Garry Wills' "Negro President": Jefferson and the Slave Power, despite its title, is not a profile of the Jefferson Presidency. Rather, the book offers a richly detailed study of the United States' tragic constitutional bargain with slavery, and meanders through the lives of several key figures in antebellum American history along the way.

While Thomas Jefferson does play a significant role in Wills' book, the real heroes are the relatively unknown abolitionist Timothy Pickering and, to a lesser degree, John Quincy Adams. Pickering offered a consistent voice of opposition to Jefferson's often secret campaign against Federalist power. Though he could never match Jefferson's charismatic persona, Pickering succeeded in his battle to undo Jefferson's embargo of England--an embargo that Pickering recognized as Jefferson's attempt to undermine the economic prosperity and power of the North. Pickering's ill-fated attempt to secede from the Union, while misguided, would fuel the latter-day abolitionist John Quincy Adams to threaten a similar revolution as the Civil War loomed.

Ultimately, "Negro President" is a book that recovers slavery as a context for understanding early American political life. At times Willis focuses too much on Jefferson, Pickering, or Adams, and the discussion is derailed by his fascination for the moral successes and failures of each personality. Nevertheless, the book addresses a long-neglected subject in American studies and will prove invaluable to readers interested in understanding America's early struggle to balance Northern versus slave-state power. --Patrick O'Kelley


From Publishers Weekly
While Pulitzer-winner Wills (Lincoln at Gettysburg, etc.) rarely writes a book without a distinctive take on its subject, in this shaggy work he's off his game. Originally a set of lectures, this book is only loosely stitched together. Its author is typically combative, but he doesn't stay on subject long, writing instead about what suddenly strikes him. Not that the work doesn't show Wills's characteristic keen intelligence. He bears down hard, for example, on the permeating consequences of the Constitution's three-fifths clause for pre-Civil War history and raises tough questions about conventional accounts of Jefferson's election in 1800 (which depended partly on the "slave vote") and the selection of a site for the capital in slave-holding country. But he never lingers long on what the book purports to be about Jefferson's determination to preserve slavery and the South's power in the U.S.nor does it add much to what we already know and think about Jefferson's agonizing, often hypocritical, struggle with race and slavery. Much of what Wills writes about the hold of slave power on the nation has been written before and more extensively by others. What's freshest is his effort to rehabilitate one of Jefferson's arch-opponents, Federalist Timothy Pickering, an attractive if flawed second-rank character of the early nation. Pickering hated slavery and helped lay the groundwork for later abolitionism. But Wills uses him tendentiously as a foil to Jefferson and never brings him fully to life. So what's the book about? About many fascinating issues surrounding the influence of slavery in the U.S. between 1790 and 1848. But don't look here for coherence and sustained history.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
Bashing Thomas Jefferson threatens to become a national pastime. Many of the recent attacks on Jefferson, particularly those by Joseph Ellis, are unfair and mean spirited. However, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Wills is an unabashed admirer of Jefferson. So, his analyses of some of Jefferson's actions as secretary of state, president, and the "sage of Monticello" after his presidency cannot be easily dismissed. Wills begins with the premise that the "three-fifths compromise" at the Constitutional Convention ensured southern slave-state domination of the Federal government until the eve of the Civil War. With slave populations counted, southern states were granted "unfair" representation in the House of Representatives. They also had inflated power in the electoral college, which gave Jefferson victory in the extremely close election of 1800. Jefferson believed passionately in "agrarian virtues," and he feared the growing economic and political power of the northern states. Wills asserts that many of Jefferson's actions, including his hostility to the Haitian revolution and his opposition to the Missouri Compromise, were efforts to fight dilution of the political power of southern states. The result of his actions, of course, was to maintain the "slave power" of a relatively small number of plantation owners. Wills takes no joy in his criticism. Rather, he views Jefferson as well as many other southern politicians as trapped by an evil system they still felt obliged to defend. This is an important and disturbing book, which will undoubtedly intensify the ongoing controversy regarding Jefferson and slavery. Jay Freeman
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Review
"An eye-opening, carefully argued expose of . . . one of the big sleeper issues in American political history."

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