(Excerpt from Disunion Sentiment in Congress in 1794: A Co...)
Excerpt from Disunion Sentiment in Congress in 1794: A Confidential Memorandum Hitherto Unpublished Upon Mrs. Madison's death it fell into the hands of her nephew, the late James Madison Cutts, from whose widow it was recently purchased by the publishers of this work. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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( John Taylor of Caroline (1753–1824) was one of the fore...)
John Taylor of Caroline (1753–1824) was one of the foremost philosophers of the States' rights Jeffersonians of the early national period. In keeping with his lifelong mission as a "minority man," John Taylor wrote Tyranny Unmasked not only to assault the protective tariff and the mercantilist policies of the times but also "to examine general principles in relation to commerce, political economy, and a free government." Originally published in 1822, it is the only major work of Taylor's that has never before been reprinted. As an early discussion of the principles of governmental power and their relationship to political economy and liberty, Tyranny Unmasked is an important primary source in the study of American history and political thought. F. Thornton Miller is Professor of History at Southwest Missouri State University.
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(Originally published: Washington City: Printed for the Au...)
Originally published: Washington City: Printed for the Author, 1823. "Taylor and myself have rarely, if ever, differed in any political principle of importance."-- Thomas Jefferson. Reprint of the uncommon first and only edition. Taylor was a champion of local democracy and one of the first and clearest spokesmen of the states rights, agrarian school. This was the fourth and last of Taylor's books on the United States Constitution, in which he expounds his philosophy of government. Known as John Taylor of Caroline 1753-1824 and for his strong advocacy of agrarian states rights, his alignment with Thomas Jefferson and his commitment to a strict construction of the Constitution, Taylor fought in the Revolutionary War and served briefly in the Virginia House of Delegates before he became a Senator from Virginia. Taylor was the author of Construction Construed and Constitutions Vindicated, A Defence of the Measures of the Administration of Thomas Jefferson, attributed to "Curtius", An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States and other works.
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John Taylor was born in 1753. The exact place of his birth has not been established, both Orange and Caroline Counties in Virginia claiming the honor, with inconclusive evidence in favor of the latter. He was the son of James and Ann (Pollard) Taylor. His father died when John was three years of age and his mother a few years later, leaving his rearing to Edmund Pendleton, who was the double first cousin of James Taylor and had married Ann Pollard's sister.
The boy received his early education from private tutors and in a private school conducted in King and Queen County by Donald Robertson, also the teacher of President James Madison, whose grandmother, Frances Taylor, was a first cousin of John's father. Here he studied Greek and Latin and acquired the rudiments of both French and Spanish.
In 1770 he entered the College of William and Mary, continuing for at least two years, and then turned his efforts to the reading of law in the office of his patron. He received a license to practise in 1774.
With the outbreak of the American Revolution Taylor entered the army. He served first in his native state, then around New York and Philadelphia. He had reached the rank of major when the reduction of the Continental Army in 1779 left more officers than were needed, causing him to resign and return home. Two years later he was appointed lieutenant-colonel in the Virginia militia and ended his military career fighting with Lafayette against the invading Hessians.
On his return from the army in 1779 he was elected to the Virginia House of Delegates, where he remained, with the exception of the year 1782, until 1785. He returned again for a four-year period in 1796.
At three different times he was a member of the United States Senate. In 1792 he was chosen to fill the post vacated by the illness of Richard Henry Lee, and served until 1794. The death of Senator Stevens Thomson Mason in 1803 brought him back for a second period of service and the resignation of James Pleasants, Jr. , in 1822 led to his appointment for a third time.
Taylor early cast his lot with the rising democratic group led by Thomas Jefferson. In the Virginia House he took part in the final steps toward religious freedom and was prominent in forwarding land legislation and extending the North Carolina boundary line to the advantage of actual settlers. He favored a wider franchise and supported the moves for a more equal system of representation. Though not a member of the Virginia convention which ratified the federal Constitution, he joined with Patrick Henry and George Mason in opposition on the grounds that the rights of the individual and of the states were not sufficiently protected.
When the new central government was established and showed signs of making the most of its powers, he quickly saw the dangers in "consolidation" and the desirability of a strict construction of the Constitution. His first political pamphlets, A Definition of Parties (1794) and An Enquiry into the Principles and Tendencies of Certain Public Measures (1794), were a condemnation of Hamilton's funding and banking measures. These he viewed as "usurpations upon constitutional principles" which, "if suffered to acquire maturity" would "only yield to the dreadful remedy of a civil war. " They aimed, he thought, at the creation of an aristocratic "paper" junto and the subversion of democratic government. In 1795 he published An Argument Respecting the Constitutionality of the Carriage Tax. He held the Alien and Sedition Acts null and void and in December 1798 introduced into the Virginia legislature the famous resolutions in support of the doctrine of delegated powers and the right of the states to interpose in cases of "deliberate, palpable and dangerous exercise of other powers. "
Taylor was a stanch supporter of Jefferson in the presidential election of 1800 and played an important part in the passage of the Twelfth Amendment in order to protect the popular choice of the president. In A Defence of the Measures of the Administration of Thomas Jefferson (1805) he upheld even the purchase of Louisiana, but drifted gradually over to the Tertium Quid group and supported Monroe against Madison in 1808. Always consistent, he opposed the War of 1812 as tending to increase the activity and powers of the Central government and endangering "the pursuit of happiness. "
Taylor's greatest influence came from his larger political writings. In 1814 he published An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States--a volume first conceived in 1794 as an answer to John Adams' A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America. Of this work it has been said: "Whatever its shortcomings in prolixity of style, it deserves to rank among the two or three really historic contributions to political science which have been produced in the United States". In it he denied the existence of "a natural aristocracy" and condemned a permanent debt with taxes and a banking system to support it. He thought the executive too powerful. He would shorten the terms of both the president and the senators and check their patronage. The American government, he explained, was one of divided powers, not classes, and its agents were responsible to the sovereign people alone. The great danger to democracy lay in consolidation and in the creation of an aristocracy of "paper and patronage. "
In 1820 his Construction Construed and Constitutions Vindicated appeared. John Marshall's decisions, especially in the case of McCulloch vs. Maryland, had aroused him and the Missouri Compromise excited his fears. He sharply denied the validity of appeals from state courts to the United States Supreme Court and insisted that the jurisdiction of the latter, except in specified cases, was confined to appeals from courts established by Congress. The states, he thought, had the right to unlimited taxation, except on imports and exports. Marshall's bank decision was a continuation of the old effort to create private property beyond the reach of the state and to upset the balance created by the Constitution in which neither state nor federal government was supreme or subordinate. The whole question of a federal negative on state action, he later declared, had been discussed and rejected in the Constitutional Convention. To Taylor the Missouri question was also the product of the same self-seeking group who had brought forward the bank and the bounties to manufactories. Slavery was but an excuse for securing a balance of sectional powers in order to "beget new usurpations of internal powers over persons and property". He denied the right of Congress to dictate to Missouri, since the presence or absence of slavery had nothing to do with a republican form of government.
A third pamphlet, Tyranny Unmasked (1822), was a direct and powerful attack on the protective tariff system. He viewed this as unconstitutional and as creating privilege and diminishing revenue. The home-market argument was false, the idea of a favorable balance of trade foolish. Tariffs interfered with the sound and natural development of the nation's economic life. Government was becoming superior to the governed. Another work was New Views of the Constitution of the United States (1823). As implied in these writings, Taylor's fundamental purpose was to preserve the old agricultural order and the security of the freeholder on which it rested. His practical efforts were aimed in the same direction.
A farmer himself, he strove to improve agricultural methods on his own estate and in 1803 published a series of essays in a Georgetown newspaper to explain his methods and his ideas. These were later reprinted (1813) in book form under the title The Arator. The central idea in this work was the restoration of lost fertility to the soils by what he called "enclosing. " He believed that plants drew on the atmosphere for life and that as a result of plowing under crops and applying manure soils would regain lost fertility. He would exclude all stock from arable and grass lands and produce only those crops which afforded the largest quantity of offal for feeding and plowing under. His favorite crop was corn but he advocated the growing of clover and field peas in rotation, and the employment of deeper plowing for all crops. He rejected tobacco, the overseer system, and the use of unprofitable slaves. He would make the farmer a power capable of protecting his interests against the encroachments of central government.
John Taylor was one of America's greatest disciples and philosophers of agrarian liberalism. He was the champion of local democracy and one of the first and clearest spokesmen of state rights. The laborious style of his writings has probably prevented his receiving recognition equal to that given other champions of these ideas. Taylor's primary plantation estate, Hazelwood, was located three miles from Port Royal, Virginia and is on the National Register of Historic Places. Taylor County, West Virginia was formed in 1844 and named in Senator Taylor's honor.
( John Taylor of Caroline (1753–1824) was one of the fore...)
(Excerpt from Disunion Sentiment in Congress in 1794: A Co...)
(Originally published: Washington City: Printed for the Au...)
Quotations:
"Great power often corrupts virtue; it invariably renders vice more malignant. . . . In proportion as the powers of government increase, both its own character and that of the people becomes worse. "
"National defense is the usual pretext for the policy of fleecing the people. "
"Adherence to men, is often disloyalty to principles. "
In 1783 he was married to a cousin, Lucy Penn, daughter of John Penn, the signer, a prosperous lawyer and planter of North Carolina, who was to contribute generously to his economic establishment. To them were born six sons and two daughters. They made their home at "Hazlewood, " one of several plantations purchased by Taylor in Caroline County.
