Born at Willington, Conn., May 10, 1789: died at Cambridge, Mass., March 14, 1866. An American historian. He graduated at Harvard in 1815, and became a Unitarian clergyman. He was pastor of a church in Baltimore 1819–23; was editor of the “North American Review” 1824–31; was professor of history at Harvard 1839–49; and was president of Harvard 1849–53. He was also the founder and first editor of the “American Almanac and Repository of Useful Knowledge” (Boston, 1830–61). He wrote, among other works, the “Life of John Ledyard” (1828), and the “Life of Gouverneur Morris” (1832), and edited “Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution” (12 vols. 1829–30), “Writings of George Washington, with a Life of the Author” (12 vols. 1834–38), “Library of American Biography” (1834–38: writing the lives of Arnold, Ethan Allen, Marquette, La Salle, etc.), “Works of Benjamin Franklin, with a Life of the Author” (10 vols. 1836–40), and “Correspondence of the American Revolution” (1854), etc.

Personal

  His manuscript has an unusually odd appearance. The characters are large, round, black, irregular, and perpendicular—the signature being an excellent specimen of his chirography in general. In all the letters now before us the lines are as close together as possible, giving the idea of irretrievable confusion; still, none of them are illegible upon close inspection.

  In personal appearance Mr. Sparks had a noble presence, a firm, bold, massive head, which, as age crept on, sometimes seemed careworn and impassive, but never lost its intellectual power. His portraits show that in his prime his face was remarkable for dignified, manly beauty. His manners were winning; and, though undemonstrative and rather reticent among strangers, with friends he was always cheerful and hearty.

  But it was not those only on his own social plane who were impressed by the sweetness and benignity of his character. He won the affection of all who came into any sort of relation or intercourse with him, and it seemed impossible for him to overlook or omit an occasion of performing a kindness. One day shortly before his death, I overtook him with a large bundle of clothes from a laundress in his hand, and a little girl, in shabby raiment, tottering at his side. I found on inquiry that he had overtaken the child staggering with a weight too heavy for her, and was going out of his way to relieve her. This seemingly slight act was typical of the temper and habit of his whole life.

General

  Mr. S. was chaplain to Congress for a time, but, much to the credit of his good sense, after two or three years of trial, has given up the pulpit—a place, for which he was not well qualified, (as a speaker, we should say,) and has betaken himself to writing, a business for which he is qualified—save when he forgets himself—and presumes to be rhetorical, warm, or generous.

  Upon the whole, we dismiss his work [“Life of Washington”] with unqualified satisfaction. Its extent required a patience of labor, which few men could have brought to the task. To these have been added rigid literary as well as moral integrity, and that love of his theme which engaged him in supplementary and illustrative researches in this country and Europe, of the most important and interesting character. Mr. Sparks must not look for his reward to pecuniary compensation. Notwithstanding Mr. Moore’s recent complimentary remarks on the splendid dowry which literature now brings to those who espouse her, we doubt not he has been as well paid for the lightest of his own graceful effusions by the Mæcenas of Albemarle Street as Mr. Sparks will be for his ten years of unrelaxing and conscientious labor. His reward has been already in part enjoyed; it must be found in the consciousness of laboriously and worthily performing a noble work;—in the conviction that he has contributed to give a wider diffusion, and a more abiding permanence, to the fame of Washington; and that, whenever the authority of the greatest and best of chieftains and patriots is appealed to in all coming time, it will be in some associations with his own name and labors.

  It may well be believed that Mr. Sparks has selected a noble subject in the history of a man like this [“Life of La Salle”], and he has treated it in a manner worthy of his own reputation. His task was not a light one.

  In the “Life of Franklin” we have another proof of Mr. Sparks’s fitness for the work he has chosen. While in that of Washington we had a picture of the harmonious union of the patriot, warrior and statesman, formed upon the only sure basis of the Christian gentleman, we have, in the biography of the great printer, as admirable a likeness of the patriot philosopher combined with the legislator. What one did from loftiness of soul the other did from a love of utility.

  I have also made frequent use of “Washington’s Writings,” as published by Mr. Sparks; a careful collation of many of them with the originals having convinced me of the general correctness of the collection, and of the safety with which it may be relied upon for historical purposes; and I am happy to bear this testimony to the essential accuracy of one whom I consider among the greatest benefactors to our national literature; and to whose writings and researches I acknowledge myself largely indebted throughout my work.

  Mr. Sparks whom we regard as an extremely well informed and fair writer…. An expert in manuscripts,… one of those diligent collators and investigators whom nothing would escape … a discriminating, candid, and singularly fair man.

  Not a few of his contemporaries in the field of American authorship have prosecuted their historical researches and found the heroes of their story in distant realms and in a remote past. But it has been one of the peculiarities of his career that it has been occupied exclusively with topics connected with his native land. In the crowded gallery of portraits which have owed their execution, directly or indirectly, to the untiring industry of Jared Sparks, and which include so great a variety of character and so wide a range of service, there is not one, I believe, which is not associated prominently, if not exclusively, with the colonial or the national history of our own country. Nor can any one write that history, now or hereafter, without acknowledging a deep indebtedness, at every step, to his unwearied researches.

  Even over the piled-up volumes which contain the work that he performed, we must say, as over the end of the career of every good and great man, that he left more of his purposes and his resolutions unaccomplished. And yet these volumes do substantially contain the “American History” which Dr. Sparks desired and intended to write. The reader of them may trace in them the rise and development of this republic. Their pages carry him over the whole territory which it originally embraced, and recognize the agency of all the leading actors, all the important events, the enterprises, discomfitures, and successes which entered into its organization and its full establishment. When we consider the number and variety of the biographies in his works, both those which are full and elaborate and those which offer only condensed sketches of ascertained facts, and remember that the writer was scrupulously careful to present accurately the opinions and the actions of his subjects, we are tempted to ask, what was there for him to do more?

  His merits as an author would probably stand out in higher relief were they not to some extent overtopped by his still greater merits as a dispassionate, laborious, and judicious investigator.

  The most indefatigable of all explorers into the unpublished letters and documents illustrating the history of the United States was Jared Sparks. His voluminous editions of “The Life and Writings of Washington and Franklin,” his “Diplomatic Correspondence of the Revolution,” and other books devoted to the task of adding to the authentic materials of American history, are mines of information to the students of history; but Mr. Sparks, though a clear and forcible writer, had not the gift of attractiveness; and the results of his investigations have been more popularly presented by Irving in his “Life of Washington,” and Parton in his “Life of Franklin,” than by his own biographies of those eminent men, based on the results of tireless original research extending through many years.

  To Jared Sparks, himself a rather unimaginative man, I owe the early conviction, confirmed by reading Hawthorne, that imagination is a desirable quality for an historian.

  With Jared Sparks, though not in him, appeared the latest and highest development of historical study and writing in America. Not an investigator of the highest order, not a writer who could set forth historical statements with the best rhetorical skill, and not the author of any single work to be compared with the masterpieces of his greater contemporaries, Sparks shared and promoted in good measure the later studies from which so valuable results were attained…. Jared Sparks was not a historian in the higher sense, though it is customary to rank him with the better American writers. He was not an analyst like Bancroft; he lacked the rhetorical and descriptive power of Prescott; nor, of course, could he be analyst and painter in one, like Motley. He was by nature a collector and arranger of materials, rather than one who, like Gibbon, could draw from them a connected story. His lives of Washington and Franklin are but extended prefaces to his collections of their writings. He left no original work of the highest class to which the student can point as Sparks’ own achievement. Again, he lacked the power of sharply separating the good and the bad in a man’s character, and of describing both in an impartial and instructive manner. He was unduly fond of eulogizing his subjects;—the besetting sin of American writers “before the war,” a sin not yet fully atoned and corrected. But without his useful labors later writers would have lacked a needed helper. Valuable material might have perished; and historical study, both in the author’s library and at the reader’s table, would have lost a great stimulus. Patience and industry, with an unfaltering determination to discover and preserve all original documents of importance, were qualities which marked Sparks’ mind and directed his life-work.

  Mr. Sparks’ letters show characteristic formality and attention to details. His letter-books contain copies, in another hand, of his most important answers to historical and other questions that were submitted to him. These letters and the wealth of knowledge which they contain are memorials of those quiet but useful years from 1853 to 1866. The extent, variety, and more or less occasional character of these writings do not admit their reproduction in the limited space of these closing chapters of a memorial volume. Suffice it to say, they all served the end for which they were written; they have entered into the thought and literary compositions of other men. The names of Mr. Sparks’ contemporaries, who sought historical aid from him or his collections, indicate something of the living currents into which the tributary influence of his knowledge flowed. The speeches and books of other men bear witness to his friendly coöperation. Among those who most frequently turned to Mr. Sparks for help or suggestion were Edward Everett, George Bancroft, Charles Sumner, Robert C. Winthrop, George Ticknor, William E. Prescott, and Francis Lieber.

  Though not educated in Germany, Sparks, with his untiring energy in the accumulating and arrangement of material, and his unusual power of making other people work systematically, was very like a sound German scholar. He really established a large historical factory; with skilled help, he collected all the raw material he could find; and he turned out something like a finished article in lengths to suit,—somewhat as his commercial contemporaries spun excellent cotton. In a mechanical way his work was admirable; he really advanced New England scholarship; and he may be said to have founded that school of earnest historical study which to this day remains so energetic and distinguished at the college of which he was a faithful professor and president. If neither Ticknor nor Sparks contributed to permanent literature, the names of both are closely connected with that of the first man in New England who wrote history in a spirit as literary as that of Gibbon or Macaulay.

  Until a few years ago the writings of Washington were as much in need of a new editor as ever Shakespeare’s were. Original manuscripts had been tampered with seriously, and there had come to light a vast store of new and significant material. Our demands of editors and publishers had much altered since the times of Jared Sparks. Textual integrity and the whole story have been exacted with relentless precision. Discretion in an editor has ceased to have the meaning it had formerly, scrupulous devotion to the text has so greatly modified the nature and extent of his function. The custom of abusing Sparks when opportunity offers fails to take sufficient account of this change. He lived in times different from ours. Not only was he hampered by the limited mass of material then accessible; the needs and requirements of the public imposed limitations upon him. These were of the simplest kind. Irving’s commendation of Sparks illustrates this. For the most part the work of Sparks was pioneer work in the truest sense. We can only appreciate the extent and value of it all when we consider the state our history would be in if he had failed to do the work which we are now wont to abuse him for not doing better.