The "Cement of Interest": Interest-Based Models of Nation-Building in the Early Republic

It is by the cement of interest only, we can be held together . . . [Westerners] would in a few years be as unconnected with us, indeed more so, than we are with South America. . . . how are we to prevent this? Happily for us the way is plain, and our immediate interests, as well as remote political advantages, points to it. . . . Extend the inland navigation of the Eastern waters, communicate them as near as possible (by excellent Roads) with those that run to the Westward. . . . [We will] bind those people to us by a chain that can never be broken.

—George Washington to Jacob Read, 11/3/1784 (1931)

This single quotation reveals both Washington’s assessment of the nation-building problem facing the young republic and his solution to it.¹ The problem was space, the centrifugal pull of diverse geographic interests. This was the archetypal problem of the first large republic, here manifest in an East-West division, although more familiar to us in its North-South form. For Washington, the solution was to create shared interests through increased trade and communications based on the simple logic that “commercial connexions . . . lead to others.” This theory survives today in the typically unspoken conviction that economic integration fosters political integration. Perhaps more important is that, within a republican framework, this was the only legitimate course of nation-building, because it alone did not require coercion. Washington goes so far as to write, “there is nothing which binds one country or one State to another but interest” (letter to Richard Henry Lee, 8/22/1785, 1838:119; emphasis added). This logic points to the centrality of that handful of federal activities which had the potential to effect economic integration, including internal improvements and the post office, as well as institutions to support a national market.²

I wish to argue three basic points. First, “interest-based” nation-building was more important in the early republic than efforts based on “imagined communities” or “invented traditions.” Although these other approaches were employed, their power depended finally on a prior reconstruction of self-interest that only economic processes and policy could bring about. This is slightly paradoxical: true nationalism, in which love of country is an absolute,³ beyond any materialistic calculation, is firmly rooted in the materialistic process of economic integration through which individuals perceive far-flung national interests as their own. Second, those partisans I label “conservative”—Federalists, National Republicans, and Whigs—operationalized the interest-based model. I will focus only on selected aspects of this program, especially Henry Clay’s “American System” and the long-term effort to establish a federal program of internal improvements. This faction was almost always in the minority in American politics, so their program was never consistently implemented. Economic integration proceeded nonetheless, at least in the North, and helped nourish a reflexive nationalism for at least some Americans. Third, the “democratic” majority failed to provide any identifiable alternative to the conservative interest-based agenda.⁴ The Jeffersonian and Jacksonian tradition did develop characteristic strategies for dealing with, and avoiding, sectional tension, but these approaches promised no final resolution to the basic problem—the problem of space for a republic—which is where we begin.

The Problem of Space

Space was the enemy of the new American republic. Political wisdom had long held that republics must be small. For the founding generation, the most authoritative statement of this basic principle came from Montesquieu: “It is the nature of a republic to have only a small territory; otherwise, it can scarcely continue to exist” (1989: 124). This is so both because the lure of private interests is greater in a large state—there are great fortunes and great ambitions—and because the common good, now far removed from the ordinary lives of ordinary citizens, is more difficult to recognize in the cacophony of competing private...