people." Washington could indeed declare in his "Farewell
Address" of 1796, "With slight shades of difference, you have the
same religion, manners, habits, and political principles"; yet no
one knew better than Washington upon what a slender thread this
political unity had often hung, and how impossible it had been to
foresee the end from the beginning.

It is idle to look in the writings of the Revolutionary period
for the literature of beauty, for a quiet harmonious unfolding of
the deeper secrets of life. It was a time of swift and pitiless
change, of action rather than reflection, of the turning of many
separate currents into one headlong stream. "We must, indeed, all
hang together," runs Franklin's well-known witticism in
Independence Hall, "or, most assuredly, we shall all hang
separately." Excellently spoken, Doctor! And that homely, cheery,
daring sentence gives the keynote of much of the Revolutionary
writing that has survived. It may be heard in the state papers of
Samuel Adams, the oratory of Patrick Henry, the pamphlets of
Thomas Paine, the satires of Freneau and Trumbull, and in the
subtle, insinuating, thrilling paragraphs of Thomas Jefferson.

We can only glance in passing at the literature of the Lost
Cause, the Loyalist or "Tory" pleadings for allegiance to
Britain. It was written by able and honest men, like Boucher and
Odell, Seabury, Leonard and Galloway. They distrusted what
Seabury called "our sovereign Lord the Mob." They represented, in
John Adams's opinion, nearly one-third of the people of the
colonies, and recent students believe that this estimate was too
low. In some colonies the Loyalists were clearly in the majority.
In all they were a menacing element, made up of the conservative,