5

Nationalism and Public Policy

George Washington waited at his Mount Vernon estate in April 1789 for the arrival of the messenger who would confirm his election as the country’s first president. Even though Washington was the consensus (and only) candidate for the office, the outcome of the election worried him. Besides being reluctant to leave his “peaceful abode” in Virginia, he harbored doubts about his fitness for the job. At fifty-seven, he had already logged years of service to his country. But friends had persuaded Washington that he was the logical choice and perhaps the only person who could successfully steer the new ship of state.

Washington also dreaded the fawning and ceremony to come. The eight-day journey to New York confirmed his expectations, as he was feted at each stop along the way. In the words of biographer Ron Chernow, the trip was “the republican equivalent of the procession of a royal coronation.” A special barge was constructed to carry him across the Hudson River from New Jersey to New York City. The huge flotilla of boats that joined the procession included musicians who serenaded the excursion. The streets of the city were lined with spectators; ladies threw flowers from windows and “shed tears of joy.” The pageantry continued over the next several days until his inauguration, when Washington stated that his foremost objective was the “triumph of national unity over ‘local prejudices or attachments.’”¹ He repeated his hope for national unity eight years later in his farewell address as president.

Washington was America’s foremost hero. He was the only political notable who received unreserved adulation from all sections of the United States. Paradoxically, he left the presidency under a cloud of vitriolic criticism. Political division, not national unity, emerged during his tenure as the nation’s chief executive. And yet, time would heal these political wounds and restore his stature among Americans, eventually elevating him to unrivaled heroic figure in the history of the United States. The history of American nationalism in many ways paralleled the Washington parable.

GOVERNANCE AND NATIONALISM IN THE ANTEBELLUM ERA

Governance embodies the legal powers granted to civic officials and how they exercise this authority. In its simplest expression, this responsibility reduces to the adoption of rules for the community (laws) and the application of these rules (administration and litigation). In democratically based polities, and in the United States in particular, these actions are publicly phrased in varying degrees of concordance with constituent thinking. The actions of government evoke various responses, often negative, especially when taxes, wars, or cultural mores are involved. Thus, the survival of a political community requires popular acceptance of its underlying foundations that transcend political conflicts of the moment. Without acquiescence to its sustaining principles, support for the state can erode and even collapse. The legitimacy of the regime, in short, requires the consent of the citizenry. Patriotism—loyalty to the national state—is a critical factor in this equation. The development of personal identification with the nation (i.e., nationalism) provides this bonding between constituents and the state.

By its nature, nationalism is difficult to define and even harder to reconstruct historically. The concept refers to sentiments manifest within a national territory and the psychological identification with the symbols of a state. Hans Kohn has defined nationalism as a “state of mind, in which supreme loyalty of the individual is felt to be due the nation-state.” These feelings spring from a “deep attachment to one’s native soil, to local traditions and to established territorial authority.” Nationalism, he states, is a living and active corporate will, “inspiring the large majority of the people and claiming to inspire all its members.”² National identity rests on a collective sentiment shared by the inhabitants of a locale; this sense of peoplehood identifies individuals as members of a distinct society. The evolution of national identity transforms a national state into a nation-state, in which cultural identity becomes fused with loyalty to a country’s civil apparatus. Although people may share identities through language, ethnicity, and a common history, a nation is a fictive congregation and not an explicit political entity.

The nation, Benedict Anderson suggests, is an “imagined community,” and its traditions are invented, according to Eric Hobsbawm. Yet German historian Heinrich von Treitschke believed that, “again and again, it has been proved that it is war which turns a people into a nation.”³ In America, however, other factors were influential in cultivating a national identity. David Waldstreicher has made a convincing case that nationalism in the early decades of the republic was shaped by rival visions of an American nation and that active participation in civic festivities, such as parades and holiday pageants, interacted with ideological declarations to construct an American nationalism. Susan-Mary Grant argues that the development of American nationalism was forged in a sectional dialectic between the North and the South.⁴

Individuals possess several identities. Race, religion, gender, and family are important personal referents; so too are attachments to place, such as one’s neighborhood, town, and region, and an individual’s status (class) in society. The overlapping nature of personal identities has produced complex configurations that were difficult to untangle historically, especially before the advent of polling techniques. This is especially the case for the antebellum era, when sentimental attachments to an American “nation” evolved slowly, displayed divisive strains, and remained largely nonexistent in places. Fogginess about the substance of nationalism is a major reason why writers have questioned the existence of an American state in the antebellum era.

We do know that America was a nation of joiners. Societies and associations multiplied among professionals, merchants, artisans, military corps, ethnic brotherhoods, and other voluntary groups, especially in the cities. Independence Day, Washington’s birthday, and memorable events such as the opening of the Erie Canal and the victory over Mexico led to public celebrations, luring myriad groups to parade the city streets and listen to patriotic rhetoric delivered by local notables.⁵ Presumably these public exercises reinforced bonds to the American state.

THE EVOLUTION OF NATIONAL IDENTITY

M. Walzer wrote that “the state needs to be personified before it can be seen, symbolized before it can be loved, imagined before it can be conceived.”⁶ George Washington fulfilled much of this requirement in the long nineteenth century. He was indelibly linked to the American Revolution, the birth of the republic, the writing of the Constitution, and the inauguration of the federal government. Partisan animus over the French Revolution and other issues during Washington’s presidency (1789–1797), however, dimmed some of this adulation.

Time restored Washington’s venerated status among Americans. By the 1830s his reputation had undergone a revival that took many forms. His likeness adorned homes, public buildings, and folk art. The nation’s capital had already been named in his honor, but 300 counties and towns later bore his name. Parson Weems’s 1800 biography (revised and republished many times) cast Washington in a saintly light, while Chief Justice John Marshall provided a longer but less fanciful narrative of his life. Jared Sparks, Harvard College’s first historian, published a twelve-volume collection of Washington’s correspondence between 1834 and 1837. Construction of a monument in the capital in Washington’s honor began in 1848 and was completed in 1885. Henry Brown’s equestrian statue of Washington was unveiled in New York’s Union Square in 1856, the city’s first commemorative monument to the Revolution. The Mount Vernon Ladies Association purchased Washington’s estate from his descendants in 1858 and turned it into a national shrine. In later years admirers continued to add reminders of Washington’s contribution to the forging of the nation.⁷

Washington’s role in the Revolution and the Constitution personified the fusion of “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable,” as Daniel Webster phrased the axiom.⁸ This ideological synthesis became the ideological heart of the American republic. The principle was repeated time and again during the long nineteenth century at Fourth of July celebrations where local luminaries delivered orations to the assembled throngs. Independence Day became the “national Sabbath.” American nationalism was, as geographer D. W. Meinig observes, “connected first of all to a set of principles rather than a place.”⁹ The union and the republican principles it embodied were key to preserving freedom, a refrain that echoed across generations of politicians. They added that this civic covenant made the United States unique among nations and posited that God had directed a “mission” to extend American liberty. When the expansion of territory was linked to this providential mandate, it was called “Manifest Destiny.” Protestantism, republican political institutions, and optimism about material progress were folded into a recurring motif of America’s special civic culture. The removal of property qualifications for white male voters represented a logical development of this civic vision. Congress and Washington designated Thanksgiving Day to commemorate the blessings of citizenship and opportunity.

Numerous factors promoted a sense of America’s civic uniqueness. Language and heritage were important. Most Americans were native English speakers of British ancestry. An even larger proportion accepted the moral imperatives of Protestantism, even if they were not active churchgoers, as was the case for large numbers of Americans. Protestant morality was diffused in the schools, which were often run by charitable and religious organizations but increasingly by local governments. The 1850 census counted nearly 81,000 public schools, sustained largely by tax dollars. The American passion for education produced the most literate nation in the world; the 1850 census identified only 9 percent of white adults as illiterate.

In addition to the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic, schooling fused a mixture of Protestant piety and American patriotism, attributes that were conspicuous in Jedidiah Morse’s Geography Made Easy (1784 and later editions), a popular schoolbook, and McGuffey’s readers (1836–1837 and later), some of the most widely read books in America at the time. A literate population encouraged the establishment of a growing number of newspapers; the formation of the Associated Press in 1849 forged an expanding network of news gatherers. The publication of newspapers and books and the creation of libraries and historical societies all contributed to an American national ethos.¹⁰ The US Post Office, which underwrote the cost of mailing newspapers, played a major role in “spreading the news” around the country.¹¹ Along with schooling and religion, literacy promoted a sense of Americanism.

The expansion of the country added a material basis to the rise of nationalist sentiments. The lure of the land was viewed as a limitless opportunity for individuals to start anew and become property owners. Orators envisioned that America’s expansion across the continent was destined to make it “a great and unified Nation.” The surge of settlers to the frontier pushed republican institutions westward, as newcomers established towns and counties to anchor the new states added to the union. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued in his famous essay “The Significance of the Frontier” (1893) that “the frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality.” More than other regions, he credited the West as being a breeding ground of American nationalism.¹²

The extent to which the frontier environment promoted distinct American attitudes is still being debated. From the vantage point of many mapmakers, however, geography was a handmaid to American nationalism. Beginning in the 1820s cartographers depicted the United States as a country with both an Atlantic and a Pacific coast, which offered visual proof that a great new “empire” had been formed. The East provided environmental inspiration for pride in America. American artists, especially painters in the Hudson River school (1820s–1850s) such as Thomas Cole (St. John in the Wilderness, 1827) and Frederick E. Church (Niagara Falls, 1857), envisioned landscapes in the Northeast as a fusion of nature, Christianity, and American identity. For a new society that lacked traditional relics of national identity, the celebration of nature was a substitute for Europe’s ancient castles and kingly epics.¹³

Technological progress also substituted for more conventional symbols of national identity. “Steam and electricity,” wrote Gordon Bennett, editor of the New York Herald, “have made and are making, this country the greatest . . . the sun ever shone upon.” The railroad was repeatedly depicted as an engine of progress that would forge national unity. A transcontinental line, promoters argued, would bind the union together by building a great commercial highway. In 1846 a midwestern member of Congress marveled how the iron horse and the telegraph had conquered distance and would allow remote places like Oregon to join “this great temple of freedom.”¹⁴

The transportation-communication revolution overlapped two important political changes: the expansion of the electorate and the development of modern political parties. Debate over Alexander Hamilton’s financial policies during the Washington administration and differing views about the French Revolution in the 1790s keyed the formation of the Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans, partisan groupings that continued through the War of 1812. During these early years of the republic, political leadership remained largely in the hands of elites, a feature that undermined the survival of the first parties. Political parties reappeared during the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1829–1837) and evolved into a primary vehicle of popular politics in the 1840s. This development was cued largely by the legal expansion of the electorate, achieved via state constitutional and statutory changes (circa 1800–1840) that removed property qualifications for voting, although suffrage remained limited to adult white males. Other reforms made offices formerly filled by appointment open to election, such as county officials in the South, city mayors in the North, and judges in many states. The admission of new states expanded the geographic reach of these electoral changes, reinforcing the logic behind constructing a national network of party organizations. From the late 1830s through the mid-1850s, two partisan groups—the Democrats (initially the Jacksonian Democrats) and the Whigs—engaged in vigorous competition and influenced the management of government.¹⁵

The rise of this “second party system” was instrumental in American statebuilding because it integrated individuals of diverse backgrounds and geographic locations into the electoral democracy, albeit within partisan groupings. The enlargement of the voter base increased the ranks of political citizenship, a civic development that numerous historians see as a kernel of early American nationalism. Historian Robert Wiebe argues that America and democracy were synonymous, resulting in a fusion of sentiments that produced a “romantic nationalism.”¹⁶ The Democratic and Whig Parties manipulated this association between democracy and citizenship in their electioneering. The cumulative effect of partisan competition contributed to a growing sense of membership in the American nation until sectional stresses in the 1850s ripped it apart.

IMPEDIMENTS TO NATIONALISM

Although political parties and economic factors influenced national identity in the antebellum years, various conditions blunted its development. One set of restraints concerned citizenship and social status. Women, free blacks, and many immigrants, especially Catholics, were denied full political rights. Slaves were defined as property, not people, and Indians were regarded as culturally incompatible with Euro-American society. Non-English-speaking and Catholic immigrants faced widespread ostracism, especially in New England, where white Protestantism set social conventions. Some people on the periphery of citizenship, such as women and Protestant immigrants, shared patriotic sentiments through family ties and identification with the dominant culture. But the strongest sense of national identification was centered among white males, the group that occupied the top rung of society’s social and political ladder.¹⁷

Americans were also segmented by geographic location. The identities of most inhabitants included a locational attachment based on their town or village, as well as their county and state. Clusters of states and even parts of states formed the geographic basis of regional cultures.¹⁸ Turner saw sections as regional aggregations of states. “Each section,” he wrote in 1922, “has its own special geographic qualities, its own resources and economic capacities, and its own rival interests.” In addition, “There is a sectionalism of culture.” The country’s history and geographic size made it “impossible” to understand American politics, Turner wrote, “except through sectional spectacles.”¹⁹ Virtually every historian of antebellum America uses the South, the North, and the West as referencing markers.

Distinctive sectional and regional characteristics are visible in the artwork of the age, which took everyday life, western migration, and natural landscapes as its subjects. The artists of the Hudson River school have already been noted, but others also interpreted American culture in the mid-nineteenth century. Emmanuel Leutze was perhaps the most well-known artist to depict heroic moments in American history. Leutze’s fame grew with his rendition of Washington Crossing the Delaware (1852) and his mural painted on the dome of the Capitol (Westward the Course of Empire, conceived in 1854 and completed in 1862). Artists such as Karl Bodmer, John Mix Stanley, and Albert Bierstadt painted idiomatic images of the Far West that evoked pride in Americans’ advance across this idyllic countryside. The art of the period fused themes of progress, Christianity, and the triumph Anglo-Saxon civilization over heathen natives and untamed natural geography.²⁰

Many of these renditions were reproduced as lithographs. The best-known vendors of affordable images were Currier and Ives, printmakers located in New York City. Consciously attempting to appeal to middle-class tastes, Currier and Ives depicted people and places that suggested the role of class, gender, and race in American culture. Their lithographs also captured sectional differences, such as fall apple picking and winter sledding in the North, plantation manors in the South, and wagon trains heading toward the Rockies in the western frontier.²¹

New England furnished the model for American nationalism. New Englanders possessed a prideful sense of their town-based communities, which they heralded as the cradle of liberty and the embodiment of their Puritan-Pilgrim heritage. More ethnically homogeneous than residents of other regions, New Englanders were predominantly of English background prior to the inflow of Irish and French Canadian immigrants at midcentury. The region produced much of the nation’s literary output and embraced a culture that venerated hard work and moral rectitude. This quest for self-improvement explains why illiteracy in the region was substantially lower than in the southern states.²² New England’s politicians condemned slavery and the three-fifths clause of the Constitution, which gave southerners additional seats in Congress and control of the presidency from Washington through Jackson (except for John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams). As Joseph Conforti explains, New Englanders considered their region the “American homeland” and had no doubt that their values should constitute the heart of the nation.²³

Many southerners took offense at northern definitions of Americanism. Differing in various ways from most of the North, the Deep South was a cotton-growing agricultural region with few cities or industries, relatively few modern transportation facilities, a poorly developed school system, and low literacy rates. Northern stereotypes depicted southern society as dominated by a patriarchal hierarchy of planter elites (cavaliers), a small minority among more numerous poor white farmers. The evolving northern conception of American nationalism fed off a negative view of the South as “feudal, aristocratic, and backward.” Whereas northerners generally welcomed innovation, the South showed less interest in technical and intellectual growth, with the exception of the cotton gin. The southern “middling” strata were considerable smaller than those in the North. Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke for many of his northern contemporaries when he called southerners “haughty, selfish, willful and unscrupulous men.” Increasingly, those in the North saw slavery as a national problem, not simply a sectional peculiarity.²⁴

In reality, “there were many Souths,” as Daniel Boorstin has observed. The region was not a cultural or geographic monolith, although northerners increasingly perceived southerners as arrogant, slave-owning aristocrats intent on controlling national policy. Partly because of these perceptions, leading white southerners defined their homeland in distinctive sectional terms, especially after 1830. William Taylor attributes the development of the cavalier myth embedded in antebellum literature as an attempt to contrast southern planters’ noblesse oblige with the heartless acquisitiveness of Yankee northerners. Susan-Mary Grant sees the development of southern sectional conceptions of Americanism as a defensive response to northern cultural chauvinism. These contrasts dichotomized into sectional nationalism by midcentury in the view of some historians.²⁵

The mid-Atlantic, which extended from New York to the upper Ohio River basin and abutted settlements around the Great Lakes, represented the most heterogeneous region. New York City was a multiethnic urban center with influence throughout the “core” area of the country, challenging Boston as the nation’s cultural capital. The city also anchored the socioeconomic “nuclear area” of the United States between Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington. Migration of native-born Americans and immigrants across the Appalachians brought Ohio and then Indiana and Illinois into the rapidly settled “west.” This region contained a variety of cultural nodes and influences, with New England Yankees settling in northern areas (Ohio and Michigan) and southerners flowing into locales along the Ohio River and up the Mississippi River into Missouri. Scandinavian and German immigrants mingled in between, with many favoring the northern reaches of the Midwest, especially Wisconsin and Minnesota. Notwithstanding this swirl of peoples in the nation’s midsection, Turner saw the “west” as the most nationalistic region in antebellum America.²⁶

Sectional, regional, and community attachments impeded the development of an unqualified nationalism. Economic development failed to instill modern values in all places in the expanding national state. The sectional cleavage that resulted in the Civil War demonstrates the shortcomings of a common national identity through 1860. Yet conversely, northern willingness to suppress southern secession from the union provides evidence that patriotic devotion to an American nation was broad, powerful, and sustained outside the South. This cohesiveness is probably what Turner meant by the existence of an “American spirit” in the midst of sectional divisions.²⁷

FEDERALISM AND AMERICAN GOVERNANCE

In 1833 Congressman Thomas Dickens Arnold from Tennessee rose on the floor of the House to advocate the distribution of “the laws of Congress” to every court of record in the nation. “It is true,” he said, “that the everyday concerns of the citizens of the country are entrusted to the legislation of the State Governments, but still there are many matters, coming under the legislation of Congress, in which the whole people have an important interest.”²⁸ Arnold’s remarks touched three elementary truths about the antebellum polity. First, he pointed to legislatures, not executives, as the primary locus of lawmaking authority. During Arnold’s time, representative bodies, not presidents and governors, were viewed as the foundation of republican government. Second, he noted the allocation of responsibilities between the states and the national government. This delegation of powers is the foundation of the American federal system. And third, he noted the states’ prevalence in dealing with “every-day concerns.”

Federalism constitutes the structural arch of governmental authority in the United States. This political-legal arrangement had immense significance for how Americans managed civic affairs. The system arose from the colonial experience, when American assemblies exercised extensive powers while remaining within Britain’s imperial jurisdiction (see chapters 2 and 3). The decisions made at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 preserved state prerogatives. The Constitution delegated explicit “enumerated” powers to Congress and contained some explicit restrictions on state authority, including the ability to break contracts, coin money, and declare war. Beyond these limitations, states could govern as their officers saw fit, so long as they observed their own constitutions and did not directly contravene federal authority. In addition, both governments shared “concurrent” powers, most notably the ability to tax, preserve law and order, and create new governing units. However, the US Constitution’s vagueness on certain provisions, and competing legal interpretations, spawned ongoing controversy about the boundary between state and national powers. These disagreements roiled politics throughout the antebellum era.²⁹

Federalism is a prism for viewing American political history, for three basic reasons. First, the federal allocation of responsibility instructs us to track both national and state actions. And one must remember that state action includes the acts of local governments, whose authorities were outlined primarily by state lawmakers. Counties, towns, townships, villages, and cities were the workhorses of public administration in the long nineteenth century. More than 10,000 local general-purpose governments existed in the United States in 1850.³⁰ Any political history that excludes state and local government cannot capture the scope and scale of American governance.³¹ In the nineteenth century, local governments, the states, and the federal government performed relatively distinct tasks.

Second, federalism provided mechanisms for interactions between state and national arenas. States, for example, selected the electors who cast ballots for the nation’s president, and state legislatures chose US senators until 1913. States designed the districts for representatives elected to the lower house of Congress and specified who could vote in all elections. Because staffing of the national government ran largely through each state, federalism created a political conduit for the expression of local constituencies at the national level of government and for sectional alliances in congressional policymaking. Changes to the Constitution had to win the approval of three-fourths of the states. Federal courts, however, could disallow state actions if they violated the US Constitution. Federalism, in short, provided a central forum for the representation of local and regional interests. In the language of the late eighteenth century, the union was a confederated polity.³²

Third, federalism was plastic and pliable, as the relationship between the national government and the states changed during the nineteenth century and even more so in the twentieth. A variety of factors prompted these alterations, in part because federalism offered a platform for politicians to challenge political practices. The addition of new states to the union altered the political dynamics, such as by recasting coalitions in Congress. The replacement of justices on the US Supreme Court and a steady stream of new laws and court rulings in the states continually revised the political-legal context in which the relationship between state and national authority was discussed. Federalism evolved over time yet remained the critical platform for statebuilding in America.³³

STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNANCE

Local government played the most conspicuous role in the everyday lives of Americans. The most dynamic governmental entities were the cities, especially the biggest cities, whose commercial activity and increasingly dense populations created a variety of dislocations and political demands. Cities derived their authority from state governments through charters and statutes that created civic offices and outlined their responsibilities. Technically, cities were legal creatures of the state; in practice, a power granted or denied to a municipal government usually represented a behest from city officials and residents. Regardless of who initiated an action, state legislatures frequently intervened in urban affairs, often by statute on specific matters, but sometimes by the wholesale revision of municipal charters.³⁴

Boston illustrates the patterns of governance in the largest municipalities. Massachusetts elevated the town of Boston to a municipality with a charter in 1821, effective in 1822. The new city brought a long civic history to its mandate, having already established public schools, including a high school; street improvements; a police force (constables and a night watch); fire protection; and care for paupers. Actions of the city legislature and the mayor, frequently based on the new authority granted by the state, expanded these functions and added new ones over the next four decades (see table 5.1). The city redeveloped Faneuil Hall into the Quincy Market (which the city rented to vendors), established a permanent police force under the command of a marshal, inaugurated a public water system, created salable land from the waters of Bay Back, appointed a single marshal to command the volunteer firefighters, constructed a public library, issued regulations for the use of horses on city streets, constructed sewers (although not yet a citywide system), and sponsored a city hospital. In 1854 the city established a police department; police officers were required to wear uniforms five years later, and in another four years, they were permitted to carry guns. Hard-core criminals could be sent to the state prison, which was located in town. Boston controlled real estate development by selling city land, issuing building permits (an early form of zoning), and regulating stables that housed the city’s growing population of horses (“living machines”). It licensed numerous trades and businesses, such as saloons, and could close them down if they were deemed “nuisances.”³⁵

Table 5.1. Boston Governance, 1821–1863

Sources: Richard H. Abbott, “Massachusetts: Maintaining Hegemony,” in Radical Republicans in the North: State Politics during Reconstruction, ed. James C. Mohr (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Dale Baum, The Civil War Party System: The Case of Massachusetts, 1848–1876 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984); Charles J. Bullock, Historical Sketch of the Finances and Financial Policy of Mass. from 1780 to 1905, 3rd ser., vol. 8: 2 (New York: Publications of the American Economic Association, 1907); Ronald Formisano, Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s–1840s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Oscar Handlin, Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy; Massachusetts, 1774–1861, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969); Albert B. Hart, ed., Commonwealth History of Massachusetts, vol. 4, 1820–1889 (New York: States History Co., 1930); Charles P. Huse, The Financial History of Boston, 1822–1909 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916); John Koren, Boston, 1822 to 1922: The Story of Its Government (Boston: City of Boston Printing Department, 1922); Roger Lane, Policing the City: Boston, 1822–1905 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967); Robert H. Whitten, Public Administration in Massachusetts: The Relation of Central to Local Authority (1898; reprint, New York: AMS Press, 1969).

Boston levied taxes to pay for these civic tasks. In 1854–1857 Boston’s financial outlay equaled $16.90 per person. Overall, the most expensive activity (at $5.71 per person) was maintaining the “streets,” a category that included sewers, lighting, bridges, ferries, public lands, and the Board of Health (which oversaw street cleaning). The other most expensive functions were schools ($2.39 per person), water ($2.19), institutions such as the House of Industry and the House of Reformation ($1.52), and police ($1.24). The remaining outlays were earmarked for the county (government), fire protection, the library, public grounds (e.g., Boston Garden), and general government. This last category covered the salaries of city officials, such as the mayor. Members of the City Council and the Board of Aldermen, the city legislature, and most committees that supervised numerous administrative activities served without compensation. Despite this donated labor, Bostonians’ share of city costs increased from $4.61 per person in 1828–1831 to four times that amount by the end of the 1850s.³⁶ These increasing expenditures reflected the expanded scale and scope of Boston’s civic activities.

Not every municipal government mirrored Boston’s civic history, of course, but the Massachusetts capital did typify governance in the big eastern cities. All the large cities maintained streets, bridges, and lighting; supported education; established a police presence; protected against fire; and developed public water systems—the major municipal responsibilities at midcentury.³⁷ Some also invested in transportation projects. This expanded role in the provision of services and the development of infrastructure is suggested by a comparison of fiscal activities in 1860 (see table 5.2). The per capita expenditures of Boston, New York, Baltimore, and other major cities were roughly six times larger than federal outlays; city spending dwarfed the financial activity of state governments.

Table 5.2. Governmental Expenditures, 1860

Sources: US Census Bureau, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975), series Y457; John Legler, Richard Sylla, and John Wallis, “U.S. City Finance and the Growth of Government, 1850–1920,” Journal of Economic History 48 (1988): 347–358; Secretary of State, Illinois Blue Book, 1929–1930 (Springfield, IL: Office of the Secretary of State, 1930), 587; Richard Sylla, “Long-Run Trends in State and Local Finance: Sources and Uses of Funds in North Carolina, 1800–1877,” in Long-Term Factors in American Economic Growth, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 819–868; Peter Wallenstein, From Slave South to New South: Public Policy in Nineteenth Century Georgia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 106–107; Edmund T. Miller, A Financial History of Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1916), appendix, table 8; Charles J. Bullock, Historical Sketch of the Finances and Financial Policy of Mass. from 1780 to 1905, 3rd ser., vol. 8:2 (New York: Publications of the American Economic Association, 1907); New York State Constitutional Convention Committee, Problems Relating to Taxation and Finance, vol. 4, State and Local Government in New York (1938); Andrew C. McLaughlin and Albert Bushnell Hart, Cyclopedia of American Government, vol. 1 (New York: Appleton, 1914), 697 (New York City); Paul Studenski and Herman E. Krooss, Financial History of the United States (New York: McGraw-Hall, 1963), 197 (Providence); Alan D. Anderson, The Origins and Resolution of an Urban Crisis: Baltimore, 1890–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 34; Charles P. Huse, The Financial History of Boston, 1822–1909 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916); Terrence J. McDonald, The Parameters of Urban Fiscal Policy: Socioeconomic Change and Political Culture in San Francisco, 1860–1906 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

^a Sample of thirty-five large cities in Randall G. Holcombe and Donald J. Lacombe, “The Growth of Local Government in the U.S. from 1820 to 1870,” Journal of Economic History 61 (2001): 188, based on regression estimates of data in Legler, Sylla, and Wallis, “U.S. City Finance and the Growth of Government,” 347–358.

Paying for these amenities required localities to levy taxes and fees. Because local revenue rested primarily on the taxation of property, developing new real estate was a rational urban strategy. In the hope of adding properties to the tax rolls and attracting new commerce and industry, cities competed for business, people, and prestige. Offering up-to-date services for burgeoning populations furthered this goal. Large projects such as supplying fresh water and building bridges, which had years of potential utility, necessitated loans. By 1860 city debt was roughly equal to state government indebtedness. City fathers in the large eastern metropolises realized that officials in smaller and newer places looked to them for inspiration and advice. Philadelphia was the leading urban model early in the century but increasingly relinquished this position to New York. The combination of urban rivalry and emulation elevated big-city governance from a local activity to national significance.³⁸

State governments aided and abetted these activities in various ways, principally by creating local governments and specifying their powers. Beginning in the 1820s states expanded their promotion of economic development, driven in part by economic rivalry among states and cities. The most famous state ventures concerned transportation projects, then called “internal improvements.” The headliner among these endeavors was the Erie Canal, an immediate financial success when it opened for business in 1825. Financed and operated by New York State, the Erie Canal sparked other states in the mid-Atlantic region and Ohio River valley to invest in canals (see tables A.2 and A.3 in the appendix). By the 1830s several states and numerous cities were involved in the financing of railroads.³⁹

From 1790 through the 1830s state economic policy took the form of mercantilism, whereby states used various techniques, including grants of monopolies to private firms and governmental operation of public facilities, to benefit the commonwealth. By the late 1830s a new pattern—an egalitarian era—began to replace earlier state practices. During this next phase, states withdrew from direct sponsorship of economic projects and opened commercial ventures to private enterprises, following principles of entrepreneurial competition and open access to the incorporation of businesses. This trend was partially the consequence of the political democratization of the electorate, as well as a heightened distrust of legislators, whom critics charged with favoritism for elites.

The Panic of 1837 inflicted a jarring shock on states’ economic promotion. The downturn in business that followed in the late 1830s and early 1840s cut direct state investment in infrastructure ventures, opening new opportunities for private entrepreneurs. By the 1840s states turned to general incorporation laws that specified administrative criteria for the formation of private businesses, which replaced the older practice of enacting a separate charter for each venture. This revised approach led to regulations that imposed legal obligations on corporate owners. These new incorporation policies, along with supportive state and federal court rulings, represented a “release of energy” that facilitated economic development.⁴⁰ In some states the new incorporation principle was extended to private banks (so-called free banking acts); by 1860 the nation counted 1,500 banks operating under state laws, some of which were run by state governments. A few states, notably New York and Massachusetts, created commissions in the 1850s that initiated the regulation of banks and insurance companies. To compensate for revenue losses from state-run ventures caused by the depression, many states levied taxes on businesses and banks; in other cases, legislatures imposed licensing fees on commercial activities. States revised their approaches to commercial activity during the egalitarian era but did not wholly withdraw from economic involvement.

Law and order concerned both state and local officials, who could impose death sentences for numerous crimes in the late eighteenth century. Public pressure to reduce the number of capital offenses swept through the states in the early decades of the nineteenth century. By midcentury northern states had reserved capital punishment for murder and treason and had outlawed public executions (which often drew massive crowds). Southern states clung to a longer list of capital offenses, used in part to control slavery. Fewer death sentences—the result of changes in the law and juries that were reluctant to condemn a person to death for nonlethal offenses such as theft or arson—stimulated the establishment of state prisons, which Pennsylvania, Virginia, and New York pioneered after the Revolution. An “institutional movement” created asylums to incarcerate individuals deemed wayward, incompetent, or in need of public supervision. Beginning in the 1820s lawmakers authorized state-operated facilities for juvenile offenders, the insane and feebleminded, and the blind, as well as almshouses for paupers.⁴¹

Local officials were tasked with maintaining order in their communities. In the cities, police forces evolved from part-time constables and night watchmen to salaried and uniformed officers under the command of a chief marshal or superintendent. New York City established a salaried police force in 1845; in the following decade it armed its officers and required them to wear uniforms. As police functions crystallized, officers concentrated on preserving law and order and relinquished tasks such as maintaining the streets and caring for the poor. Sheriffs and constables policed counties and rural areas. If local law enforcement could not handle public disturbances, which erupted regularly in large cities, governors called in the state militia. The 1849 Astor Theater riot in New York City, where militiamen killed thirty-one people, documents the extent to which local authorities could exercise lethal force. A notable parallel was the 1844 Kensington riot in Philadelphia, where militiamen fired into the crowds, causing numerous fatalities.⁴²

State and local officers’ maintenance of community mores increasingly relied on education. Schooling had been a special concern in New England communities since the colonial era, a tradition that expanded with national independence. First Massachusetts and then other states mandated publicly funded schools between the 1820s and 1860s. States provided financial aid to local communities for education, established normal schools for the education of teachers, and founded several state universities (e.g., Virginia, Wisconsin) prior to the US Land Grant College Act of 1862. Northern states far outstripped the South in the support of education.⁴³

Besides providing instruction in reading and writing, public schooling was intended to instill moral values. Lawmakers took steps in that direction, especially in the North, by enacting social regulations, such as licensing saloons and requiring that they close on Sundays; in some places the sale of alcoholic beverages was prohibited altogether. Some authorities limited lotteries. Massachusetts and California banned racial segregation in public schools, while Virginia (1836) and Illinois (1820s) adopted laws that maintained a racially segregated society. States reformed marriage law by broadening the grounds for divorce and loosening the tradition of fathers’ custody of children. Several northern states protected married women’s property rights. The myriad state and local jurisdictions were custodians of public morality during the antebellum years.⁴⁴

FEDERAL POLICY IN THE ANTEBELLUM ERA

President George Washington got down to business in May 1789, working with twenty-six US senators and sixty-four members of the House of Representatives. The First Congress worked for 519 days during three separate sessions, much longer than its subsequent meetings in the early republic. During the eight years of Washington’s presidency, legislators passed 324 public acts. Historian–political scientist Leonard White sorted these actions into forty-five separate “functions or activities.” The second act on his list, adopted in 1790, levied duties on scores of imported goods ranging from coffee and pickled fish to silk slippers and distilled spirits from Jamaica. In succeeding decades the national government also collected revenue from the sale of public lands and other miscellaneous items, including excise taxes adopted during the War of 1812. The land boom of the 1830s directed a flow of dollars into the federal treasury until the Panic of 1837 and the ensuing business depression ended the speculative scramble. But customs taxes (tariffs) accounted for the largest share of federal receipts during the antebellum era (see table 5.3). The central government’s revenue therefore depended on international trade. Most of these tax dollars were spent on defense, which consisted primarily of a small regular army and an equally minuscule navy. Aside from the wars against Great Britain (1812–1815) and Mexico (1846–1848), campaigns that necessitated federal borrowing, US military operations concentrated on subduing and relocating Indians.⁴⁵

Table 5.3. Public Finance and Administration, 1800–1860

Sources: Randall G. Holcombe and Donald J. Lacombe, “The Growth of Local Government in the U.S. from 1820 to 1870,” Journal of Economic History 61 (2001): 188; Charles P. Huse, The Financial History of Boston, 1822–1909 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1916), 351; Wallis estimate in Susan B. Carter et al., eds., Historical Statistics of the United States: Millennial Edition, vol. 5 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), table Ea-A; US Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975), series Y457–459, 463, 335, 353 (federal expenditures and revenue), series Y308–317, Y904 (employees); James Sterling Young, The Washington Community, 1800–1828 (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), table 1, p. 30 (data for 1802).

Revenue is essential for the viability of government, largely to pay public debts. Honoring these obligations was an axiomatic principle for civic officials, as it was for the elites in the early republic. The federal government began its history with fiscal obligations resulting from the Revolutionary War. Alexander Hamilton, the secretary of the treasury and George Washington’s chief economic adviser, designed a plan to manage this responsibility. He proposed to repay the federal government’s debt at its face value at the time of its issue (not at the lower rates at which the notes later traded in private markets) and to add the states’ war debts to this total. Congress adopted Hamilton’s scheme in 1790, over objections from the states that had already paid their war debts.

Hamilton also proposed the creation of a national bank, both as an instrument to manage federal finances and as a stimulus to commercial development. Uncertain whether the Constitution authorized such as institution, Washington asked Hamilton and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson for their opinions on the matter. Jefferson said it did not, as the Constitution made no explicit provision for a national bank. He charged that Hamilton’s financial schemes were “calculated to undermine the Republic,” largely by expanding national power at the expense of the states. He added that it was likely that banks would reward mercantilist interests in the North to the detriment of agrarian interests in the South. Hamilton responded that the “necessary and proper” clause of the Constitution (Article I, section 8, clause 18) granted Congress the authority to adopt measures that facilitated the implementation of enumerated powers (those explicitly mentioned in the Constitution). He argued that a bank was integral to the government’s fiscal operations. Like Washington, Hamilton was a staunch nationalist who believed that his financial proposals would promote the stability of the central government, in part by encouraging elites to assume a financial stake in its survival. Congress created a Bank of the United States in 1791.⁴⁶

The Jefferson-Hamilton disagreement was just the opening round of a dispute over a national bank and, more broadly, the scope of national power that unfolded over generations. Congress did not renew the bank’s charter when it expired in 1811, at which time Jefferson supporters controlled Congress and another Virginian, James Madison, occupied the presidency. The fiscal stress of the War of 1812, coupled with hyperactive state banks that flooded the country with paper banknotes of dubious value, persuaded lawmakers to create a second national bank with regulatory powers in 1816. The debate over banks, most of which were formed by close-knit groups of elites, grew after the depression of the early 1820s, and it became a leading issue in Andrew Jackson’s political rise and his election to the presidency in 1828. Jackson vetoed a bill to extend the life of the second Bank of the United States in 1832, claiming that it was unconstitutional, a monopoly controlled by American and foreign elites, and disposed to issue paper banknotes that undermined the economy. Following his reelection in 1832, Jackson restricted the federal government’s acceptance of state banknotes (instead of hard money, or specie) and transferred federal deposits from the national bank to selected state banks.

Jackson, his successor Martin Van Buren, and most Democrats embraced a hard-money policy (reliance on specie and a ban on small-denomination banknotes) by the 1840s. Their Whig Party opponents saw banks in general, and a national bank in particular, as essential props for an emerging commercial economy. But the Whiggish outlook remained the minority position until the Civil War, when Congress reestablished national banks. By this time, state-chartered banks—some private, some joint ventures with the government—had proliferated.

Collecting revenue, managing federal finances (including the minting of coins), adding territory to the republic and admitting new states, distributing the public domain, fighting Indians, delivering mail (to post offices, not yet to individual addresses), and maintaining a diplomatic posture that avoided entanglement with the major European powers constituted the primary functions of the national government between 1789 and 1860. Congress did, however, undertake other activities that collectively assumed significance.

Waterways played a critical role in the nation’s early development, which Congress acknowledged by voting for programs that facilitated ocean, harbor, and river transportation. The Light House Service, originally assigned to the Treasury Department, represented an important aid to coastal shipping. Surveying and offering technical advice for the improvement of harbors and removing impediments on major rivers were ongoing endeavors usually assigned to the Army Corps of Engineers, founded in 1802. Between 1824 and James Polk’s veto of a rivers and harbors bill in 1846, Congress regularly allotted money for the improvement of navigable inland rivers. Subsidies paid to marine contractors for carrying the mail added another dimension to federal assistance for water transportation. The government began to inspect steamboat boilers in 1838 and added teeth to the law in 1852, when it required the annual licensing of pilots and engineers and improved enforcement. Congress regulated space on passenger vessels and provided for the inspection of imported drugs. National lawmakers invested in canals and funded hospitals for seamen.⁴⁷

National policymakers also assisted in the development of land transportation. They subsidized the construction of a “national road” from Maryland to the Midwest and, beginning in 1850, gave grants of public land to facilitate the construction of privately owned railroads, a practice that continued until 1871. The US Army built military roads in both territories and states. Since 1803 Congress had allocated between 3 and 5 percent of receipts from the sale of public lands to the states for internal improvements. Although legal and political views placed rigid limits on the extent of federal involvement in internal improvements, the federal government’s contribution to this endeavor was important. Other significant actions that aided the economy included minting coins, patenting inventions, negotiating trade treaties, chasing down pirates, manufacturing weapons (at arsenals in Springfield, Massachusetts, and Harpers Ferry, Virginia), and transferring millions of acres of land, largely to private individuals. The army encouraged settlement of the public domain by exploring and mapping the West, performed by the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers. The navy undertook coastal surveys, providing a valuable service for a seafaring nation. The navy’s exploration and mapping of the Pacific (1838–1842) under the command of Lieutenant Charles Wilkes rendered valuable geographic information. The US Military Academy at West Point, authorized in 1802, was among the first colleges to train engineers; the War Department loaned some of them to act as consultants on private transportation projects, especially railroads, until 1838.⁴⁸

The Naval Observatory at Annapolis, opened the year before the US Naval Academy was established there, was an important site of scientific activity. Army and navy explorations and surveys, plus the creation of the Smithsonian Institution (1846) to serve as a sponsor of and repository for scientific information in the nation’s capital, put the federal government in the forefront of the promotion of science in the antebellum period. If one expands the interpretation of science to include education and publication, the national role in learning and science was even broader. The decennial census of the United States, first conducted in 1790, was the nation’s largest single data collection project through most of the long nineteenth century. Beginning with the admission of Ohio to the union in 1803, the United States granted public lands for the support of public schools in the states. The expansion of the postal system greatly widened the distribution of printed information in the form of books, pamphlets, and newspapers. Postal policy, in effect, subsidized the publication of newspapers, giving the United States the largest circulation in the world by 1810. In 1851 Congress mandated a flat fee of 3 cents for a stamp that would send a letter anywhere in the United States. Contracts to serve as mail carriers constituted a steady revenue stream for private transportation companies. A survey of the national uses of power would be incomplete without emphasizing federal support of slavery, especially via national court rulings.⁴⁹

Though administratively small by modern standards and constricted by ideological controversies, the federal government was hardly impotent during the antebellum years. Its wide range of activities was politically possible in large part because, as historian Brian Balogh argues, they were performed primarily “out of sight,” unlike the more visible presence of state and local governments. But behind the cloak of unpublicized actions, national officials played an important role in the development of the American state. The inventory of federal actions here and in chapter 4 documents the numerous ways the national government influenced society in the antebellum era. When state and local governments are included in the civic equation, the antebellum era hardly looks like a “night-watchman state,” doing little of consequence. Governments exercised a plenitude of powers over life and property in the early nineteenth century, albeit in a style wedded to communal associations, voluntarism, and reliance on private enterprise.⁵⁰ Rhetorical genuflections to the tenets of America’s civic ideology, uttered so predictably in public ceremonies, obscure the governmental side of this dichotomy. Therein lies the paradox of American statebuilding. Democratic theory heralded individual freedoms, but in practice, officials increasingly used the powers of government.