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Government by Improvisation? Towards a New History of the Nineteenth-Century American State

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 September 2021

R. M. BATES
R. M. BATES*
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Abstract

Over the last thirty years, historians and historically minded political scientists have effectively overturned the long-held perception of the nineteenth-century United States as a polity defined by its lack of an effective state. By highlighting the myriad interventions of its energetic and enterprising federal government and by incorporating subnational governments and private actors and organizations as evidence of its impressive “infrastructural” power, a generation of scholars have, collectively, described a nineteenth-century state that was both more assertive and more robust than was previously thought. Yet other scholars have begun to ask whether this interpretation has concocted a state stronger and more coherent in prospect than it was in practice. By highlighting the piecemeal and often partial nature of the nation’s institutional development and the contradictions and incoherence that accompanied its infrastructural power, these scholars have laid the foundations for a new “improvisational synthesis” that stresses the equivocal nature of American state-building and considers its enduring vulnerabilities.

Keywords

Nineteenth-century U.S. state buildingU.S. federalismCivil War and state development“improvisational synthesis” in American state-building
Type
Article
Information
Journal of Policy History , Volume 33 , Issue 3 , July 2021 , pp. 287 - 316
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2021

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References

Notes

1. The author would like to thank Gary Gerstle, Naomi Lamoreaux, Matt Lavallee, and Emma Teitelman, as well as Donald Critchlow and the anonymous reviewers, for their thoughts on earlier drafts of this article. Alexis de Tocqueville (trans. Gerald Bevan), Democracy in America and Two Essays on America (London, 2003), 84. Key examples of this liberal interpretation include Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Though Since the Revolution (New York, 1955); Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (London, 1963); Daniel J. Boorstin, The Genius of American Politics (Chicago, 1953); Oscar and Mary Handlin, The Dimensions of Liberty (Cambridge, MA, 1961). A number of scholars have pointed to the influence of World War II and the Cold War on this scholarship. See Ciepley, David, Liberalism in the Shadow of Totalitarianism (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 29 Google Scholar; Katznelson, Ira, Desolation and Enlightenment: Political Knowledge After Total War, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust (New York, 2003), 110–11;CrossRefGoogle Scholar Desmond King and Marc Stears, “The Missing State in Postwar American Political Thought,” in Jacobs and King, The Unsustainable American State (Oxford, 2009),116–31.

2. Quoted is Oscar and Mary Flug Handlin, Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy, Massachusetts, 1774–1861 (New York, 1947), xii–xiii. Likewise, Louis Hartz attributed the “distorted interpretations of politico-economic thought prior to the Civil War” to scholars’ concentration on “the national problems of the period,” and suggested that the regulatory stance of state governments could be contrasted with the lesser role of the federal government. Louis Hartz, Economic Policy and Democratic Thought: Pennsylvania, 1776–1860 (Cambridge, MA, 1948), 3. For more on place of the federal government in the works of these and other historians, see Lively, Robert A., “The American System: A Review Article,” Business History Review 29 (March 1955): 93.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3. William Sterling Young, The Washington Community, 1800–1828 (New York, 1966), 28–32; John M. Murrin, “The Great Inversion, or Court Versus Country: A Comparison of the Revolution Settlements in England (1688–1721) and America (1776–1816),” in J. G. A. Pocock, ed., Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton, 1980), 425. See also Samuel Huntington’s description of the United States as a “tudor polity.” Samuel P. Huntington, “Political Modernization: America vs. Europe,” World Politics 18 (April 1966): 382. In his criticism of the “Presidential synthesis,” Thomas C. Cochran argued that “the primary role of the central government in our historical development” had been “one of the major misconceptions in American synthesis.” Thomas C. Cochran, “The ‘Presidential Synthesis’ in American History,” American Historical Review 53 (July 1948): 751. This interpretation was indicative of a broader attitude toward the study of the state, an attitude that J. P. Nettl attributed to “the relative statelessness of the United States. J. P. Nettl, “The State as a Conceptual Variable,” World Politics 20 (July 1968): 561.

4. Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of Administrative State, 1877–1920 (Cambridge, 1982), 19.

5. The most concise summary is Richard L. McCormick, “The Party Period and Public Policy: An Exploratory Hypothesis,” Journal of American History 66 (September 1979): 279–98. See also Joel H. Silbey, The American Political Nation, 1838–1893 (Stanford, 1991), and Richard L. McCormick, The Party Period and Public Policy: American Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era (Oxford, 1986). Theodore Lowi, too, argued that distributive policies were “almost the exclusive type of national domestic policy from 1789 until virtually 1890.” Theodore J. Lowi, “American Business, Public Policy, Case-Studies, and Political Theory,” World Politics 16 (July 1964): 689. For a critique of this scholarship, see Richard R. John, “Farewell to the ‘Party Period’: Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of Policy History 16 (April 2004): 117–25.

6. Skowronek, Building a New American State, 19. See also Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA, 1977), 35; Keller, Regulating a New Economy: Public Policy and Economic Change in America, 1900–1933 (Cambridge, MA, 1990), 3; Keller, America’s Three Regimes: A New Political History (Oxford, 2007), 133–34. In the final volume of his classic quartet of administrative histories, Leonard D. White also questioned the impact of the Civil War upon patterns of American governance. After the Civil War, he argued that “the return to normalcy was rapid and substantially complete.” White, The Republican Era, 1869–1901: A Study in Administrative History (New York, 1958), vii–viii.

7. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York, 1988), 23. In his own standard account of the Civil War, James McPherson has argued that the conflict helped to “fashion a future different enough from the past to merit the label of revolution.” McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era (Oxford, 1988), 452.

8. Richard Franklin Bensel, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877–1900 (Cambridge, 2000), 526; Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York, 2008), 268; Leonard P. Curry, Blueprint for Modern America: Nonmilitary Legislation of the First Civil War Congress (Nashville, 1968), 9; Heather Cox Richardson, The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies During the Civil War (Cambridge, MA, 1997).

9. “The modern state’s inheritance from the antebellum period,” Bensel argues, “was nil.” Bensel, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (Cambridge, 1990), ix. Key examples include Walter Dean Burnham’s assertion that “the chief distinguishing characteristic of the American political system before 1861 is that there was no state,” and William Nelson’s assertion that there existed “no significant bureaucracy” prior to the Civil War. See also Daniel Carpenter’s description of the prewar federal government as “predominantly a clerical outfit.” Burnham quoted in Morton Keller, “Social Policy in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Donald T. Critchlow and Ellis W. Hawley, eds., Federal Social Policy: The Historical Dimension (University Park, PA, 1988), 103; William Nelson, The Roots of American Bureaucracy, 1830–1900 (Cambridge, MA, 1982), 5; Carpenter, Daniel P., The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928 (Princeton, 2001), 64.Google Scholar

10. Theda Skocpol, “Bringing the State Back In: Strategies of Analysis in Current Research,” in Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge, 1985), 3–43. See also the exhortations of two historians: Leuchtenberg, William E., “The Pertinence of Political History: Reflections on the Significance of the State in America,” Journal of American History 73 (1986): 585–600 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Balogh, Brian, “The State of the State among Historians,” Social Science History 27 (2003): 455–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. “The weight in the historiography,” according to one recent summary, “is now in favor of the many case studies demonstrating American governments’ consistent exercise of regulatory powers in a variety of dominions.” Dael A. Norwood, “What Counts? Political Economy, or Ways to Make Early America Add Up,” Journal of the Early Republic 36 (Winter 2016): 768. Quoted is the paradigmatic articulation of this view: William J. Novak, “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American Historical Review 113 (June 2008): 758. See also Novak, William J., “The Not-So-Strange Birth of the Modern American State: A Comment on James A. Henretta’s ‘Charles Evans Hughes and the Strange Death of Liberal America,’” Law and History Review (Spring 2006): 197;Google Scholar Sparrow, James, Novak, William, and Sawyer, Stephen, eds., Boundaries of the State in U.S. History (Chicago, 2015), 116.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

12. Gary Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion: The Paradox of American Government from the Founding to the Present (Princeton, 2015), 1.

13. The federal government, Max Edling, possessed the “full powers of the ‘fiscal-military state’ in reserve.” Max M. Edling, A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (Oxford, 2003), 227; Edling, A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money, and the American State, 1783–1867 (Chicago, 2014), 222–23; Edling, “‘A Mongrel Kind of Government’: The U.S. Constitution, the Federal Union, and the Origins of the American State,” in Peter Thompson and Peter S. Onuf, eds., State and Citizen: British America and the Early United States (Charlottesville, 2013), 150–77; Brian Balogh, A Government Out of Sight, 79.

14. Richard R. John, “Governmental Institutions as Agents of Change: Rethinking American Political Development in the Early Republic,” Studies in American Political Development 11 (Fall 1997); Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, MA, 1995), ix, 3.

15. Laurence J. Malone, Opening the West: Federal Improvements Before 1860 (London, 1998), 119–20; John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill, 2001); Paul F. Paskoff, Troubled Waters: Steamboat Disasters, River Improvements, and American Public Policy (Baton Rouge, 2007); Stephen Minicucci, “Internal Improvements and the Union, 1790–1860,” Studies in American Political Development 18 (Fall 2004): 160–85; Colleen A. Dunlavy, Politics and Industrialization: Early Railroads in the United States and Prussia (Princeton, 1994); Steven W. Usselman, Regulating Railroad Innovation: Business, Technology, and Politics in America, 1840–1920 (Cambridge, 2002); Robert G. Angevine, The Railroad and the State: War, Politics, and Technology in Nineteenth-Century America (Palo Alto, 2004); Richard R. John, Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications (Cambridge, MA, 2015), 19–21. Many of these accounts are synthesised in Daniel Walker Howe’s contribution to the Oxford History of the United States, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford, 2008).

16. The classic account of the public lands in the early nineteenth century is Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789–1837 (Oxford, 1968); but see also Jerry Mashaw, Creating the Administrative Constitution: The Lost One Hundred Years of American Administrative Law (New Haven, 2012). For welfare provision, see Michele Landis Dauber, The Sympathetic State: Disaster Relief and the Origins of the American Welfare State (Chicago, 2013), 5; Laura Jensen, Patriots, Settlers, and the Origins of American Social Policy (Cambridge, 2003); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers: The Political Origins of Social Policy in the United States (Cambridge, MA, 1992).

17. See, in particular, Sven Beckert, “American Danger: United States Empire, Eurafrica, and the Territorialization of Industrial Capitalism, 1870–1950,” American Historical Review 122 (October 2017): 1147. The role of the state in the territorialization of the United States is also at the center of accounts by Steven Hahn and Charles Maier. Steve Hahn, A Nation Without Borders: The United States and Its World in an Age of Civil Wars, 1830–1910 (New York, 2017); Charles Maier, Leviathan 2.0: Inventing Modern Statehood (Cambridge, MA, 2014). This scholarship and its implications for an interpretation of the nineteenth-century state is highlighted in Noam Maggor and Stefan Link, “The United States as a Developing Nation: Revisiting the Peculiarities of American History,” Past and Present 246 (February 2020): 291–92.

18. Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West (Norman, OK, 1991), 58. According to William Bergmann, the settlement of the Old Northwest was achieved with the help of a federal bureaucracy that was “concentrated, penetrative, centralized, and specialized.” Bergmann, The American National State and the Early West (Cambridge, 2014), 7. See also Balogh, Government Out of Sight, chap. 5; Mashaw, Creating the Administrative Constitution, chap. 7; Malone, Opening the West, 3–4; Paul Frymer, “‘A Rush and a Push and the Land is Ours’: Territorial Expansion, Land Policy, and U.S. State Formation,” Perspectives on Politics 12 (March 2014): 120; Megan Black, The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power (Cambridge, MA, 2018), chap. 1; Bethel Saler, The Settler’s Empire: Colonialism and State Formation in America’s Old Northwest (Philadelphia, 2019).

19. Ira Katznelson, “Flexible Capacity: The Military and Early American Statebuilding,” in Ira Katznelson and Martin Shefter, eds., Shaped by War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development (Princeton, 2002), 97–101; William D. Adler, “State Capacity and Bureaucratic Autonomy in the Early United States: The Case of the Army Corps of Topographical Engineers,” Studies in American Political Development (October 2012): 107–24; William D. Adler and Andrew J. Polsky, “Building the New American Nation: Economic Development, Public Goods, and the Early U.S. Army,” Political Science Quarterly 125 (Spring 2010): 87–110; Mark R. Wilson, The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization, 1861–1865 (Baltimore, 2006), 2; Samuel J. Watson, Jackson’s Sword: The Army Officer Corps on the American Frontier, 1810–1821 (Lawrence, KS, 2012); and Watson, Peacekeepers and Conquerors: The Army Officer Corps on the American Frontier, 1821–1846 (Lawrence, KS, 2013); Angevine, The Railroad and the State.

20. Jeff Pasley, “Midget on Horseback: American Indians and the History of the American State,” Common-Place 9 (October 2008), www.common-place-archives.org/vol-09/no-01/pasley; Patrick Griffin, American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier (New York, 2007); Ned Blackhawk, Violence Over The Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (Cambridge, MA, 2006); Paul Frymer, Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion (Princeton, 2019); Andrew J. Polsky and William D. Adler, “The State in a Blue Uniform,” Polity 40 (July 2008): 348–54.

21. David F. Ericson, Slavery in the American Republic: Developing the Federal Government, 1791–1861 (Lawrence, KS, 2011). See also Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government’s Relations to Slavery (Oxford, 2002).

22. Edling, A Hercules in the Cradle, 3–4.

23. Sparrow, Novak, and Sawyer, Boundaries of the State in US History, 2. In the Declaration of Independence, William Novak and Steven Pincus have seen “not so much an attack on a government grown too big, but a call for a ‘new Government’ and a system of rule that involved a strong polity—a polity that would support the manufacturing sector, and promote egalitarian economic development and trade.” William J. Novak and Steven Pincus, “Revolutionary State Formation,” in John L. Brooke, Julia C. Strauss, and Greg Anderson, eds, State Formations: Global Histories and Cultures of Statehood (Cambridge, 2018), 142, 147; Steven Pincus, The Heart of the Declaration: The Founders’ Case for an Activist Government (New Haven, 2016), 20–23. Indeed, according to Richard John, the nation’s political economy was “a project with a more-or-less coherent design that grew out of the institutional arrangements established by the founders of the republic.” See Richard R. John, “Ruling Passions: Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century America,” in John, ed., Ruling Passions, 2. Nevertheless, as Max Edling has acknowledged, the full emergence of a North American fiscal-military state represented a “potentiality rather than a reality” prior to the Civil War. Edling, A Revolution in Favor of Government, 22.

24. Balogh, A Government Out of Sight, 65; Sonia Mittal, Jack N. Rakove, and Barry R. Weingast, “The Constitutional Choices of 1787 and Their Consequences,” in Douglas A. Irwin and Richard Sylla, Founding Choices: American Economic Policy in the 1790s (Chicago, 2011), 53; Edling, A Hercules in the Cradle.

25. See especially William Novak, “Beyond Max Weber: The Need for a Democratic (not aristocratic) Theory of the Modern State,” Tocqueville Review 36 (2015): 43–91; William Novak, “The Concept of the State in American History,” in Sparrow, et al., Boundaries of the State in US History, 325–49; Max M. Edling, “The Strange Hybrid of the Early American State,” in Hans Joas and Barbro Klein, eds., The Benefit of Broad Horizons: Intellectual and Institutional Preconditions for a Global Social Science (Leiden, 2010), 15–32; Kimberly J. Morgan and Ann Shola Orloff, “The Many Hands of the State,” in Kimberly J. Morgan and Ann Shola Orloff, eds., The Many Hands of the State: Theorizing Political Authority and Social Control (Cambridge, 2017), 3–4; Peter Baldwin, “Beyond Weak and Strong: Rethinking the State in Comparative Policy History,” Journal of Policy History 17 (2005): 12–33.

26. Historians have adapted the notion of infrastructural power from Michael Mann, The Sources of Social Power, Volume 2: The Rise of Classes and Nation-States, 1760–1914 (Cambridge, 1993), 58–59. See, for example, Novak, “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” 763.

27. Balogh, Government Out of Sight, 15; William J. Novak, “The American Law of Association: The Legal-Political Construction of Civil Society,” Studies in American Political Development 15 (Fall 2001): 172. See also Adam Sheingate, “Why Can’t Americans See the State?” The Forum 7 (2009), 1–14.

28. See note 2, above. Beyond the works of the Commonwealth historians, other scholars also placed state government in contrast to the federal government. In his Presidential Address before the Organization of American Historians in 1986, William Leuchtenberg noted that “through much of our history, state and local governments had a larger impact on matters such as economic policy than did the federal government.” Leuchtenberg, “The Pertinence of Political History,” 589n20. Morton Keller likewise argued that “social policy was implemented primarily on the state and local level.” Keller, “Social Policy in Nineteenth-Century America,” 104.

29. Quoted is Peter S. Onuf, “State and Citizen in British American and the Early United States,” 13–14. See also Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville, 2000), 85.

30. John Joseph Wallis, “The Other Foundings: Federalism and the Constitutional Structure of American Government,” in Douglas A. Irwin and Richard A. Sylla, eds., Founding Choices: American Economic Policy in the 1790s (Chicago, 2011), 183; Richard Sylla, “Experimental Federalism: The Economics of American Government, 1789–191,” in Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman, eds., The Cambridge Economic History of the United States: Volume 2: The Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 2000), 491–92. On the growth of railroads, see Zachary Callen, “Local Rail Innovations: Antebellum States and Policy Diffusion,” Studies in American Political Development 25 (October 2011): 117–18.

31. Novak and Pincus, “Revolutionary State Formation,” 149, 154. See also William Novak, “A State of Legislatures,” Polity 40 (July 2008): 340–47.

32. Wallis, “The Other Foundings,” 179–80.

33. William J. Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 1996), 2. On the states’ police powers, see also Christopher Tomlins, “Necessities of State: Police, Sovereignty, and the Constitution,” Journal of Policy History 20 (2008): 48; Christopher L. Tomlins, “Law, Police, and the Pursuit of Happiness in the New American Republic,” Studies in American Political Development 4 (Spring 1990): 3–34.

34. Quoted are William Novak, “Police Power and the Hidden Transformation of the American State,” in Markus D. Dubber and Mariana Valverde, eds., Police Power and the Liberal State (Stanford, 2008), 55, and Novak, The People’s Welfare, 247.

35. Arthur M. Schlesinger, “Biography of a Nation of Joiners,” American Historical Review 50 (October 1944): 1. See also Handlin and Handlin, The Dimensions of Liberty, 5.

36. An excellent summary of this scholarship is Brian Balogh, The Associational State: American Governance in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia, 2015), 23–40. See also Elisabeth S. Clemens and Doug Guthrie, “Politics and Partnerships,” in Clemens and Guthrie, eds., Politics and Partnerships: The Role of Voluntary Associations in America’s Political Past and Present (Chicago, 2010), 1–28. Outstanding contributions to this literature include Johann N. Neem, Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA, 2008); Kevin Butterfield, The Making of Tocqueville’s America: Law and Association in the Early United States (Chicago, 2015); Theda Skocpol, Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life (Norman, OK, 2003), esp. 36–40.

37. Quoted in Novak, “The American Law of Association,” 163.

38. Novak, The People’s Welfare, 105–9; Naomi R. Lamoreaux and William J. Novak, “Corporations and American Democracy: An Introduction,” in Naomi R. Lamoreaux and William J. Novak, eds., Corporations and American Democracy (Cambridge, MA, 2017), 32; Clemens and Guthrie, “Politics and Partnerships,” 3–4.

39. Butterfield, The Making of Tocqueville’s America, 4.

40. Sparrow et al., Boundaries of the State, 6.

41. Clemens and Guthrie, “Politics and Partnerships,” 4–5; Albrecht Koschnik, “Let a Common Interest Bond Us Together”: Associations, Partisanship, and Culture in Philadelphia, 1775–1840 (Charlottesville, 2007), 2–5; Johann Neem, “Civil Society and American Nationalism, 1776–1865,” in Elisabeth S. Clemens and Doug Guthrie, eds., Politics and Partnerships: The Role of Voluntary Associations in America’s Political Past and Present (Chicago, 2010), 30; John L. Brooke, “Ancient Lodges and Self-Created Societies: Voluntary Association and the Public Sphere in the Early Republic,” in Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., Launching the “Extended Republic”: The Federalist Era (Charlottesville, 1996), 273–377.

42. Quoted in William G. Roy, Socializing Capital: The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in America (Princeton, 1997), 3; Lamoreaux and Novak, “Corporations and American Democracy,” 7–8; Ronald E. Seavoy, The Origins of the American Business Corporation, 1784–1855: Broadening the Concept of Public Service During Industrialization (Westport, CT, 1982), 255.

43. Novak, “The American Law of Association,” 172. For the key account on the “associative state,” see Ellis Hawley, “Herbert Hoover, the Commerce Secretariat, and the Vision of an ‘Associative State,’ 1921–1928,” Journal of American History 61 (June 1974): 116–40.

44. Novak, “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” 758.

45. Sparrow et al., Boundaries of the State, 2, 6.

46. This point is made in Ariel Ron and Gautham Rao, “Taking Stock of the State in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of the Early Republic 38 (Spring 2018): 62; and Stephen Skowronek, “Present at the Creation: The State in Early American Political History,” Journal of the Early Republic 38 (Spring 2018): 96.

47. Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, The Policy State: An American Predicament (Cambridge, MA, 2017), 15.

48. Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion, see esp. 89–124. Richard Hamm has also argued that “reformers faced a polity with rules that often proscribed their actions but that had enough flexibility to allow them to achieve their ends.” Hamm, Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment: Temperance Reform, Legal Culture, and the Polity, 1880–1920 (Chapel Hill, 1995), 8.

49. Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion, 164.

50. Mashaw, Creating the Administrative Constitution, ix, 6.

51. Noam Maggor, Brahmin Capital: Frontiers of Wealth and Populism in America’s First Gilded Age (Cambridge, MA, 2017), 215n13. See also Gary Gerstle, “The Civil War and Statebuilding: A Reconsideration,” Journal of the Civil War Era (March 2017); Gerstle, “The Resilient Power of the States Across the Long Nineteenth Century,” in Desmond King and Lawrence Jacobs, eds., The Unsustainable American State (Oxford, 2009), 61–87; Gregory Downs, After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War (Cambridge, MA, 2015), esp. 239–44; Gregory P. Downs and Kate Masur, “Echoes of War: Rethinking Post–Civil War Governance and Politics,” in Downs and Masur, eds., The World the Civil War Made (Chapel Hill, 2015), 1–21.

52. Quoted in Downs and Masur, “Echoes of War,” 3, and Gregory P. Downs, “Three Faces of Sovereignty: Governing Confederate, Mexican, and Indian Texas in the Civil War Era,” in Adam Arenson and Andrew R. Graybill, eds., Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States (Oakland, CA, 2015), 134.

53. Downs and Masur, “Echoes of War,” 10. See also Rachel St. John, “State Power in the West in the Early American Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 38 (Spring 2018): 88; Romain D. Huret, American Tax Resisters (Cambridge, MA, 2014), 50–52; Wilbur R. Miller, Revenuers and Moonshiners: Enforcing Federal Liquor Law in the Mountain South, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill, 1991), 61.

54. Williamjames Hull Hoffer, To Enlarge the Machinery of Government: Congressional Debates and the Growth of the American Government, 1858–1891 (Baltimore, 2007), x–xii, 197. See also Harrison, Robert, Congress, , Progressive Reform, and the New American State (Cambridge, 2004), 6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

55. Carpenter, The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy, 353. See also Mashaw, Creating the Administrative Constitution, 241.

56. Quoted is Theda Skocpol and Kenneth Finegold, "State Capacity and Economic Intervention in the Early New Deal," Political Science Quarterly 97 (1982): 271. Adam D. Sheingate, The Rise of the Agricultural Welfare State: Institutions and Interest Group Power in the United States, France, and Japan (Princeton, 2001), 51–54. An exemplary account of the USDA’s Bureau of Animal Industry as an unheralded pocket of late nineteenth-century state capacity is Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode, Arresting Contagion: Science, Policy, and Conflicts over Animal Disease Control (Cambridge, MA, 2015).

57. Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion, 104.

58. Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion, 55–86; Gerstle, “The Resilient Power of the States,” 61–87. For progressive uses of state-level power in the postwar period, see William R. Brock, Investigation and Responsibility: Public Responsibility in the United States, 1865–1900 (Cambridge, 1984).

59. Aristide R. Zolberg, A Nation by Design: Immigration Policy in the Fashioning of America (Cambridge, MA, 2006), 143–45; Kunal M. Parker, Making Foreigners: Immigration and Citizenship Law in America, 1600–2000 (Cambridge, 2015), 83–84; Hidetaka Hirota, Expelling the Poor: Atlantic Seaboard States and the Nineteenth-Century Origins of American Immigration Policy (Oxford, 2017); Anna O. Law, “Lunatics, Idiots, Paupers, and Negro Seamen: Immigration Federalism and the Early American State,” Studies in American Political Development 28 (October 2014): 108.

60. Kate Masur, “The People’s Welfare, Police Powers, and the Rights of Free People of African Descent,” American Journal of Legal History 57 (2017): 239–40. See also Law, “Lunatics, Idiots, Paupers, and Negro Seamen,” 122; Kathleen Sullivan, “Charleston, The Vesey Conspiracy, and the Development of the Police Power,” in Joseph Lowndes, Julie Novkov, and Dorian T. Warren, eds., Race and American Political Development (New York, 2008), 76. William Novak, too, has conceded the “distinct normative limitations of … the well-regulated society in some of the more nefarious policing polices of the time.” William J. Novak, “The People’s Welfare Redux,” American Journal of Legal History 57 (2017): 255.

61. Novak, The People’s Welfare, 241.

62. Gerstle, “The Resilient Power of the States,” 70–71.

63. Lowndes et al., “Race and American Political Development,” 35.

64. Gary Gerstle and Desmond King, “Spaces of Exception in American History” (manuscript in the author’s possession), 20–22. See also Desmond King, Separate and Unequal: Black Americans and the US Federal Government (New York, 1995), 6; Kimberley Johnson, Reforming Jim Crow: Southern Politics and State in the Age Before Brown (Oxford, 2010), 5–6; David A. Bateman, Ira Katznelson, and John S. Lapinski, Southern Nation: Congress and White Supremacy after Reconstruction (Princeton, 2018), 16.

65. Maggor, Brahmin Capitalism, 4–5.

66. Maggor, Brahmin Capitalism, 158–59.

67. Noam Maggor, “To Coddle and Caress These Great Capitalists: Eastern Money, Frontier Populism, and the Politics of Market-Making in the American West,” American Historical Review 122 (February 2017): 83. See also Amy Bridges, “Managing the Periphery in the Gilded Age: Writing Constitutions for the Western States,” Studies in American Political Development 22 (Spring 2008): 32–58.

68. Maggor, Brahmin Capitalism, 158–59.

69. See, for example, Daniel J. Elazar, The American Partnership: Intergovernmental Co-Operation in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Chicago, 1962); Morton Grodzins, The American System: A New View of Government in the United States (Chicago, 1962); Loren P. Beth, The Development of the American Constitution, 1877–1917 (New York, 1971), chap. 2.

70. Kimberley Johnson, Governing the American State: Congress and the New Federalism (Princeton, 2007), 162.

71. Elisabeth Clemens, “Lineages of the Rube Goldberg State: Building and Blurring Public Programs, 1900–1940,” in Ian Shapiro, Stephen Skowronek, and Daniel Galvin, eds., Rethinking Political Institutions: The Art of the State (New York, 2006), 201–7.

72. Johnson, Kimberley, “The First New Federalism and the Development of the Modern American State,” in Jacobs, Lawrence and King, Desmond, eds., The Unsustainable American State (Oxford, 2009), 89.Google Scholar

73. Elisabeth Clemens, Civic Gifts: Voluntarism and the Making of the American Nation-State (Chicago, 2020), 5–7; Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion, 347–48. On the reciprocal nature of infrastructural power, see Tarrow, Sidney, “Mann, War, and Cyberspace: Dualities of Infrastructural Power in America,” Theory and Society 47 (2018): 61–85.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

74. On the “porosity” of American government, see Gerstle, Gary, “A State Both Strong and Weak,” American Historical Review 115 (June 2010): 784;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Rodgers, Daniel T., Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA, 1998), 152–59.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

75. Richard White, The Republic for Which It Stands: The United States During Reconstruction and the Gilded Age, 1865–1896 (Oxford), 357–60; Nicholas Parrillo, Against the Profit Motive: The Salary Revolution in American Government, 1780–1940 (New Haven, 2013).

76. White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 388–95; Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion, 118–21; Clemens, Civic Gifts, 6; Elisabeth Clemens, “Reconciling Equal Treatment with Respect for Individuality: Association in the Symbiotic State,” in Morgan and Orloff, The Many Hands of the State, 44; Lisa McGirr, The War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American State (New York, 2016), 132–42.

77. Hannah Farber, “State-Building After War’s End: A Government Financier Adjusts His Portfolio for Peace,” Journal of the Early Republic 38 (Spring 2018): 67–68.

78. Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York, 2011), 511.

79. On “friendship,” see White, Railroaded, 93–102, xxix; Richard White, “Information, Markets, and Corruption: Transcontinental Railroads in the Gilded Age,” Journal of American History 90 (June 2003): 43; Steve Fraser, Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life (New York, 2005), 113–18.

80. White, The Republic for Which It Stands, 360; Clemens, Civic Gifts, 6.

81. Novak, “The Not-So-Strange Birth of the Modern American State,” 197. According to James Sparrow, William Novak, and Stephen Sawyer, writing in 2015, “current events—from a boundless war on terror to a stunningly generous, if blinkered, governmental response to the recent financial crisis—have only conspired to underscore this lesson.” Sparrow et al., Boundaries of the State in U.S. History, 1.

82. See Suzanne Mettler, The Submerged State: How Invisible Government Policies Undermine American Democracy (Chicago, 2011), 7; Frances E. Lee and Nolan McCarty, “The Anxieties of American Democracy,” in Frances E. Lee and Nolan McCarty, eds., Can America Govern Itself? (Cambridge, 2019), 1–10; Lawrence R. Jacobs and Desmond King, “The Political Crisis of the American State: The Unsustainable State in a Time of Unraveling,” in Jacobs and King, The Unsustainable American State, 3–33.

83. Morgan and Orloff, “The Many Hands of the State,” 1.

84. Johnson, Governing the American State, 3; Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek, “The Adaptability Paradox: Constitutional Resilience and the Principles of Good Government in Twenty-First-Century America,” Perspectives on Politics 18 (June 2020): 12; Orren and Skowronek, The Search for Political Development, 199.

85. Gerstle, Liberty and Coercion, 59–61.

86. Orren and Skowronek, The Policy State, 6.

87. Johnson, Governing the American State, 8.

88. Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 1.

89. On the range of actors involved in the pension system, see Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers, 118–19.

90. In contrast to Richard Bensel’s incorporation of the pension system as a component part of the late nineteenth-century Republican Party’s “great policy systems,” Paul Moreno has argued, correctly in my view, that “rather than being a well-crafted cog in an elaborate and effective political machine, the pension system … seems more accidental and ad hoc.” Bensel, The Political Economy of Industrialization, 232; Paul D. Moreno, The American State from the Civil War to the New Deal: The Twilight of Constitutionalism and the Triumph of Progressivism (Cambridge, 2013), 15.

91. Jacobs and King, “The Political Crisis of the American State,” 5–6.