James Walker  John Bartlett

Jared Sparks (1789-1866)

Jared Sparks Jared Sparks

Jared Sparks was born May 10, 1789, in Willington, Connecticut, of humble parentage. Till his twentieth year his entire school life amounted to forty months, but, nevertheless, he was at that time found competent to take charge of a district school near his native place. He was by trade a carpenter, but, being eager of education, he put himself under the tuition of the Rev. Hubbell Loomis, the minister of Willington, and as payment for tuition shingled the minister’s barn. Mr. Loomis subsequently became the first president of Shurtleff College in Alton, Illinois, and to his helpfulness Mr. Sparks always held himself much indebted. A neighboring minister, the Rev. Abiel Abbot, of Coventry, Conn., making a morning call on Mr. Loomis, was told of the remarkable young carpenter then at work on the barn. Mr. Abbot saw at once that the carpenter had the making of a scholar, and wrote to his cousin and brother-in-law, Dr. Benjamin Abbot, master of Phillips Exeter Academy, to bespeak for Sparks a place on the beneficiary list of the academy. The application was successful, and at the beginning of the next term Sparks made his appearance at Exeter, having walked the entire distance from Willington, one hundred and twenty miles, in four days. His worldly goods, packed in a small trunk, were carried to Exeter by Mr. Abbot appended to the axle of his chaise.

In 1811 Sparks entered Harvard College, and his record there bears testimony at once to unusually robust health, to strength of purpose, and to the vigorous mental fiber that made him master of his opportunities. Graduating in 1815, he became tutor to the sons of the Rev. Nathaniel Thayer, of Lancaster, and under the direction of that famous minister began his studies for the ministry, with his wonted industry doing double work. He remained at Lancaster till 1817, when he was called to Cambridge as tutor in mathematics. This office he resigned early in his second year to accept the invitation to become the first minister of the Unitarian church in Baltimore.

Mr. Sparks’s Baltimore pastorate lasted a little more than four years, and during part of the time he acted as chaplain of the House of Representatives at Washington. His parish multiplied and prospered under his ministry, and his name is a cherished tradition in Baltimore to a generation that never saw his face. He conducted in Baltimore a monthly periodical entitled The Unitarian Miscellany, and published several controversial writings in defense of the theological position of his society. He also entered into negotiations for the purchase of the North American Review, of which he assumed the editorship on his return to Boston in 1824. In the six years during which he had charge of the magazine he doubled its estimated pecuniary value. From 1824 till his death in 1866 Mr. Sparks made his home chiefly in Cambridge, with several prolonged periods of European travel. A list of the fruits of Mr. Sparks’s literary labor would require a much longer memoir than the present limits of space permit. Suffice it to say that the life and writings of Washington in twelve volumes, and of Franklin in ten volumes, are but a small part of his contributions to American history and biography. In 1838 he was chosen Professor of Ancient and Modern History in Harvard University, and in 1849 succeeded Edward Everett as president—an office which he held for four years.

Mr. Sparks was a man of immense industry and power of work. He was rigidly exact and thorough in all matters of business and firm in all matters in which principle was involved. The last years of his life were spent in the enjoyment of books and friends and society, and rounded out a singularly happy and fortunate career.