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States' Rights and the Union: Imperium in Imperio, 1776-1876. By Forrest McDonald. (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2000. Pp. viii, 296. $29.95.)
The historiography of the issue of federalism, often referred to as "states' rights," is a lengthy list of specific case studies. Books and essays abound on Hamilton's bank proposal, M'Culloch v. Maryland, and the nullification crisis, but no one has attempted to weave these numerous events into a continuing historical study of federalism. No one, that is, until Forrest McDonald. In the preface to his new book, McDonald writes that "no book-length study of states' rights as a whole has previously appeared" (viii.). He then offers States' Rights and the Union: Imperium in Imperio, 1776-1876 as his attempt to "fill that lacuna in the literature" (viii.).
The book is organized in chronological fashion. Chapter one deals with the revolutionary period and the drafting and ratification of the Constitution. Chapter nine-the last chapter-addresses Reconstruction and the implementation and interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. In between 1776 and 1876, McDonald incorporates into a continuing narrative the historical events that historians previously have studied individually, such as Hamilton's bank proposal, the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, Jackson's handling of the nullification crisis, the slavery issue, and the Marshall court's opinions in both the well-cited cases of Martin v. Hunter's Lessee and Cohens v. Virginia and the little-studied...