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  • Slavery in the American Republic: Developing the Federal Government, 1791–1861
  • Lindsay Schakenbach
Slavery in the American Republic: Developing the Federal Government, 1791– 1861. By David F. Ericson (Lawrence, University Press of Kansas, 2011) 344 pp. $37.50

The institution of slavery demanded the development of a national state stronger than most scholars have assumed to have been feasible before the Civil War. Warfare, border patrol, and colonization—hallmarks of European fiscal-military states and twentieth-century America—characterized the U.S. federal government’s efforts to manage a slaveholding society in its first seventy years of existence. Yet rather than compare it to other times and places, Ericson takes the pre-Civil War federal government on its own terms because of the early United States’ unique position as a nation seemingly divided between freedom and slavery. This “house divided,” it turns out, was built largely of slave materials. Rather than stunt its growth, Ericson argues, slavery positively affected state development. It spurred the state’s military buildup and its creation of law-enforcement mechanisms, determined its capacities to legislate, and increased its legitimacy. Ericson uses counterfactual scenarios to make the convincing case that many of the structures of the federal government [End Page 495] that were in place until the Civil War, and to some degree still are, would not have been possible without efforts to manage slavery both within and beyond U.S. borders.

To make this argument, Ericson contends with a diverse range of political and historical scholarship that characterizes the United States as a weak state either as a result of American exceptionalism or as a result of government-fearing slaveholders. The United States was not uniquely underdeveloped. Nor did slaveholders prohibit federal growth; many, in fact, were among the biggest proponents and beneficiaries of a strong central power. Fugitive-slave law, for example, required federal marshaling of legal, diplomatic, and military resources, especially in border regions and territories. It also required the federal employment of private agents. Using a structural “society-centered model of state development” in lieu of the state-centered models used for heavily bureaucratized European states, Ericson argues that the strongest state development occurred at the periphery through “covert policy-making” by members of the executive branch (6, 172). The Second Seminole War, more than any other events in Ericson’s account, exemplified slave-related state-building on the frontier, as the U.S. army fought Native Americans to protect slaveholding and stabilize slave markets. Previous studies of slavery and the federal government have shortchanged what Ericson sees as state effectiveness on the margins.

Data about federal expenditures from the first to the last fiscal year before the Civil War informs Ericson’s conclusions about the government’s role in military engagements, slave-trade regulation, colonization, fugitive-slave renditions, and slave-labor markets. These data, though incomplete for certain years, allow Ericson to identify spending and hiring patterns that illuminate periods of slave-related government growth, especially when this growth was not marked by official policy. For example, even after Andrew Jackson’s administration cut off federal funding to the American Colonization Society, Liberia continued to receive protection, arms, and other in-kind subsidies from the U.S. Navy. Although rarely cited as precedents for later state developments, slavery-related federal interventions laid some of the political and constitutional groundwork for twentieth-century military interventions, the coercive management of military employees, and the federal enforcement of civil rights.

Ericson’s successful integration of political and sociological theories about state-building, historical sensitivities to change and specificity, and the economic utilization of fiscal data provides a fresh perspective to old debates about the relationship between slavery and American politics. His work offers new ways to explore beyond official policy debates to understand the precise ways in which slavery shaped early governance and left its mark on the American political system. [End Page 496]

Lindsay Schakenbach
Brown University
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