THE AMERICAN RE VOL UTION. 219 



father as synonymous terms. When I was a child I never 

 saw an Englishman but I was on my guard against him as a 

 spy, and would look behind the fences to see that there was 

 no ambuscade of red-coats. I made secret coverts about the 

 house, so that when they came to sack and burn it, and take 

 our women and children and household gods into captivity, I 

 could lay in wait to rescue them. In our school-boy games 

 the beaten party was always called &quot;British&quot; (the term 

 &quot; Britisher&quot; I never saw except in a British book or heard ex 

 cept in England). If a law was odious it was termed a 

 British law ; if a man was odious he was called an &quot; old Tory ;&quot; 

 and it has been with us a common piece of blackguardism till 

 within a short time, if not now, to speak of those of an oppo 

 sing party as under British influence. 



The war had been with us a war of the people ; not a 

 woman as she sipped her tea but imbibed hatred to the 

 taxing British, and suckled her offspring with its nourish 

 ment ; not a man of spunk in the country but was hand to 

 hand fighting with the British, and teaching his sons never to 

 yield to them. 



In England, on the other hand, comparatively few of 

 the people knew or cared at all about the war ; even the 

 soldiers engaged in it were in considerable numbers mere 

 hirelings from another people, whom the true English would 

 have rather seen whipped than not, so far as they had any 

 national feeling about it. Their hostile feeling was even then 

 more directed towards France than towards America ; and 

 now, I do not believe there is one in a thousand of the people 

 of England that has the slightest feeling of hostility towards 

 us, descending or inherited, from that time. It was much so 

 again in the later war. England was at war with half the 

 world in those days, and if a general disposition of enmity 

 towards us had been at all aroused in the course of it, all 



