Comparing How the Rules of the Game are Contested

Abstract

To understand the nature of contestation over the rules of the game of politics in the antebellum US it is necessary to scrutinize the historical record of political and legal arguments in this period. What was under dispute in these moments of acute tension was the shared understanding structuring the rules of US politics: the allocation of competences to the different branches of government, expectations about the union, the exact location of competency over competences and the appropriate basis of representation. At stake was the future of the union, which depended either on the ability to renegotiate a compromise acceptable to both supporters and opponents of a more centralized government or on finding a way of overcoming states’ protests for preserving autonomy. Ultimately, as section 3.2 explains, no such agreement was found and the union was held together by force of arms. Following the secessionary war, a new understanding over what the game of politics presupposes had to be found in order to buttress the victorious union.

That generation which grew up with the century, witnessed during a period of fifty years the immense, uninterrupted material development of the young Republic … there seems to be little room for surprise that it should have implanted a kind of superstitious faith in the grandeur of the country, its duration, its immunity from the usual troubles of earthly empires … From this conception of the American future the sense of its having problems to solve was blissfully absent; there were no difficulties in the programme, no looming complication, no rocks ahead.

Henry James (1879: 142–3)