Reconstructing the Hydra-Headed Monster: The Bank of the United States, Institutional Change, and American Constitutional Development

This dissertation is a study of American constitutional development inspired by suspect constitutional historiography. When scholars recount the constitutional controversy surrounding the Bank of the United States (1791-1811; 1816-1836), they tend overwhelmingly to outline a two-sided, multi-generational, and inter-branch struggle over the meaning of the Necessary and Proper Clause. In truth, combatants also (1) fundamentally reconstructed that clause over time, and (2) brought a second provision — the congressional power to “Coin Money, Regulate the Value Thereof” — within the national bank’s constitutional ambit. Both of these traditionally ignored constitutional constructions were inspired by gradual but transformative institutional change between 1791 and 1811. These change-induced constitutional constructions met disparate long-run fates — the first never captured the collective imagination of federal lawmakers or Supreme Court justices, while the second effectively altered constitutional meaning between 1816 and 1832 — and this divergence generates a developmental puzzle: Under what conditions will gradual but transformative institutional change lead to constitutional development? This dissertation argues that adjustments to authoritative textual meaning will follow slow-moving institutional change when (1) actors respond to the latter by reconstructing constitutional provisions, and (2) those constructions are offered in the service of achieving policy outcomes with broadly-distributed benefits. It also considers (but rejects) a rival claim that constitutional change will follow institutional change when (1) actors respond to the latter with novel constructions of existing text, and (2) those constructions draw constitutional meaning closer to that intended by the Founding generation.