Boundaries of the State in US History

by James T. Sparrow (Editor), William J. Novak (Editor), Stephen W. Sawyer (Editor)

Overview

The question of how the American state defines its power has become central to a range of historical topics, from the founding of the Republic and the role of the educational system to the functions of agencies and America's place in the world. Yet conventional histories of the state have not reckoned adequately with the roots of an ever-expanding governmental power, assuming instead that the American state was historically and exceptionally weak relative to its European peers.
Here, James T. Sparrow, William J. Novak, and Stephen W. Sawyer assemble definitional essays that search for explanations to account for the extraordinary growth of US power without resorting to exceptionalist narratives. Turning away from abstract, metaphysical questions about what the state is, or schematic models of how it must work, these essays focus instead on the more pragmatic, historical question of what it does. By historicizing the construction of the boundaries dividing America and the world, civil society and the state, they are able to explain the dynamism and flexibility of a government whose powers appear so natural as to be given, invisible, inevitable, and exceptional.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226277813
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	12/22/2022
Sold by:	OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED - EBKS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	374
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

James T. Sparrow is associate professor of history and master of the Collegiate Social Sciences Division at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Warfare State: World War II Americans and the Age of Big Government. William J. Novak is the Charles F. and Edith J. Clyne Professor of Law at the University of Michigan Law School. He is the author of The People's Welfare Law and editor of The Democratic Experiment. Stephen W. Sawyer is chair of the History Department and cofounder of the History, Law, and Society Program at the American University of Paris. He is the translator of Michel Foucault's Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

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Boundaries of the State in US History

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By James T. Sparrow, William J. Novak, Stephen W. Sawyer

The University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-27781-3

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CHAPTER 1

The Early American State "In Action": The Federal Marine Hospitals, 1789–1860

GAUTHAM RAO

The grand return of the state in American historiography is now visible even in the study of the colonial era and early American republic. This is due to the sharp demise of the "myth" of the United States' "stateless past," which diminished the importance of governmental institutions as subjects, agents, objects, and contexts, and which once loomed large over main narratives of early America.

The United States' federal government has been a particularly fecund venue for nineteenth-century American historians to identify the state at work. This research agenda is not without its own normative agenda. Since theorists of the state have long fetishized central governmental action as a metric for state activity, historians of the United States' long nineteenth century have quite rightly argued that the very presence of an active federal government between the creation of the American republic and World War I reveals a comparatively strong early American state. The depth of these scholars' discoveries can only be summarized here: the early federal government produced a "communication revolution" through the agency of the United States Postal Service; federal improvement programs prodded a complementary "transportation revolution." Some years ago, Paul Wallace Gates and his students made the federal government's General Land Office an indispensable part of the story of American westward expansion. More recently, several scholars have reshaped this narrative by focusing on the federal government's coercive civil and military Indian policies. The federal government is also seen to have played an important role in the economy through patent administration and tariff policy. Federal pensions to veterans of the Revolutionary War and then, on a far more massive scale, to Civil War veterans, established a foundation of what would later become the welfare state. The federal government's activities in these arenas must, of course, be considered alongside national political parties and federal jurisprudence — two institutions that were considered important institutional actors even when scholars saw precious little of an early American state at all.

This chapter turns to the story of the Marine Hospitals, the federal government's first public health care program, to uncover another robust realm of federal activity in the earliest years of the United States. Beginning in 1798, the federal government used a small tax on merchant mariners' wages to fund a national network of medical institutions, ranging from federally operated hospitals in a few cities, to leased hospital wards in other cities, and contract arrangements with individual physicians in smaller ports. The secretary of the Treasury, in tandem with federal customs officials on the waterfront, operated the network under congressional supervision. Over the course of the nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of United States' merchant mariners received some manner of care in these Marine Hospitals. Historians have established that the Marine Hospitals were an important institutional precursor of federal health care policy as well as the private hospital movement in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Institutional historians have also argued that the Marine Hospitals were the centerpiece of the federal Public Health Service until the late twentieth century.

Yet the story of the federal Marine Hospitals of the early republic is more than a mere case study that adds depth to an emerging scholarly paradigm of the early American state. I argue that the political economic origins and design of the Marine Hospitals provides a new vantage point on how the federal government operated in the early American republic. During the Federalist era, Congress created the Marine Hospitals to emulate a basic feature of the early British imperial state and political economy: fostering a "nursery of seamen" to man commercial vessels and naval vessels alike. In short, the Federalists committed the federal government to protecting a maritime labor force to achieve similar commercial and military feats as had Great Britain in centuries past. With this mimetic, imperial vision came a decidedly British, imperial brand of central administration. The federal Treasury, like its British predecessor, would closely count tax revenue, while ceding to federal officials on the ground the discretion to adapt "hospital" arrangements to local needs. The federal Marine Hospitals thus signal an early, erstwhile orientation of federal policy and political economy toward the commercial means and ends of empire that had sustained the British Empire since early modernity.

The commercial orientation and local governance of the Marine Hospitals and the early federal government was not exclusive to the Federalists, though. The Marine Hospitals came into existence in 1798. The presidential administration of Thomas Jefferson enlarged the network throughout the expanding republic without much change to the local discretionary governance that had emerged under the Federalists. It was only after the end of the Napoleonic Wars, and the subsequent demise of an Atlantic commercial system rooted in centuries of interimperial conflict, that many began to question the political economic wisdom of the Marine Hospitals and the administrative legitimacy of localized governance. Politicians, statesmen, and jurists of the Jacksonian era and beyond who sought to reform or abolish the Marine Hospitals, however, found themselves up against a formidable opponent in the persistent political economy and central governance that had ruled English-speaking North America since the Glorious Revolution.

Fabricating Public Power over Property and Persons

The US Constitution of 1787–88 granted the federal government formal powers over a vast arena of public activity embracing taxation, finance, war making, and market regulation. Yet the nature and meaning of these powers would be decided in practice. In at least one area — the maritime labor market — the early federal government would develop broad powers over property and persons that had not been explicitly anticipated in the Constitution. Maritime labor constituted a significant moral and economic problem in eighteenth-century American life. On one hand, as a commercial nation the United States depended for its survival on the existence of a robust maritime labor force to fetch goods, and thereby wealth, from European, West Indian, and Asian ports and to send goods back. Yet maritime labor was notoriously scarce and fragile. Thus at the turn of the nineteenth century the federal government devised a network of medical facilities to preserve and maintain this crucial maritime labor force. But "preserving" sailors was far more intrusive than it sounded. To justify its intervention into the maritime labor market, the federal government first needed to imagine sailors as a class requiring the aid, protection, and manipulation of public law and authority. This coercive project — in effect the creation of a dependent class — was necessary because sailors were believed to be incapable of caring for themselves.

By the mid-1790s it was clear that the United States was a commercial nation whose path to prosperity lay in lucrative foreign markets. American ports buzzed with activity as sailors loaded and unloaded tons of valuable commodities from a venerable fleet of sloops and schooners. Domestic agriculture and raw goods found ready, lucrative markets in England and mainland Europe. American vessels returned from abroad with foreign manufactures and foodstuffs — from linens to wines — that satisfied the United States' voracious demand. Foreign commerce was so significant, noted a prescient Pelatiah Webster, "that no sources of wealth can flourish and operate to the general benefit of the community without it." Getting to these foreign markets, however, was a problem. Merchants complained about maritime labor shortages and the "very high price of labour [sic]" on the docks. Mariners of other countries accepted "1/2 the wages give to the American seaman," lamented a government official. The maritime boom had pushed sailors' wages to nearly double their pre-Revolutionary levels. Concluded one Federalist editor, "Unless a supply of them is preserved, no wealth will be able to procure them."

Preserving an adequate maritime labor force was a priority from the very beginnings of the United States. Public concern over sailors' well-being began during the 1780s as revolutionary Americans took a second stab at creating a new republic. "As a nursery of seamen," wrote Alexander Hamilton of commerce in 1788, "it now is, or ... will become a universal resource." The point came at a crucial juncture in the argument of Federalist 11 as Hamilton advocated federal policies to stimulate long-distance commerce. Commerce fostered maritime laborers; maritime laborers carried commerce throughout the globe; maritime laborers, as they shepherded goods throughout the world, also unconsciously partook in naval drills, for maritime navigation remained the same in peace and in war. The existence of a "nursery of seamen" was thus a prerequisite to commercial prosperity as well as "the establishment of a navy." The merchant sailor was a crucial actor in Hamilton's political blueprint of a new, distinctly commercial republic.

As was Hamilton's penchant, he borrowed the "nursery of seamen" from recent Anglican political economy. Since the late seventeenth century, Great Britain had embarked on a "fiscal-military revolution" to give the state adequate capacity to extend imperial commerce and dominion. Creating a pool of sailors for merchant and naval services — "the very pillars of any common-wealth" — and devising tools to maximize sailors' labor was a central project in this revolution. In theory, commerce alone should have attracted men to the seafaring life. But in practice other measures became necessary. The infamous press gang, for instance, forcibly transformed subjects into sailors. Like the press gang, the "Marine Hospital" of the Stuart period — the Royal Greenwich Hospital founded in 1694, and the "Sixpenny" Hospital in Liverpool four decades later — served the British state. As a group of solicitous sailors explained, these hospitals were ostensibly "their Charity," as the hospitals took care of men who had been "disabled for future Service." But one seaman's charity was a political economists' gold. Whitehall viewed the hospital as a method "for the Encrease [sic] and Encouragement of Seamen." If men knew that the state would care for them and their families in case of "ruin," they would be more likely to become sailors. As an incentive for men to become sailors, the British marine hospitals were a means to the end of creating a "nursery of seamen."

That sailors' hospitals would stimulate and buoy the maritime labor force also occurred to close observers of commerce and government in the early national United States. As early as July 1789, Congress explored creating "hospitals for sick and disabled seamen" in tandem with "the regulation of harbors." In the late 1790s the Boston Marine Society, a private charitable association of retired merchants and navigators, floated a proposal to construct a "Marine Hospital." Others sought a hospital for sailors in "Washington in the State of Virginia." North Carolina Federalist Hugh Williamson, during a lengthy disquisition on "protection to American commerce," and "the increase of American seamen," recommended that "hospitals should be erected ... at every port of entry ... for sick and infirm seamen." "While we attempt to increase the number of native seamen for the extension of commerce and general prosperity of agriculture," he concluded, "we should be solicitous to protect and cherish this useful class of our fellow-citizens."

Alexander Hamilton's April 1792 "Report on Marine Hospitals" echoed these same themes. Sailors were "a very useful ... class of the Community." "Navigation and trade" were directly "concerned in" providing "protection and relief" to merchant sailors. And like the old Greenwich Hospital, Marine Hospitals would stimulate the rise of a nursery of seamen by "conducing to attract and attach seamen to the country." Thus the first secretary of the Treasury recommended "the establishment of one or more marine Hospitals in the United States."

In these swirling winds of economic concern and political economy, nobody bothered to question whether or not it was right for government to impose itself upon the marketplace of maritime labor and commerce. There was a strictly legal case to be made that since "the regulation of commerce belonging exclusively to the National Legislature," and since sailors were a part of this commerce, that the "General Government" was responsible for regulating the maritime labor force. But such a broad interpretation of the federal government's regulatory powers had not yet entered the mainstream of American jurisprudence. And no other class of labor, despite its importance to national prosperity, was considered subject to national authority. Why was it possible to consider such measures toward merchant sailors?

Importantly, the political economic vision of hospitals for sailors drew upon a broader sociolegal understanding of the sailor as a dependent person, whose physical person required protection. In the eighteenth-century world merchant sailors were considered a partly free, partly dependent class of labor. Their dependent status owed to the shipmaster's disciplinary authority over the sailor's body. The shipmaster's authority, part of a regime of "disciplinary paternalism," was based on the basic master-seaman relationship. In this relationship, sailors owed a term of service to the merchant vessel, and they owed obedience to the master of a vessel. Masters possessed authority to compel disobedient sailors to perform the duties expected of them, in the ways expected of them. Captains were analogized to "masters ... of servants," "fathers ... of children," and even "kings ... of subjects." To be sure, this legal formula was daily the subject of a dynamic struggle in which shipmasters and sailors negotiated authority and conditions at sea. But even as mariners developed a distinct, powerful class consciousness, their legal status as dependents only hardened throughout the eighteenth century.

Mariners' dependent legal status was most clearly inscribed in admiralty law, which governed maritime labor and commerce. English law strived to maintain the master-seaman relationship. The law stood ready to reinforce masters authority in the instance that sailors "disobey the master, &c. obstruct service," or "Make a confederacy ... that they will not work but at such times, for such price, or not finish what others begun." Conversely the admiralty had frowned upon "Masters who do not pay wages to the mariners," or who were unnecessarily cruel in correcting mariners. Preserving the master-seaman relationship also stood at the heart of even the earliest admiralty jurisprudence in the United States. "Law and reason" prescribed the duties of masters toward mariners: a "seaworthy" vessel, "sufficient provisions," and fair treatment. But "the master has a right to correct a refractory, disobedient mariner."

But dependence also gave sailors certain protections. Shipmasters had a legal duty to care for seamen who fell sick or suffered injury at sea. When a sailor became incapacitated, the captain was obligated, whenever the ship anchored in a foreign port, to send sailors ashore and pay their hospital bills. "The charge should not be thrown on the sailor," opined Judge Richard Peters in Swift v. The Happy Return. Rather, "it ought to be borne" by the ship itself. Why was this? Peters cited three intersecting "interests" behind the duty to care: "humanity," "justice," and "commerce." At sea, and far from home, the sick sailor was physically incapable of maintaining himself. Since the mariner was already dependent on the master, it fell to the latter to procure proper medical care. This was only just because ancient legal authorities — "The Law of Oleron" — demanded these measures, and had done so for about five centuries. And finally, the interests of commerce were involved because a master who failed to exert the duty to care might, in the case of "infectious disease," risk the lives of the entire crew and, subsequently, the vessel and its cargo.

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

James T. Sparrow, William J. Novak, and Stephen W. Sawyer
Introduction

Part I : The State and the World

Gautham Rao
One / The Early American State “In Action”: The Federal Marine Hospitals, 1789–1860

Stephen W. Sawyer
Two / Beyond Tocqueville’s Myth: Rethinking the Model of the American State

C. J. Alvarez
Three / Inventing the US-Mexico Border

James T. Sparrow
Four / Rumors of Empire: Tracking the Image of Britain at the Dawn of the American Century

Jason Scott Smith
Five / The Great Transformation: The State and the Market in the Postwar World

Part II : The State and Civil Society

Tracy Steffes
Six / Governing the Child: The State, the Family, and the Compulsory School in the Early Twentieth Century

Gabriel N. Rosenberg
Seven / Youth as Infrastructure: 4-H and the Intimate State in 1920s Rural America

Elisabeth Clemens
Eight / Good Citizens of a World Power: Postwar Reconfigurations of the Obligation to Give

Omar M. McRoberts
Nine / The Rise of the Public Religious Welfare State: Black Religion and the Negotiation of Church/State Boundaries during the War on Poverty

Robert C. Lieberman
Ten / Private Power and American Bureaucracy: The State, the EEOC, and Civil Rights Enforcement

Richard R. John
Eleven / From Political Economy to Civil Society: Arthur W. Page, Corporate Philanthropy, and the Reframing of the Past in Post–New Deal America

William J. Novak
Conclusion: The Concept of the State in American History

Acknowledgments
Contributors
Index

Editorial Reviews

This outstanding collection captures the full breadth of exciting new work on the American state. The essays challenge us to think in novel and creative ways about the binaries—state and society, republic and empire, public and private, federal and local—that have profoundly shaped historical writing on this institution. They powerfully advance our ability to comprehend the possibilities and perils of democratic statecraft across the entire span of US history. A major achievement.

University of Cambridge Gary Gerstle

This resonant collection explores the varieties and powers of the US national state by taking its boundaries and limits seriously. Generating striking insights across a range of fundamental subjects, its thoughtful overviews and absorbing essays offer readers fresh understanding of deep-seated connections between political authority and both domestic society and basic global patterns.

Columbia University Ira I. Katznelson

The authors of these essays seek to add their explanation of the meaning of the US state to the studies produced in sociology, political science, history, anthropology, and other social sciences in recent years. Their purpose is to clarify the study by explaining how the state operates and where power is generated. The essayists wrestle with the complication of disintegrated power evident in the US system of government. . . . As in all essay collections, some authors reach the goal of the project more clearly than others, but all of them offer perspectives on the subject that deserve consideration. Recommended.

Choice

Boundaries of the State in US History contains cutting edge work on the nature of the American state. It explains how the United States managed to accomplish complex goals, such as distributing its western lands, without an elaborate bureaucratic apparatus. The contributors to this widely ranging book force us to rethink our fundamental notions of the American state, such as its weakness in comparison with European and other states. This collection will become indispensable to political scientists and historians alike.

George Washington University Edward Berkowitz