Reconstruction occurred over several years after the Civil War. At the time, some political leaders hoped to transform the South. They believed the defeat of the Confederacy and the end of slavery created exciting new opportunities to modernize the southern economy, bring southern culture into the American mainstream, and improve race relations in South. Lots of government officials and citizens tried hard to accomplish these goals, but many of their efforts fell short. Why? Professor Gallagher will suggest answers.

Thomas Jefferson had a complex relationship with his close friend, once-secretary, and career diplomat William Short. One issue over which they never found commonality was slavery. Both Jefferson and Short included slaveholding in their financial portfolios, but it was Short who made good on his philanthropic goals of divesting himself from slavery. And over Short's lifetime, his ideas about slavery evolved. Perhaps his evolved perspective on slavery and people of African descent, one that differed from Jefferson's, influenced Short's decision to make limited visits to Monticello after the 1810's. In particular, Jefferson and Short held different views on the correct path toward slave emancipation, with Short supporting the emancipation of slaves and providing them with land while Jefferson advocated for a more gradual process of emancipation. The perspectives of Thomas Jefferson and William Short illuminate the complicated political history of gradual emancipation and the early republican idea of property ownership as freedom in America.

Patrick Henry led the anti-federalists in their effort to defeat ratification of the U.S. Constitution because he believed that it created a government too powerful and distant from the people and undermined the authority of the states. Yet in the spring of 1799, at the behest of George Washington, Henry came out of retirement to defend the Constitution against the radical states' rights agenda of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Henry's commitment to democratic solutions to intractable party disputes continues to speak loudly to us today.