Conflicts between the federal government and the states dominate our current moment in American law and politics. From controversies over who governs at the southern border, to the regulation of abortion, to voting rights, firearms, healthcare, and immigration, the issues at the center of public debate today center on the fraught relationships between multiple levels of government. 

Yet these are not new debates. Arguments about federalism—the relationship between the federal government and the states—raise questions about the nature of the Union that date back to the nation’s founding. The Constitution not only failed to resolve these questions; it created them. As a result, it was left to the generation of Americans who came after the founding era to confront the unsettled nature of American federalism and to forge novel approaches to the specific problems caused by that lack of settlement.

In order to understand the federalism debates of our own moment, we must bring back into the spotlight an era that has tended to be absent from constitutional history: the period between the founding and the Civil War. My new book The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms focuses on the decades between 1815 and 1861. The book argues that this period—flanked by two wars, the War of 1812 and the Civil War—was the origin point of much of modern American constitutionalism, especially with respect to the relationships among levels of government.

Read more at Yale University Press