The Constitution in Congress: Democrats and Whigs, 1829-1861

Abstract

I imagine that most readers of this journal can count on no hands the number of reference books that they have read cover to cover with any sustained enjoyment, at least if they have not yet encountered the works of David P. Currie. Having examined the U.S. Supreme Court's body of constitutional work in previous books, Currie has more recently turned to collecting and analyzing the constitutional controversies that have roiled Congress and the presidency. The comprehensiveness of the instant volume (the first of two covering the antebellum years) and the absence of any but the broadest sort of argument make this book chiefly a reference tool. But the simultaneous vigor and good humor of Currie's prose make nearly every page an entertainment, at least for specialists who can follow Currie's lawyerly analyses as easily as he writes them. Insofar as the book does have an argument, it is the increasingly familiar one that implementation of the Constitution took place in the nonjudicial as much as the judicial branches and, relatedly, that a slew of political controversies, great and small, can be recast as episodes of constitutional interpretation. To make this case (but really to take good-natured issue with a raft of long-dead politicians) Currie marches out far more evidence than the argument requires, moving from episode to episode in fifty-one subchapters and teaching us “many little things about particular disputes” (p. 279). He begins with Andrew Jackson's Maysville veto (1830), the bank veto (1832), the nullification crisis (1832), and several comparatively obscure episodes growing from Democrats' determination to destroy Henry Clay's “American system.” With the American system dead, the remainder of the book is devoted to “The Kitchen Sink,” a collection of lively accounts of impeachments of judges and expulsions (or not) of congressmen, President John Tyler's run-ins with congressional Whigs, the navigation of constitutional technicalities to establish the Smithsonian Institution and the Court of Claims, and dozens more episodes. Conspicuously and deliberately missing from this account of the years from 1829 to 1861 is practically anything to do with slavery and sectionalism, for the compelling reason that that subject would have doubled the length of the book; thus Currie's promise of a second volume on those years.