William H. Prescott - Death and Legacy

Death and Legacy

In January 1859, Prescott decided to resume his work on Philip II, with the goal of writing a final fourth volume. On January 29, he suffered a second stroke, which resulted in his immediate death. He was buried with his parents in St. Paul's Church, and his funeral was attended by representatives, among others, of Harvard University, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Essex Institute.

Prescott's work has remained popular and influential to the present day, and his meticulous use of sources, bibliographical citations and critical notes was unprecedented among American historians. As the work of an amateur historian, the History of Ferdinand and Isabella was an outstanding achievement, and it arguably was the best English-language work on the subject published until then. The major problems with the work to the modern day historian are not related to the quality of the research or Prescott's understanding of the period, but rather that his focus is on the major political and military events as opposed to social and economic conditions. It has also been argued that Prescott partially subscribed to the Great Man theory. The Conquest of Mexico has endured more than any other of Prescott's work: it is regarded as his greatest literary accomplishment. However, modern scholarship agrees that there are problems with Prescott's characterization of the conquest. David Levin has argued that the Conquest shows "inadequate attention to detail" and remains a broad and general account of events. In contrast to the Conquest of Mexico, the Conquest of Peru has received relatively little modern scholarly attention, perhaps due to some key similarities in style and structure. However, it is generally thought that the work was the authoritative account until the 20th century, and that Prescott used a broader range of source material than any previous writer on the subject. However, the archeological and anthropological aspects of both works have been heavily criticized by historians since the end of the 19th century. Prescott had never visited archeological sites in Mesoamerica and his understanding of Inca and Aztec culture was weak. In defense of Prescott, it has been argued that despite advances in archeological understanding, and a reconceptualization of the nature of pre-Columbian society, the works remain broadly historically accurate, and Prescott's elaborations on fact were due to a fundamental lack of source material. In contrast, Phillip the Second is considered essentially an inferior piece—it lacks the epic structure and literary merits of Prescott's other work, and the work has not received more critical attention than other contemporary accounts of the monarch's life.

There is a popular misconception that Prescott was completely blind, which seems to have stemmed from a misunderstanding of his comment in the preface to The Conquest of Mexico, in which he stated, "Nor have I ever corrected, or even read, my own original draft". The myth was further propagated by a contemporary New York review of the Conquest, and has been a common theme in popular accounts of his work. Other related embellishments of Prescott's disability have also occurred—Samuel Eliot Morison, writing in a 1959 article for The Atlantic Monthly, claimed that Prescott had an artificial eye, although there is no evidence to suggest this. It has been argued that Prescott's biographers have naturally been drawn to romanticize his life due to Prescott's own romantic style of history.

Four biographies of Prescott have been written. In 1864, George Ticknor published a biography based on Prescott's then-unpublished correspondence, to which the later biographers have been greatly indebted. Rollo Ogden's 1904 account is more a stylistic modernization of Ticknor's work. Harry Thurston Peck's 1905 account is considered academically inferior due to its essentially derivative nature. C.G. Gardiner's 1969 work is considered the definitive critical biography of Prescott, taking into account a wide range of unpublished documents that were unavailable to earlier biographers.

The town of Prescott in Arizona was named in his honor, as was the William H. Prescott House (Headquarters House). Colegio Anglo Americano Prescott, a school in Arequipa, Peru, also bears his name.