1912.] HISTORIES OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. 55 



cessful party in America would not even vilify them, but ignored 

 them and their doings as if they had had no existence. The object 

 of this was to make it appear that the Revolution had been a great 

 spontaneous uprising of the whole American people without faction 

 or disagreement among themselves. In England, strangely enough, 

 the loyalists were also ignored and nothing said about them. They 

 were often suspected of being half rebels, "whitewashed rebels" 

 as they were sometimes called. Those who fled to England were 

 apt to be treated with more or less contempt. They were often 

 regarded as mere objects of charity, " lick pennies" as one of them 

 complained, or at best as mere provincials of neither social nor 

 political importance. 



But at the close of our Civil War, the people of the Southern 

 States remained in the country, were respected by the North as well 

 as by the rest of the world, published their side of the controversy 

 and again sent their representatives to Congress as they had done 

 before the war. No one has as yet dared to falsify or conceal the 

 facts of that history or turn it into myths and legends. 



In the second place, after the close of the Revolution, we were 

 for a long time a very disunited country. It was very doubtful 

 whether the States would be able to come together and form a na- 

 tional government. Many thought that some of them might go 

 back under British control. When a national constitution was at 

 last adopted, it was regarded by the rest of the world and even by 

 ourselves, as an experiment which very likely might not in the end 

 succeed. In Europe, it was largely regarded as a ridiculous experi- 

 ment. Our democratic ideas and manners were despised and our 

 newness and crudeness contrasted with the settled comfort and re- 

 finement of the old nations. We felt all this keenly. Our writers 

 and able men struggled might and main to unite our people and build 

 up a nation. They strove to give dignity and respect to everything ; 

 to make no damaging admissions, to let not the smallest fact creep 

 out, that might be taken advantage of. It was, therefore, perhaps 

 too much to expect that they would describe the factions and turmoil 

 of the Revolution as they really were, the military absurdity of the 

 British General Howe letting it go by default, the cruelty and perse- 



