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Governmental Institutions as Agents of Change: Rethinking American Political Development in the Early Republic, 1787–1835*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

Richard R. John
Richard R. John
Affiliation:
University of Illinois at Chicago
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Studies in American Political Development , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , Fall 1997 , pp. 347 - 380
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1997

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References

1. Adams's, Henry most important historical writing is his History of the United States 9 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1889–1891)Google Scholar, a survey of public administration during the presidencies of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. White's, Leonard D. principal works on governmental institutions in the early republic are The Federalists: A Study in Administrative History (New York: Macmillan Co., 1948)Google Scholar; The Jeffersonians: A Study in Administrative History, 1801–1829 (New York: Macmillan Co., 1951); and The Jacksonians: A Study in Administrative History, 1829–1861 (New York: Macmillan Co., 1954). For an overview of White's contribution to American historical writing, see John, Richard R., “Leonard D. White and the Invention of American Administrative History,” Reviews in American History 24 (06 1996): 344–60Google Scholar.

Gates's, Paul Wallace major works include The Farmers's Age: Agriculture, 1815–1860 (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1960)Google Scholar, and History of Public Land Law Development (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1968). Several of Gates's essays have been brought together in The Jeffersonian Dream: Studies in the History of American Land Policy and Development, ed. Bogue, Allan G. and Bogue, Margaret Beattie (Albuquerque, N.M.: University of New Mexico Press, 1996)Google Scholar. For a sampling of the work of Gates's students, see Ellis, David M. et al. eds., The Frontier in American Economic Development: Essays in Honor of Paul Wallace Gates (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1969)Google Scholar. For an introduction to Gates's legacy, see Bogue and Bogue, “Introduction,” ix–xx, and Scheiber, Harry N., “The Economic Historian as Realist and as Keeper of Democratic Ideals: Paul Wallace Gates's Studies of American Land Policy,” Journal of Economic History 40 (10 1980): 585–93Google Scholar. Recent works that build on Gates's legacy include Aron, Stephen, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Bonne to Henry Clay (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Taylor, Alan, Liberty Men and Great Proprietors: The Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier', 1760–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990)Google Scholar; and id., William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995).

Scheiber's, Harry N. publications include Ohio Canal lira: A Case Study of Government and the Economy, 1820–1861, 2d ed (1968; Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; “The Road to Munn: Eminent Domain and the Concept of Public Purpose in the State Courts,” Perspectives in American History 5 (1971): 329–402; “Property Law, Expropriation, and Resource Allocation by Government: The United States, 1789–1910,” Journal of Economic History 33 (March 1973): 232–51; “Federalism and the American Economic Order, 1789–1910,” Law and Society Review 10 (Fall 1975): 57–118; “American Constitutional History and the New Legal History: Complementary Themes in Two Modes,” Journal of American History 68 (September 1981): 337–50; “Regulation, Property' Rights, and the Definition of ‘The Market’: Law and the American Economy, “Journal of Economic History 41 (March 1981): 103–11; and “Public Rights and the Rule of Law in American Legal History,” California Law Review 72 (March 1984): 217–51.

2. Wood, Gordon S., “The Significance of the Early Republic,” Journal of the Early Republic 8 (Spring 1988): 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. Other historiographical traditions that neglect the role of governmental institutions include the “new” economic history and modernization theory. The new economic history, whose leading practitioners include Robert William Fogel and Douglass C. North, once regarded law, public policy, and public administration as irrelevant to the study of market rationality and economic growth. Recently, however, both Fogel and North have turned their attention to governmental institutions. See, for example, Fogel, Robert William, Without Consent or Contract: The Rise and Fall of American Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1989)Google Scholar; and North, Douglass C., Institutions, Institutional Change, and Economic Performance (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990)Google Scholar. The best known application of modernization theory to the history of the period is Brown, Richard D., Modernization: The 'Transformation of American Life, 1600–1865 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976)Google Scholar. Though Brown touched on institutional developments, particularly in communications, he was ultimately more concerned with changing modes of cultural expression. For a critique, see Henretta, James A., “‘Modernization’: Toward a False Synthesis,” Reviews in American History 5 (12 1977): 445–52Google Scholar.

4. Useful introductions to the new social history include Alice Kessler-Harris, , “Social History,” in The Neio American History, ed. Foner, Eric (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 163–84Google Scholar; Sterns, Peter N., “Toward a Wider Vision: Trends in Social History,” in The Past Before Us: Contemporary Historical Writing in the United States, ed. Kammen, Michael (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980), 205–30Google Scholar; and Henretta, James A., “Social History as Lived and Written,” American Historical Review 84 (12 1979): 1293–322Google Scholar.

5. Henretta, James A., “Comment,” American Historical Review 84 (12 1979): 1331CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6. Berkhofer, Robert F., “Comment,” American Historical Review 84 (12 1979): 1326Google Scholar. For a related discussion that focused specifically on the colonial period, see Appleby, Joyce, “A Different Kind of Independence: The Postwar Restructuring of the Historical Study of Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly 3d ser., 50 (04 1993): 245–67Google Scholar. Appleby's theme was the centrality of the concept of society to recent scholarship on colonial America. “Investing the typical conditions of everyday existence with an importance they had never known before,” Appleby wrote, “historians made society – its geographic setting, its enduring traditions, its productive and reproductive activities – the central focus of historical research” (ibid., 250).

7. Johnson, Paul E., A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815–1837 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1978), 83–88Google Scholar. For a critique, see John, Richard R., Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), chap. 5, esp. 324 n.55, 326 n.86Google Scholar.

8. Surveys of the new political history include Jensen, Richard J., “Historiography of American Political History,” in Encyclopedia of American Political History (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1984), ed. Greene, Jack P., 1–25Google Scholar; and Allan G. Bogue, ”The New Political History in the 1970s,” in Past Before Us, 231–51. For a recent update, see Formisano, Ronald P., “The Invention of the Ethnocultural Interpretation,” American Historical Review 99 (04 1994): 453–77Google Scholar.

The assumption that political history is a branch of social history has become so wide-spread that at least one political historian felt it incumbent to remind his readers that his monograph was not a work of social history. Cayton, Andrew R. L., The Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in the Ohio Country, 1780–1825 (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1986), 185Google Scholar.

9. Holt, Michael F., “The Election of 1840, Voter Mobilization, and the Emergence of the Second American Party System: A Reappraisal of Jacksonian Voting Behavior,” in A Master's Due: Essays in Honor of David Herbert Donald, ed. Cooper, William J. Jr, Holt, Michael F., and McCardell, John (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985), 16–58Google Scholar. For a critique, see Ronald Formisano, P., “The New Political History and the Election of 1840,” journal of Inter-disciplinary History 23 (Spring 1993): 661–82Google Scholar.

10. Formisano, Ronald P., The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s–1840s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 16Google Scholar.

11 Ibid., 41.

12. Ibid., 316–20, 342.

13. McCormick, Richard L., The Party Period and Public Policy: American Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 14–15Google Scholar. “The most important message conveyed by ethnocultural analysis,” McCormick wrote, “is not that voters were ethnically and religiously motivated, but that grass-roots concerns are so irrelevant to public policymaking” (ibid., 56).

14. Ibid., 18.

15. Ibid., 131–32.

16. Ibid., 87.

17. Ibid., 19.

18. Ibid., 206.

19. McCormick borrowed the concept of distributive politics from a well known typology that political scientist Theodore J. Lowi devised in 1964 (ibid., 204). Prior to 1890, Lowi declared, the distribution of resources by the government was “almost the exclusive type” of national domestic policy. After 1890, Lowi added, regulation and redistribution also became important. Lowi, Theodore J., “American Business, Public Policy, Case-Studies, and Political Theory,” World Politics 16 (07 1964): 689Google Scholar

Lowi's characterization of American public policy in the period before 1890 complements the well known thesis of legal historian Willard Hurst that legal rule-making in this period was fragmented, opportunistic, and market-driven. On this point, see Scheiber, Harry N., “Public Economic Policy and the American Legal System: Historical Perspectives,” Wisconsin Law Review (1980): 1184–85Google Scholar, and “At the Borderland of Law and Economic History: The Contributions of Willard Hurst,” American Historical Review 75 (February 1970): 753. Scheiber's own interpretation of nineteenth-century legal doctrine highlighted the centrality of a distinctive “public rights” tradition that was distinct not only from the legal instrumentalism of Hurst – and, more recently, Morton J. Horwitz – but also from the rights-based jurisprudence of Edward S. Corwin. Scheiber, “American Constitutional History and the New Legal History,” 347. See also Selvin, Molly, “The Public Trust Doctrine in American Law and Economic Policy, 1789–1920,” Wisconsin Law Review (1980): 1403–42Google Scholar.

20. Heaton, Herbert, “General Memorandum. …,” in Handlin, Oscar and Handlin, Mary Flug, Commonwealth: A Study of the Role of Government in the American Economy: Massachusetts, 1774–1861, rev. ed. (1947; Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1969), 270Google Scholar.

21. For a survey of the scholarship fostered by the SSRC project, see Scheiber, Harry N., “Government and the Economy: Studies of the ‘Commonwealth’ Policy in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 3 (Summer 1972): 135–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22. Handlin and Handlin, Commonwealth, xiv, xvii.

23. Ibid., 224, 228, 243. It is worth noting that at no point in Commonwealth did the Handlins explicitly term the nineteenth-century polity a “liberal state.” Rather, they called it a “humanitarian police state,” a “reform state,” or a “regulatory police state” (ibid., 203, 229, 242). Later historians, however, settled on the liberal state tag – picking up, no doubt, on the Handlins's brief but suggestive reference to liberalism – and for this reason it is highlighted here.

24. Hartz, Louis, Economic Policy and Democratic Thought: Pennsylvania, 1776–1860 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1948), xiCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25. Ibid., 294–95.

26. This point is made in Horwitz, Monton J., The Transformation of American Law. 1780–1860(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), xivGoogle Scholar.

27. Handlin and Handlin, Commonwealth, xvi, xiv.

28. Hartz, Economic Policy and Democratic thought, 32–33.

29. It was partly for this reason, speculated legal historian William J. Novak, that the commonwealth and mixed-enterprise studies have failed to challenge the “fundamentally liberal-capitalist portrait of nineteenth-century America.” Novak, , The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 284 n.6Google Scholar. Of the scholars who have produced studies in the commonwealth tradition, only Scheiber has challenged the primacy of instrumentalist considerations in the shaping of nineteenth-century American law.

30. Scheiber, “Government and the Economy,” 144. See also Lively, Robert A., “The American System: A Review Article,” Business History Review 29 (03 1955): 81–96Google Scholar. The Handlins and Hartz, Lively noted, “instead of eliminating the laissez-faire theme from analysis of public policy. … merely changed its chronology. Each assumed general adherence to the philosophy after the mid-century point at which their studies ended. … The authors set out to describe what the people of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania conceived to be the role of their governments, rather than to outline government activity; and with this definition of their work as exercises in intellectual history, they very often relegated principal economic themes to the position of supporting detail” (ibid., 82–84).

Lively exaggerated when he termed the Handlins' and Hartz's studies “exercises in intellectual history.” He was closer to the mark when he faulted them for treating government economic activism as episodic. For a view that stresses the continuity in government economic policymaking throughout much of the nineteenth century, see Miller, George H., Railroads and the Granger Laws (Madison, Wise.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971)Google Scholar. See also Scheiber, Harry N., “Public Policy, Constitutional Principle, and the Granger Laws: A Revised Historical Perspective,” Stanford Law Review 23 (1970–1971): 1029–37Google Scholar.

31. Oscar, and Handlin, Mary, The Dimensions of Liberty (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961)Google Scholar; Hartz, Louis, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1955)Google Scholar.

32. Bailyn, Bernard, Origins of American Politics (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), 25, 101–5Google Scholar.

33. Bailyn, Bernard, “Shaping the Republic to 1760”, in The Great Republic: A History of the American People, ed. Bailyn, et al. (Lexington: D. C. Heath and Co., 1977), 1:133–34, 188–97, 209–16Google Scholar.

34. Rakove, Jack N., “‘How Else Could it End?’ Bernard Bailyn and the Problem of Authority in Early America”, in The Transformation of Early American History: Society, Authority, and Ideology, ed. Henretta, James A., Kammen, Michael, and Katz, Stanley N. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991), 54–55, quotation on 55Google Scholar. Only occasionally did Bailyn explicitly refer to the concept of the liberal state in his writings; see Bernard Bailyn, “The Central Themes of the American Revolution: An Interpretation”, in Essays on the American Revolution, ed. Stephen G. Kurtz and James H. Hutson (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 25, 30. Bailyn did, however, repeatedly refer to the concept in his teaching. Jack N. Rakove to Richard R. John, February 6, 1996. Rakove has recently affirmed Bailyn's position: “The United States was little less a confederation when Madison died in 1836 than it had been when he set off for the Annapolis conference half a century earlier” (Rakove, , Original Meanings: Politics and Ideas in the Making of the Constitution [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996], 397 n.68)Google Scholar.

35. Ibid., 212–13, 399–400 n.23. “For all that has been written about ‘the rise of the assembly’ in America”, Rakove observes, “its legislative output has not been rigorously analyzed” (ibid., 213).

36. Berthoff, Rowland, An Unsettled People: Social Order and Disorder in American History (New York: Harper & Row, 1971), 170Google Scholar.

37. Rowland Berthoff and John M. Murrin, “Feudalism, Communalism, and the Yeoman Freeholder”, in Essays, 284, 278, 285–88. Berthoff and Murrin predicated their argument on the assumption that colonial America was, in fact, a monarchical society undergoing a “feudal revival” in which ties of personal dependence were becoming increasingly critical to one's political and economic standing. This conclusion has been challenged for Massachusetts by Bushman, Richard L., King and People, in Provincial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985)Google Scholar. Eighteenth-century Massachusetts, Bushman wrote, had a “monarchical culture” but was not a “monarchical society” (ibid., 85). Intriguingly, Bushman interpreted popular opposition to the British in the period after 1765 to the fear that the British were about to create a monarchical society in America (ibid., 207).

38. Berthoff, Rowland, “Writing a History of Things Left Out”, Reviews in American History 14 (03 1986): 1–16CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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40. Murrin, John M., ”A Roof without Walls: The Dilemma of American National Identity”, in Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity, ed. Beeman, Richard, Botein, Stephen, and Carter, Edward C. II, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 346, 347Google Scholar.

41. Gordon S. Wood, “Framing the Republic, 1760–1820”, in Great Republic, 1:341, 366.

42. Wood, Gordon S., “Equality and Social Conflict in the American Revolution”, William and Mary Quarterly 3d ser., 51 (10 1994): 709CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and id., “Interests and Disinterestedness in the Making of the Constitution”, in Beyond Confederation, 69–109.

43. Wood, Gordon S., The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), 8Google Scholar.

44. Morris, Richard B., The Forging of the Union, 1781–1789 (New York: Harper & Row, 1987)Google Scholar; Linda K. Kerber, “The Revolutionary Generation: Ideology, Politics, and Culture in the Early Republic”, in New American History, 42; Wood, “Significance”, 12–18. The phrase “deep change” was coined by Fischer, David Hackett and can be traced back to his first book. The Revolution of American Conservatism: The Federalist Party in the Era of Jeffersonian Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1965)Google Scholar. Fischer deployed the concept to refer to the organizational changes in party behavior that political leaders set in motion with the victory of Thomas Jefferson in the election of 1800. “There is no period in American history” – Fischer wrote, with reference to the period between the election of 1800 and the War of 1812 – “in which fundamental change proceeded with greater power, speed, and effect” (ibid., 199).

45. Though Wood is hardly a behavioralist, in an early essay, he did praise what he termed a “behaviorist” perspective on the American Revolution. ”Precisely because they sought to understand both the Revolutionary ideas and American society” – Wood observed, in referring to the scholarship of Merrill Jensen and his students – and notwithstanding their “crude conceptualizations”, the “behaviorist historians of the Progressive generation” have “still offered us an explanation of the Revolutionary era so powerful and so comprehensive that no purely intellectual interpretation will ever replace it” (Wood, , “Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution”, William and Mary Quarterly 3d ser., 23 [01 1966]: 32)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

46. Although Wood, in Radicalism, relied on the concept of American society as a whole as his basic unit of analysis, he now questions the value of this concept for the colonial era. For early Americanists, Wood wrote in 1995, the concept of society was no longer a viable organizing theme:So detailed has our understanding of the various bits and pieces of society become, so numerous are the monographs on this group or that local community, that historians have steadily lost confidence in their ability to conceive of early American society or even the society of a single colony as the proper area for study. Wood's observation raises the issue, which no one has yet explored systematically, of how and why a relatively coherent American society eventually emerged. Wood, Gordon S., “A Century of Writing Early American History: Then and Now Compared; Or How Henry Adams Got it Wrong”, American Historical Review 100 (06 1995): 694–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47. Several historians have touched on Wood's neglect of issues of agency. See, for example, Rakove, Jack N., “Gordon S. Wood, the ‘Republican Synthesis’, and the Path Not Taken”, William and Mary Quarterly 3d ser, 44 (07 1987): 621CrossRefGoogle Scholar. We ought to remember, Rakove contended, that republican politics were not primarily an exercise in semiotics but rather, and more elementally, a process by which “real historical actors” balanced and determined the conflicting claims that have “clamored for protection and promotion in every phase of our history” (ibid., 621).

48. Wood, ”Significance”, 4.

49. Wilentz, Sean, “On Class and Politics in Jacksonian America”, Revieius in American History 10 (12 1982): 52Google Scholar. Wilentz's theme was the social significance of the creation of mass parties that were anti-ideological in character. In keeping with this theme, Wilentz treated governmental institutions as more-or-less synonymous with political parties. The “ultimate problem” for political historians of the period, Wilentz wrote, was to determine the “social, ideological, and political contradictions” in electoral politics that led to the demise of the party system that had been organized around the Democrats and the Whigs (ibid., 59). See also his “Society, Politics, and the Market Revolution, 1815–1848”, in New American History, 51–71. For an elaboration, with a particular focus on urban artisans, see Wilentz, , Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984)Google Scholar. The relationship between social circumstance and party formation is a theme of the two recent studies of Jacksonian politics: Watson, Harry L., Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1990)Google Scholar, and Sellers, Charles, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar. See also Stokes, Melvyn and Conway, Stephen, eds., The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political, and Religious Expressions, 1800–1880 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996)Google Scholar. Both Watson and Sellers concentrate on the role of the so-called “market revolution” in shaping partisan loyalty in the decades following the War of 1812. For works that focus on the role of slavery in shaping party development, see Freehling, William W., The Road to Disunion: Secessionists at Bay, 1776–1854 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Richards, Leonard L., ”The Jacksonians and Slavery”, in Antislavery Reconsidered: New Perspectives on the Abolitionists, ed. Perry, Lewis and Fellman, Michael (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 99–118Google Scholar; and Cooper, William J. Jr, Liberty and Slavery: Southern Politics to 1860 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983)Google Scholar.

50. See, for example, Appleby, Joyce, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York University Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Nelson, John R. Jr, Liberty and Property: Political Economy in the New Nation, 1789–1812 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987)Google Scholar; and Kornblith, Gary J. and Murrin, John M., “The Making and Unmaking of an American Ruling Class”, in Beyond the American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism, ed. Young, Alfred F. (DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993), 27–79Google Scholar. For one of the most influential critiques of the role that earlier historians had assigned to the central government in nineteenth-century American life, see Cochran, Thomas C., “The ‘Presidential Synthesis’ in American History”, American Historical Review 53 (07 1948): 748–59Google Scholar. See also Farnham, Wallace D., “‘The Weakened Spring of Government’: A Study in Nineteenth-Century American History”, American Historical Review 68 (04 1963): 662–80Google Scholar.

51. Hatch, Nathan O., The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 14Google Scholar.

52. Greene, Jack P., Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Eormation of American Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988)Google Scholar; id., Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1986).

53. Newmyer, R. Kent, “John Marshall and the Southern Constitutional Tradition,” in An Uncertain Tradition: Constitutionalism and the History of the South ed. Hall, Kermit L. and Ely, James W. Jr, (Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 115Google Scholar.

54. Newmyer, R. Kent, “Harvard Law School, New England Legal Culture, and the Ante-bellum Origins of American Jurisprudence,” Journal of American History 74 (12 1987): 820Google Scholar. See also Pisani, Donald J., “Promotion and Regulation: Constitutionalism and the American Economy,” Journal of American History 74 (12 1987): 740–68Google Scholar.

55. Hurst's primary writings include Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1956); Law and Economic Growth: The Legal History of the Wisconsin Lumber Industry (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964); The Legitimacy of the Business Corporation in the Law of the United States, 1780–1970 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1970); Law and Social Order in the United States (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977); and “Old and New Dimensions of Research in United States Legal History,” American Journal of Legal History 23 (1979): 1–20. For a bibliography of Hurst's writings, see Wisconsin Law Review (1980): 1131–32.

56. Scheiber, “Borderland,” 744–56. See also Gordon, Robert W., “J. Willard Hurst and the Common Law Tradition in American Legal Historiography,” Law and Society 19 (Fall 1975): 9–55Google Scholar.

57. Cited in Keller, Morton, “Social Policy in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Federal Social Policy: The Historical Dimension, ed. Critchlow, Donald T. and Hawley, Ellis (State College, Pa.: Penn State Press, 1988), 102Google Scholar.

58. Crenson, Matthew A., The Federal Machine: Beginnings of Bureaucracy in Jacksonian America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975)Google Scholar. For sympathetic glosses of Crenson's argument, see Nelson, Michael, “A Short, Ironic History of American National Bureaucracy,” Journal of Politics, 44 (08 1982): 760–62Google Scholar; Morone, James A., The Democratic Wish: Popular Participation and the Limits of American Government (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 87–94Google Scholar; Cole, Donald B., The Presidency of Andrew Jackson (Lawrence, Kans.: University of Kansas Press, 1993), 240Google Scholar; and Wood, Radicalism, 303–5. For a critique, see John, Spreading the News, esp. 79–83, 241–52, 337 n.164, 337 n.166, 337 n.168; Shefter, Martin, Political Parties and the Stale: The American Historical Experience (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 68Google Scholar; and Pessen, Edward, rev. of Federal Machine, in Journal of Southern History 41 (11 1975), 553–54Google Scholar.

59. Crenson's analysis echoed the conclusions of historian Lynn Marshall, who propounded a similar thesis, with a similarly exalted view of the Post Office Act of 1836, in a major article that he published in the American Historical Review in 1967. Marshall, Lynn, “The Strange Stillbirth of the Whig Party,” American Historical Review 72 (01 1967): 445–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

60. Much depends, of course, on one's definition of bureaucratization. Yet, if one identifies this process with formal job descriptions, meritocratic hiring and promotion procedures, and the cultivation of a sense of esprit de corps, then it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Jacksonians slowed – and, to a significant degree, reversed – the largely successful bureaucratization of the central government that had been vigorously promoted in the 1820s by energetic and ambitious administrators such as Postmaster General John McLean.

61. Young, James Sterling, The Washington Community, 1800–1828 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966), 27Google Scholar. See also Nelson, Michael, “The Washington Community Revisited,” Virginia Historical Review 61 (Spring 1985): 189–210Google Scholar; and Bogue, Allan G. and Marlaire, Mark Paul, “Of Mess and Men: The Boardinghouse and Congressional Voting, 1821–1842,” American Journal of Political Science 19 (05 1975): 207–30Google Scholar.

62. Young, Washington Community, 35.

63. Ibid., xi.

64. Cunningham, Noble E. Jr, The Process of Government under Jefferson (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 210Google Scholar, 303, quotation on 303.

65. Skowronek, Stephen, Building a New American Stale: 'The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 19CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66. Ibid., viii, ix.

67. Ibid., 3, 5. Skowronek based his own account of these developments largely on the existing secondary literature, which, with few exceptions, reached a similar conclusion. See, for example, Hollingsworth, J. Rogers, “The United States,” in Crises of Political Development in Europe and The United States, ed. Grew, Raymond (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1978), 163–95Google Scholar. Skowronek's characterization of the American policy in the early republic as a state of “courts and parties” has proved so influential among historians as well as political scientists that it is worth noting that, particularly for the period before 1829, it rests on a thin empirical base. During the past few years, historians have documented numerous instances of administrative activism during the presidencies of James Monroe and John Quincy Adams. See, for example, Cunningham, Noble Jr, The Presidency of James Monroe (Lawrence, Kans.: University of Kansas Press, 1996)Google Scholar, and Hargreaves, Mary W. M., The Presidency of John Quincy Adams (Lawrence, Kans.: University of Kansas Press, 1985)Google Scholar. For a related discussion, see Bright, Charles C., “The State in the United States during the Nineteenth Century,” in Statemaking and Social Movements: Essays in History and Theory, ed. Bright, and Harding, Susan (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 123Google Scholar, 134–43. Skowronek himself recently amplified his account of national politics in this period to take into account this recent work. See, in particular, his suggestive survey of the Monroe and Adams administrations in The Politics Presidents Make: leadership from John Adams to George Bush (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 86–127.

68. Skowronek, Building a Nnu American State, 3–35.

69. Among historians, recognition of the new institutionalism as a distinct intellectual tradition dates back at least as far as 1965, when John Higham drew attention to it in an influential study of the historical profession:Deriving partly from studies in entrepreneurial and business history and partly from contemporary American sociology, this kind of history is less concerned with motives than with structure and process. … Perhaps we may call this the new institutionalism; for it is bringing back to life a morphological study of organizations, now freed from the formalistic, evolutionary emphasis of nineteenth century scholarship. (Higham, John, History: Professional Scholarship in America [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965], 231)Google Scholar

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81. Historians of Great Britain have recently touched on broadly similar themes. See, for example, O'Brien, Patrick K., “Political Preconditions for the Industrial Revolution,” in The Industrial Revolution and British Society, ed. O'Brien, and Quinault, Roland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 124–55Google Scholar, and Mathias, Peter, The First Industrial Nation: An Economic History of Britain, 1700–1914, 2d (1969; London: Methuen, 1983), 31–75Google Scholar.

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87. Though Tocqueville recognized the significance of voluntary associations in American public life, he overlooked the role of the central government in helping association organizers to spread their message. On this point, see Theda Skocpol, “The Tocqueville Problem: Civic Engagement in American Democracy,” Social Science History (forthcoming).

Tocqueville's inadequate account of the central government, Tocqueville specialist James T. Schleifer has observed, was the “basic error” of his discussion of the nature and future of the American federation. Interestingly, Schleifer attributed this error to an uncritical reliance on political commentators such as Massachusetts jurist Joseph Story, who deliberately exaggerated the strength, ambition, and rights of the states. Schleifer, James T., The Making of Tocqueville's Democracy in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 111Google Scholar.

88. The expansion of the postal network was greatly facilitated by the petition process, another important element of the postconstitutional civic infrastructure. To establish a new post route, Congress required interested parties to petition Congress with a formal request. Thousands of these petitions have survived and can be sampled at the National Archives. Many were earnest, handwritten appeals. As such, they constitute eloquent testimony to the relevance of the government to everyday affairs and to the determination of the American people to secure the benefits that only the government could confer. For a more extended discussion of the petition process, see John, Spreading the News, 49–51, 173–74, 185–86, 189.

89. For a related argument, see Shefter, Political Parties, 68.

90. The role of the civic instrastructure in shaping political attitudes deserves more attention than it has thus far received. Political mobilization, as J.G.A. Pocock reminds us, can be a “most powerful engine in determining political and historical subjectivity.” Pocock, J.G.A., “The Limits and Divisions of British History: In Search of the Unknown Subject,” American Historical Review 87 (04 1982): 336Google Scholar. Such an inquiry would complement studies of the cultural consequences of market growth. See Bender, Thomas, ed., The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Imagination (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1992)Google Scholar; and Haskell, Thomas L. and Teichgraeber, Richard F. III, ed., The Culture of the Market: Historical Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

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94. Ibid., 10.

95. Ibid., 156–57.

96. Ibid., 153–54.

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100. Here new institutionalists build on the insights of older scholars such as Scheiber. See, in particular, Scheiber, “Federalism and the American Economic Order, 1789–1910.”

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104. Dunlavy, Politics and Industrialization, 4.

105. Ibid., 196.

106. Andrew R. L. Cayton, “Comment,” in author's possession, 7–8.

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