The Project Gutenberg eBook, Patrick Henry, by Moses Coit Tyler

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Title: Patrick Henry

Author: Moses Coit Tyler

Release Date: July 10, 2009 [eBook #29368]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PATRICK HENRY***

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American Statesmen

PATRICK HENRY

by

MOSES COIT TYLER

Boston and New York
Houghton Mifflin Company
The Riverside Press Cambridge

Copyright, 1887, by Moses Coit Tyler
Copyright, 1898, by Moses Coit Tyler And Houghton, Mifflin & Co.
Copyright, 1915, by Jeannette G. Tyler

The Riverside Press
Cambridge . Massachusetts
Printed in the U.S.A.

PREFACE

In this book I have tried to embody the chief results derived from a
study of all the materials known to me, in print and in manuscript,
relating to Patrick Henry,--many of these materials being now used for
the first time in any formal presentation of his life.

Notwithstanding the great popular interest attaching to the name of
Patrick Henry, he has hitherto been the subject of but one memoir
founded on original investigation, and that, of course, is the Life
by William Wirt. When it is considered, however, that Wirt's book was
finished as long ago as the year 1817,--before the time had fairly
come for the publication of the correspondence, diaries, personal
memoranda, and official records of every sort, illustrating the great
period covered by Patrick Henry's career,--it will be easy to infer
something as to the quantity and the value of those printed materials
bearing upon the subject, which are now to be had by us, but which
were not within the reach of Wirt. Accordingly, in his lack of much
of the detailed testimony that then lay buried in inaccessible
documents, Wirt had to trust largely to the somewhat imaginative
traditions concerning Patrick Henry which he found floating in the
air of Virginia; and especially to the supposed recollections of old
people,--recollections which, in this case, were nearly always vague,
not always disinterested,