The Centrality of Federal Power

The Centrality of Federal Power
State governments exercised considerable power, especially in the last decades before the Civil War, and had direct influence on the everyday lives of their citizens. They managed day-to-day economic life, regulated manners, and maintained law and order, in ways prohibited to the federal government.
Yet that government, far from being insignificant or inactive, always determined the main directions of national development, even after the cutbacks that began in the s. The federal government may have been, in John
Murrin’s oft-quoted phrase, a midget institution in a giant land but it helped to ensure that the midget citizenry in the seaboard states would by win command of an ocean-to-ocean empire.
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The primary responsibility of the federal government remained national defense. Longstanding hostility to a standing army ensured that, except in moments of unusual crisis, the United States would have only a small regular establishment, and that stationed mainly on the frontiers. However, Jefferson,
as an ostensibly antimilitary President, recognized the potential influence of the regular establishment in national life, and founded West Point to imbue the future officer corps with Democratic Republican values. Even a small military establishment generated a demand for supplies and cultivated valued skills US. engineers, for example, prepared the way for grand internal improvement schemes—especially during the operation of the
General Survey Act between 1824 and and federal armories made an important contribution before the Civil War in developing techniques of mass production.
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The wars of 1775–83, 1812–15, and 1846–48 generated important political forces, especially in developing an esprit de
corps among officers that transcended state loyalties. Thus former officers played an important role in the sin bringing about the Constitution,
while veterans and their widows subsequently besieged the federal government with claims for compensation and pensions. These were normally granted by private legislation, though after 1816 general legislation provided pensions for Revolutionary veterans. The Mexican War of 1846–48 would raise divisive political issues, yet it too generated a national pride in combined military triumph, much as the War of 1812 had, as the nomination of military leaders for the presidency in 1848 and 1852 demonstrated. Inevitably
U.S. Army officers from the South faced an agonizing choice in 1861 when they found themselves having to break with comrades they had previously served alongside.
Before the Civil War, the federal government employed more people in delivering the mails than in any other civilian activity. Yet this statistic was a mark not of its inconsequence as a government, but of the centrality of the
Post Office in national life. Since the days of Benjamin Franklin the mail system had provided an important bond for literate people in the coastal
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areas. Then the Post Office Act of 1792 started a communications revolution that brought all parts of the country into regular touch with each other. The
Post Office developed systematic contacts across the republic, organizing collection, conveyance, and delivery, and its subsidies created the nation’s stagecoach system, at least until Congress withdrew the subsidies in Indeed, public transport would scarcely have existed in many parts of the
South and West had it not been for the mail stages Most important,
after 1792 newspapers were carried free of charge and so the Post Office generated—and subsidized—a system of news interchange that made possible the extension of print culture throughout the republic. Down to the s the mails carried more newspapers than letters, and reading a newspaper became a great collective ritual that confirmed the participation of the citizenry in the republic’s affairs.
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The federal government also retained control over some key elements of the economy. Though it did not exploit its power over interstate commerce as it would after the Civil War, it retained undisputed command over external commerce at a time when the United States remained essentially an exporter of agricultural surplus and an importer of manufactured goods. No one,
not even in South Carolina, questioned the federal government’s exclusive right to impose tariffs on imports, though many came to doubt whether it could use that power to foster economic growth. In practice from 1816 to the tariff always retained a protective element the compromise tariff of 1833 guaranteed a reasonable (if decreasing) level of protection until
1842, when it was replaced by a frankly protectionist Whig tariff and even the free-trade Walker Tariff of 1846 imposed higher rates on imports that might compete with American manufacturers. The antebellum norm was to impose tariffs primarily for revenue purposes but with some moderated protection for key industries.
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Thanks to its command of import duties, the federal government could generate revenue to a degree the states could not rival. Federal assumption of state debts solved their financial problems in 1790, and thereafter until the War of 1812 the states raised relatively little revenue through taxation.
A large part of their expenditure—including the cost of maintaining and using the militia—was paid for them by the federal government, at least down to the s. In the next decade, the paying off of the national debt in raised the possibility of further federal largesse. Since large-scale internal improvement schemes were now out of the question, Congress distributed the federal surplus among the states in 1836–38 for them to use as they saw fit, with the support of those states rights men who feared a central government with too much money. The Panic of 1837 demonstrated that many states did not have the resources to finance the loans they had taken out since 1830 to finance public works, and in 1840 the Whigs proposed anew assumption of state debts to restore American credit. This
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and other Whig proposals were blocked by states rights supporters, and after the federal government only rarely used its financial superiority to assist the finances of the states.
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Equally significant was the federal government’s control over the currency.
In 1787 the Founding Fathers carefully prohibited the state governments from issuing paper money and gave the federal government the exclusive right to issue gold and silver coin, which alone, they believed, constituted real money. However, the supply of gold and silver was limited, and, after the turn of the century, state-chartered commercial banks increasingly met demand by issuing paper money. The two Banks of the United States and 1816–36) were not designed to act as central banks but both began to develop techniques that compelled the local banks to restrict their note issues to an appropriate proportion of their specie base. Around some Southern and Western parts of the country were almost totally dependent on the services of the national bank, while state banks themselves on balance appreciated the stability that the national bank brought to paper issues. Most state bankers therefore disapproved of Jackson’s veto in 1832 of the Bill rechartering the national bank. Destroying the monster bank did not, however, end federal monetary control, since the Treasury had in any case been the main agent of quasi-central-banking supervision,
and the federal Independent Treasury system functioned reasonably well from 1846 to the Civil War.
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Federal authority in these areas was sustained by the ever-evolving U.S.
Supreme Court. Uncertain of its role in the s, the Court established its legal preeminence under John Marshall (Chief Justice 1801–35). It asserted its right to invalidate congressional laws in 1803 (Marbury v. Madison), and state laws in 1810 (Fletcher v. Peck). After 1815 a series of decisions asserted the supremacy of the federal law and institutions in McCulloch v. Maryland
(1819) the Court not only sustained the national bank against state hostility,
but made the most extensive assertion of federal superiority. This aggressive nationalism prompted a backlash that threatened the Court’s authority in
Jackson’s first term, until the Nullification crisis persuaded the President that only the Supreme Court, though itself an agent of federal authority, could determine the boundaries between state and federal authority. Appointing five justices, Jackson created a Court under Roger Brooke Taney (Chief
Justice from 1836 until 1864) that was more favorable to states rights,
but in practice it continued to act as arbiter of disputes between the states and federal authority. In particular, the Taney Court continued the work of building a body of nationwide commercial law that helped transform the nation’s extensive settled territory into the national market it had become by The essential precursor was the conquest of the continent, for which the federal government bore primary responsibility. It had not only to preserve
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national security and resist the claims of neighboring European empires, but also to control the aboriginal population and persuade them to sell their land to the federal government, which then supervised the process of settlement.
The military threat of Indians east of the Appalachians had been defeated during the Revolution, but the Indians of the Mississippi Valley remained a formidable obstacle. Federal troops were essential in defeating the Indians of the Old Northwest in 1794–95, and in smashing their attempted military revival before and during the War of 1812. Only the federal government could mobilize enough power to persuade Indians to move west, as Georgia recognized in 1802. During Jefferson’s presidency alone the Indians relinquished legal title to what later became southern Indiana, Illinois, Missouri,
and northern Arkansas, while between 1815 and 1820 General Jackson acquired by treaty from the Indians a fifth of Georgia, half of Mississippi,
and most of Alabama. When the remaining Five Civilized tribes refused to remove across the Mississippi in the s, southerners threatened to take matters into their own hands in defiance of federal authority, but they preferred to elect the leading Southern Indian fighter to the White House,
where he could do the job so much more efficiently for them. Under
President Jackson the federal government spent $60 million on buying million acres east of the Mississippi, and thereby, among other things, opened up the future Black Belt of Alabama and Mississippi to cotton and slaves.
This process, largely accomplished by 1840, provided a powerful reason for
Southern loyalty through the sectional tensions of the 1830s.
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If relations with the Indians remained a federal responsibility, so did the provision of government in the newly opened Western territories. Under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, each Western territory remained directly under central control, with a governor and three judges-cum-legislators appointed by and directly responsible to the federal government. On attaining a population of 5,000 free adult males the territory could elect a legislature to make laws, but subject to the same externally appointed governor. This was a system reminiscent of British control of the American colonies, except that the territorial governors were paid from the metropolis and not by the colonists. On attaining 60,000 inhabitants the territory could apply for statehood on the same terms as the original states. Thus
Congress not only retained direct command of the colonies on behalf of the whole Union, but could create new states—and so all states in future would either be created by Congress or be the equals of its creations.
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Moreover, the federal government not only commanded governmental jurisdiction but possessed the title of most land in the West outside Kentucky and Tennessee. As anticipated in the late s, the Union gained huge strength when, between 1781 and 1802, it acquired the claims to Western land possessed by seven of the states. Not only did this transfer remove a potential source of future conflict, it gave the federal government avast The State of the Union
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inheritance, held in common on behalf of all the states. Initially seen as primarily a source of revenue for the whole republic, the Western lands provided a powerful bond for the Union, and before 1830 statesmen like John
Quincy Adams and Henry Clay saw the public domain as a patrimony to be used for improving and developing the quality of national life. From at least 1803 the federal government gave to new Western states both a small proportion of land sale revenue and tracts of land, which were then sold or rented, to assist education and internal improvement. The Eastern states never directly benefited from this treasure trove to the extent that some had hoped, though the proceeds of land sales were distributed among all the states according to population briefly in 1842 and the Polk administration paid for the Mexican War partly by issuing federal land warrants. In practice the primary purpose of federal land policy, since at least 1800, had been to promote settlement as much as to raise revenue. Thus by its generous policies the federal government carried through perhaps the greatest act of privatization in history, distributing millions of acres to thousands of private individuals, even before the Homestead Act of Though this policy reduced the government’s own resources, it also ensured that large numbers of people in the public-land states remained beholden to the federal government even after statehood had been attained.
Government officers determined the process of survey and sale, and local development in new areas focused around the business of the land office.
Moreover, the system of selling federal land on credit between 1800 and meant that about half the farmers northwest of the Ohio River fell into debt to the federal government, which in 1821 granted them substantial relief to ensure they did not lose their lands following the Panic of 1819. The federal government remained a major landowner in the new states, much to the annoyance of Illinois and Missouri, which demanded that public land within their limits be ceded to them. In 1832 President Jackson advocated cession, but the vested interests of the seaboard states prevented the dispersal of the public domain, despite the adoption of a permanent preemption law in 1841. The same Act granted all new states half a million acres each to help finance state internal improvements, and in 1854 Congress agreed to progressively cheapen unsold lands, but federal control of the public domain remained an awkward limitation on the autonomy of new states.
As late as 1852, Southeastern and Northeastern congressmen voted together to preserve the public lands as a resource for the whole Union rather than give them away to homesteaders.
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The growth of the West ensured that internal improvements would be a central sphere of federal activity. After 1789 the federal government sought to develop interstate communications, and even President Jefferson recognized that the states needed federal help to develop roads and canals which were essential to their development but beyond their means, though
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he wanted an explicit constitutional amendment to give the federal government this power. After 1819 federal and state governments, including states’
rights Virginia, cooperated in joint-stock companies that undertook to build major roads and canals—and even the first long-distance railroad anywhere, the Baltimore & Ohio. These schemes of the s proceeded on the assumption that the necessary power could be deduced by abroad construction of the Constitution, but the Maysville Veto of 1830 laid down clear criteria limiting federal authority. While that decision stopped great national schemes of internal improvement, and subsequently federal spending on new projects fell considerably, some expensive projects were maintained, notably those already underway as well as river and harbor improvements. In particular, Congress continued to build the National or Cumberland) Road across Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, but gradually ceded the road to the various states through which it ran and voted its last appropriation in 1838. Despite an undoubted reduction of federal expenditure on internal improvements thereafter, Congress still made generous land grants to the states for such projects, since even states rights advocates accepted that the federal government was not restricted by the Constitution in the exercise of its rights as a landowner. Moreover, newly opening areas persistently requested financial assistance from Congress—
and sometimes received it, at least until the Panic of 1857 embarrassed federal finances.
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The operations of the federal government in critical areas of the nation’s life ensured that it would attract all those who sought public office and distinction. The most prestigious offices, both elective and appointive,
were federal rather than state, including those that operated within the states. Federal judges had a prestige and security that made them renowned among lawyers. Customs collectors in the major ports handled money in undreamed-of amounts. Land offices brought business to a town, and those in charge enjoyed great political influence and considerable local patronage,
especially as surveyors enjoyed unusual opportunities for locating the best land for themselves and their friends. Even postmasters gained great advantages, since (until 1847 or even 1855) recipients always paid the postage and so had to collect their letters from the local post office, which, outside the great commercial centers, were usually setup in the postmaster’s private business premises.
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All who wished to gain eminence, to establish a career of distinction, to gain respect as a leading man, looked to federal even more than state office as the route to advancement—and so ensured that national politics would remain central to public life.
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