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Within the span of two lifetimes, thirteen British colonies in North America evolved into an enormously wealthy and powerful national state. “America,” as the world called this new society, evoked myriad images: a people that passionately embraced liberty and cherished individual rights and equality, an abundance of natural riches, widespread economic opportunity, political democracy, and, eventually, massive military might. Less celebrated but central to America’s history were the genocidal war on Native Americans, repeated use of coercive force against residents and foreign foes, support of slavery, persistent racism, gender inequality, and business monopolies. These blemishes have contributed to an American political history that is both distinctive and paradoxical.
On the eve of the American Revolution, 3 million persons, mainly free British subjects and their slaves, were concentrated on the coastal plain of the Atlantic from Maine to Georgia. In 1920 the United States was home to 106 million people, making its population the fourth largest in the world. By the early twentieth century Americans lived on lands that stretched 3,000 miles across North America from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. This geography made the United States the fourth largest country on earth, and in terms of fertile soil, the second largest. Even before World War I, which confirmed the United States’ membership in the club of world powers, the size of its economy exceeded that of all others, and its workers’ wages were among the highest anywhere.
By the mid-nineteenth century the United States was already the world’s largest democracy. Its citizens possessed broad legal protections that were the envy of the world, despite racial, ethnic, and gender inequalities. In the early twentieth century the United States had the world’s largest system of free education, probably the highest percentage of homeownership, and more motor vehicles than any other nation. Millions of immigrants abandoned familiar surroundings to share in the opportunities that America offered. In addition to the reproduction of American institutions across the continent, the United States inserted its influence in the Caribbean and across much of the Pacific basin at the dawn of the twentieth century. This development resulted in the fusion of diverse dynamics that turned a group of “little republics” into a powerful national state between the 1760s and 1920. What propelled this political transformation?
THE AMERICAN PARADOX
The evolution of the American state began with European outposts in North America. The largest were colonies of Great Britain, which had built a strong central state and possessed a formidable military. Most residents of Britain’s American colonies were proud to be members of the British Empire. But resentment of Britain’s effort to force colonial loyalty to a “tyrannical” king led to revolution and independence. America was thus born denouncing monarchy and central state authority (Parliament and the king’s ministers), enshrining the axiom that government, especially the central regime, was an ever-present threat to liberty. This conviction became the central theme of the new republic’s ideology and was seared into its civic DNA. Political leaders and cultural tradition perpetuated this antistatist outlook, which was engraved into the country’s constitutions. Given that the United States possessed the most pronounced antistatist ideology in the modern world, how did it become the world’s most powerful state?
This question disputes the contention that there was no “state” in America before the twentieth century. Recent reassessments have challenged this traditional view, but a composite portrait of the process is needed.1 The history of the long nineteenth century (1763–1920) shows that America always acted like a state. The antecedents of American statebuilding began in the colonial period, when local governments assumed a broad range of authorities. Local officials had the authority to use deadly force to defend the homeland. They sent individuals to the gallows for theft, rape, and unwed pregnancy. Home-grown lawmakers levied taxes to support militias and sometimes drafted men to fill their ranks. Colonial and later state militias defended Europeans from Native Americans and drove the latter from their lands. These actions represent the application of powers that lie at the core of statehood.
After independence, a triumvirate of governments—local, state, and national—shepherded the country into existence as a national state. The federal (i.e., national) government remained small in its early decades, yet its officials were hardly impotent. Despite the well-known constraints on their authority, federal officials played a significant role in American statebuilding. The national government has always asserted its right as a sovereign to enforce its laws in all territories claimed by the United States.
American history thus presents a paradox. The country’s defining ideology preached restraints on civic authority, but the actual uses of governmental power repeatedly contradicted this stricture. There is no simple explanation for this disjuncture. American history, however, suggests that most decisions to use governmental power have been situational in nature. That is, practical actions were taken in response to particular circumstances that were usually seen as problematic. These situations assumed various forms, ranging from crises, such as an attack on the United States, to conflicts that evolved over decades, such as slavery and dislocations traceable to industrialization. Time and again, specific circumstances arose that either triggered a public demand for remedial action or served as a rationale for actions taken by power holders. Time and again, pragmatic responses to problems trumped America’s cautionary ideology.
Attitudes were not uniform across society or among lawmakers. Ideology is not an undifferentiated catechism; variations in belief exist among individuals and groups. These differences and the material conditions associated with them spawned conflicting interests (e.g., North and South, capitalist and worker, Republican and Democrat) that opened pathways for policymaking within the maze of ideological and constitutional constraints.2 Nonetheless, politicians are skilled at justifying their actions in terms of their consistency with the nation’s civic heritage.
A second reason for the paradoxical relationship between theory and action in American politics is the existence of many “states” in the United States. Most Americans live in several jurisdictions—namely, in the United States (under the federal government), in a state (or states) of residence, and in a particular city or town. These overlapping structures of government and their respective legal authorities have always been present in America. During most of the long nineteenth century the national government remained weaker than its European counterparts, while matrices of state and local governments performed most civic tasks and took on more responsibilities as time advanced.
Skeptics may reply that the subnational governments were not really components of a state, that they did not constitute a central regime. It is true that the American scheme of governance fragmented civic authority and distributed it broadly. But this fact does not negate the existence of state powers. Individual state and local governments exercised authority over specified territories with clearly marked boundaries. They possessed the power to tax (i.e., to take property from residents) and to use coercive force such as capital punishment, deployment of militias, and enforcement of social regulations. Federal and state courts consistently recognized the constitutional legitimacy of these powers. By any reasonable criteria, civic entities that could tax, use deadly force, and regulate social relations within a specified territorial arena held powers that lay at the heart of a state.
The federal system has obscured much of this history. James Bryce, a perceptive British observer of American government, emphasized this impaired ability to track political activity in the United States. The union, he wrote at the end of the nineteenth century, is “more than an aggregate of States and the States are more than parts of the Union.” The United States, he continued, “is a Commonwealth of commonwealths.” Hence, Americans have “two loyalties, two patriotisms.” Understanding American civic life, Bryce opined, required recognition of this “double organization.”3 That is, one must study both levels of government—the federal and the subnational tiers.
Another reason that the pragmatic tradition in American governance has been underappreciated has to do with the incremental growth of governmental power. Deference to antistatist ideas surfaced repeatedly, as political conditions waxed and waned. Yet, over the course of the long nineteenth century, the scope and scale of state power expanded. During this evolution, government at all three levels took on more tasks, developed greater administrative capacity, and acquired more revenue to fund these activities. Gauging the growth of the American state requires the reconstruction of these trends.
THE NATURE OF A STATE
States have a long history, originating in antiquity, and sometimes took the form of empires. Most scholars agree that “modern” states emerged in western Europe after 1500. These new regimes had three fundamental elements. First, they were territorially bounded, with defined borders and a central government that possessed the authority to rule (the capacity to make law) in the areas for which it claimed jurisdiction. In our own time these territorial realms are plotted conspicuously on maps. Second, states were independent in the sense that they were self-governing; in the language of international law, they had sovereignty. Within their own territory, political leaders were autonomous decisionmakers, owing allegiance only to their state and to its monarch, its constituents, or both. The king’s ministers and the nation’s president negotiated with the leaders of other countries within the system of states, with powerful nations possessing hegemonic influence over lesser countries. Third, states had the authority to take property from inhabitants, usually in the form of taxes, and they possessed a legal monopoly on the use of lethal force, which could be utilized to enforce their rules. Coercive and fiscal functions are customarily assigned to specialized personnel, such as military forces, police, and revenue officers. These two legal entitlements—to use coercive force and to extract wealth from residents—differentiate states from other entities. Territorial jurisdiction, the sovereign authority to govern, and the capacity to take life and property make states extraordinarily powerful entities.4
As modern states matured they acquired additional attributes—notably, bureaucracy, whereby administrative units were devised and officers were appointed to superintend particular civic tasks. Administrative personnel assumed defined roles within hierarchical organizations whose purpose was defined by law, and they established relationships with groups outside of government. Over time, administrative organizations became institutionalized; rules and routines for overseeing policy objectives become fixed, and bureaucracies assumed semiautonomous status. In the popular mind, bureaucracy is often equated with government.
Scholars have noted two additional characteristics that became integral to states by the late nineteenth century. The first was nationalism, which denotes a sense of common identity among the inhabitants of a country and a sociopsychological allegiance to the state it represents. These sentimental attachments form the emotional fabric of a nation, which rests on a widespread sense of belonging to a cultural community by virtue of ethnic background, language, religion, and history. The synchronization of a nation with its formal civic apparatus results in a nation-state.5 Because nationalism helps empower a state’s capacity, elites attempt to cultivate popular attachment to the regime.
The other feature of states that became increasingly visible during the nineteenth century was the recognition of citizenship and rights. With the transition from kingly domains and colonies to nation-states, most notably in western Europe and North America, the inhabitants of a territory were transformed from the subjects of a ruler to citizens with rights and entitlements. Members of democratic states expect to vote for their leaders and to have their civil liberties protected. In return for these benefits, they recognize that they owe taxes to the regime and may be required to serve in the nation’s armed forces. Modern states, therefore, have formed complex relationships with residents regarding their rights and obligations.
The Dynamics of State Formation
The origin of the modern European state is entwined with the region’s history. Scholars debate the causes of its development, but there is agreement about the most prominent factors. All agree that the rise of the modern state was a historical process in which institutions and rulers reacted to and interacted with conditions that evolved over time. Only a close examination of specific episodes can reconstruct these sequences, but several general patterns can be summarized. The feudal arrangement that had dominated medieval Europe eroded after 1500 in the face of social, economic, and political pressures such as the Protestant Reformation, which challenged the political influence of Latin Christianity. Cities grew in wealth and size with the rise of commerce, spurring the formation of modern capitalism and the creation of economic interest groups such as merchants and bankers. The Renaissance and the Enlightenment offered new ideas about social and natural phenomena and posed alternatives to older orthodoxies.
Against this background statebuilding took shape within the more specific dynamics of change, none more critical than war. And no single military development was more instrumental in undermining the medieval political order than the invention of gunpowder and its use in cannon. This new technology, as well as personal firearms and oceangoing sailing vessels capable of mounting cannon, revolutionized military tactics and strategy. Cannon rendered castles and knights—the foundation of medieval warfare—obsolete. In place of small militias at the command of nobles and hired mercenaries, state leaders created military forces that relied on full-time paid armies and navies that trained regularly, were barracked separately from citizens, and were provisioned with modern arms. Maintaining this new coercive system was expensive, so regimes were forced to seek increased revenue, which they obtained by imposing new taxes and improving tax collection mechanisms. This demand stimulated the expansion of centralized political controls, principally by improving administrative capacities. The story of statebuilding between 1500 and 1800 evolved in large measure from the interactions among the creation of professional militaries, the adoption of revenue policies to support them, and the establishment of effective bureaucracies to coordinate the modernized military-fiscal complex. As Peter the Great, tsar of Russia (1682–1725), characterized this interaction: “money is the artery of war.” And as Philip Bobbitt observed, the state is a “war-making institution.”6
Charles Tilly, a historical sociologist, offered an important caveat to this process: civic leaders seldom pursue a specific model for building a state; rather, they respond to situations as they arise in the course of managing their immediate civic concerns.7 Rulers periodically confront crises, such as insurrection at home or military threats from rival states. Economic or epidemiological crises may prompt remedial action in the face of adverse circumstances. The system of states not only engendered competition among countries but also diffused new technologies and practices. No large state shunned the acquisition of cannon, for example. Economic and political changes after 1500 generated a host of interest groups that sought favors from state leaders, who recognized the importance of cultivating the support of wealthy inhabitants. Various inducements coaxed rulers to expand their states territorially. An estimated 300 political communities existed in Europe in 1500; that number had dwindled to 30 by the late twentieth century.8 While this brief summary of statebuilding in Europe only skims the surface of a complex history, it suggests factors with a bearing on the governance of America.
DIMENSIONS OF AMERICAN STATEBUILDING
Although modern states exhibit some similarities, each has its own history and cultural makeup. These distinctions were especially important for state-building in the United States during the long nineteenth century. To orient this analysis, I have selected five major contextual influences that can be thought of as “causes,” in the sense that they identify conditions that affected historical development: geography, war and military power, economic development, identity, and political capacity. While there is no airtight historical model that explains American statebuilding, the identification of major causal influences establishes references on which to base conjecture and explanation.9
Geography
Modern states are territorially defined. Their boundaries demark an area over which a governing regime claims sole jurisdiction. Territory, of course, encompasses the physiographic, socioeconomic, and political attributes of its space. The spatial reach of the United States grew rapidly and extensively in its first seventy years, spanning North America from east to west. This huge continental mass endowed the American state with a diverse topography ranging from coastal plains to broad grasslands to towering mountains, many deep-water harbors, an array of lengthy navigable waterways, and a rich storehouse of natural resources. As settlers built towns and cities, they developed these natural resources and established pathways of commerce, giving rise to regional cultures. By the last decades of the long nineteenth century the reach of American society not only stretched across the continent but also extended outward, notably into the Caribbean and the Pacific.
Geography may not be destiny, but it clearly plays a role in shaping human societies. America’s geographic endowment had a major impact on the country’s economic growth, its diplomatic outlook, and its cultural orientation. Traversing numerous climatic zones and physiographic regions, the American landmass contained topography suitable for a wide variety of agricultural and extractive activities. Seacoasts and coastal harbors, networks of rivers, and numerous lakes served as major transportation arteries. The thousands of miles of seacoast from Maine to the Gulf of Mexico and along the Alaskan shore and the Pacific coast from the Strait of Juan de Fuca to San Diego Bay supported fishing industries and safe harbors for maritime commerce. A long list of mineral and natural resources made American real estate especially valuable and valued.
The nation’s continental expanse and geographic separation from Europe and Asia had a marked impact on its foreign and domestic policies during the nineteenth century. The ocean separating the United States from the powerful states of Europe influenced American attitudes toward national security, especially after 1815. Within North America, the availability of cultivable land at comparatively low cost offered millions of families home and hope, a condition compatible with the spread of republican political institutions. Geography was connected to the regional cultural differences that culminated in the Civil War.10
Geographic perspectives on history can illuminate the diffusion and shifts in political, cultural, and economic patterns. As historical geographer D. W. Meinig notes, “Geography and history are bound together by the very nature of things.”11 The geographic perspective in this book embraces the environment, including climate and weather. Meteorological disruptions in the form of droughts, severe winters, or prolonged periods of abnormal temperatures or wet conditions have impacted economic activity, such as depressing agricultural production. Economic calamities, particularly in the era before industrialization, commonly generated significant social stresses that contributed to poverty, migration, delayed family formation, and increased levels of sickness and mortality. Like other determinants of economic activity, meteorological influences varied in form and impact over the immense territory of the United States.12
Maps are powerful instruments for visualizing spatial and relational properties of human activity. They also constitute historical evidence. As part of the retained archive of geographic knowledge, maps from the past shed light on how contemporaries viewed their environment and how they imaged their geographic future. The study of historical maps, the subject of historical cartography, illuminates dimensions of statebuilding.
Modern states arose in tandem with the development of cartography, whereby statebuilders sought measured descriptions of territory. This new form of knowledge helped rulers assert authority over specific units of space. Maps are thus legal documents that delineate the spatial terrain of a national state, as well as subunits within it. The very shape of national entities can convey powerful ideas about the nature of a state. In our own time, most of us are aware that international borders are fenced at places and that passage between countries is subject to official control and documentation of individuals’ identities. The history of this modern reality is linked to the territorial specificity of modern states.
Mapmakers began depicting the national boundaries of states in the sixteenth century. By the eighteenth century cartographers institutionalized this practice, often coloring each national territory and its colonial holdings with a distinct hue to delineate its territory (including noncontiguous colonies) from that of other national entities. This cartographic convention gave the impression that the regime possessed full control over its lands and implied a homogeneous culture within them. Reality contradicted these assumptions, of course, yet older maps were not politically neutral; they were tools of statecraft, or, in the language of cartographic scholars, “socially” constructed. The close connection between the rise of national states and the creation of atlases contributed to the development of national pride, whereby residents increasingly formed emotional bonds with their states. Maps, in short, were tools of statebuilding.13
War and Military Power
The connection between war and statebuilding is filled with irony. Fear of centralized power and the expenditures required for military action kept the regular army and navy of the United States small during the nineteenth century. Thomas Paine, the English exile who urged American independence, agreed with these reservations, writing in 1787 that war released “a train of unforeseen circumstances” yet was certain to increase taxes and debt. Fear of unchecked militarism led the framers of the Constitution to give Congress the power to declare war. Despite this ideological apprehension, the United States engaged in six major wars between the American Revolution and World War I. If one counts the continuous clashes between Euro-Americans and Native Americans as a discrete military episode, campaigns against Indians constitute a seventh war. In addition, national and state militaries were marshaled on many occasions to quell domestic rebellions, riots, and strikes. American forces were deployed in the Mediterranean against state-based pirates in the early nineteenth century and in Mexico in the early twentieth century. The rise of municipal and state police added another layer of organized force that evolved in the United States.14
One of the great paradoxes of American history is the juxtaposition between its small-military tradition and its repeated use of coercive force. No generation of Americans failed to witness a military campaign during the long nineteenth century. And although the US Army remained tiny for most of its early history, it ballooned to become the world’s largest during the Civil War. Two million Americans were sent to France during World War I. These engagements played a prominent role in American statebuilding. As Theda Skocpol aptly observed, “wars punctuate the biographies of nations.”15
The American military took on a variety of tasks besides combat. Before the Civil War the army loaned engineers to private transportation ventures and explored, mapped, and surveyed much of the western United States. The navy surveyed coastal waters, providing valuable information to a country with a maritime tradition. The army’s command structure and logistical organization provided a model for corporate and governmental bureaucracy. Many scholars have noted that American wars stimulated surges of nationalism that generated popular support for the country’s political leaders, at least for a time.16
Military engagements had important economic effects. Expenditures for military procurement stimulated business and employment, especially during the Civil War and World War I. The larger the scale of the engagement, the higher its cost, which meant that major wars left the nation with a much larger debt. Paying down these loans was one reason, along with the provision of veterans’ benefits, that peacetime public spending was higher after war than prior to it. Major wars, in short, caused dislocations in the economy, governmental finance, and social life.17
Economic Development
To say that a country’s economy has a critical bearing on its society and government is to state the obvious. Economics concerns how people organize production for their survival, create wealth, and consume the fruits of their labors. History offers considerable guidance on these issues. A symbiotic relationship occurred in Europe between the rise of capitalism and the emergence of modern states, which taxed private wealth largely to fund militaries. Political leaders realized that expanding economies enhanced the potential to raise public revenue. The development of capitalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries contributed to the formation of economic interest groups such as merchants, bankers, and landlords, which became increasingly important to political leaders. Because they understood the state’s dependence on the private economy, governmental actors promoted and protected commercial classes. In the United States the emergence of laissez-faire economics, the doctrine that government should not interfere with private enterprise, nurtured these relationships. Despite this ideological veil, American government was not a neutral player in the economy.18
Economic growth was propelled by numerous factors. America’s bountiful natural resources have already been referenced. A growing population, fueled in part by massive immigration that brought ideas as well as labor, enlarged the workforce (supply) and added consumers (demand). Americans emphasized education, which spread literacy and broadened the skills of workers. Receptivity to technological innovation had a transformative influence on commerce and business, as demonstrated by the arrival of steam power and steel. Government had a hand in these developments, including approving new forms of business organization (corporations in particular) and legal protections for trade and commerce. Although explaining how these factors interacted is difficult, it is clear that the American economy became the largest and wealthiest in the world over the long nineteenth century.
This development, however, did not proceed at an even pace. Rather, it assumed an undulating pattern in which recurring expansions were punctuated by sharp and sometimes prolonged slumps, occasionally called panics, that usually preceded depressions. The most severe downturns caused widespread bankruptcies and business failures, loss of real estate due to mortgage foreclosure and tax delinquency, high unemployment, and elevated social distress. Nine major economic depressions occurred between the 1780s and 1920.19
Economic downturns warrant attention because they have had significant repercussions for society and government. Major depressions brought hardship and uncertainty to workers, families, and businesses, which pressured policymakers to take remedial action. The effects of these demands took several forms, such as triggering electoral realignments that altered political coalitions and inducing workers and entrepreneurs to formulate new coping strategies. Whatever vectors these shock waves followed, memory of the calamity could linger for years. Failure to defuse the anger and fear generated by economic reversals could undermine the groups in power. Depressions constituted critical moments in history when unexpected crises unleashed powerful dynamics for political change.20
Together, wars and depressions are two potent forces that have repeatedly impacted public life in the United States. Only two decades during the long nineteenth century—the 1790s and the 1880s—failed to record at least one major war or depression, and even these fortunate decades experienced minor recessions and military actions. Both types of shock to the polity figured prominently in American statebuilding.21
Identity
How individuals perceive their place in society—what I call identity—plays a central role in statebuilding. It combines several components. A key relationship between residents and the state is embodied in nationalism, or a sense of peoplehood whereby individuals share cultural bonds and consider themselves members of a wider community. As nationalism evolves, inhabitants of a country become aware of ties to nonfamily members in society, usually through linkages created by history and tradition, ethnicity, religion, and language. The fusion of cultural identification with a society’s civic and ideological foundations gives birth to a nation-state.22
The concept of nationalism may appear to be homogeneous, but it can have multiple expressions. As geographer D. W. Meinig and others have reminded us, American identity was embedded in numerous geographic and sociopolitical contexts. From the first European settlement, American society has possessed regional distinctions in which “differences in ethnic content, social character, religious expression, and political culture” were geographically diffused. Regional cultures, Meinig argues, “were fundamental to the shaping of America.” The contest between national sentiments and regional loyalties (and antinational attitudes) rendered American nationalism a paradox, particularly before the Civil War.23
The transformation of North American colonies into the American nation-state paralleled the transition in the status of individuals from subjects to citizens. The American Revolution marks the moment when most free male residents of the North American colonies renounced their allegiance to King George III of England and became citizens of the United States. Their new status confirmed and conveyed various rights and obligations. The classic enumeration of rights in the United States is the Bill of Rights in the Constitution. The individual American states also wrote their own bills of rights, some of them earlier and much longer than the national version. American citizens thus live under a dual legal framework that, in theory, protects their rights from governmental deprivation. Voting in elections for public officials is perhaps the most recognized right of citizenship. With citizenship came the obligation for males to serve in the military (when drafted or by volunteering) and for property holders to pay taxes.
Citizenship has a contested history in the United States. A perennial issue was how to integrate immigrants into the community and prepare them for citizenship. Complicating this transition were habitual complaints that newcomers had not conformed to the cultural norms of their adopted society. The barriers to full citizenship have been high even for some native-born Americans, namely, African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos, and women. Gender has long influenced the American polity, especially with regard to political participation and policy advocacy.24
Political Capacity
The final orienting referent concerns civic entities’ ability to govern. This dimension concerns the political process, especially the selection of office-holders, the making of policy, and administration. These processes are conditioned by a regime’s underlying authority, such as its ideological mantra, and its institutional expressions. Formal, written constitutions became the holy grail of civic life in the United States. These documents allocated powers and responsibilities to public officials, created institutional structures (e.g., legislatures and courts), and set forth procedures for their operation (e.g., specifying a four-year term for the president). They also set limits on the power of officeholders. The evolution of constitutional law through amendments, court rulings, and political practices, as well as the adoption of statutes and patterns of administrative practices, all have a bearing on political capacity.
Political power lies outside the structure of government as well as within it. Ideology, which permeates various corners of the polity both inside and outside the halls of government, reflects how people view the role of the state and sets informal boundaries on permissible and impermissible actions. Beyond some general homilies, the largest segment of the population probably gave little thought to the theoretical foundations of the government. Actual governance derived primarily from practical concerns. Demands filtered into the political arena through the requests of lobbyists and interest groups; from prominent figures in society, such as newspaper editors and religious leaders; and via elections, which acted as conduits of information from constituencies. Elections that realigned party coalitions had significant effects on policy.25
Reconstructing this history is complicated by the nation’s federal system, which divided governing prerogatives between the states and the central government. The shape of this legal-constitutional bifurcation changed through political practice and court interpretations after 1788, yet throughout the long nineteenth century, a broad consensus persisted that state and local governments should handle most day-to-day governance. Yet no comprehensive history of subnational (state and local) governance exists for the nineteenth century. Despite this handicap, tracking American statebuilding is incomplete unless all governing units (national, state, local, and special) are included in the analysis.26