Pennsylvania Magazine

THE PENNSYLVANIA MAGAZINE OF HISTORY AND BIOGRAPHY, VOL. LVII. 1933 No. 1 JOHN BACH McMASTER 1852-1932 An Address delivered before The Historical Society of Pennsylvania November 14, 1932 By ELLIS PAXSON OBERHOLTZER, Ph.D., Litt.D. The end of a stirring and an industrious life which is filled with achievement should be marked by more en- during commemoration than any poor record that I may be able to press into the little address of this evening. My own recollections of John Bach McMaster, based throughout a large part of the time on intimate association with him, first as a teacher and afterward as my kind and valued mentor in a similar field of ac- tivity, and as one, I think, of his warmest friends, cover forty-five years. He had been in Philadelphia for but four years when I fell under his influences in the Uni- versity of Pennsylvania. He was a young man and I was a still younger one, when his meteoric success as a writer made his one of the first names among Ameri- can historians, and gave him a firm position in our world of letters. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, on June 29, 1852, in a fine old house built by his grandfather, Robert Bach, a native of Hereford, England, situated near the end of the present Brooklyn Bridge (the erection of which necessitated its destruction), and he died on May 24, 1932, on the eve of attaining the age of eighty years, in Darien, Connecticut, whither, in VOL. LVII.—1 1 2 John Bach McMaster broken health, he had gone a few months earlier to be near his son, Dr. Philip D. McMaster, of the Rocke- feller Institute, who was living temporarily in that place. His youth had been adventurous and in some ways hard, which may have been responsible for a cer- tain democracy of temperament and a kindly human sympathy which he felt and radiated throughout his life. The grandfather, Mr. Bach, was a prosperous mer- chant who married Margaret Cowan of Newry, Ireland. Their daughter, Julia Anna Matilda Bach (1816-1885) was first married to a promising young artist, Fred- erick W. Philip, who had studied in Rome with William Wetmore Story, later a sculptor and poet of note, and with Thomas Crawford, the sculptor of the figure called "Freedom" which crowns the dome of the Capitol at Washington. Mr. Philip lived for only four months. Five years later his widow married James McMaster (1803-1873), born at Ballston Spa, at the day a noted watering place and resort of fashion, near Saratoga Springs in New York state. James McMaster, John Bach McMaster's father, as the name would indicate, was of Scottish ancestry. As a young man he had travelled as a trader in Mexico and later, with a half brother, founded a banking house in New Orleans, from which he withdrew to purchase a plantation on the Mississippi River, twelve or fifteen miles below New Orleans, adjoining that of General P. G. T. Beauregard, later famous in the Civil War on the Southern side. Here he was engaged in the growth of sugar cane and the manufacture of sugar. Title to the property was swept away by the Civil War. John Bach McMaster's elder brother, Robert Bach McMaster, lived upon the plantation for a number of years; another brother, who was born there, died in infancy, but neither the historian nor his sister ever saw the place until long after the war. John Bach McMaster 3 When this catastrophe burst upon the country the McMaster family was living in Fourteenth Street near Second Avenue in New York, then a quiet, old-fash- ioned residential district, while in summer they occupied a country place, perhaps an acre in extent, at the corner of the present 120th Street and Second Avenue in Harlem. Our historian's mind was stored with memories of "little old New York." The contrasts be- tween the city of that day and this never ceased to amuse his reflections. The family, which had known prosperous days seems by this time to have suffered serious reverses, for in recalling the period, he speaks of rather hard experiences in ill-managed public schools, of shovelling snow from the sidewalks and of saving old newspapers for sale to the rag men. His father who had interested himself in an oil company had sustained heavy losses by its collapse. The Civil War period and its exciting events made a deep impression upon the boy. He cherished distinct recollections of the Lincoln campaigns, of the draft riots, the marching regiments with flying banners and rolling drums, and the rise and fall of Union hopes, as the armies moved back and forth on their sanguinary chess-board in the South. Once, if my memory is not at fault, he spoke of seeing Lincoln. He was taken by his father to the White House. They were standing in a line to greet the President. As they came up to him a sturdy Unionist from New York state in a linen duster, such as men then wore for railway journeys, had just said—"Up where I come from we think that God and Abraham Lincoln are going to save the country." "My friend," Lincoln replied, "you are half right." The war had ended when McMaster, in 1865, was done with the grammar schools and ready to enter the ''Free Academy," which is now the College of the City of New York. He was still but thirteen years old and, 4 John Bach McMaster because of his youth, he was kept for a time in the "Introductory Class," where he displayed exceptional talent in free-hand drawing. The necessity, as it seemed to him, of contributing something to his own support, caused him to join a classmate in running a litho- graphic press for mimeographing or multigraphing, as these processes are called now. Their work was done mainly for the teachers in the college who were in need of such aid. But the labor of washing the litho- graphic stone and passing the sheets over it occupied so much of the young student's time that he was not graduated until July, 1872, when he was still, how- ever, but twenty years of age. He had been junior class orator in 1871, and, in his senior year, prize debater. He was president of his class in his graduation year and the Phi Beta Kappa man in it; and he won an appointment at once as Fellow in English in the college, with the job of teaching grammar at a salary of $500. a year, whereby he earned his A.M. in 1873. By this time he was one of the props of the family which had been obliged to remove to a small house on the outskirts of Brooklyn. In a few months, in April, 1873, his father died and still more was required of him and his brother with relation to their mother and sister. Even now McMaster's mind was engaged in reflections bearing upon American history. He was asking himself many questions—Why had the South seceded? Why was reconstruction, now in its bitter progress, necessary? What had slavery to do with it? He read Greeley's American Conflict. From this he passed to Parkman to learn how France had come into the West; to Bancroft to discover how she had been divested of this empire by England; to Hildreth and others to find out how Spain had come into the picture and how France had regained the Mississippi Valley so that, in due time, she might sell it to us. So little was in exist- John Bach McMaster 5 ence touching the events crowded into the history of the country from the Revolution to the Civil War that the young man was filled with the aspiration to compile a narrative giving to others the information which he himself desired. In the library of an aunt, living at Ballston, he found a copy of Macaulay's History and his eyes fell upon that fascinating and justly famous chapter on the state of England in 1685. This descrip- tion of the life of the people in elegant prose moved our future American historian to a resolution. "Why," this ambitious boy asked himself, "may I not write of the life of the American people in a similar way ?'' and boy-like, as he has told us in his Reminiscences (to which I shall now and again refer), he said "I will." As a lad of twenty the great undertaking of life was formulated in his mind, though he dared not utter his wish and, though obstacles, of which he then did not dream, would bar his way and make the daring object a distant end. He began his work in the Astor Library during idle afternoon hours. The first chapter would be a descrip- tion of the state of the country, more particularly the state of the people of the country, at the end of the Revolutionary War. While engaged in assembling this material he was appointed chief clerk and civil assis- tant to Major George L. Gillespie of the Engineer Corps of the United States Army. General Sheridan was one of the three popular military heroes with whom the war had provided the people of the North. Nothing was denied Grant, Sherman or Sheridan by Congress and, as Sheridan wished to write his mem- oirs, public money was voted for a topographical sur- vey of his battle fields.

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