ART. VII. Documentary History of the American Revolution. Published in Conformity to an Act of Congress. By MATTHEW ST. CLAIR CLARKE and PETER FORCE. Fourth Series. pp. 1886.

DOCUMENTARY history is to our merchants no unaccustomed thing. The careful man of business keeps a record of every transaction. Not a penny is received or expended, without a memorial; not an ounce of sugar, not a grain of coffee is imported, but the history is preserved of the harbour where it was freighted, of the ship in which it sailed, of the port where it came to hand; and should a millionaire who has kept his files of papers amuse himself with considering the sources of his wealth, he might trace it back to its feeblest springs; might know what sums he had derived from lending, and what from profits in exchanges; might follow his operations not merely into the bank or the counting-house, but to those primary elements of increase, the workshop and the field.

Or look at the navigation of the country, where already a larger public interest exists. There is not a ship built upon any portion of our seacoast, on any little river, or inlet, but its name, and age, and character, and owners, are made the subject of registry; and not a share in a sloop can change its proprietor without becoming chronicled.

If we turn to the great agricultural interest, the case is the same. The history of the ownership of every foot of land is carefully preserved; and, with the exception of a very few litigated cases, every farm and every building in the country can be traced back to its earliest occupant and its builder.

Thus careful are we of every thing which relates to our material interests. Books are kept by double entry, that not a cent may stray into the obscure limits of conjectural reasoning; ships are registered in public offices; and deeds of lands and wills are saved from seizure or loss by becoming a matter of public record. The muse of history is charged with keeping the number of fishing smacks that go out for cod or herring, and will be denounced as false to her trust, if a cornfield changes owners without a deed and a copy of it.

Let us not then be indifferent to a documentary history of

our freedom. If noble thoughts have risen in men's souls, and filled them with an enthusiasm which would not rest, till it had infused their conceptions into the fundamental legislation of the country, let us trace those conceptions to the statesmen in whose minds they sprung up, and to the moving causes which called them into being. When the farmers and mechanics of New England rushed to Bunker's Hill, and bade defiance to all the means, which monarchy and feudalism, and the European commercial aristocracy, could bring against them, they have a right that we should be curious to investigate the causes of so strange an event; that we should trace their activity to their farms and firesides, to the hum of village politics, to the aspirings of the great agricultural class, to the doings of their modest, unpretending committees, to the resoluteness of their uncelebrated Hampdens, to the vigorous daring of their rural captains. Let us look really into the life of the country; let us know, of a very truth, how the great deeds which make our land the hope of the nations, were generated and matured. History has hitherto haunted the recesses of palaces, has pryed into the mysteries of cabinets, has studied the jealousies of king's wives and king's mistresses; let us send her now into the country to study man in his simplicity, to seek the earliest and humblest expressions of natural principles and feelings. Our freedom in the days of our struggle was safe; for it had struck deep; let us know into what soil its roots have penetrated, and how deeply and how widely they extend.

New England people, especially those of Massachusetts and Connecticut, have always been a documentary people. Here we have our records that go back to the meetings of our fathers at Mr. Cradock's in London; and our first governor kept a faithful diary of the great events, of which he in part comprehended the greatness. Excellent WINTHROP ! In him, a yielding gentleness of temper was secured against weakness by deep but tranquil enthusiasm. Lavish of fortune and health in the public service, and, for the welfare of Massachusetts, cheerfully encountering poverty and premature age, his lenient benevolence could temper, if not subdue, the bigotry of his times. An honest royalist, averse to pure democracy, yet firm in his regard for existing popular liberties; in England a conformist, yet loving "gospel purity" even to Independency, in America mildly aristocratic, advocating a govern

ment of the least part," yet desiring that least part to be "the wiser of the best"; disinterested, brave, and conscientious; his character marks the transition of the reformation into avowed republicanism; when the sentiment of loyalty, still sacredly cherished, was gradually yielding to the irresistible spirit of civil freedom.

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Nor was Winthrop alone anxious to retain the memory the past. The General Court, and our public men of old time, always cherished the desire, that the wonderful kindness of Providence to our people, in the days of their weakness, should be duly recorded and perpetuated. The elder Mather must have seen Winthrop, and known Hubbard well; the younger Mather, kept up the zeal of research till the better days of Prince; and the enlightened critical curiosity of Prince was followed by the histories of Hutchinson, Trumbull, and Belknap.

The fate of Hutchinson was a strange one. He loved his native commonwealth; but, unhappily for himself, was at once ambitious of power and distrustful of popular influences. The only monument of his mind is his History of Massachusetts, written with lively inquisitiveness and a lawyerlike criticism; though without a glimpse of the great truths, which were the mighty causes of the revolutions he describes. He was philosophic, if to know somewhat of the selfish principles in man be philosophy; otherwise he was blind, except to facts. He felt himself that he had not solved the problem of the causes, which gave being and progress to Massachusetts; and it is said that tears used to gush from his eyes as he reflected on his career, and yearned for the land from which his blindness. to popular life had estranged him.

Next in character, if not in time, came the History of Connecticut by the accurate, pains-taking, scrupulous Trumbull. It excels Hutchinson in spirit, and equals it, nay, surpasses it in research. Its author lived in the scenes which he describes his heart was with the fathers of his commonwealth; he held with them one faith and one hope; he revered them as they appeared in the trainbands of the militia, or in the meetinghouse; at their village toils, or in their rural legislature. A true Connecticut feeling tingled in all his veins, and animated all his thoughts. He read all sorts of records; he picked up and tested traditions; he was wise in the theology of Hooker and Stone; he knew the hills and the valleys, the towns and No. 99.

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the villages of his commonwealth, and in fact he got Connecticut by heart before he began writing its history. Europe he knew but little of; and in reference to it he makes mistakes or betrays ignorance; but Connecticut he knew thoroughly. He could tell the name, birthplace, and career of every minister that had preached a good sermon, and every militia-man that had done a notable thing. Not a savage was overcome, not a backslider censured by the church, but he knew it all. His History is Connecticut put into a book; and done, not by a philosopher with wise arrogance, not by a heretic scoffing at men who followed somewhat the laws of Moses, not by a lawyer showing with what indifference to precedent the New England fathers were perpetually entering upon untried experiments; but by an honest, true-hearted Connecticut man.

The exact accuracy of Trumbull, always excepting his references to European matters, merits the highest encomium. He that thinks of contradicting one of Trumbull's statements, will do well to consider twice before publishing his thought. On two points his statements have been questioned. One relates to witches; of whom he insists strongly, not one was ever hanged in Connecticut. Winthrop hints the opposite; Hutchinson quotes Goff's journal to prove a particular hanging. Now the execution of a witch was in those days a great event, likely to create the widest interest, to be repeated by Cotton Mather, and to brand itself indelibly on the popular mind in the town where it happened. We have taken a good deal of pains to find any sufficient ground for distrusting Trumbull; not forgetting to examine the records in the State House; and we are inclined to adhere to his opinion. A fact which knocks at the gate of history must show its passport, before it ought to get in; and the tales of witches hanged in Connecticut are not duly authenticated. It may possibly have been so; there is no evidence of any thing, but that once upon a time such a rumor reached Boston, and upon another time, a like rumor reached the poor fugitive at Hadley. Both rumors appear to have been unfounded.

On one other point Dutch honor was testy; and honest Knickerbocker cavilled loudly at Trumbull for insisting, that during Cromwell's war with Holland, the Dutch of New York planned a conspiracy of the Indians for the massacre of the people of New Haven. Both parties in the controversy are very positive. Had either examined the records at Albany

they might have found there the positive instructions of the Dutch West India Company to Stuyvesant, charging him to set the savage tribes upon poor Connecticut. Reason enough, such instructions, for all the shrieks of the historians. How far negotiations with the tribes proceeded, their belts of wampum tell not; but the proposition itself was quite enough to startle men who loved their wives and children.

The common reader would be repelled from Trumbull's book by the diffuseness with which he details the church histories of his villages. All knotty controversies in theology are duly canvassed; the half-way covenant and the inroads of sectarianism; the momentous incidents of church reproof and discipline; the merits of ministers; these are all considered with elaborate monotony. But then the subject required it. Will you trace Connecticut liberties and laws and courage to their source? You will ascend directly to Puritan churches and Puritan ministers. Let those who will, rummage the old papers to find accounts of ridiculous things, that were said and done in the past days of piety and steady habits. We join not the scoffers. In the constitution and laws of Connecticut, as much as in any legislation, the wisdom and tolerance and freedom of that day culminated; and we are none the less disposed to admire, because these great results were achieved by ministers who could feed their own cattle, or by legislators who in quiet times knew how to hold the plough. After all, the petty religious controversies of Connecticut had intrinsically as much grandeur as the palace imbecilities of the court of Louis the Fourteenth; we respect Davenport more than we can Archbishop Laud; and know no cardinals of that day so worthy of reverence as Hooker and Stone...

Moreover, this ministerial, orthodox coloring was necessary to a faithful picture of Connecticut. In the first large group of emigrants to Hartford, Hooker the minister is the prominent figure. Or look at the colonists of the New Haven section of the State, first claiming possession of the soil. Without straining your eye, you may see a gathering of every soul under a large tree; and may hear a minister take for his text, "Then was Jesus led up of the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted of the devil"; and the members of the young commonwealth which listened, agreed that they too were come into the wilderness to be tried. So with one heart they resolved to obey the Bible. The Bible was their constitution and code