| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Constitution in Congress: Descent into the Maelstrom, 1829–1861. By David P. Currie. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. xviii, 322 pp. $55.00, ISBN 0-226-12916-0.)

This latest volume in the University of Chicago law professor David P. Currie's sweeping history of extrajudicial constitutional argument continues the series's earlier perspectives, style, and coverage through the great congressional debates over slavery, expansion, and sectionalism that led to the American Civil War. Divided into three parts—on the antislavery petition controversy, diplomacy and expansion, and slavery (the last melodramatically titled "The Evil Empire")—the book moves through a maze of constitutional argumentation by Congress and the executive branch on a tremendous range of issues. (Lamentably, the states, themselves participants in extrajudicial constitutional interpretation with a deep stake in the slavery issue, are defined out of the study's coverage.) The author aims at the specialist reader with some legal background, adopting an eclectic approach to constitutional history that occasionally ignores important scholarship (such as William Wiecek's The Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism in America, 1760–1848, 1977) and mixing dense legal commentary with a glib style.

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