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Beware the Weak State
Adam Rothman
| JACK P. Greene has thrown down a colonialist's gauntlet to historians of the early United States. His challenge is twofold. Obsessed with the novelty of the early Republic, early U.S. historians have ignored its continuity with the colonial past, especially the long, bloody process of dispossessing indigenous peoples and enslaving Africans, which continued and even intensified after the Revolution. Overwhelmed by the national idea, they have also neglected the continuing power and vitality of the states as the principal spheres of political activity long after the constitutional settlement of the late 1780s. Drawing from postcolonial theory and the historiography of early modern state formation, Greene calls for a "genuinely federal history" that more fully and accurately represents the local autonomy and activities of the American citizenry after the Revolution as they swarmed across the continent.1 Though Greene's attempt to bridge the gap between American colonial and national histories merits attention, his alternative framework suffers from three flaws. |
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Colonial historians have made great strides in rescuing early American historiography from the long nationalist shadow cast backward by the United States. Some historians have shown that many colonial subjects identified with the British Empire until late in the eighteenth century and that therefore the United States was created by a zigzag sequence of grand accidents. This insight is one of the premises of Greene's essay. Still other historians have focused on regions and peoples of North America and the Caribbean outside the British orbit. Some of these regions and peoples never became part of the United States, whereas others were forcibly incorporated into the country or overwhelmed by it. Strikingly, Greene neglects this broader geographic perspective on American history in favor of a story that is largely bounded by republican-imperial expansion. He focuses narrowly on the British colonies of the eastern seaboard and their proliferating descendants, the states. The rest of the continent figures into Greene's American history only in the sad event of its getting overrun by settlers. This geographic frame makes sense for historians of the United States but not for historians of an America that encompasses more than the republican empire did.2 |
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Greene is correct that explicating republican-imperial expansion is one of the crucial tasks for early U.S. history and a broader continental American history. But Greene's portrayal of that colonizing dynamic as largely the work of autonomous and individual settlers who received minimal assistance from the national government is wrong. His claim ignores the many essential activities of the federal government in expanding the country's borders through diplomacy and war, crushing indigenous resistance and "shoving the Indians out of the way," surveying and selling the seized lands, promoting economic and civic development through the extension of postal routes to newly acquired domains, organizing territorial governments, and overseeing the occasionally controversial transition to statehood. In short the literal process of state formation in the early United States—the addition of new states to the Union—demanded crucial interventions by the federal government in support of, and sometimes ahead of, its restless people. As Ira Katznelson has argued, the efficacy of the federal government in its appointed tasks raises the question of whether it is reasonable to describe the early U.S. federal government as weak. Compared with Shawnee and Cherokee polities, the remnants of Spanish colonial power in Florida, or the Mexican government in its northern dominions in the 1830s and 1840s, it was pretty strong.3 |
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