The Making and Unmaking of A Revolutionary Family

The Making and Unmaking of A Revolutionary Family PDF Author: Hamilton
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813924038
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Get Book Here

Book Description
In mid-April 1814, the Virginia congressman John Randolph of Roanoke had reason to brood over his family's decline since the American Revolution. The once-sumptuous world of the Virginia gentry was vanishing, its kinship ties crumbling along with its mansions, crushed by democratic leveling at home and a strong federal government in Washington, D.C. Looking back in an effort to grasp the changes around him, Randolph fixated on his stepfather and onetime guardian, St. George Tucker. The son of a wealthy Bermuda merchant, Tucker had studied law at the College of William and Mary, married well, and smuggled weapons and fought in the Virginia militia during the Revolution. Quickly grasping the significant changes--political democratization, market change, and westward expansion--that the War for Independence had brought, changes that undermined the power of the gentry, Tucker took the atypical step of selling his plantations and urging his children to pursue careers in learned professions such as law. Tucker's stepson John Randolph bitterly disagreed, precipitating a painful break between the two men that illuminates the transformations that swept Virginia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Drawing upon an extraordinary archive of private letters, journals, and other manuscript materials, Phillip Hamilton illustrates how two generations of a colorful and influential family adapted to social upheaval. He finds that the Tuckers eventually rejected wider family connections and turned instead to nuclear kin. They also abandoned the liberal principles and enlightened rationalism of the Revolution for a romanticism girded by deep social conservatism. The Making and Unmaking of a Revolutionary Family reveals the complex process by which the world of Washington and Jefferson evolved into the antebellum society of Edmund Ruffin and Thomas Dew.

The Making and Unmaking of A Revolutionary Family

The Making and Unmaking of A Revolutionary Family PDF Author: Hamilton
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 9780813924038
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Get Book Here

Book Description
In mid-April 1814, the Virginia congressman John Randolph of Roanoke had reason to brood over his family's decline since the American Revolution. The once-sumptuous world of the Virginia gentry was vanishing, its kinship ties crumbling along with its mansions, crushed by democratic leveling at home and a strong federal government in Washington, D.C. Looking back in an effort to grasp the changes around him, Randolph fixated on his stepfather and onetime guardian, St. George Tucker. The son of a wealthy Bermuda merchant, Tucker had studied law at the College of William and Mary, married well, and smuggled weapons and fought in the Virginia militia during the Revolution. Quickly grasping the significant changes--political democratization, market change, and westward expansion--that the War for Independence had brought, changes that undermined the power of the gentry, Tucker took the atypical step of selling his plantations and urging his children to pursue careers in learned professions such as law. Tucker's stepson John Randolph bitterly disagreed, precipitating a painful break between the two men that illuminates the transformations that swept Virginia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Drawing upon an extraordinary archive of private letters, journals, and other manuscript materials, Phillip Hamilton illustrates how two generations of a colorful and influential family adapted to social upheaval. He finds that the Tuckers eventually rejected wider family connections and turned instead to nuclear kin. They also abandoned the liberal principles and enlightened rationalism of the Revolution for a romanticism girded by deep social conservatism. The Making and Unmaking of a Revolutionary Family reveals the complex process by which the world of Washington and Jefferson evolved into the antebellum society of Edmund Ruffin and Thomas Dew.

The Making and Unmaking of a Revolutionary Family

The Making and Unmaking of a Revolutionary Family PDF Author: Phillip Hamilton
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813921648
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Get Book Here

Book Description
"The son of a wealthy Bermuda merchant, Tucker had studied law at the College of William and Mary, married well, and smuggled weapons and fought in the Virginia militia during the Revolution. Quickly grasping the significant changes - political democratization, market change, and westward expansion - that the War for Independence had brought, changes that undermined the power of the gentry. Tucker took the atypical step of selling his plantations and urging his children to pursue careers in learned professions such as law. Tucker's stepson John Randolph bitterly disagreed, precipitating a painful break between the two men that illuminates the transformations that swept Virginia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.".

Founders as Fathers

Founders as Fathers PDF Author: Lorri Glover
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300178603
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 343

Get Book Here

Book Description
Explores the family life of the Founding Fathers, providing intimate portraits of the households of such revolutionaries as George Mason, Patrick Henry, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison.

Confronting Slavery

Confronting Slavery PDF Author: Suzanne Cooper Guasco
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501756893
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Get Book Here

Book Description
Edward Coles, who lived from 1786-1868, is most often remembered for his antislavery correspondence with Thomas Jefferson in 1814, freeing his slaves in 1819, and leading the campaign against the legalization of slavery in Illinois during the 1823-24 convention contest. In this new full-length biography Suzanne Cooper Guasco demonstrates for the first time how Edward Coles continued to confront slavery for nearly forty years after his time in Illinois. Not only did he attempt to shape the slavery debates in Virginia immediately before and after Nat Turner's rebellion, he also consistently entered national political discussions about slavery throughout the 1830s, 40s, and 50s. On each occasion Coles promoted a vision of the nation that combined a celebration of America's antislavery past with an endorsement of free labor ideology and colonization, a broad appeal that was designed to mollify his fellow-countrymen's sense of economic self-interest and virulent anti-black prejudice. As Cooper Guasco persuasively shows, Coles's antislavery nationalism, first crafted in Illinois in the 1820s, became the foundation of the Republican Party platform and ultimately contributed to the destruction of slavery. By exploring his entire life, readers come to see Edward Coles as a vital link between the unfulfilled antislavery sensibility of men like Thomas Jefferson and the pragmatic antislavery politics of Abraham Lincoln. In Edward Coles' life-long confrontation with slavery, as well, we witness the rise of antislavery politics in nineteenth-century America and come to understand the central role politics played in the fight against slavery.

The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family

The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family PDF Author: Annette Gordon-Reed
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393070034
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 799

Get Book Here

Book Description
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize Winner of the National Book Award New York Times Bestseller #1 on Esquire's List of the 50 Best Biographies of All Time "[A] commanding and important book." —Jill Lepore, The New Yorker This epic work—named a best book of the year by the Washington Post, Time, the Los Angeles Times, Amazon, the San Francisco Chronicle, and a notable book by the New York Times—tells the story of the Hemingses, whose close blood ties to our third president had been systematically expunged from American history until very recently. Now, historian and legal scholar Annette Gordon-Reed traces the Hemings family from its origins in Virginia in the 1700s to the family’s dispersal after Jefferson’s death in 1826.

Women Shaping the South

Women Shaping the South PDF Author: Angela Boswell
Publisher: University of Missouri Press
ISBN: 0826264867
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Get Book Here

Book Description
"Expanded from papers presented at the Sixth Southern Conference on Women's History, this collection demonstrates how women of different races and classes transformed the South during its most crucial turning points, including post-Revolution, Civil War, Jim Crow era, World War I, and the civil rights movement"--Provided by publisher.

The Clamor of Lawyers

The Clamor of Lawyers PDF Author: Peter Charles Hoffer
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501726099
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 187

Get Book Here

Book Description
The Clamor of Lawyers explores a series of extended public pronouncements that British North American colonial lawyers crafted between 1761 and 1776. Most, though not all, were composed outside of the courtroom and detached from on-going litigation. While they have been studied as political theory, these writings and speeches are rarely viewed as the work of active lawyers, despite the fact that key protagonists in the story of American independence were members of the bar with extensive practices. The American Revolution was, in fact, a lawyers’ revolution. Peter Charles Hoffer and Williamjames Hull Hoffer broaden our understanding of the role that lawyers played in framing and resolving the British imperial crisis. The revolutionary lawyers, including John Adams’s idol James Otis, Jr., Pennsylvania’s John Dickinson, and Virginians Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, along with Adams and others, deployed the skills of their profession to further the public welfare in challenging times. They were the framers of the American Revolution and the governments that followed. Loyalist lawyers and lawyers for the crown also participated in this public discourse, but because they lost out in the end, their arguments are often slighted or ignored in popular accounts. This division within the colonial legal profession is central to understanding the American Republic that resulted from the Revolution.

Murder in the Shenandoah

Murder in the Shenandoah PDF Author: Jessica K. Lowe
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108421784
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Get Book Here

Book Description
Tells the story of a sensational 1791 Virginia murder case, and explores Revolutionary America's debates over justice, criminal punishment, and equality before the law.

Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West

Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West PDF Author: John Craig Hammond
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
ISBN: 0813946042
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Get Book Here

Book Description
Most treatments of slavery, politics, and expansion in the early American republic focus narrowly on congressional debates and the inaction of elite "founding fathers" such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. In Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West, John Craig Hammond looks beyond elite leadership and examines how the demands of western settlers, the potential of western disunion, and local, popular politics determined the fate of slavery and freedom in the West between 1790 and 1820. By shifting focus away from high politics in Philadelphia and Washington, Hammond demonstrates that local political contests and geopolitical realities were more responsible for determining slavery’s fate in the West than were the clashing proslavery and antislavery proclivities of Founding Fathers and politicians in the East. When efforts to prohibit slavery revived in 1819 with the Missouri Controversy it was not because of a sudden awakening to the problem on the part of northern Republicans, but because the threat of western secession no longer seemed credible. Including detailed studies of popular political contests in Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Missouri that shed light on the western and popular character of conflicts over slavery, Hammond also provides a thorough analysis of the Missouri Controversy, revealing how the problem of slavery expansion shifted from a local and western problem to a sectional and national dilemma that would ultimately lead to disunion and civil war.

The American Dreams of John B. Prentis, Slave Trader

The American Dreams of John B. Prentis, Slave Trader PDF Author: Kari J. Winter
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820339539
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 235

Get Book Here

Book Description
As a young man, John B. Prentis (1788-1848) expressed outrage over slavery, but by the end of his life he had transported thousands of enslaved persons from the upper to the lower South. Kari J. Winter's life-and-times portrayal of a slave trader illuminates the clash between two American dreams: one of wealth, the other of equality. Prentis was born into a prominent Virginia family. His grandfather, William Prentis, emigrated from London to Williamsburg in 1715 as an indentured servant and rose to become the major shareholder in colonial Virginia's most successful store. William's son Joseph became a Revolutionary judge and legislator who served alongside Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry, and James Madison. Joseph Jr. followed his father's legal career, whereas John was drawn to commerce. To finance his early business ventures, he began trading in slaves. In time he grew besotted with the high-stakes trade, appeasing his conscience with the populist platitudes of Jacksonian democracy, which aggressively promoted white male democracy in conjunction with white male supremacy. Prentis's life illuminates the intertwined politics of labor, race, class, and gender in the young American nation. Participating in a revolution in the ethics of labor that upheld Benjamin Franklin as its icon, he rejected the gentility of his upbringing to embrace solidarity with "mechanicks," white working-class men. His capacity for admirable thoughts and actions complicates images drawn by elite slaveholders, who projected the worst aspects of slavery onto traders while imagining themselves as benign patriarchs. This is an absorbing story of a man who betrayed his innate sense of justice to pursue wealth through the most vicious forms of human exploitation.