peers.
To complete the PhD in two years Bolton needed a fellowship in his second year. The need became imperative in January 1897, when Gertrude gave birth to their first child, Frances. Turner thought that the prospects for a fellowship were good for Herbert and Fred, who would be back from Germany in the fall.51 “If one or two fellowships pan out right, then O.K.,” he told Fred; “if not then O___.”52 Turner wanted to keep Bolton at Wisconsin but offered to nominate him for fellowships at other universities including Harvard.53 Such a fellowship did not necessarily mean a complete transfer away from Wisconsin. In the 1890s it was not unusual for graduate students to take a fellowship for a year at another university and return to their home institution to complete the degree. This was a way to broaden graduate training, and (from the perspective of Turner and Haskins) advertise the bright young graduate students of the University of Wisconsin to the elite East Coast schools.54
Neither the Harvard nor the Wisconsin fellowship came through for the Boltons. The experience left the usually optimistic Herbert feeling a little abused. “Turner told me right up to [the vote] that my chances were strong.” “The policy of the Univ.…was to turn down home men,” he fumed. Turner and Haskins were now plumping Herbert for a fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, but he had “no strong hopes.”55
Herbert's judgment was a bit harsh. Turner probably told Bolton much the same thing about fellowships that he told Carl Becker. “It would give me pleasure to see you win a fellowship,” Turner explained. Of course, “we have to settle them purely on the basis of competition, but I should be glad, other things being equal, to see one of the men trained entirely by us win the honor. Of course I cannot make any promises, and you, I understand, are not asking for any.”56 Herbert probably heard what he wanted to hear without registering Turner's careful qualifiers.
Nevertheless, Turner offered him a place as his assistant and some extension work. Herbert thought that things might turn out all right after all. “I felt pretty blue last night but there's a good deal of India rubber in me and I bound back into shape pretty easily.”57 Herbert's disappointment was somewhat assuaged with his election to an alumni fellowship, but it did not pay as much as the one he had lost. “Turner says that if I get something in the East I'd better resign…which I think I'll do.” Three weeks later the university of Pennsylvania faculty elected him to a Harrison Fellowship.58 Still, Herbert's failure to obtain major support at Wisconsin rankled. “It is the policy of the UW profs. to get outsiders and to widen their own reputations. I know Turner was very anxious to get me a place but he preferred it to be abroad. I hardly think that a fair policy.”59
Herbert had drawn an astute assessment out of the disappointment that he felt over losing the Wisconsin fellowship. He had been a pawn in a larger game of professional and institutional politics. Haskins and Turner were brilliant young comers who assiduously cultivated their reputations with older men at more prestigious institutions. Promising graduate students like Bolton, Becker, and Ford could be moved around on the academic map to further the careers of their mentors. Improvements in the mentor's status sometimes created opportunities for students. Indeed, in April, the month before the fellowship election was held at Wisconsin, the prominent American historian John Bach McMaster had invited Turner to take a position at the University of Pennsylvania. Although he did not want the job, Turner visited Penn and returned to Wisconsin no doubt armed with knowledge about the Harrison Fellowship for which he recommended Bolton.60 The move to Pennsylvania would benefit Bolton, but he resented being forced out of his alma mater in order to succeed in his chosen field. The graduate student who wanted to rise had gotten a lesson on just how that was done in the historical profession. He did not think it fair, but he would not forget the lesson.
Bolton left Wisconsin reluctantly, but he must have thrilled to the historical associations of Philadelphia and the University of Pennsylvania.61 Founded in 1740, Penn was one of the older institutions of higher learning in the united States. The university had struggled to become a first-rate institution until the 1880s when private endowments and an aggressive new administration began to improve things.62 In 1883 Penn hired John Bach McMaster to teach American history. Only thirty-one at the time, McMaster had an unusual background for a historian. He had graduated from City College of New York, where he had distinguished himself in the sciences. After college McMaster surveyed the Civil War battlefield at Winchester, Virginia, a task that supported General Philip H. Sheridan's Memoirs. McMaster's technical books on engineering qualified him for a faculty position at Princeton in 1877. He taught surveying and led Princeton's fossil-collecting expedition to the Wyoming Bad Lands. In these early days of bone collecting McMaster's experience as a surveyor no doubt outweighed his inexperience in paleontology. The experience gave McMaster a lasting interest in the American West.63
McMaster began writing the History of the American People as a diversion from teaching Princeton boys the art of surveying. He intended his multivolume work to be a story about ordinary people that was entirely unlike the accounts of political affairs that dominated historical writing at that time. When the first volume appeared in 1883, it became an instant best seller. Almost overnight McMaster had become one of the nation's leading historians. Two months after his book appeared, a representative from Penn offered McMaster a new chair in American history.64
McMaster's enthusiasm for Penn was matched with a deep hatred of Princeton. He detested teaching the surveying courses, and was certain that he would never be promoted or allowed to teach history at Presbyterian Princeton, because he was not a church member. Thus, when he headed for Pennsylvania, McMaster penned in his diary, “Left Princeton, Thank god forever.”65
Bolton found that McMaster was a very different sort of teacher than Turner or Haskins. McMaster was a poor lecturer and inattentive mentor. Although he demanded much from his graduate students, his mentoring style is best described as benign neglect.66 but McMaster had connections and used them to benefit his students. He arranged for Bolton to attend a dinner for Herbert M. Friedenwald, superintendent of manuscripts in the Library of Congress and formerly McMaster's doctoral student. “The party was very select, only the club and three history Fellows,” but it was costly at $1.50 per plate.67 Bolton bore the expense so that he could make the connection with Friedenwald. To Herbert, fresh from the western provinces, Penn must have seemed the center of a social and scholarly world he had only dreamed of in Wisconsin.
Brother Fred had also moved east, to Worcester, Massachusetts, where he won a fellowship at Clark University. The Clark faculty had already accepted the thesis he had written in Germany for a doctorate in psychology, although he had yet to pass his exams.68 Fred was developing a specialty in educational psychology. He soon arranged to publish his thesis as a book and began submitting articles to professional journals. Once again, Fred proved to be Herbert's role model.
By the end of October Herbert had decided on a thesis subject, the “status of negro as a slave in 1860; changes effected in his status by emancipation, reconstruction, and the attempts of the south to make these laws inoperative.” This was his general plan, “but think a doctors thesis may be written on the first chapter.”69 His interest in slavery seems to have developed over a period of a year or so. He began studying slavery intensively in 1896 before returning to Madison for graduate work with Turner.70 Within weeks he could report that he had already written the first few pages of his thesis after going through “at least 100 vols of state statutes and digests,” demonstrating the prodigious capacity for primary source investigation that would distinguish Bolton's career ever after.71 By the end of the fall term he had written forty pages for McMaster's seminar and hoped to finish the dissertation in six months.72
Thesis writing did not go as smoothly as Herbert had hoped. In late December the meeting of the Federation of Graduate Clubs in Chicago took a week out of his crowded schedule.73 Family life had its satisfactions, but “you know the difficulties of studying with small
