Fieser.QXD 6/9/04 1:59 pm Page 1 THE LIFE OF GEORGE TUCKER Excerpted from The Life and Philosophy of George Tucker Edited and introduced by James Fieser © 2004 THOEMMES CONTINUUM Fieser.QXD 6/9/04 1:59 pm Page 2 Tucker vol 1 21/4/04 1:20 PM Page v CONTENTS Editor’s Introduction Tucker’s Life and Writings vii Summary of Tucker’s Philosophy xiii Bibliography xxv Tucker’s Life 1. Major Events in George Tucker’s Life 1 2. Maria Ball Carter Tucker, “Commonplace Book” (c. 1817–1819) 3 3. George Tucker, “Autobiography” (1858) 12 4. Robley Dunglison, “Obituary notice of Professor Tucker” (1862) 89 v Tucker vol 1 21/4/04 1:20 PM Page vi Tucker vol 1 21/4/04 1:20 PM Page vii EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION George Tucker (1775–1861) is one of the more unique nineteenth-century American philosophers. A practicing attorney and Congressman from the state of Virginia, he was an original thinker who expressed his views in a range of literary genres. Many of these were among the first of their kind: a biography of Thomas Jefferson, a major history of the United States, a science fiction novel about the moon, and a southern U.S. novel. He also composed several influential books in economic thought and frequently wrote on the subject of slavery. While in Congress, he published a collection of essays on philosophical and political subjects, which attracted the attention of Jefferson who subsequently appointed him as the first professor of moral philosophy at the University of Virginia. Near the end of his life he published a second collection of philosophical essays. Tucker believed that the state of philosophy in the United States was largely undeveloped and, in his various writings, he attempted to address this deficiency. TUCKER’S LIFE AND WRITINGS. Our main source for Tucker’s life is his “Autobiography,” which he composed in 1858, three years before his death. Additional material comes from Tucker’s letters, a commonplace book by his second wife, and an obituary penned by a close friend. Born in St. George’s, Bermuda in 1775, Tucker was part of a distinguished family that had been on the island for 150 years. He describes himself as a mischievous child, an avid reader as an older boy, and a love-struck adolescent. He worked for a time as a law clerk, and at age 20 moved to Williamsburg, Virginia at the urging of his famous cousin who resided there, St. George Tucker. He enrolled in the college of William and Mary, where St. George was a law professor. His interests leaned decidedly towards social life rather than academics, and when he left college he was ill-prepared for the practice of law which he had been studying. In 1797 he married a wealthy young woman from a Williamsburg family; she died two years later, and, depressed from the loss, he moved to Richmond to escape inevitable reminders of her. In Richmond, he obtained his law license, but worked incompetently from fear of public speaking, having “neither the requisite self-possession nor fluency.” He again preoc- cupied himself with social activities and soon became addicted to gambling at cards, a problem that was to plague him for years to come. In 1802 he vii Tucker vol 1 21/4/04 1:20 PM Page viii viii Tucker’s Life and Writings married again – a relative of his first wife – after getting her pregnant. Around this time he launched his literary career with a pamphlet on slavery and contributions to Richmond’s newspapers. Although achieving local recognition as a talented writer, Tucker’s finances spun out of control through poor investments, gambling debts, and a lottery scandal that got him jailed for a few days. He wisely moved from the area, first staying with relatives and then relocating to southern Virginia. He writes, “I was therefore kept busy for some time in making the necessary preparations – as in buying negroes for the plantations – sending them out – providing materials for my new house, and settling up my accounts.” For ten years in this rural area he honed his legal skills, raised a family, improved his finances, and contributed articles to national magazines. In 1818 he moved to Lynchburg, Virginia, hoping to provide better education and social surroundings for his growing children. He was soon elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, a position he held for six years. He describes his service as unremarkable – largely because of his aversion to public speaking and his “livelier ambition to be a great chess player than to be a distin- guished member of Congress.” While he was in office, his second wife died from pregnancy complications, leaving him with four children. It was also while in office that he published his first books. In 1822 he gathered together several of his anonymous magazine articles and published them under the title Essays on Various Subjects of Taste, Morals, and National Policy. Inspired by the success of Walter Scott, he attempted to achieve fame and fortune through novel writing. In two months he composed The Valley of Shenandoah, a tragic novel about the decline of a Virginia plantation family. Regretfully, he states, “The work may be regarded as a failure. It had the dis- advantage of ending unhappily, and its catastrophe was offensive to Virginia pride.” At the close of his third term in office, it became clear that he would not succeed in a run for a fourth. Thomas Jefferson, impressed with Tucker’s Essays, then invited him to become professor of moral philosophy at the newly-formed University of Virginia. Still hoping for the success of his novel, Tucker hesitated a few months, but accepted the job when his dream of a literary career seemed it would remain unfulfilled. Now at age 50, he moved to Charlottesville and assumed teaching responsibilities in, as Jefferson words the job description, “mental sciences generally, including Ideology, general grammar, logic and Ethics” (Jefferson to Tucker, March 9, 1825). To this were later added belles lettres, rhetoric, and political economy. Over the next 20 years at the University his literary output was as varied as it was voluminous. With lingering hopes at fiction writing, he composed two science fiction novels. A Voyage to the Moon, modeled after Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, appeared in 1827, and A Century Hence remained in manuscript form until 1977. He assumed editorship of a University journal, Tucker vol 1 21/4/04 1:20 PM Page ix Introduction ix The Virginia Literary Museum, for which he did much of the writing. There were also three books on economic theory, a biography of Jefferson, and many magazine articles. He married his third wife in 1828, travelled to Europe in 1838, and retired at age 69 in 1845. Leaving Charlottesville, he emancipated his five household slaves, and moved to Philadelphia where he became an active member of the American Philosophical Society. His literary output not waning, he published a four- volume History of the United States, a fourth book on economics, and compiled a second collection of previously published essays. In the midst of these projects in 1858 his third wife died, and the same year he composed his autobiography for the benefit of his grandchildren, which remained unpub- lished for a century. In 1861, wanting to avoid a cold Philadelphia winter, he travelled through the South. While onboard a ship in Mobile, Alabama, he was struck on the head by a bale of cotton, which knocked him tem- porarily unconscious. He was transported to his daughter’s house in Charlottesville, where he died three months later. Tucker was exceptionally well read in the British philosophical traditions of the 18th and 19th centuries, and his principal influences were the great Scottish writers who in general had such a strong impact on early American philosophy, namely, David Hume, Thomas Reid, Dugald Stewart and Thomas Brown. Consistent with the Scottish tradition, he was also well- versed in ancient Greek and Roman philosophers, and paid little regard to medieval and German writers. Unlike his Scottish counterparts, though, Tucker was not a philosophical system builder and instead focused on specific issues that attracted his attention. He was an essayist in the true sense of the term, composing short, self-contained articles on single subjects aimed at a broad audience. Nevertheless, there are consistent themes that run throughout his philosophical writings and give them an overall structure. A dominant feature that unifies many of his writings is the notion of progress: the science, culture, and economy of countries all inevitably march onward. The driving force behind this is human nature itself to the degree that we are all psychologically restless, and seek for our own betterment. The United States, he believes, manifests this more distinctly than other cultures because of its resources and the unrestricted cultural and economic opportunities available to its inhabitants. Another unifying feature of Tucker’s philosophy is that it is thoroughly secular, the concepts of God and religion playing no role. In his autobiography he mentions a religious expe- rience he had as a youth while courting a young woman. This, though, seems to have not taken hold, and even his earliest writings display some antipathy towards religion. He denies the view that “the belief of rewards and punishments, in the next world, influences human conduct in this” (Letter on the Conspiracy of the Slaves). Too much religion, he believes, is a Tucker vol 1 21/4/04 1:20 PM Page x x Tucker’s Life and Writings bad thing: “even religion itself, pure and exalted as is its character, may be pursued to a pernicious excess” (“On Theatre”).