Rating: 
Summary: Not about Jefferson but America
Review: Critics of this work that carp about small points concerning Jefferson miss the point entirely. The book is a useful corrective that puts slavery ands its preservation front and center in early US history. Too often, early American history barely mentions slavery until is suddenly surfaces to split the country. It was often the only issue that mattered. An abolitionist could not get elected in the Slave states, no matter what other stands they took. They would be lucky to get out alive, since many were beaten, jailed and lynched. The Free states, while solidly prejudiced, stoutly opposed the spread of slavery and the plantation system. The constant push of Slave states to spread slavery to new territories and the resistance of the Free states is the story of America from 1770 to 1865. Thanks to Wills for reminding us of that.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Addition to Wills Canon
Review: Garry Wills returns again to Thomas Jefferson, sort of. The title of the book is "Negro President", Jefferson and the Slave Power, but that can be somewhat misleading. The historical personage who sits front and centre in this discussion of the slave power is New England's own Timothy Pickering. The author provides a different take on this often maligned character. It is shown how Pickering doggedly fought againt the 3/5 federal ratio that allowed the Southern slave states to count their slaves (partially) in order to increase their place in the houses and, in the case of Jefferson, help elect a President of the United States. Jefferson's role in this extension of slave power is examined. Particularly enlightening is a new look at the selection of Washington as the site of the new capital. When focused must directly on these aspects, the book is strongest. The text does, on occasion, wander a little farther afield though. The sections on John Quincy Adams feel undeveloped in an appendix sort of fashion, although interesting in their own right. It is nice to see a reexamination of Pickering, particularly as a way to view Jefferson in a fresher light.
Rating:
Summary: Good Addition to Wills Canon
Review: Garry Wills returns again to Thomas Jefferson, sort of. The title of the book is "Negro President", Jefferson and the Slave Power, but that can be somewhat misleading. The historical personage who sits front and centre in this discussion of the slave power is New England's own Timothy Pickering. The author provides a different take on this often maligned character. It is shown how Pickering doggedly fought againt the 3/5 federal ratio that allowed the Southern slave states to count their slaves (partially) in order to increase their place in the houses and, in the case of Jefferson, help elect a President of the United States. Jefferson's role in this extension of slave power is examined. Particularly enlightening is a new look at the selection of Washington as the site of the new capital. When focused must directly on these aspects, the book is strongest. The text does, on occasion, wander a little farther afield though. The sections on John Quincy Adams feel undeveloped in an appendix sort of fashion, although interesting in their own right. It is nice to see a reexamination of Pickering, particularly as a way to view Jefferson in a fresher light.
Rating:
Summary: The Tragedy of the Three-Fifths Compromise
Review: Gary Wills has done a great service to the search for truth in American history. Thomas Jefferson's involvement in the slavery issue has recently been trapped in the dull and irrelevant arguement concerning whether TJ romped with his slave girls or not (practically all slave owners did, it was one of the perks of the institution that Jeff and his fellows loved so much.) What has been obscured was that Jefferson was the architect of the monstrous defense of slavery, disquised as states rights, which Calhoun and the others used to justify succession. One of the tired excuses always marched out in defense of Jefferson is that he was a man of his times, everyone owned slaves, we can't judge him by our standards, blah, blah, blah. By putting the brave and noble abolitionist Thomas Pickering center stage, Wills has given a human face to the struggle against one of history's terrible abominations. We Americans will never really have a mature understanding of our history until we stop idolizing the defenders of slavery (Jefferson, Lee etc.) and begin celebrating the brave men and women who oppossed it from day one. Thank you, Gary Wills. What a wonderful step in the right direction.
Rating:
Summary: Performing a Service by Stimulating Debate
Review: Gary Wills once more reveals himself as an author of courage who explores controversial issues with a microscopic eye. This time he has the author of America's Declaration of Independence and the nation's third president, Thomas Jefferson, in his analytical sights.Despite being an admirer of Jefferson's and much of what he stood for, Wills also realizes that he was, as a member of the Southern aristocracy, standing in the middle of the fledgling nation's major controversy, which would ultimately rock America to its foundations, that of slavery. While Americans who have studied the history of the nation's early years were aware of the highly controversial three-fifths rule, the service Wills performs in this book is to analyze Jefferson's role in the ongoing debate concerning it and deduce that he was able to become presidency on the strength of a rule that was seen as a compromise between the north and the south on the subject of slavery. Wills sees Jefferson as a "Negro president" in that he was the beneficiary of the controversial rule, achieving the presidency as a result of its application. By having large numbers of slaves counted as three-fifths of a person this segment made it possible for Jefferson to achieve the presidency. With so many slaves located in states where Jefferson had strength, the three-fifths rule provided a rocket thrust which made the difference in the election of 1800. The tragic irony is that fictitious votes of individuals who were not even considered persons in the legal sense, and had no right to vote, made the difference. Slavery ended up serving as a gigantic bonus, providing an electoral boost. This is a debate that is certain to continue, and Wills deserves praise for setting it into motion. In order to know about ourselves as a people we must tackle all questions, no matter how tough or unpleasant. Another point Wills covers is that Jefferson's founding of the University of Virginia, which he considered his proudest accomplishment, was also tied strongly to the ongoing slavery debate between the south and the north. Wills asserts that Jefferson wanted a university in his own state of Virginia to serve as a counter balance to strong anti-slavery sentiments at institutions of learning in the north such as Yale and Harvard.
Rating:
Summary: The History You Weren't Taught in School
Review: I am re-reading Negro President. I think I will give it a third reading at some point.
Garry Wills is a Jefferson historian and self-described Jefferson-admirer. (Those who dismiss this book as Jefferson-bashing have not read the book carefully.) This is Wills' third book on Jefferson. In this one he wanted to take a hard look at the problem points of Jefferson's life and career.
The true story of our Revolution explains the inevitability of the Civil War and our nation's current polarization. This book eloquently explains why we have the Electoral College, and why Philadelphia with Quaker sensibilities was unacceptable to Southerners as our nation's capital.
Wills had to do quite a bit of digging into the election of 1800 to exhume the matter of the Electoral College. The election of 2000 was almost a replay of the election of 1800 in many ways. Wills explains that the Electoral College was a device to give the South more representation (the slave bonus) in presidential elections by counting slaves as three-fifths of a person-yet, these same slaves had no vote of their own. Thus, in presidential elections, a slave-owner cast, in addition to his own vote, three extra votes for every five slaves he owned.
The polarization our nation faces today is perplexing until you realize that it goes back to the bickering amongst the founders. For example, Hamilton's longstanding dispute with Burr which led to there "interview " at Wehawkin (interview being code for duel) was not a singularity of the time, but epigrammatic of it. Another book I can recommend is Founding Brothers.
Although the ostensible subject is Jefferson, Wills uses Timothy Pickering , an immensely complicated and highly moral man as a foil to Jefferson to flesh out his portrait of Jefferson. Pickering, although dismissed by historians as a minor luminary of the Revolution, and so dismissed by Wills, himself, leaps from the pages of this book as one of the truly interesting Founders. I think it is time to re-discover this amazing fellow Pennsylvanian. It is time to get back to our Yankee roots.
Because historians underrate Pickering, you probably never were taught about him in school. In fact, the American history we were taught in school, regardless of whether you attended public or parochial school (I have attended both), was drained of its blood in an attempt to make the facts age appropriate. Unfortunately, this has made us a nation ignorant of our own history. Such a nation cannot be said to be grooming good citizens.
Rating: 
Summary: How could a great historian write such nonsence.
Review: There is no question Garry Wills was in the past
a very substantial historian.I have only read the prologue
and two chapters and have found the book to be full
of gross terminological inexactitudes(an attempt to put it politely}.
On the first page of the Prologue he gives a major clue
as to his problem, when he states that he has been a
at numerous Monticello fundraisers and is on the Board
of advisors of the International Center there.Those
of us who are aware of Jordan's agenda need no further
explanations.
In 1784 from what I remember having read twenty five years ago,
only one man from the South voted with him for the
ban of slavery in the new territories.That man was
Hugh Williamson from Carolina.All of Thomas Jefferson's
Virginia delegation voted against him. How can Garry Wills
miss this point! Even if the New Jersey delegate
had not been sick and the vote had gone through,
this would have had no effect on the thirteen.
Garry Wills writes that Jefferson real reason for being in
a hurry to start the University Of Virgina was to have a fine
institution to further expand slavery and not have young men
go to Harvard and Yale and get new anti slavery ideas.This
incredibly preposterous preposition is not worthy of comment.
Mr Wills writes that he does not want to discuss the Sally
Hemings relationship as if this is a fact.Is he not aware of the
five hundred page report by thirteen of the most respected
historians in the Country,twelve of whom do not believe it to be a fact?
If he was so against slavery why did he not free his slaves?
Under Virginia sequestration law which was passed during the
revolutioanary War it was possible for debts to creditors to be
discharged with depreciated paper currency. In short Patrick
Henry,Edmond Pendelton, William Harrison, the Lees, the Marshalls
and many others took advantage of this chance and pay less than
five cents on the dollar.Thomas Jefferson refused this opportunity to escape these crushing debts."Justice is my objective, as decided by reason."
Finally had he freed his slaves, his creditors would have repossesed them. After his death let us not forget when his
slaves were auctioned for his creditors, half of them fetched
no price. In reality Jefferson was without a question towards
the end of his life running an old age home, with half of his slaves growing produce and working to keep a roof over the
the heads of the other half, too feeble to work.
From what I have read of this book MR Garry Wills has given
a totally distorted view of Jefferson attitude toward slavery.
Rating:
Summary: The Colonial History You Should Have Learned In School
Review: We won the revolution, the Articles of Confederacy didn't work too well, a bunch of smart men got together in Philadelphia and came up with a brilliant constitution, then the British interfered with our ships, so we had the War of 1812. That's the basic outline we all learn in school Wills takes this history, and re-examines it through the lens of slavery. The South had slaves; the North didn't. If we were going to survive as a single country, some compromise had to be worked out. The South would not join any country that did not protect its right to own slaves. But there were more people living in the North, and the northern population was growing much faster than the south. So, what did the South do--demanded that its slaves would be counted in figuring out how many representatives each state got in the House of Representatives. Was this a bargain worth making for the north? Wills doesn't answer. Was it wholly immoral--maybe, but lots of people (women, children, those who did not own property) were counted as whole people, yet absolutely denied the vote. Once slavery is factored in, the whole dichotomy usually presented (big states vs. little states) becomes far more complex. The negotiations were really four cornered--big, little, slave, free all jousting for a political structure which would be most advantageous to their position. Wills applies this same analysis to several other events from the country's first 25 years. Believe me, this is not the history you learned in school--but it should have been. Why only four stars--the middle third of the book strays away from the slave-free dicotomy, and examines the Jeffersonian embargo. While fascinating history (who knew that the country was on the verge of armed rebvellion from about 1800 all the way through 1812--and it was largely the NORTH threatening armed resistance to the federal government--then dominated by the south (back to that 3/5 of a vote compromise!). Massachussets refused to allow its soldiers to serve in teh War of 1812, and threatened to prosecute anyone who tried to enforce the call to arms. Madison took the threat so seriously, that he simply abandoned all pretense of trying to mobilize soldiers from Mass. during the War of 1812. As fascinating as all this is--it has little to do with slavery--it really does appear to have been a question of trade vs. agriculture. Wills' attempt to fit this story in with the rest of his thesis appears a stretch. Wills has written a fine addition to the history of America's early formative years. Once you understand the forces at work, the compromises made, and the continued pressures which threatened to blow the country apart, you can then make sense of the events that culminated in our Civil War. Was the compromise with slavery worth it? Was there ever a way to avoid the mass slaughter of the Civil War? Wills does not give us an answer, but he has given us a way to think about the issue.
Rating: 
Summary: negro president
Review: While an interesting book, it deals little with Thomas Jefferson. Wills seems to be far more interested in building a case for Timothy Pickering and Arron Burr. Not at all sure why it got the title it did. In a way, I feel like sending it back as the title did not represent the subject
Rating:
Summary: The Tragedy of the Three-Fifths Compromise
Review: While Wills begins this book by saying that he does not want to disparage Thomas Jefferson or cause people not to admire him, it was impossible not to see him and other Southern presidents like James Madison and James Monroe in a more tarnished light after finishing the book. NEGRO PRESIDENT presents a much clearer picture of how the Three-Fifths Compromise continued the appalling practice of slavery in this country and led the United States inevitably toward the Civil War. Readers learn, too, of the unsung hero of the anti-slavery movement, Thomas Pickering, whose death seems to have finally transformed John Quincy Adams into an unflinching opponent of slavery towards the end of his career. This is a very interesting book that everyone should read. There should be more done to counter the mythology of slavery and the South that has developed in this country since the end of Reconstruction. It's good to know that the Founding Fathers were not "supermen." They were simply the same flawed people that we all are.
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