Digesting Scholarship

Andrew Shankman: "Toward a Social History of Federalism: The State and Capitalism
To and From the American Revolution," Journal of The Early
Republic, Vol 37#4 2017 https://www.jstor.org/stable/90014987

This collagic essay of historical and political-economic sketches offers to advance understanding of the American state, the early "organic federalism," and capitalism
toward a social history of federalism.
In colonial and early republic America, distance was a major factor. The difficulty of projecting coercive force, like taxation, into the piedmont, the trans-Appalachian and southern growing edges compelled government to adapt policy to the needs and activity of localities, to "white male property holders." Geographic reality shaped the state from the bottom up. Britain lost its ability to adapt and lost the colonies.
Post-revolution cooperation of state and federal governments, promoted by men like
Henry Clay of Kentucky, facilitated a great expansion of domestic markets. Regions
defined themselves. A national bank and protective tariff supported regional development.
Shankman sketches how this organic federal reality mutually benefited free- and
slave-labor regimes. Government was strong but flexible.
Shankman's sketch of the free-labor regime arising in early modern Europe with the
concentration of productive property emphasizes the protective role of political power.
Political power defined and defended property and labor as a private affair. A sanctioned
brutality eventually made "free-labor" an accepted fact of nature.
Southerners, including Henry Clay, worried about losing control of political power.
The federal chartering of corporations like the national bank, roads and canals could
place in states legal power outside of state control. Not found in the Constitution, this
corporate power could interfere with slave-economy. Plantationers needed to control
government and law.
By late 1830s both economic regimes, weakened by their own structural contradictions,
fell into crisis. Both attempted to use the federal government for relief through western expansion. After the war with Mexico national political battles intensified. Episodes of
brinkmanship increased. Then the "organic federal reality" of 150 years "came to and sudden and violent end."
Wealth mobilized after 1861 produced greater concentration of productive property
and increasingly uncontainable surplus profit, "surplus capital." The attempt to employ
this surplus shook the country with financial crises. It pushed the conquest of the
remaining West and global expansion to China and Philippines. It funded the "corporate reconstruction of American capitalism." Decisions affecting all Americans concentrated in the hands of a much smaller group.
Andrew Shankman's collage of sketches rests on deep footnoted layers of
scholarship holding up to us how we got here.