The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms

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. These decades of the Interbellum Constitution were a foundational period of both constitutional crisis and creativity.

The Interbellum Constitution was a set of widely shared legal and political principles, combined wit...