1912] HISTORIES OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION. 63 



thorities, and keeps on the safe side of mere ordinary dates and 

 events. The great mass of actual evidence; the position, the doings, 

 the arguments of the loyalists, the causes which led to the Revolu- 

 tion, the real conditions in America, the navigation and trade laws, 

 the strategy of battles, the controversy over General Howe's conduct 

 of the war, his trial before Parliament, the Clinton-Cornwallis con- 

 troversy over the final strateg}' — these and a host of other actu- 

 alities, one would never learn anything about from the pages of John 

 Andrews, LL.D. 



In 1787 a very ambitious and laborious account of the Revolu- 

 tion appeared by the Rev. William Gordon, an English whig, and 

 Congregationalist minister, who had come out to Massachusetts 

 early in the difficulties and remained with us all through the Revolu- 

 tion, interviewing generals and prominent men, visiting battlefields, 

 examining private papers and public records and collecting notes and 

 materials. When the war ended he returned to England and wrote 

 his history. 



He was not altogether liked in America. John Adams said he 

 talked too much, and that his history in attempting to favor both 

 sides was a failure. But he seems to have been trusted with im- 

 portant papers and he was unquestionably very painstaking and 

 accurate. Many of the papers which he examined in manuscript, 

 notably in the year 1775, have been published in the American Ar- 

 chives and confirm his statements. No one has given us a better 

 detailed contemporary account of the Battles of Fort Mifflin and 

 Red Bank. But he had no historic ability. He follows the Annual 

 Register as a basis for a great part of his information, copying 

 from it without changing the language, and announces in his preface 

 that he has done so. He stays cautiously within the whig limits of 

 safety already described. The remaining British colonies would not 

 be stirred to rebellion by anything he says. But as a chronicler who 

 lived amidst the events of the Revolution, his work is of some value 

 as a piece of original partisan evidence. 



In 1789 Dr. Ramsay of South Carolina, who had written about 

 the Revolution, in his own State, brought out a general history of 

 the Revolution, which strange to say, rejected in some respects the 



