Going Big by Going Small: Alison LaCroix’s The Interbellum Constitution

Guest Blogger

For the Balkinization Symposium on Alison L. LaCroix, The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms (Yale University Press, 2024).

Anne Twitty

Alison LaCroix’s The Interbellum Constitution deftly weaves together an enormous range of constitutional debates in the four and a half decades between the end of the War of 1812 and the American Civil War. This so-called interbellum era has often been framed as a period of constitutional stasis, a lull between the watershed events of the Revolution and Reconstruction during which disputants worked narrowly within the confines laid out for them by the Founders. But LaCroix amply demonstrates the vibrancy and creativity of the era’s constitutional debates, and, in so doing, reframes the period as central for understanding how and why our constitutional order developed as it did. She likewise provides an overarching framework for understanding the relationships between seemingly disparate issues of commerce, migration, and slavery. This is a book about the connective tissue that links Gibbons v. Ogden to Cherokee Nation v. Georgia to the enforcement of laws like the South Carolina Seaman Acts, the Tariff of 1828, and the Fugitive Slave provision of the Compromise of 1850. It is a remarkable achievement, a book as analytically powerful as it is beautifully written. Raising questions of the first significance and masterfully charting a course through a thicket of legal developments, it is sure to be essential reading for understanding this pivotal era for years to come.

For LaCroix, the key to understanding how the interbellum era’s vast array of constitutional debates hung together is appreciating that they were all, in some way, about how the “pieces of the many governments of the United States” fit together. That might seem like a familiar claim—after all, we’ve long been accustomed to seeing this period as uniquely obsessed with what we call federalism, or the relationship between the state and federal government. But interbellum Americans, LaCroix shows us, didn’t see state and federal entities as the only—or even maybe the primary—actors. They had much more expansive, and often conflicting understandings of who and what might be involved in properly apportioning power. Their “federalisms,” plural, described a world of legal experience and a set of ideas that has been largely lost to us. LaCroix has made them visible.

Scholars in a variety of disciplines and subfields are going to find something in this ambitious work that speaks to them. But in the limited space I have, I want to highlight what, to my mind, are two particular strengths in a book filled with them.

First, while The Interbellum Constitution takes the world of the courts very seriously, the book is so much richer and broader than the usual tour of the era’s constitutional history. This is no case-by-case account of the Marshall and Taney Court’s greatest hits, nor is the action confined to Washington, D.C.

Instead of focusing exclusively on the usual suspects in the usual places, LaCroix has presented us with a much wider array of constitutional disputants across far more of the country. Judges, to be sure, have an important role to play in LaCroix’s narrative, but so too do the men who argued before them. Beyond the confines of the courts, moreover, we also hear from privileged daughters of South Carolina’s leading families, Cherokee political leaders, western newspaper editors, formerly enslaved men, and all their various interlocutors. We find these actors arguing about a huge variety of issues, across much of the young republic, inside and outside the courtroom. As LaCroix demonstrates, constitutional argumentation wasn’t merely the province of enrobed elites. It was happening in so many more spaces, and among a much bigger swath of the population, than we’ve usually been led to believe.

Nor was all this additional constitutional thought somehow siloed. The broader cast of characters LaCroix introduces us to influenced the Supreme Court in a whole host of ways. They publicly broadcast their ideas in legal arguments they made in a variety of courtrooms and in newspapers, pamphlets, and speeches. They also maintained private networks of influence. After all, they were embedded in families and communities, and enjoyed connections to many others, including many in high places.

As a historian of the era, LaCroix’s portrait of an expansive, multivocal constitutional discourse routinely focused on the division of governmental power between various entities, strikes me as exactly right.

Indeed, for me, The Interbellum Constitution helped articulate lurking, but essential dynamics at play in some of my own recent work. Specifically, it called to mind some of the undercurrents in my 2021 essay in Jeff Pasley and John Craig Hammond’s A Firebell in the Past. There, I explored the efforts of Winny, one of Missouri’s many freedom suit plaintiffs, to pursue her cause amidst the so-called Missouri Crisis, the debate over whether Missouri would enter the union as a “slave state” or a “free state” that emerged when Congressman James A. Tallmadge presented two amendments to a bill authorizing Missouri statehood in 1819.

The essay was largely focused on how a particular enslaved woman would have understood and experienced the Missouri Crisis, but I now think many of the raw ingredients of this piece could be refashioned into a kind of lost, tenth chapter of The Interbellum Constitution.

Let me explain. Like so many of the controversies LaCroix examines, the Missouri Crisis has generally been framed as a national controversy, one that primarily played out in Washington, D.C. But again, as in LaCroix’s work, the action didn’t merely take place at the highest levels of government. In addition to the story of congressional battles over Missouri statehood, there was also, I argued, an intensely local story to be told. Missourians, like their elite counterparts in the nation’s capital, engaged in vibrant constitutional debates about Congress’s attempts to fix conditions on their admission to the Union. They had it out in town resolutions, petitions, and, most especially, in the pages of the state’s newspapers. And these debates even spilled over into the formal judicial process as grand juries were convened in several Missouri counties to declare their sentiments on the Tallmadge Amendments. (Although my own piece didn’t dwell much on the substance of these constitutional arguments, moreover, there were broad similarities with the kinds of arguments LaCroix’s actors make. Indeed, during the Crisis, as in The Interbellum Constitution, Missourian’s debates centered on the meaning of the American Revolution, the nature of the Union, and the proper relationship between various entities, in this case the federal government and the territories.)

There are other parallels as well. One of the key figures in the Missouri Crisis, Nathaniel Beverly Tucker, bears a remarkable resemblance to some of LaCroix’s most prominent protagonists. Consider, for instance, some of the similarities between Tucker and William Johnson, a key figure in The Interbellum Constitution. Although he certainly never rose to the heights of the United States Supreme Court like Johnson, Tucker was also a judge, in his case, of the St. Louis circuit court. And like Johnson, Tucker’s private advocacy in the local press helped shape the constitutional arguments around him during a particularly heated controversy: Johnson, who initially wrote without attribution, attacked the hysterical response to the alleged Denmark Vesey slave revolt conspiracy, while Tucker, who wrote pseudonymously and was never publicly exposed, became the most prolific and voluminous local commenter on the Missouri Crisis. In addition to Johnson, however, Tucker also calls to mind Maria Henrietta Pinckney, another of LaCroix’s central actors. Specifically, like Pinckney, Tucker too had a famous family: his father, St. George Tucker, who plays a significant role in an early chapter of LaCroix’s book, was a famed jurist and author of the first American edition of Blackstone’s Commentaries; his stepbrother was the brilliant, eccentric John Randolph, who then served in the United States House of Representatives. These well-known figures no doubt shaped and were shaped by Tucker in much the same way that, as LaCroix shows, Pickney’s family both influenced and were influenced by her.

With The Interbellum Constitution, then, LaCroix has helped me understand my own work in a new light, as an episode, like the many she narrates, that reveals just how broad and vibrant the constitutional culture of the era truly was. I expect that, if we only look, we might start reinterpreting a whole host of other early national and antebellum controversies in the same vein.

LaCroix, however, doesn’t merely draw our attention to the fact that so much constitutional discourse took place outside of the halls of power, among those often far removed from Washington, D.C. She also demonstrates the extent to which local concerns often animated the conversations.

Now, to be sure, “local” can occasionally be a slippery term in The Interbellum Constitution. Sometimes it seems to relate to a much more narrow, much more limited sphere than the state or the region. LaCroix’s actors seem, for instance, to have often employed the term pejoratively as a way of exposing the supposed parochialism or private nature of an issue. In other instances, however, local seems to be used as a stand in or synonym for state or region. When, in the interbellum era, for example, slavery was described as a “local” institution, it seems plain that those who used this expression thought of slavery as instantiated and protected by state law and driven by regional interests.

If LaCroix invokes “local” in a variety of ways, however, it seems clear that the first sense of the term, the one in which “local” denotes something truly immediate, plays an especially outsized role in shaping her narrative.

Afterall, throughout The Interbellum Constitution, LaCroix is painstakingly situating us, tracking the movements of various figures across the American landscape, and, through architectural history, getting us to imagine the very rooms in which arguments were produced. Indeed, in some ways what she’s written is a kind of spatial history of constitutional debate.

Consider, for instance, how LaCroix frames the origins of the debate over states’ rights and southern nullification in South Carolina in the 1820s. In her telling, the South Carolinians’ Seaman Acts, which were first adopted in Charleston in 1822 and required free Black sailors to be housed in the city’s jails when their vessels made landfall in particular jurisdictions, were central. But crucially, she points out, they were not motivated by some general, abstract fear of slave revolt but instead by what white Charlestonians thought was a very real slave revolt fomented by a very real man in their own city named Gabriel.

LaCroix’s account of northern nullification and defiance of the Fugitive Slave Act is similar. The Wisconsinites who broke accused runaway Joshua Glover out of a Milwaukee jail in 1854, and the constitutional arguments that grew out of their efforts, she insists, were not compelled by some general, abstract hatred of slavery. On the contrary, in LaCroix’s telling, white actors were moved first and foremost by the idea that they were personally being made a party to the institution. Glover’s Black rescuers, meanwhile, were driven to protect an actual person who lived in their actual community from being sent back to a Missouri plantation to live as a slave. Glover was not some symbol, he was their friend and neighbor.

In short, LaCroix shows us, much of the interbellum era’s constitutional discourse was decidedly local. It emerged from immediate concerns in very particular places, it reflected the very particular history of those places, and it was understood through that lens.

The Interbellum Constitution is a big book, in both senses of the word. But certainly some of its success lies in going small. By drawing our attention to lesser-known disputants and the local concerns that motivated them, LaCroix gives us an exciting new portrait of American constitutional debates between the War of 1812 and the Civil War. It is testament to the extraordinary accomplishment of the book that such a sweeping account of lofty debates and principles can, at the same time, seem so intimate. This is constitutional history of the rarest kind, where inert doctrine is brought to life by people, experiences, and locations. And as many scholars are likely to take inspiration from this book’s extraordinary style and construction as its pathbreaking arguments.

Anne Twitty is an Associate Professor (Teaching) of History at Stanford University. You can reach her by e-mail at atwitty@stanford.edu.