Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.1 | The History Cooperative

The First Impeachment: The Constitution's Framers and the Case of Senator William Blount. By Buckner F. Melton Jr. (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1998. xxiv, 344 pp. $40.00, isbn 0-86554-597-9.)

In 1797, a decade after the framing of the Constitution, the impeachment process received its first test. Sen. William Blount of Tennessee, an enterprising politician and land speculator with a taste for conspiracy who had signed the Constitution on North Carolina's behalf, stood accused of conspiring with the British to detach the Old Southwest from the new nation. Although the Senate swiftly voted to expel Blount, the House impeached him; his trial dominated the Fifth Congress's business, ending inconclusively in early 1799. 1

Most historians have ignored or slighted this tangled episode. As Buckner F. Melton Jr. proves, Blount's ordeal deserves full-length treatment. An assistant professor of clinical law at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a constitutional historian, Melton pursues three linked goals in examining the collision between Blount's conspiracies and the impeachment process. First, he elucidates impeachment's intricate history from its beginnings in fourteenth-century England to the American experience in the 1790s and thereafter. Second, he illuminates the Old Southwest's murky currents of politics, diplomacy, and conspiracy in which the Blount crisis had its roots. Third, he demonstrates the uncertainty and contentiousness that plagued early national politicians as they struggled to make the Constitution work. . . .

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