Unity and Uniqueness in Jeremy Belknap's Federalist

Chapter 2 Natural History Turned National History: Unity and Uniqueness in Jeremy Belknap’s Federalist Historiography 1 The Third Volume of The History of New-Hampshire American historical writings in the post-Revolutionary era exhibited a cer- tain generic feature: the intermixture of chronological narrative and natural- historical description. The first two volumes of Jeremy Belknap’s The History of New-Hampshire (3 vols., 1784–92) traced the chronological course of events from the settlement of New Hampshire to the period of national indepen- dence, while Belknap appended the full-length third volume to the historical narrative with this explanatory title: “Containing a Geographical Description of the State; with Sketches of Its Natural History, Productions, Improvements, and Present State of Society and Manners, Laws and Government.” The two apparently mismatched contents coexisted in one book. What made Belknap undertake this third volume of natural-historical sketches as part of the os- tensibly historical text? And what does this curious combination of natural history and historical narrative say about the modes of early American history writing itself? Predictably enough, The History of New-Hampshire has been criticized for its discrepancy between the first two volumes and the last one. Although the third volume has been evaluated as an exhaustive collection of factual data and statistics of early New Hampshire—often compared with another contemporary natural history text, Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1784)—critics have considered it to be an independent, if not wholly redun- dant, segment of the series. The trilogy has never been discussed in its totality due to its alleged lack of methodological unity.1 Nonetheless, in my view, the generic mixture or apparent dissonance of natural-historical cataloging and 1 See Leonard Tucker, Clio’s Consort: Jeremy Belknap and the Foundation of the Massachusetts Historical Society (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 1990), 36–37; Russell M. Lawson, The American Plutarch: Jeremy Belknap and the Historian’s Dialogue with the Past (Westport: Praeger Publishers, 1998), 54–55; George B. Kirsch, Jeremy Belknap: A Biography (New York: Arno Press, 1982), 152–56; and Sydney Kaplan, “The History of New-Hampshire: Jeremy Belk- nap as Literary Craftsman,” The William and Mary Quarterly 21, no. 1 (January 1964): 36. © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2020 | DOI:10.1163/9789004424319_004 46 Chapter 2 historical narrative did not indicate that Belknap’s books—or, for that matter, late eighteenth-century American historical writings in general—were partic- ularly immature as a literary craft. Judging from its later developments, the combination of these two representational modes rather constituted an es- sential part of American history writing, at least up to the mid-nineteenth century. What should be noted is the strong affinity, not the incongruity, between natural history and American history writing, as is shown in Belknap’s historical texts. In the course of the following discussion, moreover, the combination of natural history and national history takes place against a contemporary social backdrop, i.e., the arguments on the federal system of the centralized government. Natural history, history writing, and the Federalist contention— these might seem widely different from each other at first glance, but they actually shared a common concern about “the individual” or, to be exact, the uniqueness and typicalness of individual components in the overall system- atization. Whether in natural history, national history, or the federal government system, late eighteenth-century America witnessed the great rise of the individual (individual natural objects, individual archival data, and individual states and citizens), who/which newly turned out to be prime movers, as well as fundamental constituents, of the world. Belknap’s concern about the As for general assessments of Belknap’s works, Tucker’s Clio’s Consort, Lawson’s American Plutarch, and Kirsch’s Jeremy Belknap are the best sources. Other than these books, see also John Spencer Bassett, The Middle Group of American Historians (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1917), 24–43; Michael Kraus, A History of American History (New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1937), 134–140; and Kraus, The Writing of American History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1953), 73–76. All in all, Belknap has been praised for his assiduous docu- ment collecting and penchant for historical objectivity. Lawrence Buell refers to The History of New-Hampshire as the best distinguished work of its day, and “none yet quite superseded.” See Buell, New England Literary Culture: From Revolution through Renaissance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 195. Alexis de Tocqueville once maintained that “Jeremy Belknap’s History of New-Hampshire, 2 vols. in octavo, printed in Boston in 1792, is rightly held in high esteem…. Readers will find in Belknap more general ideas and more forceful think- ing than in any other American historian to date.” See Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1835–40; New York: The Library of America, 2004), 849. As for the contemporary reception and sales, see Tucker, Clio’s Consort, 37–38 and Kirsch, Jeremy Belknap, 125–28. Despite its modest sales, it must be admitted that The History of New- Hampshire, along with Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), was a trailblazer for a number of regional histories that followed, such as Samuel William’s Natural and Civil His- tory of Vermont (1794), James Sullivan’s History of the District of Maine (1795), Robert Proud’s History of Pennsylvania (1797–98), Ira Allen’s Natural and Civil History of the State of Vermont (1798), and George Minot’s Continuation of the History of the Province of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (1798)..

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