Document Type
Blog Post
Publication Date
8-2-2024
Abstract
For the Balkinization Symposium on Alison L. LaCroix, The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms (Yale University Press, 2024).
Alison LaCroix’s insightful new book, The Interbellum Constitution, builds on an often-overlooked fact: that Americans living before the Civil War did not know they were part of an “antebellum” period. That oversight has contributed to a conventional narrative of constitutional history and doctrine during the first half of the nineteenth-century that tends to read that history and doctrine backwards through the lens of a war that contemporaries did not know would define them. From this perspective, American constitutional history between 1815 and 1861 (the period between the end of the War of 1812 and the start of the Civil War and that gives rise to the title of LaCroix’s book) is often depicted as something of an inconsequential lull between the constitutionally significant events of the framing of the Constitution and Reconstruction in the aftermath of the Civil War. Considered “the flyover country of constitutional history,” events during this period have often been neglected and misunderstood, overshadowed by what preceded and followed them.
Instead, LaCroix’s book demonstrates the important and creative developments in constitutional thought, argument and practice during the period of the Interbellum Constitution. In doing so she not only upends much received wisdom about the constitutional history and doctrine of the period, but identifies the existence of multiple “federalisms” that emerged as Americans wrestled with understanding the nature of the Union and interpreting the constitutional framework established by the Constitution. One great achievement of LaCroix’s book is that it reclaims the legal and political debates, discussions, and struggles of this interbellum period as an important part of the narrative of American constitutional thought.
Publication Title
Balkinization
DOI
https://perma.cc/L2HK-PVSP
Keywords
The Interbellum Constitution, American Constitutional History
Recommended Citation
Christian G. Fritz,
The Complexity of American Federalism,
Balkinization
(2024).
Available at:
https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/law_facultyscholarship/951
