The Interbellum Constitution is Alison LaCroix’s sprawling account of the development of the constitutional law of American federalism in the period between the War of 1812 and the Civil War. LaCroix engages what she characterizes as “a strange paradox” that this time “is held to have been bereft of constitutional creativity or intellectual development” even though the Supreme Court through much of the period was presided over by Chief Justice John Marshall and produced enduring landmarks of constitutional law, most notably on matters of federalism (p. 15). She takes direct aim at Yale constitutional historian Bruce Ackerman, who omits the interbellum period from his account of constitutional moments that shaped and reshaped American society. By contrast, LaCroix characterizes the interbellum as an “immensely creative and conflict-filled period” in which “constitutional thought did not reside in constitutional amendments” but rather in “judicial decisions; opinions of attorneys general; lawyers’ arguments in federal, state, county and city courtrooms; the letters of state-crafters; and political speeches and essays” (p. 26). The constitutional developments of this sometimes overlooked period are central to the establishment of the United States as a unified economic force. McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) took a broad view of Congress’s power, approving the establishment of the Second Bank of the United States and immunizing it from state taxation, and Gibbons v. Ogden (1824) affirmed Congress’s power to regulate interstate navigation to the exclusion of conflicting state law. Through accounts of these decisions and more, LaCroix shows how the early Court mapped out the relationship between federal power to regulate commerce and traditional state power to address health, safety, and welfare, even when those matters touched on subjects affecting interstate commerce. Echoes of these developments reverberate today in continuing struggles between state and federal authorities over economic and social regulation.

LaCroix’s greatest contributions lie not in her rich and insightful accounts of Supreme Court and other judicial decisions (and their backgrounds) but in less traditional sources including political and legal debates and the machinations of federal, state, and tribal authorities aiming to preserve and expand their domains of authority, including the reach of Southern slave power through the Constitution’s purposeful malapportionment. LaCroix reveals the development of interbellum federalism understandings through the lives of important public figures of the period. Enter advocate for federal power William Wirt, prosecutor in the treason trial of Aaron Burr and “the era’s leading man of law and letters” (p. 23). Wirt served as attorney general under Presidents James Monroe and John Quincy Adams and, in that and other public and private pursuits, played a major role in the development of the law of federal, state, and tribal power, notably arguing three of the Marshall Court’s most important decisions, McCulloch, Gibbons, and Worcester v. Georgia (1832), which established a measure of tribal sovereignty that Georgia had violated by requiring a state license for a non–Indian person to enter Native lands. As counterpoint to Wirt we have Marie Henrietta Pinckney, who, as a daughter of a prominent South Carolina revolutionary family, played an outsized role in the development of state’s rights ideology and the nullification movement among Southern states. As a woman of the era, it was impossible for Pinckney to assume an official role in federal or state government or political affairs, but her influence was felt nonetheless through her writing, most notably a short treatise oddly titled The Quintessence of Long Speeches, Arranged as a Political Catechism (1830), explaining her conversion to a “nullifier” (p. 219).

In addition to the economic-focused controversies of the interbellum period that are of greatest salience to contemporary business interests, LaCroix provides fascinating accounts of numerous constitutional federalism controversies, including Georgia’s efforts to assert authority over the lands of the Cherokee Nation in the years just before the expulsion of the tribe by the federal government as well as the adoption of nullification by anti-slavery advocates after the passage of the draconian 1850 federal Fugitive Slave Act. Although sometimes the level of detail seems overwhelming, after finishing this excellent volume, the reader feels as if they had lived through a period of constitutional turmoil not completely dissimilar to our own, centering on the distribution of power to regulate the national and local economies.