History Commons^™

Rights Of Humans, Rights Of States: The Academic Legacy Of St. George Tucker In Nineteenth-Century Virginia, Chad Vanderford

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

College professors in the nineteenth-century South lavished a great deal of attention on the issues of slavery and constitutionalism, and they paid careful attention to the connections between these issues and the idea of natural rights. In this dissertation I offer an analysis of the lives and writings of three generations of college professors in nineteenth-century Virginia, focusing especially on St. George Tucker and his descendants. As a contemporary of Thomas Jefferson and as a delegate to the Annapolis convention, Tucker can rightly be considered as one of the founding fathers. But he is best known for inaugurating the academic …