High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! William Manning (1747–1814) was a New England farmer, foot soldier and author. After fighting in the American Revolutionary War, he began to believe that his service and labor meant little to those in charge. He soon became a member of the Jeffersonian Republican Party (otherwise known as the Democratic-Republican Party) in response to the day’s ruling Federalist Party. As the years passed and his distrust in government grew, he wrote multiple papers on what he deemed was the corruptness of the “Few” and what the “Many” endured because of it. In 1798, Manning wrote his most famous work, The Key of Libberty (later corrected to The Key of Liberty), in which he explained that the goal of the Few was to distress and force the Many into financially depending on them, creating a continued cycle of dependence. The Many’s only hope was to vote for leaders that would fight for those with lesser power and urge for smaller government. His work, however, would not be published for more than a century, suggesting that those in power did not agree with Manning’s observations.