For the Balkinization Symposium on Alison L. LaCroix, The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms (Yale University Press, 2024).
Rachel A. Shelden
The
standard story of the period stretching from the 1810s to 1861 is one of
impending doom. When historians and legal scholars consider these years, they
tend to work from the end point—from a Constitution that could not withstand
the increasing political fractures over slavery, eventually leading to the
breakup of the union. It is undeniably difficult to separate the antebellum period
from the civil war that followed as even a cursory survey of book titles and
subtitles on the period indicates. (I am as guilty as anyone.