Conquering Space Through Internal Improvements: Federal Nation-Building in 19Th-Century America

Conquering Space through Internal Improvements: Federal Nation-Building in 19th-Century America October 2019 Word Count: 8,623 Abstract Early American political leaders were tasked with sustaining a representative republic on a seemingly impossible scale. Their struggle to stave off political dissolution raises an important question for scholars of federalism. How can democratic governments integrate disparate political communities across a vast – and rapidly expanding – territory? We revisit the solution most-often proposed by contemporary political leaders: a nationally directed system of internal improvements. Using a dataset of 19th-century appropriations, we find that patterns in internal improvement funding are consistent with a nation-building strategy. Congressional districts at the fringes of the republic received disproportionate support from the federal government, even after accounting for political preferences, positions of legislative authority, and sub-national spending patterns. Our research stands in contrast to existing work on internal improvements – which is primarily interested in testing theories of distributive politics – and contributes to a diverse body of research on federalism, nation-building, congressional politics, and American political development. From the earliest days of the American republic, the size of the nation presented a challenge to the viability of the nascent government. Direct democracy was understood to be unworkable across an expansive territory, and no country had successfully established a representative republic on such a scale. While the United States was undoubtedly rich in natural resources, the economic promise of America’s physical geography simultaneously imperiled the young nation’s tenuous political stability. The Founders constructed the American Constitution to be “partly federal, and partly national” to allow representative government to thrive in a large, diverse place (Federalist 39). That carefully balanced structure required constant upkeep in the years following ratification. The health of federalism was so centrally important to the national government, in fact, that differing solutions advanced by Hamiltonian Nationalists and Jeffersonian Republicans would sketch the fault lines of American political ideology for years to come. The problem of governing a vast political domain without the complete consolidation of federal power proved to be a thorny, recurring motif in the development of U.S. political institutions. In other words, American political leaders had a nation-building problem. To survive, democratic regimes require secure territorial boundaries, adherence to the rule of law, and strong economic, social, and political integration.1 Governments that effectively connect citizens to one another and to their central political institutions thus succeed in nation-building. While greater integration promises stability, a failure to effectively construct the nation threatens dissolution. Given the stakes, it is not surprising that America’s Founding Fathers eagerly engaged in early 1 “Nation-building” is a widely used and rarely defined term. We primarily think of nation-building as a particularly important form of integration. While “integration” is defined in various ways, each definition is consistent with what we believe is the common understanding of nation-building. Integration primarily invokes efforts to mix groups, to take separate parts and make them whole, and to coordinate processes in a complex system. In short, we view nation-building as an effort to take diverse constituencies and render that fragmented political community more complete. 1 projects of nation-building to overcome the very real threats of sectionalism, economic competition, and political chaos. Nation-building is critically important to any regime, but America exacerbated the nation- building challenge through a constant impulse for expansion. As settlers moved west and America’s political leaders dreamt of an empire stretching to the Pacific coast, the challenges of governing a large republic under a mixed regime grew. In this sense, the central problem of nation-building for America in the early 19th century was one of overcoming space. Connecting people to one another, uniting material interests behind an integrated national economy, and establishing the pre-requisites of an imagined community with responsive representation became paramount (Pears, 2017). Few policy areas illuminate this challenge as clearly as the attempt to establish a bold, nationally sponsored system of infrastructural projects throughout the first century of American history. Internal improvements became, for a large group of 19th-century statesmen, a key tool in the fight to bring citizens closer to one another and the institutions of the federal government. Between 1789 and 1882, Congress allocated hundreds of millions of dollars for infrastructure and development. These efforts, ranging from the construction of the national road to the dredging of massive harbors, would be the equivalent of a roughly $5.6 Billion investment by today’s standards. In short, federal funding for internal improvements was among the most important and contentious issues in 19th-century American politics. While these projects were almost universally recognized as politically and economically beneficial to the United States, fears of consolidated federal power drove ideological battles over whether and how the federal government should pay for improvements within state borders. As a result, systematic plans for nation-wide infrastructure development were never fully enacted, and piecemeal federal and state-level funding became the norm. Nevertheless, the allocation of federal funding for internal improvements provides a lens through which we can view American nation- 2 building efforts and reconsider existing research on federalism, congressional politics, and the development of political institutions. Most political science research specific to internal improvements considers the allocation of federal funds from a distributive politics perspective. In part, this research reflects a growing interest among political scientists in leveraging 19th-century cases to empirically investigate modern theories of lawmaking (Jenkins and Gailmard 2018; Finocchiaro and Jenkins 2015). In this spirit, Wilson (1986) finds that river and harbor legislation generally reflected a universalistic pattern of distribution. More broadly, Minicucci (2004) looks at the pre-war period of internal improvements and concludes that the introduction of national political parties in the 1830s disrupted the tools of distributive politics used before that period, forcing an adjustment in the politics of pork-barrel appropriations. Gordon and Simpson (2018) similarly employ an exhaustive dataset on internal improvement appropriations to make a compelling argument that internal improvements follow a familiar pattern of distributive politics, complete with universalistic logrolls, but this trend only emerges in the last quarter of the 19th century. In contrast to these studies, Finocchiaro (2015) detects a distinct majority party advantage after analyzing public building projects at the end of the century. Despite their differences, each of these studies is primarily interested in the distributive nature of internal improvement projects. This focus is somewhat surprising, as some of the most prominent political actors in American history plainly stated that internal improvements were designed as a critical component of nation-building and a means of connecting citizens to their central government. We believe our understanding of Congress has been greatly enriched by the move to test contemporary theories of politics using historical data, but in contrast to that body of research, we do not approach these projects as an opportunity to better understand the roots of distributive politics. Instead, we evaluate whether appropriations for federal projects in the 1800s adhered to 3 political leaders’ avowed nation-building goals. More specifically, we advance a simple question: is the distribution of federal funds consistent with a nation-building perspective? In other words, is it possible lawmakers used internal improvements to connect citizens and conquer the space that separated Americans from their central government? In this sense, we revisit the logic most-often articulated by political leaders in the era to assess whether implementation followed rhetoric. Following Minicucci (2001), we take seriously the possibility that nation-building – among other motivating factors – played a significant role in the designation of federal investments. If claims of union and nation-building were truthful, we should be able to identify the political communities that disproportionately benefited from these projects. Investigating internal improvements from this perspective also allows us to link existing research on legislative affairs with empirical work on nation-building among comparative and American political development scholars (Adler 2012), but political scientists are not the only group of scholars interested in the subject. Historians often describe internal improvements as an important case of failed nation-building. For example, Larson (2001) argues that Americans – "tutored constantly on the dangers of big government and public power" (p.5) – squandered an enormous opportunity to implement a truly national plan and, along with Goodrich (1960), claims that

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