Long a neglected topic, the early American state has lately attracted increasing attention. The once common notions that the federal government played no role in the nation’s development before the Civil War and that the early republic was a “stateless” society have become increasingly untenable. This interpretative shift is due to a series of important books on early American government that have appeared over the last decade or so. Peter Onuf and David Hendrickson have written on federalism, John Larson on internal improvements, Richard John on the Post Office, and William Novak on economic and moral regulation at the state and local level. Brian Balogh draws on these works to provide a rich synthesis of the American central government in the period between the adoption of the Constitution and the turn of the nineteenth century. Yet his interest is not primarily historical. Rather, he turns to the past to offer a crucial lesson to citizens and political leaders in the twenty-first century.

Balogh’s book aims at both progressives, who favor statist solutions, and conservatives, who champion a reduction in government. The former will learn that the twentieth-century state they celebrate as a new beginning in fact built on the nineteenth-century associational state—a polity where the federal government acted in partnership with local and state governments, voluntary organizations, the professions, interest groups, and even private corporations. The conservatives will learn that the American associational state did not spring out of the progressive movement but was present from the nation’s founding. No matter how much they would like to, conservatives cannot return their nation to a “stateless” laissez-faire society for the simple reason that no such society ever existed in America. To Balogh, progressives and conservatives have both failed to grasp the role of the state in American history in large part because they have mistakenly assumed the Gilded Age as representative of the American past when in fact no period was less so.

During the Civil War, Balogh says, markets, corporations, and communication networks grew to become national in scope and thereby outgrew the governmental arrangements that maintained and regulated them at the state and local level. Whereas voluntary and professional organizations also became national in the wake of the war, the conflict did not give rise to a national regulatory government. To the contrary, the federal government responded with deregulation, attempting to shape a national market according to laissez-faire principles and to draw a sharp line between the private and the public sphere. This policy constituted a sharp break with “the ‘commonwealth’ mingling of public and private interests” that had dominated government–society relations in the first half of the nineteenth century (14). When the reaction to laissez-faire politics came after the crisis of 1893, it did not take the form of an endorsement of statist solutions, however. Instead, the “new liberals” returned to the nineteenth-century associational state by “nationalizing” the “commonwealth” tradition of American government. Direct administrative rule by the federal government was only one of many means to achieve nationwide political results. “Far more often … new liberals stressed other forms of cooperative action: state and local intervention rather than intervention by the national government; action by voluntary and private organizations compelled by the force of public opinion to do the right thing; and most significantly, delegating national authority to private and voluntary groups so that they, rather than the national government directly, could compel individuals to comply with polices that served the greater good of the country” (353).

Balogh’s argument takes him back to the period before the Civil War, to which two-thirds of A Government Out of Sight is devoted, to demonstrate first that the Gilded Age falls outside the American tradition of government and second that the present-day associational state has deep roots in the nation’s past. He hopes that a better appreciation of history will make possible the pursuit of progressive policy ends by means more in tune with American political traditions than the national administrative state. Progressives should embrace rather than reject cooperative partnerships between the federal government and state and local government, voluntary associations, and private organizations. By making their policies more legitimate, their politics will become more efficient.

In Balogh’s story, the important shift in American government appeared when civil society organizations became national after the Civil War and the new liberals responded by nationalizing the commonwealth tradition at the state and local level. The argument would therefore have been best served by an analysis of nineteenth-century state and local politics. Yet, despite the fact that Balogh is well aware that nineteenth-century Americans “did not think of Washington, D.C. first when they turned to politics and governance” (264), and despite several passages on local and state government, his book presents an analysis of the federal government. But if the choice of focus seems slightly misplaced, all students of the pre–Civil War federal government have reason to be grateful for Balogh’s choice of focus. For Balogh’s book is the first ever attempt to provide a systematic and comprehensive account of the central government in the decades between the Constitution and the Civil War.

The ghost of Max Weber still hovers over all discussions of the state as a historical phenomenon. Weber’s measures of “stateness” centered on bureaucratization, territoriality, and autonomy. He saw the state as an autonomous actor differentiated from, and independent of, society. Its relation to other social actors is competitive as the state seeks to monopolize power and resources. The state also aims to exercise authoritative rule-binding power over its territorial jurisdiction, backed up by the legitimate use of force. Finally, state agencies strive to assume the shape of bureaucratic administrations because it is the most efficient way of governing. This concept of the state is clearly of little use to an analysis of a polity such as the early United States which was organized around the principles of federalism, popular sovereignty, limited government, and representation, and where the central administration was limited in size, power-sharing between levels of governments institutionalized, and the concept of a civil service slow to develop. Balogh therefore wisely gives all this conceptual baggage a wide berth. Instead, he uses historical scholarship to theorize the early American state from the bottom-up in order to analyze the federal government as it is, or perhaps more correctly, as it was. It is not an easy task, but Balogh does a first-class job.

Liberty and union lie at the core of the American founding. To the founders, liberty meant guaranteeing individual rights, including the pursuit of property. Union meant balancing the ideal of local self-government in the states-republics with the need to protect and promote common national interests. It also meant keeping the peace between the member states of the federal union, which would allow the American republics to pursue a different historical trajectory from Europe. In the Old World, balance-of-power politics led to constant warfare and state expansion, resulting in an exploitative state that undermined civic rights. Could the American republics keep the peace, their governments could remain small and their demands on the property and services of the citizenry limited. The United States was not only a “peace pact” among republics, however, but also an independent nation in a competitive international system of states. This predicament necessitated the creation of a national government possessing military and fiscal capacity to act with vigor in the international sphere. By pooling resources, such a government would gain sufficient strength without having to press too heavily on the citizenry.

The need for union and a national government did not eclipse the states. As the Constitution made clear, the state governments were the primary institution in the American polity, responsible for safeguarding citizen rights and opportunities. The Philadelphia convention both confirmed the existence of diverging state interests and legitimated their protection. Self-government in states and localities is of course still celebrated in the United States, but it is important to note that in the original context self-government meant investing the citizens with the power to control and exploit non-citizens. In particular it meant the power to regulate and police the color line, an aspect of American governmental arrangements that Balogh could perhaps have paid more attention to.

As Balogh makes clear, the awareness of state interest was complemented with an awareness of common American interests. A primary common concern was political independence, precarious up to the end of the Napoleonic Wars. But there was also a strong “developmental vision”: an idea that the United States could grow in size and wealth through the support of government action. This vision made the federal government the preferred instrument in promoting international commerce and territorial expansion. More controversially, it also saw the central government intervene in the economy by supporting transportation and other internal improvement projects, often in partnership with local and state governments. Such action inevitably generated concern about the federal government’s encroaching on states’ rights and fear that the central government would expand beyond the control of the citizens and the states, however.

The outcome of the American founding was a government that in crucial respects looked different from the Weberian ideal-type state. It celebrated not autonomy but responsiveness to states and citizens. It did not seek power over civil society but tried to uphold the rights of citizens and state governments. Thus a number of defining features of American government, such as constitutionalism, the Bill of Rights, state representation in the senate, and the separation of power, were techniques designed to prevent central government power from undue expansion. Federalism institutionalized power sharing between the federal and the state governments. As set out in the Constitution, federalism demarcated a division between the states and the central government both territorially and functionally. In the territories, the federal government reigned alone and its exercise of a wide range of power was relatively unproblematic. Functionally, the federal government was responsible for international and interstate relations, whereas the internal police of the states was left to the state governments. Like other states in the nineteenth century, the federal government did not adopt a uniform bureaucratic mode of administration but employed many different governmental arrangements. A great strength of Balogh’s work is his identification of the many different policy areas in which the federal government was active and the many different forms that governmental arrangements took. This sensitivity makes visible a federal government that has often been dismissed in an offhand manner as a “midget institution in a giant land” or a “state of courts and parties.”

In the territories, the federal government was responsible for transforming land into property and for making land valuable. It acquired territory through treaty, purchase, annexation, and conquest, and then explored, surveyed, and sold it. It guaranteed property rights, maintained law and order, pacified and removed Indians, provided access to markets through road construction, and subsidized education. Finally, it oversaw the integration of the territories into the union through the process of state creation. This feature of federalism, which allowed territories in time to become full members of the union, ensured the successful expansion of the American republic across the North American continent.

The second major sphere of federal government action was foreign policy, including defense and commercial policy. Despite the internal peace pact, the United States resorted to war frequently against both foreign nation-states such as Britain or Mexico or stateless Indian nations. The federal government promoted international commerce through treaty-making, trade discrimination, the protection of international trade routes, and through the collection of information about markets and navigation. It maintained an extensive consular service abroad as well as naval stations as far off as the Mediterranean and the China Sea. The federal government also facilitated navigation along the American coast, maintained buoys and lighthouses and improved rivers and harbors.

The third area of federal government activity concerned interstate relations. Congress and the party system were used as institutions of conflict resolution between clashing state interests. The Supreme Court under James Marshall shaped the rules governing interstate commerce and imposed a uniform interpretation of contracts that promoted market integration. Through the Post Office Department, the federal government created an expansive communication network second to none. The Patent Office secured nationwide protection of property to inventors. A fourth area in which the federal government was active was revenue generation. To ensure a reliable income, Congress created a revenue system based on customs duties. In times of crisis, such as war, or when opportunities presented themselves, such as when Louisiana came up for sale, tax revenue was supplemented by loans.

A final sphere of federal governance was economic development broadly construed. As long as the central government confined its actions to the territories or international trade, such as building roads in the West or creating a Marine Hospital system, there were no objections. But whenever its actions threatened an uneven distribution of benefits between states or sections or the increase of central government power at the expense of the states, political controversy inevitably ensued. Nevertheless, the federal government was active in paying bounties for manufactures and adopting protective tariffs, and it shaped monetary policy through the Bank of the United States, the Mint, and the prohibition on state-issued currency. Attempts were made to adopt a master plan for a national transportation network as well as to earmark funds for federally initiated projects. Both failed. Congress instead came to play a role as sponsor of state-initiated projects in a piecemeal fashion but was outspent by far by state and local governments.

In its core spheres of action, where its administration had constitutional sanction, the federal government established direct rule and created a state apparatus that can be compared to contemporary states and empires elsewhere. Congress created an army, including an Army Corps of Engineers, and a navy, a revenue administration, a territorial government, an Indian department, a Post Office Department, supervisors and keepers of lighthouses, judges and judicial officers, a diplomatic corps and a consular establishment, a Land Office, Marine Hospitals, a Patent Office, and expeditions of exploration. These agencies rarely conformed to the modern standards of bureaucratic administration. As Balogh notes, many of them depended on partnerships with nonstate actors to implement policy. Thus, the construction of military roads was supervised by the Army Corps of Engineer, but the labor was provided by private contractors. The Marine Hospital is another case in point. In large port cities, special hospitals were erected and staffed by doctors and other government personnel. In smaller ports, however, the government hired rooms in private homes and contracted with local doctors to treat and oversee patients. It is doubtful if the United States was exceptional in this respect as part-time employees and private contractors were common also in European administration. In contrast to European states, however, most of the federal state apparatus was deployed along the seaboard and in the territories, creating a waterfront and frontier state out of sight to the majority of citizens.

In the more contested zones of federal government activity, direct rule was not the norm. Instead, the government opted for diverse forms of associational arrangements that involved some form of partnership with state or local government or with civil society groups. The federal government created a semipublic corporation in the Bank of the United States and supported the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures, both highly controversial institutions. It also subsidized military contractors and helped state and local government in planning, surveying, and financing internal improvement projects. It supported the American Colonization Society, a curious mix between charity and nation-building project with an international reach. In these endeavors, federal government personnel were only temporarily, if at all, engaged in the direct administration of government.

Balogh’s work is an impressive achievement that not even a long review can do justice. As all successful works, it inspires many suggestions for further research. It would be valuable to have comparative analyzes that measure early American government performance not against twenty-first-century standards but against contemporary governments elsewhere. More studies of day-to-day administration on the ground would also be welcome. Another fruitful avenue of research is investigations of how and when citizens interacted with the federal government to achieve desired social and economic ends. To these and all other attempts to make sense of the early federal government, the necessary starting point will from now on be A Government Out of Sight.