I have pursued several goals in writing this book. The first was to somehow anchor an analytical description of American political development “at the beginning” of national state formation. As will become clear, I think, in the course of the book, the American state emerged from the wreckage of the Civil War. The state that early American nationalists had previously attempted to establish at the Constitutional Convention in 1787 had become a mere shell by 1860 – a government with only a token administrative presence in most of the nation and whose sovereignty was interpreted by the central administration as contingent on the consent of the individual states. This antebellum government was not so much overthrown by the Civil War as rendered anachronistic. In the process, prewar constitutional doctrine and administrative tradition became the ineffective weapons of the regime's opponents as they attempted to prevent the Republican party from consolidating the power and authority of the new Union state. Other than these pleas for a return to “the Constitution as it was,” the modern state's inheritance from the antebellum period was nil. In that sense, then, an account of American state formation can begin with the Civil War with little lost in historical continuity or theoretical generality.