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| Gilbert Stewart's unfinished--did he ever finish a picture?--portrait of Jared Sparks about 1827. |
Jared
Sparks may be best remembered for just sitting and
listening to a speech. The speech was
really a sermon by the Rev. William
Ellery Channing given at the First Independent Church of Baltimore
on May 5, 1819 on the occasion of Spark’s ordination and installation as
minister. The sermon, known as Unitarian Christianity, was the
final declaration of independence for what had been called liberal Christianity
from the Calvinist orthodoxy of the New England Standing Order. Essentially it was the foundational
document of American Unitarianism.
Why Channing chose far off Baltimore and the ordination of a young man
brought up in Connecticut’s strict
orthodoxy has puzzled many. The answer
may lie in the remarkable life of Sparks himself.
Sparks was born on May 10, 1789 in Willington,
Connecticut, a younger son of a large and struggling family with few prospects
of his own. He grew up in the post-Revolutionary period steeped in
the lore of that struggle and in the strict orthodoxy that dominated the Congregationalists who dominated the
state religiously and politically.
Unable to support or
educate young Jared, his family sent him to live with relatives in Camden, New York when he was six.
His uncle and aunt were hardly in better shape to tend to his needs despite
his obvious natural intelligence and eagerness to pick up any scrap of knowledge
through haphazard reading and self instruction.
In his teen years he returned to his parents and got some grammar school
education where he showed a special passion for astronomy. By age 18 he was helping support the family
as carpenter and rural schoolmaster.
At age twenty he gained
access to the personal library of a local pastor and began systematic study of Latin, mathematics, and astronomy. Impressed with his progress, the pastor
arranged for his admission to Phillips
Exeter Academy on a scholarship. His
tutors and classmates began describing him as a genius and he gained his first
public reputation writing articles on education and science for local newspapers.
Upon graduation from
Phillips Exeter, Sparks was undoubtedly expected to enroll a Yale, the bastion of Orthodoxy where he
would have prepared to dutifully join the Black
Legion of Congregationalist clergy.
Instead, Sparks surprised everyone, perhaps even himself, by opting
attend arch-rival Harvard, then already in the hands of restive theological
liberals. Sparks cast his lot with
people who asked questions.
He had to drop out of
school in 1812 for financial reasons. He
signed on as a private tutor of a plantation family in Havre de Grace, Maryland. He
was a witness in May of 1813 when the town at the head of Chesapeake Bay was shelled by British
naval forces under Admiral George Cockburn. Sparks later wrote a memorable account of
the action.
With the money he
earned as a tutor, Sparks was able to return to Harvard where he became a
stand-out student leader. He won the
coveted Bowden Prize for his essay
on Sir Isaac Newton, joined the Phi Beta Kappa society, and was a commencement
speaker when he graduated in 1815.
Sparks stayed at
Harvard to study in the Divinity School
paying his way as a tutor in geometry, astronomy, and natural history.
Upon graduation, he was
called to the Baltimore congregation and to his rendezvous with American
religious history. Sparks was a
respected minister and his carefully crafted sermons much admired. He participated, as much as separation from
the hub of the Unitarian universe in Boston
permitted, in the affairs of Unitarianism.
He contributed to its vigorous press.
But he was not happy with the routine duties of a pastor and yearned for
an academic or literary career.
He resigned his pulpit
and left active ministry—although he would occasionally fill a pulpit as a
guest or supply preacher—and returned to Cambridge
in April of 1823. Back in Massachusetts he became editor of the North American Review, already
the young nation’s first and most distinguished literary magazine. Under Spark’s stewardship it further cemented
its reputation and printed not only literary criticism and poetry, but what
would today be called policy-wonk stories about national and international
events and politics.
Sparks also honed a new
interest in history and biography, particularly concentrating on the
Revolutionary period. His first book, in
1827, was a biography of American explorer John Ledyard.
To prepare for a
planned biography of George Washington,
Sparks traveled to Mt. Vernon to
examine his papers. Fascinated by what
he found he went on a search for everything Washington wrote, interviewing and
collecting letters and materials from survivors of the Revolution and from
archives and libraries around the country.
The result was the massive 12 volume The Writings of George Washington published between 1834 and ’37.
No one had ever done anything quite like it before. It was a revolutionary step forward in
historical scholarship.
Sparks applied
editing standards of his day—correcting spelling, punctuation, and grammar;
polishing rough phrasings, and omitting passages that might embarrass or demean
the Old Hero. Modern editors have had to
re-plow Sparks’s ground to restore the original voice, warts and all, but that
would probably have been impossible without his original efforts.
Sparks followed
with other important books—The Diplomatic Correspondence of the
American Revolution,
The Life of Governeur Morris, The Works of Benjamin Franklin,
The Library of American Biography.
To
gather materials for the book on
diplomacy, he became the first American to travel to Europe to examine and
collect source material there.
The books not only were
essential contributions to understanding American history, they were popular
enough to actually make money, making Sparks one of the few literary men in the
country to be able to make a comfortable living from his private scholarship
and pen.
In 1839 Sparks returned
to Harvard as the McLean Professor of
Ancient and Modern History. He
offered the first course in American history at any university and abandoned
the traditional pedagogy of teaching from texts and requiring recitation by
students instead using a combination of lectures, assigned reading from various
materials including original sources, and small group discussion. This refreshing change made his classes among
the most popular with Harvard students.
Despite opposition of
some disgruntled traditionalists, Sparks was elected President of Harvard in 1849.
He instituted several campus reforms.
He personally oversaw the organization and preservation of Harvard’s own
institutional history documents, a bonanza for future historians. But Sparks hated the petty politics of
academia, the drudgery of a mountain of routine clerical work, and being
disciplinarian to notoriously rowdy Harvard students. He resigned in 1853 after only four years.
In retirement Sparks
privately tutored and mentored Harvard students and continued his historical
research. His last major book was Correspondence of the American Revolution,
Being Letters of Eminent Men to George Washington in 1853. In 1857 he took an extended tour of Europe
concentrating on museums, libraries, and archives where the raw material of
history could be found. He published articles
on those travels.
Jared Sparks
died on March 14, 1866 at the age of 77.
He was honored as America’s premier historian—and the as the guy at whose ordination William
Ellery Channing spoke.
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