tion than I expected, so that the edition was soon exhausted by the demands of historical collectors. It has been long out of print. Lately, new illustrative information, in considerable quantity, has been received by me, which may be judiciously added; and a fresh edition being asked for, I have carefully revised the whole and recast some of the passages, so as to give the paper-what in truth it should have had in the beginning - the character of a historical essay, rather than an oration.

The main authorities for the thorough vindication of Michael Cresap's memory, are the extremely rare little volume of Jacob's Life of Cresap, published in 1826, at Cumberland, Maryland, and the letter of General George Rogers Clark, published in the first edition of my discourse, but now first printed from the original MS. in appendix No. 1, of this volume. In the edition of this narrative published in 1851, General Clark's letter was printed as sent to me by Mr. Lyman C. Draper. It was then charitably surmised that Mr. Jefferson, for whose enlightenment the letter was written, had never received this vindication, inasmuch as he neither published nor alluded to it in any edition of his Notes on Virginia, issued after the veracity of Logan's speech was attacked by Luther Martin, the eminent attorney general of Maryland. But the belief entertained in 1851 became no longer possible, when it was discovered, a few years ago, that Mr. Jefferson's manuscript collections, deposited in the department of state at Washington, not only contained the original letter of General George Rogers Clark to Dr. Brown, vindicating Cresap, but also, Dr. Brown's letter to Mr. Jef ferson, under date of Sept., 4th, 1798, transmitting the paper

to the distinguished statesman, two years before he published his testimony in regard to the Logan speech in the appendix to his Notes on Virginia, issued in 1800.

It would be useless to speculate on the causes of Mr. Jefferson's failure to insert or allude to this letter, for all who could speak authoritatively on the subject, are long since dead. Martin, who was married to a daughter of Capt. Michael Cresap, had attacked Jefferson severely for the slur on his father-in-law's memory; but Martin was a federalist. Jefferson had felt the sting of Martin's publications against him, as is shown in his letter to Governor Henry, of Maryland; but Jefferson was a democrat. It is not improbable that party feeling - then quite as venomous as in later days may have swayed Jefferson's mind from the justice that should govern historians in regard to even the humblest of whom they write. His omission of this letter is more remarkable and less pardonable, because General Clark had said, “I shall relate the incidents that gave rise to Logan's suspicion, and will enable Mr. Jefferson to do justice to himself and the Cresap family, by being made fully acquainted with the facts." But the cautious warning seems to have been disregarded; for in 1800, Cresap had been already twenty-four years in his grave; while the minute, cumulative, lawyer-like pleadings of Appendix iv, to the Notes on Virginia, though slightly modifying the original charge, still tended to exhibit Cresap in an odious light, and to show the rankling of personal animosity. Indeed, the suppression is rather to be regretted on Mr. Jefferson's account than Cresap's. For, though the original manuscript of General Clark's complete exculpation of the Pioneer, appears only

at this late day, the place in which it is detected, discloses the statesman's decided reluctance to justify the dead, even under friendly monition and invocation. It is a sad picture of the infirmity of a nature which was not proof against political passion, and was known to be ambitious, at least, of seeming to be never mistaken.

The exceptions taken by a few critics to my first publication of this narrative, were two-fold. It was thought by some, that I had written too much as an advocate of Cresap, and so placed him higher in the scale than he deserved; and by others, that I had, perhaps unconsciously, attempted to underrate the character of Logan. My intention was to do neither. I had no personal interest in the Pioneer or his family. I did not even know his kindred or descendants; while, I confess, it was hard to free my mind from its early, habitual sympathy with the Indian, so as to write of him with pure and simple justice. I hope, therefore, I have not been, either in my original publication, or the present one, the attorney of Cresap, or the slanderer of Logan. Both these persons are to be measured by the standards of their time and place, for both were representative men. Civilization is to be mercifully and charitably — if not always justly weighed in the balance of its particular time and locality. Let us consider these.

The time was nearly a century ago; the place a wilderness in America; the actors, an untutored child of that wilderness, on the one hand, and a child of the nascent frontier civilization, on the other hand. What was the measure of that civilization? It may even shock us a little

It

to contemplate the civilization of much more modern times. Pure civilization, which will be the manifestation of universal obedience to God's law, has never existed. will be remembered that imprisonment for debt was allowed by us, within the recollection of people who are still young: that the disabilities of the Jews have not been long removed in all parts of America and enlightened England, while there are parts of the world-not in heathendom — in which the Israelites are still locked up at night-fall, in the quarters of the cities they inhabit. We must recollect that the Florida war occurred within the last three decades; that Utah, with its tolerated abominations of Mormonism, is growing into a power under our eyes; and lastly, it is not "beyond the memory of man," that human slavery existed in the United States, and that doctors of divinity unfrocked themselves to fight in its defence. We are, therefore, not to pride ourselves conceitedly on the masculine civilization of our time, which affects to look disdainfully on Maryland and Massachusetts, whose statutes, in colonial days, offered bounties for Indian scalps.

Ninety years ago, the ideas and purposes of frontier-men were primitive and precautionary. It was an armed society of hunting agriculturists. Men ploughed the fields with their rifles slung over their shoulders. The Pioneer, axe in hand, wanted the land denuded of forest for cultivation. The Indian wanted the same land covered with forest, for his game. It was the direct conflict between enterprise getting bread by labor, and idleness getting food by luck. Of course, the Pioneer was the intrusive aggressor; the Indian, the conservative protector; the former, compara

tively few in numbers, and forced to be prompt and wary; the latter numerous, and fearing not only the superior weapons of his foe, but the organization and discipline, which together made the comparatively few equal to the greater number. "What was called the frontier," says a writer who was familiar with the border life of America in the middle of the eighteenth century," was constantly changing and diverging westwards, so that the habits and feelings of the people remained the same many miles eastward, after the frontier was changed. Our frontier inhabitants were constantly exposed to a predatory war with the Indians, not embodied as an army publicly invading our country, but as a predatory banditti, attacking individuals and families, remote from a dense population. These attacks were often at night, or just at break of day; sometimes killing all the family, at others only a part, namely, the men and small children, leading the women and elder children captives, but, I believe, always burning the houses, and stealing the horses." In my own family, there are records of brutal outrages on its members in Western Virginia, in which the living were slaughtered while in the act of performing the rites of sepulture to their offspring in their forest homes, and even the dead were torn from the coffin, and hung on trees for the sake of the trophy scalp.

In truth, the natures as well as the purposes of the two antagonistic races that were constantly bordering on each other, were so completely inharmonious and irreconcilable, that the life of the resolute and exasperated Pioneer was concentrated on the impulse to get rid of Indians with as little compunction as if they had been vermin. Indeed,