PREFACE. THE circumstances under which this volume has been brought into existence are briefly these. The manuscript which forms the nucleus appears to have been designed by the late General Graham with the twofold purpose of serving as a tribute to the memory of a very dear friend of his early life, Lieutenant-Colonel Gordon, and of vindicating his friend's memory in connection with an expenditure of the public money, which Colonel Gordon, acting in his official capacity, had very properly sanctioned, in order to obtain the release of Captain Asgill, but which the auditors of the public accounts, on some frivolous pretext, long hesitated to ratify. Whatever may have been the real object of General Graham in drawing up a narrative of transactions during the last four years of the American war, the result is a sketch expressed in plain and homely language, but with all the truth and power of an original drawing. To read it is, to a certain extent, to realize the dire suspense of the young officers at Lancaster on the night previous to their being assembled to cast lots for life or death. In deciding to put the General's manuscript in type, the editor felt the satisfaction of a person about to give effect to one of the last wishes of a revered parent. In the execution of this resolution he felt an irresistible desire to add to the narrative in his possession some account of his father's career subsequent to his captivity in America, that the monument about to be raised to the memory of Colonel Gordon might become a memorial also of the attached friend by whom it was first designed. The materials available for such a memoir being scanty, he has been obliged to confine himself to an outline of the services upon which the General was engaged, interspersed with a few personal recollections and letters calculated |