INTRODUCTION


A good deal of American history was once violently distorted by the
partisanship of the eighteenth century, frozen solid by its icy
formalism, and left thus for the edification of succeeding generations.
For example, it was not until 1868 that Franklin's Autobiography was by
accident given to the world in the simple natural style in which he
wrote it. The book had been "edited" by Franklin's loyalist grandson,
and had been cut and tortured into the pompous, stilted periods that
were supposed to befit the dignity of so important a personage. When
John Bigelow published the original with all its naïveté and homely
turns of phrases and suppressed passages, he shed a flood of light upon
Benjamin Franklin.

But not _such_ a flood as has still more recently been shed upon our
struggle for independence, and the hero who led it.

Mr. Sydney George Fisher[1] has shown how the history of the Revolution
has been garbled by the historians into the story of a struggle between
a villainous monster on the one hand, and a virtuous fairy on the other:
He has shown how a period that is said to have changed the thought of
the world like the epochs of Socrates, of Christ, of the Reformation,
and of the French Revolution, has been described in a series of "able
rhetorical efforts, enlarged Fourth-of-July orations, or pleasing
literary essays on selected phases of the contest." These writers have
ignored the fearful struggle of the patriots with the loyalists, the
early leniency of England as expressed in the conduct of General Howe,
the Clinton-Cornwallis controversy, and many other important subjects.