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.