THE REPUBLICAN COURT; OR, AMERICAN SOCIETY IN THE DAYS OF WASHINGTON. BY RUFUS WILMOT GRISWOLD. A NEW EDITION, WITH THE AUTHOR'S LAST ADDITIONS AND CORRECTIONS. With Twenty-five Portraits of Distinguished Women, ENGRAVED FROM ORIGINAL PICTURES BY WOLLASTON, COPLEY, GAINSBOROUGH, STUART NEW YORK: D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 443 AND 445 BROADWAY LONDON: 16 LITTLE BRITAIN. 1867. Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1854, by D. APPLETON & COMPANY, Jn the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of New York. The following work was planned and its materials partially collected several years ago; but the feeble and precarious condition of my health prevented its execution until the present season; and now it has been written in such haste and so rapidly printed-each day's product of the pen being returned to me in proof-sheets the following evening-that I have had little opportunity for revision or any thought of the graces of composition. From appearances of carelessness, however, you will readily perceive that one chapter, that entitled "The Convention," is exempt. For this I am indebted to one of the most justly eminent of contemporary scholars and men of letters, who kindly consented to assist me, after the book was announced, and when there was very little prospect of my having sufficient strength to furnish any considerable portion of its contents. For the rest I alone am responsible; and while regretting that it has so little merit of a purely literary character, I can claim for it the far more important excellence of a most exact adherence to truth. The subjects treated undoubtedly admitted of easy and striking embellishments of fancy, but it seemed to me that the volume would be, upon the whole, far more acceptable if in its preparation I confined myself in even the most trivial details of narrative, delineation, and suggestion, to what was clearly warranted by unquestionable authorities. And of such authorities, fortunately, I have had an ample collection. Besides those which are printed and accessible to every student of American history, I have had in my possession more than two thousand unpublished private letters, of which some three hundred were by Washington, and great numbers by Mrs. Adams, Mrs. Jay, Mrs. Cushing, Mrs. Pinckney, the families of Wolcott, McKean, Livingston, Boudinot, Willing, and others who participated in the life I have attempted to describe. It is not so much from a consideration of our long continued friendship, my dear Dr. Francis, that I inscribe tc you these pages, as from a desire suitably to recognize my indebtedness to those inexhaustible resources of minute and curious knowledge with which you are wont to instruct and delight the attached circle which gathers about you, in the intervals of that severe professional labor from which, after half a century from its commencement, the public, for your eminent abilities, refuses to relieve you. You have retained to the age of nearly three-score years and ten all your native physical and intellectual vigor, a spirit as inquisitive, a memory as retentive, and a temper as genial and indomitable, as you possessed when the fathers and grandfathers of the new generation were your partners in youthful energy, and the heroes of the first and best age of the republic still lived to instruct the world from their experience. May God long preserve to you these qualities, and, to your friends, your wise conversation and the assurance of your unfailing happiness. No. 22 WEST TWENTY-THIRD STREET, NEW-YORK, October 20, 1854. R. W. GRISWOLD. |