Slave Property in the Old South
Still image from Operation Crossroads, U.S. nuclear test at Bikini Atoll, July 25, 1946 (Everett Historical/Shutterstock.com).This quarter, I assigned Liberty, Equality, Power in the U.S. history...
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This Republic of Federalism
Timothy Sandefur’s The Conscience of the Constitution contributes to the debate over the best way to limit the powers of the United States government in order to secure liberty. Sandefur, a lawyer and...
View ArticleSection 4 of the Fourteenth Amendment and Compensation for Emancipation of...
Still image from Operation Crossroads, U.S. nuclear test at Bikini Atoll, July 25, 1946 (Everett Historical/Shutterstock.com).Today, one of the least-discussed aspects of the Emancipation Proclamation...
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The Thirteenth Amendment as a Conservative Counterrevolution
In “If Slavery Is Not Wrong, Nothing Is Wrong,” I proposed that the Civil War was fought to restore the original unity of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, and that the Thirteenth...
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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...
View ArticleLincoln: Slavery, Sovereignty, and Secession
Still image from Operation Crossroads, U.S. nuclear test at Bikini Atoll, July 25, 1946 (Everett Historical/Shutterstock.com).This past week, I gave a talk (along with colleague Maimon Schwarzschild)...
View ArticleReacting to Lincoln
Still image from Operation Crossroads, U.S. nuclear test at Bikini Atoll, July 25, 1946 (Everett Historical/Shutterstock.com).In my previous post, I wrote about a talk that I had recently given about...
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Honor the Man, Not the Demi-God
In his Second Inaugural Address, Lincoln reprises the brevity and complexity that has made his Gettysburg Address so well known and so cherished. He also reprises the Biblical allusions and spirit...
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Introducing the Constitution: A Conversation with Michael Paulsen
This next edition of Liberty Law Talk is a discussion with Michael S. Paulsen, co-author with his son, Luke Paulsen, of their new book entitled The Constitution: An Introduction. The Paulsens’ book is...
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Up in Arms About a Coat of Arms
Harvard Law School, in abject surrender to student activists, is about to change its escutcheon because its design was derived from that of Isaac Royall, Jr., who endowed the first chair at the school....
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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
Still image from Operation Crossroads, U.S. nuclear test at Bikini Atoll, July 25, 1946 (Everett Historical/Shutterstock.com).I am grateful for the learned responses of Professors Bernstein, Levinson,...
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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...
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Making Jefferson Safe for the Historians
Washington, DC - Jefferson MemorialRice 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...
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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 (metmuseum.org)Calhounian constitutionalism worked toward overthrowing republicanism and establishing oligarchy as the new model of government in the...
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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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