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John Taylor

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Transforming the Union

Lincoln claimed the North was fighting to preserve the Union. However, fighting to preserve a voluntary Union is a contradiction since force is antithetical to voluntary consent. Alexander Hamilton noted: “To coerce the States is one of the maddest projects that was ever devised…Can any reasonable man be well disposed toward a government which makes war and carnage the only…
John M. Taylor
August 19, 2025
Blog

The Apotheosis of Abraham Lincoln

“Abraham Lincoln…has almost disappeared from human knowledge. I hear of him, I read of him in eulogies and biographies, but I fail to recognize the man I knew in life.”--Union General Donn Piatt You have to give credit to those who fought to prevent Southern Independence. Post-war, they seized the narrative, stated they were going to “reeducate” Southerners and created…
John M. Taylor
November 13, 2024
Clyde Wilson Library

Nullification Reconsidered

With the destructive evil of centralized power becoming every day more evident and 10th Amendment resolutions appearing in various State capitals, publication this month of the second volume of Professor W. Kirk Wood's magisterial three-volume "Nullification:A Constitutional History, 1776-1833" is serendipitous. For the first time in a half century and long past due, serious people are beginning to search for…
Clyde Wilson
August 15, 2024
Clyde Wilson Library

John Taylor’s Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States, Part 2

We now approach the heart of Taylor's Inquiry: recent times had created a new type of privileged order exercising dominion in a new way. This was the “paper and patronage aristocracy,” a form of government that had been perfected by England. John Adams had completely failed to notice the new type of regime (although, in fact, he actually wrote most…
Clyde Wilson
June 26, 2014
Clyde Wilson Library

John Taylor’s Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States, Part 1

John Taylor (1753–1824) of Caroline County, Virginia, is the most important, profound, prophetic and neglected American political thinker of the Revolution and early national period. To explore his thinking is, for a twenty-first century American, an adventure in time travel. We return home amazed—much enlightened about our forefathers' world and with new perspectives on our own. Taylor is the Jeffersonians’…
Clyde Wilson
June 19, 2014
Review Posts

Caveat, America, Emptor

Probably no man in America in 1800 knew more about, or cared more passionately for, republicanism than Thomas Jefferson. It was the common belief that a true republic had to be of a fairly limited size, on the model of the Greek republics, in which Athens, at perhaps 200,000 was the largest, or the Italian republics of the middle ages,…
Kirkpatrick Sale
May 27, 2014