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Gordon Wood’s Reflections on the Constitution and Slavery

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Everett Historical/Shutterstock.com
Many historians today tell a dismal tale of woe about our Founding, but Wood sees it whole with defects that do not blot out its real virtues.

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The Reconstruction Republicans: Answering the Slaveocratic Revolution

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Prisoners from the Front, Winslow Homer, 1866 (metmuseum.org)
A timely reminder of the full range of anti-republican institutions that the Confederacy fought a war to try to perpetuate.

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 Thomas Jefferson’s Legacy

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Washington, DC - Jefferson Memorial
In Thomas Jefferson—Revolutionary: A Radical’s Struggle to Remake America historian Kevin Gutzman examines the legacy of Jefferson.

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John C. Calhoun, Madisonian Manqué

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His institutional innovations were geared toward preserving slavery.

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The Constitution: A Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery Document?

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The U.S. Constitution (Derek Hatfield / Shutterstock.com)
The most telling evidence in the debate over slavery in the Constitution is how the pro-slavery forces responded to Lincoln's election.

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New Birth of Freedom Betrayed

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Prisoners from the Front, Winslow Homer, 1866 (metmuseum.org)
Calhounian constitutionalism worked toward overthrowing republicanism and establishing oligarchy as the new model of government in the United States.

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Three Fifths of All Other Persons

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Newspaper engraving from 1864 (NYPL digital collections)
J.Q. Adams decried the constitutional clause that enhanced the power of the slave masters.

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J.Q. Adams, Diarist

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He saw “the hideous reality of the slave ascendency in the Government of this Union" and set about resisting it.

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Making Jefferson Safe for the Historians        

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Washington, DC - Jefferson Memorial

Rice University’s John Boles was for many years (1983-2013) editor of The Journal of Southern History, which after The Journal of American History is the most-cited scholarly journal in the field of American history. In that position, he had substantial influence on, besides being substantially influenced by, the shape of the field today. Jefferson: Architect of American Liberty comes as a kind of valedictory.  As in his earlier work, Boles is self-consciously guided in writing it by recent developments in academic historiography. Contemporary politics make themselves felt in his story of the Master of Monticello, too. A full one-volume account has long…

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The Radical Jefferson: A Conversation with Kevin Gutzman

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In this edition of Liberty Law Talk historian Kevin Gutzman discusses his latest book, Thomas Jefferson—Revolutionary. We focus on Jefferson's account of federalism, conscience rights, education, and race.

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