Frontier Democracy: Constitutional Conventions in the Old Northwest By Silvana R. Siddali

Abstract

Many students of history will define the Age of Jackson as one that wrestled with national constitutional questions, but the era also produced a flurry of constitutional activity at the state level. Between 1830 and 1860, twenty-two states either crafted new constitutions as they entered the union or revised existing ones. This interesting moment nestled between the first wave of constitutional activity that ended with the entry of Missouri and Maine into the Union in 1820, and the punctuated bursts of constitutional revisionism, largely among slaveholding states, during the Civil War and Reconstruction eras.