John Taylor of Caroline (1753-1824) was the chief theoretical writer of the Jeffersonian Republican party. His pamphlets and books, along with his career in the Virginia House of Delegates and U.S. Senate, offer the clearest enunciation of Jeffersonian Republican political philosophy.
As their title indicates, Garrett Ward Sheldon and C. William Hill Jr. hope to locate Taylor at the intersection of republicanism and liberalism. They summarize his thought as a "combination of a concern with Lockean natural rights, freedom, and limited government along with a classical interest in strong citizen participation in rule to prevent concentrated power and wealth, political corruption, and financial manipulation" (p. 224).
The authors devote their first chapter to a survey of recent historiography. The classic works of J.G.A. Pocock, Bernard Bailyn, Gordon S. Wood, Joyce Appleby, and Lance Banning all appear. Chapter 2, on Taylor's ideological context, fleshes out some of the description provided in the first chapter. Only with chapter 3 does the book turn in earnest to Taylor's own writings.
That chapter deals with Taylor's pamphlets of the 1790s, or at least some of them. While Sheldon and Hill describe Taylor's arguments against Hamiltonian centralization of power in the federal government and in a moneyed elite accurately, the authors slide past Taylor's 1795 pamphlet criticizing the carriage tax. Thus, they miss the point that Republicanism, from its earliest stages, included among its warnings about Hamiltonianism the idea that the loose construction of congressional powers favored by the treasury secretary might be employed to attack slavery in the South.
In chapter 4 the authors err in describing the Virginia Resolutions (of which Taylor was a sponsor) as taking "a more moderate approach to the question of whether state legislatures had a role in interpreting the U.S. Constitution" than the Kentucky Resolutions did (p. 69). They might have avoided this misstep if they had consulted my article "The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions Reconsidered: 'An Appeal to the Real Laws of Our Country;'" (Journal of Southern History, 66 August 2000, 473-96), but here as elsewhere they seem not to have consulted the journal literature, which is nearly absent from the notes and bibliography. They also fail to consider Taylor's participation in the House of Delegates debate on the resolutions and thus fail to glean from it lessons concerning Taylor's conception of the Union and of Virginia's place in it.
Other elements of the historical setting of Taylor's thinking also deserve more attention. For example, Taylor's break with Wilson Cary Nicholas was over clashing conceptions of proper political behavior. This theme dominates the 1809 pamphlet collection of Taylor's correspondence with Richmond Enquirer editor Thomas Ritchie, to which scarcely any attention is paid in this volume.
From Arator's exploration of the life of the farmer through Taylor's overlengthy chef d'oeurve An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States (1814) to the three outstanding Jeffersonian blasts of Taylor's final years, this book makes its way relatively clearly.
Taylor's Tyranny Unmasked (1822) has regained a resonance it has not had in decades. Its chief arguments were that the federal protective tariff was unconstitutional and that it chiefly benefited connected insiders at the expense of the rest of the population. This concern led Taylor quite far. Sheldon and Hill tell us that, unlike Jefferson, Taylor never contemplated outright secession (p. 160). Taylor may not have thought of it in the 1820s, but he held that apportioning property politically rather than through the operations of the market economy bred "rapacity and indignation, and . . . hostility" (p. 163). In other words, the policies he disfavored threatened the Union.
The solution to this problem was Taylor's reading of the Constitution, which allocated very few powers to the federal government. He received vindication for this view from the publication of the notes of some of the delegates and from the record of the Constitutional Convention, all of which he employed in writing his final work, New Views of the Constitution of the United States (1823). In that book, Taylor's unhappiness with the Madisonian faction at the convention is on full display. One infers that Taylor went to his grave believing that James Madison, by withholding the extensive notes he had taken during the convention, had played into the hands of the nationalists on the Supreme Court. Taylor's book demonstrates that Madison's faction was defeated in Philadelphia, but - as Taylor feared but could not know - it was winning the day in the Supreme Court even as he wrote.
Taylor's teaching is more than political and constitutional; it is also social and moral. These themes are picked up, though by no means exhausted, in this short book. One wished for more.
|
