Brother Jonathan

HEZEKIAH BUTTERWORTH
AUTHOR OF IN THE DAYS OF AUDUBON, IN THE BOYHOOD OF LINCOLN, IN THE DAYS OF JEFFERSON, ETC.
NEW YORK D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1903
Copyright, 1903 By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
Published September, 1903

The writer has heretofore produced in the vein of fiction, after the manner of the Mühlbach interpretations, several books which were anecdotal narratives of the crises in the lives of public men. While they were fiction, they largely confided to the reader what was truth and what the conveyance of fiction for the sake of narrative form. It was the purpose of such a book to picture by folk-lore and local stories the early life of the man.
It has been said that a story of the life of Jonathan Trumbull would furnish material for pen-pictures of the most heroic episodes of the Revolutionary War, and bring to light much secret history of the times when Lebanon, Conn., was in a sense the hidden capital of the political and military councils that influenced the greatest events of the American struggle for liberty. The view is in part true, and a son of Governor Trumbull so felt that force of the situation that he painted the scenes of which he first gained a knowledge in his father’s farmhouse, beginning the work in that plain old home on the sanded floor.
Governor Trumbull was the heart of every need in those terrible days of sacrifice.
His wife, Faith Trumbull, a descendant of the Pilgrim Pastor Robinson of Leyden, was a heroic woman to whom the Daughters of the Revolution should erect a monument. The picture which we present of her in the cloak of Rochambeau is historically true.
The eminent people who visited the secret town of the war during the great Revolutionary events were many, and their influence had decisive results.