Excerpt from The Key of Libberty: Shewing the Causes Why a Free Government Has Always Failed, and a Remidy Against It
William Manning was a New England farmer, with little in his outward life to distinguish him from the rest of the Yankee yeomanry. His paternal ancestors came to Massachusetts from England, in the great Puritan migration. He was born in North Billerica in 1747, on the same farm that his great-grandfather had hewed out of the wilderness; and there he lived and died.
It was a level, fertile farmstead near the Concord River, about four miles from its junction with the Merrimac. The house, now known as the Old Manse, was built by the same pioneer ancestor in 1696. During the Indian wars it served the community as a garrison house. Framed in massive oak, boarded with weather-rusted pine clapboards, covered with a shingled roof which sloped almost to the ground on the north side, the house was already old-fashioned in 1797, when its owner was suffering the growing pains of authorship. Its few, small rooms, huddled about a great central chimney, sheltered not only William and Sarah Manning and ten or eleven of their thirteen children, but an occasional traveller. For, situated as it was on the main road between the seacoast and the upper Merrimac Valley, the Old Manse had been used as a tavern since the time of William"s father.
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