Dissertation Information for Anthony Alfred Laccarino NAME: - Anthony Alfred Laccarino
DEGREE:
- Ph.D.
DISCIPLINE:
- History
SCHOOL:
- University of California, Los Angeles (USA) (1999)
ADVISORS: - Joyce Oldham Appleby
COMMITTEE MEMBERS: - Brenda E. Stevenson - Karen Orren
MPACT Status: Fully Complete
Title: Virginia and the national contest over slavery in the early Republic, 1780-1833
Abstract: In the 1780s prominent slaveholding politicians from Virginia--including James Madison and George Washington--were the greatest supporters of a strong federal government which would more effectively integrate the newly independent states. The ratification of the Federal Constitution, however, coincided with the abolition of slavery in the Northern states. By helping bring together free and slave states under one Constitution, Virginia's political leaders contributed to making slavery a federal responsibility and inadvertently created a national forum for slavery's critics.
Long before the rise of an organized abolitionist movement, early national politicians, particularly from the Northern wing of the Federalist Party, promulgated federal policies which challenged the legitimacy and stability of slavery. The leaders of the emerging Republican opposition, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, struggled to build a party which would protect slavery and at the same time appeal to Northerners who had disavowed the peculiar institution. Jefferson helped resolve this apparent contradiction by developing a high-minded, appealing philosophy of limited government principles and a tentative theory of white racial superiority which, taken together, mitigated sectional conflict over slavery.
The period spanning the presidencies of Jefferson, Madison, and James Monroe--between 1800 and 1822--represented the heyday of Virginia Republicanism in national politics. At the same time, however, the stunning success of the Republican Party lessened the incentive for internal party discipline, and as a result, free state Republicans began to criticize slavery more openly. Southerners legitimately began to fear that the free state majority in Congress might mobilize federal power to undermine slavery.
Virginia's nationally-minded politicians who worried about the desegregating effect of slavery on the Union attempted to develop an inter-sectional solution to the problem of slavery by promoting the use of federal public land sale revenues to fund the emancipation and removal of enslaved Americans from the territorial United States. They were eclipsed, however, by a new generation of state rights politicians who viewed themselves as sectional, rather than national leaders, and whose commitment to state rights served as a thinly veiled cover for the unqualified defense of slavery.
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MPACT Scores for Anthony Alfred Laccarino A = 0
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calculated 2008-09-29 12:00:57
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