Revising the History of the Early American State

Several recent works, such as Brian Balogh's Government Out of Sight and Sheldon Pollack's War, Revenues, and State Building, have attacked the “weak state” trope in the American political development literature. My paper intends to assess this revisionist literature. The argument is the revisionists have not gone far enough in revising the history of the early American state because they still have not factored in the effects of slavery on state development. For example, one of the reasons that the federal government was most energetic on the periphery during the pre-Civil War period was paralysis at the center because of disputes over slavery. Another reason was to cloak, from both public and congressional view, controversial policies that directly promoted the interests of Southern slaveholders. One such case was the Second Seminole War, where the Van Buren administration generated very substantial, and for most of the war unreported, expenses forcibly removing the Seminoles from Florida at the behest of local slaveholders who were extremely anxious about the security of their slaveholdings. Other examples would be the federal government's largely undocumented use of slave labor and subsidization of African colonization. In short, a real revisionism would not keep slavery “out of sight.”