Alison L. LaCroix, University of Chicago Law School, has published The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms in the Yale Law Library Series in Legal History and Reference at the Yale University Press:
Here are some endorsements:Between 1815 and 1861, American constitutional law and politics underwent a profound transformation. These decades of the Interbellum Constitution were a foundational period of both constitutional crisis and creativity.
The Interbellum Constitution was a set of widely shared legal and political principles, combined with a thoroughgoing commitment to investing those principles with meaning through debate. Each of these shared principles—commerce, concurrent power, and jurisdictional multiplicity—concerned what we now call “federalism,” meaning that they pertain to the relationships among multiple levels of government with varying degrees of autonomy. Alison L. LaCroix argues, however, that there existed many more federalisms in the early nineteenth century than today’s constitutional debates admit.
As LaCroix shows, this was a period of intense rethinking of the very basis of the U.S. national model—a problem debated everywhere, from newspapers and statehouses to local pubs and pulpits, ultimately leading both to civil war and to a new, more unified constitutional vision. This book is the first that synthesizes the legal, political, and social history of the early nineteenth century to show how deeply these constitutional questions dominated the discourse of the time.
“The Interbellum Constitution reminds us of the important insights that have helped transform the historiography of the early American Republic, of slavery, and of relations between European settlers and Indigenous Peoples. . . . By mining the archive for information, [LaCroix] expands our understanding of the range of ideas about union, federalism, and sovereignty.”—Annette Gordon Reed, University of Chicago Law Review
“No scholar is better equipped to challenge our understanding of the history of federalism than Alison LaCroix. In this pioneering study, she recovers the spirited, contingent, decades-long argument that shaped an era that most constitutional historians have dismissed as uneventful. Essential reading.”—Jill Lepore, author of These Truths: A History of the United States
“Alison LaCroix’s invaluable book is a fount of information and brilliant insights about a grievously neglected period of American constitutional development. It is often gripping in the stories it relates. This is truly essential reading.”—Sanford Levinson, author of An Argument Open to All: Reading The Federalist in the 21st Century
“A brilliant, alternately rollicking and harrowing account of the law in action in the nineteenth-century United States. Prodigiously researched and bristling with startling revisionist arguments, this book is far and away the best account of the roiling world of American federalism in the crucial decades between the War of 1812 and the Civil War. The Interbellum Constitution carries urgent lessons for the emerging federal-state battles of our times.”—John Fabian Witt, author of American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to COVID
Professor LaCroix discusses her book in a virtual session sponsored by the Supreme Court Historical Society.
--Dan Ernst
