIGINS V . PIONEERING

IN

THE

. . .

66

EIGHTEENTH

CENTURY

84

V I . T H E METHOD

109

V I I . T H E SCHOLAR AS CITIZEN V I I I . T H E PERSONAL EQUATION I X . T W O EDITORIAL

122 . . . .

134 157

X . CHRONOLOGY

166

11

HERBERT LEVI OSGOOD A N A M E R I C A N SCHOLAR

I YOUTH

THE writer leaves his own memorial, great or small as it may be. John Milton, who knew somewhat of writing, realized with a poet's understanding that " A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit embalmed and treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life." A seven-volume work of scholarship built by ten thousand days of toil is a monument that speaks eloquently of its author, his Benedictine patience and his wisdom, his breadth and his philosophy, and his unconquerable zeal. The man of action, the statesman, the soldier, the interpretative artist whose achievement passes in a moment, the musician, the great actor, — such men need biographers to set 18

HERBERT LEVI

OSGOOD

down what they have done. But an annotated history needs no history, double record, as it is, of past events and of the process by which the truth about them has been found. And an historian's biography is not likely to make interesting reading, for his external life is not dramatic and one who watched him at his desk turning yellowed sheets of manuscript and printed record and then scribbling notes, relieved from time to time by little journeys to the book-shelf, would soon grow tired of a spectacle so drearily monotonous. The excitement of discovery, the pride of well-considered judgment, the baffling search for logical connection in the evidence, the pain of composition, cannot easily be made the subjects of a narrative; fortunately the reader may surmise them as he follows through the history. Yet this reader's curiosity may not all be slaked by inference; he is likely to desire that the picture of the author which he forms in his mind's eye be filled in by a few external facts, so that he may see 14

YOUTH

more clearly the man with whom he has to deal. Such is the purpose of these pages. No interest is subtracted by the circumstance that in many lines the portrait may seem a genre picture of the American scholar of post-Emersonian days, when colleges of robust moral growth were being fertilized by ideas of research brought from continental Europe and a few great universities were coming into being. An academic life that began in a freshman year of 1873 and wore out just as modern scientists and scholars were giving mighty aid to bring their country to success in a world war, was bound to reflect some of the development of learning in America. A modest exposition of it will contribute also to a clearer understanding of some attitudes and opinions which may be discerned throughout his book. The farm-land of the little town of Canton in the upper Androscoggin valley some years before the Civil War, or now, would seem an unpromising place to develop the taste of a scholar, except 15

HERBERT LEVI OSGOOD

that in this country, whose other name has been Opportunity, such things seem less incongruous than they would to Europeans who connect the tilling of the soil with a fixed class of peasants. Here, where thrift and resolution found no well-clamped lid upon their enterprise, it was the individual will that counted, the will which, according with the fine American tradition, stiffened the desire of a father and a mother that their child should rise beyond them. The farmer and his wife to whom on the ninth of April, 1855, Herbert Osgood was born, were New Englanders of this description, descended from immigrants of the heroic years when King Charles the First tried to break the spirit of his subjects. Successive generations had edged their way north-eastward on the frontier, developing independence and stamina and selfrespect. Stephen Osgood was a quiet man, given to reading books on winter evenings, but steady in the business of drawing food from land. No farmer in the neigh16

YOUTH

borhood was more prompt or thorough than he in the daily tasks of tillage and in the end he earned his way to a competence that eased the last part of his seventy-two years in the humble comfort of a village. Like many men of few words ihe was proud and somewhat sensitive, severe with his own short-comings and now and then worrying in silence over some slight which, very likely, had not been intended; these traits, by inheritance or imitation, were reproduced in his son. Joan Staples, who many years before had married him, was in some respects his complement; she was a bright and bustling little woman with a sparkling interest in her generation far and near. The Portland paper, as often as it could be had, was her mirror of the outside world, and an hour after its arrival she was very ready to discuss the public questions of the day with any who came in. There was a brother older by eleven years, who left home while still a youth; Herbert, then, remained in all the circumstances of an only son. H e was given broad ex17

HERBERT LEVI OSGOOD

emption from the usual farm-boy's chores so that he might apply himself to books, the added labor shouldered by the devoted man and woman who, without foolish indulgence but with all the intelligence they had, were bent on making of their son a man of usefulness and power. Such centering hope and sacrifice might in another stock have resulted in a selfish prig, but the little lad appeared to catch the spirit of responsibility that moved the household. When he had exhausted the resources of the district school the family moved to Wilton, a village of three or four hundred people in a nearby town, where there was a tolerable academy, housed in an abandoned church. Here while the father cultivated a small patch of land the mother gave her further aid of sympathy, stopping now and then from her work among the pots and pans to express a fine disdain of pious ¿Eneas or an unorthodox compassion for Catiline, as the boy read out his slow translations from the kitchen bench. It is not surprising to read in a letter from an 18

YOUTH

old Wilton schoolmate: " A s I recall Osgood as a boy in the early seventies and knew him forty years later, he was just about the same kind of a boy that he was a man." There were vistas opened from the school-room and even the debating club, but the focusing of his ambition came, as so frequently has been the case, from a scholarly minister of the old Congregational church, whose word he hung upon and whose books he borrowed. Himself a graduate of Bowdoin, he told the lad the meaning of a college, a meaning not alone of sports and leisure and gay social customs. Not that the boy despised the play-ground, for he could pitch a ball that made him a reliance when sides were chosen on the lot near the academy, but he easily caught the minister's enthusiasm for a life of study and some sort of literary contribution. The family talked it over, prepared for a little more of selfdenial and decided he should go to Amherst, an institution which they understood could give the solidest education to 19

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be found. After his certificate with honor from the academy he worked a year in private preparation to such purpose that in 1873 he made his way to the distant college, passed the examinations and entered with a creditable standing at the age of eighteen years. In the Amherst of 1873, a score of teachers, many of them ordained to the ministry, were dedicated to the task of making Christian gentlemen out of about three hundred young New Englanders; faith should be strengthened as Greek and chemistry and conic sections were expounded. The prayers of Dr. Stearns, the aged polished Puritan who ruled the college, were answered once again in the spring of 1876 by the ninth and last religious revival of his presidency. In a community so shut off in its little valley the social pressure of enthusiasm becomes a mighty force; the skeptical junior for a moment misdoubted his own doubt and joined the college church. But it must be said that the Apostles' Creed did not take firm hold upon his mind and in after 20

YOUTH life he reviewed the Christian epic with sympathetic interest but without acceptance, and he was not counted among the admirers

of

revivalist

religion,

as

his

chapter on the Great Awakening may reveal.

E v e n then he felt that the college

was far from being perfected by the religious efforts of the faculty and he became the president of the senior class as leader of

a quite secular reformist

movement. One or two personalities upon the faculty impressed him with the dignity and fruitfulness of academic service, chiefly Julius H . Seelye, who at that time combined the duties of professor of philosophy and Member of Congress, who stood for Calvinism at its best and who in Osgood's last year was called to preside over the college. The discipline of the rigid course of study the young man afterward appreciated, but he needed little prodding to apply himself

and he gained much

more from private unrequired reading — philosophy, belles-lettres, biography — in the library, where he worked as an assis21

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tant, than from the professors in the classroom. When he was graduated, fifth in a class of seventy-nine men, he could look back upon a college course which had refined his taste, made possible human friendships that he always prized, and given him opportunities of self-development which he had eagerly embraced; when in 1907 Amherst bestowed upon him a doctorate of laws it honored a loyal son. But the strongest personal influence which Osgood felt at Amherst did not come from the president or from the elderly professors; it was young John W . Burgess, a teacher fresh from study in Germany, who was his real evangelist at that wicket gate. In his course on government taken in the last year the student caught something of the spirit and method of scientific investigation, applied in this case to the fields of public law and history. The ingenuity in finding the right original source, the thoroughness in its examination, the recognition of the significant word, the impartiality of judg22

YOUTH

ment, steadily building out with increment of new truth — this seemed better to him than the literary life of saying well again what had been said before. " We came to the college at the same time," writes Dr. Burgess, " and left it at the same time. Our educational careers were thus peculiarly linked together from the first. I soon discovered in him extraordinary qualities as a student. I was first attracted by his deep earnestness, or, better, seriousness, in the pursuit of his studies. H e appeared to me to be always gazing fixedly and intently at something, with utter self-forgetfulness as well as forgetfulness of his surroundings. I soon learned what that something was, namely, the truth. In other words, he revealed, at the beginning of his college life, the highest qualities of scholarship, viz., the capacity and disposition for earnest, unprejudiced, conscientious research." H e left college with a feeling that his " commencement " must be really a beginning of a scholarly career. Many 23

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other young Americans of the eighteenseventies felt the stirring of a similar ambition; those with family fortune found it difficult enough, those without might well have been discouraged. A t Worcester Academy for two years he taught Roman history, botany, English composition and calisthenics. By tutoring and other employment, here and there, a little store of funds was built up to make his further study possible, but it was easier to get money in this country than the training he desired. Post-graduate courses under Morse at Amherst and under Sumner at Yale sharpened an appetite for more and he resolved to follow Burgess' counsel and strike out for Germany. After a year of further preparation and assiduous study of the language, he set forth across the sea.

24,

II APPRENTICESHIP

IT was Germany at its best that he found in 1882, justifying its new national power with lofty enterprises of the mind. Berlin itself was a revelation of wonder to the young scholar from New England. The stately buildings and the galleries of art spoke of a glorious past; here was history in three dimensions, so much more real than it had seemed in text-books and epitomes. At the splendid concerts, so frequent and so appreciatively attended, he discovered a taste for music that had not been excited by the parlor organs of the Androscoggin valley, but a taste which once realized was to be cherished through a long life as a source of keen enjoyment. The spirit of free inquiry which he found in conversations all about him was a tonic to his mind; learning seemed to have no necessary reference to faith, and there seemed a sharper curios25

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ity as to what the truth was than as to a chain of syllogisms by which some orthodoxy might be proved. I t was rather cruel to contrast Amherst intellectually with Berlin; the two existed for quite different purposes. Osgood listened with respect and admiration to the professors lecturing in the university. Adolph Wagner was expounding his "socialism of the chair"; Schmoller was reviewing the slow development of business organization, Gneist was setting forth the history of the Prussian and the English constitutions; von Treitschke, stone-deaf but fervid in his eloquence, was lecturing on Politik, exalting the state and praising patriotism as " the spirit of the individual cooperating with the Volks-Geist and Volks-Wille." H e listened somewhere to von Sybel appealing for the systematic care of archives, such as he was illustrating with the Prussian records. The prestige and the power for truth (or falsehood) such scholars wielded impressed the young man mightily, but even more the method which 26

APPRENTICESHIP

they used in their research. Once or twice he caught a glimpse of Leopold von Ranke, feeble in limb but with mind unwearied by his eighty-six years, and known to be still writing on his Weltgeschichte. Since he began his seminar in 1828, how great a change had come through that technique of investigation! Osgood had already studied much of his work and thought his method better than Treitschke's; it was better to tell the thing wie es eigentlich gewesen, without varnish or concealment, to be an historian rather than an apologist, a propagandist or a literary artist. In after life he modelled his style consciously after Ranke's. He wished to inform and to explain, and not to thrill; if he was perfectly clear it was not necessary to be melodious. This wonder-year came to an end with the end of his funds — perhaps a few weeks earlier, for he was summoned home to Amherst to supply a term for Professor Anson D. Morse, absent on account of illness. He also did some tutoring and similar odd teaching at 27

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Smith, yet he learned painfully enough how difficult it was then for a young scholar to get a regular appointment to a college post, even in the humbler ranks. Finally through a teachers' agency in 1883 he took a place in the Brooklyn H i g h School. Here, of course, the weekly schedule called for some twentyfive hours in the class-room, putting the youngsters through the proper text-books in the fields of history. The secondary school does not call for men of secondary worth; certainly the education of youth may demand intelligence as keen as the seminary of the university. During his six years of high-school teaching no duty was neglected, though it often seemed a grinding drudgery, and many a time decades afterward he would be stopped on the street by some old Brooklyn boy to thank him for his teaching in the middle eighties. But he never could have reached distinction in the work of secondary education, lacking as he did any considerable interest in pedagogy or in school administration, and such success as he attained 28

APPRENTICESHIP

was due to his enthusiasm for history, the subject which he taught. In the eye of his imagination he saw before him mature and eager students of the university, and he went behind the common manuals, digested sources and dipped deeply into controversies. He wrote out lectures for the class-room, half-wistfully, half-certain that they might be valuable as stock for more exalted business in some future day. Years later, indeed, the old man did prove debtor to the young and certain lectures were delivered to budding doctors of philosophy, the learned notes of which had first found hearers in the Brooklyn High School. Meanwhile in 1885 he had married Caroline Augusta Simonds, the daughter of a New England clergyman, who with executive gifts and social charm was to smooth the pathway of her scholar-husband until his death. Intelligently sympathetic with his effort, as generously ambitious as himself, and willing cheerfully to pay the price of frugal waiting, no sketch of his career, however slight, 29

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could properly be written without appreciative mention of her constant aid. One consideration that made the place in Brooklyn not only tolerable but highly prized was the opportunity it gave him in the afternoons to carry forward study under Burgess, who was now teaching at Columbia. The institution then on Fortyninth Street was a meagre enterprise compared with the Columbia that now almost covers Morningside Heights. A s a university, in the true sense of the word, that offered opportunity to serious and able post-graduate students, it was then crossing the threshold. Burgess, whose title of Professor of Constitutional History, International and Constitutional Law and Political Science indicated the range of his responsibility, had founded six years before, in 1880, the School of Political Science, with the first faculty of the university devoted to advanced nonprofessional instruction and research. The staff of his associates was made up of his former pupils at Amherst or Columbia, and the institution was indeed 30

APPRENTICESHIP

the lengthened shadow of the man. In 1880 also he had founded the Academy of Political Science with fifty or sixty men that he had formerly indoctrinated in the class-room, and now in 1886 as a vehicle for their productions there was established the Political Science Quarterly. " The purpose for which the School of Political Science was created," said its founder, was " the education of the rulers of the country — for the lawyers are the rulers of the country — in those subjects which will properly prepare them for their highest work." The classes were made up in large part of ambitious students of the law school who sought knowledge of government and institutions. Into this somewhat austere environment Osgood entered with enthusiasm, and according to his old master's testimony, became immediately the leading member of his seminar. Developing an interest which he had gained from Professor Wagner in Berlin, he wrote an essay on " Rodbertus and Scientific Socialism," which was printed in the fourth 31

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number of the Quarterly. His first published work revealed a mind able to analyze and lucidly to present abstruse economic theory, and acquainted with the contributions of the classical economists as well as the prophets of a newer order. No less it showed his poise; he reviewed the statement of Rodbertus with perfect fairness, but refused to follow Wagner into an endorsement. " A s a practical programme," he said, " it has little to offer which views of a more moderate character cannot supply." Books on socialism fell into his hands to review, among them the second volume of Marx's Kapital, which he declared showed " not the slightest attempt at induction " and constructed no indictment against the present form of society beyond that which is furnished by the author's theory of the origins of surplus value. A t the opposite extreme of radical reform was anarchism, then of lively interest in world affairs, and to this he addressed himself with the same acumen he had shown in dealing with the scientific socialists. H e frequently con32

APPRENTICESHIP

ferred with Benjamin R. Tucker to get the point of view of those unsparing critics of the existing order, and after considerable study published in the spring of 1889, likewise in the Quarterly, a paper on Proudhon and his disciples which remains the clearest analysis in English of that great anarchist and his scattered and discursive writings. These two long articles republished as a dissertation were accepted as completing the requirement for his degree of doctor of philosophy, which was conferred at the next commencement. Upon economic theory, however, he was not to concentrate his interest. He desired rather a field yet unworked with the tools of scientific method, marked off by clear boundaries and not too large for the employment of one life-time. The institutional development of the thirteen English colonies in America he appraised as a great and worthy theme upon which he might train his faculties with as reasonable a hope of an exhaustive study as the chances of life would allow, and as an 33

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earnest of his resolution he had published in 1887 an article on " England and the Colonies."

D u r i n g the last f e w years he

had carried on his study in an atmosphere of legal doctrine and discussion, and his decision for an inquiry into governmental institutions was a natural outcome. I t was characteristic of his thoroughness, however, that he realized from " the nature of the colonial period of American history, that the best training for those who wish to devote themselves to it will be obtained from the study of English history." No sooner had he won his doctorate than he set out for a fifteen months' sojourn in England to sense the scene on which that drama had been played and learn more of the literature and sources of the subject. Considering his slender means it was a bold adventure, as he had resigned his post in Brooklyn with nothing in the future more substantial than determination to win appointment to a university. Such opportunities were few, but he would not fail for want of preparation. In London, partly on the merit 34

APPRENTICESHIP

of his study of the radicals, he and Mrs. Osgood were cordially received by members of the Fabian Society, and, indeed, were oftentimes admitted to secret meetings of less moderate reformers, held in dimly lighted back rooms out of sight of the police. This was diverting, but his business was the study of English history, as he read it in the books and pamphlets and in the old streets and buildings of the British capital itself. Then came messages from Burgess and from President Low offering an appointment at Columbia. The long day of his apprenticeship was over.

35

Ill THE

TEACHER

OSGOOD'S appointment was one of many signs of change in the spirit of Columbia. Much had happened since commencement day the year before; a college had been reorganized, after argument and opposition, into a university. Other graduate schools had been set up like that of political science, each with its dean; Barnard and Teachers College were formally included in the scheme; a new president with large administrative gifts and personal prestige was explaining to the public these developments; a university, it was said, had been born. In the years of 1890 and 1891 three young men were given professorial chairs in the School of Political Science — Herbert L. Osgood, John Bassett Moore and William A. Dunning. Richmond Mayo-Smith and E. R. A. Seligman divided the instruction in economics, and Dean Burgess,

36

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Munroe Smith and Frank J. Goodnow that in public law. All had been more or less historical in their presentation, but the teaching of history as a subject in itself of post-graduate study and research was now begun. In 1891 was started the Columbia University Studies in History, Economics and Public Law, locally referred to as " the Series," through which some of the better dissertations of the school might be published. From this time forth among the students and graduates of the seminars there would be fewer practicing lawyers and more teachers. Without question there has been the tendency in the higher learning of the German and American type to promote intensive study in some narrow corner of a subject, to make specialists who add each his little contribution to the store of knowledge, like tiny polyps on a coral island — a tendency which has, perhaps, reached to unfortunate excess. The young student is likely to forget that to know everything about something is best 87

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accomplished by first knowing, as far as he is able, something about everything. I t may well be that Dr. Osgood has been instanced as a notorious example of this too highly concentrated scholarship, and, indeed, one might excusably conclude from a hasty reading of his published writings that his outlook on the world was hemmed in by the boundaries of the thirteen colonies. A glance at his courses may correct this error and reveal what should lie behind and around a specialty. A short time after his arrival as an adjunct professor of history he was asked to teach a full course in political economy in substitution for Professor MayoSmith, whose ill health enforced his absence. Hundreds of foolscap pages now preserved, many of them showing rigorous revision, contain in full literary form or in elaborate notes the lectures that he delivered. H e outlined the general principles of wealth, value, capital, labor, exchange, etc., with definitions nicely phrased and logically developed without a wasted word. They show an eclectic 38

THE

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but a wary spirit, following no book, yet hinting at the influence of Mill upon the one hand and Roscher and the historical school upon the other. H e then analyzed the doctrines of the leading economic thinkers from the time of Adam Smith, and for the balance of the course applied them in examining various great problems of the practical world — bimetalism, banking, competition, foreign exchange, housing, land-rent, and the like — in the study of which he was using recent monographs and solid and extensive government reports. As one scans the manuscript, for example, of the lectures of the second week — " Wealth may be obtained directly either by gift or labor; indirectly by exchange; lastly by force, either illegally (theft), or legally (slaving, taxation, or confiscation for public purposes). Wealth may exist in three forms. 1. Persons and personal services. 2. Things. 3. Relations. Persons can be wealth only under a régime of slavery. In its absence the term can be applied to personal services alone. . . . " — one realizes 39

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that for all the difference in subject matter, one is in the presence of the same mind as in the published volumes, severely analytical and strict and rigid in its habit of thought. And one is even more impressed with the conscientiousness which so met a temporary trust which chance had placed upon him and which would have but little bearing upon his reputation in his chosen field. For the first five years, until the coming of James Harvey Robinson and, soon afterward, William Milligan Sloane, he taught the European history of the graduate school. H i s course, which soon led all others in attendance, began at 29 B.C and concluded with the development of the constitutional idea in the nineteenth century. A t his opening lecture, as was his wont, he suggested reading on section one, which would occupy the dozen classroom hours of the first six weeks. I t may not be amiss to recite the list of books with which he wished his students to become familiar: Mommsen's Roman History (4 volumes), his History of the 40

THE

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Provinces from Augustus to Diocletian, his Römisches Staatsrecht (3 volumes), Marquardts Römische Staatsverwaltung (3 volumes), Jung's Romanischen, Landschaften des Römischen ReicheSj Friedländer's Sittengeschichte Roms (3 volumes), Thierry's Tableau de l' Empire Romain, Lecky's History of European Morals from Augustus to Charlemagne (2 volumes), J . R. Seeley's Roman Imperialism, Merivale's Romans under the Empire (6 volumes), Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (6 volumes), Burckhardt's Zeit Constantins des Grossen, Wietersheim^ Geschichte der Völkerwanderung (edition by Dahn, 2 volumes), Bury's History of the Later Roman Empire (2 volumes). He desired them also to examine the appropriate portions of the Weltgeschichten of von Ranke and of Weber. Picture the state of mind of the graduate from some remote, sectarian, struggling college in the southern mountains who had lightly taken up a course in history to qualify for high school teaching, as he thus heard read out 41

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the beginning "lesson!" Straight on with the same thoroughness for a thousand closely written pages the lectures run, breaking into chapters, sections, and smaller subdivisions; church controversies, theological disputes, the feudal intricacies, the rising power of kings, the culture of the quattrocento, the armies marching back and forth across the eighteenth century battle-fields — all are set forth with plentiful citation from the standard works and thoughtful personal estimate of men In 1893 he had a and movements. " seminarium " of advanced students for research in European institutions, and for several years, in combination with Professor Robinson, he taught the bibliography of that subject. English history he long retained as an important province of his interest. A t first his course ran from the constitutional beginnings down to the Reform Bill of 1884, but later it was divided at the middle of the seventeenth century, each part expanded and finally offered in alternate years. It is scarcely necessary to remark 42

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how thoroughly he had digested the important works on English history, voluminous as they were. In his course the evolution of law could be clearly seen; his best students used to say, more clearly than in any published treatise they could find. Dipping into the great pile of his manuscript lectures now before me, I pull out section six under the chapter on the period of the English Revolution, 168&1715 ; this section is given to the revolution in Ireland. Starting with a list of fifteen authorities, original and secondary, on which the lecture is principally based, his thirty-five pages buttressed with full citations in the margin might go to press almost without a change. But he was constantly revising in the light of new material. F o r example, Paul Mantoux'

La révolution industrielle au

XVIIIe

siècle, published in 1906, impressed him deeply, and the following year he rewrote and expanded his lectures on that subject. The opening paragraph of his notes makes clear that he took no narrow view

43

HERBERT LEVI OSGOOD

of the development of the modern industrial system: By this is meant in general the development of world commerce, great improvements in the means of internal communication (highways, canals, railroads), founding of institutions of credit on a large scale, intensive cultivation of land with rotation of crops in agriculture, invention of machines and processes, use of new motive power, the rise to predominance of the factory system in industry, with the development of entrepreneur or employer function, massing of workmen in factories with highly developed division of labor and organization of employments. Social consequences: large and rapid increase of population, massing of these populations in cities, rapidly increasing prominence of an urban democracy, development of capitalist or employing class, conflict between the two. General tendency as result of this for modification or abolition of mediaeval or semi-mediaeval restrictions on industry and trade (laissez faire) as a means to reorganization of society — low wages, excessive hours of labor, large birth rate, unsanitary conditions of labor, pauperism and helpless condition of workingmen when left unprotected in competition with capitalists; lock-outs, strikes, trades unions, factory legislation. 44

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Growth of modern physical sciences. Growth of science in all lines. New views of universe.

H e then went forward to develop these topics with reference to writings on the subject from R. H . Thurston's History of the Growth of the Steam Engine to Goldsmith's Deserted Village. This paragraph has been set forth in full not because it represents a contribution to the subject of English history, but because it illustrates the breadth of interest of a scholar supposed to be exclusively concerned with institutions, and, in its elaborate revision, his desire, now in the seventeenth year that he had taught the subject, to keep up with the progress of its study, and not to take refuge in musty dog-eared notes of years gone by. It must be remembered, too, that he was then in the midst of his researches for his magnum opus; he was no mere timeserver in the other fields of his responsibility. H e taught more than the early history of the United States; but it was in this 45

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field, of course, that his scholarship was chiefly focussed, where his contribution was made, and where he would be judged. His course on the Political History of the Colonies and the American Revolution, begun in 1891, soon took on the ominous title of " investigation course " and for more than a quarter of a century students found here not only knowledge of their country but the ideals and methods of research; as he guided 'prentice hands the discipline was hard, but the disciples striving for his nod of approbation learned the satisfaction of sound scholarship. His course was always keyed to the capacity of the ablest, and the others might pick up what they could. By 1898 it was divided at the critical events of 1689, and six years later the American Revolution was cut off for extended treatment by itself. Students took as full notes as they could for there was no book that gave a substitute for what he had laboriously worked out from the records, and on many a scholar's shelf today these notes stand bound, not as a souvenir of 16

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university days, but as an ever-present help in understanding the foundations of the Republic. His books at times seem wearisome in their particularity, but they are condensations of his lecture manuscript. So, too, back of that stand piles of rough notes, digests and analyses, almost appalling in the labor that they represent. His volumes on the colonies to 1763 speak for his researches on that period, but those on the Revolution must be remembered from his course. As far back as his Brooklyn days he had held definite opinions on this subject and, as we have seen, in 1887 had published in the Quarterly an article on " England and the Colonies." It betrays impatience with the patriotic rhetoric that so long had passed as the history of that crisis, the old epic where the children of light, super-human in their virtue and their strength, prevail against George the Third, standing for the powers of darkness. Nearly all this history had been written in the spirit of the criminal lawyer. " There was nothing," he maintained, " that can be called 47

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tyrannical or unconstitutional in the plans of Grenville, Townshend or Lord North. Severe measures were not resorted to till they were provoked by colonial resistance. The most that we can say of the policy is that it was blundering and vacillating." The American leaders, he thought, were more concerned with community independence than with individual liberty or social progress. But the break was inevitable because English law and traditional policy came into conflict with Puritanism and frontier conditions in America; revolutionary theories of the social contract and the legality of taxation were bound to be developed. In reviewing John Fiske's American Revolution (1891) he stated his position: . . . What Mr. Fiske may hold in reserve for future volumes we do not know, but it is true that in this instalment of his work he made no effort to describe the constitution of the English colonial empire, or the course of policy which the statesmen guiding its development had followed previous to the outbreak of the conflict. That empire, as a political organism which had been in existence for nearly two cen48

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turies and had grown to vast dimensions, certainly had a claim to continued life. How then is it possible for an historian to do justice to the American Revolution, — a revolt which destroyed the unity of this empire and involved great constitutional changes, — without making the reader understand what was the character of the political structure thus assailed? We learn nothing in this work of the efforts which the home government had long made t o establish a tolerable administrative system here, or of the opposition with which it had met. T h e objects aimed a t by the English ministries are not supposed to have been even relatively justifiable. Suppose an historian should adopt M r . Fiske's method in t r e a t i n g of the fall of the Roman empire or of the P r o t e s t a n t revolt against the p a p a c y in the sixteenth century, would the result be satisfactory? H e would produce a thoroughly p a r t i s a n , and therefore inadequate, account of the events involved. He would leave the world as ignorant of the real views and aims of Marcus Aurelius and Diocletian, of Charles V and P a u l IV, as it was before he took the pen in hand. T h e colonial revolt like every other similar movement, involved questions both of right and of fact. The former are quite as important to the historian as the l a t t e r ; f o r it is only through the adequate treatment of 49

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these that justice can be done to the institutions attacked. Mr. Fiske says that the American

principle

of

no

taxation

without

representation was sound and just. B u t how was it possible for the English aristocracy to admit that? I t was to them a thoroughly revolutionary doctrine. H e also says that the British government should have frankly and cordially admitted the soundness of the American position, that ' the right of levying taxes in America resides only in the colonial legislatures, in which alone could American freemen be adequately represented.' But that was inconsistent with the j u s t claims of the home government under the charter, if not with the very conception of a colony. Those, too, who claimed that the granting of such a demand would imperil the empire had great show of reason on their side. It was a point to be decided, not to be granted at the outset. Through a long course of development toward independence a crisis had been reached in the relations between the colonies and the mother country from which there was no issue except through war, and when the gauntlet was thrown down by Massachusetts the K i n g was bound by the most sacred obligations to suppress the revolt if possible. Two political societies of quite different type were thus brought into conflict, and to the reviewer it seems clear that the historian 50

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is bound to do justice to the c h a r a c t e r and aims of both. I n this, the most i m p o r t a n t p a r t of his task, M r . Fiske has succeeded no better than his predecessors. I n some respects he is even more strongly p a r t i s a n t h a n they. I do not remember t h a t any of the earlier historians have actually compared the Boston P o r t Act and the legislation accompanying it t o the decrees of an Artaxerxes, or an Abderrahman. T h e t r u t h is until American historians cease the a t t e m p t to defend a dogma, and begin in earnest the effort t o understand t h e aristocratic society which existed in E n g l a n d and the democracy which was m a t u r i n g here, and the causes of conflict between the two, we shall not have a s a t i s f a c t o r y history either of the colonial period or of the revolution. T h e Englishman too who carries his p a r t y p r e j u dices into the work will reach no better results.

When the dates of these pronouncements are recalled one is struck with their originality along two lines. First, there is the detachment which allowed a secular view of what had generally been regarded as a sacred struggle for freedom against unmitigated tyranny, seeing, as he did, an " other side." Henry B. Dawson, that furious controversalist of half 51

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a century ago, had published his defiant account of the Revolution in New Y o r k some years before in the pages of Scharf's Westchester County, and no doubt some others had reacted in like fashion against the prevailing Bancroftian tradition. But probably no other influential scholar and teacher in America spoke so soon and argued so steadily in the class-room in those days for a fair review of the American Revolution as did Professor Osgood. Secondly, if one were to be fair one must learn what were the ideals, organization and policies of the British imperial system. The writer who recorded the meeting of the American Historical Association in 1901 for the Review, remarked of his paper: " Colonial history has been treated, even by Englishmen, so persistently as if it were only, or in large measure, the history of the United States in its infancy, that one is furnished with a pleasing sense of novelty when he sees many of the well known facts fitted cleverly into the history of English colonization and used to explain in part the great 52

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process of empire building." But this was an inquiry, which, as its promoter well knew, would need the time and energy of many men. His seminal idea reached its first fruit in the monograph of his student Mr. G. L. Beer on The Commercial Policy of England toward the American Colonies, growing out of a paper in his seminar and published by Columbia University in 1893; and he found great satisfaction in that eminent scholar's later volumes on this theme. He felt, naturally, no proprietary interest in this field and was glad to notice year by year its widening appeal to scholarly coworkers; no claim was made that these contributions all had genealogical relation to his word; post hoc is not inevitably propter hoc. He well recognized the importance of economic theories and practices in the imperial relation, but yet he knew as well that there were other interests to consider in the " old colonial system," and always held the sentiment expressed in his chapter on Westward Expansion and 53

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the Albany Congress of 1754: " In the process of colonization, expansion or empire building, by whatever name it is described, land and trade are the two impersonal objects sought, while increase in the number of the population involved, with their physical and spiritual improvement, and that of the world at large, is the only justifiable and ultimate goal of the effort. A treatment that throws any one of these three elements into the foreground, to the neglect or undue obscuring of the others, is one-sided and inadequate." The history of European settlements on this side of the Atlantic had been chronicled with perhaps wearying minuteness, but nearly always, in the nineteenth century, from the colonial point of view. The story of the thirteen colonies planted (it always seemed) as steps in the conquering march of human liberty, was followed with respectful interest in view of its tremendous issue. Searching for seeds was the grateful task of the patriotic scholar — the seeds of repub54

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lican institutions and union and all the glorious ideals adverted to in the first ten amendments. When any measure of control was observed as proceeding from the offices of London it was treated merely as an attempt at impediment which the heroic colonies overcame. The imperial or mercantilist view was described almost as a personal aberration from which a few near-sighted and ungenerous counsellors of the king seemed to suffer. Hildreth wrote his " severely impartial" account of New England without visiting the old. Palfrey found a summer's notes in London sufficient to balance his five volumes. Bancroft while minister to the court of St. James did hire copyists to transcribe the manuscripts of Dartmouth, Grafton, Lord North and others, but he had published his three volumes on the United States of America as Colonies before he turned seriously to research in English sources. But this neglect seems greater than it was, and is explained not so much as resulting from a lack of right desire to 55

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know the truth as from the lack of opportunity to find it. So long as the English records on America and the West Indies, for example, were left extended through their seven hundred volumes, research was not invited; it was not until after the middle of the century that the Master of the Rolls began to analyze and publish in synopsis the papers confided to his care, and not until 1870 that the Commission on Historical Manuscripts brought forth its first report. Two letters, one from James Bryce, then Member of Parliament, and the other from Robert T. Lincoln, the American minister in London, will illustrate the restraints upon scholarship in this field as late as 1889: VENICE, S e p t . 28, '89 M Y DEAE SIR :

Your letter enclosing Prof. Burgess' has just reached me here. I hasten to reply to it, and to enclose a letter to Mr. Lincoln which I trust will be sufficient for his purpose and your wishes. I do so with much pleasure, sympathizing with your desire to consult these documents. I am however not certain that the 56

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Colonial Office opens all its possessions to investigators. When I was at the Foreign Office three years ago, they told me that some of the papers relating to the American Revolution were still kept secret, because, tho' more than a century old, they were of * a confidential nat u r e ! ' I don't know whether this reserve continues or is practiced at the Colonial Office also. It will give me much pleasure to see you when I return to London which I hope will be in the end of October. A line to the Athenaeum Club, Pall Mall, will find me. I enclose the note, that you may send it to Mr. Lincoln, for I am not sure whether he has yet gone to Lowndes Square or what his present address may be. Yours faithfully J.

BKYCE

LEGATION OF T H E U N I T E D

STATES

LONDON

October 12, 1889 SIR,

With reference to your letter of 2d. instant, I am happy to acquaint you that I have received a communication from the Foreign Office stating that the Deputy Keeper of the Public Records has been authorized to permit you to peruse and take copies from the corre57

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spondence in the Public Record Office bearing upon our Revolutionary W a r . I am, Sir, Your obedient servant, ROBERT T . LINCOLN

H. L. Osgood 17 Torrington Square W . C.

No one who has sought to use official records in Europe, for example at the Vatican, will be much less impressed by these letters; Great Britain was less secretive about its archives than most nations, and soon these particular manuscripts were opened to the public. But it may be desirable to remind the reader that a fair view of the Revolution and an inquiry into the empire of the eighteenth century did not remain for Osgood and his followers solely because of a greater competence in scholarship than had been possible for their predecessors with less training to develop. To the uninstructed it may seem that the opportunities of the historian diminish with his distance from the event. But whatever an era 58

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of " open diplomacy " and " complete publicity " may bring forth in the future, in times past it has not been possible to write the history of states with anything like finality until archives and family papers are available, with the passing of fifty or a hundred years or perhaps much more. All this does not detract from the merit of Professor Osgood. I t helps to explain why an achievement was possible; it was still a great achievement to lead American scholars in taking a new view of American history to 1776. N o paragraph summary could set forth the character of his course on the American Revolution. Only in the last year when he felt the ebbing of his strength did he abandon his design of putting into print several volumes on the subject, and his lecture manuscript could have furnished virtually the substance. Seemingly no pamphlets had eluded him; the archives of the nation and states he had examined and those of many towns; week after week had evidently 59

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been spent scanning the columns of colonial newspapers; there was, as his statement in 1891 had promised, much transcription of the English records. With keen curiosity he visited nearly every battle-field, north and south, including Canada, often making his own maps, though he lectured chiefly on political affairs. The Tories had fair treatment at his hands and he cordially welcomed the article on that subject by Professor Moses Coit Tyler in 1895,1 and his Literary History in 1897, as presenting views on that party which he himself had taken. But he detected in Professor Tyler's argument what seemed to him a fatal inconsistency. After accepting the doctrine of virtual representation, as that author did, perhaps correctly, how could he likewise endorse the central charges of the Declaration of Independence? Professor Osgood did not think that because the policy of procuring a revenue by parliamentary taxation of the colonies was i In the first number of the American Historical Review. 60

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adopted while the king was engaged in his efforts to secure control of parliament that it could be argued, as Jefferson assumed, that the policy was the result of those efforts and their successes — that the two lines of action were related as cause and effect. It was not alone the King's idea; Grenville, Townshend, Bedford, Halifax, were Whigs, or had received their official training under Whig ministries and their policies of reform had nothing in them foreign to the theory to which parliament had committed itself in the laws of trade. " The aristocracy, gentry and merchants — and these were the politically active nation — would probably have supported a more vigorous policy than was adopted. . . . The Sugar Act did not mean the adoption of a new policy or the assertion of new claims: it meant rather an extension of the old policy, while parliament had certainly never abandoned its right to secure a revenue from the colonies. Viewed from the standpoint of sovereign authority, of what consequence was it whether 61

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an act provided for protection with incidental revenue or revenue with incidental protection." Professor Osgood was willing to grant the menace of a French return, and thus the need of Grenville's standing army, while for the Stamp Act he thought an excellent argument could be made. According to the universal testimony of imperial officers in the colonies throughout the eighteenth century there was no hope of solidarity and safety as long as the assemblies were relied upon for revenue, for their interests were narrow and particularistic and their tactics often exasperating in the extreme. Certainly the requisition system provided a doubtful revenue in war time, as Americans themselves were soon to find; and the colonial militia, as pictured for example in Washington's letters, seemed a broken reed to lean upon. It was quite inappropriate to quote from Magna Carta, the Petition of Right or the Bill of Rights; these were guaranties of the liberties of the subject as against the King but gave him no pro62

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tection against the modern legislature. Neither did the charters give defence against an act of parliament. So in his lectures and in his essay on " The American Revolution " printed in the Political Science Quarterly in the spring of 1898, Professor Osgood gave his notion of the legal argument set forth in the Declaration of Independence. That there were other considerations he saw clearly, especially the stupid iniquity of the mercantilist empires which placed their colonies in a state akin to servitude, reduced to desperation by a perpetually unfavorable balance of trade. At least the administration of such a system very likely was impracticable at a distance of three thousand miles when colonists with an English tradition had a rich continent behind them. It was certainly impracticable when operated by an inefficient hesitating government at home, which had possibly lost its legal powers by failure to use them. Psychology, geography and economics were more important in the American Revolution than was law. 63

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Nevertheless his recognition a quartercentury ago, when such pronouncements smacked more of treason than they would today, of a legal Tightness in the British ministry's position, showed his unwillingness to accept, without personal verification, the traditional version of events — what Voltaire called the fable convenue. Lord Acton, in his famous inaugural lecture, remarked that the American Revolution had had such exhaustive treatment as to become one of the few matters in history about which the truth was known. Professor Osgood did not think so. Quite apart from the study of the causes, he saw work for a generation of scholars in making clear just how the people in villages and neighborhoods decided on the war and carried it on, how business fared, how supplies were furnished to the armies, how land laws and settlement were affected, etc., etc. Much of this must be garnered from local sources, but, he once declared, " I t is only through the study of local and state histories that the real nature of our demo64

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cratic society can be understood." H e knew the subject of the Revolution to be one of lively, growing interest and kept fully abreast of the tide of publication. In his last years he completely revised his chapters on Indian relations of the time in the light of the recent contributions of Professor Alvord and others.

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T o Professor Osgood, as we have seen, the Revolution was not an isolated episode starting with remonstrances against George Grenville's policies, but Tather the inevitable end of a long development of self-reliance and its attendant jealousy of all outside control. W e may look back, then, to survey his whole scheme of study, for it all was planned with a logical unity, involving a close examination of English institutions and how they were modified by American conditions in each colony. When in 1896 history was given the dignity of separate departmental organization at Columbia, its four professors issued an announcement in the quarterly Bulletin setting forth the advantages of study at that university. " These," it said, " are three in number: the carefully elaborated system of instructing those who wish to become specialists; the ex66

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tended scheme for the study of our origins ; and the opportunities for historical research in New York City." The first, it will be noticed, was due to an institutional policy, the third to a location, the second to a man. The half dozen pages on the second point, doubtless written by Professor Osgood, reveal his views and plans at the age of forty-one, when they had been fully matured, and offer, perhaps, as good an apologia for his scholarly life as could be found. H e spoke again of the value of studying English history, especially the constitution as it was in the time of the Tudors and early Stuarts, and continued: The commercial policy of England after the Restoration, and the conflict with France which developed in connection therewith, should be studied with especial care. I t should be remembered that during this entire period our history is not only American, but English. We have to do here with the expansion of England. . . . It is believed that the nature and history of [colonial] political organisms can be understod only in the light of the English institutions from which they sprang. They 67

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were English institutions, worked by Englishmen, but under new and strange conditions. They therefore underwent modification. The study of the different types which appear, and of the changes which were wrought in them as a result of the comparatively free development through which they passed, will reveal the origin and nature of our early domestic institutions. Here again, though amidst considerable variety, certain fundamental tendencies will be found at work, which give unity to the internal development of the colonies. These, where unchecked, led naturally toward greater independence of the mother country. B u t they were checked to a greater or less extent by the assertion of imperial control in each of the lines of governmental activity. As time went on imperial administration tended to become more systematic and inclusive. Its growth, together with the conflicts which arose in consequence of the application of its restraining influence to the colonies, constitutes the central thread of our colonial history. B y following it the essential unity of the period will be discovered and a satisfactory explanation of its leading phenomena will be found. At the same time the relations between the executive and the legislature in the provinces will be brought into clear relief. Upon the ideas thus outlined the graduate 68

THE STUDY OF OUR ORIGINS instruction given in Columbia on American colonial history is based. It is a period upon which much has been written, but often to little purpose. Notwithstanding the vast literature which exists upon it, it is by no means understood or adequately treated. This is due to a variety of causes. One of them is the failure of the national government and of many of the commonwealths to print their records and to make accessible the rich stores of material which exist in England. It is largely for this reason that today American scholars know almost nothing of the system of British colonial administration, while scarcely any attempt has been made to trace the internal development of the colonies between 1690 and 1760. As it is in vain to hope that Congress or the state legislatures can be induced within a reasonable time to order the printing of the records under their control, it is urged that students should devote themselves to the task of working out from manuscript sources the history of the first half of the eighteenth century. That period is practically virgin soil. Purely original work can be done in it and rich harvests can be reaped. The material is near at hand and accessible, though largely in manuscript. The publication of a series of thorough and able monographs on this period will surely open the way to a more systematic study 69

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of early American history. I t will be brought out into proper relief, while much important material will be contributed toward the history of Greater Britain. The correct point of view will also be attained from which to t r e a t the American Revolution. In treating this historical material the colony and the imperial policy — so f a r as this affected the colony — should be the first objects of attention. T o these the history of local institutions should be properly subordinated. Social and economic forces should be treated as contributing to and thus conditioning historical development, but the historian must never lose sight of the fact that they operate within a framework of law. His fundamental divisions of the period and his classification of this subject should thus be based on the facts of law and polity. This will lead to the abandonment of the old classification by sections, — northern, middle, and southern colonies, — which is essentially economic in its character, and to the substitution of a classification which is based on the forms of colonial government. T h e period, then, when viewed mainly from the colonial standpoint, will be treated under the divisions of the corporation, the proprietary province, and the royal province. Each of these varieties of colonial government will be subjected to comparative 70

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study, irrespective of the section of the country where it appears. A t the same time, however, due weight should be given to the social and economic causes operating upon it. I t is believed t h a t only by pursuing a course like this can the history of this period be effectively and systematically treated. W e are accustomed to classifications of the subject which are based on economic causes, also on forms of local government. We are too familiar with writers of commonwealth histories who laud their s t a t e or section as if it were the center about which the universe revolves. All of this leads to confusion. I t begins nowhere in p a r ticular and it ends practically where it begins. The g r e a t need in the treatment of this period is correct general ideas. Only by a t t a i n i n g and adhering to these can the confusion which beT h e points sets the subject be removed. wherein these twenty colonies — more or less — as political structures resembled one another, as well as those wherein they differed, must be ascertained, and in the light of these their development must be traced. W e must go back to the origins and foundations, and follow in our building the models which have been set f o r us by the great historians of the Old W o r l d . As soon as the period is studied in this way, it will be seen t h a t English law, administration, 71

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and policy furnished the basis upon which proceeded the development of the time. This is emphatically true of the provinces; it is also to a large extent true of the New England colonies. When the history of British colonial administration is brought into its proper connection with the internal development of the colonies, this, of course, becomes still more evident. W h a t the colonists did they accomplished by building on the British foundations. By the proper recognition of this fact two important results will be secured. In the first place, American colonial history will be taken out of its isolation and will appear as a natural outgrowth of the history of Europe. The institutional, and hence organic, connection between the Old World and the new will thus be seen, while at the same time the large degree of freedom which the colonies enjoyed in their development will become evident. In the second place, the period will be treated as it ought to be, with reference chiefly to English law and precedents. The ideas and prepossessions which have arisen since the beginning of the colonial revolt will not be allowed to control judgments passed upon its events. I t will be seen t h a t here the historian has to do largely with certain mediaeval survivals, prominent among which are the feudal nature of the province and the close connection between church 72

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and commonwealth in New England. These can be understood only by reference to the conditions and ideas from which they took their rise. As the conditions were neither modern nor democratic, the best preparation for studying them will be obtained, not from American history in the nineteenth century, but from the history of England during the middle ages and the centuries of transition which immediately followed their close. In the light of these studies it will be seen that the period in question is that of the old régime in America.

As to his books, which to a considerable degree made up the permanent deposit of the ideas which had been held, as it were, in solution in his mind in the nineties, he has explained his purposes in liis introductions. They were purposes, indeed, which he had cherished since 1887', when, like Gibbon watching monks amid the ruins of the Roman Capitol, he had made his decision for exactly the masterpiece that at last he finished. Six articles, three on " The Colonial Corporation," printed in the Quarterly during 1896, and three the following year on " The Proprietary Province as a Form 73

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of Colonial Government" in the American Historical Review, may be recognized as containing elements of a design of the first two volumes which were to follow. His fundamental classification is here; he had the larger aspects of the subject in mind; the books really refined these ideas and with order in complexity provided ample illustration of each point. Nevertheless it is perfectly evident how his mind strengthened its grasp during the interim, for it was not merely the expansion of paragraphs into chapters that produced the books; his analysis had revealed many phases unknown or vaguely hypothesised in 'ninety-six and -seven. In this there may seem nothing surprising, yet on second thought it has significance: these intervening seven years of study did not seriously modify his early statement in essentials, indicating thus that the articles must have been the result of study and reflection; on the other hand, for one who had made so excellent a sketch not to be satisfied and 74

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turn to something else, but rather to persist in filling in every line of the picture, illustrates the self-control and will-power that distinguished his scholarship. It is at once apparent that this is not a narrative history in the ordinary sense, but a treatise on governmental forms in evolution. It was not likely that an old student of Schmoller's should think lightly of history outside of politics, and he warmly welcomed in review the sectional economic histories of Weeden and of Bruce. But his own was a work on institutions and only those things were admitted that illustrated their development. In 1898 he pronounced his dictum that "it is only through law and institutions that social forces become in a large sense operative." H e showed that the earliest settlements at Jamestown and Plymouth could not prosper with governments totally unsuited to them; but, on the other hand, he must have noticed how similar societies may have different governments, when he had to treat the Virginia of 1623, the 75

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Maryland of 1634, and the Virginia again of 1625 at intervals of about a volume each. If he came upon drama directly in his path, as in the controversy over Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, the rebellions of Bacon and Leisler, or the Braddock expedition, he put it in, but only because it had to do with questions of the organization and functions of government. Organized religion is often treated, yet as a concern of state, rather than a human interest; for example, Presbyterianism in America is not mentioned except where it challenges the Massachusetts theocracy, where it gives its own interpretation to the New York Law of 1693, where it objects to having chartered an Anglican college in that province, or where it seeks political favors in Virginia. There is no discussion of how its presbyteries and synods were organized or how its clergy was educated or how it affected thought. Land interests him not as something to till with spades and hoes, or to sell for profit, but as some76

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thing that engenders controversy as to distribution and taxation by the different governments. Trade as an activity, giving employment, enriching individuals, encountering natural obstacles, he does not notice, but gives a far clearer and more comprehensive statement of trade laws and policy than had appeared before. Among the chapters which he found at once most difficult and most enjoyable to write, according to his own report, were those in volume one devoted to the land, financial and defensive systems of the corporate colonies, perhaps because they were the products of systematic minds and allowed of analytical description without lapse into narrative. In later years he was ready to admit that, in his anxiety that his first large contribution should leave no ground for a charge of insufficiency of evidence, he had been somewhat over-full in some chapters, such as that on the northward expansion of Massachusetts and that on King Philip's War. H e sharply distinguished between the 77

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relations of the proprietor in public and in private law, and in those respects compared the various provinces falling under this once generally prevalent but transitional type. The land tenure is elaborately described with attention to such incidents as patroonships, manors, feudal income, quitrents and land offices, closing with a study of the land basis of such towns as Perth Amboy, Germantown, Annapolis and Charleston. The government of Maryland is described in actual operation and the social and political forces are traced as they acted through the legislature to transform the fief and thus to open the way for the growth of modern democratic institutions. " The rise of assemblies in the English-American colonies," he says, " is an event of great significance in the history of the world." Seven chapters are devoted to the study of the law and practices of proprietary New Netherland, New York, New Jersey, the Carolinas, and Pennsylvania, and then five to generalized description, with particular illustration and comparison, of 78

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the judiciary, ecclesiastical relations, finance, defence and Indian affairs. A t the end of his first installment there is a luminous conclusion. His principal reviewer, Professor Andrews, considered by the author the most competent in the United States, declared of these two volumes : " As a whole the work is the first adequate account of the origin, character, and development of the American colonies as institutions of government and as parts of a great colonial system. . . . It is a severe and unimpassioned, but highly suggestive, interpretation of the legal and institutional aspects of colonial history, written in a restrained and eminently judicial spirit." " Professor Osgood's work," observed a writer in The Nation, when the first two volumes were published in 1904, " differs from all other comprehensive studies of American history in its consistent interpretation of that history from the point of view of and in the terms of public law. Altogether the book must be adjudged the most substantial and masterful con79

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tribution made to the study of American colonial history in recent years." The chorus of praise throughout this country and in Europe was not marred by a single note of censure. In 1907 when volume three appeared the demonstration was repeated. Professor Egerton of Oxford, for example, writing in the English Historical Review, said that " The great reputation which Professor Osgood holds among those interested in American history receives abundant justification from the work on the seventeenth century, which has now reached completion. . . . Anyone who has followed, for any portion of this work, the track of the original authorities here dealt with, will put no less confidence in the rendering of that portion for which he cannot vouch from personal investigation." The Historische Zeitschift remarked that " The volumes constitute one of those original and thorough works on their past history which are becoming more and more characteristic of the historical investigation and writing of 80

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Americans in recent years. . . . The author brings to his task the fullness of learning." It was, indeed, a more significant contribution than the two which had preceded it, in that it dealt with an aspect of American history that had had little previous attention, namely the rise of the royal system. His chapter on the organs of imperial control was admired as presenting something new, though in the light of the treatment of the subject in his later volumes on the eighteenth century it seems but a preliminary sketch reflecting the unformed state of these organic relations in the Stuart age. In this volume he was the first to trace the growth of the navigation policy, which later Mr. Beer developed in detail, from the early interference with the tobacco trade in 1621 through the acts of Charles the Second. He likewise gave the first extended treatment to the royal and parliamentary commissions sent out to regulate the colonies from time to time in the seventeenth century, and of course reviewed the vigorous attempt to supervise 81

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the northern governments under Andros and Randolph, and the reaction of the Glorious Revolution wliich did so much

for democratic tendencies in America. Yet, after all, he says: " In the seventeenth century, so far as the continental colonies were concerned, the home government directly undertook very little in the great departments of justice, finance, and military affairs." In all his chapters there was the evidence of the same enormous industry, of the same good judgment as to what was significant and of the same insight as to tendencies. Afterward in 1914 he wrote that, if opportunity offered, he would gladly revise this volume in the light of new material he had discovered in London, but it was the verdict of those competent to say that it marked a scholarly advance beyond the first two and was perhaps the most valuable treatment of colonial institutions that had at that date appeared.1 Amherst College now made him doctor of i See, for example, American April, 1908.

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laws, and the following year he was awarded the capital Loubat prize for the best work published within the past five years on the early history of the United States.

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as the first three volumes were, their author knew that so far he had been working in a field familiar to many scholars, however unsatisfactory their treatment was from his point of view. But there were discoveries to be made. The older generation can remember maps of Africa with its brightly colored coast-land fading into the bare, open white of the interior, marked, mysteriously, " Unexplored." So, too, in our written history the seventy years that followed 1690, or at least the half century that lay between the two great treaties reordering the European world at Utrecht and at Paris, has remained a terra incognita, beckoning and baffling, ready to yield its secret only to unremitting labor directed by keen insight. Why the earlier period was more fascinating is not so very hard to understand. The SIGNIFICANT

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purpose and the daring of the pioneers who first made the transit is a dramatic theme scarcely inferior to those which caught the genius of Homer and Vergil. " Plantations," wrote Lord Bacon, " are amongst ancient, primitive and heroic works." The period of those first settlements is the heroic age of American history. Then the historian who seeks action as a subject for his pen, after 1690, turns like Parkman to Canadian affairs and gives himself to the external history of the intercolonial wars. " The drudgery which is involved in the reading of manuscript and the study of printed colonial records he avoids, and thus leaves the internal development of the colonies and their relations to England for seventy years almost a total blank. He therefore approaches the consideration of the Stamp Act and of later legislation without preparation, as if nothing had occurred since Andros was driven from Boston." 1 As showing how clearly Dr. i Professor Osgood's essay on the "American Revolution," in the Political Scitnct Quarterly, volume XIII, page 68. 85

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Osgood envisaged the task of covering this period of the colonies twenty years before lie came to its completion, it may be interesting to extract a paragraph from his paper before the American Historical Association in 1898: I would study the origin and transmission of power within them, the organization and powers of the executive and legislature, and the relations between the two as they unfolded through the entire history of the provinces. T h a t constitutes the central thread of their history. In the light of that I would study the fiscal, judicial, military, and ecclesiastical systems of the provinces, their local government and their social development, all of these, not only for the purpose of showing what they were in themselves hut how they contributed to the life of the provinces in its totality. The political and constitutional side of the subject, it seems to me, should be given first place, because it is only through law and political institutions that social forces become in a large sense operative. The directions which these forces take are also largely determined by the political framework within which they act. They are ever modifying institutions, but it is by acting on and through them. 86

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The task was so gigantic that it did not attract serious competitors. Palfrey's volumes dealing with this period were admittedly his weakest. Professor Fiske, in 1899, published his Dutch and Quaker Colonies, but Osgood noticed that " when the author crosses the threshhold of the eighteenth century, his narrative becomes so sketchy as to lose nearly all its value." Fiske apparently felt no impelling need of finding out the truth. " He can only express the pious belief that such and such things are so; the proving of them requires activity of an order different from that of telling a pretty story or sketching the results of earlier investigations." Nearly a decade later Mr. Doyle, of Oxford, attempted with one volume on The Colonies under the House of Hanover to balance his previous four on conditions before 1714, but to Osgood it seemed quite unsystematic and done in a perfunctory spirit. The colonial archives had had but desultory use in this work; imprinted materials, whether in England or America had 87

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been wholly ignored. " His final volume is far more fragmentary and inadequate than any of its predecessors. One would infer from reading it that the history of a declining, rather than a growing political system was being related." The massive work of Beer and the little book of Andrews on The Colonies, of course, he hailed with praise, but each was worked out on a plan unlike his own. He early realized the immense labor that was necessary before we could know the early American development of public law. When, for example, in 1898, Dr. Greene's excellent study of the provincial governor appeared, he was much pleased, but, he said, " the conditions actually existing in the different provinces must be understood and distinguished much more clearly, and we must know better than we do now how much effectiveness there was in the support given by the home government to the governors, before we can fully estimate their position." The American Nation books on the 88

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period he thought were as successful as could be expected at that stage of the study. He himself had been invited in 1900 to bear a hand in that great enterprise, but he replied that he thought our progress in the examination of colonial institutions was insufficient to allow a summary. He would not be hurried. Quite reasonably, it would seem, but quite in vain, the enthusiastic editor argued the benefit of a present statement even if incomplete: " When Mr. Winsor began his Narrative and Critical History there were vast fields which he was able to consider only in a crude and imperfect form; but he gave a point of departure for other students. Ten years hence the work of restating American history can be better done than at present, but twenty years thereafter results will again have to be restated," etc. He still refused to be hurried; without implying a rebuke to anyone who differed with him, he did not personally desire to do that which must be redone in so short a time as a decade. He was asked to write the 89

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section in the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica given to the early history of the United States, but again demurred because he thought no one should generalize about the eighteenth century colonies and the Revolution without more study of the records in London than he had been able to make. This editor also found such scruples a bit perplexing, but argued his case at greater length. " An encyclopedia," he wrote at last, after an elaborate and courteous explanation, " cannot hope to summarize the final conclusions in any subject at the time when it appears. Now, is there no way in which you can accommodate yourself to this point of view? " In this case the author struck a compromise with his scientific conscience, although in his twenty-two pages in the twenty-seventh volume he stated nothing that he could not prove from first hand knowledge of the sources. Every reader has good reason to be grateful for a statement so orderly and clear. The long shelves of the published ar90

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chives of the states, together with the unpublished masses in the American libraries and the numerous monographs, look formidable enough, but, he tells us, the largest part of the indispensable material for the eighteenth century was in London and in manuscript. H e not only worked in practically all the important collections throughout the thirteen states but spent about two years, at one time and another, in the libraries of London. H e had first surveyed these resources in 1889 and now was only carrying out the plan he then had formed. He found there that even our published official volumes were inadequate: "Many of the most important and significant papers were omitted by the editors, while much more material has been brought to light since they were published. This necessitates a careful examination of the manuscripts from which unscholarly editors drew their material if one would be sure of his ground." H e went over the enormous collections available in the British Museum (including the Newcastle, Egerton, 91

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Haldimand and Hardwicke Papers), the Public Record Office, Lambeth and Fulham Palaces, the House of Lords, and the library of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. All told he estimated that more than a thousand volumes of manuscript were examined, a large part of it uncalendared and much hitherto almost unused. Professor Andrews' guides to these materials he found an invaluable aid, and presumably those works have not been and may never be more effectively employed. No Hercules of scholarship could have taken all these notes with his own hand; most of the time he had working with him five or six copyists and secretaries, some of them professional salaried investigators while others were the members of his family, wife, son and daughter, who shared his generous purpose and his spirit of devotion. H e laid out assignments from the lists and calendars of documents and correspondence and was in constant consultation with them all, keeping parallel in his mind half a dozen lines of interest, 92

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like Caesar dictating to his corps of scribes. He had no inheritance of property. His father could not have endowed a professorship as Parkman's did, nor when his son received his bachelor's degree invite five hundred guests to dinner as did Prescott's ; and unlike the case with George Bancroft there was here no ample fortune on the spindle side. Schouler, Rhodes and H. H . Bancroft have each left on record his opinion that a great historian must be rich in this world's wealth, for he must not only have leisure and books, but must buy the services of others. There is still much truth in this, but they left out of reckoning the growth of universities with research professorships, and seminary dissertations, the vast libraries with constantly enlarging manuscript and photostat collections, and institutions for investigation endowed by great philanthropists. Professor Osgood had no private income, except his salary, which had now reached the maxi93

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mum of five thousand dollars, and, unfortunately, of this a substantial portion had each year to be devoted to the sanitarial care of an invalid son. " So vast," he wrote in 1910 when he returned from a year in London, " is the amount of manuscript and printed material which must be read and from which notes must be taken in the preparation of those volumes, that it is physically impossible for one man to perform the task." His family, as has been hinted, was a partnership of zeal and labor; he made his little funds go to incredible length in carrying on his work; twice the university gave special aid by paying his full salary through the year while he enjoyed sabbatical leaves of absence; but it was not until 1912, when he was granted a small annual sum by the Carnegie Institution that his faith was restored that he could complete his task. H e was a modest man, but took his enterprise with the utmost seriousness and realized its importance. Application had been made for this subvention with the clearest con94

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science, for as he wrote two years later, " The reputation of American scholarship makes it necessary that the utmost possible completeness and accuracy should be secured in a work of this kind." He now could have the continued service of a secretary, as he has indicated in his second preface, and having a precise appreciation of what was to be done, kept him employed to the best advantage in taking notes, now in one source collection and now in another. Had he himself outlived the war he would have sent a secretary to London to complete his notes upon the Privy Council Register and some other files. As the author had set forth in his statement of 1898, the two great themes of American political history in the eighteenth century were imperial policy and colonial resistance. I t is impossible to treat the former in part one and the latter in part two because the interplay was constant; thus these last four volumes cannot be divided with neat precision, as were tlie first three, duly labelled 95

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on their backs " Self-Government" and " Imperial Control." Seven chapters, scattered through the work, deal with the structure and function of the imperial system as seen from London, while others take up certain phases of this system, like Indian diplomacy and ecclesiastical affairs, as carried forward in all the colonies. Yet even in the broad vision of a great scholar the colonies remained to a large extent discrete and individual and, with the exception of the sections on Connecticut and Rhode Island, the body of the narrative has to be given to the encounters of the governors, standing for the principle of external control, on the one hand, and the assemblies, standing for the principles of representation and home rule, upon the other. As one glances hastily at chapter headings one might think that the struggle with the French, occupying more or less completely the entire period, might afford a central subject, but more attentive reading soon discloses that the military exigencies are considered only for their 96

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value in revealing the nature of American governments under strain. The chapters on the theory and policy of the British Empire standing by themselves might give a sadly false impression. In the middle of the eighteenth century Governor Clinton of New York might make his claim that the assemblies existed only by executive clemency, but, whatever the legal theory, the fact was that they had become almost American parliaments with their precedents and their pride. The controversies between the executives and these assemblies are not rehearsed for their dramatic interest nor solely because they foreshadowed and developed a spirit of independence, but because they disclose the political structure of the government and the weakening character of the imperial rule. They reveal a rudimentary American executive emerging from the assembly in the shape of standing committees of continuing personnel, treasurers of its own appointment and responsible for itemized expenditures, and military officers exclusively 97

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designated by name in the appropriation bills. The assembly gathered power with each new year. In New York it directed when the militia was to be called and laid down military plans; in another colony it cast a royal justice into jail, leaving him no remedy of a writ of habeas corpus against legislative tyranny. It even limited the powers of the king's appointed council. In a number of provinces it would allow no amendment whatsoever to its money bills; in South Carolina it refused to show its papers to the council, while in Virginia it insisted on reviewing the council's journal; in Maryland the assembly pointed out the striking contrast between the jurisdictions of the upper house and those of the house of lords in England; and Thomas Wright of South Carolina could go so far as to say that the council really had no legislative power at all. The council itself did not steadily uphold the interest of the crown. In some colonies, as in South Carolina, it prohibited the governor's attendance on its 98

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days of legislative business. In Virginia this body expressed its deep resentment at the royal disallowance of colonial laws, and at times expressed a jealousy of the British parliament. The councillors, in their preferred position, in every royal colony, except Massachusetts, filled their own pockets by passing bills defrauding the king of land and quit rents. These controversies show how far back in the eighteenth century — which in America began in 1690 — one has to go to trace out certain Revolutionary issues, for example, the question of the validity of English statutes in the colonies, which agitated Maryland for more than a generation after the Baltimores were first driven from their province, and came up again in North Carolina under Dobbs. The paper money question, which British statesmen could not realize came inevitably from the old imperial system with its balance sheet of trade against the colonies, can be followed here from the days of Sir William Phips. In the early part of the eighteenth cen99

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tury there were schemes for taxing the colonies and for paying the royal officials from the royal chest, but remaining only schemes they injured more than helped the royal power. There were " prerogative men" after 1690; Andros, Dudley and Randolph, for example, the dreadful three of the Dominion of New England, continued their careers; but there was little interest at home. The board of trade was supine, and the Hanoverian government so indifferent that for a time it was not willing to assume control of South Carolina even when the proprietors offered it. Some of the governors sent over were shameless peculators and others, like Jonathan Belcher, were cheerfully willing to take the colonial point of view, if their personal compensations were thereby rendered more assured. Even these few instances here given illustrate the value of Professor Osgood's general and comparative study of the colonies in the eighteenth century. Every episode, perhaps, had had some treatment 100

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somewhere, but it was a great advantage to have them brought together so that one could see relations and proportionate importance. He used the special secondary works of value — about a score of them in this field having been written by his students under his direction — and if he had relied entirely upon them it would have been a service to sift out the most significant truth and present it in a balanced orderly account. But he used them rather as additional help in discovering the sources, as guides to the mines of historical evidence, and smelted his own ore as they had done. If on many points the instructed reader can find but little new, he may yet be grateful for assurance that nothing in the London records, here freshly used, has in these particulars disturbed the old accounts. I t is told of Buckle, as fever-stricken in far-away Damascus he lay awaiting death, that he kept repeating an infinitely sad refrain: " My book, my book! I shall never finish my book!" Osgood had been granted a score of years beyond the 101

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lot of Buckle, had chosen his theme with a wiser understanding of the possibilities of human life, perhaps, than he — or E . J . Payne or Edward Eggleston, to take examples from a nearer field — and in his death there was none of that peculiar pathos that clings around the early crushing of a great hope. T h e manuscript of the American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century was left almost complete. The author intended to write a chapter on slavery as it stood before the law in the colonies and affected government with respect to land, defence, finance and other matters, and another chapter in which he would compare institutional tendencies in the continental colonies with those of Ireland and the W e s t India islands, discussions — especially the latter — where his powers of generalization would have had full play. H i s final chapter lacks some paragraphs that he had planned upon the Peace of Paris, and he intended also, as has been said, to write an essay briefly summing up conclusions from the four volumes, whose value, if he could have 102

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had the opportunity to finish it, might be guessed at by reference to those which he inserted at the close of volumes two and three in his earlier work. The four months' illness which ended in his death on the eleventh of September, 1918, came without much preliminary warning, and there was no time for going over his manuscript with the strict revision that he doubtless would have given it. Consequently there fell to the unready hands of the present writer many matters of detail, filling in blanks, checking references and developing some notes that had been roughly indicated, working out an analytical table of contents, et cetera. The author's handwriting was small, somewhat cramped, and difficult to copy, and without doubt there are errors in the text as it is presented to the reader which his practiced eye would have immediately detected. Professor Osgood had died content that his work was done. The added recognition and prestige which the last four volumes would bring, would, no doubt, 103

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have been grateful to him, as to any man, but it was consoling in his last days to know that they would soon be in the hands of all who sought light on the institutions of the colonies and the imperial system. Indeed, he thought their publication was contracted for under an arrangement made nearly twenty years before. His heirs on going to complete it found that such was not the case; thereupon they started on a round of visitation among publishers, and found it an experience thoroughly disheartening. Everywhere there was politeness and assurance of respect for the author and his scholarship, but everywhere, as well, were sheets of figures adduced to prove that such books do not pay in the United States. In this country, for better or for worse, the man of wealth is not a man of leisure, and the market for extensive works on subjects that do not touch the interests of the better paid professions is correspondingly small. Teachers who do desire to read them must, with their meagre stipend, be content to borrow the well104

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thumbed copies in the public libraries. Literary men who write history have their reward — Irving's works of this kind paid him $118,000 and still are sold — and historians who cultivate a literary faculty, like Prescott, for example, sometimes recover their expenses; the writer of a successful textbook can live respectably upon his literary income. But it was discovered that advancing the boundaries of knowledge, in itself, is not a profitable business. The situation came to wear the look of tragedy. The meagre savings from Professor Osgood's salary, as has been seen, were all devoted to the prosecution of research, and none remained to hire the publication of his books. Not only had a considerable sum of money — well over ten thousand dollars — been expended in the actual gathering of material, but the hope, the intellect, the will, of many years of a scholar's life had been set to this task. Yet despite an earnest effort on the part of those responsible and a genuine concern throughout 105

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the little world of historical scholarship, the manuscript remained waiting in its vault. Meanwhile historians were writing for the date of publication that they might plan their work so as to take the best advantage of Professor Osgood's contribution. There are few endowed presses in this country and none adequate to more than a small fraction of the worthy enterprises that they would like to undertake. By actual computation it appears that nine out of ten American doctors of philosophy never print a second book; the reason usually advanced is that the press and strain of teaching leave no time for writing, but perhaps the knowledge that except for text-books they will probably have to publish at their own expense is likewise a deterrent. The university presses here are in no such happy circumstances as those of ancient Oxford and Cambridge, enjoying as they do a virtual monopoly of that perennial best-seller, the Holy Bible; their sales are small for want of marketing facilities. One becomes an ex106

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pert on all such information, it may be grimly written here, on an errand like the one described. At last, one day, after nearly four years, came the liberating stroke. In the course of a conversation in a Pullman car a gentleman spoke somewhat of his student days in the law school of Columbia a quarter-century before; he recalled especially a course in early American institutions that he had taken outside the regular legal program with Professor Osgood, and said that in after years while he practiced law he had found the work on the seventeenth century of practical avail. His companion, a Columbia professor, in reply referred to the subsequent four volumes still in manuscript. To the lawyer this state of things seemed shocking, and without hesitation he declared that if it were money that was needed he was willing to help. The alert professor tactfully inquired as to how much might be expected; the answer was five thousand dollars. The gentleman was Mr. Dwight W. Morrow of the firm of J. P. Morgan 107

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and Company, and his offer was indeed the answer; in it there was no gesture of Chesterfieldian patronage, but only the tribute of gratitude and respect of an old student.

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may be some curiosity as to Professor Osgood's methods of work. A s to his industry much has been indicated. It is said of the marvelous seventeenth-century scholar Magliabecchi that he went to bed only in the winter time ; Dr. Osgood's family were almost ready to declare his regimen comparable, though to him the seasons made but little difference. He felt — though just why it is not easy to discern — that his start in scholarship had been belated, and he was always working to catch up. When not in the class-room he was to be found at home at his desk from nine in the morning until ten at night, though the evening hours were often devoted to secondary works upon the subject he was then investigating, which he might read without taking notes. Each year when commencement duties were completed he took boxes of books to THERE

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the family summer home at Short Beach, Connecticut, where one window of his room gave out upon a bay in the Sound, spotted with little islands as in a Japanese print, and the other upon a grove behind the house which gradually merged into a woodland tangle. The place had to him the advantage of being within an easy distance of the Yale library, which he could use for general reference. In these four summer months he modified his schedule to the extent of ceasing work at half past four, but till then each day the scratching of his pen could be heard in his up-stairs work-room, varied from time to time by the rhythmic creak of his old Boston rocker, indicating periods of reflection. The concentration of his mind not infrequently disturbed his sleep and he would rise about two at night to set down some insistent self-suggestion and write or study until morning. Watching him at work at this time one could almost actually see the element of will pitilessly driving a poor body to the limit of iti power. Indeed, it overreached that limit, no

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and though endowed with health beyond the average young man, and originally fond of sport, his later habit of toil broke him down on more than one occasion. The light he shed came from the burning of his life. H e thoroughly enjoyed pictorial art and formed a collection of fine photographs of masterpieces in the European galleries, which he loved to contemplate; listening to music was always a refreshment, and the motion picture was not disdained. Now and then he would regale a friend with a discriminating estimate of some musical comedy that for the moment held the boards, showing the while a surprising twinkle in his eye. I n the nineties he was something of a cyclist; often at Short Beach, if he found his mind worked sluggishly, he would go down and saw wood for an hour or two; but in his later years the most obedient imagination refused to fancy him with golf club in his hand or at the wheel of a motor car. I n social sport his limit was croquet. I n early manhood he was of 111

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good stature, vigorous, straight and personable, but his later students knew him as bent and somewhat frail, with face of cameo line but full of gentleness, so that as he quietly made his way out about the campus one might mark his passage and look after him as a striking model in appearance of the scholar of tradition. He had dedicated himself to a service as unrelentingly as any monk. He desired to know and to present the history of man, particularly that of the American governments from 1578 to 1783. There could be no better illustration of the truth in Browning's line: W h o keeps one end in view, makes all things serve.

He did not use the card-index system in taking his own notes, though he recommended it to others. He did not use a typewriter, and so far as is known, never dictated a word. He frequently wrote out a long analysis of a book that he had read with page references down the margin, and seemed able in his mind 112

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to organize this knowledge without cutting, pinning, pasting or distributing his notes throughout a filing case. Y e t his rough notes were certainly large enough in bulk. His article of 1887 on " England and the Colonies " has been mentioned ; to support a certain point he puts in a footnote citing seven rather obscure cases in old English courts. These were not plucked, as might be supposed, from the pages of some ready compendium; among his papers there are found a number of little note books filled with long and thorough digests of these seven cases apparently prepared for this particular use. In his articles of 1891 on " The Political Ideas of the Puritans" he mentions, by the way, eight English philosophers; behind this, his notes reveal, was an outline of the main works of every one. He cordially disliked all show of erudition. Although in his books he does not load the pages down with bibliography of secondary works, his manuscript notes show that there must be no inference that he had not read them. In fol113

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lowing through these notes one is astonished at their particularity. They tell what happened at this town when the sloop Mary Ann attempted to land five pipes of brandy, what happened at this other when the snow Esther was condemned; his students sometimes thought they saw too many little bands of Indians stalking through his lectures, but for every one of these there lurked half a dozen in his notes. When in England his little army of transcribers filled scores and scores of note books about six inches by eight in size, containing two hundred numbered pages and covered with a shiny black material that resembled patent leather. Each, of course, was labelled with the subject of its contents. Professor Osgood knew so well these abstracts that for the most part he could write directly from them without any physical analysis and distribution to assorted sheets. His style, it will immediately be seen, is unadorned and seldom picturesque; it is restrained and pruned of adjectives. It 114

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might be said of him, as it was of Samuel Rawson Gardiner, that he had the defects of his virtue, in that his cautious fairness makes little appeal to the emotions and leaves the reader cold and unmoved. It has been well observed that there is a natural warmth in advocacy that is lacking in the dry light of judicial opinion. A distinguished historian of another institution spoke of his books in some disparagement as dull in presentation. This troubled him, and he talked it over with a colleague; " but," he queried, " after all, is it the function of an historian to make history interesting? " H e had no desire like Macaulay to supplant the latest novel lying on milady's table. He knew he was no Parkman either in peculiar gifts or in theme; he was describing laws and constitutional contentions, not the roar of musketry echoing through rocky gorges. His was not the type of fancy that would naturally find its first expression in a novel, as was the case with Motley and with Parkman, and he restrained whatever " literary " impulses he had, for, on 116

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the one hand, reckless rhetoric would be foolish and, on the other, too much tooling of a phrase for great force or beauty would take time that should be given to finding out the truth. Heroic character, piquant anecdote, striking spectacle, romantic episode, all these interested him as he came across them, but he seldom varied from his narrow path of institutional analysis and exposition in order to present them to the reader. H e was careful, too, that the thread of his story was never drawn finer than the staple of his evidence would support and that it should not be improperly colored by some feeling that took rise from prejudice. His family often heard him speak out with personal wrath against some colonial official, now buried these two hundred years, and guess at the lowest motives for his conduct, and then saw him turn to his desk and write a cool and cautious judgment, based only on what was incontrovertably known. H e knew that his books would have to be studied with attention, but no bibliographer would have to warn 116

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that they must be " used with care." H e knew the student would have to work to get the meat of his volumes, and he hoped some John Fiske would follow to rewrite them for popular consumption. H e was himself a scholar for scholars, an historian's historian. Yet it must not be inferred that he lacked power of statement; lucidity was what he aimed at and reference to his pages will show how he succeeded. Take, for example, his " Political Ideas of the Puritans," essays which, buried in the files of the Political Science Quarterly of thirty years ago, are not as convenient to the general reader of today as their merit would entitle them to be. What could be more crystal clear than his analysis of Calvin's Institutes, the relations of church and state in the Bible commonwealths, or their tendency, unconfessed but inherent, toward political democracy? Two paragraphs may illustrate the quality of his thought and writing, firm and sinewy and devoid of ornament: 117

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If this survey of the development of political thought among the Puritans be truth, one must conclude that the modern revolutionary movement began not in the eighteenth, but in the sixteenth century. Protestantism, especially in the form which Calvin gave to it, was hostile to absolutism both in church and in state, and carried with it a moral vigor without which the mere revival of classical learning would have been powerless to effect deep social changes. Calvin built upon the foundations laid by Augustine and the earlier reformers, but he gave to his work a connection and logical consistency in all its p a r t s which had a profound influence upon the adherents of his doctrines. Calvinism, in spite of the aristocratic character which it temporarily assumed, meant democracy in church government. I t meant more than that, for its aim was to make society in all its p a r t s conform to a religious ideal. Thus only would the perfect commonwealth, the city of God on earth, be realized and established. Ideas derived from the organization of the church, the thought that human distinctions disappear before the sovereignty of God, gave color also to the political views of the Calvinists. They did not need to search the records of antiquity to find communities wherein the theory of human equality was approximately realized. 118

THE METHOD The local church furnished a much better model than any Greek state. The theory upon which it was based was easily transferred to the domain of politics. Wherever the Calvinists appeared as a political p a r t y , this transfer was more or less fully made. Their attitude was not due solely to the fact that the monarchy supported Catholicism, or what was considered to be in alliance with it. It was the result of a positive force, which impelled Calvinists to be advocates of popular government. Among the English Puritans this tendency showed itself with various degrees of strength, from the ideas of elective monarchy with a supreme legislature, held by the Presbyterians of the Long Parliament, to the extreme republicanism of the Levellers. . . . But it should never be forgotten that the Puritan's conception of democracy was far different from that held by many of its later defenders. There was nothing vulgar about it. The Puritans did not believe that wisdom would be discovered by the counting of heads. They talked little about equality, except the equality of the elect before God. The thought of duty was more often in their minds than that of right. They did not claim for all an equal share of political power. They knew the value of character and intelligence, and were resolved that nothing should rob these of 119

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their j u s t influence in a well-ordered commonwealth. T h e y identified l i b e r t y with virtue. " Know," says Milton in one of his loftiest passages, " t h a t to be f r e e is the same t h i n g as to be pious, to be wise, to be temperate a n d j u s t , to be f r u g a l and a b s t i n e n t , and, l a s t l y , to be magnanimous and b r a v e ; so to be the opposite of all these is the same as to be a slave." H e who believes implicity in the wisdom of the multitude, o r who places his confidence chiefly in f o r m s of social organization, can have little s y m p a t h y with sentiments like these.

H i s first article on " The Colonial Corporation " (1896), wherein he supplanted Blackstone's classification of the colonies, shows his spare strength of terseness as well as his logic, and his " England and the American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century" (1902) is a model of comprehensive summary. That he could generalize and state conclusions with a close economy of words that made for vigor and dignity is shown by his article in the Encyclopedia Britannica.1 Although he virtually completed his work on the scale i Eleventh edition, volume X X V I I , pages 063-684. 120

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that he had planned it, he hoped to live to write one volume on the whole development to 1783; had he done so it might have ranked with Seeley's Expansion of England.

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IT will rightly be inferred by any reader who has come this far among these pages that Professor Osgood was intensely interested in the care and preservation of historical materials. H e considered the attention which it gave to its records, a fair index of the character of a government. Certainly these records in their development reflect the complex growth of the state, and late in his life he expressed agreement with Professor Maitland that " there is no method so thorough and effective for gaining a knowledge of the organization and workings of a government as the study of its archives. Their classification, the appearance of new groups among them, the process of regrouping and expansion which they have undergone reflect the evolution of the system of which they constitute the official record." H e had, as 122

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has been noticed, been much impressed by the work of von Sybel with the records in Berlin, and in the Quarterly in 1893 he published an article on " The Prussian Archives." Doubtless he had not read through all the fifty published volumes he described, but he certainly had studied the many long introductions and had carefully regarded the editorial technique. He was likewise familiar with the methods of arrangement and the scope of publication in France and England. Traveling about this country during the nineties on his search among the state repositories he was generally met with courtesy and sometimes with very intelligent service, but on the whole he was increasingly disheartened at the ignorance and carelessness shown by American governments in this concern. He had some influence in bringing about the transcription of English public journals for the Library of Congress and was principally responsible for the publication by that institution of the Records of the Virginia 123

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Company. H e was glad in 1900 to aid in the survey of public archives undertaken by the American Historical Association. Many of the adjunct members of the commission — there was one for each state — were content with what preliminary inspection they might find convenient, but this was not according to the Osgood formula. In the first annual report ten states were treated; three were considered at some length and six had mere tentative sketches, but Osgood's description of the archives of New York took up two-thirds of the volume, and in this series it has remained an unequalled model. His contagious enthusiasm brought the help of three former students and this little voluntary band began their Domesday inquest of New York records. Singlehanded he covered what had just become the greater metropolis with all its present and historic parts, laboriously setting down the character and contents of each volume or packet of manuscript, digging through the dust in bins of unassorted 124

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documents, listing and describing in the scores of departmental offices. In this search he brought to light long forgotten records, such as the minutes and addresses of the Society of Dissenters founded at New York in 1769, which showed how the American Revolution might have taken on a religious aspect, and which he published with an introduction in the American Historical Review for April, 1901. To do all this in less than a year without neglecting the responsibilities of teaching seems like one of those impossible tasks set by kings in fairy tales to confound heroes, yet he did it. H e did not regard his report as " exhaustive and final," but he had learned more of the records of an American city than probably any other one man had known, and incidentally saw how rich a mine was here for history. A quotation will give his view of what was to be done: The history of any municipality, as such, consists of the record of its development as an administrative organization, of the ways and means it has adopted to supply its needs 125

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as a municipality. These are its needs for streets, water, police, prevention of fires, schools, parks, preservation of tlic public health, and the like. I t is to secure these needs that municipalities are created, and the activities aroused in securing them — in rendering those services — constitute the life of the municipality as such. The study of the character and composition of the city's population should accompany t h a t of its administrative organization, so that the social side of its development may be thrown into proper relief. A comparison of the ideal j u s t outlined with any of the so-called histories of New Y o r k City will show how little right they have to the titles they bear. T h e y are in no proper sense histories of the city, but rather collections, not seldom ill-assorted, of miscellaneous facts, the most important and best digested of which belong to the history of the province or the commonwealth rather than to that of the municipality. T h e notion of what a municipal history is seems to have been but feebly grasped by the writers of these books. They have passed by the genuine records of the city's life in order to make room for entertaining gossip and description of public p a g e a n t s ; and while the publication of such works steadily continues we still know little about the real history of the municipality. 126

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Years later he was able through two competent students to set forth a volume showing what he meant, at least as far as concerned the years 1653 to 1776. It was his stirring word that brought to publication the Minutes of the Common Council of the City of New York (16751776), called the "English records" to distinguish them from those of New Amsterdam, and he edited the eight substantial volumes as a civic duty, for the meagre payment for his service was hardly a temptation. These volumes issued in 1906 were not annotated and the editor's chief responsibility was to guard the purity of the text. To gauge correctly at first hand his success in this respect would naturally be difficult, but we have testimony as to his care from a source unexpected, perhaps, but undeniably competent on this point — his typesetter. " In my humble capacity," he writes, " I was impressed with your conscientiousness and persistent efforts toward accuracy, and the finished work is a monument to your indomitable courage 127

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and determination to have a faithful reproduction." A g a i n some time after, it may be remarked, Professor Osgood was delighted to see one of his students use his work as a model and complete in many volumes the publication down to 1831, so that there came finally into print the most extensive and important city records in America. H e called attention to possible improvements in the care of the city's records and many of his practical suggestions were promptly followed. H e offered counsel likewise on desirable changes in the state departments, submitting to the governor, for example, an eleven-page memorandum on the archives in the office of the state engineer. The care of the records in N e w Y o r k City and Albany was inadequate enough, but to anyone with a regard for such things the condition in the towns and counties was appalling. Onondaga County was selected as a specimen and its archives carefully surveyed, or, in many cases, perhaps rediscovered were a better word. Since among the fif128

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teen towns there were but three town halls, they were found in wooden buildings, feed stores, glove-factories, barbershops, and furniture stores, in ancient wooden desks, in packing boxes, mildewed in damp cellars and blackened by the rain in ill-roofed attics. A large proportion had disappeared beyond the memory of man. Professor Osgood now drew up a bill making the state historian a commissioner of records with broad powers over clerks and registers throughout the state, and the press, especially in N e w Y o r k City, gave him strong support. But the members of the legislature were not well versed in the canons of archival science, and, naturally enough, the salary of ten thousand dollars which he proposed for this official in hope of setting a new standard for the country, seemed to them romantic folly, for they did not see the need of compensating a mere record keeper as highly as the governor. Despite his emphasis on the persuasive rather than the mandatory functions, the 129

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measure looked too autocratic to make good campaign reading. Senator Henry W . Hill wrote J. N. Larned, March 17, 1903: " Objection has been raised to the Osgood Public Records bill, on the ground that it is interfering with the local and county home rule provision of the Constitution which places the public records entirely within the control of the county, or other local officials." The bill did not pass. A defect in personnel, however, seemed to him as disturbing as the defect in law. The politician who for many years had held the office of state historian was hardly the man to take on these responsibilities. His editing was severely criticized and his publication seldom rose above the original purpose of his office — to issue military lists and records that would be valuable for genealogical reference, etc., to the " Sons " and " Daughters " of the various wars. Osgood knew what good editing was and he earnestly sought to improve the state's publication 130

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as well as care of archives by a change of officers. With the advent of Governor Hughes he thought he saw his opportunity, and he straightway organized what came to be known as " the college crowd" to further the candidacy of Mr. V . H . Paltsits, whose ability as an editor and archivist, he, of course, highly respected. H e desired to see a Department of Archives and History that by example might bring our states in this respect to something like a parity with similar governments in Europe, and his correspondence shows how earnestly he entered into this campaign, which proved successful. The appointment, however, by no means brought an end to his anxiety. The new incumbent's diligence and talent produced volumes that were all that his supporters could have hoped for, but a new danger, or what was thought a danger, now appeared in a movement to absorb the state historian and his work into the education department of the state, a consummation which Professor Osgood believed would 131

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detract from the dignity and importance of the office and make less possible the conspicuous service which a separate department might give. H e again bent all his energies to avert what he considered a disaster, but he found that his ambition ran counter to an invincible tendency in Albany to simplify, at least in appearance, the state administration. Worse than this, however, was the result of the election of 1910 and the determination of the new Governor D i x to appoint a Democrat in place of M r . Paltsits. T o Professor Osgood and " the college crowd " it seemed intolerable that party politics should control a scientific function of the state. W h y should not a competent historian and expert archivist continue useful service through the decades, as, for example, the office of state geologist had been distinguished for half a century by the work of D r . James H a l l and D r . John M . Clarke? The governor's favorite candidate made no pretence of being a specialist. The quiet scholar at Columbia again heard the call to duty 132

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and took up his pen; during the few years of the controversies he had written hundreds of letters in the matter of state historian, full and personal, and in long hand, and now again he sent for help to most of the important historical scholars and archivists in America. The campaign failed, but four years later he was heartened by the appointment of a trained historian to the post with every prospect of a long and useful term. From 1900 forward he had played an important, though often an invisible part in this movement for the better care of archives, and no account of these years in his life could leave untouched these interests which drew so heavily upon his time and energy. I t was his sole excursion into public affairs, unpleasant to his taste, but in a department where he felt that he was thoroughly competent to speak. He who had chronicled the legislative quarrels and partisan intrigues of long ago, found here a modern instance. 133

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remain now to summarize some further points of personal character. Two, certainly, impressed all who knew him: his sincerity of mind and his judicial fairness. F o r people, especially those assuming to write history, who airily referred to matters they had not examined, he had a deep contempt which he neither concealed nor flaunted. T o the genuine the fraudulent is always disagreeable, but with him the quest for truth seemed almost a passion, and when he detected a sham, no matter how genial its association, it grieved or incensed him as would a personal affront; he could not smile and tolerate it as a human foible. H e had disciplined himself to fairness and desired it in others. Did some former student publish a one-sided statement of historic fact or write flippantly in review of some work that should have had more serious attenTHERE

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tion, the next mail brought from the old master's pen a few brief devastating comments; and these were respectfully received, for they were known to be disinterested and without a grain of malice. So too in his relation with his colleagues. Retiring as he was in taste and habit and disdainful of all petty schemings and complainings within the academic circle, on occasions where he thought he saw injustice he fearlessly and clearly spoke his mind. He heartily disliked the partisan, conscious or unconscious, and always strove hiipself for scholarly detachment. This was evident in his treatment of the American Revolution, but perhaps more clearly, and certainly more painfully, in the terrible days from 1914 to 1918. At the beginning of the war in Europe he felt that the Kaiser had committed a crime of aggression and would suffer for it; he felt that the largest share of blame lay at the door of the German war lords, but not all. As time went on he saw most of those about him mentally comfortable because they could see all the right upon 135

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one side. Their panegyrics and denunciations aroused his critical spirit. H e heard, in this country, of course, more reckless shouting for the Allies than for Germany, and in conversation with intimate friends he began to play the devil's advocate. For one who had been living in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries France's claim to Alsace and Lorraine seemed less striking than to those whose history began in 1871, and the memory of Napoleon across the Rhine was not a memory of justice. Unlike some others he found it hard to consider the Czar of Russia a liberal power. England, too, had taken territory by the sword; for some reason he could never forgive the acquisition of Gibraltar. How did we know that the British Empire was the best possible development? It seemed, anyway, to have enjoyed an unearned increment. He, a student of colonization, thought perhaps the German genius had earned its right to try a hand at this sort of adventure. There was room in the world, at least for a long 136

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time, for three great empires; the BritishAmerican, which he thought might soon come to see its political center of gravity on this side of the Atlantic; the RussoAsiatic, backward but culturally not inharmonious and susceptible of slow advance; and that of Mitteleuropa which could send its populations or at least its economic power forward to the Persian Gulf. He could not condemn the Germans as colonizers until they had had a fair trial; from them also the world might possibly find something to choose for its progress. And then the Germany that he remembered was the Germany of the historians and the musicians, and that had so fine a welcome for the young scholar in 1882. By chance the Germans whose record and whose literature he was just then investigating were the Pennsylvania Dutch, mild and peaceable and pious; he was much distressed by a play that he had recently seen in which they had been ridiculed. All these ideas were tentative in his mind; he spoke of them only to his family and a few friends and 137

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certainly was not sufficiently sure of their value to try to influence opinion. H e was a little nettled, though, when everyone around him was so sure about historic justice and he unsure — and yet he felt he knew as much of history as most of those he met, and was as just as they. Of course all such reflections were inappropriate in war-time, which is a time for action, not for thought. Especially after America's declaration — an event to which he had not quite brought his mind by April sixth, though the fall of the Czarist government had helped — he realized that ideal partitions of the world were not at issue. Then, too, it looked as if England and France might be so crippled as to impair their present cultural influence, and nothing was further from his desire than that. The Germany in the saddle he came to see was not the Germany of forty years ago. His elder son Harold, on whom he set the fondest hope, promptly volunteered and in the course of time went overseas; the father took pride in the deeds of the son as far 138

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as the censor allowed report to reach him in the letters. He was very anxious now for decisive victory, but the news of Chateau-Thierry found him already in a hospital, worn out by a life of labor capped by four years of worry at the fell misfortune of the world. He died in hope; but a personal part of his hope could not have been realized, for about a fortnight later Sergeant Osgood, on the field in France just after performing a valorous feat of signalling which was highly praised, was heavily gassed and not long afterward borne to a restingplace in the cemetery at Rouen. The toll of war had claimed them both. When in 1889 he went to England for a stay of fifteen months, he was captivated by its mellow charm, its peaceful country lanes and lawns and its ancient buildings, quaint or stately as the case might be, silent witnesses of history. Already stored by systematic reading his mind could see the pageantry of great events that had transpired on this ground and, no doubt, in certain places he felt 139

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more truly at home than many Englishmen themselves. A t one time he seriously laid a plan to spend his last years in this environment which he found so interesting, and it was certainly an element of his ambition that some day his name should be known here as well as in his native land. Years afterward when his family again took up a residence in London to carry on researches in the records of the eighteenth century, he feared that he had cherished that particular hope in vain, for with a few exceptions he found the British public quite incurious as to his work. The last few years have seen a great growth of interest on the part of Britons in the history of their empire, and could he now, for example, chance in upon a seminar in the Institute of Historical Research, he would find his published writings regarded with much respect. Perhaps too much emphasis is given here to this consideration, for he was not writing for applause, yet perhaps, also, in those uncomfortable days when he watched the European war, he 140

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may have wondered if English society had as high a regard as German for scholarship as such, and if an historian had written three solid volumes on a phase of German history his work would have been overlooked in Berlin or Munich. H e may have recalled a letter James Bryce had written him in the spring of 1890, in which that sagacious scholar admitted readily enough that his countrymen were not much concerned with matters which to Osgood seemed tremendously important: . . . The more I think of it the more surprised I am that it should be so hard to persuade people in England that Political Science is a subject and ought to have a faculty. While Germany and France were alone ahead of us, one found it less wonderful that the stolid English mind should refuse to appreciate the services to be expected from such a school; but now that you in America have several, 'tis passing strange we cannot get even one. Columbia seems now the most fully equipped.

Professor Jameson in his interesting essay on " The Age of Erudition" 141

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accounts for the enormous productivity of the polymaths in the time of Louis X I V partly by the cloistered lives they led. " The modern scholar," he remarks, " is hindered by a multitude of distractions. H e must lecture to classes. H e must conduct a seminary. H e must attend innumerable committee meetings. H e must do his part in the vitally important work of insuring that neighboring colleges do not outstrip his own in numbers. H e must appear at educational conventions, and seem to say something not already said a thousand times. He must prepare a text-book. Perhaps he must collect money for Alma Mater. Perhaps, pushed by the unchastened ambition of his wife or of his own divided heart, he must make his way into society, that strange unquiet society of the American rich, in essence so hostile to the austere pursuits of learning." It may be interesting to inquire as to how Professor Osgood's purpose met these multifarious demands. There is a tradition that while in resi142

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dence he never missed an academic engagement; he was the soul of regularity in meeting classes, and as for committee appointments while he did not court them he faithfully performed his part. But as for other " distractions" mentioned in the catalogue above, he was little touched. H e had but few close friends besides his colleagues on the campus, and even there he never joined the Faculty Club and lunched in the easy give and take of its conversation. Yet it must not be supposed that he lacked capacity for friendship. Among scholars outside his own university, for instance, there was one for whom he felt a deep attachment, a man whose interests and whose principal contributions lay within the same field as his own. H e delighted in correspondence and long conversations with this friend both in London and America, and instead of any tinge of competitive jealousy in their relations, there was complete understanding and respect. To attempt to fancy him as raising money for a project would bring a smile 143

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to anyone who knew him, for probably there never was a personality in which the element of persuasiveness was more certainly left out. On paper he might be effective, as to a certain degree he was in his campaign for a state historian, by stating facts and judgments, but he would have been utterly unable, had he wished, to win over anyone to a course of action by the ordinary arts of appeal. H e was, it must be said, not a hail fellow or well met by a stranger, and as years went by the annual meetings of the American Historical Association had less and less attraction for him. Though he was always ready to do whatever he could to aid the work of the Association, when the winter gathering was announced, against a trip to the convention city he balanced off what he could do in four or five days at his desk and stayed at home. His travels, almost without exception, had an immediate bearing on his book. " I have so many places to visit," he wrote a student who inquired as to his summer plans in 1913, " that I may start 144

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off in any direction, and also so much to do at home that I am always tempted to remain here." Text-book writing he knew would interfere with his scheme of scholarship and he successfully resisted the blandishments of publishers. His bibliography reveals no great variety of interests; he did not write for the newspapers or popular magazines; his comment on books appeared exclusively in the Quarterly of which he was an editor and the American Historical Review. Neither was he an after dinner speaker, a promoter of movements, a lyceum lecturer or an occasional orator. The simple goings and comings of his exterior life made the poorest kind of " copy " for the university Bulletin, but those around him were well aware that the absence of his name in the news of the quarter was not due to indolence or incapacity. They knew the progress of the book and knew the significance of the occasional item that did appear, that Professor Osgood had made two courses out of one. Again and again he was solicits

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ited to edit books of source material, but while expressing his approval of the enterprise he steadfastly refused. " W e all admired the way," writes Professor Seligman, who preceded and survives him at Columbia, " in which he resolutely refrained from all extraneous tasks and potboiling in order to devote himself wholeheartedly to his supreme object. We were proud of him and he reciprocated by his generous appreciation of all the rest of us." H e had no eagerness for numbers in his classes, but a writer in the New Republic mentioning his work remarked that he always " had around him a small band of devoted students (the mighty Fustel was happy to have two or three) working in his spirit and under his guidance." 1 If the members of that little band really showed that they had experienced a " conversion " to history, his whole self was at their disposal. H e welcomed tliem as colleagues in a great work and became more than a teacher, a i Charles A. Beard, in the number for April 6, 1918. 146

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warm devoted friend, stimulating and helpfully critical as a friend should be. His classes had an atmosphere of comradeship — anything but boisterous, yet genuinely felt; the spirit led to mutual respect and gain among the abler students. Among his papers, however, there appears a poem written by some irreverent young savant in his group on a late discussion of the colonial governor which shows that this spirit was not depressing. A s they left the university they spoke sincerely of their gratitude to the simple, kindly scholar who had, in and out of the class-room, pointed out their way, but the sentiment seemed to grow stronger as in after life they carried on the work of their research. They sent him word of any manuscript or other rare material that they had come upon and he reciprocated with like report. Their letters show great interest in the progress of his book and assure him that, as they grope their way in little nooks and byways of the subject, they realize the magnitude of the task that he had set 147

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before him. " The students have begun to smile when I refer to you," writes one. There are many thanks for the unexpected heartiness of his good offices in helping them to better appointments. Many of his students have been to London to prosecute their study of that side of the imperial relation, and it is only necessary now in the British Museum or the Public Record Office for a scholar to mention that he has been a pupil of Osgood to get special courtesies and opportunities, such is the respect in which his work is held by the well-informed custodians of the British archives. The counsel as to dissertations which were in progress entailed a large amount of correspondence — there is preserved, for instance, a packet of nearly fifty letters from one man — and he worked night after night studying and checking their manuscript and writing his keen but kindly criticism and his thoroughly practical and definite suggestions. There was nothing perfunctory in his review of the manuscript, which if worthy to be 148

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published and to bear the university's name, must be made as perfect in form and substance as was humanly possible. A series of twenty letters which he wrote a certain student illustrates how seriously he took the responsibility of accepting a dissertation; the marginal notes which he had generously scattered through the chapters he considered the smallest part of his task, and he argued point by point, reviewing the evidence and judging its interpretation with as watchful a solicitude as if his name were to appear as joint-author of the work. Indeed, as is the case with all men who have established a " school" of investigation, many of these monographs were in a sense cooperative, his inspiring presence being felt on every page. He was always urging condensation and succinctness and clarity of style; he recommended the avoidance of foot-note controversies thinking that it added little to the world's instruction or enjoyment to catalogue the errors of past writers; he hardly needed to enjoin upon his students to be thorough. His best 149

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monument is the productive scholarship of these students — men and women like George Louis Beer, William R. Shepherd, Alexander C. Flick, Charles A. Beard, Susan M. Kingsbury, Charles R. Lingley and A. M. Schlesinger, to select a few representing different epochs in his nearly thirty years of teaching. Today a certain university, not his own, has in its history department four gentlemen who were primarily his students; at Columbia not long ago there were as many; and two other similar institutions come to mind which have had three at one time on their faculties. The history of every separate colony has been illuminated by his doctoral candidates, most of them by several hands. His home was hospitable beyond the custom of New York. H e was an ideal listener, sitting in his roomy old wing chair that he had brought from England, with hands folded in his lap, head thrust a little to one side and clear blue eyes fixed with kindly attention upon his 150

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guest. H e never interrupted, and enjoyed the wit of others better than his own. When the family were alone he would now and then break his evening routine and read aloud choosing from his shelves perhaps George Herbert's poems or Renan's Life of Christ or Edmund Gosse's Father and Son, or, indeed, Mr. Dooley, for his taste could not always be predicted. H e read in a somewhat monotonous voice, as he did his lectures, but with a certain rhythm that seemed to indicate an enjoyment of good style. By some con jury with his purse, he had collected between four and five thousand volumes, made up in part of works of general human interest but forming in their main bulk what was certainly one of the best professorial libraries in English and colonial history in the country. H e desired to work in the quiet of his home, — the brown stone house on One Hundred and Fiftieth Street, that he had bought when he became a full professor in 1896, and which remains as a pleasant memory to successive genera151

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tions of his students — and he desired as far as possible to have his own books. Nevertheless, it may be said in passing, that after his death it required a truck to take back other books that he had borrowed from the university. H i s library, lining a large room up to the ceiling, made an agreeable appearance, but it was not there for show. Most of the volumes bear his pencil mark here and there throughout their pages, either in lines of approving emphasis or brief notes often with page references to other books; and one is quite as likely to run across such traces in the stories of Maria Edgeworth or Thomas Hardy as in the Voyages of Richard Hakluyt or the solid tomes of the Pas ton Letters. If it is ever possible to pigeon-hole the characteristics of a personality, as the intellectual, the volitional, the emotional, and the moral, it certainly is not with one so integrated as Professor Osgood's. In hard thinking he found genuine pleasure; if he felt a sensation of pleasure he immediately sought to reason why an 162

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experience had so affected him. He had the rationalist mind. Perhaps it was a a heritage of the pioneer spirit that he loved to chop a clearing in the wilderness of the unknown. Orthodoxies wearied him, in politics and religion. In fact, despite his college escapade in regeneration he really had no genuine religious experience until 1912, when at the age of fifty-seven he fell under the influence of the Unitarian preaching of Dr. Merle St. Croix Wright. The spiritual adventurings of this philosopher and poet he waited for from week to week, and though usually quite economical in praise he often told his friends how much help as historian and man he gained from these Sunday mornings at church. H e was always keenly interested in ethical and religious discussion and read much, and frequently aloud, upon such matters. He was cautious in making up his mind and more so in expressing it, yet now and then he broke through his reserve and his classes heard a memorable analysis of some man or system on the principles of 153

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right and wrong. As to immortality he seemed to lean to vitalism and was not certain of personal survival. H e enjoyed long conversations with his friend, Dr. James H . Hyslop of the Psychical Research Society, but appeared himself to find most comfort in the prospect of living on in his books and in his influence upon his students. In philosophy he was most interested in the problem of happiness, seeming to reflect the finer phases of the doctrines of The Garden; his recipe for peace of mind was always to have ready an alternative. It is difficult to estimate Professor Osgood's final place in American historiography until one has seen the reaction of his small but important reading public upon the last part of his life-work. The writer of the article on " History " in the Encyclopedia Americana, who had some knowledge of the manuscript he left behind, declared that " his monumental seven volume work on the American Colonies constitutes the highest point to 154

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which exact American scholarship has attained." Such superlatives may be dangerous, however the scale of his work, even with its rigid self-set limitations, his originality, his objectivity and his thoroughness, will rank him among the small group of great scholars. I t was an enterprise of great importance and extent, bravely and thoughtfully planned, and carried through with a relentless diligence. By a fine propriety of fate his strength proved just sufficient to sustain him to the end. " The few who have undertaken tasks of similar magnitude," he wrote Professor McMaster when in 1913 that author had completed his eighth volume, " can best understand the resolution that is necessary for success. Many die in the harness or just as the last lines of the final chapter have been written." So he himself went on into history as he brought his work to a close. A French critic has defined a great life as a thought conceived in youth and realized in later years; certainly Professor Osgood's life was singularly perfect as an illustration 165

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of this truth. Yet about it all there were no trappings and no blare of trumpets. One of his former students, now become the most distinguished American scholar in his own field of interest, phrased in the course of a letter after Professor Osgood's death the quality of his life: " So simple, direct, honest, patient, and yet so great."

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EDITORIALS SEPTEMBER 2 1 ,

1918

WITH the death of Herbert L. Osgood on September 11 there passed from the world of historical scholarship in America a personality of rare endowment and far-reaching, though unobtrusive, influence. Professor Osgood was the first historian to undertake a scientific study of the political origins of the American Republic, and to this enterprise, his lifework, he devoted a capacity for tireless investigation and a power of mature historical judgment. His three-volume treatise on the institutional history of the American colonies in the seventeenth century is the recognized authority in its field, and, together with numerous articles published in historical journals, attests a mastery of detail and a faculty of luminous generalization that are rarely 157

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found in combination. He lived to carry almost to completion the manuscript of a four-volume work, soon to be published, which will bring his narrative and interpretation of colonial development down to the eve of the American Revolution, and will, without doubt, throw fresh light upon the causes of that many-sided event. Professor Osgood's mind was inquiring and contemplative, congenial rather to the studious atmosphere of the seminar than to the less sedulous environment of undergraduate teaching. He was not interested in making learning attractive to those who needed to be pursuaded to its quest. But year after year, during the long period of his professorship at Columbia, there gathered about him groups of mature men and women anxious to learn rather than to be taught, and to them he gave without stint of his time and energy and helpful criticism. No serious-minded student ever came within the influence of his scholarship and failed to carry away an abiding sense of the worth of historical research and of the 158

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high responsibility of the historian's calling. Believing that the essential function of the university is the widening and diffusion of knowledge, Professor Osgood took little part in the work of administrative and academic routine; and the game of university politics he left to colleagues whose intellectual labors were less exacting than his own. But whenever a question arose which involved a principle that he felt to be important he was unflinching in the support of the right as he saw it. [ R O B E R T LIVINGSTON

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H E R B E R T

FROM The

Columbia

L E V I

University

JANUARY, AN

OSGOOD

Quarterly,

1919

H I S T O R I A N OF T H E T H I R T E E N

COLONIES

JUST as the fundamental causes of the war that has now been brought to a close cannot be ascertained until the lapse of many years has afforded a proper perspective from which its inception may be viewed, so the basic reasons for the struggle that freed the greatest of nations in America from the control of a European power were not appreciated until a century and more after independence had been attained. The first American historian to make them known was Herbert L . Osgood. Although his death, on September 11, 1918, ended a career of personal services at Columbia, the inspiration of his example and the guidance of his works had spread far beyond the bounds of the University, and will perpetuate his memory among all who value the fine achievements of a pioneer. 160

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By his students Professor Osgood was regarded as more than a teacher, more even than a consummate master of his subject. To them he was a mentor in the best sense of the term, a wise and helpful counsellor in precision, accuracy and thoroughness. It was not his function to instruct the merely willing to be taught, but to suggest the proper procedure to those who wanted to learn. His was the exceptional faculty of training men and women in the patient, persevering, tireless labor of research which delves into the uttermost parts of the mine and brings forth treasure in abundance. These qualities of intellect were reinforced by the attributes of heart which connote kindliness, sympathy, justice and rectitude. They won for him the admiration and respect of his colleagues, as they implanted among his students a sense of gratitude for the impulse he gave to an assurance of exact analysis, sound interpretation, clearness of statement and absolute regard for truth in historical scholarship. To the extent that the many doc161

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toral dissertations prepared under his direction embodied these characteristics, they became models of their kind, displacing the old type of brief, perfunctory treatises by monographs that were designed to be real contributions to science. Before Professor Osgood pointed out the way, historians of the United States had penetrated into the period that lay back of the American Revolution only so far as to select what appeared to them the most obvious explanation of the circumstances under which the Thirteen Colonies had separated from the mother country. To show that the motives for it rose out of certain measures taken by Great Britain in virtue of the outcome of the contest with France for maritime and colonial supremacy, and to expound them in drum-and-trumpet fashion, seemed to such writers sufficient. Of other incidents in pre-Revolutionary times, cognizance should be taken only to the extent of dwelling at length upon the story of discovery, exploration and early settlement, 162

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and describing a series of more or less picturesque episodes. That the real foundations of the United States as a nation should be sought rather in the political institutions and practices of the Thirteen Colonies, in their varied experience as incipient commonwealths, was the belief of Professor Osgood, and to it he devoted the resources of his mind and pen. How they were originally constituted as organisms transplanted from Europe to America; how they changed even while they flourished in their new environment; how they developed an independence of character in the face of efforts at restraint from abroad, were the themes that he reckoned most important. Possessed of an extraordinary breadth and depth of knowledge, derived from investigations that ramified into every quarter where information might be forthcoming; never disposed to iterate what " authorities " might have said, and quick to detect errors in their assertions; endowed with the insight that singles out instinctively the gist of a thing and the 163

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evidence for it, and determined never to neglect an account of how things were and came to be for the sake of telling a story, he traced the evolution of self-government and its struggle against imperial control until he had laid bare the very pillars on which the structure of American liberty and nationality rested. To this monumental accomplishment his three volumes on The American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century, which appeared in 1904 and 1907, and four additional volumes that describe the process of development up to the eve of the Revolution, which he left practically ready for publication, are ample testimony. . . . To criticism that he had confined his attention too narrowly to the Thirteen Colonies, Professor Osgood was oblivious — and from the standpoint he had chosen, rightly so. Steadfastly and consistently he upheld his opinion that in the institutional history of those Colonies lay the genesis of the nation called the United States. To him the abiding faith of a nameless seer of 1610, conveyed in " News 164

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from Virginia," may be said to have remained throughout the guiding-star of his thought and action: Be not dismayed at all For scandall cannot doe us wrong, God will not let us fall. Let England knowe our willingnesse, F o r that our work is good; We hope to plant a nation Where none before hath stood. W[ILLIAM]

R[OBERT]

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S[HEPHEBD]

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April 9, 1 8 5 5 — September 11, 1918. A.B. Amherst College, 1877, M.A. 1880; Ph. D. Columbia College, 1889; LL.D. Amherst, 1907; teacher in Worcester Academy, Worcester, 1 8 7 7 - 7 9 ; graduate student Amherst, 1 8 7 9 - 1 8 8 0 ; graduate student Yale, 1 8 8 0 - 8 1 ; student at Berlin University, 1 8 8 2 - 8 3 ; teacher in Brooklyn High School, 1 8 8 3 - 8 9 ; Seligman Fellow, Columbia College, 1 8 8 8 - 8 9 ; student at British Museum and Public Record Office, London, 1 8 8 9 - 9 0 ; Adjunct Professor of History, Columbia College, 1 8 9 0 - 9 6 ; Professor of History, Columbia University, 1 8 9 6 - 1 9 1 8 ; Report on the Archives of New York (American Hist. Assn. Report, 1 9 0 0 ) , American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century; Vols. I and II, on The Chartered Colonies (New York, HERBERT LEVI OSGOOD,

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1904), Vol. I l l , on Imperial Control

(New York, 1907); in England, 19091910, 1914; American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1923).

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THE AMERICAN COLONIES IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Br HERBERT L. OSGOOD, PH.D. LATE PROFESSOR Or HISTORY IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

In four volumes, Svo, cloth. 660 paget each. t6 per volume

Professor Herbert L. Osgood left in manuscript four volumes on The American Colonies in the Eighteenth Century which are now in process of publication by the Columbia University Press and will appear complete during the year. Added to the author's previous three volumes on The American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century. this will complete for the period in question a monumental and definitive work by the principal authority on the early institutional development of the United States. The forthcoming volumes, which are based for the most part on imprinted material in London and America, present a systematic narrative covering what has been called the neglected period" of American History. Tne four new volumes contain a thorough and penetrating analysis of the controversies between the British executive and the American assemblies, and show clearly the slow growth during the eighteenth century of the American political spirit which found its expression in the Revolution. "The historian of the American colonies," wrote Professor Osgood in 1898, "usually treats with considerable fullness the period of settlement; but when he reaches 1600, the current of his narrative is deflected to Canadian affairs, and he devotes himself almost exclusively to the external history of the intercolonial wars. The drudgery which is involved in the reading of manuscript and the study of printed colonial records he avoids, and thus leaves the internal development of the colonies and their relations with England for seventy years almost a total blank. He therefore approaches the consideration of the Stamp Act and of later legislation without preparation, as if nothing had occurred since Andros was driven from Boston." This blank is now filled by the publication of the remaining manuscript of Professor Osgood's monumental work.

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