Conquest and the Nation State

The transformation of a federation of colonies, united primarily in opposition to the centralized authority of the British monarchy, into the enormously powerful and centralized twenty-first century U.S. nation-state is self-evident but not easily accounted for by historians. Key twentieth-century studies of the growth of state power in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era traditionally opened with unquestioned assertions about the “weak” federal state in the antebellum era, the nearly blank slate upon which the dramatic changes of the later century could be etched.

But what does it mean to say a nation-state is “weak”? Following the lead of such scholars as Richard John, William Novak, and Joel Silby, two historians have written three books arguing that the first decades of the American republic were marked by an increasingly assertive and expansive federal state. What distinguishes these new volumes is that they locate both the exercise and the source of that power in a highly unlikely location: on the frontier. Myths of Turnerian individualism, superimposed on a nation-state in its infancy, may have obscured the strength of federal power in the early national borderlands.

In his painstakingly detailed study of U.S. expansion in the Ohio Valley and Southern Great Lakes from 1775 to 1815, William Bergmann argues that federal government was a crucial actor, with power and influence far beyond that accorded it in the mythology of our small-government past. By 1815, the nation-state was “concentrated, penetrative, centralized, and specialized” (p. 7), although almost no one at the time recognized it as such. Alexis de Tocqueville commented on the apparent “absence” of any government administration decades later, even in relatively centralized New England. “The hand which directs the social machine is invisible” he remarked. “The administrative power in the United States presents nothing either centralized or hierarchical in its constitution.”¹ The early West was a far cry from New England. In the West, most Americans only felt the presence of the nation-state at the post office and during time of war. But visibility may not be the best gauge of governmental strength. Bergmann argues that we should instead assess the power of the early American nation-state “on the ability of government to accomplish desired and achievable goals within its limit of power” (p. 7).

His assertion, in this volume, is that the state accomplished quite a bit. It appropriated land, funded exploration and discovery of resources, developed infrastructure, and distributed fiscal resources. That modifying clause, “within its limits of power,” at the end of his definition of a strong national state may raise some eyebrows, since what better defines a government’s power than the extent of its limits? But this definition is crucial to his argument. By no stretch of the imagination would citizens fifty years later, let alone in our own time, have understood the state in 1815 as “strong” in the West. Few federal funds found their way into the hands of anyone in the Old North, and efforts at developing infrastructure were extremely limited. But Bergmann makes a solid argument that the administrative capacities of the early national state were broader than many scholars have suggested.

The author begins his narrative of the growth of the federal state in the West by tracing the dissolution of British authority in the region and the subsequent property war between settlers and Indians. The federal state was forced to intercede in this military conflict, and the presence of the army marked the origin of federal power. Bergmann then explores how...