Evils of Necessity

Robert Goodloe Harper (1765-1825), a prominent attorney and U.S. Congressman from S. Carolina and Maryland, was one of the most influential Federalists of the early national period. The South’s leading proponent of the Jay Treaty, a framer of the Sedition Act, the powerful chairman of the House Ways and Means Comm., a dogged supporter of Aaron Burr, an outspoken counsel for John Pickering and Samuel Chase, and two-time failed V.P. candidate, Harper is traditionally remembered as an extreme example of unthinking, reactionary conservatism in an era of intense partisanship and bitter sectional conflict. This revisionist account reinterprets Harper’s political philosophy in light of his personal struggle with the moral dilemma of slavery.