THE LOYALISTS OF MASSACHUSETTS
AND THE OTHER SIDE OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION
CHAPTER I.
THE FIRST CHARTER.
A nation's own experience should be its best political guide, but it is not certain that as a people we have improved by all the teachings of our own history, for the reason that our "patriot" writers and orators mostly bound their vision in retrospect by the revolutionary era. And yet, all beyond that is not dark, barren, and profitless to explore. It should be known that the most important truths on which our free forms of government now rest are not primarily the discoveries of the revolutionary sages.
Writing of the Revolution, Mr. John Adams, the successor of Washington, declared that it was his opinion that the Revolution "began as early as the first plantation of the country," and that "independence of church and state was the fundamental principle of the first colonization, has been its principle for two hundred years, and now I hope is past dispute. Who was the author, inventor, discoverer of independence? The only true answer must be, the first emigrants." Before this time he had declared that "The claim of the men of 1776 to the honor of first conceiving the idea of American independence or of first inventing the project of it, is ridiculous. I hereby disclaim all pretension to it, because it was much more ancient than my nativity."