Statesmanship in American History

This lecture deals with what the term statesmanship means and how it differs from leadership. Is statecraft a skill that can be learned, or does it require a temperament? To what sources can we point for contrasting views of statesmanship? What distinguishes the statecraft of founding, preservation, and refounding?
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The eighteenth century followed the Enlightenment’s move toward reason in politics by developing new concepts of statesmanship. There was a very delicate transition to be managed between the traditional statesmanship of the Renaissance and the absolute monarchies of the seventeenth century on the one hand, and the new democratic republics of the American and French Revolutions. George Washington is a particular example of a republican statesmanship (and all the more important for how so many other attempts at crafting a revolutionary or republican statesmanship failed) and of the statesmanship of founding.
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This lecture examines excerpts from The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass in addition to landmark speeches in which Douglass considered whether the Constitution of the United States, and the union more generally, were pro-slavery or anti-slavery in origin and essence.
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This lecture examines excerpts from The Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt and selected essays from Roosevelt’s The Strenuous Life. The purpose is to consider the roles character, self-discipline, moral decency, and grit play in the formation and education of a young statesman.
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Woodrow Wilson, the only political science professor to be president of the United States, thought deeply and published widely as a scholar of the American political order and its history. As a teacher, scholar, and president of Princeton University, Wilson emerged as a leading Progressive thinker, advancing a reinterpretation of the American constitutional order as an evolving, organic charter for a changing country. How Wilson thought about the Constitution, and about the role of the presidency in its adaptation, will be the focus of this lecture.
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