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This chapter presents an overview of the book’s central arguments. The conventional wisdom surrounding the national bank controversy – namely that it was a recurring two-sided struggle over the meaning of the Necessary and Proper Clause – is reviewed but quickly dismissed. In its place, the chapter supplies a revisionist narrative in which constitutional claims respecting the institution were both more diverse and repeatedly evolving between 1791 and 1832. It also outlines an explanation for this diversity and evolution, one that prioritizes the stuff of ordinary politics: ideological strife, institutional change, and economic stress. The chapter also explains the broader import of a revisionist national bank narrative, first by stressing that an account of constitutional development in which ordinary politics plays a crucial role is consistent with much recent work among historically-oriented students of public law, and second by outlining the ways in which the fine details of the national bank controversy refine our understanding of (1) how majority parties deal with internal quarrels over constitutional meaning, (2) how constitutional conflicts respond to change in the underlying object of controversy, and (3) how the size of an economic event relates to its downstream constitutional impact.

This chapter offers a reassessment of the Supreme Court’s work in McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) in light of the previous chapter’s claim that Republicans revived the national bank on the strength of the Coinage Clause. After observing that Congress’s power (or lack thereof) to charter a national bank was not originally part of the dispute between the institution’s Baltimore branch and the state of Maryland – it was added to the Court’s agenda at the last minute – the chapter finds that Republicans’ Coinage Clause argument from 1816 was mentioned in neither McCulloch’s oral arguments nor Chief Justice John Marshall’s decision for the Court. Insofar as Marshall’s decision rested (at least in part) upon claims about the meaning of the Necessary and Proper Clause, what emerged in 1819 was a gap between political and judicial understandings of the national bank’s constitutionality. The chapter then unpacks the implications of this fact, concluding that while the Court’s holding was “majoritarian” (i.e., it aligned with the preferences of the Republican majority), its reasoning was surely not (i.e., Marshall’s commentary on the meaning of the Necessary and Proper Clause could only serve to exacerbate divisions over the scope of federal power within that majority).

This chapter reexamines the closing episode in the national bank controversy: President Jackson’s extended assault upon the institution (1829-1832). The traditional narrative respecting the constitutional action from this period focuses on Jackson’s July 1832 veto of a bill to extend the national bank’s charter, and highlights both his written rejection of McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) as a definitive resolution of the national bank’s constitutionality and his attending claim that the institution was neither “necessary” nor “proper.” The chapter revises this narrative by drawing attention to the importance of the Coinage Clause in both the events that led to Jackson’s veto and the veto message itself. It posits that (1) the Democratic majority in Congress relied upon the power to coin money in passing a bill to extend the national bank’s charter, and (2) that reliance forced the president to explicitly reject the Coinage Clause argument in his veto message. In doing so, the chapter reveals that the power to coin money was relevant to the national bank controversy long after the events of 1815 and 1816.

This chapter depicts South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks’ 1856 assault on Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner as a flashpoint for 1850s controversies over the laying of transatlantic telegraphic cable connecting the U.S. with Britain. Widely treated by both northern and southern commentators as a form of political discourse, Brooks’ caning of Sumner also reverberated with broader concerns over international telegraphic communication. Transoceanic telegraphic communication provoked commentaries, on both sides of the Atlantic, on the prospect of disembodied voices through which international relations would be re-configured along with longstanding epistemologies of voice and writing. The Brooks/Sumner affair, in which a southern legislator smote his abolitionist colleague using a fragment of the era’s most salient symbol for global peace and goodwill, called upon anxieties over the telegraphic disembodiment of the voice, unchecked proliferation of speculation and rumor, and the globalization of the American cotton trade.

This chapter focuses on the evolution of civil society participation in the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) process and the rise of “multistakeholderism” as a new principle with the potential to inform more of information and communications technology (ICT) global governance. After discussing the role of the WSIS in fostering a new trilateral relationship among governments, private industry, and civil society and in promoting international diplomacy, the chapter looks at the Carlsbad Treaty of 1819, the debate over the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO), the Global Information Infrastructure Initiative, and the Working Group on Internet Governance.

The Panic of 1819 crippled America’s economy, forced endless business closures, and left many without the ability to repay loans. In Kentucky, the Debt Relief Party emerged and soon dominated both houses of the state legislature. A series of controversial legislative reforms followed, and the state was soon divided between competing visions of reform. The so-called relief controversy brought new and particularly unwelcome attention to Horace and his university; politically charged attacks against him manifested in charges of heterodoxy, corruption, and vice. This chapter examines the ensuing controversy and describes Presbyterian-backed efforts to dislodge Horace from the presidency.

Attention to the violence of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 usually focuses on that of the soldiers who attacked the peaceful protesters gathered to demand equal representation and workers' rights. However, this chapter demonstrates that the event and its aftermath brought into sharp focus the intense concern with, and conflicting attitudes towards, self-directed violence and its ultimate expression, suicide, in Romantic-era Britain. Self-directed violence met with a variety of legal and cultural responses in the long eighteenth-century, but it was often presented sympathetically as a courageous political act that asserted individual autonomy in the face of implacable tyranny in Romantic literature. This theme was threatened, however, when Viscount Castlereagh - Conservative defender in the House of Commons of the government's attack at Peterloo, and the very figure of despotism in the period - slit his own throat with a pen knife in 1822.

This chapter explains how, during the 1810s and 1820s, a more effective political opposition to aristocratic education formed. In different ways, the “Jeffersonian Revolution” of 1800, the War of 1812, and the Panic of 1819 all helped bolster the critique of academies, and built popular support for public common schools. Historians often skip over this “first era of school reform” and look instead at Horace Mann and the common school reformers of the 1830s. But it was during this period that many northern states started investing in common schools, and also revamping academies and colleges to serve a new educational vision. These institutional changes were all geared toward overthrowing aristocratic education and instead trying to create widespread informed citizenship. But as education came to be seen as an important path to citizenship, the impulse to segregate public schools grew, confining their benefits primarily to white men.

This chapter explores Anglo-American policy-making between 1891 and 1834, with a particular focus on policies concerning piracy, privateering, and slavery. It examines British policy concerning the Gulf of Mexico and territories under Spanish control; American policy regarding piracy and privateering; the effect of the Monroe Doctrine on international relations - as it declared the Americas as part of the US economic and strategic sphere, and warned European colonisers from interfering with South America; Monroe’s eventual compromise; slave trade policies; and the 1819 Anti-Slave Trade Act. American and British policy-making differed in many of these regards, particularly concerning slavery, but it concludes that they continued to maintain a co-operative relationship as it furthered their own economic interests to do so.

This chapter provides a further analysis of naval relations, piracy restrictions and the suppression of slavery between 1820 and 1830. It continues to document the anti-piracy stance of the US Navy during the increase and decline of piracy in the early 1820s. It also documents the British anti-piracy efforts, and discusses their perceived lacklustre effort as reported by US media outlets. It examines colonisation in detail, including the actions of the American Colonization Society on the West African coast, and the presence of the Royal Navy in West Africa. It concludes by stating that the Anglo-American relationship was heavily strained in this period due to conflicting attitudes toward slavery, yet despite tensions, they remained co-operative while combatting piracy.