In recent years the word “progressive” has had a resurgence in popularity among American leftists (perhaps because the word “liberal” is too well understood by the American public). In 1991 the most liberal members of the United States Congress joined together to form the “Progressive Caucus.” Hosts on the now-defunct Air America radio network billed themselves as “The Aggressive Progressives.” Income tax structures that force high wage earners to pay taxes disproportionate to their income are called “progressive,” while tax structures that require everyone to pay in proportion to income are derided as “regressive.”  Ultimately, though, it doesn’t really matter what name left wingers use for their agenda. The agenda never changes.

The word “progressive” comes to us from the early twentieth century, when leftists like US Presidents Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and Woodrow Wilson used it to portray themselves as agents of progress. History textbooks refer to the period during which these three men ran the government (1901 to 1919), as the “Progressive Era.” Most modern textbooks reflect the leftist bias of their authors by framing this period as a time when enlightened leaders used the power of government to promote “social justice.”¹ The other side of the story, generally downplayed by history professors and other leftists, is the way the original “Progressive” politicians trampled on the Constitutional principle of checks and balances, and ushered in an era of unprecedented government power.

The View from the Ivory Tower

The left-leaning scholars who write most of our history textbooks portray the Progressive Era as a time of bold leaders motivated by high ideals. Progressives, according to Columbia University Professor Eric Foner, inclulded “forward-looking businessmen,” working hand-in-hand with reformers “who hoped to protect women and children from exploitation,” and “social scientists who believed that academic research would help to solve social problems…”

The widely used freshman textbook Making a Nation² tells students that early twentieth century progressives “shared an optimistic conviction that modern institutions could be made humane, responsive, and moral.” (The same book, in a somewhat surprising display of candor, credits the progressive movement with having “made universities into centers of advocacy.”)

Progressivism Peaks under Wilson

President Woodrow Wilson, the first and only US President who was elected to the office after having worked as a university professor, is widely recognized as the most progressive of the Progressive Era Presidents. The textbook Nation of Nations³ says of Wilson “All his life, he believed he was meant to accomplish great things, and he did. Under him, progressivism peaked.” Those of us who take a more conservative point of view would use different words to describe Wilson’s legacy.

Wilson had little regard for tradition. In a 1912 campaign speech he boasted that during his time as a university professor and university president he had frequently stated “that I should like to make the young gentlemen…as unlike their fathers as possible.”⁴

In the same speech Wilson espoused a philosophy of government based on atheistic Darwinism; in contrast to the Founders’ vision of a Constitutional government constrained by checks and balances.

Now, it came to me, as this interesting man talked, that the Constitution of the United States had been made under the dominion of the Newtonian Theory. You have only to read the papers of the Federalist to see that fact written on every page. The speak of the “checks and balances” of the Constitution, and use to express their idea the simile of the organization of the universe, and particularly of the Solar System – how by the attraction of gravitation the various parts are held in their orbits; and then they proceed to represent Congress, the Judiciary, and the President as a sort of imitation of the Solar System. …

The Constitution was founded on the law of gravitation. The government was to exist and move by virtue of the efficacy of “checks and balances.”

The trouble with the theory is that government is not a machine, but a living thing. …It is accountable to Darwin, not to Newton. No living thing can have its organs offset against each other, as checks, and live. …Living political constitutions must be Darwinian in structure and in practice.

Wilson’s concept of a “living constitution,” offered up in opposition to the old-fashioned idea of a binding written Constitution, has become an article of faith among liberals today. Vice President Al Gore, for example, promised during his 2000 presidential campaign that he would appoint Supreme Court Justices who viewed the US Constitution as a “living, breathing document,” subject to such ad hoc changes as they might see fit. No one had ever suggested such a thing before the Progressive Era.

Progressives Deny Jefferson’s Doctrine of “Unalienable Rights”

Another leader of the Progressive movement was Dr. Frank Goodnow. Goodnow, like many other radical leftists, taught at Columbia University.

Today most liberals, while pushing for larger and more powerful government, nonetheless do at least give lip service to the idea of protecting the rights freedoms of the individual. Things were different in the Progressive Era. Goodnow and some of his fellow Progressives candidly opposed the founding principles of the United States, including the doctrine of “natural,” or God-given, individual rights.

In a typical lecture ((footnote: ))  Goodnow tries to refute the ideas of Locke and Rousseau, which had provided the philosophical underpinnings of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights

The end of the eighteenth century was marked by the formulation and general acceptance by thinking men in Europe of a political philosophy which laid great emphasis on individual private rights. Man was by this philosophy conceived of as endowed at the time of his birth with certain inalienable rights. Thus, Rousseau in his “Social Contract” treated man primarily as an individual and only secondarily as a member of human society. Society itself was regarded as based upon a contract made between the individuals by whose union it was formed. At the time of making this contract these individuals were deemed to have reserved certain rights spoken of as “natural” rights. These rights could neither be taken away nor be limited without the consent of the individual affected.

Such a theory, of course, had no historical justification.⁵

Progressives like Goodnow understood that the doctrine of inalienable individual rights was antithetical to the kind of all-powerful central government they envisioned for the United States. If Government was to re-order every aspect of society in accordance with the Progressives’ agenda, it would have to have to have the power to over-ride individual rights in the service of the public good. Goodnow argued that only the repudiation of individual rights could allow the kind of progress that changing economic conditions required.

Changed conditions, it has been thought, must bring in their train different conceptions of private rights if society is to be advantageously carried on. In other words, while insistence on individual rights may have been of great advantage at a time when social organization was not highly developed, it may become a menace when social rather than individual efficiency is the necessary prerequisite of progress.⁶

Then and Now

Whether liberal ideas are called “liberal” or “progressive” or even “populist,” they are always pretty much the same: Only government can do good things, and government must get bigger and more powerful in order to more good. The only real difference between the progressives of today and the Progressives of a hundred years ago is that those original progressives were more candid about their agenda.

¹Davidson, Gienapp, Heyrman, Lytle, and Stoff; Nation of Nations, p. 640
²Boydston, Cullather, Lewis, McGerr, and Oakes; Making a Nation, 2004 edition
³Davidson, Gienapp, Heyrman, Lytle, and Stoff; Nation of Nations
⁴American Progressivism: A Reader, edited by Pestritto and Atto, 2008 paperback, p. 48
⁵Ibid., pp. 55-56
⁶Ibid.

Over the last few decades Americans have gotten used to the idea that Supreme Court Justices can and should create new “Constitutional” principles, as grounds for overturning laws that they, the justices, do not like. In an off-the-record conversation with Supreme Court clerks, Justice Thurgood Marshall once described this judicial philosophy quite candidly: “You do what you think is right, and let the law catch up.” (Justice Marshall had the good sense to abstain from statements like that in public.) A close look at American history will show that the kind of judicial activism Justice Marshall was talking about was not seen as either normal or proper when our nation was founded. But, ironically, the very scholars we trust to teach American history to the next generation of voters have been hiding the historical context of the issue.

Having judges create new government policies based on what they “think is right” violates in both letter and spirit the Separation of Powers principle that the Founding Fathers labored so hard to build into the US Constitution, and it was extremely rare until the late twentieth century; but don’t expect to hear that in a typical college history class.

“Creating” New Rights

Commonly used history textbooks don’t mention a word about how concerned the Founders were about restricting the role of the judiciary. But when it comes to more recent history, the textbooks portray judicial activism with a candor that the judges themselves would never dare use in public. Take the famous Roe v. Wade decision, for example. The justice who wrote the decision tortured both logic and the English language to frame his decision as an application of the Fourteenth Amendment; an application, in other words, of existing law. The three authors¹ of the freshman history textbook America’s Promise were more direct. “In Roe,” says the textbook, “Justice Harry Blackmun wrote the majority opinion that made abortion within the first three months of pregnancy a constitutional right.” (Italics added.) It’s very true that the court decision Justice Blackmun wrote is the thing that made abortion a legal right in America. The word “constitutional” might be a stretch, but Justice Blackmun and the six justices who agreed with him did make abortion a recognized right.

In the textbook Give Me Liberty, author Eric Foner is even more candid than the authors of America’s Promise. In describing the activities of the US Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren, Foner tells his readers that “The Warren Court not only expanded existing liberties but it also outlined entirely new rights in response to the rapidly changing contours of American Society. (Italics added.) In describing the Roe decision, Foner states “This was Roe v. Wade, which created a constitutional right to terminate a pregnancy. (Italics added.) The word “created” in that sentence is absolutely correct, even if the word “constitutional” is debatable. And Foner says not a word about activism of this type being a departure from tradition.

A Political Issue

As with so many other classroom issues, the question of how to portray judicial activism boils down to a simple conservative/liberal dichotomy. Conservatives tend to believe that the job of a judge is to simply apply the written Law, regardless of any personal feelings; and that writing or changing laws is the job of legislatures. Having that point of view, conservatives are fond of pointing out that our Founding Fathers felt the same way.

Liberals, ironically including most college history professors and textbook writers, would rather not talk about the historical context of this issue. Better to point out the benefits of this or that Court decision, without any discussion of the Court’s historical role in American politics.

 Liberals tend to applaud judicial activism in principle because it almost always promotes a leftist agenda in actual practice. The association of judicial activism with leftist causes is so strong that the term “conservative” is pretty much universally used to describe judges like Clarence Thomas who allow themselves to be bound by the written law.

Thomas made his judicial philosophy clear in a very brief opinion he published on the 2003 Lawrence v. Texas case, and it couldn’t be more different from Justice Marshall’s. The Court had been asked to rule on a Texas law against sodomy. Thomas voted to uphold the Texas law even though he described it as an “uncommonly silly” law, and said “If I were a member of the Texas legislature, I would vote to repeal it.”

Similarly Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who served on the Supreme Court from 1902 to 1932, made no secret of his dedication to upholding the written law, even when his own personal feelings would have led him to do otherwise. In describing  his career as a judge he once said “I loathed most of the things in favor of which I decided.” His job, he said, was “to see that the game is played according to the rules whether I like them or not.”

What the Founders Thought

What most history textbooks fail to mention is that the discipline and integrity of justices like Thomas and Holmes is what the Founding Fathers had in mind when they wrote up Article III of the Constitution. The idea John Adams described as “an empire of laws” was largely borrowed from Greek and Roman philosophies. Plato, for example, said “Where the law is subject to some other authority and has none of its own, the collapse of the state, in my view, is not far off; but if law is the master of the government and the government is its slave, then the situation is full of promise and men enjoy all the blessings that the gods shower on a state.”  

In 1787, when the legislatures of the thirteen states were debating whether to ratify the Constitution, opponents of ratification worried that the proposed US Supreme Court could become too powerful. Alexander Hamilton tried to put such fears to rest in Federalist Paper 78. The Constitution, he pointed out, allows justices to remain on the court only “during good Behavior” (Article III Section I) meaning that they can be impeached by the Senate for bad behavior. “The standard of good behavior for the continuance in office of the judicial magistracy,” said Hamilton, “is certainly one of the most valuable of the modern improvements in the practice of government.”  This is true, he wrote, because “it is the best expedient which can be devised in any government to secure a steady, upright, and impartial administration of the laws.”  

Seventeen years later the Senate would prove Hamilton’s point, by impeaching Justice Samuel Chase for letting his partisan bias influence his decisions on the bench.

The first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court certainly had no quarrel with the limited role the Constitution laid out for him. In 1795, in a move that would be unthinkable today, John Jay resigned from his lifetime appointment as Chief Justice after successfully running for governor of New York. Today a US Supreme Court justice wields far more power than a mere state governor, but things were different when the men who wrote the Constitution were still alive.

Jay, like Alexander Hamilton, was one of the authors of the Federalist Papers. And, like Hamilton, he was a passionate abolitionist. As State Governor he would have the pleasure, in 1799, of signing a bill that banned slavery in the State of New York. At the end of the eighteenth century no one would have suggested any non-democratic method for accomplishing something as important as banning slavery.  

Conclusion

Today liberals and conservatives argue back and forth about whether it is a good idea to let judges create new legal principles for a whole nation based on what they “think is right.” History professors have every right to take the liberal side of politically controversial issues, but they are letting their politics interfere with their teaching when they talk in the classroom about major changes in the structure of our nation without putting them in the proper historical context.

¹Rorabaugh, Critchlow, and Baker

Today the United States Government spends trillions of dollars annually, on everything from prescription drugs to teapot museums. It already exerts significant control over the relationships between doctors and patients, and Congress is grasping for still more power over the health care industry. The government owns banks and car companies. It confiscates money from unpopular businesses and groups of people, and transfers some of the money (after infrastructure costs) to more-favored business and groups.

The government uses taxpayers’ money to buy corn, then “lends” more tax dollars to third world governments that have no ability to repay the “loans,” so those governments can buy the corn from the US government with US money. It levies punitive taxes on cigarette sales, and subsidizes tobacco growers. For a while in the 1990’s the government forbid condom companies to advertise their products on television, while spending taxpayers’ money on TV adds to promote condom use. The national government dictates the marijuana laws your state has to implement, the curriculum at your local public schools, and the amount of water your toilet can use when it flushes.
 
It wasn’t always this way.

The men who wrote up the US Constitution in 1787 did not view centralized government power as the solution to every problem. Far from it. The representatives of the thirteen states of the original union viewed government in general as a source of all kinds of evil; and a big, centralized government as most dangerous of all. The Constitution they wrote reserved control of most issues for the states, and granted power to the federal government only in clearly defined and limited areas.

Even this much centralization of power was controversial among the American people of the eighteenth century; there were many people who opposed ratification of the Constitution because they thought that even the limited powers granted to the proposed federal government were too great. Those who supported ratification (the big-government leftists of their day) were called Federalists.  Those who opposed ratification of the Constitution, the right wingers of that era, were called Anti-Federalists.

What the Textbooks Say

History professors typically gloss over the differences between the role the Founding Fathers had in mind for the federal government, and the role it actually occupies in the twenty-first century. In the freshman history textbook Give Me Liberty, for example, author Eric Foner portrays the right and left wings of 1787 politics as being similar to the political factions we see today. He must know how false this is, but it is apparently what he wants the next generation of American voters to believe. In describing the Constitution’s division of powers between state and federal government, Dr. Foner tells his readers that “This principle of divided sovereignty was a recipe for debate, which continues to this day, over the balance of power between the national government and the states.” (Italics added.)

Eight pages later Dr. Foner reiterates this point. The Anti-Federalist movement died out when the Constitution was ratified, he tells us. “But as with other movements in American history that did not immediately achieve their goals…some of the Anti-Federalists’ ideas eventually entered the political mainstream. To this day, their belief that a too-powerful central government is a threat to liberty continues to influence American political culture.”

The truth is very different. During the last hundred years the federal government has arrogated so much power that it can no longer even be accurately called a “federal” government. It is no longer just a confederation of independent states; it is a centralized national government that controls the lives of the American people directly. It has become precisely the kind of government that leaders of both sides of the ratification debates of the 1780’s opposed.

George Mason and Anti-Federalism

In 1787 Anti-Federalists like George Mason warned that if the states ratified the Constitution the US government would be “a National Government, and no longer a confederation.” Prior to ratification of the Constitution the federal government had to depend on the legislatures of the respective states for money. The Constitution granted to the federal government the power to levy taxes directly, and Mason viewed this as a dangerous usurpation:  “The assumption of this power of laying direct taxes, does of itself, entirely change the confederation of the States into one consolidated Government.”… “The very idea of converting what was formerly a confederation, to a consolidated Government, is totally subversive of every principle which has hitherto governed us.”   

Despite what Professor Foner says, no modern politician has any interest in promoting the point of view of the Anti-Federalist faction of 1787. The Anti-Federalists opposed ratification of the US Constitution on the grounds that even the very limited powers it claims for the federal government were too great. They opposed the institution of the office of the President, they opposed the creation of the Senate and House of Representatives, they opposed the creation of the federal courts, and they opposed giving the federal government the power to levy taxes directly.

The Federalists, on the other hand,  pushed for ratification of the Constitution; but they argued very passionately and convincingly that there would be no danger of the Constitution, if ratified, allowing the federal government to intrude into the business of the state governments. Like their rivals the Anti-Federalists, they have very little in common most of today’s politicians.

Hamilton and the Federalists

In Federalist Paper #32, Alexander Hamilton addressed the concerns of Anti-Federalist skeptics like George Mason. “The State governments,” Hamilton said, “would clearly retain all the rights of sovereignty which they before had, and which were not, by that act, exclusively delegated to the United States.” (Italics in the original.)

In Federalist Paper #39, Hamilton states “Each State, in ratifying the Constitution, is considered as a sovereign body independent of all others, and only to be bound by its own voluntary act. In this relation, then, the new Constitution will, if established, be a federal and not a national constitution.” (Italics in the original.)

Alexander Hamilton was the biggest advocate of big government in eighteenth century America, and even he was eager to limit the scope of the federal government to narrowly defined powers and responsibilities.  He did not contradict George Mason’s position on the rights of the states; he merely promised that the proposed Constitutional government would respect those rights.

Nearly half a century later French bureaucrat Alexis de Tocqueville would tour the United States and observe that the division of powers Hamilton had promised was still in effect. There were twenty-four states by then, and they still retained their prerogatives. “In short,” Tocqueville said, “there are twenty-four small sovereign nations, whose agglomeration constitutes the body of the Union.”¹  Tocqueville went on to describe in detail the clearly separated responsibilities of the state and federal governments, which were just what Hamilton had described in the Federalist Papers.

Redefining the Terms of Debate

How different things are today. Only a handful of the most conservative Republicans in modern-day politics would even suggest cutting the federal government back down to the limited role envisioned for it by the left wing Federalist party of the 1780’s. Those who do are disparaged as “right wing extremists.”

There is a group called the Federalist Society that advocates a return to the division of powers between state and federal government that the original Federalists spelled out in the Constitution. The society was “founded on the principles that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to our Constitution, and that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be.”  

Today this position is considered so controversial that the a nominee for federal office can be disparaged as a radical if he can be shown to have been involved with the Federalist Society. In 2005, for example, when John Roberts was a nominee for the US Supreme Court, the Democratic Party accused him of having been associated with the Federalist Society. This would make Roberts unsuitable for the Supreme Court, the Democrats said, because “Working with the Federalist Society would reveal an extremist right wing philosophy.”

Scholars and other leftist may like the idea of a very large, expensive, and paternalistic national government; but they should at least be honest enough to say that our Founding Fathers had something very different in mind when they wrote the Constitution.

¹Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Bantam Classic paperback, p. 65

According to college professors and other leftists, the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution does not guaranty individual citizens a right to keep and bear arms. As with many other classroom representations of history, this one is designed to influence the way the next generation thinks about (and votes on) current political issues.

Liberals and conservatives disagree on the meaning of the Second Amendment. The argument is fueled by the somewhat ambiguous wording of the Amendment: “A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Advocates of gun rights claim that the Second Amendment ensures a right of gun ownership for all individuals. Advocates of gun control take the position that Second Amendment rights are restricted to members of state-sanctioned militias, which no longer exist, hence there is no constitutional right to own guns. There are arguments to be made for both sides, but only one side is presented in a typical college history class. 

What Students Hear in Class

The textbook America’s Promise, for example, in a section describing the content of the Bill of Rights, flatly states “The Second Amendment provided for the right of militiamen to keep and bear their own arms.” (Italics added) Professor Eric Foner uses similar language in his textbook Give Me Liberty. He states that the right to keep and bear arms is valid “in conjunction with” membership in an organized militia. These statements sound authoritative, but they are really just endorsements of one particular political position.

The Other Side of The Argument

In June of 2008 the US Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment does indeed establish the right of all individuals to keep and bear arms. The vote was five to four, which means that only four justices endorsed the view being taught in America’s classrooms, and the majority contradicted it.

Even presidential candidate Barack Obama, who had been an advocate of gun control laws throughout his political career, agreed with the Supreme Court majority that the Second Amendment protects the rights of individuals. In a public statement about the Court’s decision, Obama said “I have always believed that the Second Amendment protects the right of individuals to bear arms…” (italics added).

Not all historians espouse the pro-gun-control view expressed in the textbook excerpts above. The late Leonard W. Levy, to cite one noteworthy exception, published a book titled Origins of the Bill of Rights, based on an in-depth study of the original intent of the Founding Fathers who wrote and ratified the first ten amendments to the Constitution. In the chapter on the Second Amendment he flatly contradicts the “facts” being taught in many classrooms, supporting his position with quotes from an impressive lineup of 18th century documents. “Believing that the amendment does not authorize an individual’s right to keep and bear arms is wrong,” says Levy. “The right to bear arms is an individual right…If all (the Amendment) meant was the right to be a soldier or serve in the military, whether in the militia or in the army, it would hardly be a cherished right and would never have reached constitutional status in the Bill of Rights.”¹

He goes on to point out that “Pennsylvania, whose constitution of 1776 first used the phrase ‘the right to bear arms,’ did not even have a state militia.”² Levy then details the protections of gun rights incorporated into other states’ constitutions, and how they influenced the language of the federal Bill of Rights in 1791.

Levy describes in some detail the intentions of James Madison, who was the primary force behind the Bill of Rights:

When James Madison in 1789 proposed to the First Congress the amendments to the Constitution that became the Bill of Rights, he included one that drew on his own state’s (Virginia’s) constitution: “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country; but no person scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service in person.” Madison did not make the right to bear arms dependent on serving in a militia. In his notes for the speech in which he urged Congress to recommend Constitutional amendments, he wrote of those amendments, “they relate 1st to private rights,” and he referred to the English Declaration of Rights, which protected the right of individual Protestant subjects to have arms. In his personal correspondence Madison referred to his proposals as “guards for private rights.”³

Levy quotes other Founders who expressed similar sentiments. He also quotes an English minister who warned the English government, on the eve of the American Revolution, that gun factories in the Colonies were producing high quality rifles on a large scale.⁴ This observation is especially remarkable in light of British law at that time, which forbad manufacturing of almost any kind in the Colonies.⁵

Resorting to Fraud

There is little in the historical record to support the idea that the Founding Fathers wrote and ratified the Second Amendment only to protect the gun rights of militia members. There was, however, one recently published award-winning book that purported to document the claims of gun control advocates. The book is Arming America, by Dr. Michael Bellesiles; originally published in 2000. In it, Bellesiles cites actual 18th century documents to support the claim that guns were rarely owned by individuals in the years leading up to the ratification of the Bill of Rights, and that an individual right to keep and bear arms was not important enough to Americans of that era to justify a Constitutional amendment. The back cover of the current paperback version summarizes the contents:

Painstakingly examining the historical record, Bellesiles shatters the myth of America’s gun-toting revolutionary citizens. Beginning with the European tradition from which the American colonists emerged, Bellesiles indicates that ordinary people had little access to or practical training in firearms…At the end of the (Civil War), the decision to allow soldiers to keep their weapons transformed the once seldom-needed tool to a perceived necessity, fostering an emotional connection between man and weapon.

Bellesiles’ book was quickly embraced by gun control advocates in academia and the media. Columbia University awarded Bellesiles its Bancroft Prize for best history book of the year. In 2002, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit cited Bellesiles’ book in a landmark court decision. Here at last, it seemed, was a scholarly work with real documentary evidence to support the pro-gun-control view of history that left-leaning scholars were eager to teach.

The book was a fraud.

In the book, Bellesiles cited reams of data from eighteenth and nineteenth century probate records, among other “sources.” His troubles began when another scholar, a specialist on probate records, asked Bellesiles where the records he cited could be found. This innocent request began a long soap opera of denials, changing stories, and obvious lies; until it became painfully obvious that Bellesiles had resorted to making up facts to suit his conclusions. Columbia rescinded his Bancroft Prize. Emory University pressured him to resign. The Ninth Circuit expunged its references to Bellesiles’ book from the record of its anti-gun-rights decision, but, significantly, let the decision stand. Soon another university hired Bellesiles.

That a United States circuit court could be influenced in handing down a precedent-setting decision by the work of a history professor shows how important the biases of university scholars are. If, as seems likely, the misrepresentations of history professors have long-term influence on the beliefs and attitudes of millions of young voters, the leftist bias so common among college faculties must have significant impact on modern American politics.

¹Leonard W. Levy, Origins of the Bill of Rights, Yale Nota Bene 2001, pp. 134-135
²ibid., p. 135
³ibid., pp. 144-145
⁴Ibid., pp 140
⁵J.R. Dolan, The Yankee Peddlers of Early America, Bramhall House, p. 48