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'''John Taylor of Caroline''' (born John Taylor) (1753-1824), was an exponent of [[Jeffersonian Democracy]] and republicanism]]. He was born into a rich planter family in Virginia and is known as "John Taylor of Caroline." Taylor engineered Virginia's resolution against the Sedition Act (1798); and helped pass the Twelfth Amendment. He served multiple terms in the state legislature and U.S. Senate. He is best known for his orations and essays against aristocratic theories of [[Federalist Party]] leaders Alexander Hamilton and John Adams. He despised cities and modernization and ardently defended an agricultural economy and scientific farming that would reverse the damage done to the soil by heavy reliance on tobacco.
'''John Taylor of Caroline''' (born John Taylor) (1753-1824), was an exponent of [[Jeffersonian Democracy]] and republicanism]]. He was born into a rich planter family in Virginia and is known as "John Taylor of Caroline." Taylor engineered Virginia's resolution against the Sedition Act (1798); and helped pass the Twelfth Amendment. He served multiple terms in the state legislature and U.S. Senate. He is best known for his orations and essays against aristocratic theories of [[Federalist Party]] leaders Alexander Hamilton and John Adams. He despised cities and modernization and ardently defended an agricultural economy and scientific farming that would reverse the damage done to the soil by heavy reliance on tobacco.
As the most articulate exoponent of republican agrarianism and [[Jeffersonian Democracy]], Taylor feared that in the America forms of "paper and patronage aristocracy" could get the upper hand and undermine [[republicanism]]. His argued that a virtuous republic should be based on agriculture and the predominant role of the landowner in society. Taylor condemned corruption and patronage and exalted good moral principles and the practice of civil virtue as the basis of a republic which would safeguard freedom and political independence. Hamilton, on the contrary, considered the construction of a strong central government and financial institutions, such as the Bank of the United States, which could direct the national economy and increase the prosperity of citizens, as indispensable to the growth of the United States.
Conservative huistorian Adam Tate (1998) argues that Taylor believed that the government of the United States was the best yet formed, but he argued that the nation suffered from an overpowerful president and Supreme Court and from finance capitalism and its paper money system. Taylor, a modern rather than a classical Republican, believed that an agrarian society was best. To protect farmers, he advocated easy taxation and improved farming techniques, and he opposed protective tariffs and government-subsidized internal improvements. He urged farmers to form an agricultural party to defend their economic interests. At the end of his life, Taylor invoked states' rights as a way to save Southern farmers from capitalist tyranny.
However, Lenner (1997) argues that Taylor has been misinterpreted by historians as a strict constructionist, states' rights Southerner, and virulent Jeffersonian Republican. In fact, he went beyond mainstream Republican thought in his suspicion of federalism and his belief that the new federal republic was merely a collection of independent states, all with the duties and rights of independent nation-states which had merely collected themselves into a voluntary league of nations. Ruled by the "Law of Nations," Taylor's federal republic was neither a mainstream Federalist or mainstream republican society, but a third alternative of American political thought in the antebellum period.
==See also==
==See also==
* [[History of Virginia]]
* [[History of Virginia]]
* [[Jeffersonian Democracy]]
==Further reading==
* Lenner, Andrew C. "John Taylor and the Origins of American Federalism." ''Journal of the Early Republic'' 1997 17(3): 399-423. [http://www.jstor.org/stable/3123942 in JSTOR]
* Shalhope, Robert E. ''John Taylor of Caroline: Pastoral Republican'' (1980), 304pp; thestandard scholarly biography
* Tate, Adam L. "John Taylor and the Formation of an American Ideology." ''Continuity'' 1998 (22): 55-76. 0277-1446 by a conservative historian
* Tate, Adam L. ''Conservatism and southern intellectuals, 1789-1861: liberty, tradition, and the good society'' (2005) [http://books.google.com/books?id=oB23DhuvZykC&printsec=frontcover excerpt and text search]
[[Category:The South]] [[Category:Early National U.S.]] [[category:Virginia]] [[category:republicanism]] [[category:environmentalism]]
[[Category:The South]] [[Category:Early National U.S.]] [[category:Virginia]] [[category:republicanism]] [[category:environmentalism]]
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