They see his position as a "combination of a concern with Lockean natural rights, freedom, and limited government along with a classical interest in strong citizen participation in rule to prevent concentrated power and wealth, political corruption, and financial manipulation.

Taylor was a close friend of Thomas Jefferson, and, as member of the House of Delegates, was one of the men who offered the Virginia Resolves to that body.

Taylor was a prolific political writer, and was the author of "An Inquiry into the Principles and Policy of the Government of the United States," 1814; "Construction Construed and the Constitution Vindicated."

"[5] The historian Clyde N. Wilson describes Taylor as "the systematic philosopher of Jeffersonian democracy"[6] and as "representing 'both a conservative allegiance to local community and inherited ways and a radical-populist suspicion of capitalism, 'progress,' government and routine logrolling politics.

'"[7] According to historian Adam L. Tate, Taylor was "an agrarian who 'viewed happiness as possession of family, farm, and leisure,' had no great love for organized religion, social hierarchy, and other such traditional institutions.

'"[9] Taylor's solution to the effects of factionalism was to "remove the base from under the stock jobbers, the banks, the paper money party, the tariff-supported manufacturers, and so on; destroy the system of patronage by which the executive has corrupted the legislature; bring down the usurped authority of the Supreme Court.

"[8] Taylor feared that widespread emancipation would ultimately and invariably lead to the horrific bloodshed witnessed in the French colony of Saint-Domingue in 1791, the site of the greatest of all successful slave insurrections, the Haitian Revolution.

Taylor argued that "[s]laves are docile, useful and happy, if they are well managed," that "[t]he individual is restrained by his property in the slave, and susceptible of humanity, and that "[r]eligion assails him [the slaveholder] both with her blandishments and terrors.

[21] "Like his radical bourgeois counterparts in England, Taylor would not concede that great extremes of wealth and poverty were natural outcomes of differences in talent; on the contrary they were invariably the result of extra-economic coercion and deceit.

"[23] Tate (2011) undertakes a literary criticism of Taylor's book New Views of the Constitution of the United States, arguing it is structured as a forensic historiography modeled on the techniques of 18th-century whig lawyers.

Taylor believed that evidence from American history gave proof of state sovereignty within the union, against the arguments of nationalists such as Chief Justice John Marshall.

[24] Taylor's primary plantation estate, Hazelwood, was located three miles from Port Royal, Virginia and is on the National Register of Historic Places.

From Reprints of Legal Classics (1) Little-known today, Taylor's work is of great significance in the political and intellectual history of the South and is essential for understanding the constitutional theories that Southerners asserted to justify secession in 1861.

Construction Construed and Constitutions Vindicated was Taylor's response to a series of post-War of 1812 developments including John Marshall's Supreme Court decision in McCulloch v. Maryland, the widespread issuance of paper money by banks, proposals for a protective tariff, and the attempt to bar slavery from Missouri.

He saw them as the attempt of an "artificial capitalist sect" to corrupt the virtue of the American people and upset the proper constitutional balance between state and federal authority in favor of a centralized national government.