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John Taylor of Caroline

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Remembering John Taylor of Caroline

Prophet of Encroaching Tyranny John Taylor of Caroline was a man of the American Revolution. During the fight for independence, he served in the Continental Army and Virginia militia. He left the latter at the end of the war with the rank of lieutenant-colonel. Military life molded his character as it did for so many other men, but the enduring…
William J. Watkins
January 24, 2024
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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
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Economic Interpretation of American History

This article was originally published in the May 1916 issue of the Journal of Political Economy. To turn men away from the “barren” field of political history is one professed object of Professor Charles A. Beard in the two volumes which he has in recent years submitted to the public. Other purposes of these interesting volumes are to call the…
William E. Dodd
October 14, 2021
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Disunion Sentiment in Congress in 1794

John Taylor was born in Orange County, Virginia, in 1750, one year before James Madison, and the boys were neighbors; but Taylor afterwards moved to Caroline County, where he lived for the rest of his life, and died in 1824, at the age of seventy-four years. To distinguish him from others of the same name as himself he was called…
Gaillard Hunt
July 28, 2021
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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
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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
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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
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The Challenge of the Southern Tradition

In 1966, Senator Jim Eastland of Mississippi walked into the Senate Judiciary Committee and asked, “Feel hot in heah?” A staffer replied: “Well Senator, the thermostat is set at 72 degrees, but we can make it colder.” Eastland, puzzled by the response, doubled down, “I said, Feel Hot in heah?” The staffer now was perplexed and fearing that he might…
Brion McClanahan
March 25, 2019
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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
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
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
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
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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
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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
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
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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
Clyde Wilson Library

A Jeffersonian Political Economy

Your other lecturers have pleasant and upbeat subjects to consider. I am stuck with economics, which is a notoriously dreary subject.   It is even more of a downer when we consider how far the U.S. is today from a Southern, Jeffersonian political economy which was once a powerful idea. Economics as practiced today is a utilitarian and materialistic study. It…
Clyde Wilson
July 29, 2015
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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
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
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
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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
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
Review Posts

John Taylor on War, Peace, and Imperial War Finance

Part IV of a Five Part Series. Part I, Part II, Part III 1. War Finance Disillusioned by the policies of his Republican allies, who had leapt unprepared into the War of 1812, Taylor writes: “War is among the most plausible means used to delude a nation into the errour of anticipation,” or living on credit: ‘Yet it cannot bring…
Joseph R. Stromberg
November 17, 2014
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
Review Posts

John Taylor on Federal and Constitutional Questions

Part II of a Five Part Series. Part I 1. Liberalism Taylor stood on liberal ground in holding that men were a mixture of good and evil. Self-interest was the only real constant in human action.43 He broke with archaic-republican ideas of mixed constitutions and social balance. His key idea was to divide power up so many ways, federally and…
Joseph R. Stromberg
October 14, 2014
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
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
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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