Alison L. LaCroix. The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms.

Document Type

Book Review

Publication Date

12-2025

ISSN

0002-8762

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Language

en-US

Abstract

One major theme in histories of the American founding is imperium in imperio (sovereignty within sovereignty, government within government). This phrase is often treated as the framers’ original understanding of federalism: the new states sharing sovereignty with the new federal government. Before it was treated as a solution, it was the Latin name of a serious problem, an error, a contradiction, even an impossibility. Alison L. LaCroix and other American historians have cited Blackstone and eighteenth-century Whigs on sovereignty as “supreme,” “absolute,” unitary, and exclusive; and have quoted Alexander Hamilton’s famous description in 1774 of such attempts to split the sovereignty baby as a “solecism of politics,” an error. A year later, John Adams put the problem in theological terms: Two sovereigns could coexist in the same state no more than “two supreme beings in the same universe.” Nevertheless, the framers took the leap and embraced imperium in imperio as the solution to the same problem. However, it was just a new informal experimental solution, an abstract solution in theory. The problem would be how to solve the solecism in practice, and those practices from 1815 to 1861 are the deeply engaging stories in LaCroix’s The Interbellum Constitution: Union, Commerce, and Slavery in the Age of Federalisms. The last word in the subtitle is the most important: Each chapter shows how this formative era produced more complicated and more intriguing alternative models. Even if the framers had any single theory of federalism—which LaCroix rightly doubts—the theory soon multiplied into multiple doctrines and practices of federalisms, plural.

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