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Robert Goodloe Harper (1765-1825), a prominent attorney and U.S. Congressman from S. Carolina and Maryland, was one of the most influential Federalists of the early national period. The South’s leading proponent of the Jay Treaty, a framer of the Sedition Act, the powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Comm., a dogged supporter of Aaron Burr, an outspoken counsel for John Pickering and Samuel Chase, and two-time failed V.P. candidate, Harper is traditionally remembered as an extreme example of unthinking, reactionary conservatism in an era of intense partisanship and bitter sectional conflict. This revisionist account reinterprets Harper’s political philosophy in light of his personal struggle with the moral dilemma of slavery.
Price: $29.99
Pages: 160
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Imprint: The American Philosophical Society Press
Series: Transactions of the American Philosophical Society
Publication Date:
01 January 1997
Trim Size: 10.00 X 7.00 in
ISBN: 9780871698711
Format: Hardcover
BISACs:
PHILOSOPHY / Ethics & Moral Philosophy
"Eric Papenfuse sheds wholly new light on some of the central conflicts over slavery in the South from Robert Goodloe Harper’s astonishing antislavery speech in upcountry South Carolina to his central role in this colonization movement. This is a brilliant analysis of a crucial period of transition in Maryland and in the early Republic more generally."
— David Brion Davis, Sterling Professor of History, Yale University
"By reproducing and indexing four of Harper’s most important speeches and letters, Papenfuse examines a fundamental paradox of the age: how an abiding conviction that all races were inherently equal could allow for such forced rationalizations and maddening compromises."
— J. Tracy Power
"Based on research in recently discovered material … Papenfuse’s closely argued and provocative work makes a substantial contribution."
— Robert M. Weir
— David Brion Davis, Sterling Professor of History, Yale University
"By reproducing and indexing four of Harper’s most important speeches and letters, Papenfuse examines a fundamental paradox of the age: how an abiding conviction that all races were inherently equal could allow for such forced rationalizations and maddening compromises."
— J. Tracy Power
"Based on research in recently discovered material … Papenfuse’s closely argued and provocative work makes a substantial contribution."
— Robert M. Weir
Eric R. Papenfuse is a scholar and historian specializing in the Early American Republic. His publications include Unleashing the “Wilderness”: The Mobilization of Grassroots (1996) and The Evils of Necessity: Robert Goodloe Harper and the Moral Dilemma of Slavery (1997).