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

What was the nature of the American union between 1815 and 1861? Between the Founding and the Civil War, U.S. constitutional law and politics underwent a profound transformation. The Interbellum Constitution was a set of widely shared legal and political principles—commerce, concurrent power, and jurisdictional multiplicity—that concerned what we now call “federalism.” Yet there existed many more federalisms in the early nineteenth century than today’s constitutional debates admit. It was a period of intense rethinking of the very basis of the U.S. national model—a problem debated everywhere, from newspapers and statehouses to local pubs and pulpits, ultimately leading both to civil war and to a new constitutional vision. We must upend the conventional story of the period as a hiatus between the “real” constitutional moments of the Founding and Reconstruction.

Alison L. LaCroix is the Robert Newton Reid Professor of Law, Associate Member of the Department of History.

This Maurice and Muriel Fulton Lecture was delivered on May 7, 2024.