Gordon Lloyd

Where and when
The Great Difficulty of Framing: Slavery and the Constitutional Convention
Summary: When James Madison’s Debates at the Federal Convention of 1787 became available to the public in the 1840s, it launched a very contentious debate. Was the Constitution intended to put slavery on the path to extinction, or to preserve a slaveholders’ Union? Professor Lloyd offers insights into how to approach that question through the text of his recently published version of Madison’s Debates.
Gordon Lloyd is a Senior Fellow at the Ashbrook Center. Profressor Lloyd is also the author and editor of a series of online exhibits on the American Founding hosted by the Ashbrook Center’s website, TeachingAmericanHistory.org. These online exhibits focus on the Constitutional Convention, the Federalist-Antifederalist Debate, the Ratification of the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.
Drawing from over fifty years of scholarship and teaching, Professor Lloyd has compiled within these online exhibits a wide range of primary and secondary sources from the American Founding. In addition, he has created or overseen the development of resources designed to help introduce interested teachers, students, and citizens to the American Founding, and to support scholars in their research and teaching about these topics.
Professor Lloyd earned his bachelor’s degree in economics and political science at McGill University. He completed all coursework toward a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago before receiving his master’s and Ph.D. degrees in government at Claremont Graduate School. The coauthor of three books on the American founding and sole author of a book on the political economy of the New Deal, he also has numerous articles, reviews, and opinion-editorials to his credit. His latest coauthored books are The Two Narratives of Political Economy (2010) and The New Deal and Modern American Conservatism: A Defining Rivalry (2013). In 2014, Lloyd published a new edition of Madison’s coverage of the Debates of the Constitutional Convention. He has received many teaching, scholarly, and leadership awards including admission to Phi Beta Kappa and the Howard White Award for Teaching Excellence at Pepperdine University. He currently serves on the National Advisory Council for the Walter and Leonore Annenberg Presidential Learning Center through the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation.