Completely reset text;
archival quality paper and
binding; new introduction;
CIP data; new comprehensive
index.
5x8, approx. 225 pages
Hardcover
ISBN-13: 978-1-934182-02-4
$55.00
Federal Government: Being a Review of Judge Story’s
Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States
By Abel P. Upshur
With new introduction by Donald W. Livingston
Published in 1840, Abel Upshur’s Brief Enquiry is arguably the
finest rebuttal of high Federalist doctrine every penned and is
an essential document in the history of American constitutional
law—but one very difficult to obtain, until now.
In 1833 Joseph Story wrote his famous Commentaries on the
Constitution of the United States, the first systematic nationalist
view of the Constitution. Federalists welcomed the book, but
the heirs to the Jeffersonian tradition in American politics
rejected Story’s interpretation. And none more strongly or
effectively than Abel Upshur (1790-1844), who asserted that,
contrary to Judge Story, the United States was a federation of
sovereign political societies called states, not a single nation
comprising so many administrative departments. Upshur’s
work, at one time a required text at The College of William and
Mary and the University of Virginia, was widely influential on
later writers in the Jeffersonian tradition.
Born in Northampton County, Virginia, Upshur attended Yale
and Princeton and subsequently became an enormously
successful attorney in Richmond, Virginia. In 1841 President
Tyler selected Ushur to be secretary of the navy and in 1843
secretary of state. In February 1844, while joining the
president and others on the maiden cruise of the new
steamship USS Princeton, Secretary Upshur and several others
were killed when one of the ship’s guns exploded.