Antiques

Magazine Antiques, Jan, 2005 by Wendell Garrett

To rescue from the dust and obscurity of private repositories such
important documents, as are liable to be lost or destroyed by the
indifference or neglect of those into whose hands they may have fallen,
will be a primary object of our attention .... for without the aid of
historic records and authentic documents, history will be nothing more
than a well-combined series of ingenious conjectures and amusing fables.
John Pintard, "To the Public, New-York Historical Society,"
New-York Herald, February 12, 1805

Americans took their first steps to safeguard their national memory almost as soon as there was an American nation. On November 20, 1804, during the administration of President Thomas Jefferson, John Pintard (see p. 145, Pl. X) and ten other eminent residents of New York City met at the old City Hall in the office of Mayor De Witt Clinton and "agreed to form themselves into a Society the principal design of which should be to collect and preserve whatever may relate to the natural, civil or ecclesiastical History of the United States in general and of this State in particular." The organization was chartered as the New-York Historical Society, the second historical society in the United States after Massachusetts, which set up its own in 1791. The purpose of the New York founders was to collect, preserve, and publish the books, manuscripts, and pamphlets that were the basic sources of American history. The focus was to be the entire United States as it then existed.

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All the founders had been passionate patriots during the American Revolution and ardent nationalists once the Republic was established. They believed deeply in the cultural premises underlying Bishop George Berkeley's "Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America" (1752), which predicted the movement of settlers westward and offered a theory that associated economic and cultural success. The society's founders believed that a historical society would make a tangible contribution to the new political and social order they foresaw.

The Reverend Jeremy Belknap's Massachusetts Historical Society became the model for Pintard's New York society, Isaiah Thomas's American Antiquarian Society (1812), the Historical Society of Pennsylvania (1824), the Virginia Historical Society (1831), and dozens of others that sprang up in the early nineteenth century. Pintard acknowledged his debt to Belknap in an address in 1805 in which he said: "Not aspiring to the higher walks of general science, we shall confine the range of our exertions to the humble task of collecting and preserving whatever may be useful to others in the different branches of historical inquiry. We feel encouraged to follow this path by the honorable example of the Massachusetts Society, whose labors will abridge those of the future historian, and furnish a thousand lights to guide him through the dubious track of unrecorded time."

Pintard was a fascinating figure who deserves greater recognition than he has received. He assumed active roles in at least seventeen civic institutions, by the count of the historian Thomas Bender, and his letters to his daughter record his relentless civic load. A nineteenth-century collective biography of the great merchants of New York related: "There never lived that man in the city who could start great measures as John Pintard could do." The New-York Historical Society is certainly one of the greatest.