A Constitutional History of the United States
by Andrew C. McLaughlin
Summary
Andrew C. McLaughlin's A Constitutional History of the United States sets out to trace the development of American constitutional principles across nearly two centuries, from the colonial background through the Constitution's framing and on into the early twentieth century, treating the Constitution as a living document shaped by political and social change rather than a fixed text interpreted only by courts. McLaughlin, who had spent decades teaching constitutional history first at Michigan and then at Chicago, built the book to be read clearly by a general audience rather than only by legal specialists, stating his purpose as presenting the subject briefly and directly rather than exhaustively.
The book follows constitutional development well beyond the courtroom, arguing that the country's constitutional order has been shaped as much by political conflict and social pressure as by judicial rulings, and McLaughlin himself memorably illustrated that view with a claim of his own: that the most significant constitutional decision in American history was not handed down by any court but settled at Appomattox, when Robert E. Lee's surrender to Ulysses S. Grant closed the argument the Civil War had been fought to decide by force rather than by law. McLaughlin traces the constitutional story from the earliest colonial charters through the framing debates of 1787 and into the amendments and interpretive shifts that followed, always returning to that central claim that constitutional history is inseparable from the political history surrounding it.
Reading the book means following a historian's argument that the Constitution cannot be understood from its text alone, built by a scholar who had already spent a career as the first director of historical research at the Carnegie Institution and as president of the American Historical Association. It suits a reader who wants constitutional history explained as a story of political struggle and social change rather than as a sequence of court decisions read in isolation.
Historical Context & Significance
A Constitutional History of the United States won the 1936 Pulitzer Prize for History the year after its 1935 publication, arriving late in a career that had already taken McLaughlin from the University of Michigan, where he first taught Latin before moving into history, to the University of Chicago, where he taught constitutional history from 1906 to 1929. He had served as the first director of the Department of Historical Research at the Carnegie Institution from 1903 to 1905 and as president of the American Historical Association in 1914.
McLaughlin had built toward this synthesis across earlier books, including Confederation and Constitution, 1783 to 1789, and The Foundations of American Constitutionalism, published just three years before this capstone volume. His daughter, Constance McLaughlin Green, later became a historian in her own right and eventually won a Pulitzer Prize herself, making the McLaughlins one of the rare families to produce two Pulitzer Prize winning historians across two generations.