This volume continues the acclaimed annotated edition of the papers of Chief Justice John Marshall, the great statesman and jurist. The constitutional nationalism of the Marshall Court reached its peak in 1824 with Gibbons v. Ogden, in which Marshall broadly expounded the commerce clause while striking down New York's steamboat monopoly laws. By 1827, however, a crack in the nationalist consensus revealed itself in Ogden v. Saunders, a contract clause case that elicited Marshall's first and only dissent on a question of constitutional law.

Marshall's...

Collected here are correspondence, papers, and legal documents--including selected judicial opinions--of American jurist John Marshall. Revolutionary officer, congressman, and secretary of state before his appointment to the Supreme Court, Marshall served as the Court's fourth Chief Justice. In this capacity, he helped define the role of the Court and elevate its status, as he interpreted the Constitution from the bench. The documents presented in these volumes--with introductory material and notes--shed light not only on Marshall's life and thought but on the evolution of American...

At the close of 1830 John Marshall (1755-1835) had completed his third decade as chief justice of the United States. The preceding four years had been among the busiest of his long and active life. Between April 1827 and December 1830, Chief Justice Marshall delivered numerous circuit court opinions as well as six Supreme Court opinions that addressed issues of constitutional law. His travels on judicial business regularly took him from his Richmond home to Washington and to Raleigh. Marshall attended a convention on internal improvements in Charlottesville in July 1828, and he served as a...

This twelfth volume of The Papers of John Marshall concludes the first scholarly annotated edition of the correspondence and papers of the great statesman and jurist. In providing an accessible documentary record of Marshall's life and legal career, this collection has become an invaluable scholarly resource for the study of American law and the Constitution in their formative stages.

Volume XII covers the final years of Marshall's life, from January 1831 to his death in July 1835. It also includes an addendum of documents (mostly letters) from 1783 to 1829 that came to light...

When the Revolutionary War began, the odds of a united, continental effort to resist the British seemed nearly impossible. Few on either side of the Atlantic expected thirteen colonies to stick together in a war against their cultural cousins. In this pathbreaking book, Robert Parkinson argues that to unify the patriot side, political and communications leaders linked British tyranny to colonial prejudices, stereotypes, and fears about insurrectionary slaves and violent Indians. Manipulating newspaper networks, Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Franklin, and their fellow agitators broadcast...

This work explores a neglected aspect of the forced migration of African laborers to the Americas. Hundreds of thousands of captive Africans continued their journeys after the Middle Passage across the Atlantic. Colonial merchants purchased and then transshipped many of these captives to other colonies for resale. Not only did this trade increase death rates and the social and cultural isolation of Africans; it also fed the expansion of British slavery and trafficking of captives to foreign empires, contributing to Britain's preeminence in the transatlantic slave trade by the mid-eighteenth...

This sweeping history of popular religion in eighteenth-century New England examines the experiences of ordinary people living through extraordinary times. Drawing on an unprecedented quantity of letters, diaries, and testimonies, Douglas Winiarski recovers the pervasive and vigorous lay piety of the early eighteenth century. George Whitefield's preaching tour of 1740 called into question the fundamental assumptions of this thriving religious culture. Incited by Whitefield and fascinated by miraculous gifts of the Holy Spirit--visions, bodily fits, and sudden conversions--countless New...

In the years following the Glorious Revolution, independent slave traders challenged the charter of the Royal African Company by asserting their natural rights as Britons to trade freely in enslaved Africans. In this comprehensive history of the rise and fall of the RAC, William A. Pettigrew grounds the transatlantic slave trade in politics, not economic forces, analyzing the ideological arguments of the RAC and its opponents in Parliament and in public debate. Ultimately, Pettigrew powerfully reasons that freedom became the rallying cry for those who wished to participate in the slave trade...

In 1798, English essayist and novelist William Godwin ignited a transatlantic scandal with Memoirs of the Author of "A Vindication of the Rights of Woman." Most controversial were the details of the romantic liaisons of Godwin's wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, with both American Gilbert Imlay and Godwin himself. Wollstonecraft's life and writings became central to a continuing discussion about love's place in human society. Literary radicals argued that the cultivation of intense friendship could lead to the renovation of social and political institutions, whereas others maintained that...

After his 1728 Virginia-North Carolina boundary expedition, Virginia planter and politician William Byrd II composed two very different accounts of his adventures. The Secret History of the Line was written for private circulation, offering tales of scandalous behavior and political misconduct, peppered with rakish humor and personal satire. The History of the Dividing Line, continually revised by Byrd for decades after the expedition, was intended for the London literary market, though not published in his lifetime. Collating all extant manuscripts, Kevin Joel Berland's...