Liberty Chronicles

Southerners did not support Jeffersonianism as a matter of principle, but as a strategy that would ensure the survival of slavery and institutionalized racism. This support of Jeff...

Phil Magness joins us this week to teach the radical nature of Lysander Spooner. Spooner’s legal career started in an apprenticeship under 2 lawyers and he was best known for his s...

The Democrats and Republicans in the House were doing everything they could think of to force the hands of their opponents into appointing the House Speaker. However, no one could ...

Stephen Maizlish sifted through 1700-1800 different documents and speeches from the 19th century in order to recreate an accurate depiction of the discourse that was occurring in C...

Prior to 1857, no one had ever heard of Hinton Helper. To be clear, Helper was not a libertarian, he was a vehement racist who made it quite clear that he did not believe that peop...

Phil Magness best describes George Fitzhugh as an “eccentric character” because that frames the intellectual direction of his life. Fitzhugh had an obsession with reading about the...

One of the biggest drawbacks of thinking in “vulgar libertarian” fashion is that you forget that there were ever alternatives available to people, that the way that we live now or ...

Historians usually mark off the years, about 1815 to 1845 as the Jacksonian era and for Americans, and many other people across the planet, these were years of singularity. This pe...

Abram Smith caught political fire as a radical Locofoco Democrat, a friend of working people and outsiders. Smith was elected to the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 1852 after he spent ...

All the way from the 1770s to the 1850s, Americans had plenty of political disagreements, but nothing ever seriously disrupted the machinery of state until abolitionists and plante...

This is a updated version of “There’s No Excuse for Slavery” which was released on July 3rd, 2018. Enjoy!The planters of the South believed that slavery had grown up with American ...

In the mid-20th century, it was fashionable for historians to speak of a “Blundering Generation” of pre-Civil War politicians, people who—well intended or not—made a long series of...