As the most striking contradiction to the founding values of the United States, slavery has always posed a special problem to historians of the early American republic. The existence and significance of slavery in early America is undeniable. But so are the many liberal features of the Founding. To reconcile this contradiction historians have often argued that slavery was exogenous to the American experiment in republican statecraft. In David Ericson's words, they have claimed that the “institution of slavery was a temporary institution that might have negatively affected early American state development but still was not constitutive of it” (164). Yet as Ericson's Slavery in the American Republic demonstrates, this is a deeply problematic claim. The federal government, acting on the authority of the Constitution, made defending and promoting slavery a central task. Just as important, slavery shaped the development of the American state between the adoption of the Constitution and the outbreak of the Civil War.

The federal government was most active in defending slavery on and beyond the nation's borders. It prevented the smuggling of slaves across international borders; it resettled manumitted slaves in a semiofficial colony on the west coast of Africa; it intervened in Spanish Florida to bring back fugitive slaves and to close off a haven for escapees; it removed the five “civilized tribes” from the Old Southwest to allow for the expansion of slave agriculture and to secure the institution from external threats; it sought fugitive-slave extradition treaties with British North America and demanded compensation from the British government for slaveholders' property losses in the War of Independence and the War of 1812. But the federal government was also active in protecting slavery within the nation's borders. Southern state laws were upheld against fugitive slaves in Northern states as well as in federal territories. Federal agents assisted in apprehending and returning runaway slaves to their owners throughout the Union. By allowing for the unrestricted migration of slaves within the nation, the federal government promoted the internal slave market in the United States. The US Army responded to calls for troops to put down slave rebellions. The army was also a major employer of slave labor and slaves could be found working for the federal government in many different capacities, from constructing the White House to conveying the mail.

Slavery in the American Republic provides a systematic investigation of how the federal government interacted with the institution of slavery through the first seven decades of its existence. The book is arranged thematically rather than chronologically. Five chapters deal with, respectively, the policing of the international slave trade; the establishment of Liberia by the American Colonization Society; the apprehension of fugitive slaves; the use of military force to create a political geography conducive to slavery's continuation; and the federal employment of slave labor. Throughout these chapters Ericson's focus is both on how the federal government defended and promoted slavery and on the ways in which slavery drove the development of governmental institutions and polices. As an example of the latter, the transfer of responsibility for international border controls from the state governments to the federal government originated in federal regulation and later prohibition of slave imports.

Historians of the early republic and antebellum era will readily recognize that the topic of Slavery in the American Republic was also the subject of Don E. Fehrenbacher's The Slaveholding Republic: An Account of the United States Government's Relations to Slavery (Oxford University Press, 2001). Ericson is the first to acknowledge this. But in contrast to Fehrenbacher, the explicit concern of Ericson is the creation and development of the early American state, which was not central to Fehrenbacher. In methodological terms, Ericson belongs to the American Political Development tradition. He joins a growing number of historians and political scientists working to expose the myth of the weak or nonexistent antebellum state, done most forcefully by William Novak in the American Historical Review 113, no. 2 (June 2008). In place of this myth scholars are building an understanding of the working and institutional makeup of the early American state from the bottom up, on the basis of empirical investigations rather than the abstract theories of state formation that dominate the social sciences. The most prominent example of such work to date is Brian Balogh's A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Ericson's contribution to this literature lies in making slavery, which was largely missing in Balogh's overview for example, central to the creation and evolution of the American state. While avoiding the mistake of making slavery the sole determinant of American state-building Ericson nevertheless convincingly argues that a history of the antebellum federal government has to take the “peculiar institution” seriously.

The thematic arrangement of the book does not allow Ericson to address the causes of the breakdown of the Union in civil war head on. But his argument does provide an important clue to the South's decision to secede: because the federal government was a crucial instrument in upholding slavery, the loss of control over this institution meant that the future of slavery was threatened. In other words, the federal government was not so much a danger as a prerequisite to the continuation of slavery. This argument challenges the common claim that the political culture of the South was antistatist and that this attitude was a major impediment to the development of the antebellum state. Most recently Robin Einhorn's American Taxation, American Slavery (University of Chicago Press, 2006) argued that slaveholders successfully mobilized against attempts to create a powerful federal government in the late eighteenth century and thereby stunted the growth of the American state. But as Ericson shows, Southerners had nothing against a robust central government as long as they owned it. The federal government removed over fifty thousand Native Americans from the Old Southwest and transferred their lands to Southern planters, it upheld slaveholders' rights in the territories, and it captured and returned escaped slaves from the North. These were all significant achievements. In the antebellum period it was the slaveholders and their politicians who pushed for the creation of strong governmental institutions and for their vigorous use in support of the preservation and expansion of slavery.

Slavery in the American Republic is an important contribution to a growing literature that is reassessing the nature and significance of the American state in the period between the adoption of the Constitution and the outbreak of the Civil War. Previously, slavery has not been fully incorporated into our understanding of the creation and development of the federal government. Ericson therefore fills a major lacuna because for most of this period the United States was in fact a slaveholders' republic. His book will form an essential part of all future attempts to construct a historically accurate understanding of the early American state.