William S. Belko’s Philip Pendleton Barbour in Jacksonian America provides the first comprehensive biography of a pivotal yet nearly forgotten statesman who made numerous key contributions to a transformative period of early American history.
 
Barbour, a Virginia lawyer, participated in America’s transition from a mostly republican government to a truer majority democracy, notably while serving as the twelfth Speaker of the United States House of Representatives and later as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. After being elected to the US Congress during the War of 1812, Barbour also emerged as one of the foremost champions of states’ rights, consistently and energetically fighting against expansions of federal powers. He, along with other Jeffersonian Old Republicans, opposed federal plans for a national tariff and internal improvements. Later, Barbour became one of the first Jeffersonian politicians to join the Jacksonian Democrats in Jackson’s war against a national bank.
 
Barbour continued to make crucial strides in support of states’ rights after taking his seat on the United States Supreme Court in 1836 under Chief Justice Roger Taney. He contributed to the Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge and Briscoe v. Bank of Kentucky decisions, which bolstered states’ rights. He also delivered the opinion of the court in New York v. Miln, which provided the basis for the State Police Powers Doctrine.
 
Expertly interweaving biography, history, political science, and jurisprudence, Philip Pendleton Barbour in Jacksonian America remembers the man whose personal life and career were emblematic of the decades in which the United States moved from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Jackson, contributing to developments that continue to animate American politics today. 

William S. Belko is the executive director of the Missouri Humanities Council and the author of The Triumph of the Antebellum Free Trade Movement (winner of the 2013 Phi Alpha Theta Best Subsequent Book Award) and The Invincible Duff Green: Whig of the West. He is also the editor of America’s Hundred Years’ War: U.S. Expansion to the Gulf Coast and the Fate of the Seminole, 1763–1858.

"Belko has added to our understanding of the political debates of the first half of the nineteenth century by restoring Philip Pendleton Barbour to his rightful place as one of the first men to articulate some of the defining principles of Jacksonian Democrats."
—Journal of Southern History

"Belko should be celebrated for recovering the history of an important man. [  . . . ] As an advocate of the rights of states and as a proponent of the principles advanced in Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, Barbour should, at the very least be remembered alongside such Virginians as John Taylor of Caroline and John Randolph of Roanoke."
—Virginia Magazine

"Robustly researched and exceptionally well written, Philip Pendleton Barbour in Jacksonian America reveals Barbour's political and intellectual world."
—Alfred L. Brophy, author of Reconstructing the Dreamland: The Tulsa Riot of 1921, Race, Reparations, Reconciliation; coauthor of Integrating Spaces: Property Law and Race; and coeditor of Transformations in American Legal History, volumes I and II

"Philip Pendleton Barbour in Jacksonian America provides a much needed and overdue scholarly intervention. It elevates Barbour to his proper place in history."
—H. Robert Baker, author of The Rescue of Joshua Glover: A Fugitive Slave, the Constitution, and the Coming of the Civil War and Prigg v. Pennsylvania: Slavery, the Supreme Court, and the Ambivalent Constitution