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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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Greene's call for renewed attention to state history supplies a disappointing conclusion to a provocative essay. Historians of the early United States have hardly neglected the states as key arenas of political struggle over socioeconomic development. Most graduate students studying for their comprehensive exams in the field can rattle off a long list of monographic studies focusing on politics at the state level, and some may even read a few of them. But if the states hoarded the lion's share of the functions of government, they were not sovereign polities and never commanded the loyalty and affection of their citizenries in the way that nations usually do. Why not? Part of the answer may be that Americans from different states recognized that they had won their independence not from each other but from Great Britain, and they owed that victory to their fragile ability to cooperate with each other during a long and bloody war. National solidarity thus congealed with their "mingled blood" (as James Madison put it in Federalist 14), the collective memory of their mutual self-sacrifice during the Revolution.4 |
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How does slavery fit into the shift from colonial to national history? At first glance the history of slavery in North America seems to confirm the thrust of Greene's argument. Slavery existed before the Revolution and persisted afterward. Its fate was largely a matter of local determination. In the Northern states, slavery was extinguished by judicial decree or slowly legislated away. The more southerly states allowed slavery to endure and flourish, though several took steps to regulate or prevent the importation of enslaved peoples from the Caribbean and Africa. The variation in outcomes correlated with the economic viability of slavery in staple commodity production and the concomitant power of slave owners and their allies in the political elite of each state. Yet even in the Southern states where slavery persisted and expanded, Greene's emphasis on the continuity of colonial processes obscures long-term changes in the North American slave regime. The rededication of slavery to cotton production integrated North American slavery into a new complex of commodity production that reshaped the whole world. Severed from the transatlantic slave trade, the once-heterogeneous North American slave population became almost uniformly Anglophone and Afro-Protestant in the nineteenth century. And finally, North American slave owners found themselves locked in an intensifying political and moral struggle to defend slavery against the rise of abolition and antislavery in the Northern states and the wider Atlantic world. Though beyond the scope of this brief comment, the influence of the Revolution on slavery and abolition outside the United States is also a significant story.5 |
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Crucially, the fate of slavery in the early Republic was never wholly determined on the state level by local elites. Along with translocal market networks, the federal government delineated local elites' room for maneuver. The United States Constitution took account of slavery in its veiled clauses on fugitives, the slave trade, and apportionment. With some deference to local elites, Congress determined whether new territories and states would be slave or free, at least until the national judiciary that Greene asserts did nothing for 150 years decided in the Dred Scott case that Congress never had such a power to begin with.6 Greene's argument that most political activity took place at the state and local levels cannot explain why American citizens argued so bitterly over the problem of slavery at the level of the nation-state, why so many Northerners died to preserve a Union that allegedly had never captured their imaginations or commanded their loyalty, or why so many white Southerners died to defend a country that hardly existed outside their dreams. |
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Adam Rothman is an associate professor of history at Georgetown University.
Notes
1 Jack P. Greene, "Colonial History and National History: Reflections on a Continuing Problem," William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 64, no. 2 (April 2007): 249.
2 The broadest survey of colonial America in a continental frame is Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York, 2001). Exemplary monographs include Andrew Jackson O'Shaughnessy, An Empire Divided: The American Revolution and the British Caribbean (Philadelphia, 2000); Elizabeth A. Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82 (New York, 2001).
3 D. W. Meinig, Continental America: 1800–1867, vol. 2, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History (New Haven, Conn., 1993), 78 (quotation). Meinig's analysis of republican imperialism is magisterial. I have tried to call attention to the powerful effect of the national government in the region that eventually became the states of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. See Adam Rothman, Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (Cambridge, Mass., 2005). The idea of the early U.S. government as weak is criticized in Ira Katznelson, "Flexible Capacity: The Military and Early American Statebuilding," in Shaped By War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development, ed. Katznelson and Martin Shefter (Princeton, N.J., 2002), 82–110.
4 For an analysis of American nationalism that begins with James Madison's invocation of "mingled blood," see Aviel Roshwald, The Endurance of Nationalism: Ancient Roots and Modern Dilemmas (New York, 2006), 266–72 (quotation, 266). The centrality of the Revolutionary War to American nationalism is the theme of Sarah J. Purcell, Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America (Philadelphia, 2002). On the diminishment of the states in the revolutionary and early national period, see J. R. Pole, "The Politics of the Word 'State' and its Relation to American Sovereignty," Parliaments, Estates and Representation 8, no. 1 (June 1988): 1–10.
5 Ira Berlin overturns the traditional, static image of American slavery in Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass., 1998). His description of slavery's divergent paths in different regions during the "Revolutionary Generations" (pt. 3) is esp. relevant to this Forum. For a new treatment of the American Revolution's effect on British antislavery, see Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006).
6 For a comprehensive account of the federal government's involvement with slavery, see Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government's Relations to Slavery, ed. Ward M. McAfee (New York, 2001).
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