Thomas Jefferson, Legal History, and the Art of Recollection

Through his discussion of Thomas Jefferson, historian Matthew Crow offers a new perspective on constitutional transformation in early American history.

Matthew Crow (Author)

9781107161931, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 March 2017

294 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.2 cm, 0.55 kg

'Crow's insights on Jeffersonian thinking make this volume a welcome contribution to the intellectual history of the early Republic. Highly recommended.' R. F. Lucas, III, Choice

In this innovative book, historian Matthew Crow unpacks the legal and political thought of Thomas Jefferson as a tool for thinking about constitutional transformation, settler colonialism, and race and civic identity in the era of the American Revolution. Thomas Jefferson's practices of reading, writing, and collecting legal history grew out of broader histories of early modern empire and political thought. As a result of the peculiar ways in which he theorized and experienced the imperial crisis and revolutionary constitutionalism, Jefferson came to understand a republican constitution as requiring a textual, material culture of law shared by citizens with the cultivated capacity to participate in such a culture. At the center of the story in Thomas Jefferson, Legal History, and the Art of Recollection, Crow concludes, we find legal history as a mode of organizing and governing collective memory, and as a way of instituting a particular form of legal subjectivity.

1. Introduction: 'in the course of human events…'
2. Jurisdiction and British legal memory in colonial Virginia
3. New-modeling and rewriting in revolutionary Virginia
4. Labor, language, and the legal subject of the Notes on the State of Virginia
5. Governing the usufruct of the living
6. The discipline of recollection
Index.

Subject Areas: Political science & theory [JPA], American War of Independence [HBWF], Colonialism & imperialism [HBTQ], Modern history to 20th century: c 1700 to c 1900 [HBLL], History of the Americas [HBJK], Historiography [HBAH], History [HB]