Perfecting the Union: National and State Authority in the US Constitution by Max M. Edling

Abstract

Reviewed by: Perfecting the Union: National and State Authority in the US Constitution by Max M. Edling Donald F. Johnson (bio) U.S. Constitution, Constitutional history, Legal history Perfecting the Union: National and State Authority in the US Constitution. By Max M. Edling. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 208. Cloth, $29.95.) Americans have never fully agreed on the nature of the U.S. Constitution. As jurists and legal scholars have debated and re-interpreted concepts like originalism and the extent of executive power, historians have long argued over the ideological and economic motivations of the framers as well as their racial and gender politics, imperial ambitions, and countless other considerations. Recent scholarship has demonstrated just how long a genealogy these debates have had, tracing their origins to the first decades after ratification as the framers themselves changed their positions and revised their interpretations of the document they drafted to reflect [End Page 173] changing political realities.1 From James Madison to Samuel Alito, then, interpretation of the founding has had as much of an eye on the present as the past. In Perfecting the Union, Max M. Edling seeks to strip out two centuries of forward-looking interpretation and place the Constitution in both the larger context of late eighteenth-century Euro–American statecraft and the narrower context of relations between the American states in the 1770s and 1780s. What results is a refreshing new analysis of the framers' Constitution as a fundamentally "Unionist" national charter, intended neither to entrench revolutionary values—however defined—nor to empower republican elites. Rather, the leaders of the early republic sought to create a more effective alliance between the states by clearly dividing areas of sovereignty between states and the new Federal government in ways that improved upon but did not fundamentally change the conceptions of government and authority that triggered the break with Britain and underpinned the earlier Articles of Confederation. In short and to-the-point chapters, Edling takes the reader through the framers' concept of a constitution as "federal treaty" or "compact of union between the states," and of their concept of such a union as "the means whereby weak states could safeguard their sovereignty" and "a political organization meant to further the interests of the states"—concepts that largely held for both the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution (11, 36). The author then turns to "internal police"—a term just emerging in the eighteenth century referring to a sphere of sovereignty with control over crime and punishment, infrastructure, economic development, poor relief; areas of government found in modern ministries of the interior or contained in domestic policy portfolios. While in the 1780s the concept had "an elastic and imprecise meaning," strong internal policing was nevertheless considered essential by late-eighteenth-century Anglophone political thinkers to "the refined, well-ordered, and opulent society" (81, 89). Through close readings of how these ideas functioned from the 1760s through the 1790s, Edling makes a persuasive case that a majority at least of the framers saw the Constitution not as a national charter supplanting state authority but rather strengthening the compact so that a more powerful [End Page 174] union could better protect the sovereignty of each state over its own internal affairs. As a result, the success of the unionist Constitution should be judged not on "the federal government's regulation of domestic affairs but its regulation of the western borderlands and the Atlantic marketplace" (14). To further the unionist interpretation, the book's intriguing final chapter uses legislative records at the Federal and state levels to demonstrate that, at least initially, the framers followed through on their promises of an outward-looking Congress and inward-looking states. Compiling an impressive quantitative analysis of legislation in Congress and the Pennsylvania legislature from 1789 through 1796—a time period in which national politicians "did their best to implement the political program that had propelled the framers to Philadelphia" (13). Using Great Britain's eighteenth-century Parliamentary record as a control, Edling demonstrates persuasively that, with a few splashy exceptions such as the Bill of Rights, the first Federal Congresses largely limited itself to "regulat[ing] relations between the United States...