Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in this book; otherwise they were not changed; spelling variants were not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; occasional unbalanced quotation marks retained.

Ambiguous hyphens at the ends of lines were retained.

Page 185: the dates “1663” and “1773” must refer to two different people.

Page 330: “IN CONGRESS, JULY 8, “1778” was misprinted as 1788”; corrected here. Some apparently incorrect dates on other pages of the original book have not been noted or corrected.