DISCUSSION POST 7 RAOS ARTICLE

The New Historiography of the Early Federal Government

• Over the past two decades, political scientists and historians have produced a new historiography of the early U.S. federal government.
• This historiography is part of a broader movement to bring the state "back in" to American history.
• These new histories focus on the institutions and policies that comprised the early American state.
• They challenge the long-standing view that the U.S. federal government and the American state after the Revolution were diminutive and weak.
• Early federal offices were important agents of change, despite being smaller and more disparate than their bureaucratized successors.
• These scholars are critiquing Max Weber's understanding that equates the state's strength with its monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force.
• A richer understanding may lie beyond the history of institutions.
• It is necessary to study the state at its peripheries to avoid regurgitating "official" histories and recover the contingency and conflict that define state building.
• It should now question in whose interests, and for what purposes, those institutions worked.
• By connecting central administration to distant federal officeholders, scholars can better understand the extent of the federal government's policies and ambitions.
• Historians of the early federal government might better explain how people distant from the nation's capital of different backgrounds confronted, contested, and legitimated federal authority and the state.
• Recovering the stories of how citizens and subjects interacted with and shaped federal power will add new experiential dimensions to existing institutional understandings.

Institutions, Contexts, and the Imperial State

• Recent scholarship on Native Americans' relationship to the early federal government provides a powerful case study of federal governance from the vantage point of those subject to and shaped by federal power.
• Scholars have documented relationships between Native peoples, early federal officialdom, and the federal bureaucracy.
• They provide a new and poignant perspective on the operation of federal authority in the early republic.
• This literature provides foundational accounts of the forging of the early federal government's more coercive powers.
• This literature shows where, at whose behest, and upon whom they functioned, and how Natives contested and marginalized federal power.
• Native voices from below, within, and without the state bear witness to the construction and limitations of the U.S. central government from the American Revolution through the Age of Jackson and beyond.
• The early federal government and American state was in a double sense a vital part of "an imperial state."
• The architects of the new federal government sought to emulate the British Empire's structure of governance with a strong central administration and distant officeholders.
• The early federal government operated similarly, and world of conflicts surrounding American political life in the mid- to late eighteenth century and beyond cannot be neatly divided between a British imperial state and a nascent American one.
• Second, a central—if uneven and episodic—goal of federal policy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was to stabilize and enlarge the American empire through territorial expansion.
• Native confrontation with the new federal government offers a clear history of imperial conflict.
• The established historiography of Natives' interactions with the federal government demonstrates the empire's formidable powers.
• These accounts teach not only of coercive powers but also how they were experienced and contested.
• At the center of this imperial state lay the federal government, which faced outward to Indian country, inward toward legal, regulatory, infrastructural, and fiscal concerns, and to the liminal shared realms in between.
• The federal government simultaneously wielded what John M. Murrin once labeled "its soft side and its hard side.”
• White men benefited from its institutions and legal protections, while “Indians, blacks, and Spaniards experienced the hard side of these formulations" in the form of military confrontation and territorial contests.
• The early federal government was simultaneously a network of scattered bureaus and a coercive force in Indian country and beyond.
• It resembled the British Empire that preceded it and the successive American empires that would soon follow.
• Federal politicians and officeholders appear prominently in legal and constitutional histories.
• They appear in histories of commercial and financial regulation, federal activity on the western and maritime frontiers, and domestic policy such as slavery and the slave trade. Some historians challenge the view that the early federal government was thematically and statistically insignificant.
• Those engaged with different frameworks nonetheless provide evidence of interventionist federal policy and officialdom throughout the states and territories.
• To a great extent, the foundation of this new literature is the similarity between the eighteenth-century British central government and the early U.S. federal government.
• The parallels resulted from a broader process of Anglicization as much as cultural Anglophilia.
• The founders aimed to re-create “a progressive and enlightened empire" shorn of metropolitan overreaching into local affairs but replete with “the colonizing impulses that the British Empire had before the imperial crisis—so vigorously promoted."
• The divided sovereignty between central and local marked the boundaries between federal and state concerns in the Constitution of 1787.
• The English and then British state that the American founders would seek to emulate found its power in the creation of major central governmental institutions such as the Treasury Department and the military.
• Some historians have illustrated the spectacular growth of the "fiscal-military" state to accommodate England's geopolitical contest with its continental rivals over territory.
• The state developed the capacity to collect taxes on commerce, the machinery to coordinate spending of that revenue, the apparatus to procure and supply the army and navy, and the cultural means to communicate its achievements.
• Policy argues that politics in early modern Britain was a contest over which the state would be applied, not over the existence of the state itself.
• According to Pincus, the Americans' Declaration of Independence was a blueprint for the Whig state.
• It would maintain a strong center while avoiding the British state's previous encroachments on sacred metropolitan affairs.
• The American Revolution was a delayed but powerful aftershock to the Glorious Revolution.
• The location of political authority at the center of the new federal government was also necessary to address an underway movement of federalism..
• The first stemmed from the British Empire's difficulty in imposing command over a vast geographic landscape with competing populations.
• Imperial authority in leading port cities was subject to powerful checks by local politics and merchants, and negotiated authority was already the modus operandi of imperial governance.
• “The farther into the interior a policy traveled, the more the gulf widened between the claim to power and actual power."
• As Alison L. LaCroix explains, federalism meant that "multiple independent levels of government could legitimately exist within a single polity, and that such an arrangement was not a defect to be lamented but a virtue to be celebrated.”
• Federalism was an ideology that emerged from American revolutionary mobilization, as patriots flouted the British assertion of unitary parliamentary sovereignty in favor of a system that divided authority over what has come to be known as the “tax” or “fiscal-military" state from local self-governance and jurisdiction.
• This was the reality of governance in the world into which the U.S. federal government was born.
• Federalism's constraint on a new central government was apparent in the 1781 Articles of Confederation.
• Early proposals for the national Congress to possess broad authority gave way to “a more restrictive, sharper definition of congressional power," and the document explicitly created “a confederation of sovereign states, individually free to accept or reject congressional measures as each saw fit."
• This confederation possessed “the leanest possible union" with an infinitesimally small center awash in “governmental multiplicity."
• Congress's lack of a taxing power doomed attempts to use the central government to stabilize the young confederation's calamitous fiscal affairs.
• Halting attempts at raising revenue from the stated underscored the need for a more authoritative federal taxing power.
• The Confederation Congress's lasting contribution to federal governance was the 1787 Northwest Ordinance, which propounded a vision for imperial expansion through North America.
• Two important features of the ordinance that are discussed further below were its protection of slavery in the South and its exclusionary posture toward Native Americans within the context of territorial expansion.
• Gregory Ablavsky's doctoral dissertation examines the collision of “these worlds of high federal law and policy and territorial reality" under the ordinance.
• The 1790 Act to Regulate Trade and Intercourse with the Indian Tribes “bolstered the power of the federal state" by criminalizing private purchases of Indian lands except by federal treaties.
• Constitution promised a federal or central government that mirrored that the British Empire.
• The consensus in recent scholarship is that the early federal government was “energetic,” possessed of "the full powers of the 'fiscal-military state' in reserve,” and touched the lives of "millions of Americans."
• The Constitution structured a modern state capable of collecting revenue, exerting regulatory authority, and utilizing military force.
• The Federalists derided the confederal government as “too weak to defend the territorial and commercial interests of the United States."
• "Even though the Federalist national state was intended to be small," he writes, "it would still need resources."
• For Edling, a constitutional revolution had poised the state for a revolution in political economy when it came to taxing and spending.
• In fact, those ideological constraints of federal authority could even scuttle federal programs that fit squarely within the founders' understanding of the legitimate exercise of a fiscal-military state.
• For Naomi R. Lamoreaux and John Joseph Wallis, the states’ profound influence over political economy in nineteenth-century America is evidence that "the federal government played no role” in the institutional development of the early U.S. economy.
• Consider for instance the activity of the U.S. Post Office, the Postal Policy and employees sparked communications revolutions.
• Benedict Anderson, federal postal policy provided evidence that the federal government was a pivotal agent in forming the U.S. national “Imagined Community.”
• Understanding the early federal government requires coming to terms with both the decisions of the postmaster general and those made by thousands of local postmasters scattered throughout the country.
• There was a description of the negotiations between the local officials and the patrons and subjects of laws being developed.
• Studies about federal activity include the lower courts in the early national United States.
• Kate Elizabeth Brown's Alexander Hamilton and the Development of American Law is about “federal courts, administrators, and lawyers."
• Scholars have also studied early federal administrative practices with two other crucial federal institutions: land offices and customer houses.
• Although the Federalists devised a halting land office policy in the 1790s, the Louisiana Purchase forced land offices to become a priority.
• In federal land policy, Frymer finds a lens through which to understand both the emergence of an American empire and the process by which that empire became the province of white supremacy.
• Customs officers in port towns and cities bent federal laws to fit local merchant communities' demands out of fear that strict enforcement of the letter of congressional law would jeopardize their status and that of the federal government.
• Farber demonstrates the outsized influence of the merchant and financier class over matters of political economy.
• Congress and the federal courts routinely regulated maritime labor contracts.
• This included sailors on the margins of society.
• For these potentially problematic populations, the early federal government developed the authority and means to act decisively when necessary through the doctrine of emergency powers.
• George William Van Cleve's A Slaveholders' Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic states that the Constitution was explicitly “pro-slavery in its politics, its economics, and its law.”
• The Constitution created a system where slavery could be permitted where slavery was desired.
• These constitutional compromises fashioned a national political economy in the slaveholders' image.
• Van Cleve identifies how the constitutional compromise to keep open the international slave trade until 1808 made it possible for the slave trade to provide an ample supply of slaves to western settlers.
• But legal scholars have found dismal enforcement of anti-slave trade legislation persisted after 1808.
• The relationship between slaveholders, enslaved people, and the federal government remains ripe for further exploration.
• Fine recent studies of the fugitive slave laws.
• As legal historian Ethan Davis argues, Congress vested enormous discretion in enforcing power.
• To write an alternative history of the early federal government and the imperial state of which it was a crucial constituent part, some historians are taking us to the edge of institutions.
• Eliga H. Gould in a slightly different context characterized as “outside in”: the framework of the American state, including the influence of settlers.
• Prioritizing Indians' experience offers a new approach in contending with white settlers and government officials.
• The history of nineteenth-century American settler colonialism is largely that of white, westward-moving settler colonists who expropriated Indians, violated promises and treaties, and committed bloody violence.
• Because early American officials did see federal policy on the natives as a solution to problems.
• Those Natives saw treaties as necessary, and had little influence to begin with.
• Even thought the Civil War looms, the U.S. Federal government never truly had an empire as we understand it.

Analysis of the historiography surrounding the early American state, including Pierre Bourdieu's arguments. It includes the study of institutions and laws and the connection between central administration and federal officeholders. The new historiography aims to change the understanding of the state in the early republic.