Note 316 — Chapter I · (continued 3)

"Massachusettensis", a Tory writer, brought out his first letter in the Mass. Gazette, Dec. 12, 1774, and continued them at intervals till April 3, 1775. The evidence that their writer was Leonard is presented in Bancroft, orig. ed., vii. 231; by Lucius Manlius Sargent in the N. E. Hist. and Gen. Reg., July, Oct., 1864, or vol. xviii. 291, 353 (from the Boston Transcript). The letters were separately published in New York, 1775, as The present political state of the province of Mass. Bay in general and the town of Boston in particular, and again as The origin of the Amer. Contest with Great Britain, or the present political state, etc.,—both giving the writer as "a native of New England" (Haven in Thomas, ii. p. 660). What is called a second and third edition (London, 1776) purports to follow a Boston imprint, and is called Massachusettensis, or a series of letters containing a faithful state of many facts, which laid the foundation of the present troubles, ... by a person of honor upon the spot. (Cf. Sabin, x. p. 219.) There was also an edition in Dublin, 1776 (Hist. Mag., i. 249). Lecky (iii. 419) speaks of these letters as showing "remarkable eloquence and touching and manifest earnestness." Trumbull, in the first canto of his M'Fingal, had early assumed that Leonard was the author. See, on Leonard, Sabine's Amer. Loyalists and Ellis Ames in the Mass. Hist. Soc. Proc., xii. 52.