Author’s Note
In this historical romance the hero, who tells his own tale, is supposed to speak with the feeling of a Western American of his time, and not with the colder and more critical judgment of a later day. His attitude toward Europe, and particularly toward Great Britain, is caused by the events of the War of 1812 and of the years immediately preceding it, when the death struggle of Britain and Bonaparte drew the whole civilized world into war, including the United States, distant and detached though the latter was from the European system.
It is admitted by all historians that the rights of weak neutrals, such as the United States then was, received no respect from either of the great contending powers, and the author believes that we had more cause to complain of Great Britain than of France, because Great Britain had more ability, and not more willingness, to do us harm. It is perhaps true also that in the early years of the century the British, as Mr. Ten Broeck remarks in the course of his narrative, showed us the worse and not the better side of their nature; and a careful study of this period confirms the author in his belief that the ill feeling once so widely prevalent in the United States against our mother country, Great Britain, now happily passing away, and perhaps wholly removed by recent events, had its origin more in the War of 1812 and its causes than in the War of Independence. Perhaps if Mr. Ten Broeck had lived at a later time he would have modified some of his opinions concerning the parent nation.
Mr. Ten Broeck’s attitude, moreover, is that of an American of the West, one who distrusts the politics and manners, even the art, of Europe, and fears that his brethren of the East have been touched a little too much by influences from that source, sacrificing some of the stronger and greater virtues for the sake of forms and refinement—a belief which many Americans who lived west of the Alleghanies held at that time. No doubt what he saw in the East gave him another view of this subject.