ret spy, who
betrayed the cause of the rebels, while pretending to fight under its
colors, in the uniform of an American Officer of the army of George
Washington!

Such appears to have been the character of General Joseph Reed, from
documents decidedly authentic--so authentic as to have led to their partial
destruction, by his vain and silly descendants, who imagined that _truth_
could be extinguished, while vanity was kindling a spurious flame to
consummate an imaginery[TN] _apotheosis_, for one whose actual deeds
consigned him to the keeping of the furies and his country's execration.

If such men are to be allowed an enrolment on the page of fame, as
revolutionary patriots, who achieved our independence, there is no merits
in those who stood side by side with Washington, in the darkest hour of the
Revolution, when dismay sat on the bravest brow--spurning the temptation of
British bribes--bidding defiance to British battalions, and enduring the
pangs of hunger, thirst, and howling blasts--naked amidst winter's snow,
with earth for a pillow, and the canopy of heaven for a covering--treason
thundering in their ears--rewards offered for their heads, and nothing but
liberty and independence, with the secret assurance of heaven's succour
from a just God, to cheer and console them--bleeding, dying, desolate.
Shall the _time-serving_ traitor take his position by the side of such men?
Shall all merit be levelled into one common mass of calculating
selfishness? For such must be the effect, if General Joseph Reed is to
occupy a niche of glory in the same temple with George Washington. But
there is no moral crucible to melt down such deeds into a general and
indiscriminate mass. Truth revolts from such profanation. Justice spurns
the contamination. Nature herself rises up in arms against the thought, as
doing violence to all her holiest sympathies; her purest heart-throbs, her
noblest aspirations. God himself denounces the impiety.

Having demonstrated the importance of the revelations of "Valley Forge" to
the truth and accuracy of history--of that history, in which we are all so
intensely interested--as belonging to the fame of the fathers, and as
destined for an inheritance to our children, to the end of time--it remains
to consider how the editor of the Evening Journal, in giving publicity to
corroborative materials for history, has merited that torrent of
scurrility, that has been vomited upon him from the sympathisers in t