View of the Constitution of the United States. St. George Tucker
volumes to five. Tucker’s revised, Americanized Blackstone was published in Philadelphia in 1803 and was widely used thereafter.
While the use of Tucker’s work cannot be quantified, all authorities agree that it was influential. Later American editions of Blackstone followed Tucker’s method, and there is evidence of the extensive use of Tucker’s work in Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Virginia. Doubtless it was taken westward by young Virginians who emigrated to every state in the nineteenth century.
In addition to View of the Constitution of the United States, this book includes seven other essays lifted from Tucker’s edition of Blackstone. These are the most important writings in regard to Tucker’s political and constitutional thought. A great deal that was more narrowly legal has not been selected.
In addition to his edition of Blackstone, Tucker published several political pamphlets and articles, sometimes under pseudonyms, as was customary at the time. These included “Reflections on the Policy and Necessity of Encouraging the Commerce of the Citizens of the United States,” in American Museum (September 1787): 267–74; Remarks on the Treaty of Amity … Between Lord Grenville and Mr. Jay (Philadelphia: M. Carey, 1796); Cautionary Hints to Congress, Respecting the Sale of Western Lands, by “Columbus” (Philadelphia: M. Carey, 1796); Letter to a Member of Congress, Respecting the Alien and Sedition Laws, by “Columbus” (Richmond: 1799); Reflections on the Cession of Louisiana to the United States, by “Sylvester” (Washington, D.C.: printed by Samuel Harrison Smith, 1803); and possibly others. The essays on the common law and on slavery that are published here had been printed as pamphlets before they were included by Tucker in his Blackstone.
St. George Tucker was also by avocation a writer of moderately good verse, both patriotic and humorous. These have been collected, with an interesting introduction, in William S. Prince, ed., The Poems of St. George Tucker of Williamsburg, Virginia, 1752–1827 (New York: Vantage Press, 1977).
In 1803 Tucker became a judge of the highest court in Virginia. In 1813 he was appointed by President James Madison to be the United States district judge for Virginia, an important post in which he had a distinguished career, resigning shortly before his death in 1827. As a jurist Tucker never wavered from the principles he had set forth as a professor of law.
Tucker established a virtual dynasty of legal and constitutional talent that carried on Jeffersonian principles through successive generations. A son, Henry St. George Tucker (1780–1848), served in the state legislature and the U.S. House of Representatives, was chief justice of Virginia, conducted a successful private law school at Winchester, Virginia, declined President Andrew Jackson’s appointment as attorney general of the United States, became professor of law at the University of Virginia, and published books on natural law, constitutional law, and the laws of Virginia.
Another of Tucker’s sons, Nathaniel Beverley Tucker (1784–1851), became professor of law at William and Mary and published three novels and a number of works on political economy and public issues. He is a major figure in the intellectual history of the Old South.
In the next generation, St. George Tucker’s grandsons were equally distinguished. John Randolph Tucker (1823–97), son of Henry St. George Tucker, was attorney general of Virginia, professor of law at Washington and Lee University, counsel in numerous major cases before the United States Supreme Court, served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1875 to 1887, and published, among other works, The Constitution of the United States (2 vols., 1899). Another son of Henry St. George was Nathaniel Beverley Tucker (1820–90). He edited an antebellum newspaper in Washington, D.C., was U.S. consul at Liverpool, and served the Confederate States as an economic agent abroad.
St. George Tucker’s great-grandson, Henry St. George Tucker (1853–1932), son of John Randolph Tucker, represented Virginia in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1876 to 1889 and again from 1922 to 1932, carrying on the states’ rights, populist, anti–big business tradition of his family and state. He was also professor of law at Washington and Lee University, and published Limitations on the Treaty-Making Power Under the Constitution of the United States and Woman’s Suffrage by Constitutional Amendment.
Given the massive changes in the extent and distribution of political power since the Civil War, and the resulting adjustments in accepted understandings of the Constitution, Tucker’s principles of states’ rights and limited government are likely to seem strange to Americans today, unless it is remembered that these principles were the prevailing ideas not only during Tucker’s time but also for several generations after.
The Constitution that Tucker explicates is the Constitution that was ratified by the people of the several states. It is to be understood as explicated by the ratifiers, including their reservations, some of which were embodied in the first ten amendments, which were a further limitation on the delegated powers of the new general government. For the assumption that the meaning and authority of the Constitution is to be found in its ratifiers, and not in the learned discussions of the Framers at Philadelphia, who were, after all, only drafting a proposal for the people’s consideration, Tucker has the support of Madison himself. (See Madison’s letter to Thomas Ritchie, September 15, 1821.)
Tucker, then, does not stand in awe of the Federalist Papers. He recognizes them as special pleadings for the Constitution before ratification and amendment. He finds some things in them admirable, particularly the defense of an independent judiciary, but he quotes them most often in support of the limited nature of the new federal government. Though Tucker is well read in political philosophy, he does not need a long historical exposition of ideas to explain the Constitution. The document is for him generally clear and specific, self-evident to those who ratified it. This is not to suggest, however, that Tucker cannot when necessary call upon Justinian, Grotius, Pufendorf, Vattel, Montesquieu, Locke, Rousseau, or other more nearly contemporaneous writers.
Tucker is the exponent of Jeffersonian republicanism, or what has been called “South Atlantic republicanism,” in contrast to the commercial republicanism of New England that has since the Civil War been taken to be the only true form of American philosophy. The political background of Tucker’s work is significant. The Constitution had been ratified reluctantly and with reservations by Virginia and New York (and not at all by North Carolina and Rhode Island) only on the understanding that amendments would be made. Twelve such amendments were proposed by the First Congress, and ten of them swiftly were ratified. This “Bill of Rights” was to reassert the limited nature of the new government’s powers and their dependence solely on the delegation of the people of the several sovereign states.
Hardly had the federal government gotten under way, however, than the largely Northern political faction gathered under Hamilton and Adams launched an initiative to stretch those powers as far as they would go, and to make light of the limits. Much of this expansion represented a desire to use the government in mercantilist ways—for example, a national bank, a funded national debt, a commercial treaty with Great Britain. All were policies that profited the commercial classes of the North and were burdensome to the free-trade agricultural empire of the South.
Into this domestic conflict burst the French Revolution. The great ideas of revolution and reaction that tore apart Europe could not go unnoticed in the New World, which had just experienced its own revolution and whose leaders were well aware of the power of ideas. The relation of American neutral commerce to the belligerent powers in Europe was a vexing practical issue, and the ideological heat from Europe intensified the intra-American conflict over the nature and powers of the general government.
Thus, for example, the Puritan clergy of New England during the presidential election of 1800 denounced Jefferson as a Jacobin atheist who would set up the guillotine and undermine the moral foundations of American society. Probably the conflict was really cultural, contrasting the highly ordered, communal society of New England—where most of life was regimented under leaders of proper principle—and the easygoing laissez-faire life of the South. It is a curious fact that the bourgeois leaders of the North had visions of imminent uprisings of Jacobin mobs and supported such policies to stifle dissent as the Alien and Sedition acts, whereas the aristocratic leaders of the South declared for the people and for policies of liberality. While Jefferson in Virginia