I'd just like to take a moment to disagree slightly with the previous reviewers.

If you're looking for a biography of Thomas Jefferson, no, this is not where you want to start. But I believe that those reviewers who say that this book is misleading with its title or otherwise are missing the point. (I've seen similar reviews at Amazon and elsewhere.) I don't believe that Mr. Wills set out to write a biography of Jefferson, per se, but rather his intention was to explore how the Republicans (Jefferson in particular) exploited slavery through the three-fifths compromise in order to gain (and keep) power.

Perhaps a more appropriate title would have been something like "Negro Party: Republicans and the Slave Power" as the book is a bit broader than just covering Jefferson. Still, I don't think the title is all that misleading.

Oh, and it's a good read! ( )

Several years ago I borrowed Wills' previous book, "Lincoln at Gettysburg" from the library and discovered that Mr. Wills was way smarter than I was - to the point that I couldn't even follow him. Either "Negro President" is simpler or I've gotten smarter, because I found this book to be lucid and comprehensible - and even enjoyable.

Point of order, however - despite the picture of Jefferson on the dust jacket and the book's subtitle, "Negro President" is not about Jefferson at all. In fact, discussions of the election of 1800 (which provides the classic illustration of the book's argument) and Jefferson himself make up only a minor portion of the book. Instead, the focus is on the infamous "three fifths" clause of the Constitution, and how it influenced American history and political life prior to the Civil War. Wills' thesis is that much of what we "know" about the early Republic is wrong, because historians have minimized and downplayed the role of the "slave power," that is, the slave holding political elites. Thus, the election of 1800 is not, as it is generally portrayed, a victory of democratic principles over monarchistic tendencies, but the triumph of slaveholders (who had an advantage in the Electoral College due to the three fifths clause) over free voters. Thus, the location of the new capitol next to the Potomac was not to place it in a neutral locale (or even to increase the value of George Washington's personal land holdings), but rather to accommodate slave holding legislators by placing the district within the borders of slave states.

Wills argues cogently and effectively for his point of view, and it is not detracting anything from the book to state it clearly has a position it is advancing - one could argue (and many have argued) from a contrary point of view. But Wills is most effective at reminding us that what we believe is "obvious" about our history, e.g., that the Constitution needed to be amended after the near-disaster of 1800 to provide for the President and Vice President tickets we now take for granted, was not necessarily so clear cut to the people who participated in these events. Wills presents his argument so clearly that I guess I'll have to go back to "Lincoln in Gettysburg" now, to see if it's him or me that's changed. ( )

"Negro President"? Should be Pickering's Challenge instead!

Author Wills promised me a book about the 3/5's clause and how it assured Jefferson's climb to the presidency. By the blurbs and advanced notices on this book I expected to find a detailed exposition on the conventions created to cajole the Southern representatives into signing onto the Constitution and how, in turn, it was used to clinch Jefferson's presidential ascension.

To date I am still waiting for that book.

So, what we got in "Negro President" instead was more like a few short and rather unsatisfying bios on several other Founding era personalities and surprisingly little on Jefferson himself. Wills does remind us that he has written on Jefferson in several other books, and that is well and good, but it seems then that he should have called this "Pickering's Challenge" or at least titled the book closer to the actual subject OF the thing!

I do hope Wills takes the time to write on the 3/5's clause like he promised to do. After all, this little known aspect of Constitutional history was so important that it caused a lock for Southern power with those ideas becoming the South's most important power-play all the way until the Civil War. The 3/5's clause caused the Civil War if anything did!

So, for a little background on the Founder's era, it is fine, but I can't help but feel this book suffers from a bit of false advertising. ( )

Garry Wills' "Negro President": Jefferson and the Slave Power, despite its title, is not a profile of the Jefferson Presidency. Rather, the book offers a richly detailed study of the United States' tragic constitutional bargain with slavery, and meanders through the lives of several key figures in antebellum American history along the way.

While Thomas Jefferson does play a significant role in Wills' book, the real heroes are the relatively unknown abolitionist Timothy Pickering and, to a lesser degree, John Quincy Adams. Pickering offered a consistent voice of opposition to Jefferson's often secret campaign against Federalist power. Though he could never match Jefferson's charismatic persona, Pickering succeeded in his battle to undo Jefferson's embargo of England--an embargo that Pickering recognized as Jefferson's attempt to undermine the economic prosperity and power of the North. Pickering's ill-fated attempt to secede from the Union, while misguided, would fuel the latter-day abolitionist John Quincy Adams to threaten a similar revolution as the Civil War loomed.

Ultimately, "Negro President" is a book that recovers slavery as a context for understanding early American political life. At times Willis focuses too much on Jefferson, Pickering, or Adams, and the discussion is derailed by his fascination for the moral successes and failures of each personality. Nevertheless, the book addresses a long-neglected subject in American studies and will prove invaluable to readers interested in understanding America's early struggle to balance Northern versus slave-state power. --Patrick O'Kelley