Hening did edite the texts of his manuscript sources - e.g., you can see his
penciled editorial instructions to the typesetter on manuscript laws in the
Jefferson Collection at the LIbrary of Congress.  In the Bland MS, which
contains some things from 17th-century VA that Hening regarded as irrelevant
to a collection of Acts of Assembly, those paragraphs are circled in pencil
and OMIT is written in the margin.  For some sessions, Hening also numbered
the Acts when they were not numbered in the original manuscript, etc.  In
every case I've seen - except when he misread a W in an abbreviated first
name and thereby created a Ma[thew] Chiles for Wa[lter] Chiles - Hening and
his typesetters were scrupulous and careful and reliable as to the text of
the acts.
    And of course, logically, people living DURING a period that may LATER
get a descriptive term such as interregnum, middle ages, ante bellum -
cannot yet describe their time by that term since they cannot know their
era will necessarily end, or when it might end - just as no one could have
given the birth and death dates for Cicero as 106 BC and 43 BC until AFTER
the event from which subsequent generations counted the years backwards. . .
.

On Sat, May 24, 2008 at 12:45 AM, [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> So the "Interregnum" designation was invented by Hening (ca. 1819-1823) and
> not the Virginia legislature?  Because if the Virginia legislature affixed
> "Interregnum" ("Between kingdoms") on their proceedings at the time they
> made them, to me it means that they, or possibly the whole of the English
> colonies in revolt, were considering choosing their own king (actually I
> have heard this was true even after the Revolution)...when they changed it
> to "In the nth year of the commonwealth" after 1776, the Virginia
> legislature had believed that America was not going to be led by a king of
> any sort.
>
> Now yes, if the designations were actually added by Hening in retrospect,
> then yes it is a distinction without a difference.
>
> Joe McCollum
>
>
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-- 
Jon Kukla
www.JonKukla.com

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