A MEAN-SPIRITED MERCHANT BRINGING RIBBONS AND RUM TO A MESSY WORLD

Hook's clash with Patrick Henry meant one thing to Hook-another chance for his unscrupulous neighbors to parley their patriotism into a way to avoid paying their debts-while it meant another to those backcountry neighbors who saw in Hook the embodiment of every stereotype they had about Scottish merchants: "cheap, quarrelsome, and greedy" (p. 196). [...] it makes us realize that there was a politics and a culture to buying in the eighteenth century.