What Secessionists Thought: John Taylor of Caroline's New Views of the Constitution

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The purpose of this thread is not to defend secessionist thought, but to explain and present it.
Limited rebuttal with evidence is good, but no mere bashing.

John Taylor was a long time States Righter. Called for secession of Va in 1798 and wrote a lengthly book about States Rights "New Views of the Constitution of the United " in 1823 which will be briefly reviewed here.

John Taylor of Caroline
John Taylor (December 19, 1753 – August 21, 1824), usually calledJohn Taylor of Caroline, was a politician and writer. He served in theVirginia House of Delegates (1779–81, 1783–85, 1796–1800) and in the United States Senate (1792–94, 1803, 1822–24). He wrote several books on politics and agriculture. He was a Jeffersonian Democrat and his works provided inspiration to the later states' rights and libertarian movements. Sheldon and Hill (2008) locate Taylor at the intersection of republicanism and classical liberalism. They see his position as a "combination of a concern with Lockean natural rights, freedom, and limited government along with a classical interest in strong citizen participation in rule to prevent concentrated power and wealth, political corruption, and financial manipulation" (p. 224).
Taylor argued that the national government was entirely a creature of the states and was subordinate to them.

In the creation of the federal government, the states exercised the highest act of sovereignty, and they may, if they please, repeat the proof of their sovereignty, by its annihilation. But the union possesses no innate sovereignty, like the states; it was not self-constituted; it is conventional, and of course subordinate to the sovereignties by which it was formed — John Taylor of Caroline

States' rights[edit]
Stromberg, says Taylor's role in calling for Virginia's secession in 1798 and his role in the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, "show how seriously he took the reserved rights [interposition (nullification) and secession] of these primary political communities [the States]." [15] Taylor was responsible for guiding the Virginia Resolution, written byJames Madison, through the Virginia legislature.[16] He wrote: "enormous political power invariably accumulates enormous wealth and enormous wealth invariably accumulates enormous political power." [17] "Like his radical bourgeois counterparts in England, Taylor would not concede that great extremes of wealth and poverty were natural outcomes of differences in talent; on the contrary they were invariably the result of extra-economic coercion and deceit." [18] "Along with John Randolph of Roanoke and a few others, Taylor opposed Madison's War of 1812--his own party's war--precisely because it was a war for empire." [19]


Tate (2011) undertakes a literary criticism of Taylor's book New Views of the Constitution of the United States,arguing it is structured as a forensic historiography modeled on the techniques of 18th-century whig lawyers. Taylor believed that evidence from American history gave proof of state sovereignty within the union against the arguments of nationalists such as U.S. Chief Justice John Marshall.[20]
 
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