The recovery of the ideas and experiences of William Manning is a major event in the history of the American Revolutionary era. A farmer, foot soldier, and political philosopher, Manning was a powerful democratic voice of the common American in a turbulent age. The public crises of the infant republic - beginning with the Battle of Concord - shaped his thinking, and his writings reveal a mind grappling with some of the weightiest issues of the nation's founding. His most notable contribution was the first-known plan for a national political association of labouring men. That plan, and...