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gutzmank
ParticipantFor an introduction, Kolchin, American Slavery.
For a sweeping synthesis, Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll.
For the three major American slave systems, Berlin, Many Thousands Gone.
For slavery’s cultural impact, Sobel, The World They Made Together.
An excellent and enlightening comparative account is Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom.
I also quite like Genovese, The Slaveholders’ Dilemma.
The classic treatment of 100+ years ago is Phillips, American Negro Slavery.
Taylor’s The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832 is well written and of inherent interest.
If you want suggestions on any other subtopics, just ask.
ParticipantHe has always been admired by nationalists–that is, by people who wanted the government to be increasingly centralized. Charles Hobson, the editor of his Papers, characterizes Marshall’s as a common-law approach to constitutional law, which of course is an alternative approach to that of Madison, Jefferson, Roane, Taylor, et al., who began by asking what the people thought the Constitution was going to mean when they ratified it.
ParticipantBailyn’s The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution marked the break between the Progressive approach to the Revolution/Founding and the ideological approach, which remains dominant now. Wood extended his teacher Bailyn’s attitude into the Philadelphia Convention and ratification.
McDonald essentially hoed his own row. He didn’t adopt either the republican or the liberal (Joyce Appleby’s and Drew McCoy’s) approach to the era.
ParticipantProf. McClanahan and I agree that both Martin and Cohens were wrongly decided; that’s not the same as saying the Supreme Court didn’t have jurisdiction to decide Cohens–with which McClanahan may or may not agree. Judicial review doesn’t equal judicial supremacy, as Jefferson explained in his September 6, 1819 letter to Chief Judge Spencer Roane of the Virginia Court of Appeals. No, I don’t think Marshall is saying the other two branches can ignore the Constitution, which is for the Supreme Court alone to interpret. Again, see Jefferson to Roane.
ParticipantAs I understand it, Congress has given the president authority to implement such measures.
ParticipantMcDonald was an avowed Hamiltonian. Certainly not a Straussian. I agree that his work, particularly Novus Ordo Seclorum, is superb.
ParticipantParticipantYes, it’s certainly true that George III hadn’t personally committed/been responsible for some of the acts with which the Declaration charges him. British response to the Declaration generally was to find the list of allegations against him either risible or bewildering. The reason he was named rather than Parliament or a past king is that the colonists had long since agreed Parliament was, as Jefferson said in “A Summary View of the Rights of British America,” “foreign to our constitutions and unknown to our laws” (or some such), and so what remained was to accuse the king of having wantonly violated colonists’ rights.
Of course, his August 1775 proclamation that the colonies were in rebellion, thus the complaining colonists were beyond his royal protection, satisfied many waverers that the tie to George III had to be severed.
ParticipantNo, Thompson’s Adams book came out 20 years ago. I reviewed it at the time:
https://www.independent.org/publications/tir/article.asp?id=254
You ask, “Do you agree with Wood when he says that the Constitution was radical because it represented a shift from the Ciceronian/Whig view of the executive and judicial branches representing the upper classes while the legislature represented the people to a more democratic one based on dispersed popular sovereignty, or do you personally agree with Jensen and Sheldon Richman that the Constitution was a conservative reaction to the forces of democracy unleashed by the Revolution and embodied in the Articles?” That’s a false choice. Both Wood’s claim and the one you attribute to Jensen and Richman are correct.
ParticipantHere we get to the 1970s dispute among scholars over the difference between republican and democratic societies. The former stressed the need for a virtuous citizenry, we were told. You can find more on this subject in Lance Banning’s The Jeffersonian Persuasion, Gordon Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic, and, if you want to trace the rebirth of this notion all the way back to the 16th century, Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment.
ParticipantJensen there echoes the old Beardian distinction between country/Antifederalist debtors and court/Federalists creditors that Forrest McDonald exploded decades ago.
It certainly is true that in Virginia at least there was a marked drop-off in the quality of state-level officials when the Revolution began and prominent Virginians went off to lead the army, sit in Congress, work as diplomats, etc. Many members of the old elite complained about unlettered men dressed in buckskin showing up to sit in the General Assembly, which never would have happened before. You see a bit of push-back against it in Madison’s tenth Federalist essay, where he says that larger districts will produce higher-class representatives.
ParticipantYes, it’s certainly true that the idea of a single sovereign national legislature was rejected at the founding. The Continental Congress acted as a kind of clearinghouse of the states’ policies/diplomatic arena, not as a sovereign legislature; the Confederation Congress had narrowly constrained powers; and the US Constitution is a federal constitution, not a sovereign body. Thus, this didn’t shift between the Revolution and ratification.
Yes, Wilson acted after ratification in some senses as if the US Government were sovereign in the old British sense.
Wood’s account of Adams’ thought on this score is generally accepted among historians and political scientists. I’m currently reviewing a new Adams biography for The American Conservative in which the author says Adams had no theory of federalism–which seems about right.
Wood does miss that in Virginia, at least, Federalists said during the ratification contest that states would have the option of secession if they ratified.
ParticipantYes, Jeff, that was my reasoning.
In general, I’m invested in an earlier generation of scholarship, which was dominated by Perry Miller, Edmund Morgan, et al. I can’t recommend a general survey of New England history (in fact, there isn’t a scholarly history of Connecticut from 1636 to present, so far as I know). I can however point you to narrower works.
Participant1) That depends whether the power seemingly must by its nature be unitary.
2) This has never come up. It’s an interesting question. See “1.”
3) Militiamen at the time of the Constitution’s ratification were state soldiers. There had been state regular-army units during the Revolution, but having those units, militia units, and congressional units proved unworkable, and so the power to raise regular army units was delegated to Congress.ParticipantI haven’t seen it. I’ll keep an eye out, thank you.
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