Richard E. Ellis – författare

The Nullification Crisis of 1832-33 is undeniably the most important major event of Andrew Jackson's two presidential terms. Attempting to declare null and void the high tariffs enacted by Congress in the late 1820s, the state of South Carolina declared that it had the right to ignore those national laws that did not suit it. Responding swiftly and decisively, Jackson issued a Proclamation reaffirming the primacy of the national government and backed this up with a Force Act, allowing him to enforce the law with troops. Although the conflict was eventually allayed by a compromise fashioned by Henry Clay, the Nullification Crisis raises paramount issues in American political history. The Union at Risk studies the doctrine of states' rights and illustrates how it directly affected national policy at a crucial point in 19th-century politics. Ellis also relates the Nullification Crisis to other major areas of Jackson's administration--his conflict with the National Bank, his Indian policy, and his relationship with the Supreme Court--providing keen insight into the most serious sectional conflict before the Civil War.

McCulloch v. Maryland (1819) has long been recognized to be one of the most significant decisions ever handed down by the United States Supreme Court. Indeed, many scholars have argued it is the greatest opinion handed down by our greatest Chief Justice. Much of this praise is merited for it is brilliantly argued, far reaching in its implications, and unusually eloquent. While Marshall, dedicated to the vision of a powerful and growing nation, ultimately laid the foundation for the living constitution, the impact of the opinion in his own time was short-lived. Almost all treatments of the case consider it from the vantage point of Chief Marshall's decision in which he famously declared the act creating the Second Bank of the United States constitutional and Maryland's attempt to tax it unconstitutional. Yet a careful examination of the context in which the case emerged reveals other, even more important issues involved that Marshall chose to ignore: the private profit making nature of the Second Bank of the United States; the power of the Bank to create branches in the states without their consent, which many people viewed as a direct assault upon the sovereignty of the states; and the differences between a tax levied by a state for the purposes of raising revenue and one which was meant to destroy the operations of the branches of the Bank. Addressing these issues most likely would have undercut Marshall's extreme nationalist view of the constitution, and his unwillingness to adequately deal with them produced immediate, widespread, yet varied dissatisfaction among the States. These issues are particularly important as the Supreme Court was forced to rehear them in Osborn et. al. v. Bank of the United States (1824) and they also formed the basis for Andrew Jackson's famous veto for the re-chartering of the Bank in 1832. Not only the first in-depth examination of McCulloch v. Maryland, but also a new interpretation of this familiar and landmark decision, this sharply argued book provides much new information and fresh insight into a source of constant division in American politics, past and present.