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Liberate the Captives
The Birth of a Nation has been called a classic revenge movie—Braveheart set in antebellum America—and it’s a largely accurate assessment. This is a biopic of Nat Turner, a slave who led a rebellion in...
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The Radical Jefferson: A Conversation with Kevin Gutzman
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...
View ArticleMaking Jefferson Safe for the Historians
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...
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Founding Freedom: Self-Government and Slavery in America
To recite the title of George William Van Cleve’s book, A Slaveholders' Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic, is to beg the fundamental question regarding the...
View ArticleSo Much Power in So Few Hands: Reevaluating Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation...
Professor Nichols urges us to revisit the arguments surrounding the Emancipation Proclamation (EP) for two reasons. The second reason noted is that the “constitutional issues at stake . . . are...
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An Oppressive Power From the Beginning
Eliga Gould has written an intriguing new history of the diplomatic engagement of the United States in the long period spanning the Seven Years’ War to the Monroe Doctrine. It is different from most...
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An Impressed People
“In 1700s, impressed seamen became second only to African slaves as the largest group of unfree laborers in the British Empire”: and yet, the appreciation of the historical reality and magnitude of...
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Capitalism and Forced Labor
Recent polling of the millennials’ attitudes toward socialism suggests that higher education on the postmodern campus has better prepared graduates to denounce capitalism than to defend it....
View ArticleLaw and Tradition in America: Marc DeGirolami Replies
I am grateful for the learned responses of Professors Bernstein, Levinson, and Stoner to my Liberty Forum essay on law and tradition. Of course, it will not be possible to reply to each point. But it...
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J.Q. Adams, Diarist
He saw “the hideous reality of the slave ascendency in the Government of this Union" and set about resisting it.
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Three Fifths of All Other Persons
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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New Birth of Freedom Betrayed
Prisoners from the Front, Winslow Homer, 1866 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)Calhounian constitutionalism worked toward overthrowing republicanism and establishing oligarchy as the new model of government...
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The Constitution: A Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery Document?
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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John C. Calhoun, Madisonian Manqué
His institutional innovations were geared toward preserving slavery.
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Thomas Jefferson’s Legacy
Washington, DC - Jefferson MemorialIn Thomas Jefferson—Revolutionary: A Radical’s Struggle to Remake America historian Kevin Gutzman examines the legacy of Jefferson.
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The Reconstruction Republicans: Answering the Slaveocratic Revolution
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.
View ArticleThe Peculiarity of the Three-Fifths Rule
Still image from Operation Crossroads, U.S. nuclear test at Bikini Atoll, July 25, 1946 (Everett Historical/Shutterstock.com).The three-fifths rule of the Constitution treated slaves as three fifths of...
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An Oppressive Power From the Beginning
Eliga Gould has written an intriguing new history of the diplomatic engagement of the United States in the long period spanning the Seven Years’ War to the Monroe Doctrine. It is different from most...
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Slavery, Abortion, and the Politics of Constitutional Meaning
This Liberty Law Talk is with political scientist Justin Dyer on his latest book, Slavery, Abortion, and the Politics of Constitutional Meaning (Cambridge University Press, 2013). In debates over the...
View ArticleFriday Roundup, December 6th
Still image from Operation Crossroads, U.S. nuclear test at Bikini Atoll, July 25, 1946 (Everett Historical/Shutterstock.com).What should be the purpose of the for-profit corporation? Debate over this...
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