Entered according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1841, by WILEY & Putnam, in the Clerk's office of the District Court of the Southern District of New-York. THE NEW YORK PUBLIC LIBRARY Aster, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. NEW-YORK: 88 William-street. PREFACE. THE present volume is but one of a series, the composition of which the author has been meditating for several years. The original design contemplated a complete history of the great Iroquois Confederacy, known at first as the Five Nations, and afterward, by the addition of the Tuscaroras from North Carolina, as the Six, from the discovery to the present time. Circumstances, which were explained in the Life of Brant, induced the preparation of that work first. The design of that effort was not merely to embrace the biography of the chief himself, but under the shadow of his name to preserve the history of his people during the half century of his active life, and also to gather up, and reduce to form, the rich materials of the previously unwritten border history of the American revolution. Brant, both as the military leader and civil governor of his people, and also as one of the most active and formidable officers of the border service, was selected as the principal figure around whom to weave the stirring historical details comprised in the two volumes bearing his name. The present volume, containing the life of the great Seneca orator, Red-Jacket, has been constructed upon the same plan. After the death of Brant, Red-Jacket became the man of greatest distinction among the Six Nations; and in writing his life, the author, as in the preceding work, has used him as the principal figure in illustrating the history of the Six Nations down to the conclusion of the treaty for the sale of the residue of the Seneca lands, in the autumn of 1838. That treaty, when carried into execution, extinguishes the confederacy of the AQUANUSCHIONI, or United People,-a confederacy, the duration of which is lost in the shadowy obscurity of tradition for ages before the sound of the white woodman's axe rang upon the solemn stillness of the forest-continent. The life of Red-Jacket, therefore, may be considered as the sequel, or conclusion, of the History of the Six Nations. Two divisions of the work meditated by the author, and those the most difficult and laborious,-remain to be executed, viz.: the Life and Times of Sir William Johnson, and the yet earlier history of the Iroquois Confederacy from the discovery down to the year 1735, when Mr. Johnson first planted himself among the Mohawks in the valley of their own beautiful river. The life of the Baronet is the next, which, should health and time allow, the author proposes to take in hand. This work will review an important and most interesting period in the colonial history of New-York, embracing, as it must do, the border history of the colony during the French wars of 1745, and of 1755-63. Nor can that history be properly illustrated without recourse to the archives of the British and French governments. Hitherto the author has been disappointed in the expectation of making a voyage to Europe in connexion with this branch of his historical investigations. But he hopes yet to accomplish this object. At all events, "The Life and Times of Sir William Johnson" is a work the execution of which will not be relinquished except from stern necessity. |