Footnotes and Further Reading

Elizabeth Porter Phelps

1747-1817
Footnote # 1

Elizabeth Pendergast Carlisle, Earthbound and Heavenbent: Elizabeth Porter Phelps and Life at Forty Acres, 1747-1817 (NY: Scribner, 2004), 8-11; Sylvester Judd, History of Hadley: including the early history of Hatfield, South Hadley, Amherst and Granby, Massachusetts (H.R. Hunting and Company, 1905) genealogy section, 113.

Footnote # 2

Carlisle, Earthbound and Heavenbent, 15-18, 20; Judd, History of Hadley, 388-39.

Footnote # 3

The Porter-Phelps-Huntington Paper, including Elizabeth Port Phelps' journals are housed in the Archives and Special Collections at the Frost Library of Amherst College in Amherst, MA. The Porter-Phelps-Huntington Museum is open to the public. May – October. For more information, see http://www.pphmuseum.org/

Footnote # 4

Kevin Sweeney, "Mansion People: Kinship, Class and Archutecture in Western Massachusetts in the Mid Eighteenth Century" Winterthur Portfolio, Vol. 19, No. 4 (Winter, 1984), pp. 232.

Footnote # 5

Judd, History of Hadley, genealogy section, 110;Carlisle, Earthbound and Heavenbent, 46-49. For a discussion of the interplay between notions of gentility and status, see Richard R. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (NY: Knopf, 1992) especially chapters 3 and 4.

Footnote # 6

Carlisle, 55.

Footnote # 7

Ibid., 58-9.

Footnote # 8

Ibid., 62-8. Elizabeth Porter Phelps was typical in accepting slavery as part of a hierarchical society in which one's station in life was determined by one's economic and social status. These assumptions, so different from our own, help explain why, according to her biographer, Elizabeth Carlisle, "Nothing in Elizabeth's diaries questions the system of slaveholding." It would be Elizabeth's daughter, Elizabeth Phelps Huntington, who would become an active abolitionist. Ibid., 309 n.

Footnote # 9

Ibid., 78.

Footnote # 10

Ibid., 79; 81.

Footnote # 11

Ibid., 91.

Footnote # 12

Ibid., 111-12. Elisha Porter was the Hampshire County Sheriff. He negotiated with the protesters, agreeing to hand over three of their men in exchange for Samuel Ely.

Footnote # 13

Ibid., 114.

Footnote # 14

George Richards Minot, History of the insurrections in Massachusetts in 1786 and of the rebellion consequent thereon (NY: Da Capo Press, 1971). First published in Worcester in 1788, this Da Capo press reprinted an edition originally printed in Boston, 1810.

Footnote # 15

Minot, History of the Insurrection, 113-14; Hampshire Gazette, January 31, 1787; Carlisle, Earthbound and Heavenbent, 115; Leonard Richards, Shays's Rebellion: The American Revolution's Final Battle (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 35.

Footnote # 16

Carlisle, Earthbound and Heavenbent, 261-63; 276; 282.


Further Reading

Bushman, Richard R. The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992.

Gross, Robert A., ed. In Debt to Shays: The Bicentennial of an Agrarian Rebellion. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993.

Minot, George Richards. History of the insurrections in Massachusetts in 1786 and of the rebellion consequent thereon. New York: Da Capo Press, 1971). First published in Worcester in 1788, this Da Capo press reprinted an edition originally printed in Boston, 1810.

Richards, Leonard. Shays's Rebellion: The American Revolution's Final Battle. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002.

Starkey, Marion L. A Little Rebellion. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1955.

Taylor, Robert F. Western Massachusetts in the Revolution. Providence: Brown University Press, 1954.