GLORY OF AMERICA; COMPRISING MEMOIRS OF THE LIVES AND GLORIOUS EXPLOITS OF SOME OF THE DISTINGUISHED OFFICERS ENGAGED IN THE LATE WAR WITH GREAT BRITAIN. AMONG WHICH ARE Andrew Jackson, Richard Mentor Johnson, Stephen Decatur, David Porter, Zebulon Montgomery Pike, PUBLIC LIBRARY 168617 ASTOR, LENOX AND 1900. Entered according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1833, by Ezra Strong, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the Southern District of New York. IF, among readers, as some very shrewdly imagine, the greater part would willingly dispense with a preface, the fact is certain, that whatever may be their wishes, or, mayhap, their caprices, few authors or editors are willing to dispense with this preliminary to a book. My own plea Ti -if plea be required—is necessity, a necessity growing out of the circumstances under which the work was performed; the writing of which is more for the edification of the reader, than to please the fancy of the editor. Few, if any, who are not experimentally taught the lesson, have any adequate conception of the difficulties under which an editor labours, in compiling a work consisting of biographical sketches of various individuals, residing, or acting, in different sections of an extensive country, with few of whom he can be personally acquainted. If every Johnson has not a Boswell, neither has every Washington a Marshall and a Weems, nor every revolution a Thacher. But still biographers must toil, and the public will read; and till writers shall be endued with the power of ubiquity, and the gift of annihilating both time and space, errors will unavoidably occur in their works; the captious will cavil; and the ill natured, who perhaps can hardly pen a sentence of good English, will be furnished with abundant matter on which to vent their harmless venom. In preparing the following pages for publication, three points have been constantly in view: 1st. To obtain all |