May 17, 1775, describing the battles of Lexington and Concord.1 In comparing this early account with that appearing in his later work due allowance must be made for the intervening years and the consequent cooling of the passions of the moment. We should hardly expect, for instance, to find in sober history such a sentence as this: "Eight hundred of the best British Troops in America having thus nobly vanquished a company of nonresisting Yankees while dispersing, and slaughtering a few of them by way of experiment, marched forward in the greatness of their might to Concord." And while we may be able to understand why he omitted in his later account the phrase "inimical torified natives," yet he should have mentioned that they were present in the Lexington-Concord expedition. One of the most curious alterations occurs in connection with the Lexington skirmish. In the first account it is related that as the officers of the regiment rode up toward the Americans one of them shouted, "You damned rebels, lay down your arms;" another, "Stop, you rebels;" and a third, "Disperse, you rebels." But in his history the version of the affair is taken from the Annual Register, as follows: "An officer in the van called out, 'Disperse, you rebels; throw down your arms and disperse." 3

In his treatment of Major Pitcairn, Gordon shows his change clearly enough. In the letter of 1775 he says: "Major Pitcairn, I suppose, thinking himself justified by Parliamentary authority to consider them as rebels, perceiving that they did not actually lay down their arms, observing that the generality were getting off, while a few continued in their military position, and apprehending there could be no great hurt in killing a few such Yankees, which might probably, according to the notions that had been instilled into him by the tory party, of the Americans being poltroons, end all the contest, gave the command to fire, then fired his own pistol, and so set the whole affair agoing." This hardly reads like the later version: "An instant compliance not taking place, which he might construe into contempt, he rode a little farther, fired his pistol, flourished his sword, and ordered the soldiers to fire;" "undoubtedly," he says, further on, "from the mistaken appre hension he had entertained of American resolution, for he has the character of a good-tempered officer." This last sounds somewhat different from his denunciation of the same officer in 1775, which he concludes by saying, "I have no such great opinion of the Major's character."

With all its mutilation, however, we may be sure that this letter of 1775 was the basis for his later account of the first bloodshed of the Revolution. There are so many agreements of detail, wording, and spirit which no revision could quite destroy. The expedition of 1,100 men, for instance, to Jamaica Plains and Dorchester, resulting in a great destruction to the stone fences; the influence of the Tories in causing Gage to send out the famous expedition; the presence of British officers on the road out of Boston the night before the battle of Lexington; the taking of the grenadiers and light infantry off duty under pretense of learning a new exercise, which made the "Bostonians jealous;" the incident connected with the Lexington meetinghouse, or "meeting "as he calls it, which he proves did not shelter armed Americans; the braining of a wounded British soldier by a young farmer armed with an ax, and his denial of the report the British soldiers were scalped-these details with their exact phraseology reappear as evidence of the essential unity of the two accounts. The most curious feature of the later account occurs in the description of Lord Percy's march to aid the flying British, where Gordon pauses midway to explain at length the origin of the term "Yankee." Stranger still is the alteration of his original story of Lord Percy's playing Yankee Doodle as he marched out of Boston, and being reminded later how he had been made to dance to that tune. This at least has local color; but in his history Gordon tells us that a mocking youth calls out to Lord Percy that he is soon to dance to the tune of Chevy Chase. Now, though we are aware of the uncommon precocity of the Boston boys of 1775, yet it is hard to believe that one of them could so cleverly connect Lord Percy with the hero of Chevy Chase. This smacks decidedly of the atmosphere of some quiet English study, but is out of harmony with everything in Boston at this period of her history.

The net result of the alterations, then, of this original letter of 1775 is to give a view decidedly more favorable to the British. The incident of the braining of a wounded soldier is retained, while he omits to mention Pitcairn's insolence and brutality, the presence of Tories in the detachment of soldiers sent to Lexington, and the detail of atrocities committed by the British soldiers. Most curious of all is the addition (in parenthesis, to be sure) of the statement that at the battle of Concord Lieutenant Gould would have been killed but for the intervention of a clergyman. Yet in his deposition soon after the battle, Gould gives every important detail of his experience except this one.1 In his use of Ramsay, also, Gordon shows the same partiality for the British side by attempting to palliate the injustice and cruelty of their soldiers in Charleston by citing cases somewhat similar on the part of the Americans elsewhere, even making use of Washington's losses by dishonest debtors to show how corrupt they had become.

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To sum up our conclusions thus far, we may say that Gordon was neither a man of unimpeachable veracity nor a great historian, and that his history must be rejected wholly as a source for the American Revolution. Anditis meant to include in this statement not only the three-fourths taken largely from other histories, but also the remaining portion, chiefly contained in the first eight letters of Volume I. We may conclude further that Gordon's letter of 1775 (American Archives), describing the battles of Lexington and Concord, is a fair type of his original history, as he took it to England for publication, and that his later account of these battles shows how the history suffered in contents and spirit by the revision to which it was subjected.

It must be admitted, on the other hand, that while there are abundant evidences of the presence of the original manuscript in Gordon's history, it is by no means easy to verify the hypothesis of his compilation of the work by the aid of friends in England. How many portions of his published history resemble the description of the battles of Lexington and Concord it is impossible to say, and in the absence of similar material for comparison we have little means of knowing. Internal evidence alone can hardly reveal whether it was

1

Gordon or his clerical friends who mangled this original manuscript and transcribed portions of the Annual Register in the production of the published work. We may be quite sure, however, that Gordon passed judgment upon the whole pro duction and gave to certain portions of it a characteristic animus which is easily recognizable. A good example of this is his treatment of Gates, which betrays his partisanship for this ignoble rival of Washington. This could hardly be the result of a fortuitous selection from Gordon's entire manuscript by an ordinary compiler. The work must have been done under his constant supervision, and nowhere, unless it be in the foreign letters, do we fail to find traces of its presence.

There remains, consequently, the difficult task of disentangling the composite of original and borrowed material and the assignment of each fragment to its proper source. This is by no means the simple problem it at first appears, for after the material of the original has been separated from that of the Annual Register and of Ramsay, we are confronted with the difficulty of distinguishing the particular compiler who copied or abridged the various portions of the plagiarized material. That there were several compilers at work upon the history seems quite apparent; what each contributed to the composite result is exceedingly difficult to determine. These and other similar questions must await a more detailed and careful study of the whole subject at some future time, but even though new evidence may modify, as to minor details, the conclusions so far reached, the main contention is beyond cavil that no part of Gordon's history can any longer be taken as authority on the American Revolution.

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XI.-A RECENT SERVICE OF CHURCH HISTORY TO THE CHURCH.

By WILLIAM GIVEN ANDREWS, D. D.,

GUILFORD, CONN.