Excerpt from History of the United States of America, Vol. 1: Under the Constitution
To write, without fear or favor, a History of the United States under the Constitution has long been my cherished wish. For more than fifteen years past I have, as a diversion from graver professional tasks, pursued special studies for that period which ends with the War of 1812; and it is ten years ago this day since I laid aside the first draft of the Introductory Chapter contained in the present volume to fulfil more pressing literary engagements of another character.
These statements, which the reader may think trivial, I make in order to convince him that the present work has not been undertaken hastily nor without serious preparation. There is no narrative in existence from which one may safely gather the later record of our country's career; no narrative, I mean, of ample historical scope, prepared from a critical and minute study of the copious materials of the past. The venerable Mr. Bancroft's masterly achievements as the historian of America stop short of the constitutional era; it is our colonial and revolutionary periods alone that he has made his own. We can find but one work, that of Mr. Hildreth, which shows the diligent research of a scholar among the accumulated records of 1783-1817, a work of whose high merits as to the three final volumes I may be permitted to speak after a minute comparison of almost every page with authentic materials elsewhere gathered; yet Mr. Hildreth wrote more than thirty years ago, with the horizon lines of his generation.
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