The Liberal Arts and Sciences Office sat down with Dr. Matthew Bridgewater to discuss his new book The Marshall Court and the Rhetoric of American Republicanism. Here he shared insights into what inspired the book, who he wrote it for, and what he hopes it will accomplish. (Responses have been edited for clarity and length)
What motivated or inspired you to write the book and how did this book come about?
“The book started off with my own interests with the Supreme Court given more contemporary discussions about the Supreme Court. When I first got interested in that, I started to think, well, I could write a book on some of these conversations about ‘Why is the Court important?’ ‘Why do people get so exercised one way or the other about court rulings?’ There’s a whole media spectacle behind them now, especially with landmark cases. So I started looking at some of this. But then I started to realize that to better understand these more contemporary questions, we should start earlier and look at it from a historical perspective. ‘Where did the Court come from?’ ‘What were its origins?’ ‘How did it exert power within early America?’ ‘How did it create a framework for it to operate in within early American Republicanism and civic discourse?’ So it started with some contemporary interests and it started to link up with my own interests being in history.
I’d say that another aspect to it was [that] in 2017 I took a seminar hosted by the Rhetoric Society of America on the rhetorical presidency. A lot of the concepts from the rhetorical presidency, I felt, hadn’t been fleshed out in terms of thinking about the Court. I felt, ‘Well, let’s see what people have said about Court decisions and how they communicate those decisions to people.’ Also, ‘Are there concepts from the rhetorical presidency that perhaps could apply and help us understand communication with the Court, at least back in in those days?’ So that’s really how the project initiated.
How would you summarize this book for potential readers?
“[Hamilton] says that the Court is the weakest of the three branches of government because it does not have the power of purse like Congress or the power of sword like the Executive branch. It only has the power of persuasion, what [Hamilton] called the ‘wisdom and rectitude’ of the opinions, to speak for themselves and to convince people to follow the Court’s authority. So taking that, I take a look at how the Court was persuasive and how it was able to convince different actors that it was an important part of the US Constitutional system.
Each of the five body chapters discuss a landmark case in the early Court. I discuss the context that surrounded each case, the lawyers (how they strategized and what they decided to argue about in court, we have records of that for the most part), then I parse the opinion and editorial and political responses to it.
Some of the findings are that it identifies the Court with ‘the people’ of the Constitution. At the time, many people argued that [the Court] was a despotic branch that wasn’t at all attached to ‘the people.’ President Jefferson called Chief Justice Marshall “the Federalist serpent in the democratic Eden of our administration.” After McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), one newspaper editorialist referred to Marshall as a “deplorable idiot” in his opinion column. These are just two of many, many examples of the political and personal attacks the Marshall Court faced.
Then the other aspects of why it became persuasive, I would say first, it went out of its way to describe and to define its own power in terms of limiting it and saying, ‘We’re not trying to do this,’ ‘We’re not trying to act in this way.’ The Court often held back until the other organs of government (Congress, the President, the states) had had a chance to weight in. And then lastly, it also played on people’s fears of demagoguery and too much democracy from either Congress, or state governments, or from the Presidency. We have these same debates about ‘What are the powers of the President, or Congress, or states?’ If you were to take a look presently in terms of, let’s say, the debate about abortion, there’s a huge debate about the Court’s role in that, but also Congress’s role. There’s fear that Congress could make an abortion ban, or at the state level, there’s fear that it could be restricted or expanded, and people get anxious about all of that. These same debates were happening back then under different topics. So that was another part it [the Supreme Court] was able to play on some of the people’s fears of the other parts of the Constitutional system and hence define American civic government and the Court’s role in it to be a persuasive player in that as well.
How long did it take you to write this?
“I started during COVID, so I’d say like three years.”
Who would you say your target audience is?
“It’s being published through the University of Alabama Press which is an academic publisher and those are typically targeted towards scholars. So probably people that have scholarly backgrounds in rhetoric, humanities, and the law. As I wrote the book I read a bunch of legal books about constitutional history. I read history books, a lot of biographies to better understand the times and what the questions were they were going through. And then I also, of course, read a lot of rhetoric books. Teaching rhetoric, you know, I am more familiar with that. So I think scholars with those backgrounds would get a lot out of it.
But I am always very conscientious about writing for a broader audience. So I hope that a more public audience would also get a lot out of this and better understand the Court cases, the history behind the Court cases, the rhetorical strategies that Marshall used to help communicate and write his opinions, the aftermath of the cases, how they were reported in newspapers, and how politicians reacted to them.
What are you hoping this book achieves?
“A better understanding of the US Supreme Court within our political cultural milieu. I talk about how these landmark cases, if they’re done successfully, can help alleviate cultural and socioeconomic tensions sometimes caused by generational shifts (not every landmark case is done successfully. There’ve been several instances [where] it’s like a stick a dynamite being thrown onto things). Every generation has to interpret and apply the Constitution to contemporary problems. And this doesn’t mean to reinvent it necessarily, but inevitably, this process is not so simple as transmitting what the intent of the Founders was to a situation. There’s part of that, but there’s also a larger interpretation going on within the confines of socioeconomic changes that are happening.
In Marshall’s era, there was a big change around the time of the War of 1812, it was the first time where the Founding generation was largely out of power; they were either dead or retired from public life. You also had an immigration boom going on, and you also had the country change in the spirit of the War of 1812 as countries often do change post-war. So you had a generational shift, you had an immigration shift, and you also had a shift caused by war. Some of the rulings after that, I show how there was a shift from just transmitting what the Founders said, to applying it to this changing context of ‘What is America becoming and what is it going to be in the future?’
So there’s this cultural tension that, I think these opinions, if done successfully, can help connect the current generation to the past and to these Founding documents. It’s almost like a reenacting of the Constitutional Convention, just in its own modern sense. It’s just done through the eyes of the Supreme Court, but it’s ‘How to resolve this problem that can’t be resolved politically anymore?’. It’s almost like a type of conversion of sorts that transforms the country. I hope [the book] helps to achieve a better understanding of this process of what happens when there’s Court rulings and its effect on the polity.”
What opportunities has this book opened up for you?
“I’ve had some speaking opportunities. I’ve been at a couple of conferences to present on some of the chapters. I presented on my chapter on Marbury v. Madison and my chapter on Fletcher v. Peck. What’s interesting is some of the people in the audience are more like legal scholars [and] there’s a typical way that they understand these [cases] or how [they are] taught in law school. I feel that there are opportunities though to talk about this not just from a traditional legal standpoint, (which some of the traditional legal standpoints [are] debatable anyways, there’s been a lot of legal scholars who’ve talked about this) but from historical point[s] of view. I think there’s other opportunities to talk about this in terms of ‘How do these opinions allow the Court to define itself and to define the country in terms of American Republicanism as it was understood back then?’
I’m hoping to maybe teach a seminar on it at some point. Maybe a constitutional history class if one’s offered here [at Woodbury] or early American history class. I hope there’s some teaching opportunities about that as well.”