Note 15 — Chapter I
Reading edition
The same Benjamin Bates who in 1816 as clerk of the Virginia Yearly Meeting drew up and presented to the Burgesses of Virginia a protest against the existing militia laws of the State and accompanied it by an able letter, of which the editor of "Niles' Register," November 30th, says that it perhaps "forms a body of the ablest arguments that have ever appeared in defense of certain principles held by this people."—"Friends' Miscellany," Vol. VII, p. 221; "Niles' Register," VII, p. 90, supplement. William Wirt also pronounced its arguments "unanswerable."