PREFACE.

HE following Lectures were written for the Lowell

THE

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Institute of Boston in 1862, and read before it in the January and February of 1863. A part of them was also read before the Cooper Institute of New York in March and April of the same year. Relating to a past of great present value, they have already, I am told, done some good; and I publish them in the hope that, in a more accessible form, they may do still more. nation can neglect the study of its own history without exposing itself to the danger and disgrace of repeating past errors. No statesman can confine his attention to the present, without losing sight of the principles from which the present grew, and thus becoming a groper in the dark, instead of a trustworthy guide.

It is impossible to read our history without seeing that we, like all other historical nations, have been controlled by general laws. It is a universal law that every principle works out its own development; and hence, as an inevitable corollary, if you accept the principle, you must sooner or later accept its consequences. Our Puritan forefathers claimed freedom of judgment for themselves, and founded their Colonies that they might have a home of their own to exercise it in. But

they failed to see that what was true for one was true for all; and the dark pages of their history are the pages which record their fruitless struggle with the fundamental principle of their own institutions.

It is a principle of English law, that the King cannot take the subject's money without the subject's consent. Denying this principle, England attempted to tax the Colonies through the Imperial Parliament instead of the Colonial Assemblies, and lost them. Appealing to this principle, the Colonists claimed the right to dispose freely of the fruits of their own labors, and established their claim by the War of Independence. But they failed to see that, if the principle was true, it was true as a law of universal humanity, and therefore must sooner or later demand and obtain universal application. And this failure to accept all the consequences of the accepted principle left the bitter and bloody warbella plus quam civillia — through which we are now passing as a part of their legacy to their children. Will not history say that wise statesmanship should have foreseen this as a logical sequence, and consistent Christianity should recognize it as the act of that divine justice which could not have imposed the obligation of personal responsibility without according the right of personal freedom?

The conduct too of the War of Independence is full of lessons. More than half its waste of blood, treasure, and time was caused by the want of an efficient general government. What a comment is the history of the civil government of the Revolution upon the doctrine of State rights! When Washington, in his proclamation of the 25th of January, 1777, called upon those

who had accepted British protections to give them up and take an oath of allegiance to the United States, a delegate from New Jersey, Mr. Abraham Clark, condemned his proclamation as "exceptionable in many things and very improper”; adding, with an air of infinite condescension, "I believe the General is honest, but I think him fallible." Has not the present war given rise to many accusations which history will record with the same wonder and disgust with which she records this?

Another cause of the profuse expenditure and protracted sufferings of the War of Independence, was the neglect to raise an army for the war when popular enthusiasm was so high that the ranks might have been filled with hardly any effort but that of making out the rolls. If I were to copy from Washington's and Greene's letters all the paragraphs against short enlistments and temporary levies, I should fill a volume. Have we not seen the lesson blindly and fatally neglected?

A copy of Washington's letters in every school and district library of the country, to serve as a text-book in clubs and debating societies, and a manual for public men in every department of civil and military administration, would do more for the formation of our national character, would stand us in better stead in difficult emergencies, and furnish us more appropriate examples of that wisdom which we need at all times, than any other source to which we could go for guidance and counsel. A careful study of them by our statesmen at the beginning of the present war would have saved us thousands of lives and millions of treasure.

"Why have the fathers suffered, but to make
The children wisely safe?"

I have not attempted to give my authorities for the statements and opinions contained in these Lectures, for the form of Lectures does not admit of it; and if my purpose in publishing them is reached, they will carry the reader directly to the original sources. But I can

not permit them to go forth into the world without acknowledging my obligations to the profound and eloquent History of Mr. Bancroft, to the judicious and accurate Annals of Holmes, and to that admirable series of publications by which Mr. Sparks has connected his name indissolubly with the history of our Revolution. Force's Archives unfortunately cover only the first two years of the war; but for those years they leave nothing to be desired. What a disgrace to the administration of 1853, and its immediate successor, that such a work should have been suspended, and the exhaustive researches and wonderful critical sagacity of such a man lost to historical literature, by the arbitrary violation of a solemn contract.

In using Gordon, I have often felt the want of the critical edition which was promised us some years ago in the name of Mr. George Henry Moore of the New York Historical Society. In using the Journals of Congress, I have constantly had occasion to regret the awkward separation of the secret journals from the main collection, and the want of a new edition based upon an accurate collation of the original manuscript, and completed by the insertion in their proper places of the fragments of debates and speeches that are scattered through the works of Adams, and Jefferson, and Gouverneur Morris, and other members of that body.