Partisan media, disinformation, allegations of electoral fraud, voter disenfranchisement, anxieties over white supremacy, political assassinations, insurrections, and the deployment of troops in the streets have become disturbingly familiar features of contemporary American political life. For many, the United States appears to have entered an unprecedented and deeply uncertain historical moment. Marcus Alexander Gadson's timely study demonstrates, however, that such seditious action is neither novel nor aberrational. Rather, he argues it has a history essentially as old as the Republic itself and has been central to the formation and evolution of the American constitutional order since the nation's founding.Gadson divides the book into two sections, each covering three episodes of constitutional crisis throughout the 19th century. Each section, while united on the subject of how political violence shaped constitutionalism, has its own themes. The first section focuses on the question of who constitutes “the people” in a republic. As the founding era faded into memory and democracy increasingly became the political mantra of the day, the older vestiges of 18th-century politics led by the elite clashed with the belief that all white males had a say in politics. The three episodes covered in this section, the Buckshot War in Pennsylvania in 1832, Rhode Island's Dorr War of the late 1830s and 1840s, and the Bleeding Kansas of the 1850s, all resulted from this clash over who should govern. Although cooler heads eventually prevailed in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, and blood was not shed, the same could not be said in Kansas, which witnessed intense violence throughout the 1850s. However violent or near-violent these crises were, their conclusions nonetheless marked the end of an older regime of constitutional politics and helped solidify the acceptance of a new era of democratic constitutionalism, albeit one in which only white men governed.The second section, which is the strongest part of the book, covers Arkansas’ Brooks-Baxter War of the 1870s; South Carolina's multi-year attempt during Reconstruction to establish white supremacy; and a similar incident in North Carolina known as the Wilmington Plot. This section builds on the conclusions of the first. With democratic constitutionalism accepted following antebellum political violence, the great constitutional question emerging in the aftermath of the Civil War was how to build a democracy grounded in racial equality. In much of the deep south, however, political actors embraced an alternative constitutional vision predicated on two assumptions: first, that white men possessed the “freedom to maintain white supremacy in every possible form,” and second, that they retained the “right to use any means necessary to overthrow a constitutional order standing in the way of that objective” (93).As Gadson demonstrates with his three case studies, Southern states enacted these assumptions with devastating consequences. Unlike the first section of crises, where physical conflict almost occurred in two of three, extreme violence and outright cruelty marked all three of the latter ones. This cruelty was especially true in Wilmington, which served as an example throughout the south. The recipients of much of this viciousness, moreover, were freedmen who sought to exercise the freedom and rights the Civil War had just secured. In the end, what emerged in those southern states was the entrenchment of a constitutionalism of white supremacy in which “in some ways, Black people had less political power than they held when slavery was legal” (198). Indeed, only with the civil rights movement of the mid-20th century did the foundations of the white supremacist constitutionalism begin to crumble in the south.Gadson should be commended for bringing attention to the connection between political violence and constitutional change. Except for Bleeding Kansas, most have been forgotten, and they should not be. Examining these neglected episodes at the state level and their relationship with constitution-making allows Gadson to move beyond the hagiographic aspects of the federal Constitution and its writers to examine far messier, far less enlightened, and much more violent—what he rightly calls the “Unsavory Part”—of American constitutionalism. Since most of our political life occurs at the state level, Gadson's focus allows him to demonstrate the fundamental importance of the states in shaping how we perceive our constitutional principles, as well as the often unseemly and shocking events that have developed those values. Gadson is correct when he concludes that we should maintain vigilance in preventing a state constitutional crisis. One emergency in a single state could spill over into a national constitutional crisis, as Bleeding Kansas did in helping to cause the Civil War. Only a persistent concern for our state constitutional structures, he contends, can prevent a recurrence of that calamitous event.Even as Gadson is correct to point out that these moments of violence in the 19th century shaped American constitutionalism, he risks implying that violence was the only vehicle for constitutional change. Not every state experienced an episode of sedition or order-threatening crises. How and why did these constitutional principles create a constitutional crisis in one state but not others? Gadson offers no explanation. At the same time, he overlooks how other examples of sedition, such as Kentucky's 1855 nativist riot, known as “Bloody Monday,” occurred but did not lead to constitutional change. Why certain acts of sedition reshaped constitutionalism while others did not remain unexplored. Thus, Gadson's thesis, while persuasive, is narrower than it might have been. Nevertheless, scholars and the general public should read this excellent work. For all its limitations, it provides a stark reminder that the American principles of self-government rest upon a fragile bedrock.
Aaron N. Coleman (Mon,) studied this question.