| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

States' Rights and the Union: Imperium in Imperio, 1776–1876. By Forrest McDonald. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000. viii, 296 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-7006-1040-5.)

Dreams of a More Perfect Union. By Rogan Kersh. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. xi, 358 pp. Cloth, $39.95, ISBN 0-8014-3812-8.)

The books under review complement each other. They focus on two linked yet quarreling concepts—union and states' rights—in the same time frame, from the roots of the American republic to the close of the nineteenth century, with contrasting methodologies, and they conclude with reflections on their stories' contemporary relevance. 1

Forrest McDonald's is the more problematic of the two books. Long known for his truculent refusal to accept (liberal) conventional wisdom and his pawky individualism, McDonald, Distinguished Research Professor of History at the University of Alabama, views the issue of states' rights as no issue at all. Seeing his mission as one of recovery and defense, he reasserts the hegemonic legitimacy of states' rights constitutionalism. Written with elegance and verve, his book is a vigorous brief for states' rights at least as much as it is a history of that concept's rise, uncertain triumph, cataclysmic fall, and tentative revival. It illustrates the power of what the constitutional historian John Phillip Reid calls "forensic history"—a form of legal and constitutional argument invoking historical evidence to make presentist points. . . .

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