Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year one thousand eight hundred and forty-eight, by HARPER & BROthers, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District of New York. TENCX LIBRARY NEW YORK ADVERTISEMENT. OF centennial sermons and Fourth-of-July orations, whether professedly such or in the guise of history, there are more than enough. It is due to our fathers and ourselves, it is due to truth and philosophy, to present for once, on the historic stage, the founders of our American nation unbedaubed with patriotic rouge, wrapped up in no fine-spun cloaks of excuses and apology, without stilts, buskins, tinsel, or bedizzenment, in their own proper persons, often rude, hard, narrow, superstitious, and mistaken, but always earnest, downright, manly, and sincere. The result of their labors is eulogy enough; their best apology is to tell their story exactly as it was. We have accordingly, in this book, an attempt to set forth the personages of our colonial and revolutionary history, such as they really were in their own day and generation, living and breathing men, their faults as well as their virtues, their weaknesses as well as their strength-for to know men, we must know them in both aspects; an endeavor to trace our institutions, religious, social, and political, from their embryo state; to show, in fine, from what beginnings, by what influen ces, and through what changes the United States of America are what they are. For facts, recourse has been had to the original authorities, particularly laws, state papers, public documents, and official records, printed and manuscript. Free use has also been made of the numerous valuable collections of letters and memoirs relating especially to the Revolution, published within the last twenty-five years. It has not been thought necessary to distract the reader's attention, and to increase the size and cost of the book, by a parade of references; but, for the benefit of those curious in such matters, and especially of such young students as may wish to investigate our history in its original sources, a list of the printed books chiefly used is placed at the end of the third volume. In all cases of citations from statutes, which are very numerous, public records, letters, and generally from memoirs and histories, the dates in the margin will furnish a guide to those who may desire to verify the quotations. To combine a mass of materials, generally dry, sometimes defective, and sometimes contradictory, embracing a multiplicity of petty details concerning numerous independent communities, into an harmonious, well-proportioned whole, all the parts of which shall illustrate each other, and, preserving the necessary brevity, to convey to the reader a distinct idea of the persons, facts, and bearings of our history, in narrative somewhat picturesque and life-like, is a task so difficult, that in the pres ent defective state of our historical literature even a distant approach to it can hardly fail to be acceptable. No other work on American history, except mere compends and abridgments, embraces the same extent of time; none comprehends the same circuit of inquiry, or has any thing like the same plan and objects. Nowhere else can be found in the same distinct completeness the curious and instructive story of New England theocracy, the financial, economical, and political history of the colonies and the Revolution, the origin and shaping of our existing laws and institutions, state and national, the progressive, social, and intellectual development of our people. The foundation thus laid, it is intended in two more volumes to sketch the story even to the present times. |