This panel reinterprets the notion of constitutional crisis in the early nineteenth-century American state, examining crises within a state, in the state/federal government relationship, and through transatlantic connections. We define constitutional crises as conflicts that emerge over fundamental principles in a republic. Such conflicts can include the protection of the rights and sovereignty of democratic institutions. More often, they revolve around the rights, will, and sovereignty of the people themselves. Finally, constitutional struggles can also arise from problems, or gaps, in the founding charters. Our questions are fundamental to American constitutionalism: Why do such emergencies arise? How do republican constitutions cope with problems that appear to have no structural resolution? Can state constitutions manage sudden cultural, political, or economic changes more readily than the U.S. Constitution? and finally, What happens when the charters of individual states clash with the national constitution?

Our papers revolve around the core question of how citizens define crises, and how they attempt to revise (sometimes violently) their founding charters to resolve struggles over rights and sovereignty. Whether those crises occur within states or in the state-federal relationship, they can reveal a great deal about how people define democratic and republican government. The papers range from debates over the 1796 Tennessee state constitution to the sectional conflicts of the mid-nineteenth century, and one of our papers explores constitutionalism in a comparative context.

Our panel comprises a diverse group of scholars: an assistant professor, two senior scholars, and two graduate students.