That's No Guppy, That's Leviathan: Rethinking the Federal Government in the Nineteenth Century

It has long been a shibboleth in historical writing and public debate that the United States government was small and weak during the nineteenth century. With the dramatic exception of the Civil War and Reconstruction, scholars and pundits agree, the federal government had a minimal administrative structure and a small policy footprint before the 1890s. It was only with the adoption of a regulatory state in the early twentieth century and the New Deal that the federal government acquired influence comparable to that of European states. Such a view has bolstered American exceptionalism in both historical and political circles.

Even the "new institutionalists" agreed, at least at first. From the late 1970s on, these political scientists, historical sociologists, and historians, who also refer to their school of thought as American Political Development, rejected the view that governments merely mirrored social interests. They insisted that institutional structures, routines, and networks determined political possibilities and shaped policy. During its early years, the state-centered story told by this scholarly movement began at the end of the nineteenth century. Stephen Skowronek, one of the founders of the new institutionalism, described the nineteenth-century American government as "a state of courts and parties." ¹ Skowronek's memorable phrase set the terms of scholarly work and undergraduate lectures for a generation.

There have been dissenters from this view. In 1947, Oscar and Mary Handlin argued that local and state governments actively intervened in social and economic affairs between the Revolution and the Civil War. Scholars since then have emphasized state and local governments' active role in shaping social and economic life. ² But few if any scholars contested the view that the federal government played a minimal role in American social and economic life. This consensus began to crack in the 1990s, as scholars (mostly legal historians and academics associated with the new institutionalism) began to investigate federal state capacity more closely. Richard John, Christopher L. Tomlins, Jeffrey Pasley, and others found a far more active and influential federal government than previous scholars. But their studies focused on particular branches of the government or on specific eras. They left no clear assessment of the course of American state formation over the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. ³

Brian Balogh's A Government Out of Sight synthesizes this literature, as well as other scholarship on federal policy and state-society relations, into a full-scale narrative of the development of American federal state capacity during the nineteenth century. American national government, Balogh argues, governed differently, not less, than its European contemporaries. It developed very little administrative apparatus, governing not through "unilateral state power" (p. 3) but by contracting out state functions to entrepreneurs, corporations, and voluntary associations. The national state remained "hidden in plain sight"; federal power governed most directly at the edges of the nation, operated through intermediaries, and was seamlessly integrated into local life (p. 4). Despite its low level of visibility, the national government decisively shaped American economic development.

From the 1780s forward, Balogh argues, American political leaders of all political persuasions embraced a powerful, activist state. Each major party endorsed a variant of a "developmental vision" in which national health would be sustained by robust economic growth, vigorously promoted by national policy (p. 53). Federalists promoted a visibly active state that they hoped would both awe the citizenry and create an integrated national culture and economy. Thomas Jefferson rejected many of the Federalists' statist policies, but he repeatedly overcame his devotion to minimal government and his constitutional scruples to expand the national territory and ensure Americans' access to international markets. The National Republicans went further, enlisting the federal government to promote territorial expansion, internal improvements, a national bank, and the development of a home market for manufacturing. In pursuing economic development through governmental action, however, Republicans of all stripes explained their actions in liberal terms. Economic growth would be driven by...