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Editors’ Note Most of the documents in this collection are firsthand accounts by British officials and military officers who were serving in North America during the War for Independence . There are also responses and reports from government officials in London with letters and petitions from Loyalists on both sides of the Atlantic, conveying their dismay at what was occurring in the colonies. There are more than 160 different correspondents and diarists in the collection alongside 70 anonymous newspaper accounts, although the majority of the dispatches are from military commanders such as William Howe, Henry Clinton, and Earl Cornwallis. Although there were sporadic disturbances and protests throughout the colonies in 1774, especially in the Massachusetts Bay colony, our documentary collection begins in January 1775, a few months before the Battles at Lexington and Concord in April and the Battle of Bunker Hill in June. Despite much less fighting during the final years of the Revolution, we include observations made by the British in 1782 and 1783 leading toward negotiations for a peace treaty and an end to the war. We note the source of each item. For those documents that have been published previously, we cite the most accessible printed work. For the many dispatches that have never been printed before, we cite their location in the British National Archives at Kew. Spelling and punctuation in the eighteenth century were highly idiosyncratic, so we have edited the letters in such a way as to make them more intelligible to today ’s reader. Many letter writers capitalized all nouns, while others did not. Often a general or colonel spelled proper names phonetically, and we have corrected such spelling in this volume. Some writers used punctuation after every phrase, while others rarely used commas, semicolons, or even periods. The British spelling of words such as labour, favour, and honour has been retained where appropriate. Occasionally we have put first names in square brackets in order to clarify which individual is meant, in the case of a common family name like Campbell or Stuart. Sometimes we have been unable to learn anything more about a given soldier. Identifying high-ranking officers was relatively easy, whereas researching noncommissioned officers often proved unsatisfactorily inconclusive. xi Nevertheless, brief sketches of the great majority of the correspondents and the people mentioned in their letters, as well as significant place names, can be found in the biographical directory at the end of volume two. xii editors’ note ...

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