Liberty's Chain
Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York
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Liberty's Chain
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Narrated by:
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Keith Sellon-Wright
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By:
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David N. Gellman
About this listen
Liberty's Chain forges a new path for thinking about slavery and the nation's founding. John Jay served as the inaugural president of a pioneering antislavery society. His descendants, especially his son William and his grandson John Jay II, embraced radical abolitionism in the nineteenth century, the cause most likely to rend the nation. The scorn of their elite peers—and racist mobs—did not deter their commitment to end southern slavery and to combat northern injustice.
John Jay's personal dealings with African Americans ranged from callousness to caring. Across the generations, even as prominent Jays decried human servitude, enslaved people and formerly enslaved people served in Jay households. Abbe, Clarinda, Caesar Valentine, Zilpah Montgomery, and others lived difficult, often isolated, lives that tested their courage and the Jay family's principles.
The personal and the political intersect in this saga, as Gellman charts American values transmitted and transformed from the colonial and revolutionary eras to the Civil War, Reconstruction, and beyond. The Jays, as well as those who served them, demonstrated the elusiveness and the vitality of liberty's legacy. This remarkable family story forces us to grapple with what we mean by patriotism, conservatism, and radicalism. Their story speaks directly to our own divided times.
©2022 Cornell University (P)2022 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 51
Thomas Jefferson designed his own tombstone, describing himself simply as "Author of the Declaration of Independence and of the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, and Father of the University of Virginia". It is in this simple epitaph that R. B. Bernstein finds the key to this enigmatic Founder - not as a great political figure, but as leader of "a revolution of ideas that would make the world over again". In Thomas Jefferson, Bernstein offers the definitive short biography of this revered American - the first concise life in six decades. Bernstein deftly synthesizes the massive scholarship on his subject into a swift, insightful, evenhanded account.
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5 out of 5 stars
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In-Depth and Interesting
- By Sarahi Nieves on 04-24-19
By: R. B. Bernstein
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Patrick Henry
- Champion of Liberty
- By: Jon Kukla
- Narrated by: Paul Woodson
- Length: 17 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 31
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 27
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 28
Born in 1736, Patrick Henry was an attorney and a planter and an outstanding orator in the movement for independence. A contemporary of Washington, Henry stood with John and Samuel Adams among the leaders of the colonial resistance to Great Britain that ultimately created the United States. The first governor of Virginia after independence, he was reelected several times. After declining to attend the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Henry opposed the Constitution, arguing that it granted too much power to the central government.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Long awaited biography of Patrick Henry
- By GallowsJudge on 11-18-17
By: Jon Kukla
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The Birth of Modern Politics
- Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and the Election of 1828
- By: Lynn Hudson Parson
- Narrated by: Milton Bagby
- Length: 10 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 85
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 65
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Story4 out of 5 stars 66
The 1828 presidential election, which pitted Major General Andrew Jackson against incumbent John Quincy Adams, has long been hailed as a watershed moment in American political history. It was the contest in which an unlettered, hot-tempered southwestern frontiersman, trumpeted by his supporters as a genuine man of the people, soundly defeated a New England "aristocrat" whose education and political resume were as impressive as any ever seen in American public life.
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4 out of 5 stars
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a very good popular history book
- By D. Littman on 01-29-10
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The Three Lives of James Madison
- Genius, Partisan, President
- By: Noah Feldman
- Narrated by: John H. Mayer
- Length: 34 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 528
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 470
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 468
Over the course of his life, James Madison changed the United States three times: First, he designed the Constitution, led the struggle for its adoption and ratification, then drafted the Bill of Rights. As an older, cannier politician, he cofounded the original Republican party, setting the course of American political partisanship. Finally, having pioneered a foreign policy based on economic sanctions, he took the United States into a high-risk conflict, becoming the first wartime president and, despite the odds, winning.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Cogently organized, meticulously balanced
- By Diana Black Kennedy on 06-15-18
By: Noah Feldman
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The Lost Founding Father
- John Quincy Adams and the Transformation of American Politics
- By: William J. Cooper
- Narrated by: Richard Poe
- Length: 16 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 48
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 45
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 44
Why has John Quincy Adams been largely written out of American history when he is, in fact, our lost Founding Father? Overshadowed by both his brilliant father and the brash and bold Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams has long been dismissed as hyper-intellectual. Viciously assailed by Jackson and his populist mobs for being both slippery and effete, Adams nevertheless recovered from the malodorous 1828 presidential election to lead the nation as a lonely Massachusetts congressman in the fight against slavery.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Edifying
- By Jean on 01-15-18
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Andrew Jackson, Southerner
- By: Mark R. Cheathem
- Narrated by: Trevor Thompson
- Length: 9 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 30
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 28
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 28
Many Americans view Andrew Jackson as a frontiersman who fought duels, killed Indians, and stole another man's wife. Historians have traditionally presented Jackson as a man who struggled to overcome the obstacles of his backwoods upbringing and helped create a more democratic United States. In his compelling new biography of Jackson, Mark R. Cheathem argues for a reassessment of these long-held views, suggesting that in fact "Old Hickory" lived as an elite southern gentleman.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Lesser Work than HW Brands or John Meacham's books
- By Jose on 05-10-17
By: Mark R. Cheathem
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Friends Divided
- John Adams and Thomas Jefferson
- By: Gordon S. Wood
- Narrated by: James Lurie
- Length: 17 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 447
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 399
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 397
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams could scarcely have come from more different worlds or been more different in temperament. Jefferson, the optimist with enough faith in the innate goodness of his fellow man to be democracy's champion, was an aristocratic Southern slave owner while Adams, the overachiever from New England's rising middling classes, painfully aware he was no aristocrat, was a skeptic about popular rule and a defender of a more elitist view of government.
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5 out of 5 stars
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A Great Read
- By Jean on 12-22-17
By: Gordon S. Wood
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The Supreme Court
- The Personalities and Rivalries That Defined America
- By: Jeffrey Rosen
- Narrated by: Alan Sklar
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 190
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 93
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Story4 out of 5 stars 94
A leading Supreme Court expert recounts the personal and philosophical rivalries that forged our nation's highest court and continue to shape our daily lives. The Supreme Court is the most mysterious branch of government, and yet the Court is at root a human institution, made up of very bright people with very strong egos, for whom political and judicial conflicts often become personal.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Overruled!
- By Stephen McLeod on 08-23-08
By: Jeffrey Rosen
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American Sphinx
- The Character of Thomas Jefferson
- By: Joseph J. Ellis
- Narrated by: Susan O'Malley
- Length: 15 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 88
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 78
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 78
For a man who insisted that life on the public stage was not what he had in mind, Thomas Jefferson certainly spent a great deal of time in the spotlight. Historian Joseph J. Ellis sifts the facts shrewdly from the legends and the rumors, treading a path between vilification and hero worship in order to formulate a plausible portrait of the man who still today "hover[s] over the political scene like one of those dirigibles cruising above a crowded football stadium, flashing words of inspiration to both teams".
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3 out of 5 stars
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So: they did the DNA and … time to change appendix
- By Jamanosa on 11-03-21
By: Joseph J. Ellis
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Thomas Jefferson
- A Biography of Spirit and Flesh
- By: Thomas S. Kidd
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 11 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 65
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 58
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 58
Thomas Jefferson was arguably the most brilliant and inspiring political writer in American history. But the ethical realities of his personal life and political career did not live up to his soaring rhetoric. Indeed, three tensions defined Jefferson’s moral life: democracy versus slavery, republican virtue versus dissolute consumption, and veneration for Jesus versus skepticism about Christianity. In this book, Thomas S. Kidd tells the story of Jefferson’s ethical life through the lens of these tensions.
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3 out of 5 stars
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This version is the standard non in depth bio
- By Fred F on 03-28-24
By: Thomas S. Kidd
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The Problem of Democracy
- The Presidents Adams Confront the Cult of Personality
- By: Nancy Isenberg, Andrew Burstein
- Narrated by: Robert Petkoff
- Length: 22 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 46
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 42
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 42
John and John Quincy Adams: rogue intellectuals, unsparing truth-tellers, too uncensored for their own political good. They held that political participation demanded moral courage. They did not seek popularity (it showed). They lamented the fact that hero worship in America substituted idolatry for results; and they made it clear that they were talking about Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson. When John Adams succeeded George Washington as President, his son had already followed him into public service and was stationed in Europe as a diplomat.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Very insightful and rewarding adding understanding
- By William on 05-12-19
By: Nancy Isenberg, and others
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A Magnificent Catastrophe
- The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America's First Presidential Campaign
- By: Edward J. Larson
- Narrated by: John Dossett
- Length: 6 hrs
- Abridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 60
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 46
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Story4 out of 5 stars 46
A Magnificent Catastrophe tells the story of the most perverse, bizarre, nail-biting, and influential election battle ever in U.S. history: America's first true presidential campaign, and a contest so important to the future of the country that Jefferson referred to it as "the second American Revolution" because the outcome resolved so much unfinished business about just what kind of government we would have. This election in many ways determined just how democratic a country we would be.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Get this if you have to use it for a class!!!
- By Gabriel on 03-03-17
By: Edward J. Larson
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Mr. Jefferson's Hammer
- William Henry Harrison and the Origins of American Indian Policy
- By: Robert M. Owens
- Narrated by: Doug McDonald
- Length: 11 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 158
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 135
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Story4 out of 5 stars 133
Often remembered as the president who died shortly after taking office, William Henry Harrison remains misunderstood by most Americans. Before becoming the ninth president of the United States in 1841, Harrison was instrumental in shaping the early years of westward expansion. Robert M. Owens now explores that era through the lens of Harrison’s career, providing a new synthesis of his role in the political development of Indiana Territory and in shaping Indian policy in the Old Northwest.
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5 out of 5 stars
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Title = Truth in Advertising
- By William Jenks on 06-18-19
By: Robert M. Owens
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The War Before the War
- Fugitive Slaves and the Struggle for America's Soul from the Revolution to the Civil War
- By: Andrew Delbanco
- Narrated by: Ari Fliakos
- Length: 13 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 201
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 177
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Story5 out of 5 stars 177
For decades after its founding, America was really two nations—one slave, one free. There were many reasons why this composite nation ultimately broke apart, but the fact that enslaved black people repeatedly risked their lives to flee their masters in the South in search of freedom in the North proved that the "united" states was actually a lie. Fugitive slaves exposed the contradiction between the myth that slavery was a benign institution and the reality that a nation based on the principle of human equality was in fact a prison-house in which millions of Americans had no rights.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Great promise greater disappointment
- By Amazon Customer on 12-09-18
By: Andrew Delbanco