Customer Reviews

Commentaries on the Constitution

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Joseph Story wrote some of the most important Supreme Court decisions during the early days of the country. This book explores, in detail, his views of the Constitution and it provides a fascinating view of how the Constitution was viewed in the early nineteenth century. Story borrows, liberally at some points, from the federalist papers and early Court opinions to back up his contentions. Each section is very carefully laid out, and the entire book is constructed to explain the Constitution passage by passage. The logical order and a good index make this book essential for Constitutional scholars and provide ease of use for the casual historian. Whether you are looking for the meaning of a single passage in the Constitution or if you just want to get a broad understanding of its meaning as a whole, I highly recommend this book.

I've run across quotes from this work for years. Now, at a fair price, I have a reference copy to check context and such. A welcome addition to my library.

Joseph Story began his political career as a Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican in a New England State dominated by Hamiltonian Federalists. When he was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court by President James Madison, it was under the impression that Mr. Story would serve as a counter-weight to the nationalistic-minded Chief Justice John Marshall. Yet, after his appointment, Justice Story made a conversion to the Hamiltonian Federalist mentality, and became the protege of the Chief Justice. (In fact, he dedicated his Commentaries on the Constitution to Chief Justice Marshall.) While serving on the Supreme Court, Justice Story also served as a law professor at Harvard University, a position in which he was encouraged to produce works espousing the nationalistic point of view (in opposition to the States' Rights school of thought that emphasized the federal nature of our system of government).

Within the Commentaries, Justice Story bended the truth to suit his purposes, as, for example, in his explanation of the adoption of the Constitution of 1787. According to Justice Story, the Constitution was adopted by the American people as a single sovereign Nation over the States. The wording of the Preamble, "We the people of the United States," for instance, was offered to sustain this view, despite the fact that, in the Constitutional Convention, the Preamble had been worded as, "We the people of the States of," followed by the names of the thirteen sovereign States. The Convention's Committee of Style modified it to read "We the people of the United States" only because it was not known whether all 13 States would actually ratify it. Justice Story chose to ignore this historical fact in presenting his view of the Constitution, because the fact did not support his conclusion.

The fact that the Constitution was ratified by the States, as States, with each State being bound only by its own act of ratification, was deemed irrelevant by Justice Story. The ratification of the compact by States was simply a matter of convenience in his opinion. So, too, was the fact that the new government under the Constitution was inaugurated before North Carolina and Rhode Island had ratified the compact, and those two States were not even members of the Union when Washington was inaugurated as the first President of the United States. In fact, President Washington's first term was nearly half completed before Rhode Island finally ratified the Constitution and joined the Union. Nonetheless, Justice Story insisted that the Constitution was adopted by a single, consolidated Nation of Americans, because such a contention was requisite to sustain his theory that the States are not sovereign and had little or nothing to do with the establishment of our current political system.

Justice Story's Commentaries on the Constitution contributed significantly toward the developing Consolidating School of Thought that originated with Alexander Hamilton and was transmitted by Daniel Webster and other Whig politicians. That school of thought ultimately gave rise to the doctrines espoused by Abraham Lincoln and the Radical Republicans that the States of our Union are not sovereign and cannot resist the supremacy of the centralized power or secede from the Union.

Considering the historical significance of Justice Story's Commentaries on the Constitution, I would recommend it to all serious students of constitutional history and political science. However, at the same time, I strongly recommend that the reader have alternative explanations of the Constitution available for reference and comparison. In particular, I recommend "A Constitutional View of the Late War Between the States," by Alexander H. Stephens, and "The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government," by Jefferson Davis. In both of these books, the most glaring fallacies of Justice Story are identified and corrected by superior reasoning and historical fact.

While Joseph Story is commonly acknowledged as a constitutional expert, he advanced some very flawed theories on the Constitution, which ran counter to the what the founders put into place, and ran directly against the limited federal government that was essential to the concept of federalism.

In Story's historically incorrect assertion, the national government pre-dated the states, which later gave rise to the dimution of states' rights and the utter destruction of the Constitutional Republic, replaced by the consolidated mess we have today. The truth, of course, is that the states were sovereign in their own territory, and only delegated away certain powers (clearly deliniated in Article 1, Section 9).

While there is much in this volume that is useful from a historical perspective, the underlying theory that Story holds of the origin of the Constitution (and thereby, the Constitutional Republic) is deeply flawed, which adversely affects what he writes about the document.

Part of the Introduction came out immediately as if it were never attached. This shouldn't happen on a "Like New" book. I enjoy the book but the condition is wholly unacceptable. No other pages have fallen out, however.