As a historian James Schouler's industry, ambition, and opportunity exceeded his ability. Though well known and applauded in his own day, his reputation has faded into obscurity except within the esoteric confines of historiographical study. He was among the last of those nineteenth-century gentlemen scholars who aspired to write a comprehensive history of the United States. Thanks to independent means and forty years of work he succeeded, although his ambition, as well as the methods with which he carried it out and the viewpoints he adopted, were obsolete long before he had finished.

Schouler was born in West Cambridge (later Arlington), Massachusetts. His father, William Schouler, a minor Whig politician and newspaper editor, had come from Scotland as a child. His mother, Frances Eliza Warren, was of an established New England family. During James Schouler's youth the family moved to Ohio. Its economic position was such that Schouler...