When the Secretary of the Treasury announced that Andrew Jackson would be replaced on the face of the $20 bill by Harriet Tubman, responses from conservatives were lively.
My current podcast is a discussion with a most excellent scholar, Michael Paulsen, on the book he has coauthored with his son, Luke Paulsen, introducing the U. S. Constitution to the general reader. Good as the book is in many respects, it did surprise me with its embrace of the idea that the Constitution of 1787 was a pro-slavery document.
Abraham Lincoln is in the news again. That means that our politicians are comparing themselves to President Lincoln. This is an old pattern. After David McCullough’s Truman became a bestseller, the political class was busy drawing Truman comparisons. Now they are busy drawing Lincoln analogies. (Perhaps because he is from Illinois, President Obama has been comparing himself to Lincoln for years.) This pattern should not surprise us. John Adams noted that the most fundamental passion in the breast of politicians is the desire to be seen, to be noticed, to be loved: “The desire of the esteem of others is as real a want of nature as hunger; and the neglect and contempt of the world as severe a pain as the gout or stone.” Politicians hope to turn America’s affection to their own benefit by associating themselves with Lincoln, or Washington, or Truman, etc.
This new conversation in Liberty Law Talk is with Gordon Lloyd, a scholar of the American founding. Lloyd focuses on the debates in the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and the state constitutional ratifying conventions of 1788 in order to better understand the compromises leading framers made to accommodate the institution of slavery in the early republic. Many, however, would dispute the term "compromises" and argue that it is an inaccurate understanding of the Constitution's relationship to slavery. Numerous historical arguments center on the protections the Constitution provided to slaveholders through the three-fifths clause, the fugitive slave clause, and the twenty-year…