From Tocqueville in the 1830s to scholars in the twenty-first century, most observers have found the state in the antebellum American republic elusive and complex. As any student of American history knows, the new nation that emerged from the Revolutionary War was not ruled by uniformed national officials. In place of a king the United States had popular sovereignty and the law; instead of strong central authorities it had federalism and local autonomy; lacking administrative bureaucracy, it relied on democratic party politics. In the Constitution, the new nation wrote a blueprint for government that called for separation rather than conglomeration of powers. It would prove remarkably successful in endowing the American state with both flexibility and durability, as Madison and other founders had desired.

The state in the early United States did not look like an entity approaching the Weberian ideal-type of the modern state: an organization capable of enforcing a successful monopoly of violence over a given territory, ruled through a legal-administrative order. But for all its apparent distinctiveness, the state in the early United States, no less than its counterparts in Europe and Asia, performed the fundamental tasks of any state: managing its population, economy, and territory. The history of how it did so suggests that the American state in the early nineteenth century was more substantial and energetic, especially at the national level, than many have suggested.