Cambridge History of American Literature: volume 2
Trent, William Peterfield, 1862-1939., Erskine, John, 1879-1951., Sherman, Stuart Pratt, 1881-1926., Van Doren, Carl, 1885-1950., Ed.

---

[108] Present United colonies, followed in 1782 by another work called Introduction to the history of the revolt of the American colonies. Chalmers was an able writer and gave at least continuity to his subject. He was, however, strongly British in sympathy, and his work was not esteemed in the United States. It stimulated more than one American to write what he considered a true history of the rise and progress of the Revolutionary struggle.

Of the Americans who undertook to do the same thing, and to do it in a spirit more friendly to the cause of America, the first man worthy of notice here was the Rev. Abiel Holmes (1763-1837), whose American annals (2 vols., 1805) represented much accurate and careful work. It marked the author as a man of scientific mind, worthy of equal respect with his son, the delightful Autocrat. The next to take up the task was Benjamin Trumbull, whose history of Connecticut has already been mentioned. He planned to write a history of the United States in three volumes and prepared for it by collecting many documents. The first and only volume, published in 1810, carried the narrative to the year 1765. Accuracy of statement and a spiritless style are the chief characteristics of the work.

Somewhat later came Timothy Pitkin's (1766-1847) Political and Civil history of the United States (2 vols., 1828). The author was a man of great industry and painstaking care. He had a fancy for statistical knowledge, and wrote also a valuable Statistical view of the commerce of the United States (1817). His political history has the merits and the demerits to be expected in a statistician. Although it is marked by accuracy and a just sense of industrial development, its style is disjointed and difficult. Pitkin strove for fairness, but he saw the history of the country as a man of New England would see it. His own section bulked large in his treatment, and he did not get the point of view of the rest of the Union.

Twenty-one years after Pitkin's book was published, New England found a still abler and more satisfying historian in Richard Hildreth (1807-65), who in 1849 gave to the world the first three volumes of his History of the United States; three more appeared in 1852. The six volumes cover the years 1492 to 1821. For the lover of entertaining literature