The Interbellum Constitution

A synthesis of legal, political, and social history to show how the post-founding generations were forced to rethink and substantially revise the U.S. constitutional vision
 
Between 1815 and 1861 American constitutional law and politics underwent a profound transformation. A foundational period of both constitutional crisis and creativity, these decades were the era of the Interbellum Constitution.
 
The Interbellum Constitution was a set of widely shared legal and political principles, combined with a thoroughgoing commitment to investing meaning in those principles through debate. The shared principles were commerce, concurrent power, and jurisdictional multiplicity. Each of these issues concerned what we now call “federalism,” meaning 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, plural, in the early nineteenth century than today’s constitutional debates admit.
 
As LaCroix shows, this period was a time 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 to synthesize the legal, political, and social history of the early nineteenth century to show how deeply these constitutional questions dominated the discourse of the time.