While many of Americas founders are justifiably famous, others have received too little attention. St. George Tucker is one.

Born July 10, 1752, in Bermuda, Tucker was a militia colonel in the American Revolution, who even wrote Liberty: a Poem, on the Independence of America that George Washington said was equal to a reinforcement of 10,000 disciplined troops. Afterward, his service included his appointment to the 1786 Annapolis Convention that led to the Constitutional Convention, and his opposition, with Patrick Henry and George Mason, to adopting the Constitution in the absence of a bill of rights.

Tuckers greatest service to posterity, however, involved the law. Not only was he a law professor and judge on three different Virginia courts, historian Clyde Wilson noted that,

St. George Tuckers View of the Constitution of the United States was the first extended, systematic commentary on the Constitution after it had been ratified by the people of the several states and amended by the Bill of Rights. Published in 1803 by a distinguished patriot and jurist, it was for much of the first half of the nineteenth century an important handbook for American law students, lawyers, judges, and statesmen.

David Kopel wrote, St. George Tucker is perhaps the preeminent source of the original public meaning of the Constitution. His 5-volume American edition of Blackstones Commentaries was by far the leading legal treatise in the Early Republic.

Tom DiLorenzo summarized it as laying out the Jeffersonian interpretation of the Constitution, which was replaced by the centralizing, big governmentinterpretation after 1865. The fact that the Supreme Court has cited Tucker 40 times illustrates the importance of his work.

Today, with St. George Tuckers commitment to limited government, states rights, and the judiciarys role of preventing government oppression a too-dim memory, his insights into liberty and the original understanding of government under our Constitution are worth revisiting.

St. George Tucker searched for the criterion that distinguishes laws from dictates, freedom from servitude, rightful government from usurpation.

And Clyde Wilson suggests that his answer is best summarized in his statement that, It is the due [external] restraint and not the moderation of rulers that constitutes a state of liberty.

Given that today, the federal power to oppress has clearly increased at the expense of Constitutional restraints, we should give Tuckers understanding as much serious thought now as our forefathers did when our great experiment in liberty began.

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39 Quotes on Liberty, Power, and the Constitution From America's 'Preeminent' Originalist | Gary M. Galles - Foundation for Economic Education