Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,422

This is the grave of William H. Prescott.

Born in 1796 in Salem, Massachusetts, Prescott grew up well off. His father was a prominent lawyer, his grandfather a colonel in the Revolutionary Army. They moved to Boston in 1808 and the money really started pouring in then, so Prescott got all the fancy private tutors of that time and place. He enrolled at Harvard in 1811, as a sophomore. He graduated in 1814. There’s two things worth noting about his time here. First, he really sucked at math but in figuring out how to get around this, he came to understand that he had a photographic memory and so could get by by just repeating what he had read, even though he understood none of it. Second, during a cafeteria food fight, he was hit in the face by a piece of bread. And while bread-related injuries are not among our leading food casualty issues in American history, in this case, I guess it hit him just right or a piece got lodged in his eye because it caused him permanent visual degeneration that would impact him for the rest of his life.

Despite his eye issue, Prescott left for a grand tour of Europe upon graduation, which included hanging out with John Quincy Adams, who as we all know was a huge partier and just a great social guy generally……Prescott learned about the noctograph, which was a device that helped visually impaired people write and so he invested in one. He spent the rest of the 1810s figuring out what to do with his life. He traveled a lot in Europe, did some academic research, and trained for the law. But he gave up the law because of his ol’ bread eye. I am not entirely sure how his studies as someone who would become a leading American academic of the early 19th century was less strenuous on the eyes than legal work, but in any case, that’s the path he chose. First, he worked on Italian poetry and published some pieces on Dante and Boccaccio in North American Review, which was the peak literary magazine of this very unliterary country at that time. He then moved to work on Spain, which would become his primary interest.

Prescott also became an active supporter of education for the blind, building on his own vision problems to rally fundraising among New England elites to support the Perkins School for the Blind. He became a school trustee in 1830.

Prescott did not work quickly, in part because of his vision, but he did work and in 1837, he published The History of Ferdinand and Isabella, probably the most important history of Spain that had been published in the U.S. to this point. For context though, European publishers rejected it and so he published in the U.S. because this intellectual backwater was the only place interested in what he had to say on the topic. But the book was well received in Europe and made Prescott an international reputation.

Now, Prescott is not remembered by, well, anyone today. But if he is by anyone, it’s because he became really interested in the history of the Spanish conquest of what became Latin America and so helped shape the initial narratives in American life about those nations’ histories. Now, we shouldn’t really take these histories very seriously in terms of facts. There were two big issues here. First was the fact that there was no way a guy like Prescott was not going to bring his cultural biases to the subject. That’s normal enough for any historian, even today, but given the cultural biases toward Latin America and indigenous peoples at the time, well, there are going to be problems of interpretation. Second, no one hardly knew anything about indigenous civilizations of Latin America at this time, including the Aztecs and Incas. The best source was probably Alexander von Humboldt, who is still an important figure in early 19th century Latin America in contemporary historiography. But otherwise, the literature was mostly speculation. So Prescott was really working from nothing here. History of the Conquest of Mexico came out in late 1843. It was much more popular in the U.S. and Europe than with Mexican critics. Again, it was problematic. Of the Aztec language, undecipherable at that time, he wrote, “Clumsy as it was, the Aztec picture-writing seems to have been adequate to the demands of the nation, in their imperfect state of civilization. … The few brief sentences [of their histories] were quite long enough for the annals of barbarians.” So….yeah. It was also Prescott who basically created the myth that Moctezuma panicked in the face of Cortes, which has remained part of the myth of the Spanish conquest of Mexico to the present.

Prescott immediately started working on an South American version of this project. The Conquest of Peru came out in 1847, mostly borrowed from early Spanish writings about the issue and thus reflecting those biases as well. Throughout these years, Prescott was a big social figure, hanging out with presidents and Cabinet members, getting his portrait painted, traveling in Europe, and doing other rich elite things. His eyesight was up and down; while he had few issues for several years, during the writing of the Peru book, it suddenly deteriorated again. He started working on a biography of Phillip II, but it didn’t go that well, as he decided he didn’t much care for writing biographies. So he worked it up as a history of Spain in those years, though it was still titled Phillip the Second. He published a few volumes of it in his later years, but the interest wasn’t really very high and it didn’t get the attention of his early works. Even today, it is seen as his most minor work. One of the enduring parts of Prescott’s work though, something that was still pretty common in Spanish historiography until quite late in the 20th century, was that Spain was an enervated power compared to the dominating manly growth of the United States. At the core of this was Prescott’s typical disdain for the Catholic Church and his equally typical ideology that free trade and commerce was a morally superior system than Spanish mercantilism. But you set these myths early and they can last unquestioned for a long, long time.

Interestingly, though he was buddies with John Quincy Adams and hung out with Democratic presidents too, Prescott really didn’t care about politics one bit until very late in life. I guess the Slave Power finally got to him because he actively supported John C. Fremont in 1856. It’s likely he didn’t even bother voting much if ever before this. What difference did tariff policy make to him? But his health was also declining in these years and he died in 1859 after a series of strokes. He was 62 years old.

Incidentally, Prescott remained a big enough deal that the city of Prescott, Arizona is named for him, which I guess isn’t that surprising since it is one of Arizona’s earlier cities and was named I think shortly after his death. But still, semi-interesting factoid.

William H. Prescott is buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

If you would like this series to visit other American scholars of Latin America, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. The linguist Helen Parish is in New Haven, Connecticut and David Pletcher, who wrote extensively on American investment and imperialism in 19th century Mexico, is in Faribault, Minnesota. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.