[.ca] Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power (ISBN 0618485376)

From Amazon.com:
Garry Wills' "Negro President": Jefferson and the Slave Power, despite its title, is not a profile of the Jefferson Presidency. Rather, the book offers a richly detailed study of the United States' tragic constitutional bargain with slavery, and meanders through the lives of several key figures in antebellum American history along the way. While Thomas Jefferson does play a significant role in Wills' book, the real heroes are the relatively unknown abolitionist Timothy Pickering and, to a lesser degree, John Quincy Adams. Pickering offered a consistent voice of opposition to Jefferson's often secret campaign against Federalist power. Though he could never match Jefferson's charismatic persona, Pickering succeeded in his battle to undo Jefferson's embargo of England--an embargo that Pickering recognized as Jefferson's attempt to undermine the economic prosperity and power of the North. Pickering's ill-fated attempt to secede from the Union, while misguided, would fuel the latter-day abolitionist John Quincy Adams to threaten a similar revolution as the Civil War loomed. Ultimately, "Negro President" is a book that recovers slavery as a context for understanding early American political life. At times Willis focuses too much on Jefferson, Pickering, or Adams, and the discussion is derailed by his fascination for the moral successes and failures of each personality. Nevertheless, the book addresses a long-neglected subject in American studies and will prove invaluable to readers interested in understanding America's early struggle to balance Northern versus slave-state power. --Patrick O'Kelley

negro president:
While an interesting book, it deals little with Thomas Jefferson. Wills seems to be far more interested in building a case for Timothy Pickering and Arron Burr. Not at all sure why it got the title it did. In a way, I feel like sending it back as the title did not represent the subject

The truth at last - thank you, Gary Wills:
Gary Wills has done a great service to the search for truth in American history. Thomas Jefferson's involvement in the slavery issue has recently been trapped in the dull and irrelevant arguement concerning whether TJ romped with his slave girls or not (practically all slave owners did, it was one of the perks of the institution that Jeff and his fellows loved so much.) What has been obscured was that Jefferson was the architect of the monstrous defense of slavery, disquised as states rights, which Calhoun and the others used to justify succession. One of the tired excuses always marched out in defense of Jefferson is that he was a man of his times, everyone owned slaves, we can't judge him by our standards, blah, blah, blah. By putting the brave and noble abolitionist Thomas Pickering center stage, Wills has given a human face to the struggle against one of history's terrible abominations. We Americans will never really have a mature understanding of our history until we stop idolizing the defenders of slavery (Jefferson, Lee etc.) and begin celebrating the brave men and women who oppossed it from day one. Thank you, Gary Wills. What a wonderful step in the right direction.

The Tragedy of the Three-Fifths Compromise:
While Wills begins this book by saying that he does not want to disparage Thomas Jefferson or cause people not to admire him, it was impossible not to see him and other Southern presidents like James Madison and James Monroe in a more tarnished light after finishing the book. NEGRO PRESIDENT presents a much clearer picture of how the Three-Fifths Compromise continued the appalling practice of slavery in this country and led the United States inevitably toward the Civil War. Readers learn, too, of the unsung hero of the anti-slavery movement, Thomas Pickering, whose death seems to have finally transformed John Quincy Adams into an unflinching opponent of slavery towards the end of his career. This is a very interesting book that everyone should read. There should be more done to counter the mythology of slavery and the South that has developed in this country since the end of Reconstruction. It's good to know that the Founding Fathers were not "supermen." They were simply the same flawed people that we all are.

The Colonial History You Should Have Learned In School:
We won the revolution, the Articles of Confederacy didn't work too well, a bunch of smart men got together in Philadelphia and came up with a brilliant constitution, then the British interfered with our ships, so we had the War of 1812. That's the basic outline we all learn in school Wills takes this history, and re-examines it through the lens of slavery. The South had slaves; the North didn't. If we were going to survive as a single country, some compromise had to be worked out. The South would not join any country that did not protect its right to own slaves. But there were more people living in the North, and the northern population was growing much faster than the south. So, what did the South do--demanded that its slaves would be counted in figuring out how many representatives each state got in the House of Representatives. Was this a bargain worth making for the north? Wills doesn't answer. Was it wholly immoral--maybe, but lots of people (women, children, those who did not own property) were counted as whole people, yet absolutely denied the vote. Once slavery is factored in, the whole dichotomy usually presented (big states vs. little states) becomes far more complex. The negotiations were really four cornered--big, little, slave, free all jousting for a political structure which would be most advantageous to their position. Wills applies this same analysis to several other events from the country's first 25 years. Believe me, this is not the history you learned in school--but it should have been. Why only four stars--the middle third of the book strays away from the slave-free dicotomy, and examines the Jeffersonian embargo. While fascinating history (who knew that the country was on the verge of armed rebvellion from about 1800 all the way through 1812--and it was largely the NORTH threatening armed resistance to the federal government--then dominated by the south (back to that 3/5 of a vote compromise!). Massachussets refused to allow its soldiers to serve in teh War of 1812, and threatened to prosecute anyone who tried to enforce the call to arms. Madison took the threat so seriously, that he simply abandoned all pretense of trying to mobilize soldiers from Mass. during the War of 1812. As fascinating as all this is--it has little to do with slavery--it really does appear to have been a question of trade vs. agriculture. Wills' attempt to fit this story in with the rest of his thesis appears a stretch. Wills has written a fine addition to the history of America's early formative years. Once you understand the forces at work, the compromises made, and the continued pressures which threatened to blow the country apart, you can then make sense of the events that culminated in our Civil War. Was the compromise with slavery worth it? Was there ever a way to avoid the mass slaughter of the Civil War? Wills does not give us an answer, but he has given us a way to think about the issue.

Performing a Service by Stimulating Debate:
Gary Wills once more reveals himself as an author of courage who explores controversial issues with a microscopic eye. This time he has the author of America's Declaration of Independence and the nation's third president, Thomas Jefferson, in his analytical sights. Despite being an admirer of Jefferson's and much of what he stood for, Wills also realizes that he was, as a member of the Southern aristocracy, standing in the middle of the fledgling nation's major controversy, which would ultimately rock America to its foundations, that of slavery. While Americans who have studied the history of the nation's early years were aware of the highly controversial three-fifths rule, the service Wills performs in this book is to analyze Jefferson's role in the ongoing debate concerning it and deduce that he was able to become presidency on the strength of a rule that was seen as a compromise between the north and the south on the subject of slavery. Wills sees Jefferson as a "Negro president" in that he was the beneficiary of the controversial rule, achieving the presidency as a result of its application. By having large numbers of slaves counted as three-fifths of a person this segment made it possible for Jefferson to achieve the presidency. With so many slaves located in states where Jefferson had strength, the three-fifths rule provided a rocket thrust which made the difference in the election of 1800. The tragic irony is that fictitious votes of individuals who were not even considered persons in the legal sense, and had no right to vote, made the difference. Slavery ended up serving as a gigantic bonus, providing an electoral boost. This is a debate that is certain to continue, and Wills deserves praise for setting it into motion. In order to know about ourselves as a people we must tackle all questions, no matter how tough or unpleasant. Another point Wills covers is that Jefferson's founding of the University of Virginia, which he considered his proudest accomplishment, was also tied strongly to the ongoing slavery debate between the south and the north. Wills asserts that Jefferson wanted a university in his own state of Virginia to serve as a counter balance to strong anti-slavery sentiments at institutions of learning in the north such as Yale and Harvard.