SEDITION: How America's Constitutional Order Emerged from Violent Crisis, one of the most urgent reads of 2025

SEDITION: How America's Constitutional Order Emerged from Violent Crisis
MARCUS ALEXANDER GADSON
NYU Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$32.00 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: How Americans have weathered constitutional crises throughout our history

Since protestors ripped through the Capitol Building in 2021, the threat of constitutional crisis has loomed over our nation. The foundational tenets of American democracy seem to be endangered, and many citizens believe this danger is unprecedented in our history. But Americans have weathered many constitutional crises, often accompanied by the same violence and chaos experienced on January 6. However, these crises occurred on the state level. In Sedition, Marcus Alexander Gadson uncovers these episodes of civil unrest and examines how state governments handled them.

Sedition takes readers through six instances of constitutional The Buckshot War, Dorr’s Rebellion, Bleeding Kansas, the Brooks-Baxter War, a successful terrorist campaign to overthrow South Carolina’s government during Reconstruction, and the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898. He chronicles these turbulent periods of violent anti-government conflict on the state level, explaining what it was like to experience coup d’états, rival governments fighting in the streets, and disputed elections that gave way to violence. As he addresses constitutional breakdown, Gadson urges Americans to pay increased attention to the risk of constitutional instability in their home states. His sweeping historical analysis provides new insights on the fight to protect democracy today.

As Americans mobilize to prevent future crises, Sedition reminds us that our constitutional order can fail, that democratic collapse is possible, and offers us advice on how to save our constitutional system.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I've turned the references in the publisher's synopsis into links. I did this so you can look into the high points of the events the author has chosen to highlight in search of a context for the public, academic, and media responses to the unfolding crisis in the US Federal government. Tellingly, each of these cases examined involved a bloody uprising by some (definitionally reactionary, as they chose armed rebellion as a response to change) element of the affected population.

I'm not going to go into the events, that's why I've given you the links, but I do want to highlight a vitally important takeaway from the book. Our system only works when we all play by the rules. When any group decides the rules set out in a constitution just will not do, and determine the effort to change that constitution is better expended in imposing new rules by force, bloodshed must follow. Otherwise the path to anarchy is paved.

This is not theoretical. These are not hypothetical case studies. This is US history, researched by a professor of Law at an accredited (christian) university. His entire text, including an excellent endnotes section, is under three hundred pages. Wear your biblio-track shoes. Have coffee before reading, I had a half-star off for my inability to read and absorb it without taking copious notes. But listen, please to a voice that should be coming from inside the coup-executers' house. He brings facts to the table that demonstrate the danger, and the impracticality, of the current crisis actors' intended result.

It is too important and too imminent a threat not to learn how it has been attempted...and thwarted, however kludged together and flawed the response was...before. And at what cost.