Dictionary of Literary Biography on John Lothrop Motley
John Lothrop Motley (15 April 1814-29 May 1877), historian, was one of the most prominent figures in the mid-nineteenth century "classic age" of historical writing in the United States. He was born into a mercantile family in Dorchester, Massachusetts. His education began at George Bancroft's Round Hill school, continued at Harvard from 1827 to 1831, and then from 1832 to 1834 in Germany, first at the University of Gottingen and then in Berlin. From childhood he was an omnivorous reader and showed a talent for languages which he put to good use in Germany in the study of Roman and international law and classical history. At Berlin, Motley roomed with Otto von Bismarck, who became his lifelong friend and whom he portrayed, thinly disguised as Otto von Rabenmark, in his novel, Morton of Morton's Hope, in 1839.
Motley returned to Boston in 1835 and in 1837 married Mary Benjamin, sister of the writer Park Benjamin. His social and financial position made it unnecessary for him to practice law, and one term in the Massachusetts legislature satisfied his limited political ambitions. The only public career to which he aspired was diplomacy, but a tour to St. Petersburg as secretary of legation in 1841-1842 brought him no satisfaction. His real love was literature, dating from his college days when he had joined Oliver Wendell Holmes and John O. Sargent in editing the Harvard Register , an undergraduate magazine. Motley had then written a long essay on "The Genius and Character of Goethe." In the 1830s, he began writing again; two more articles on Goethe were published in the New York Review in 1838 and 1839, and in the latter year Morton of Morton's Hope appeared, to no acclaim even from his friends. He wrote a second novel, Merrymount, but suppressed its publication until 1849. By that time he had located the real focus for his talents in the writing of history. An essay of 1849, "The Polity of the Puritans," showed that he had found his theme in the story of the triumph of representative institutions and freedom of conscience over the reactionary forces of Popery and tyranny.
Motley's first great book, The Rise of the Dutch Republic, was begun in 1846 and was, in effect, rewritten twice before its publication ten years later. He worked on the book for five years in Boston; then, realizing the need for better sources, he took his family to Dresden where he spent two more years. Moving on to The Hague and Brussels, he found so much new archival material that he had to rewrite his manuscript once more. The resulting work was published at his own expense, as neither Motley nor his publishers expected much sale. But 30,000 copies of the three volumes sold in the first year and the book's popularity continued for half a century. It was abridged, revised for young readers, and translated into Dutch, French, German, Swedish, and Russian.
The Rise of the Dutch Republic and its successors, The History of the United Netherlands (1861-1868) and The Life and Death of John of Barneveld (1874), which carried the narrative up to the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War, orchestrated Motley's idealist theme: there are certain "true principles" in human history, which will triumph despite the actions of individuals, though some great men, like William the Silent, may forward their advance. These "true principles" are the great liberal ideas of freedom and democracy. In Motley's books the villains are the minions of Catholicism; the heroes are the champions of Protestantism. There is, moreover, a dominant racial theme: the Northern, Germanic races have a natural propensity to freedom and representative institutions, while the Southern Europeans are prone to superstition and tyranny. Motley carried this race idea to a ridiculous extreme when he used it to explain the division between the United Provinces, which revolted against Spanish rule, and the Belgians, who remained loyal to Spain. This was Motley's basic weakness: a determination to make the facts fit his presuppositions. But he was an extremely effective writer. He shared his philosophy of history with his great American contemporaries, George Bancroft, William Hickling Prescott, and Francis Parkman. His method has been likened to that of the nineteenth-century historical painters: the production of an effect through the accumulation of overwhelming detail. His aim, well achieved, was to produce in his readers an impression of reality; that is, to make them believe that the historic past as he reproduced it had as much truth as the world they saw about them in the present. As he himself expressed it: "If ten people in the world hate despotism a little more and love civil and religious liberty a little better in consequence of what I have written, I shall be satisfied."
The outbreak of the Civil War brought Motley back to America to seek appointment as Minister at The Hague. He was miffed at being given Vienna instead, but served well there, in spite of his disappointment at finding that he, as a diplomat, could not be admitted to the Austrian archives where he had hoped to begin work on his projected volumes about the Thirty Years' War. He was recalled in 1866 because of a supposed hostility to the Johnson administration. In 1869-1870 he was Minister to England, but again was recalled, probably because of the quarrel between President Grant and Motley's patron, Senator Charles Sumner. Motley remained in England, where his daughters had married, and died there in 1877.
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