important event creates its own legend or tradition, and such legends tend to be preserved and to be handed down from generation to generation. But legends are not history. No one worthy to rank as a careful historian would presume to write the history of the Great War on the basis of legends now crystallizing about it. No more can one write the history of the Revolution on such a legendary basis. This view, that much which once was thought to be history but was in fact mere legend, is not in any sense new. James Russell Lowell, who ranks among the very distinguished Americans of the last generation, wrote, in 1864, that the early reports of the battle of Lexington claimed for the Yankee minutemen a non-resistant attitude.
The Anglo Saxon could not fight without the law on his side. But later, when the battle became a matter of local pride, the muskets that had been fired at the Red coats under Pitcairn almost rivalled in number the pieces of furniture that came over in the Mayflower. Indeed, whoever has talked much with Revolutionary pensioners knows that those honored veterans were no less remarkable for imagination than for patriotism. It should seem that there is nothing on which so little reliance can be placed as facts, especially when related by one who saw them. It is no slight help to our charity to recollect that, in disputable matters, every man sees according to his prejudices, and is stone blind to whatever he did not expect or did not mean to see. Even where no personal bias can be suspected, contemporary and popular evidence is to be taken with great caution, so exceedingly careless are men as to exact truth, and such poor observers, for the most part of what goes on under their eyes.[1]
It is hardly necessary at this late day to insist that no writer is justified in building his narrative of events on unverified tradition. He must try to penetrate to the truth that lies behind the legend (which in some cases will differ very widely from the legend itself). It is no easy task at best to perform a successful piece of historical research, and the questions on which final agreements have been reached are not numerous. Accordingly, if the law should be so construed as to enforce banishment from the schools of any book which can be proved incorrect
- ↑ Essay on The Rebellion.
