-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Aaron Hall, On Constitutional Romance and Federalisms Long Forgotten: A Review Essay, American Journal of Legal History, Volume 64, Issue 2, June 2024, Pages 218–235, https://doi.org/10.1093/ajlh/njae011
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
When former Attorney General William Wirt addressed the rising generation at Rutgers College’s 1830 commencement ceremony, he turned to common themes of constitutional duty and danger. Observing ‘collisions between the Federal and State authorities’, the orator fretted that the national fathers’ ‘children will, in their wantonness, pull down the noble edifice which it cost them so much pains and anxiety to build up for our happiness’. The audience must take up the mantle of constitutional preservation, ‘to protect and defend your institutions, and hand them down unimpaired, to your posterity’. But how? An indispensable step was to learn and obey constitutional truths, available in the ‘justly celebrated essays of the Federalist’ along with the ‘constitutional opinions of Chief Justice Marshall’. The Constitution and Union depended on reverence, education, and compliance.1
The recent publication of two remarkable books of constitutional history summon attention to Wirt’s concerns about American constitutionalism. Alison LaCroix quotes the oration in introducing The Interbellum Constitution, a revelatory tour of the ghosts of federalisms past.2 LaCroix explores what the constitutional Union could mean to jurists like Wirt and their communities in debates over commerce, concurrent power, and jurisdictional multiplicity between 1815 and 1861. Aziz Rana’s monumental The Constitutional Bind chronicles the Constitution’s place in American political life, focusing on veneration and its antipode, discontent.3 Rana tells a twentieth-century story, but Wirt’s reverent pleas for preservation connect directly to Rana’s titular promise to explain ‘How Americans Came to Idolize a Document that Fails Them’. Betraying concerns about both federalism and veneration, Wirt raised questions surrounding the Constitution’s practical and cultural meaning. LaCroix and Rana each follow a different branch of these problems. Wirt’s plea to the rising generation reminds us that these matters were entwined for those who experienced them.
