View of the Constitution of the United States
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Cover photograph of St. George Tucker courtesy of Swem Library, College of William and Mary.
This eBook edition published in 2011.
eBook ISBN: E-PUB 978-1-61487-138-5
Note on Tucker’s Numbering of the Amendments
On Sovereignty and Legislature
Of the Several Forms of Government
View of the Constitution of the United States
Of the Unwritten, or Common Law of England; And Its Introduction into, and Authority Within the United American States
Of the Right of Conscience; And of the Freedom of Speech and of the Press
Of the Cognizance of Crimes and Misdemeanours
On the State of Slavery in Virginia
Index
Notes
ST. GEORGE TUCKER’S View of the Constitution of the United States was the first extended, systematic commentary on the Constitution after it had been ratified by the people of the several states and amended by the Bill of Rights. Published in 1803 by a distinguished patriot and jurist, it was for much of the first half of the nineteenth century an important handbook for American law students, lawyers, judges, and statesmen. Though nearly forgotten since, Tucker’s work remains an important piece of constitutional history and a key document of Jeffersonian republicanism.
Two reasons may account for the neglect of Tucker’s work and of related, supportive writings. First, his view of the federal government as an agent of the sovereign people of the several states, and not as the judge of the extent of its own powers, was buried by the outcome of the Civil War, the ground for the triumphant views of Abraham Lincoln having been well prepared by Justice Joseph Story of the Supreme Court and lawyer, orator, and Senator Daniel Webster. Second, Tucker’s constitutional writings were appended as essays to a multivolume densely annotated edition of Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England that was never reprinted.
St. George Tucker was born in 1752 in the British colony of Bermuda. The Tuckers were a numerous and talented family, many of whom emigrated to the mainland colonies in North America, where several made their fortunes. For example, St. George’s brother, Thomas Tudor Tucker, made his way to South Carolina, represented that state in the first two Congresses, and was treasurer of the United States from 1801 until 1828, on appointment of President Thomas Jefferson.
St. George Tucker reached Virginia in 1771. For a year he studied law at the College of William and Mary (as did Thomas Jefferson and John Marshall) under George Wythe, who shortly thereafter became a signer of the Declaration of Independence and chief justice of Virginia. Talented, urbane, and sociable, Tucker had no trouble making his way in the best society. In 1775, at the age of twenty-three, he was admitted to the bar. In that same year he was present in Richmond when Patrick Henry made his stirring appeal to “liberty or death!” Tucker then took part in an expedition to Bermuda that gained possession for the colonists of a large quantity of military stores that were of great use to the army of George Washington.
St. George married well, in 1778, to a wealthy widow, Frances Bland Randolph, and acquired large estates in Chesterfield County. He also acquired three stepsons, one of them the five-year-old John Randolph, later to be famous as “Randolph of Roanoke.” The relationship between Tucker and Randolph was often tense.
Tucker took an active part in the Revolutionary War. In addition to the expedition to Bermuda, he was elected colonel of the Chesterfield County militia and led them to Nathaniel Greene’s army in North Carolina, and is said to have distinguished himself at the Battle of Guilford Court House. During the Yorktown campaign, serving as a lieutenant colonel of horse and an aide to Governor and General Thomas Nelson, he was wounded.
Tucker’s letters to his wife during his military service were published in the Magazine of American History in July and September of 1881, and, in addition to exhibiting marital felicity, are a valuable source of historical information on the Revolution’s last Southern campaign.
After the war, Tucker’s law practice flourished. He was appointed one of the committee to revise the laws of Virginia, and he served with James Madison and Edmund Randolph as Virginia commissioners to the Annapolis Convention. Tucker’s career as an expounder of the new constitutions of Virginia and of the United States began in 1790 when he succeeded Wythe as professor of law at William and Mary.
Contemplating the necessities of instruction, Tucker decided to use as a text Blackstone’s famous Commentaries on the Laws of England. Blackstone (1723–80) had for the first time brought the great chaotic mass of statutory and common law into a system that could be approached by students. Published in four volumes, from 1765 to 1769, his work largely supplanted the Institutes of Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634) as the premier legal text of the English-speaking world.
Though Blackstone’s work was indispensable, for Americans it was problematic because it was suffused with the principles of a monarchial and aristocratic state that Americans had only recently repudiated. Americans had exhibited to the world constitutions in which the people exercised their sovereign authority to create governments that rested specifically on the people’s consent at an identifiable moment of history and not on a long growth of authority and precedent. Such governments were delegates rather than masters of the people and were limited to those specific powers which the people had granted them. And, through regular elections—or if necessary a drastic reassertion of sovereignty—the American people could change their government and their governors.
It was necessary, then, to republicanize Blackstone. This task Tucker accomplished by extensive notes to the body of Blackstone’s work, and by writing several dozen essays, the longest of which were View of the Constitution of the United States and “Of the Constitution of Virginia.” These essays appeared as