Although he has been remembered best in American history as a judge and as a legal commentator, St. George Tucker has been said to rival Thomas Jefferson in versatility. Tucker's public life, his published works, and his private papers reveal his impressive accomplishments as professor, Revolutionary War soldier and blockade runner, distinguished jurist, inventor, poet, playwright, essayist, political economist, musician, and educational theorist. Few of Tucker's poems were published during his lifetime, but his manuscript papers contain more than 200 poems, three full-length plays, and about thirty Addisonian essays. His A Dissertation on Slavery (1796) makes Tucker the most significant writer against slavery in the 1790s, and his comments in his edition of Blackstone's Commentaries (1803) are the first legal commentaries on the United States Constitution to appear in this country. In his later essays this thoroughgoing Jeffersonian republican felt a mission to warn Americans of the dangers of losing their...