John Taylor: Economist of Southern Agrarianism

Abstract

John Taylor, of Caroline, has for long attracted students of American political and intellectual history as the great adversary of Federalist policy and the prodigious defender of the economic order of the South.' Taylor's prolix writings range widely over political philosophy, economic doctrine and policy, and they have furnished abundant material for the study of Virginia's great agrarian. Yet for all such profusion of riches and the allure they have held for historians, the student of theoretical economics cannot be very happy over the treatment Taylor has been accorded in this field.2 Though his interpreters have not failed to direct attention to Taylor's economic doctrine, they have not examined it with the critical care it deserves. This neglect is rather puzzling in view of the position held by Taylor among Republicans. Although his contemporaries were not uninterested in his political tracts (which have drawn most, though not all, of the attention of students), they considered him to be one of the two economists among the anti-Federalists who was able to meet and conduct himself with honor against Hamilton, the great law-giver of Federalist economic policy as well as strategist of the party. (Gallatin was the other.3) While carrying on with vigor in the realm of political philosophy, Jefferson and Madison were prone to defer to others on questions requiring close economic analysis. This paper is an inquiry into the economic doctrine of John Taylor from the point of view of its origins in political philosophy, its relation to the currents of economic thought of the age, and its relation to the economic ideas expressed by his American contemporaries. It attempts to delineate the essential difference between the ideas of Taylor and those against which he fought throughout his life, to appraise his ideas in the light of what he contended against, and to find the distinctive features in Taylor's economic doctrine and policy and that of the Republicans with whom he was nominally allied. This inquiry may be justified,