Historian's Heritage

Columbia University was delighted and flabbergasted to read in the papers last week that it had inherited some $2 million. Its benefactor was a competent but obscure historian named Frederic Bancroft,* who died in Washington last fortnight.

The news presented two mysteries: 1) how a historian came by such a fortune; 2) why he bequeathed it to Columbia. Investigation soon disclosed that Bancroft, born in Galesburg, Ill. and an Amherst A.B., had taken his Ph.D. at Columbia in 1885, and lectured there for a year.

Except for other brief tenures as lecturer, Bancroft held only one other notable job, as librarian of the State Department from 1888 to 1892. A bachelor, he joined Washington's old, exclusive Metropolitan Club in 1891. A pleasant but solemn man, he was known to fellow members as a "very retiring and quiet sort." Historians respect his excellent studies of the South (Slave-Trading in the Old South, The Negro in Politics).

The money came from an older brother, the late Edgar Addison Bancroft, crack corporation lawyer and onetime U.S. Ambassador to Japan (1924-25). It will be used to establish the Edgar A. and Frederic Bancroft Foundation at Columbia.

*Distant kinsman of famed George Bancroft (History of the United States), first (1800- 1891) major U.S. historian.

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