Officials in Action: Geographies of the Nineteenth Century American State

Debates in American political development center on the nature of the American state, especially the character and scope of public authority in the nineteenth century. This paper contributes to this debate by posing the question: where was the American state? I answer this question using microdata from the 1850 census to geolocate members of the military and government employees at the federal, state, and local levels. This informs a spatial analysis of public authority in the nineteenth century along with an examination of the geographic and demographic correlates of the early American state. Whereas the extractive and military powers of the federal government were located around the perimeter of the United States, the information capacity of the state was diffused widely throughout the interior. At the state and local level, governing authority reflected distinct regional political economies organized around slavery with the policing functions of local government clustered around a securitized border between free and slave states. Attention to the multiple geographies of the nineteenth century state has broader implications for the study of American political development by recentering questions of state formation and state building in comparative perspective. It is the spatial organization of authority that distinguishes the early American state from patterns of state formation and state building in Europe and Latin America.