As the last federal troops departed the South in the late 1870s, hundreds were sent west to repress a strike by the workers on Jay Gould’s newly consolidated railway lines. The “Southern question,” a Virginia newspaper observed, had been put to rest. Now, the “trust question” and “the relation of labor and capital” would dominate the nation’s politics. The dislocations and discontent produced by new national corporations, national markets, and burgeoning industrial centers brought forth a welter of new legislative responses and new uses of state power, including experiments in administrative state-building at both state and national levels. Not only nation-spanning railroads and manufacturing firms but also mass immigration from abroad and increasingly bitter inequalities and class conflict at home presented new challenges that made America’s pre-Civil War traditions of local self-government and Jacksonian laissez-faire seem inadequate and antiquated.

When Europeans spoke of the “statelessness” of nineteenth-century America, they had in mind the absence of a powerful central administration and of a national “state elite” to run it. “Administration” and “bureaucracy” were foreign-sounding terms. They seemed antithetical to the American system of government, which had been born in revolt against just such a modern state. Instead, antebellum America possessed a small, unassuming national government, which left most tasks to state lawmakers, local officials, and the courts. The leaders of bar and bench were, in Tocqueville’s famous phrase, America’s “high political class”; they were the rough equivalent of Europe’s administrative state elites. Common law judges hammered out and administered a remarkable portion of the important rules of social and economic life.