Lanterna Rally

Author: David Duncan Wallace

Publisher:

Published: 2015-07-12

Total Pages: 568

ISBN-13: 9781331228974

Excerpt from The Life of Henry Laurens: With a Sketch of the Life of Lieutenant-Colonel John Laurens Several years ago Prof. Charles W. Kent, of the University of Virginia, asked me to prepare a sketch of Henry Laurens for the Library of Southern Literature, to which in my ignorance I readily consented. I soon found that the sketches, eulogies, monographs, etc., from which one can usually throw together an article were in this case very much lacking. Dr. David Ramsay, who numbered Laurens as the last of his three eminent fathers-in-law, published a brief sketch in 1808 in his History of South Carolina, which has been variously pillaged, plagiarized, and distorted from time to time since, and which is invaluable as a character sketch, but otherwise very lean. Dr. Francis Wharton, in the sketches of the diplomatists of the Revolution in the first volume of his Diplomatic Correspondence of the American Revolution, gives a very incisive review and criticism of Laurens's life on the national stage which is, however, disfigured by filling in the plenteous gaps in his information by atrocious innuendoes, erroneous inferences and outright misstatements. Besides these there was a rather meager and widely scattered body of Laurens's published writings. I resorted to the Laurens MSS. in the South Carolina Historical Society collections and found them an unworked treasure field. With every spadeful my interest grew. I found that here was a great and good man who had lain for a century in an unjust neglect. My quickened interest in the historical material was equalled by my affectionate esteem for the man. I determined to write his life. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.