y has
been written by their adversaries, and strangely misrepresented. In the
vindication of their character, I have not opposed assertion against
assertion; but, in correction of unjust and untrue assertions, I have
offered the records and documents of the actors themselves, and in their
own words. To do this has rendered my history, to a large extent,
_documentary_, instead of being a mere popular narrative. The many
fictions of American writers will be found corrected and exposed in the
following volumes, by authorities and facts which cannot be successfully
denied. In thus availing myself so largely of the proclamations,
messages, addresses, letters, and records of the times when they
occurred, I have only followed the example of some of the best
historians and biographers.

No one can be more sensible than myself of the imperfect manner in which
I have performed my task, which I commenced more than a quarter of a
century since, but I have been prevented from completing it sooner by
public duties--pursuing, as I have done from the beginning, an untrodden
path of historical investigations. From the long delay, many supposed I
would never complete the work, or that I had abandoned it. On its
completion, therefore, I issued a circular, an extract from which I
hereto subjoin, explaining the origin, design, and scope of the work:--

"I have pleasure in stating that I have at length completed the
task which the newspaper press and public men of different parties
urged upon me from 1855 to 1860. In submission to what seemed to be
public opinion, I issued, in 1861, a circular addressed to the
United Empire Loyalists and their descendants, of the British
Provinces of America, stating the design and scope of my proposed
work, and requesting them to transmit to me, at my expense, any
letters or papers in their possession which would throw light upon
the early history and settlement in these Provinces by our U.E.
Loyalist forefathers. From all the British Provinces I received
answers to my circular; and I have given, with little abridgment,
in one chapter of my history, these intensely interesting letters
and papers--to which I have been enabled to add considerably from
two large quarto manuscript volumes of papers relating to the U.E.
Loyalists in the Dominion Parliamentary Library at Ottawa, with the
use of which I have been favoured by the learn