A political insiders perspective on the inaugural Congresses from one of South Carolinas signers of the Constitution

Confronting the rise of Black Jacobins, 1791-1793 -- Confronting Black Jacobins on the march, 1793-1797 -- Confronting the surge of Black Jacobins, 1797-1803 -- Confronting the triumph of Black Jacobins, 1804-1819 -- Hemispheric Africans and Black Jacobins, 1820-1829 -- U.S. Negroes and Black Jacobins, 1830-1839 -- Black Jacobins weakened, 1840-1849 -- Black Jacobins under siege, 1850-1859 -- The U.S. Civil War, the Spanish takeover of the Dominican Republic and U.S. Negro emigrants in Haiti, 1860-1863 -- Haiti to be annexed/Haitians to be re-enslaved? 1863-1870 -- Annex Hispaniola and deport U.S. Negroes there? 1870-1871

Master of vast rice and cotton plantations in South Carolina and Georgia, delegate to the Constitutional Convention, Major Pierce Butler bequeathed his family and nation a legacy of slavery--an inheritance of immense wealth sown with the seeds of Civil War. In Major Butler's Legacy, Malcolm Bell charts the unfolding of the Butler patrimony, an epic story that reaches from the eve of the Revolution to the first decades of this century and includes in its course such figures as George Washington, Aaron Burr, Fanny Kemble, William Tecumseh Sherman, Henry James, Theodore Roosevelt, and Owen Wister.

“Whatever Principles are imbibed at College will run thro’ a Man’s whole future Conduct.” —William Livingston, signer of the Constitution Schools for Statesmen explores the fifty-five individual Framers of the Constitution in close detail and argues that their different educations help explain their divergent positions at the 1787 Constitutional Convention. Those educations ranged from outlawed Irish “hedge schools” to England’s venerable Inns of Court, from the grammar schools of New England to ambitious new academies springing up on the Carolina frontier. The more traditional schools that focused on Greek and Latin classics (Oxford, Harvard, Yale, William and Mary) were deeply conservative institutions resistant to change. But the Scottish colleges and the newer American schools (Princeton, Philadelphia, King's College) introduced students to a Scottish Enlightenment curriculum that fostered more radical, forward-thinking leaders. Half of the Framers had no college education and were often self-taught or had private tutors; most were quiet at the convention, although a few stubbornly opposed the new ideas they were hearing. Nearly all the delegates who took the lead at the convention had been educated at the newer, innovative colleges, but of the seven who rejected the new Constitution, three had gone to the older traditional schools, while three others had not gone to college at all. Schools for Statesmen is an unprecedented analysis of the sharply divergent educations of the Framers of the Constitution. It reveals the ways in which the Constitutional Convention, rather than being a counterrevolution by conservative elites, was dominated by forward-thinking innovators who had benefited from the educational revolution beginning in the mid-eighteenth century. Andrew Browning offers a new and persuasive explanation of key disagreements among the Framers and the process by which they were able to break through the impasse that threatened the convention; he provides a fresh understanding of the importance of education in what has been called the "Critical Period" of US history. Schools for Statesmen takes a deep dive into the diverse educational world of the eighteenth century and sheds new light on the origins of the US Constitution.

Few events in the history of the United States were of greater consequence than the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Although most histories have focused on the issues and compromises that dominated the debates, the exchanges were also shaped by the dynamic personalities of the fifty-five delegates who attended from twelve of the thirteen states. In The Men Who Made the Constitution, constitutional scholar John R. Vileexplores the lives and contributions of all delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, including those who left before the Convention ended and those who stayed until the last day but refused to sign. Each biography records the delegate’s birth, education, previous positions or public service roles, homes, family life, life after the Convention, death, and resting place. Drawing directly from Convention debates and a vast array of secondary sources, Vile covers the positions of each delegate at the Convention on both major and minor issues and describes his service on committees and afterward at state ratification conventions. The Men Who Made the Constitution includes a bibliography of key sources, engravings of delegates for whom portraits were created, a quiz on key facts, and a transcript of the Constitution of the United States. This work is the perfect reference for students and scholars, as well as professional and amateur historians, of colonial and early American history, constitutional law, and American jurisprudence.

Describes how the Bill of Rights came into existence, detailing how the Founders argued over the contents of the document, reflecting an ideological divide between the power of the federal versus state governments that still exists to this day.

James Wilson’s life began as an Atlantic World success story, with mounting intellectual, political, and legal triumphs, but ended as a Greek tragedy. Each achievement brought greater anxiety about his place in the revolutionary world. James Wilson's life story is a testament to the success that tens of thousands of Scottish immigrants achieved after their trans-Atlantic voyage, but it also reminds us that not all had a happy ending. This book provides a more nuanced and complete picture of James Wilson’s contributions in American history. His contributions were far greater than just the attention paid to his legal lectures. His is a very human story of a Scottish immigrant who experienced success and acclaim for his activities on behalf of the American people during his public service, but in his personal affairs, and particularly financial life, he suffered the great heights and deep lows worthy of a Greek tragedy. James Wilson's life is an entry point into the events of the latter half of the 18th century and the impact of the Scottish Enlightenment on American society, discourse, and government.

A radical reconstruction of the founders’ debate over slavery and the Constitution. Americans revere the Constitution even as they argue fiercely over its original toleration of slavery. Some historians have charged that slaveholders actually enshrined human bondage at the nation’s founding. The acclaimed political historian Sean Wilentz shares the dismay but sees the Constitution and slavery differently. Although the proslavery side won important concessions, he asserts, antislavery impulses also influenced the framers’ work. Far from covering up a crime against humanity, the Constitution restricted slavery’s legitimacy under the new national government. In time, that limitation would open the way for the creation of an antislavery politics that led to Southern secession, the Civil War, and Emancipation. Wilentz’s controversial and timely reconsideration upends orthodox views of the Constitution. He describes the document as a tortured paradox that abided slavery without legitimizing it. This paradox lay behind the great political battles that fractured the nation over the next seventy years. As Southern Fire-eaters invented a proslavery version of the Constitution, antislavery advocates, including Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, proclaimed antislavery versions based on the framers’ refusal to validate what they called “property in man.” No Property in Man invites fresh debate about the political and legal struggles over slavery that began during the Revolution and concluded with the Confederacy’s defeat. It drives straight to the heart of the most contentious and enduring issue in all of American history.

A comprehensive history of the relationship between Africa and the United States Toyin Falola and Raphael Njoku reexamine the history of the relationship between Africa and the United States from the dawn of the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the present. Their broad, interdisciplinary book follows the relationship’s evolution, tracking African American emancipation, the rise of African diasporas in the Americas, the Back-to-Africa movement, the founding of Sierra Leone and Liberia, the presence of American missionaries in Africa, the development of blues and jazz music, the presidency of Barack Obama, and more.

From the eighteenth century to the eve of the Civil War, Georgia's racial order shifted from the somewhat fluid conception of race prevalent in the colonial era to the harsher understanding of racial difference prevalent in the antebellum era. In Cultivating Race: The Expansion of Slavery in Georgia, 1750–1860, Watson W. Jennison explores the centrality of race in the development of Georgia, arguing that long-term structural and demographic changes account for this transformation. Jennison traces the rise of rice cultivation and the plantation complex in low country Georgia in the mid-eighteenth century and charts the spread of slavery into the up country in the decades that followed. Cultivating Race examines the "cultivation" of race on two levels: race as a concept and reality that was created, and race as a distinct social order that emerged because of the specifics of crop cultivation. Using a variety of primary documents including newspapers, diaries, correspondence, and plantation records, Jennison offers an in-depth examination of the evolution of racism and racial ideology in the lower South.