a section on Political Economics and Statistics. He as well engaged in a debate, as antagonist of Malthusian population theory with proponent Alexander Hill Everett. History of the United States In 1856, Tucker completed his four-volume History of the United States, From Their Colonization to the End of the 26th Congress in 1841. Tucker had sprightly begun his work on this production in 1850, at the age of 75. Robley Dunglison commented as follows on the work: "To aid him in the execution of his work, as [Tucker] himself remarks, it had been his good fortune to have a personal knowledge of many, who bore a conspicuous part in the Revolution, and of nearly all those who were the principal actors in the political dramas which succeeded. The history extends to the elevation of General William Henry Harrison to the Presidency in 1841, which is as far as Tucker thought he could prudently go." The work includes a brief review of slavery, in which Tucker took issue with Jefferson's decades-old view in his Notes on the State of Virginia (1781), that slavery still had a degenerative effect upon slaveholders. According to Tucker, previews of the work by his colleagues brought commendation, the reception of the publisher was encouraging, and payment advances were arranged with a bank. Then came the bank failures and loss of credit from the Panic of 1857, and printing was halted. Tucker's final comment on the situation was an optimistic one, for the future of the economy and for his authorship. Final years Though Tucker may have displayed in his old age "a spirit of pugnacity becoming earlier years," as one critic claimed, such a nature was not in evidence with his family. He corresponded positively and frequently with his children and vacationed with them in the summers in Virginia and New York. He appears to have been consistent in his devotion to his family, which was returned by them in kind. His exchanges with them were replete with a concern for their financial well-being. Musing on his own past errors, he told them that "except for the loss of friends, a want of prudence in money matters has contributed nine-tenths of the pain and vexation of [my] life." Even after the death of his wife Louisa in 1858, Tucker's vitality persisted and, not long before the American Civil War began, in January 1861 he journeyed south