State and Citizen: British America and the Early United States

“A Mongrel Kind of Government”

150 ⡰ “A Mongrel Kind of Government” The U.S. Constitution, the Federal Union, and the Origins of the American State m a x m . e d l i n g I t is a curious fact that the world’s sole remaining superpower is the creation of an allegedly stateless society. More than most peoples, Americans are convinced that their central government plays only a marginal role in the development of their society. To the extent that the federal government figures at all in the popular imagination, it does so mainly as a threat to the American way of life. Born a liberal society, out of a revolution against the oppressive regulations and taxation of an overbearing government, the state, it is often assumed, was never part of America’s history before the nation’s leaders took a wrong turn in the Great Depression. Shorn of its populist excesses, this attitude is largely embraced also by historians and political scientists. Within the historical profession the statelessness of the early United States became “a rigid orthodoxy” in the critical decades after the Second World War, when there was a rapid expansion of the field. Perhaps this development was inevitable. Presenting the United States as the inversion of Communist totalitarianism , American historians and social scientists deliberately played down the significance of the state in favor of nonstate actors in their accounts of their nation’s historical development.¹ The early American state, in the shape of the federal government, is thus presented as something of a nonentity. While no one doubts the existence of a central state, students of the early republic have typically ridiculed it as small and irrelevant. In a statement that resonated widely, John Murrin dismissed the antebellum state as “a midget institution in a giant land,” a government that “had almost no internal functions” and whose “role scarcely went beyond . . . the use of port duties and the revenue from land sales to meet its own expenses.” The federal government, others chimed in, “was not a directive force in social affairs” and its sovereignty was considered to be “contingent on Thompson & Onuf final pages.indd 150 Thompson & Onuf final pages.indd 150 1/3/13 1:38 PM 1/3/13 1:38 PM “A Mongrel Kind of Government” 151 the consent of individual states.” Before the Civil War, it was the states rather than the federal government that were “the significant locus of formal authority and real power, vigorously exercised.”² Historians’ dismissal of the federal government results from an ironic reading of the framing and adoption of the federal constitution of 1787. In contrast to most laymen, who tend to view the Revolution and the Constitution as expressions of the same political creed, professional historians typically depict the Constitution as an instrument of the counterrevolution. Called together to turn the tide of democratization that had swept over the state legislatures in the wake of the struggle for independence and had led local majorities to trample on the rights of minorities and disregard the greater good of the nation, the Constitutional Convention represents the counterrevolutionary moment of the American Revolution. In the Convention, nationalist politicians tried to relocate power from the people to a distant central government removed from popular pressure. They envisioned the creation of a central government that could reach deeply into society to protect individual rights, principally to property, against democratic majorities in the states. But if they succeeded in their immediate goal to frame and adopt the Constitution, it soon became evident that “their Constitution failed, and failed miserably, in what they wanted it to do.” The federal government never replaced the states as the central locus of power and its influence on the nation’s internal development proved to be negligent. Whereas the states grew in importance and power in the early nineteenth century, “governance in Washington barely mattered in the lives of ordinary Americans.”³ The presentation of the early federal government as a nonstarter rests on a misunderstanding of what the Constitution’s framers were really after, however . Contrary to the claims of many historians, the Founders never set out to replace the state governments with a nation-state. The federal government was designed to complement, not to compete with, the states. In fact, the Constitution upheld an older concept of the American state as a two-tiered structure in which the national government and the states divided different government functions between themselves. According to this division, the national government was...