Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,895

This is the grave of Jared Sparks.

Born in Willington, Connecticut in 1789, Sparks did not grow up wealthy. He went to his common, local schools, which by the standard of the day were among the best in the nation, but there was nothing special about that except growing up in a region that valued education. Maybe the one thing you can say good about the Puritans and their legacy is that they really believed in education. Anyway, Sparks finished school, apprenticed as a carpenter for awhile, and then became a school teacher. He was able to get into Exeter Academy in 1809 for a couple of years of semi-higher education. Then it was onto Harvard, where he graduated in 1815, with a master’s degree achieved in 1818. He taught at a school a bit in there as well and then taught some classes at Harvard when he was doing that master’s degree.

Sparks became the kind of intellectual/minister/social leader that one could combine in the Early Republic. He was ordained as a minister, with William Ellery Channing providing the sermon in that ceremony, so he was working with the big time elites. He became the first pastor of the First Independent Church of Baltimore in 1819 and stayed there for four years. He left his other position to do this–editor of the North American Review, which actually still exists in some form. This was the first literary magazine in the United States, founded in 1815. He wasn’t the first editor, but he did it in 1818-19.

Sparks was a committed Unitarian and started a new journal in 1821, titled Unitarian Miscellany and Christian Monitor. That same year, he was named chaplain of the House of Representatives. But in 1823, Sparks had a health crisis of some kind. He left his positions in Baltimore and Washington and returned to Boston. Back there, he became an important intellectual and historian. He was in all the big intellectual societies of this period such as the American Antiquarian Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Alexis de Tocqueville spent a bunch of time with Sparks on his journey to the U.S. to write what became Democracy in America.

What Sparks became most known for was putting together the first more or less complete set of George Washington‘s letters. Published in a mere 12 volumes between 1834 and 1837, The Writings of George Washington were most important in simply existing. Washington is a very hard person to know and understand and his writings only get us so far in that process. Sparks wrote, “Whoever would understand the character of Washington, in all its compass and grandeur, must learn it from his own writings and from a complete history of his country during the long period in which he was the most prominent actor.” He corresponded closely with the Washington family, particularly his nephew Bushrod (George was of course notoriously impotent) to gather information and learn more about just what Washington was like.

In short, it might be the first truly researched biography in American history, though I suppose there are multiple claims to that crown. John Marshall had also written a biography and Bushrod Washington had given him what letters he had. Marshall became interested in Sparks’ project and I think recognized it as the more researched biography and helped out too, convincing an initially reluctant Bushrod to participate. A National Park Service website has reproduced some of the correspondence between Sparks and Bushrod Washington, for those of you who are interested in a very specific detail of history. Surprised DOGE boys allow it to exist still.

There was some controversy over all this. Evidently, Sparks did enough editing to the letters to get people to find his processes suspicious and perhaps changing Washington’s meaning. He spent most of the rest of his life defending his honor here, including a whole other pamphlet about this in 1852. Evidently, most people found that he was correct in these debates and it did not hurt his reputation. In 1838, Sparks was named the MacLean Professor of Ancient and Modern History at Harvard, which might be the first named endowed chair in the history of American higher education.

Sparks did quite a bit of research in European archives to conduct his research on the revolutionary generation. While in France in 1840, he found a critically important map that had set the border between New Brunswick and Maine, a border that at this very time was leading to low-level violence and tensions that became known as the Aroostook War. The map he discovered helped to settle the problem was used by the U.S. and the British in setting a more solidly defined boundary. In fact, what Sparks found backed up the British/Canadian side. It was a map that Benjamin Franklin had drawn back in the day that he had used to convince Massachusetts to accept a given boundary that was more pro-Canadian than some Americans would like. But of course Americans were incredibly land greedy and so they were quite resistant to accept the reality the map forced upon them. Anyway, with some reluctance, Daniel Webster, leading these negotiations, admitted the truth after he had the evidence that did not support his case.

In 1849, Sparks became president of Harvard. He did this for four years and I don’t think made any kind of major difference on the institution per se. He left the position in 1853, theoretically because of his health, but he lived another 13 years, so I don’t know. I’m sure that was part of it given the poor health of the 19th century generally, but he also had other things he wanted to do. Among other things, he was later a member of the Massachusetts Commonwealth Board of Education, so he wasn’t that sick.

Other bits of Sparks’ career worth noting is his work assisting Henry Gilpin in publishing the first collection of the papers of James Madison. He also really wanted to push the study of history in this country. If only we had that today. Anyway, he edited some of the British historian William Smyth’s writings that were about the necessity of studying history in a modern nation and this did spur more interest in intellectual circles at the very least of the need to study the past. He was also a mentor to Francis Parkman, who dedicated his 1851 The Conspiracy of Pontiac to Sparks.

Sparks died in 1866, at the age of 76.

Jared Sparks is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

If you would like this series to visit other 19th century historians, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Frederick Jackson Turner is in Madison, Wisconsin and John Neal is in Portland, Maine. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.