Tag

John Taylor of Caroline

The Conspiracy No One is Talking About Blog

The Conspiracy No One is Talking About

Originally published at From the Desk of Jon Harris. I recently recorded a podcast on John Taylor of Caroline’s important but often neglected book New Views of the Constitution (1823). I initially believed that the most compelling way to introduce this work to modern audiences would be to highlight how Taylor, writing from a federalist perspective, disagreed with Joseph Story’s…
Jonathan Harris
December 8, 2025
How John Taylor of Caroline Unmasked the Tyranny of Special Privileges Blog

How John Taylor of Caroline Unmasked the Tyranny of Special Privileges

This piece was originally published at fee.org Taylor’s arguments are as relevant today as they were in the 1820s. John Taylor (1753–1824) of Caroline County, Virginia, is not often remembered as a key figure in the early American Republic, but for champions of liberty, perhaps he ought to be. While Taylor’s life included stints as a lawyer, Revolutionary War officer,…
Justin Madura
October 30, 2025
The New South and Future South Blog

The New South and Future South

What does the Southern tradition have to offer America in 2025? Richard Weaver wrote in his Southern Tradition at Bay that the Old South may not be a place where we would want to live, but it certainly could offer examples of how to live. That’s a pregnant statement. Southerners, more than Americans in other sections, held fast to tradition…
Brion McClanahan
December 31, 2024
A Knotty Nodus Blog

A Knotty Nodus

I have ever championed the view that the hallmark of good history or philosophy, especially for young scholars, is for a scholar to take what might be considered as a small problem or topic, perhaps one typically overpassed by others (e.g., Jefferson and guns), and do a thorough job of it. In that way, whoever wishes to write on that…
M. Andrew Holowchak
November 8, 2024
Agrarianism After Taylor Blog

Agrarianism After Taylor

I was not here for Dr. Fleming’s talk, but I imagine he made the point he often likes to make: the term “agrarian” is problematic, because in European and general political terms “agrarian” suggests a group of wild-eyed radicals who want to seize and divide up other peoples’ property. Of course, this not what our Agrarians are about, but I…
Clyde Wilson
July 3, 2023
Judicial Review? No. Nullification Blog

Judicial Review? No. Nullification

“Acts of congress, to be binding, must be made pursuant to the constitution; otherwise they are not laws, but a mere nullity.” -St. George Tucker “There is no danger I apprehend so much as the consolidation of our government by the noiseless, and therefore unalarming instrumentality of the Supreme Court.” -Thomas Jefferson As a pro-life Jeffersonian, I am constantly frustrated…
Earl Starbuck
February 22, 2021
Reforming the Southern Man Blog

Reforming the Southern Man

I am not from where I live, yet I have a deep fear that where I live won’t be where I live for very much longer. The god of progress bears down on our town like cavalry upon the steppes. There is not a whole lot one can do outside of seeking divine intervention, much like a Magyar farmer in…
Rev. Benjamin Glaser
February 5, 2021
Taylor and Jefferson on Secession Blog

Taylor and Jefferson on Secession

One of the most enduring myths of American history centers on the “compact theory” of the Constitution. According to the standard interpretation, Thomas Jefferson and his fellow Republicans invented the “theory” to challenge Federalist control of the general government in the 1790s. This implies that Jefferson and the other Republicans acted in bad faith by playing fast and loose with…
Brion McClanahan
November 6, 2019
Sectionalism Returns Blog

Sectionalism Returns

Recently Michael S. Greve of George Mason University Law School wrote an insightful article which contends that sectionalism has reared its head again. This new sectionalism is dividing the states along the lines of economic interests, which also happen to be aligning nicely with current ideological and partisan fault lines as well. Professor Greve rightly points out that the states…
John Devanny
January 29, 2018
Up at the Forks of the Creek: In Search of American Populism Review Posts

Up at the Forks of the Creek: In Search of American Populism

Editor's note: With the rise of "populism" around the world, we should revisit the history and origins of American populism. In "Populism" we are confronted with a term that raises so many different connotations in different minds that we well may wonder if the term is usable at all. It is not quite as bad, in this respect, as democracy—a…
Clyde Wilson
November 16, 2016
Two Aristocracies Review Posts

Two Aristocracies

Editor's note: This piece was originally printed as an unsigned piece in DeBow's Review in 1866. The author had already recognized that the deal struck between Midwestern farmers and Northeastern merchants would in short order ruin agriculture and by default a more Jeffersonian economy in the "farm belt" of America. His call for Southern and Midwestern farmers to unite against…
Abbeville Institute
October 5, 2016
Reflections of a Ghost: An Agrarian View After Fifty Years Review Posts

Reflections of a Ghost: An Agrarian View After Fifty Years

Of the twelve agrarians who wrote the symposium I'll Take My Stand, only three are alive: Robert Penn Warren, the poet and novelist, Lyle Lanier, a psychologist and former executive vice-president of the University of Illinois, and myself, a writer and reader of fiction. I don't presume to speak either for Warren or Lanier, and I don't know how to…
Andrew Nelson Lytle
August 23, 2016
Musings of a Southern Antifederalist on the Presidential Election Blog

Musings of a Southern Antifederalist on the Presidential Election

The one consolation of the Antifederalist persuasion is telling everyone you meet “I told you so.”  Granted, this does not go down well in most circles, be they progressive, socialist, conservative, neo-conservative, constitutionalist, et al.  At best, some of these folk will agree that the Antifederalists were correct about the consolidation of power in the federal government, the excesses of…
John Devanny
July 8, 2016
Sayings By or For Southerners, Part XXIV Blog

Sayings By or For Southerners, Part XXIV

Totalitarianism, defined as the existential rule of Gnostic activists, is the end form of progressive civilization.--Eric Voegelin The South is the foe to Northern industry---to our mines, our manufactures, and our commerce.--Abolitionist Theodore Parker, 1861 Consolidators, supremacists, and conquerors, however, will all equally disregard any instrument, however solemn and explicit, by which ambition and avarice will be restrained and the…
Clyde Wilson
January 13, 2016
Sovereignty Review Posts

Sovereignty

The reader has perceived that the question concerning state powers, is condensed in the word sovereignty, and therefore any new ideas upon the subject, if to be found, would not be unedifying. A will to enact, and a power to execute, constitute its essence. Take away either, and it expires. The state governments and the federal government, are the monuments…
John Taylor of Caroline
November 10, 2015
Pope Francis and the Southern Tradition Blog

Pope Francis and the Southern Tradition

Recent attempts made by the left and the right to make Pope Francis one of “their” own has sparked considerable debate among the political class and their voices in the mainstream media.  Pope Francis’s speech before Congress was nothing more than a continuation of themes he has publically endorsed throughout his time as pontiff, namely support for the environment and opposition…
Brion McClanahan
October 1, 2015
Bailing the Capitalists: Our Southern Fathers Told Us What to Expect Clyde Wilson Library

Bailing the Capitalists: Our Southern Fathers Told Us What to Expect

“. . . and bank-notes will become as plentiful as oak leaves.” —Thomas Jefferson “They , and not the rich are our dependence for continued freedom. And to preserve their independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt. We must make our election between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude. If we run into such…
Clyde Wilson
August 26, 2015
The Tuckers of Virginia Blog

The Tuckers of Virginia

If any American today were to listen to the nationalists in charge of either the political class or American education at large, they would get the sense that it is settled science that the American Union is comprised of one people held together by a national government with uncontested sovereignty over all matters foreign and domestic.  Certainly, States and local…
Brion McClanahan
June 8, 2015
Cincinnatus, Call the Office! Clyde Wilson Library

Cincinnatus, Call the Office!

“. . . a republican government, which many great writers assert to be incapable of subsisting long, except by the preservation of virtuous principles.” — John Taylor of Caroline The United States Senate, one summer morning near the end of the session in 1842, was busy with routine reception of committee reports. The Committee on the Judiciary reported favorably on…
Clyde Wilson
December 31, 2014
The Political Wisdom of John Taylor of Caroline Blog

The Political Wisdom of John Taylor of Caroline

In honor of John Taylor's birthday, December 19. From Tyranny Unmasked: “The rival remedy for our troubles, so insignificant in the eyes of the Committee as to be wholly suppressed, although it has been often enforced by a multitude of able writers, and some patriotick statesmen; and although it was the basis of two federal administrations, which diffused more happiness and…
W. Kirk Wood
December 19, 2014
John Taylor and Construction Review Posts

John Taylor and Construction

States’ rights may have been the defining force in Antebellum America, but modern, mainstream historians would have you believe that they were nothing more than a wicked creed cooked up by a few corrupt slaveowners. A review of a recent biography of John Taylor of Caroline referred to his “opprobrium” as the “premier states’ rights philosopher.” It would have been…
James Rutledge Roesch
December 19, 2014
John Taylor of Caroline: Liberal, Radical, and Reactionary Review Posts

John Taylor of Caroline: Liberal, Radical, and Reactionary

Part V of a Five Part Series.  Part I, II, III, and IV. 1. Taylor as a Liberal “Individualist” Taylor writes that society not made up of individuals is a pointless abstraction: ‘Society exclusively of individuals, is an ideal being, as metaphysical as the idea of a triangle. If a number of people should inclose themselves within a triangle, they…
Joseph R. Stromberg
December 10, 2014
The Political Economy of John Taylor of Caroline Review Posts

The Political Economy of John Taylor of Caroline

Part III of a Five Part Series. Part I, Part II. 1. Republicanism and Liberalism Revisited As noted previously, 18th-century Anglo-American opposition writers employed several political languages. One of these, classical republicanism, asserted reciprocal causal relations between power and property such that a republic secures stability and liberty by way of a “mixed constitution” resting on a broad class of…
Joseph R. Stromberg
November 6, 2014
John Taylor: Republicanism, Liberty, and Union Review Posts

John Taylor: Republicanism, Liberty, and Union

Part 1 of a Five Part Series 1. The Relevance of John Taylor John Taylor of Caroline (1753-1824) has a secure, if minor, place in the history of American political thought. Charles A. Beard considered him “the philosopher and statesman of agrarianism” and “the most systematic thinker” of the Jeffersonian Republican party. Indeed, Beard's writing on Taylor, early in the…
Joseph R. Stromberg
September 12, 2014
Steady Habits and Chivalry Clyde Wilson Library

Steady Habits and Chivalry

The burden of our endeavour in this conference is to examine the great morality play of Northern Good versus Southern Evil that is the conventional history of anti-slavery in the United States. This convention dominates not only our understanding of the sectional conflict of the 19th century but colours all of American history with a self-serving distortion that Robert Penn…
Clyde Wilson
August 25, 2014
John Taylor of Caroline on Debt Blog

John Taylor of Caroline on Debt

From Tyranny Unmasked: The Committee inform us ‘that the true economy of individuals, is to earn more than they spend; het this is said to be bad policy for a nation. The first assertion is universally known to be true; but the second is gratuitously and unfairly attributed to their adversaries, to discredit the very principle by which only the…
W. Kirk Wood
July 18, 2014