“The great King of Zion has endowed the Presbyterian church in the United States with a goodly heritage, and, under his fostering care, its borders have been widely extended. In the space of a century and a half, a cause which at first was represented by a few itinerant missionaries, labouring among a number of scattered settlers on the shores of the Chesapeake and the adjoining regions, has attained to a magnitude unprecedented in the annals of Presbyterianism.” — William Blackwood, Introduction to Richard Webster, A History of the Presbyterian Church in America (1857), p. 45