History of the Conquest of Mexico, Volume 1

William Hickling Prescott was born in Salem, Massachusetts, May 4, 1796. He died in Boston, January 28, 1859. William Prescott, his father, a lawyer of great ability and of sterling worth, was at one time a judge, and was frequently elected to public positions of trust and responsibility. His mother was a daughter of Thomas Hickling, for many years United States Consul at the Azores. His grandfather, William Prescott, was in command of the American forces at the battle of Bunker Hill, June 17, 1775. On both sides, therefore, the future historian was descended from what Oliver Wendell Holmes aptly termed the “New England Brahman Stock.” He was prepared for college by an unusually accomplished scholar, John Sylvester John Gardiner, for many years the rector of Trinity Church, Boston, and entered Harvard College as a sophomore in 1811. Three years later he graduated with the Class of 1814.

During his junior year came the accident which was to change the whole course of his life. As he was leaving the dining-hall, in which the students sat at “Commons,” a biscuit, thrown by a careless fellow-student, struck him squarely in the left eye and stretched him senseless upon the floor. Paralysis of the retina was the result; the injury was beyond the reach of the healing art, and the sight of one eye was utterly destroyed. After a period of intense suffering, spent in a darkened room, he recovered sufficiently to resume his college work and to be graduated with his class. For a year and a half the uninjured eye served him fairly well. Then, suddenly, acute rheumatism attacked it, causing, except in occasional periods of intermission, excruciating pain during the rest of his life. Total darkness, for weeks at a time, was not infrequently Prescott’s lot, and work, except under a most careful adjustment of every ray of light, was almost out of the question. Under these circumstances the career at the bar which his father had planned for him, and to which he had looked forward with so much pleasure was no longer to be thought of. Business offered no attractions, even if a business life had been possible to him in his semi-blindness. He turned his attention to literature, and found there his vocation.

But for this work he felt that the most careful preparation was necessary. In a letter, written eighteen months before his death, he says, “I proposed to devote ten years of my life to the study of ancient and modern literature, chiefly the latter, and to give ten years more to some historical work. I have had the good fortune to accomplish this design pretty nearly within the limits assigned. In the Christmas of 1837 my first work was given to the public.”