54 FISHER— MYTH-MAKING PROCESS IN [April i8, 



trenchant, luminous and captivating style, a considerable portion of 

 that history. His essays on the military strategy of the Revolu- 

 tion are contributions of permanent value, refreshing and ennobling, 

 because they substitute truth and actuality for the mawkish sen- 

 timentality and nonsense with which we have been so long nauseated. 

 Minor investigations like the recent works on the Loyalists by 

 Flick, Van Tyne, Ryerson and Stark, Bartlett's " Destruction of 

 the Gaspee," Judge Horace Gray's essay on the " Writs of Assist- 

 ance," publications like the Hutchinson Letters, the Clinton-Corn- 

 wallis Controversy, have of course helped to bring about this 

 change. The general improvement in public libraries, in accessibil- 

 ity to the old pamphlets and original evidence of all sorts, has also 

 helped and led to a desire for knowledge of the actual events. 

 Lapse of time, too, is no doubt having its effect in lessening the 

 supposed inadvisability of letting all about the Revolution be known. 

 Within the last two years in writing a life of Daniel Webster I 

 had occasion to examine the original evidence of our history from 

 the War of 1812 to the Compromise of 1850 ; and I found that it had 

 substantially all been used in our histories of that period. There 

 was no ignoring of it or concealment of it such as I had found when 

 I investigated the original evidence of the Revolution. It is 

 strange at first sight, that the history of our Civil War of 1861 

 should have all its phases so openly and thoroughly exhibited, 

 the side of the South as well as the side of the North, both fully 

 displayed to the public, and that the greater part of the evidence 

 of the Revolution should be concealed. But the circumstances of 

 the Revolution were quite different. 



In the first place, the large loyalist party in this country in some 

 places a majority, were so completely defeated, hunted down, ter- 

 rorized, driven out of the country and scattered in Canada and 

 various British possessions, that to use a vulgarism they never 

 " opened their heads " again. It is only in recent times that any 

 one has had the face to collect their evidence and arguments from 

 the original sources and publish it. For more than half a century 

 after the Revolution no writer could gain anything but condemna- 

 tion and contempt for mentioning anything about them. The sue- 



