Book Description

Robert Goodloe Harper (1765-1825), a prominent attorney congressman from South Carolina & Maryland, was one of the most influential Federalists of the early national period. Harper is traditionally remembered as an extreme example of unthinking, reactionary conservatism in an era of intense partisanship & bitter sectional conflict. In this lively, revisionist account, Eric Robert Papenfuse reinterprets Harper's political philosophy in light of his personal struggle with the moral dilemma of slavery. Papenfuse uses newly discovered documents to show how Harper rose to power among back country South Carolinians as both an advocate of innate racial equality & a proponent of the gradual end to slavery's westward expansion. Though deeply troubled by slavery's irremediable moral & political evils, Harper accepted the system as a temporary necessity, & turned his efforts to achieving social progress through the education of lower-class white Americans & the "emancipation" of European peasants from Napoleonic tyranny. The establishment of the American Colonization Society in 1816 renewed Harper's commitment to resolving the problem of slavery by educating blacks & transporting them to an environment free from white racial prejudice, where they might one day become a "great nation." By conveniently reproducing & indexing four of Harper's most important speeches & letters, Papenfuse invites readers to examine for themselves a fundamental paradox of the age: how an abiding conviction that all races were inherently equal could allow for such forced rationalizations, painful self-deceptions, & maddening compromises.