Entered according to Act of Congress. in the year 1864, by JOHN GORHAM PALFREY, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by JOHN GORHAM PALFREY, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. JAN 27 '37 -2 PREFACE TO THE THIRD VOLUME. THIS portion of my History has been composed in circumstances less favorable than attended the preceding volumes. While it has been on my hands, most of my time has been due to occupations of a quite different nature; the state of my country has been such as to engage the thoughts of every patriotic citizen, to the disturbance of calmer meditations; and I have not been. without a full share in the domestic and personal anxieties of these afflicted years. I have done the best that I could under the conditions of the case. While my advancing life forbade me to delay anything that I proposed to do, I have felt the obligation of not hurrying to the press. I hope that at least I have been sufficiently cautious to set down nothing that may mislead the reader. For the rest, I must trust to the indulgence which hitherto has encouraged my endeavors. I am sensible to the generous kindness with which my work has been received in this country. Nor has foreign criticism dealt with it less liberally. It could not reasonably have been expected to have much attraction for English readers. It relates what was done in a few years, in a remote and narrow sphere of action, by a few worthy offshoots from their own generous stock; and in single instances, as in the account of the motives for emigration in the First Volume, and of the controversy between the Presbyterians and the Independents in the Second, I may perhaps be thought to have made some contribution to English history. But it is impossible for my book to be judged 685965 by a standard applicable to works which relate the course of wars on a large scale, the intrigues of courts, and the vicissitudes of great empires. The nature of the subject determined that my main purpose should be to trace the growth of these States in their primitive colonial condition; and the materials for this narrative, which I could take only as I found them, are such as, in hands far more capable than mine, would, I suppose, hardly prove susceptible of picturesque exposition. On the other hand, an interest of a peculiar kind undoubtedly attaches to the elementary condition of a people which within so short a period has become so numerous and so important in the world. A few weeks only before the time at which I am writing these words, there passed away, in the scarcely abated strength of his fine. powers, an illustrious man, whose life had covered considerably more than a third part of the life of Christian New England. When Josiah Quincy, of Boston, was twelve or thirteen years old, Nathaniel Appleton was still minister of Cambridge, and a preacher in the Boston pulpits; Appleton, born in Ipswich in 1693, had often sat, it is likely, on the knees of Governor Bradstreet, who was his father's neighbor; and Bradstreet came from England, in John Winthrop's company, in 1630. Eyes that had seen men who had seen the founders of a Cisatlantic England have ooked also on New England as she presents herself to-day. Everywhere in our times there are local antiquaries thorughly acquainted, each in his place, with the parts of this history which I have essayed to combine into a whole. Either I have not hitherto fallen into material errors; or they have been unnoticed; or they have been passed over with lenity. While I have sedulously aimed at accuracy, I am not so ignorant as to presume that, in presenting so many matters of detail, I have escaped mistakes. I shall very gratefully receive suggestions enabling me to correct them. In the preparation of this volume, I have continued to experience the kindness of friends who laid me under obligations for assistance in the earlier parts of the work. Among them I ought again particularly to mention Mr. Deane, Mr. Trumbull, |