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Easily the best is Chitwood’s. Although it overlooks some evidence, it depicts Tyler as a cradle Jeffersonian, which is how I understand him.

May is a very pedestrian account, and Crapol is hostile. Seager devotes abundant attention to his wife, etc., which I find uninteresting.

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I’m thanked in the Acknowledgements to A Patriot’s History….

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During Reconstruction, the South was controlled by Republican-dominated governments. Besides that, several states had been admitted to the Union during and since the war, which left the South essentially unable to obstruct majority moves to further Hamiltonian mercantilism that had been implemented during the war.

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That isn’t all Jackson did. He also put the money in various “pet” banks around the country, and then issued the Specie Circular requiring that payments for federal lands be made in specie. In general, the Bank War had featured intentional, abrupt constriction of the money supply by the Second B.U.S., the pet banks had inconsistent policies from state to state, and the Specie Circular led to failure to pay on the parts of many people who had entered into the contracts when it was assumed they could pay with bank paper.

Unmentioned in all of this was a factor Temin highlighted: a change in British monetary policy, which also had a significant effect on the American economy.

Taken together, these factors all had significant effects on the US economy.

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This has never happened, of course, but electors are free to vote for whom they will, and one supposes that Democrats in your scenario would coalesce behind an alternative candidate.

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In general, states today enforce unconstitutional federal policies in order to obtain the federal funding Congress offers them for doing so. All they’d have to do to cease being complicit in this is stop taking the federal money. Good luck.

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Virginia, typically of southern states, didn’t have public primary and secondary education until Reconstruction. The best estimate is that about half of Virginian white men were illiterate at the time of the Revolution. Jefferson proposed extensive reforms in this area, which are the subject of one chapter of my forthcoming book, Thomas Jefferson–Revolutionary.

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That essay is itself propaganda. So, for example, Lincoln had said for years by the time he was inaugurated that his program would ultimately lead to the end of slavery everywhere, and that he hoped it would.

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No. It’s written from a Marxian perspective, with lots of racial and economic nonsense scattered through it.

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I’ve listened to several of the courses. Their quality is quite uneven. The one on Transcendentalism, for example, isn’t up to much, but the one on the history of English is outstanding.

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He didn’t.

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Obama did not veto the PPACA, but instead cites it as his main achievement.

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Khruschev left office decades before Reagan came to power.

You might enjoy a book analyzing each president from a libertarian point of view, Ivan Eland’s Recarving Rushmore. Eland doesn’t think much of Reagan.

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Ralph Ketcham’s book Presidents Above Party shows that the first six presidents understood the veto power that way and only used it that way. The classic example is James Madison’s Bonus Bill Veto, which was a veto of a bill he had repeatedly asked Congress to pass. I describe that in James Madison and the Making of America.

As Ketcham notes, the change came with Andrew Jackson’s Bank Bill Veto. In the message explaining the veto, Jackson referred not only to constitutional objections, but to political and sociological ones. Since then, presidents have used the veto power as a means of insinuating themselves into the legislative process. Congress has funded an increasingly large presidential staff, which helps the president in his legislative functions.

I agree with Washington and Madison about these matters, but it’s hard to imagine a president eschewing the power the Executive Branch has accumulated since Jackson’s day.

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Since the 1910s, the federal courts have been in the business of claiming that first one provision of the Bill of Rights, then another was enforceable against the state governments. Most recently, Justice Scalia claimed that the 2nd Amendment was. This leaves very little of the first eight amendments that isn’t.

I understand this entire trend to be mistaken. The best explanation is Raoul Berger’s _Government by Judiciary_. Follow up with his _The Fourteenth Amendment and the Bill of Rights_.

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