Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power (Hardcover)

by Garry Wills (Author) "TIMOTHY PICKERING has been no favorite of American historians, who only dimly remembered him - as an enforcer of the Sedition Act and John Adams's..." (more)
Key Phrases: federal ratio, slave count, northern secession, New York, United States, New England (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
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

From Publishers Weekly
While Pulitzer-winner Wills (Lincoln at Gettysburg, etc.) rarely writes a book without a distinctive take on its subject, in this shaggy work he's off his game. Originally a set of lectures, this book is only loosely stitched together. Its author is typically combative, but he doesn't stay on subject long, writing instead about what suddenly strikes him. Not that the work doesn't show Wills's characteristic keen intelligence. He bears down hard, for example, on the permeating consequences of the Constitution's three-fifths clause for pre-Civil War history and raises tough questions about conventional accounts of Jefferson's election in 1800 (which depended partly on the "slave vote") and the selection of a site for the capital in slave-holding country. But he never lingers long on what the book purports to be about Jefferson's determination to preserve slavery and the South's power in the U.S.nor does it add much to what we already know and think about Jefferson's agonizing, often hypocritical, struggle with race and slavery. Much of what Wills writes about the hold of slave power on the nation has been written before and more extensively by others. What's freshest is his effort to rehabilitate one of Jefferson's arch-opponents, Federalist Timothy Pickering, an attractive if flawed second-rank character of the early nation. Pickering hated slavery and helped lay the groundwork for later abolitionism. But Wills uses him tendentiously as a foil to Jefferson and never brings him fully to life. So what's the book about? About many fascinating issues surrounding the influence of slavery in the U.S. between 1790 and 1848. But don't look here for coherence and sustained history.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1st Edition/1st Printing edition (November 1, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618343989
• ISBN-13: 978-0618343980
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #709,106 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

80 of 90 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Did Freedom's Champion Have A Moral Blind Spot?, October 20, 2003

By	W. C HALL (Newport, OR USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Garry Wills reminds us at the beginning of this book that he's previously written two volumes that praised aspects of Jefferson's life and work. He insists he's still an admirer of Jefferson, though he concedes readers may differ with that claim after they finish this book. The reason? In these chapters, Wills lays out a persuasive case that Jefferson's presidency was largely shaped by the "slave power"--the constitutional provision requiring that each slave be counted as three-fifths of a person in determining congressional representation.

Without the "slave power," Jefferson would have never won the presidency in 1800. Wills examines how Jefferson's determination to preserve and extend the rule of the slave states drove many of his most important decisions. The acquisition of the Louisiana Territory was seen as an opportunity to add more slave territory to the emerging nation. The embargo, one of Jefferson's most controversial acts, seems to make more sense when considered in the light of its positive benefits for the agrarian south and negative impacts on the commerce of the northern states. Even the selection of the site for the nation's capitol, Wills argues, was heavily influenced by the slaveholder's desire for a setting where their values and way of life would be embraced instead of shunned.

Jefferson's questionable political and moral decisions were not made without opposition. Wills sheds the spotlight on, and helps to rehabilitate Timothy Pickering, secretary of war under Washington, secretary of state under Adams, and consistent critic of Jefferson during his years in congress. After Pickering passed from the scene, John Quincy Adams emerged as the chief moral spokesman against the influence of slavery.

To dismiss this book as mere Jefferson-bashing would be facile. As Wills himself notes, though Jefferson devoted much energy to preserving the slave power, he was not the worst offender in this regard; and he did not argue, as some did, that slavery itself was benign. Rather, he says, "Jefferson belonged to that large class of southerners--including the best of them, men like Washington and Madison--who knew that slavery was evil, but felt they could not cut back on the evil without cutting the ground out from under them."

What Wills is asking us to do, I believe, is to set aside our prejudices, pro and con, and re-examine this nation's formative years in the harsh but honest light of how they were corrupted by slavery; and how even today, we are paying the price for the immoral bargains that men of good faith and character believed they were required to make.--William C. Hall

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The History You Weren't Taught in School, November 25, 2004

By	M. Shaffer (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I am re-reading Negro President. I think I will give it a third reading at some point.

Garry Wills is a Jefferson historian and self-described Jefferson-admirer. (Those who dismiss this book as Jefferson-bashing have not read the book carefully.) This is Wills' third book on Jefferson. In this one he wanted to take a hard look at the problem points of Jefferson's life and career.

The true story of our Revolution explains the inevitability of the Civil War and our nation's current polarization. This book eloquently explains why we have the Electoral College, and why Philadelphia with Quaker sensibilities was unacceptable to Southerners as our nation's capital.

Wills had to do quite a bit of digging into the election of 1800 to exhume the matter of the Electoral College. The election of 2000 was almost a replay of the election of 1800 in many ways. Wills explains that the Electoral College was a device to give the South more representation (the slave bonus) in presidential elections by counting slaves as three-fifths of a person-yet, these same slaves had no vote of their own. Thus, in presidential elections, a slave-owner cast, in addition to his own vote, three extra votes for every five slaves he owned.

The polarization our nation faces today is perplexing until you realize that it goes back to the bickering amongst the founders. For example, Hamilton's longstanding dispute with Burr which led to there "interview " at Wehawkin (interview being code for duel) was not a singularity of the time, but epigrammatic of it. Another book I can recommend is Founding Brothers.

Although the ostensible subject is Jefferson, Wills uses Timothy Pickering , an immensely complicated and highly moral man as a foil to Jefferson to flesh out his portrait of Jefferson. Pickering, although dismissed by historians as a minor luminary of the Revolution, and so dismissed by Wills, himself, leaps from the pages of this book as one of the truly interesting Founders. I think it is time to re-discover this amazing fellow Pennsylvanian. It is time to get back to our Yankee roots.

Because historians underrate Pickering, you probably never were taught about him in school. In fact, the American history we were taught in school, regardless of whether you attended public or parochial school (I have attended both), was drained of its blood in an attempt to make the facts age appropriate. Unfortunately, this has made us a nation ignorant of our own history. Such a nation cannot be said to be grooming good citizens.

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Addition to Wills Canon, December 18, 2003

By	Ricky Hunter (New York City, NY United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Garry Wills returns again to Thomas Jefferson, sort of. The title of the book is "Negro President", Jefferson and the Slave Power, but that can be somewhat misleading. The historical personage who sits front and centre in this discussion of the slave power is New England's own Timothy Pickering. The author provides a different take on this often maligned character. It is shown how Pickering doggedly fought againt the 3/5 federal ratio that allowed the Southern slave states to count their slaves (partially) in order to increase their place in the houses and, in the case of Jefferson, help elect a President of the United States. Jefferson's role in this extension of slave power is examined. Particularly enlightening is a new look at the selection of Washington as the site of the new capital. When focused must directly on these aspects, the book is strongest. The text does, on occasion, wander a little farther afield though. The sections on John Quincy Adams feel undeveloped in an appendix sort of fashion, although interesting in their own right. It is nice to see a reexamination of Pickering, particularly as a way to view Jefferson in a fresher light.