"The great majority of the documents printed here have been hitherto inaccessible to students except in manuscript form. It has not been my purpose to include in the volume material previously published in well-known collections, unless there was some special purpose to be served. Thus the documents illustrating the activities of Thomas Bentley have been given a place, because so many of the French letters, memorials, and records were concerned with his career. Yet all the Bentley material is not included, because much of it had little bearing on Illinois history, and most of the material has already been published in the Michigan Historical Collections. In the first chapter there are printed a few documents showing the conditions immediately preceding the occupation by the Virginians, but no attempt has been made to exhaust the documents for these years, which really belong to the previous period of the history of the state and will be printed in future volumes.” Chapters include: The Prelude; The Rule of the Virginia Soldiers in Illinois, July 4, 1778, to May 12, 1779; The Beginnings of Civil Government, May 12 to November 13, 1779; The Court and the Military, November 15, 1779, to June 8, 1780; The Summer of 1780, June to October; The Triumvirate, October 18, 1780, to March, 1781; The Government of the Magistrates, March, 1781, to April, 1782; The Struggle for Ascendency Between Dodge, Winston, and the Court, April to November, 1782; The Coming of the Commissioners from Virginia, November, 1782, to March, 1783; The Ascendency of John Dodge, March, 1783, to August 14, 1786; The French Assert Themselves, August 14, 1786, to August, 1787; The Coming of Colonel Harmar as Told by a Small Faction of the French, August, 1787; Barthelemi Tardiveau Appeals to the Continental Congress, August, 1787, to September 17, 1788; The Climax of Anarchy, August, 1787, to March 5, 1790; Ecclesiastical Letters, 1780 to 1792; and List of Documents. An index to full-names, places and subjects completes this work.
Clarence Alvord
(1909), 2013, 5½x8½, paper, index, 748 pp.
ISBN: 9780788430121
101-A3012
