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\"With ... illustrations, paintings, maps, political documents, and other media largely drawn from the post-revolutionary era itself, this book details both the new nation's growing pains and shortcomings, its major accomplishments and optimism, its sociocultural trends, and its rapid growth and expansion\"--Amazon.com.

This Violent Empiretraces the origins of American violence, racism, and paranoia to the founding moments of the new nation and the initial instability of Americans' national sense of self.Fusing cultural and political analyses to create a new form of political history, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg explores the ways the founding generation, lacking a common history, governmental infrastructures, and shared culture, solidified their national sense of self by imagining a series of \"Others\" (African Americans, Native Americans, women, the propertyless) whose differences from European American male founders overshadowed the differences that divided those founders. These \"Others,\" dangerous and polluting, had to be excluded from the European American body politic. Feared, but also desired, they refused to be marginalized, incurring increasingly enraged enactments of their political and social exclusion that shaped our long history of racism, xenophobia, and sexism. Close readings of political rhetoric during the Constitutional debates reveal the genesis of this long history.

In Chained to History , Steven J. Brady places slavery at the center of the story of America's place in the world in the years prior to the calamitous Civil War. Beginning with the immediate aftermath of the War of the American Revolution, Brady follows the military, economic, and moral lines of the diplomatic challenges of attempting to manage, on the global stage, the actuality of human servitude in a country dedicated to human freedom. Chained to History shows how slavery was interwoven with America's foreign relations and affected policy controversies ranging from trade to extradition treaties to military alliances. Brady highlights the limitations placed on American policymakers who, working in an international context increasingly supportive of abolition, were severely constrained regarding the formulation and execution of preferred policy. Policymakers were bound to the slave interest based in the Democratic Party and the tortured state of domestic politics bore heavily on the conduct of foreign affairs. As international powers not only abolished the slave trade but banned human servitude as such, the American position became untenable. From the Age of Revolutions through the American Civil War, slavery was a constant factor in shaping US relations with the Atlantic World and beyond. Chained to History addresses this critical topic in its complete scope and shows the immoral practice of human bondage to have informed how the United States re-entered the community of nations after 1865.

\"Francis J. Grund, a German emigrant, was one of the most influential journalists in America in the three decades preceding the Civil War. He also wrote several books, including Aristocracy in America (1839), a fictional, satiric travel memoir written in response to Alexis de Tocqueville's famous Democracy in America. However, Grund's political work and life have never been analyzed in depth. In his introduction to this long out-of-print work, Armin Mattes provides a thorough account of Grund's dynamic engagement in American political life, and brings to light many of Grund's reflections on American social and political life previously published only in German. Comparing Aristocracy in America with Tocqueville's Democracy in America, Mattes shows how Grund's work can expand our understanding of the emerging democratic political culture and society in the antebellum United States\"--Provided by publisher.

This Article refutes the claim that the Constitution was originally understood to contain a nondelegation doctrine. The Founding generation didn’t share anything remotely approaching a belief that the constitutional settlement imposed restrictions on the delegation of legislative power—let alone by empowering the judiciary to police legalized limits. To the contrary, the Founders saw nothing wrong with delegations as a matter of legal theory. The formal account just wasn’t that complicated: Any particular use of coercive rulemaking authority could readily be characterized as the exercise of either executive or legislative power, and was thus formally valid regardless of the institution from which it issued. Indeed, administrative rulemaking was so routine throughout the Anglo-American world that it would have been shocking if the Constitution had transformed the workaday business of administrative governance. Practice in the new regime quickly showed that the Founders had done no such thing. The early federal Congresses adopted dozens of laws that broadly empowered executive and judicial actors to adopt binding rules of conduct for private parties on some of the most consequential policy questions of the era, with little if any guidance to direct them. Yet the people who drafted and debated the Constitution virtually never raised objections to delegation as such, even as they feuded bitterly over many other questions of constitutional meaning.

The Supreme Court is poised to toughen the nondelegation doctrine to strike down acts of Congress that give broad discretion to administrators, signaling a potential revolution in the separation of powers. A majority of the Justices have suggested in recent opinions that they are open to the far-reaching theory that all agency rulemaking is unconstitutional insofar as it coerces private parties and is not about foreign affairs. If adopted, this theory would invalidate most of the federal regulatory state. Jurists and scholars critical of rulemaking's constitutionality base their claims on the original meaning of the Constitution. But these critics face a serious obstacle: early Congresses enacted several broad delegations of administrative rulemaking authority. The critics' main response has been that these early statutes do not count, because they fall into two areas in which (say the critics) the original nondelegation doctrine did not apply, or applied only weakly: noncoercive legislation (e.g., giving benefits) or foreign-affairs legislation. This Article finds that the originalist critics of rulemaking are mistaken to say that no early congressional grant of rulemaking power was coercive and domestic. There is a major counterexample missed by the literature on nondelegation, indeed by all of legal scholarship, and not discussed more than briefly even by historians: the rulemaking power under the \"direct tax\" of 1798. In that legislation, Congress apportioned a federal tax quota to the people of each state, to be paid predominantly by owners of real estate in proportion to their properties' respective values. Thousands of federal assessors assigned taxable values to literally every house and farm in every state of the Union, deciding what each was \"worth in money\"—a standard that the legislation did not define. Because assessors in different parts of a state could differ greatly in how they did valuation, Congress established within each state a federal board of tax commissioners with the power to divide the state into districts and to raise or lower the assessors' valuations of all real estate in any district by any proportion \"as shall appear to be just and equitable\" —a phrase undefined in the statute and not a term of art. The federal boards' power to revise valuations en masse in each intrastate tax district is identical to the fact pattern in the leading Supreme Court precedent defining rulemaking. Thus, each federal board in 1798 controlled, by rule, the distribution of the federal real-estate tax burden within the state it covered. This Article is the first study of the federal boards' mass-revision power. It establishes that the mass revisions (a) were often aggressive, as when the federal board in Maryland raised the taxable value of all houses in Baltimore, then the nation's third-largest city, by 100 percent; (b) involved much discretion, given serious data limitations and the absence of any consensus method; (c) had a major political aspect, as the federal boards were inheriting the contentious land-tax politics that had previously raged within the state legislatures, pitting the typical state's rich commercial coast against its poor inland farms; (d) were not subject to judicial review; and (e) were accepted as constitutional by the Federalist majority and Jeffersonian opposition in 1798 and also by the Jeffersonians when they later took over, indicating the boards' power was consistent with original meaning or, alternatively, with the Constitution's liquidated meaning. In short, vesting administrators with discretionary power to make politically charged rules domestically affecting private rights was not alien to the first generation of lawmakers who put the Constitution into practice. More broadly, this Article is the first in-depth treatment of the 1798 direct tax's administration. It shows that the tax, measured by personnel, was the largest federal administrative endeavor, outside the military, of the Constitution's first two decades. It is remarkable that today's passionate debate on whether the administrative regulatory state violates the Framers' Constitution has so far made no reckoning with this endeavor. This Article's dataset is available at: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/IGMJ7E.

The United States witnessed an unprecedented failure of its political system in the mid-nineteenth century, resulting in a disastrous civil war that claimed the lives of an estimated 750,000 Americans. In his other acclaimed books about the American presidency, Fred Greenstein assesses the personal strengths and weaknesses of presidents from George Washington to Barack Obama. Here, he evaluates the leadership styles of the Civil War-era presidents. Using his trademark no-nonsense approach, Greenstein looks at the presidential qualities of James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, and Abraham Lincoln. For each president, he provides a concise history of the man's life and presidency, and evaluates him in the areas of public communication, organizational capacity, political skill, policy vision, cognitive style, and emotional intelligence. Greenstein sheds light on why Buchanan is justly ranked as perhaps the worst president in the nation's history, how Pierce helped set the stage for the collapse of the Union and the bloodiest war America had ever experienced, and why Lincoln is still considered the consummate American leader to this day. Presidents and the Dissolution of the Unionreveals what enabled some of these presidents, like Lincoln and Polk, to meet the challenges of their times--and what caused others to fail.