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William Robertson’s Influence on Early American Literature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 December 2015

Frederick S. Stimson
Frederick S. Stimson*
Affiliation:
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois
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Extract

For early North America and particularly its first creative writers (to 1831), William Robertson (1721–1793) seems to have been the chief source for all things pertaining to the Spanish in the New World. King’s chaplain, principal of the University of Edinburgh, and historiographer-royal of Scotland, Robertson achieved world-wide fame with his histories of Scotland, the reign of Charles V, and with A History of America. Of this last, the first eight books, published in 1777, dealt with the discovery of the western hemisphere and the conquests of Mexico and Peru.

These eight books furnished North America’s nationalist and early romantic writers, the epic poets of the late eighteenth century, and the romantic poets, novelists, and dramatists, even historians, writing into the early nineteenth with facts to be developed into Hispanic themes. One is led to suspect, moreover, that Robertson not only provided facts but, what may be more important, guided North America’s interpretation of them and the themes in the light of the popular fancies of the heroic Columbus, the “black legend,” and the “noble savage.”

Type
Research Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , July 1957 , pp. 37 - 43
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 1957

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References

1 Support for 1830 as a dividing date for early North American fiction is given by Loshe, L. D., The Early American Novel (New York, 1907)Google Scholar and Wegelin, Oscar, Early American Fiction, 1114–1830 (3d ed.; New York, 1929); for early drama, by Hill, F. P., Wegelin, Atkinson, F. W., Brede, C. F., and Roden, R. F. Google Scholar See Hill, American Plays, Printed 1114–1830 (Stanford University, California, 1934), p. vi Google Scholar.

2 Robertson, William, A History of America (3d ed.; London, 1780), I. xi Google Scholar.

3 Bernstein, Harry, “Las primeras relacions intelectuales entre New England y el mundo hispánico,” Revista Hispánica Moderna, V (1939), 2, 6 Google Scholar.

4 Barlow, Joel, The Vision of Columbus (Hartford, Connecticut, 1787), p. vii Google Scholar.

5 Williams, Stanley T., The Life of Washington Irving (New York, 1935), I, 305 Google Scholar.

6 Barlow, op. cit., p. vii.

7 Sabin, Joseph, Bibliotheca Americana (New York, 1869—), XVII, 369 Google Scholar.

8 Bernstein, loc. cit., pp. 1–17.

9 Richardson, L. N., A History of Early American Magazines 1141–1189 (New York, 1931), p. 350, n. 54Google Scholar.

10 Zunder, T. A., The Early Days of Joel Barlow (New Haven, 1934), p. 220 Google Scholar.

11 Robertson, op. cit., 89, 95.

12 Zunder, op. cit., p. 87.

13 Simms, William Gilmore, The Vision of Cortes, Cain and other poems (Charleston, South Carolina, 1829), pp. 147–148 Google Scholar.

14 Bissell, Benjamin, The American Indian in English Literature of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, 1925), p. 16, n. 35Google Scholar.

15 Simms, op. cit., p. 150, n. Many early historians, too, based their accounts of the conquests on Robertson, but this subject is beyond the scope of this paper. See Barnes, H. E., A History of Historical Writing (Norman, Oklahoma, 1931), pp. 156–158 Google Scholar.

16 Juderías, Julian, La Leyenda Negra (Barcelona, 1943), p. 233 Google Scholar.

17 Robertson, op. cit., II, Bk. V, 250.

18 Ibid., pp. 524–525, n. 78.

19 Ibid., Ill, Bk. VI, 50.

20 Ibid., p. 56.

21 For studies of the “noble savage” in world literature, see Chinard, Gilbert, L’Amérique et le rêve exotique (Paris, 1934)Google Scholar and Fairchild, H. N., The Noble Savage, A Study in Romantic Naturalism (New York, 1935)Google Scholar.

22 Zunder, op. cit., p. 220.

23 Robertson, op. cit., II, Bk. IV, 57–58.

24 In The Spanish Background of American Literature (New Haven, 1955), I, 26, the late Stanley T. Williams pays the following tribute to the History and its influence on American literature: “ One of the great works of eighteenth-century rationalistic historiography, this book made a considerable use of the Spanish chronicles. Different in method and tone from the later romantic histories of Irving and Prescott, it helped to inspire these and to make fashionable for at least a hundred years various types of narratives in prose and poetry concerning South America and Mexico. . . . It became a landmark in America as well as in England. In both countries it oriented readers in regard to Spanish America.”