American Blueprint

And it has a clear purpose. The coauthors—Edgar J. McManus, professor emeritus of history at Queens College, and Tara Helfman, a professor at Syracuse Law School—take care to explain that Liberty and Union is not a history of the Constitution, but “a constitutional history of the United States.” Thus, it pays attention not just to the making of the Constitution but also to the “century and a half of constitutional development [that] preceded the Philadelphia Constitutional Convention.” Further, while the book treats what the Supreme Court has said in numerous constitutional cases, it also recognizes that constitutional history is found not only in judicial (also known as constitutional) review, but in actions taken by the elective branches and the states. 

So this “constitutional history of the United States” may also be described as “a history of American constitutionalism”—constitutionalism being, the authors observe, “the most powerful and durable ideology this country has produced.” Their purpose, they write, is “to provide a readable account of how constitutionalism has functioned over the years.” And in that they have succeeded. The focus on constitutionalism is present in the title, which is taken from Daniel Webster’s famous reply to Robert Hayne in their 1830 Senate debate over the nature of our national government. Webster ended his remarks this way: “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable!” Those two great ideas were then, and remain now, great pillars of American constitutionalism.

In a book of more than 640 pages, excluding appendices and index, McManus and Helfman tell the story of our constitutionalism in 33 chapters, the first one being “English and Colonial Origins” and the last “The Roberts Court.” Each of the chapters contains short entries (averaging a page or two each) on key episodes. Thus, “English and Colonial Origins” treats, among its 20 entries, Magna Carta and the divine right monarchy, while “The Roberts Court” discusses, among its 11 entries, the Affordable Care Act and marriage equality and the Court. 

There is no shorting of the older history and its significance. For example, while the Declaration of Independence was, at the time of its writing, “only a political document framed to rally support for independence,” it is “perhaps the most important document” of American constitutionalism, setting forth “with stirring clarity not only the reasons for the break with Britain but the principles to which Americans committed themselves as a free and independent nation.”

Regarding the government established under the Articles of Confederation, the authors relate the familiar reasons for its failure but also observe its “notable successes.” The Confederation government succeeded in prosecuting the war against Britain, bringing it to an end by way of the Treaty of Paris, merely “the single most important treaty in American history.” Then, too, it passed the Land Ordinance for the distribution and settlement of the Western lands, which wound up defining basic land policy in the United States until the Civil War. It also enacted the Northwest Ordinance, which arranged for the government of the territories north and west of the Ohio River. “The importance of the Northwest Ordinance cannot be exaggerated,” write McManus and Helfman, as it established “territorial principles that were followed by the United States for more than a century,” giving “a gloss of legitimacy to future westward expansion.” 

After the Civil War, the Supreme Court began to assume a larger and larger role in American life. The Court’s decisions attract the authors’ attention, and rightly so, since judicial doctrines adopted early in the 20th century, during the New Deal and then during the Warren Court, set the stage for many of the constitutional cases that the Court has been asked to decide in the past half-century, chief among them Roe v. Wade (1973), which created a woman’s constitutional right to abortion. Not surprisingly, judicial selection since the Warren Court has become more and more contested, as witnessed by the confirmation fight in 1987 over the nomination of Judge Robert Bork, which the authors carefully treat here.

Liberty and Union is made the more engaging by the authors’ assessments, as they may offer the reader something with which to quarrel. The modern president they admire the most is Dwight Eisenhower, and they give high marks to the body of judicial work by Ike’s Supreme Court appointees, including the liberal chief justice, Earl Warren. They nicely describe as a hallmark of the Burger Court “the jurisprudence of temporizing.” They offer a nuanced discussion of the legality of affirmative action, but leave this reader exasperated by their conclusion—which is that both sides in the debate are right. Regarding the constitutional challenge to Obamacare, they venture that, “had [John Roberts] not been chief justice, he probably would have voted to overturn the law completely, but as custodian of the court’s traditional role in the constitutional life of the nation he had more compelling priorities.” 

Maybe that explains it.

Liberty and Union is designed for students in short, single-semester courses. But it is also a valuable resource for anyone interested in the origins of the American experiment, its development, and its prospect. And for Americans, in particular, it teaches something transcendently important about our politics, which is that we have (as the authors put it) “no royal family, state religion, or common ethnicity cementing [our] links with one another. We have only the Constitution and the way of life it guarantees in creating the commonality of nationhood. It is what holds us together and legitimizes our political aspirations.” 

Terry Eastland is an executive editor at The Weekly Standard.