Note 1379 — Chapter VIII · (continued 2)

Ryerson in his Loyalists of America (ii. ch. 34) compares the accounts of Wyoming given by Ramsay, Bancroft, Tucker, and Hildreth, and credits Hildreth with the most accurate story. He copies Stone's account from the Life of Brant, and expresses himself in approbation of it. There is an account of the Wyoming affair in The History of Connecticut from the first Settlement to the present time, by Theodore Dwight, Jr. (New York, 1841), which is unusually full of errors. I should be strongly inclined to quote here from the pages of Murray's Impartial History of the present War, etc., to show that British opinions were as strongly pronounced in their expressions against the reported acts of Butler, and that they held the authorities who permitted him to bear a commission responsible, were it not that I find so many pages in this book identical with An Impartial History of the War in America, which was published about the same time in Boston, that I am at a loss to determine which was the original book. The two books are not in all respects the same. The one purports to be an English composition, the other an American recital. Phrases in which the enemy are alluded to in the one are reversed in the other, while topics which are elaborated in one are barely mentioned in the other; still, there are enough pages identical in the two, except for the toning down of the adjectives, to make me doubtful of the authorship of the Rev. James Murray. The bibliography of these books is examined elsewhere in this History.