The

TWO FACES

of

AMERICAN
FREEDOM

Aziz Ran a

i

CT

JM

*:■■- i

THE TWO FACES OF AMERICAN FREEDOM

THE TWO FACES OF AMERICAN FREEDOM

Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England

2011)

Copyright © 2010 by the :llows of Harvard College

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

This book was published with the support of the
Hull Memori; nd of Cornell University.

Library of Con gn: nhliailion DjLi

The two faces of American freedom / Aziz Rana.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-674-04897-3 (alk. paper)

1. United Sta government. 2. United States —

Territorial expansion. 3. Frontier and pioneer life — United States.

4. Liberty — History. 5. Imperialism — History. 6. Political culture —

United States — History. 7. Democracy — United States — History.

8. Hegemony — United States — History. I. Title.

E183.R27 2010

973— dc22 2010005770

For my parents and Odette

Long having wander'd since, round the earth having wander'd,
Now I face home again, very pleas'd and joyous,
(But where is what I started for so long ago?
And why is it yet unfound?)

-Walt Whitman, "Facing West from
California's Shores" (1860)

CONTENTS

Introduction: Liberty and Empire
in the American Experience

1 Settler Revolt and the Foundations
of American Freedom

2 Citizens and Subjects in Postcolonial
America

3 The Populist Challenge and the Unraveling
of Settler Society

4 Plebiscitary Politics and the New
Constitutional Order

Conclusion: Democracy and Inclusion
in the Age of American Hegemony

Notes 351

Acknowledgments 397
Index 399

THE TWO FACES OF AMERICAN FREEDOM

INTRODUCTION:

LIBERTY AND EMPIRE IN THE

AMERICAN EXPERIENCE

It is not surprising for members of a political community to follow their
domestic elections closely or to celebrate the victory of favored candi-
dates. It is surprising, however, when individuals do the same for a politi-
cal contest taking place in a distant country, to which they have little
apparent relationship and in which they have no capacity to influence
the outcome. Yet, in the days before and after Barack Obama's election
as president of the United States, not only did individuals throughout the
world pay rapt attention to the results, many engaged in spontaneous
celebrations. Few of those who took part in such political fanfare were
U.S. citizens. In places like Kenya and Indonesia, most had never visited
the United States (nor were they ever likely to), and at no point during
the election had their daily concerns surfaced as part of the political
discussion.

This global attention suggests two remarkable features about how
America finds itself currently embedded in the international order. First,
Obama's victory highlighted the continuing power of the American
example. In recent years, national prestige has been badly tarnished by
the global unpopularity of foreign wars as well as by the much-publicized
human rights violations of detainees. But, for communities across the
globe, the fact that a multiracial man of middle-class background could
reach the presidency spoke to another vision of the country. It empha-
sized the vitality of the American dream — the notion that in the United
States everyone has the opportunity to achieve economic success, social
respectability, and political office. To the extent that American commen-
tators focused on the international response at all, this was their primary
interpretation: the outpouring of affection illustrated the United States'
undiminished standing as the "first nation" among equals and as a symbol
of liberty.

At the same time, the world's interest in the election dramatized a
second, less explored feature. The United States today enjoys tremendous
and perhaps historically unparalleled economic, military, and political
power. In the wake of the recent financial crisis, some domestic commen-
tators have questioned whether the country is losing this international
preeminence, especially to emerging states such as China. 1 Yet, despite
the fear of decline, by most barometers America's position as sole global
superpower remains firm. Its output amounts to 20 percent of the world's
total and nearly doubles that of China, the next closest country. 2 In terms
of sheer military might, the United States accounts for almost half of
global defense expenditures, a number equal to the following twenty na-
tions combined. 3 As of 2009, some 516,273 military service members —
not including Department of Defense civilian officials — were deployed
abroad, stationed across 716 reported overseas bases and present in ap-
proximately 150 foreign states (nearly 80 percent of the world's coun-
tries). 4 The United States employs this authority directly and indirectly to
shape international institutions, to intervene in the domestic politics of
foreign countries, and to enlist weaker nations to implement American
goals. Perhaps more than anything else, the world's fixation with the U.S.
presidential election spoke to this reality. Scenes of rapt attention and
celebration thus presented a vision of those at the very edges of American
power looking to the center to see what the future might hold. It also
suggested a startling disjunction: while American citizens were largely
unaware of these groups or of how U.S. influence affects them, those at
the periphery by contrast felt bound to the country and its practices.

This book is an effort to make sense of the transformations in the re-
lationship between American liberty and American power. The present
moment is hardly the first time that the United States finds itself exercis-
ing authority over communities that are not considered properly Ameri-
can. In fact, the American Revolution itself was centrally concerned with
basic disagreements between colonists and British administrators regard-
ing the meaning of political membership as well as how governments may
appropriately assert power over both insiders and outsiders. In the fol-
lowing pages, I engage in a large-scale act of historical reconstruction
that begins with the national founding and explores the degree to which
American projections of power have become unmoored from clear demo-
cratic ideals. In the process, I reinterpret the lasting implications of our
political origins and shed light on how questions of settler identity, eco-
nomic independence, and ethnic assimilation grounded popular contests

regarding social inclusion and the substantive meaning of freedom. In
particular, I argue that most of the American experience is best under-
stood as a constitutional and political experiment in what I term settler
empire and that we cannot understand how accounts of expansion, im-
migration, race, and class have been intertwined at various historical
moments without appreciating the larger ideological and institutional
context.

This historical reconstruction focuses broadly on how a uniquely
American ideal of freedom entailed imperial frameworks, which over
time undermined the very promise of this ideal. The earliest projections
of American power were the product of a specific approach to collective
freedom held by Anglo settlers. These colonists saw their own internal
account of liberty as necessitating external modes of supervision and
control. This account of freedom, which emphasized continuous popular
mobilization and direct control by insiders over the sites of political and
economic decision making, provided generations of Americans with a basic
vision of social possibility. However, the promise of such liberty was his-
torically linked to practices of subordination. Many settlers believed that
the preservation and enhancement of their own democratic institutions
required Indian dispossession and the coercive use of dependent groups,
most prominently slaves, in order to ensure that they themselves had ac-
cess to property and did not have to engage in menial but essential forms
of work. This fact embodies the two faces of American freedom: our
long-standing difficulty in imagining liberty without suppression and
free citizenship without the control of subject communities. Yet, for all
its brutality, settler empire was the servant of a unique and robust view
of self-rule, seen by many as crucial to the fulfillment of emancipatory
ambitions.

Despite these origins, at key periods in the nation's history, reformers
and social movements sought to expand the meaning of liberty and to
imagine this American ideal without either subordination or empire. Their
efforts ultimately failed, and by the twentieth century the vision itself
had atrophied. As a consequence, external authority today is largely
disconnected from its historic and guiding commitments. Just as the
United States has gained such international primacy that its domestic
elections are now global political events, the internal concepts of free-
dom that previously directed efforts of economic and political expan-
sion have become marginal. In a sense, American politics today is at a
crossroads. The United States' paramount position in the world remains

steady. Yet, at home, public life is marked by striking popular uncer-
tainty and a persistent desire for basic change. Although ideas of liberty
and democracy remain collective watchwords — invoked almost ritual-
istically by politicians — the current mood is one of ambivalence over
what such words amount to and how they could be achieved in every-
day life. In the absence of a substantive ideal of freedom, the goal of
projecting power has placed security at the center of political discourse
and has entrenched hierarchical forms of economic and political rule —
most evident in corporate consolidation and the rise of an expansive
executive. Therefore, while many of the harshest features of the United
States' imperial past have been eliminated, what distinguishes the pres-
ent is not the end of external forms of authority over outsiders — both
those abroad and those who live within our borders. It is instead that
empire, so to speak, has become the master rather than the servant of
freedom.

For all the popular discussion of change, our institutions seem akin to
permanent social facts, neither the work of tangible and continuous po-
litical activity nor truly alterable by future collective effort. To the extent
that Americans are serious about reconceiving governing practices, it is es-
sential to recognize the deep linkages between external power and internal
normative commitments. Today, we face a series of connected challenges
about the nature of membership in the American political community as
well as the frameworks of both domestic and global authority. To make
sense of these challenges, it is important to appreciate not only such
internal-external linkages but also the degree to which the parameters of
political possibility are structured by past struggles over inclusion and
collective liberty. This means coming to grips with many of the basic
questions that shaped and continue to influence the American experi-
ence. In particular, to what extent has the United States been constitu-
tionally organized as a project of empire, and how have legal frame-
works shifted over time? How is the United States' self- understanding as
an immigrant nation tied to its settler roots, and to what extent has im-
migration sustained or challenged notions of internal freedom? And
how have ideas of race and class been joined in national accounts of
economic and political self-rule, and to what degree has racial exclusion
fostered or undermined class equality? Providing an answer to these
questions allows us to perceive the contours of our institutional arrange-
ments as well as the opportunities that exist at present for their potential
revision.

The Myths of U.S. Exceptionalism
and Constitutional Perfection

This project of historical excavation involves engaging with the domi-
nant narrative of the national experience: American exceptionalism. The
idea of the United States as standing outside the contested histories of
Europe, particularly its bitter conflicts over social standing and class,
continues to provide a powerful mythology of American identity. Yet it is
precisely this mythology that undermines our ability to think critically
about current institutions as well as to perceive what is truly distinctive
about the American project. What distinguishes the national experience
is not the lack of meaningful struggle over class. Rather, it is the way in
which a robust ideal of republican freedom emerged through practices of
external coercion and control. Only by interrogating the historical inter-
connection between internal freedom and external subordination can we
understand the development of our political and legal institutions and
thus recognize both the difficulties and possibilities implicit in the con-
temporary moment.

In 1793 the French American farmer J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur
produced perhaps the earliest systematic effort to articulate the idea of
U.S. exceptionalism, famously beginning his Letters from an American
Farmer with "What then is the American, this new man?" 5 Along with
highlighting a variety of factors including local customs, religious beliefs,
and social attitudes such as self-reliance, Crevecoeur viewed the relative
equality and independence of freeholders as fundamentally separating
the new polity from Old Europe. Four decades later, Alexis de Toc-
queville restated the argument, maintaining that the United States pre-
sented a wholly novel experiment in modern politics due to the lack of a
landed aristocracy and the fact that "ever since the birth of the colonies"
Americans enjoyed a condition of democratic equality 6 In twentieth-
century historiography, this claim was most strongly tied to Louis Hartz's
seminal book The Liberal Tradition in America, where he maintained
that the United States had been gripped by a "Lockean consensus" that
deemphasized the importance of social questions of class and focused
instead on the protection of negative individual liberties such as property
rights and freedom of speech. 7 As Rogers Smith notes, today this Toc-
quevillian thesis is both an essential aspect of collective self-understanding
and a crucial means of venerating established institutions. Smith writes,
"Analysts of American politics since Tocqueville have seen the nation as

5

a paradigmatic 'liberal democratic' society, shaped most by compara-
tively free and equal conditions and the Enlightenment ideas said to have
prevailed at its founding." 8

Ultimately, the most lasting legacy of American exceptionalism is the
manner in which it reinforces the inevitability and legitimacy of govern-
ing practices. Since, according to this view, the United States from the
very beginning avoided the inegalitarian difficulties plaguing Europe, its
earliest leaders essentially solved the problems of monarchical despotism
and class conflict. Rather than being the product of large-scale and un-
folding collective efforts, institutions are instead presented to us as gifts
from mythic founders — outside the bounds of popular contest or contin-
ued struggle. American exceptionalism thus produces a second basic
myth, what Mark Tushnet describes as the deification of a "perfect Consti-
tution." Under this idealized view, "the existing Constitution ... is entirely
adequate to meet the perceived needs of contemporary society." 9 As a
result, when faced with new challenges and social problems, judges, law-
yers, and politicians by and large see their work as an act of preservation,
in which their primary function is to impose the proper constitutional
solution and thus to defend the appropriateness of established institu-
tions. Political opponents may have differing interpretations of the Con-
stitution, but they can all agree that the prevailing system of government,
when adequately construed, provides the correct remedies.

Reinforcing these related ideas of exceptionalism and constitutional
perfection is a literary culture in which the most popular historical works
are panegyrics to great statesmen of the past, seen as larger-than-life fig-
ures to whom we are collectively indebted. Each year, it seems that a new
biography praising the wisdom and subtlety of the Founding Fathers is
produced, emphasizing their skill in political creation and the impor-
tance of such wisdom for social order. Despite the reality of increased
political hierarchy and its accompanying public unease, the dominant
forms of historical memory offer little assistance in imagining social al-
ternatives. Rather than serving as instruments to question the necessity
or legitimacy of institutional structures — or to provide templates for fu-
ture action — exceptionalism and constitutional perfection simply reaf-
firm the notion that the present is permanent and unavoidable.

A central reason for why American exceptionalism fails as a useful
tool for assessing the current moment is because it reads the national
past solely from an insider's perspective. In other words, it produces an

account of the U.S. experience that completely ignores the second dimen-
sion of American liberty — namely, the constitutive role of external power
in shaping internal notions of membership and collective freedom. As
many have noted, the mythology of exceptionalism and democratic equal-
ity disregards a historical record riddled with ethnic, racial, and sexual
exclusion, not to mention real class inequalities and conflicts. For instance,
Smith in his seminal book on U.S. citizenship, Civic Ideals, argues that
American identity has been permeated by a multiplicity of traditions,
both liberal democratic and ideologically illiberal: "The multiple tradi-
tions thesis holds that American political actors have always promoted
civic ideologies that blend liberal, democratic republican, and inegalitar-
ian ascriptive elements in various combinations designed to be politically
popular." 10 But even Smith's critique of exceptionalism tends to present
these "multiple traditions" as insular and discrete — "none too coherent
compromises among the distinct mixes." 11 The result is to keep the demo-
cratic heritage isolated from and uncontaminated by practices of racial
ascription and status hierarchy. Yet the United States' historical record
suggests more than a past failure to live up to the ideals of liberty. Rather
than separate currents flowing into the well of American values, the demo-
cratic ideals themselves gained strength and meaning through frame-
works of exclusion. Projects of territorial expansion and judgments about
who properly counted as social insiders helped to generate and sustain
the very accounts of liberty.

The basic consequence of this conceptual failure to link insider free-
dom to practices of subordination is that for current political discourse
the real struggles that produced the country's institutions remain opaque.
Without a clear sense of how these institutions developed, it has been
equally difficult to imagine the circumstances and conditions required for
their reform and improvement. In a sense, by focusing only on one side of
the American experience, we are cloaked from both the tragedy and the
hope embedded in social practices and political disagreements. Yet, devel-
oping a more complete account of the national project, and thus of the
present predicament, involves making a move that is counterintuitive for
many Americans. It means assessing how our collective past participates
in the colonial history of European expansion. Only by recognizing this
shared history can we adequately appreciate how the external uses of
American power continue to affect our normative commitments and con-
stitutional structures.

American Settlerism in Comparative Perspective

Like similar experiments in imperial conquest, the United States' earliest
beginnings and political founding were first and foremost as a settler so-
ciety. While the image of the pioneer settler has become a staple of Ameri-
can popular culture, the centrality of settler colonialism to the development
of national institutions and ideas remains essentially hidden in collective
consciousness. The dominant approaches to imagining the settler experi-
ence either praise the heroism of the rugged pioneer or denounce Ameri-
can settlement for its treatment of indigenous peoples. Both variants fail to
recognize how the emancipatory and exclusionary aspects of the experi-
ence were deeply intertwined. They consequently contribute to an over-
simplified and stultifying understanding of collective history. Prevailing
accounts also neglect the ways in which reading the American past against
that of settler societies more broadly can shed light on both what is
shared and what is unique in the U.S. experience. By contrast, this book
seeks to identify the ideology and practices of settlerism in its early forms
and its later mutations, and to draw out how American identity emerged
through historic practices of empire building. These practices were seen
as politically necessary means to the collective ends of democratic self-
government and economic independence.

Technically, settler societies are characterized by substantial and long-
lasting imperial populations, which seek to transplant home country ways
to the new environment. As Ronald Weitzer writes, colonies of settlement
generally produce extensive political and economic institutions that
"achieved de facto or de jure political independence from [the imperial]
metropole." 12 This de facto autonomy tends to promote decentralized
and less hierarchical modes of internal political authority. Just as impor-
tant, in such communities the descendents of colonists also wrest politi-
cal supremacy from indigenous groups; they maintain this supremacy
permanently or for many generations and develop complex ideologies to
legitimate such enforced inequality. 13

In the history of imperial expansion, there were two distinct modern
periods of settler colonialism. The first wave included what Caroline
Elkins and Susan Pedersen call the "new world colonies," exemplified by
European settlement in the United States, South Africa, Australia, and
elsewhere. 14 These colonies were typified by efforts to claim indigenous
territory exclusively for settler communities, territory that was repeat-
edly described as virgin or empty. Moreover, the primary approach to the

local population was driven less by the desire "to govern indigenous
peoples or to enlist them in their economic ventures than to seize their
land and push them beyond an ever-expanding frontier of settlement." 15
New World colonies consistently sought to weaken metropolitan authority
over settler life and to employ de facto relationships of autonomy to press
both for full independence and for the complete removal of indigenous
groups.

The second wave took place during the late nineteenth and early to
mid-twentieth centuries and included European and Japanese settlements
across parts of Africa and Asia. In contrast to the New World colonies,
these later efforts generally confronted indigenous populations whose
size and strength on the ground left settlers as a distinct numerical mi-
nority. This resulted in a central difference with the earlier wave of colo-
nization. Both settlers and metropolitan officials were unable simply to
depopulate the territory. Rather, they engaged in "protracted negotia-
tions or struggles with always more numerous indigenous populations." 16
These realities meant that while colonists may have sought greater auto-
nomy from their home countries, in the final analysis they remained
politically — and especially militarily — dependent on metropolitan author-
ity for their continued social supremacy and privilege. Without home
country support, colonists faced the persistent danger of becoming small
minorities in a hostile political community.

In a sense, the key distinctions between twentieth-century settlerism and
its earlier form in the New World help to explain why Americans today
rarely conceive of themselves as tied to a settler past or ideological project.
As Patrick Wolfe, a scholar of Australian society, notes, the basic logic of
the early settler wave was not the exploitation of indigenous groups but
rather native elimination. This elimination took the form not merely of vio-
lence against local communities or the dissolution of indigenous political
and economic practices. It also meant that settlers sought to replace native
society as such and to "erect a new colonial society on the expropriated
land base." 17 In a sense, the vision of indigenous territory as empty land
was part and parcel of settler efforts to transform themselves into "na-
tives" and to escape the very category of colonialism. In keeping with this,
the desire to see the United States as an exceptional nation was partially
built on the need to distance the country from its European origins and to
assert an authentically local American character or way of life.

Yet, by failing to place the national project within the context of set-
tler colonialism, public discourse in the United States essentially forgets

the conditions that gave rise to American accounts of liberty and their
implications for contemporary politics. When describing the democratic
features of American founding, scholars and commentators unwittingly
isolate only the internal aspects of the settler colony. Thus most discus-
sions of national origin fail to appreciate how these internal features de-
veloped as a result of settler interaction with an external and excluded
native population. As Michael Mann points out, settler democracies have
been linked historically to projects of ethnic and political cleansing. The
emphasis on ethnicity as a justification for economic and political control
has meant that such democracies are intricately bound up with organic
notions of citizenship. These notions depict the political community as
an inseparable union based on ethnic and cultural affinities and tied to a
particular plot of land. For Mann, the historical precondition for demo-
cratic government in settler societies often has been the subjugation,
forced removal, or outright murder of those deemed outsiders. Mann
writes:

These were distinctly democratic communities, yet their ethnic
cleansing of the natives was usually worse than that committed by
the colony's less democratic imperial authorities. The Spanish, Por-
tuguese, and British Crowns, Viceroys and Governors, and the
Catholic and some Protestant Churches, tended to be milder to-
ward the natives than were the settlers themselves — which is why
most Indians supported the British in the American Revolutionary
War. Second, deliberate genocidal bursts were more common
among British than Spanish or Portuguese settlers. In both cases
we find that the stronger the democracy among the perpetrators,
the greater the genocide. 18

Thus a focus on settlerism provides us with the tools to connect the
emancipatory and oppressive features of the American experience. Settler
society's ethnic basis flattens internal inequalities while justifying the
construction of dependent external communities, be they slaves or indig-
enous natives. By solely viewing the internal characteristics of the settler
colony, many commentators never confront the extent to which our
democratic ideals were themselves produced and sustained by colonial
domination.

This is not to say that the American self-understanding as a histori-
cally exceptional political and social project is simply false. Rather, what
makes the American experience distinctive must be read in light of its

comparative continuities. American commentators and citizens often
view aspects of national history to be uniquely homegrown, when in fact
they are present to varying degrees in numerous settler societies, as di-
verse as the French in Algeria, the English in Northern Ireland, the Euro-
pean Jewish community in Israel/Palestine, and the Chinese in Taiwan.
Among others, these qualities often include greater equality within the
settler colony than in the imperial metropole or home country; a cultural
sense of being "chosen" as an ethnic or religious community for a histori-
cal mission; a greater emphasis on militarism due to perceived threats
from indigenous and foreign populations; and, finally, a wariness of metro-
politan social and political customs, which are depicted at times as corrupt
or decadent. 19

Even the idea of a frontier as distinctively American obscures similar
claims made by other settler societies. For example, while a century ago
Frederick Jackson Turner famously argued that the frontier experience
was essential to shaping American individualism and democratic self-
government, 20 Afrikaners in South Africa and Anglo settlers in Australia
presented nearly identical arguments (at virtually the same historical mo-
ment) to explain the egalitarianism and uniqueness of their own commu-
nities. For Afrikaner nationalism, the Great Trek, the large-scale migra-
tion of Dutch-speaking farmers known as Voortrekkers into the South
African heartland in the 1830s and 1840s, was both a narrative of politi-
cal independence and a celebration of European expansion. According to
this frontier mythology, Afrikaner pioneer settlers sought not only new
land for grazing but also freedom from British tyranny by establishing
the republics of the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. 21

Yet, as Seymour Martin Lipset notes, what does make the American
example of settlerism distinctive is "in starting from a revolutionary event,
in being 'the first new nation,' the first colony, other than Iceland, to be-
come independent." 22 Beginning with the onset of European imperialism
in the sixteenth century, the United States is the first example of a suc-
cessful settler revolt against metropolitan rule. Certainly, other settler com-
munities have used violence to reduce or eliminate overweening control
by colonial authorities. Afrikaners in South Africa fought two ultimately
unsuccessful wars against British power, the Anglo-Boer Wars in 1880-
1881 and 1899-1902, to maintain republican control over the Orange
Free State and the Transvaal. 23 In Ireland, commentators often forget that
the first twentieth-century revolt was not the Easter Rebellion of 1916
but the September 28, 1912, signing by nearly half a million English

Protestants of the Solemn League and Covenant to defend Ulster from
the threat of Irish Home Rule. 24

Nonetheless, as will be discussed throughout the book, the success of
the revolt by the thirteen British colonies spawned a unique settler ideol-
ogy. This ideology fused ethnic nationalism, Protestant theology, and re-
publicanism to combine freedom as self-rule with a commitment to ter-
ritorial empire. Such self-rule involved the elimination of all modes of
arbitrary authority and required individuals to assert actual decision-
making power over economic and political relations, through productive
control and democratic participation. As a consequence, American set-
tlerism was organized around four basic components. First, in radicaliz-
ing those seventeenth-century republican ideas that were increasingly
prevalent in England, settlers came to view economic independence as
the ethical basis of free citizenship. Centuries of Americans saw control
over the instruments and conditions of work as providing insiders with a
collective experience in autonomy and moral independence. Primarily
through land ownership and individual proprietorship, settlers sought
to create an internally egalitarian and participatory political community.
Second, Americans viewed the basic engine of republican freedom to be
conquest. Without new territory for settlers, the ethical benefits of "free
labor" could not be made generally accessible. In other words, as a political
necessity, settlers viewed republicanism as constitutively bound to empire
and expansion.

Third, settler society presumed that republican principles at root were
not universally inclusive. In other words, most settlers believed that not
everyone could enjoy the benefits of economic independence. They ar-
gued that the nature of agricultural life meant that for some to engage in
the dignified work marked by productive control, there would have to be
others who participated in forms of labor long perceived to be degraded —
such as tenancy, wage labor, and domestic service. Thus, for settlers there
existed at the heart of republican notions of economic independence a
basic divide between free and unfree work. Over time, Americans solved
this problem by employing subordinated external groups, particularly
African slaves, to engage in the most oppressive modes of production.
And they justified both the expropriation of native land and the control
of dependent laboring communities through arguments about ethnic and
religious superiority.

Fourth, settlers recognized that in order to sustain a project of repub-
lican freedom and territorial conquest, they would necessarily need new

12

migrants beyond the initial flows of English colonists. As a result, they
created remarkably open immigration policies for Europeans deemed co-
ethnics and thus co-participants in the republican project. This meant
that for most of the American experience, the U.S. border was essentially
a port of entry for European immigrants who were often quickly incor-
porated into the political community. This incorporation included prac-
tices that today would be quite surprising, such as the prevalence of
noncitizen voting and noncitizen access to federal land out west. On the
one hand, the territorial need for immigrants checked the most xeno-
phobic tendencies within settler society over the course of the nineteenth
century, by expanding the ethnic and religious categories for who could
count as American. On the other hand, it also hardened the divide be-
tween social insiders and subordinated outsiders. Thus, while many
new European immigrants may have had immediate access to the con-
ditions necessary for free citizenship and equal political participation,
Indians, blacks, or Mexicans who had long lived on the land were de-
nied these basic rights. In essence, they existed as colonized populations
within the territory of the United States in ways akin to twentieth-
century settler structures of indigenous control, in which "a caste divi-
sion . . . [was] built into the economy, political system, and the law,
with particular economic activities and political privileges . . . reserved
for members of the settler population." 25 Rather than settlerism and
immigration existing as two distinct accounts of the American experi-
ence, for most of the collective past the idea of the United States as an
immigrant nation was directly bound to settler needs and institutions
of privilege.

By appreciating this settler structure of American society and its con-
tinuities with other examples of colonization, we are able to recognize
perhaps the greatest difficulty with current discussions of the historical
record. Even when the interconnections between internal liberty and ex-
ternal subordination — the two faces of American freedom — are raised in
popular discourse, settler exclusivity is almost always viewed as an origi-
nal sin. It embodies a past episode that while reprehensible has little to
say about the development of collective institutions. However, settler
exclusion was more than a distant period of conquest and subordination;
it provided the basic governing framework for American life for over
three centuries. 26 This was because the goals of economic independence
and democratic self-rule rested on a continual project of expansion. Amer-
ican political identity was intricately tied to assumptions about imperial

power and the need for external control over indigenous and dependent
communities.

In emphasizing how settlerism set the ideological and structural pa-
rameters for collective life, my point is decidedly not to demean or reject
the past. Our accounts of liberty may well have emerged precisely in the
context of slavery and native expropriation. These contexts were the liv-
ing embodiment of freedom's antithesis: bondage and servitude. How-
ever, any one-sided rejection of settlerism, due to its brand of Anglo su-
premacy and social subordination, would necessarily ignore how such
circumstances gave birth to a liberating vision of collective possibility. 27
For most of the American experience, this vision articulated and justified
a historically new political creature — an independent and imperial settler

Yet, at decisive historical moments, it also led some Americans to
imagine a republicanism that was both inclusive and disconnected from
territorial conquest. In essence, these reformers saw the ideal of democ-
racy as a guiding social practice, which was bound neither philosophically
nor politically to existing forms of bondage. They imagined an alterna-
tive identity for the country, one that would revise dramatically the uses
of external power and thus create a new, universal, and nonimperial
American polity. In a sense, they suggested the real exceptionalism of the
American project: the effort to strip republican ideals of their oppressive
roots and to make free citizenship broadly accessible to all.

The Book in Outline
Each chapter of the book explores the conceptual relationship between
the settler experience and notions of liberty during a given historical pe-
riod. In Chapter 1 1 detail the legal and political basis for Anglo coloniza-
tion of North America and the ways in which settler ideology combined
a rich understanding of collective freedom with the project of empire. I
then reconceive the central causes and consequences of the American
Revolution by reinterpreting the Revolution as a settler revolt over the
future of imperial colonization. By the 1760s, London's imperium had
grown exponentially, extending from Indian Bengal to French Canada
and transforming almost overnight into a global and culturally diverse
effort in colonial administration. For Anglo settlers, the emerging impe-
rial order was a threat to both their vision of republican freedom and
their position of social supremacy vis-a-vis marginalized groups. Through

revolt, colonists reaffirmed the inherent link between internal liberty and
external subordination and established an independent settler empire
along the lines of the old imperial status quo. The ultimate result was a
political community motivated by the promise of republican self-rule and
imprisoned within a deeply limited vision of social inclusion.

Chapter 2 describes how, for small farmers and townspeople, the ex-
perience of revolutionary upheaval promoted a radicalizing of collective
ambitions — what I refer to as the populist form of republican liberty. For
such groups, achieving meaningful independence required energizing
government power and linking it to a self-assertive popular will. How-
ever, this vision confronted a basic postcolonial predicament, one not
unfamiliar to the independent African and Asian polities that emerged in
the twentieth century. Anglo settlers found themselves embedded in a
world of competing European states, in which the goal of achieving
substantive independence from Europe ran squarely against the imple-
mentation of populist politics. As a result, small farmers and towns-
people came to see government authority, as employed by commercial
and political elites, as a threat to what remained of popular autonomy.
This sense was reinforced by the fact that federal power became in-
creasingly associated with territorial expansion and the congressional
assertion of the old imperial prerogative. Retreating from their original
revolutionary vision, farmers and artisans sought instead to police state
activity and protect their own social status by imposing this preroga-
tive on marginalized groups. As a consequence, the new United States
developed a rigid politics of duality, which separated free citizens from
an increasingly complicated structure of control over (among others)
slaves, emancipated blacks, semisovereign Indian tribes, and Mexican
citizens.

In Chapter 3 I describe the reemergence and flourishing of the robust
populist account of republican freedom, which accompanied a general
reevaluation of social goals and institutional arrangements generated by
the Civil War, industrialization, and the closing of the frontier. In this
context, a sweeping protest movement, organized through the Farmers
Alliance, the Knights of Labor, and the People's Party, sought to adapt
economic and political self-rule to new collective realities. At their most
expansive, radical agrarian and labor activists suggested a more univer-
sal and nonimperial mode of popular politics, which engaged in a thor-
oughgoing critique of external American power and its corrosive effects
on internal liberty. They sketched, although often incompletely, a vision

of freedom without empire. In the end, the defeat of the Populist revolt
meant that when later reformers sought to challenge internal and exter-
nal modes of authority, they faced institutions and practices that had
grown more deeply embedded with each passing year.

In Chapter 4 I chart the rise of the alternative vision of constitutional
and political life that took root in the wake of the Populist movement.
This new consensus, which culminated in the constitutional order estab-
lished by the New Deal, ultimately involved abandoning the notion of
freedom as self-rule. It dismantled settler institutions and ideals and cre-
ated a new statecraft along the lines of the United States' European rivals,
transforming the American presidency, perhaps ironically, into an apt suc-
cessor to the English crown. In the process, New Dealers emphasized
security — from both want and foreign threat — as the main collective
goal, instead of economic independence or participatory citizenship. This
commitment to security involved developing a strong and flexible execu-
tive, able to respond aggressively to social crises at home and abroad. It
also meant reconfiguring the old imperial prerogative, centralized now in
the presidency, as a routine and general mode of state authority rather
than a specialized method for policing the boundary between insiders
and outsiders. In international affairs, while the country refrained from
pursuing a traditional colonial empire, the United States nonetheless in-
creasingly sought global dominance and justified such policies as neces-
sary for domestic and foreign safety. This projection of power helped to
reinforce the new constitutionalism, in which the executive served as an
authoritative representative body and spoke broadly on behalf of "we
the people."

By way of a conclusion, I pursue more directly the current implications
of this historical reconstruction, focusing on post-New Deal reform
projects and modes of mass mobilization. I look especially at the implica-
tions of popular efforts at greater political and economic inclusion, such
as for blacks and women. These efforts have taken two basic trajectories.
On the one hand, they have served to strengthen prevailing institutions
by incorporating elites from previously marginalized groups into arenas
of corporate and governmental privilege. Yet, on the other hand, they
have at times also made explicit the ties between internal dependence
and external power and, in the process, reasserted the goal of a universal
and nonimperial republican politics. In fact, the civil rights movement can
be read as our most recent collective attempt to revive dormant accounts
of freedom as self-rule and to connect such accounts to a full-throated

critique of American interventionism. Today the goal of inclusion contin-
ues to have this dual potential — to sustain governing hierarchies and to
challenge them fundamentally. Despite this ambiguity, it remains the
best available avenue for reviving a robust vision of republican freedom
and for joining this vision to the ideal of an open political community. In
particular, the question of immigration — the appropriate economic and
political status of immigrants within our borders — provides a central
method for engaging structurally with the meaning of internal and exter-
nal authority.

Social Criticism and the Uses of History

Before turning to the project in earnest, a short note about the methodol-
ogy of the book is warranted. Although the subsequent chapters follow a
basic chronology and offer novel interpretations of past events, this ef-
fort is not a work of traditional historical scholarship. Rather, I see this
project as a form of social criticism, in which history is presented in the
service of today's problems as well as tomorrow's latent possibilities. My
focus on the historical past is ultimately instrumental; it seeks to illumi-
nate how the American experience itself holds the normative tools for
grappling with the current moment and for imagining emancipatory
alternatives.

In many ways, the book is an experiment in what Michael Walzer has
called "connected criticism." By this, Walzer means that there are two ways
to engage in normative argument. On the one hand, a person can stand
outside a particular social community, as if he or she were a "dispassion-
ate stranger," and assess local arrangements on the basis of principles
derived from universal justice. On the other hand, a critic can approach
his or her views as part of an internal argument within the practices of a
given society and seek to reshape collective life by reference to shared
traditions, histories, and values. 28 My decision to engage in the second
brand of social criticism is a conscious one, motivated by an appraisal of
our present conditions.

Today, it is difficult for many of us to imagine real social alternatives,
ones that challenge prevailing hierarchies and justifications for internal
and external power. In a way, the highly analytical forms of theorizing
evident in political philosophy only reinforce the seeming gulf between
governing institutions and Utopian ideals. As one seminal example, in A
Theory of Justice John Rawls hopes to shed light on the problems of

contemporary life by presenting a perfectly realized condition of justice.
He does so by engaging in a complex thought experiment, in which he
imagines what political decisions people would make when placed in the
"original position." 29 The problem with this abstract form of utopianism
is that it unwittingly underscores our dominant sense of collective uncer-
tainty. Such ruminations about ideal conditions are severely disconnected
from the everyday facts of diminished popular authority and political
alienation. Although this form of Utopian thinking embodies one avenue
for social creativity, it never attaches the promise of improvement to a vi-
sion of practical agency. Moreover, it fails to suggest the cultural tools
within the American experience that make these accounts of justice not
just universal aspirations but rather constitutive elements of our local and
contested debates over social possibility.

In excavating the ideological visions that shaped specifically Ameri-
can struggles, I hope to articulate a robust account of human freedom
embedded in our past. In a sense, I would like to underscore how seem-
ingly radical arguments about economic control, political participation,
and imperial legacy — arguments that we ordinarily do not associate with
American identity — have been at the heart of internal projects of change
and social renewal. In its own way, this project is therefore an attempt
to construct an alternative image of the nation's founding and experi-
ence, one that can replace the traditional accounts of exceptionalism
and constitutional perfection. In the process, it asserts that one of the
central pitfalls of the current public discourse is precisely the preserva-
tionist impulse, which tends to flatten our rich and varied traditions of
political argument. Thus a primary task for the social critic is to show
how apparently marginal views of freedom and social membership are
themselves foundational aspects of our identity. This means making us
appreciate as our own practices and ideas that at present appear distant
and culturally foreign.

In the end, simply reproducing the political actions of our predeces-
sors will not be enough to make society less authoritarian. Even in those
historical periods when Americans sought to universalize republican free-
dom and dislodge the commitment to economic and political indepen-
dence from the reality of colonial rule, settler thinking nonetheless
compromised such efforts in collective hope. But what these previous
moments do provide are the basic contours for making sense of our cur-
rent problems and the possible shape that democratic control might take.

They present a means for critiquing the institutions and concepts that
have dominated contemporary thinking. In our era of American primacy
abroad and democratic unease at home, the past suggests how individu-
als might again assert popular power and how such power could be
made compatible with a fuller and more inclusive moral identity.

SETTLER REVOLT AND THE
FOUNDATIONS OF AMERICAN FREEDOM

ive a vast multitude of
slaves. Where this is the case in any part of the world, those
who are free, are by far the most proud and jealous of their
freedom. Freedom is to them not only an enjoyment, but a
kind of rank and privilege. Not seeing there, that freedom, as
in countries where it is a common blessing, and as broad and
general as the air, may be united with much abject toil, with
great misery, with all the exterior of servitude, liberty looks,

....■■.:■

— Edmund Burke, "Speech on Conciliation with the
Colonies" (1775)

No event in national history is as shrouded in mythology as the Ameri-
can Revolution. For historians and theorists of American exceptionalism,
it marks out the American project as a unique site for political freedom.
Hannah Arendt in On Revolution writes, "The colonization of North
America and the republican government of the United States constitute
perhaps the greatest, certainly the boldest, enterprises of European man-
kind." She bemoans that the American example, rather than the French
one, did not become the revolutionary model and that its act of political
construction remains a historical outlier. "The sad truth of the matter is
that the French Revolution, which ended in disaster, has made world his-
tory, while the American Revolution, so triumphantly successful, has re-
mained an event of little more than local importance." 1

For Arendt, the exceptionalism of the Revolution springs from two
related facts. First, it was a spontaneous act by individuals to create a
new political beginning. By crafting a set of institutions, the Founding
Fathers engaged in the purest form of freedom — the collective act of po-
litical creation. Moreover, what made this revolutionary act so liberating

20

was that it was fundamentally political rather than social. According
to Arendt, whereas politics is marked by shared and spontaneous action in
the public realm, society is characterized by common drives to produce
and consume within an economy. These drives mimic the natural ones of
production and reproduction that serve the ends of biological necessity.
Such mimicry means that society, unlike the public realm, does not allow
people to exhibit either their uniqueness or capacity for free action. Arendt
argues that the American Revolution, unlike the French, did not concern
social standing or economic well-being and thus transcended both instinct
and necessity. Instead, it embodied the liberating political attempt to insti-
tutionalize a public sphere, which would provide a permanent house for
freedom.

While Arendt's distinction between the social and the political has
been justly criticized, her account of the American Revolution continues
to inform how scholars imagine the national founding and, in particular,
the supposed radicalness of colonial independence. No recent thinker
has been more associated with defending this proposition than Gordon
Wood. In his seminal book, The Radicalism of the American Revolution,
Wood disagrees with much of the Arendtian thesis while still arguing for
America's historical uniqueness as a republic founded on liberty. For Wood,
the Revolution's emancipatory character lay precisely in the fact that it
addressed the social question and drastically altered social standing in
the colonies. He describes the event as an assault on aristocratic privilege
and claims that, "In a monarchical world of numerous patron-client rela-
tions and multiple degrees of dependency, nothing could be more radical
than this attempt to make every man independent." 2

Yet, like so many arguments premised on American exceptionalism,
those offered by Arendt and Wood fundamentally mistake what in reality
was exceptional about the Revolution. They do so because the authors
ignore the fact that America was a settler society and that the Revolution,
an Anglo settler revolt, was as much about the nature of imperial coloni-
zation as it was about political beginning. In this chapter, I argue that at
stake in the conflict between England and her colonies was the meaning
and purpose of British Empire. For well over a century prior to revolt,
North American expansion had been — to an extensive degree — a decen-
tralized and autonomous project of settler colonization. Common ances-
try, religion, land use, and notions of liberty linked colony to metropole
and helped to ensure that settler conquest was consistent with the greater
interests of England. Yet, as British imperium grew, it became increasingly

diverse, extending to peoples and parts of the world never before con-
nected in modern European history. The need to maintain control over
such a culturally disparate empire directly conflicted with local colonial
autonomy, autonomy long enjoyed by settlers and seen as a basic ances-
tral right. Settler revolt was consequently as much about the past as it
was about the future. It expressed the belief that in asserting indepen-
dence colonists could reclaim a lost imperial status quo. 3

By placing the Revolution within a debate over the meaning of em-
pire, we can perceive the basic difficulties with the accounts offered by
Arendt and Wood. Settlers sought to defend their long-granted privileges
and thus their cultural and political supremacy from what at the time was
far more distinctive: an emerging empire that seemed to view meaningful
royal protection as a right of all subjects regardless of ethnicity and con-
sidered religious toleration essential to imperial authority. In other words,
Arendt's new house for freedom was in many ways the reconstruction of
an old colonial consensus, only now one that jettisoned British supervi-
sion. Moreover, settler revolt was a decidedly social event, concerned with
the loss of hegemony entailed by the inclusion of marginalized groups
such as natives, Catholics, and even slaves. This social impetus for revo-
lution also highlights the shortcomings of Wood's narrative. Only from
the insider perspective of settlers can one view revolt as a radically equal-
izing moment. I contend that, in point of fact, such equality was predi-
cated on reinforcing the dichotomy between friend and enemy, between
those included as free citizens and those excluded as threats to settler
freedom.

Ultimately, the failure by both Arendt and Wood to appreciate this
social dynamic speaks to perhaps the greatest flaw of arguments from
revolutionary radicalism. These narratives seek to keep the revolutionary
experience uncontaminated from those forms of subordination that gave
it sustenance. Rather than Arendt's pure act of freedom or Wood's uni-
versalizing discourse of equality, revolutionary ideals were at root depen-
dent on a host of exclusivities. Such exclusivities underscored the inextri-
cable ties, for Anglo settlers, between liberty and empire. In the years
preceding revolt, colonists developed a remarkably robust account of
freedom, one that saw self-rule as requiring economic, political, and spiri-
tual independence. Liberty presupposed the individual's ability to assert
control over all the primary sites of collective life. However, the precon-
dition for this vision was both the expansion of slavery and the expro-
priation of indigenous groups. Not unlike other historical experiments in

11

settler colonization, the internally emancipatory features of settler society
politically necessitated external domination. This essential connection be-
tween liberty and subordination shaped the institutions of the early repub-
lic and has exerted a lasting impact on the direction of collective life. Only by
recognizing this dichotomy can we appreciate what was historically novel
in our collective experience — the attempt by an independent settler society
to intertwine republicanism with empire.

In the following pages, I argue that British efforts to make imperial
power more culturally inclusive, particularly after its global war with
France, jeopardized settler supremacy and internal freedom. This approach
counters previous narratives of the Revolution, which emphasize the
colonists' republican ideology and wariness of British authority but fail
to situate these views within the larger argument over the future of settler
colonialism. By describing in extensive historical detail the legal, politi-
cal, and economic contexts in which American settlerism emerged, I hope
to present the often disquieting ideological roots of freedom as self-rule.
In doing so, the goal is not only to offer an alternative account of the
Revolution, and our national founding, but also to highlight the tragedy
and the hope implicit in American liberty. In essence, both this tragedy
and this hope provide the backdrop for long-standing efforts to imagine
how supremacy and freedom could be disentangled.

The first section of this chapter provides my interpretation of the legal
and political basis for the initial settlement of North America, paying
particular attention to the ways in which Anglo colonists carried from
the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland a set of ideological presumptions
and imperial practices about indigenous dispossession. In the second sec-
tion I explore a surprising feature of the very earliest period of coloniza-
tion, the fact that both settlers and conquered populations were treated
similarly as subjects of an immutable and discretionary royal power, not
unlike that operating in Spanish or Portuguese dominions. The result was
that settlers and natives each faced coercive modes of authority, and, as a
consequence, some social fluidity existed between colonists and marginal-
ized groups like slaves and freed blacks. As I argue in the third section, it
was only as settler institutions became more autonomous from external
supervision and were increasingly imbued with republican ideas that a
new status quo emerged on the ground. Such a framework rigidly separated
free Anglo settlers from colonized subjects, who alone could be ruled
through imperial force. This discussion draws together the basic features of
settler life prior to the French and Indian War and describes the developing

account of freedom as self-rule, which marked colonial societies in the
decades before the Revolution.

Finally, in the fourth section I detail British attempts to reorganize the
new polyglot empire and highlight how policies toward French Canadi-
ans, Native Americans, and African slaves threatened to unravel the basic
tenets of settler life. By discussing the relationship between slavery and
liberty, I also assess how metropolitan-settler disagreements suggested
two fundamentally incompatible accounts of freedom operating in Lon-
don and in the colonies. For settlers, greater tolerance and ethnic inclu-
siveness meant depriving all British subjects — regardless of British ances-
try or Protestant faith — of economic and political self-rule. Rather than
universalizing freedom, new practices simply truncated the meaning of
liberty and reduced Anglo colonists to the level of their cultural inferiors.
As a conclusion, I provide the outlines for the new republic's reformed
vision of empire, based largely on the previous colonial status quo and
driven by commitments to republican independence and territorial ex-
pansion. Ultimately, this chapter seeks to lay the theoretical foundations
for settler notions of both liberty and conquest; it analyzes the collective
struggles and processes that gave birth to the American ideal of freedom
as self-rule and the American project of settler empire.

Establishing the Legal and Political Basis
for American Settlement

To understand what Anglo colonists imagined they were fighting for and
arguing against, we need to take a step back and assess the initial justifica-
tions for settlement. This means revisiting the distant past and reconstruct-
ing the social dilemmas, cultural assumptions, and political practices, now
lost from collective memory, that defined colonial America. To a large
extent, these practices were borrowed from the experience in Ireland and
emphasized the way in which heathenism and savagery disqualified local
communities from claiming legitimate sovereignty over their own land.
In addition to looking at the Irish experience, in this section I consider how
legal jurists and colonial administrators, such as Sir Edward Coke and
John Locke, sought to establish the foundations for Anglo colonization.
English conquest presupposed that while new indigenous populations
were the king's imperial subjects, such status did not necessarily bring with
it meaningful rights, and these conquered groups could be ruled as the
Crown saw fit.

The Dilemma of a Polyglot Empire
A central argument of this chapter is that the Revolution was ultimately
a revolt over the shifting status of Anglo colonists in the British Empire
and over which group — settlers or London administrators — should direct
imperial expansion. In order to appreciate the link between early North
American colonization and later settler restiveness, it is helpful to high-
light the state of the British Empire just prior to the Revolution. In partic-
ular, due to dramatic and global territorial growth, London administra-
tors began articulating the importance of restructuring notions of royal
subjectship.

In the early 1760s, Britain and its colonies celebrated a series of victo-
ries over Bourbon France, culminating in 1763 with the Treaty of Paris,
which consolidated British control of Canada and established the empire
as the dominant political force in North America. Against this upsurge
of popular confidence, an anonymous pamphlet appeared in 1761 titled
The Reasons for keeping Guadaloupe at a Teace, preferable to Canada
explained in five letters from a Gentleman in Guadaloupe to his Friend
in London, which questioned the political, economic, and moral value of
global conquest. 4 This decidedly minority position would later be de-
scribed as the "little Englander" approach and become most associated
in Whitehall with the Duke of Bedford. 5 While the desire for permanent
political supremacy over France made this perspective a practical non-
starter, 6 the views expressed suggest much about the basic nature of the
British Empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the funda-
mental changes wrought by both war with France and other imperial ad-
ventures at the time.

The author presented several arguments against the retention of New
France, the most obvious being that the economic benefits brought by the
fur trade would be outweighed by the cost of supporting and protecting
the new possession. The writer also argued that the cultural and political
nature of this new territory ran contrary to British traditions and the struc-
ture of British settlement abroad. As Philip Lawson summarizes, "The
people of New France . . . were an alien race, with a different culture and
religion that would demand special handling. Their allegiance would
forever be suspect, and the only hope of securing a loyal population
rested with a permanent garrison of troops in the main areas of settle-
ment and trade." 7 The author continued his argument by articulating the
reasons why Britain should instead maintain the West Indian islands while

returning Canada to France. To begin with, the American colonies were
increasingly undermining their own dependent economic and trading
status and would become more amenable to British policies if a foreign
Canada remained to check settler ambitions. Second, the possession of
Guadeloupe would draw the American colonies into a trading commu-
nity, which would serve British economic needs and more tightly bind the
colonies to the empire. Presciently evoking events to come, the author
wrote that unless there was continued French presence and a strength-
ened West Indies, "so extensive and fertile a country as North- America"
would not "long remain dependant upon . . . Great-Britain" without pro-
found "jealousies" undermining metropolitan authority. 8

At root, this "little Englander" view saw imperial Britain as primarily
a trading empire rather than one built on territorial expansion. As the
writer contended by drawing a lesson from history, territorial expansion
brought with it greed, corruption, and innumerable threats to the main-
tenance of civil rule at home and abroad:

Spain, in the beginning of the last century, was the dread of
Europe. . . . But behold the fatal consequences of such pernicious
measures in a state. Spain grasped at conquests in a foreign country
in the new world, so far above the extent and ability of the mother
country that she dispeopled herself: and though she conquered
those countries, the inexhaustible fountain of those precious met-
tles that the world hunt after with so insatiable an appetite, yet she
gradually declined from those mistaken maxims to the state she is
now in. 9

In questioning the wisdom of territorial conquest, the "little En-
glander" view recognized the radical changes such conquest meant for
British imperial rule. Prior to the 1760s, the British Empire was essen-
tially a small and mostly homogenous collection of American colonies,
in which Anglo-Protestant settlers expanded metropolitan territory and
economic power in North America and the Caribbean. These settlers
brought with them British political concepts and institutions, in particu-
lar a template for colonization drawn from the conquest of Ireland.
Moreover, during most of the eighteenth century, whatever wealth and
power the home country acquired from these colonies was relatively
limited, as compared with Spanish possessions and their "inexhaustible
fountain" of gold. 10 To speak of the British Empire was really to describe
a series of colonial settlements that reproduced Old World customs, in

26

which Anglo settlers saw themselves as privileged and free subjects of
Britain.

However, the extensive territorial additions of the 1760s brought an
unprecedented multitude of new peoples within British dominion, includ-
ing previous colonies of foreign powers as well as acquisitions in India
and elsewhere in Asia. As D. K. Fieldhouse notes, by the early nine-
teenth century this emerging British Empire was "of such size and
complexity that [it was] entirely new in European colonial history." 11
According to contemporary estimates, in 1763 such expansion meant
that Britain now claimed power over "an additional seventy-five thou-
sand French Canadians, approximately thirty thousand planters, slaves,
and Caribs in the Ceded Islands, perhaps one hundred thousand Native
Americans, a smattering of Spanish colonists in the Floridas, and, it
was believed, anywhere between ten and twenty million people in the
Bengal." 12

This massive addition of new peoples threw into relief problems of
how to maintain order over such a diverse empire and raised profound
questions about what legal structure and basic rights applied to these new
subjects. In the eighteenth century, the idea of subjectship retained the
medieval implications of a personal bond attaching between lord and
vassal. A subject enjoyed such status either due to birthright or from con-
quest or naturalization. The relationship between subject and sovereign
carried with it a series of obligations and rights. While the subject owed
the sovereign allegiance, the Crown in turn owed the subject protec-
tion. 13 In a sense, this newly polyglot empire faced a basic dilemma re-
garding the meaning of subjectship for non-Anglo peoples, particular
their relative status vis-a-vis Englishmen at home and in the colonies.
Were conquered peoples simply denied any relevant protections, did they
possess the same position and rights as natural-born Englishmen, or did
an alternative framework hold?

In 1768 William Knox, later the undersecretary for the American De-
partment, asserted with regard to new possessions in India, "They are
British colonies, and the inhabitants are British subjects, though gov-
erned by their own laws, or laws framed by the East-India company." 14
Knox was attempting to square the circle regarding status and rights by
categorizing all individuals falling under British authority as subjects. Yet
local customs rather than English traditions and political institutions
would establish the rights attaching to native subjects in faraway domin-
ions. For colonial administrators, the culturally diverse nature of the

emerging empire required two basic shifts in long-standing practice:
greater imperial centralization and increased toleration of indigenous
laws. In doing so, Knox and other administrators found themselves chal-
lenging (often unwittingly) basic assumptions of Anglo-Protestant colo-
nization and, as a result, the political supremacy of settlers within the
empire.

The Irish Experiment in Colonization
The critical national experience that did most to set the stage for the co-
lonial settlement of North America was the effort in the late sixteenth
century to conquer Celtic Ireland. 1 ^ Perhaps the clearest connection be-
tween such efforts and the future colonization of North America is that
numerous gentlemen and families, often from the English West Country,
played crucial roles in both the settlement of Ireland and later American
expeditions. Besides Walter Raleigh, Humphrey Gilbert, Ralph Lane, and
Thomas White, there were dual connections that lasted well into the
seventeenth century and included "such obvious cases as the Winthrop,
Calvert, and Penn families." 16 Yet, even more critically, out of its experi-
ence in Ireland, England developed a set of legal justifications for territo-
rial conquest as well as methods for asserting power and maintaining
political control over native communities.

Beginning in 1565, the English government sought to extend its do-
minion past the "Pale" — namely, Dublin and its direct surroundings —
and to bring all of Ireland under the control of the Crown, in the pro-
cess "planting" the region with Anglo farmers. As with most Elizabethan
attempts at expansion, this project was undertaken by private indi-
viduals who were given royal licenses to conquer and settle Irish land
for both personal and public profit. Although these efforts could be ex-
plained for economic and strategic reasons, the Crown and its colonists
were faced with two interlinked legal and ethical questions: First, what
gave the Crown legal right to new lands? And second, how could it jus-
tify removing the indigenous population and replacing it with English
settlers?

The initial question of rights to land could be solved with relative
ease, since according to the proponents of colonization the Norman con-
quests of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries established ownership over
most of Ireland. While indigenous groups had reasserted control over all
but the "Pale," the British argued that such occupation did not extinguish
the right of conquest, and therefore the native Irish were trespassers on

28

land possessed by the Crown. In fact, the British government went so far
as to claim that inheritance from the earls of Ulster, a line of long extinct
Norman conquerors, established the queen's legal title to the land. Un-
fortunately, the Norman precedent was less suited to Elizabethan plans
for controlling the indigenous population. Although the Normans had
driven off the Celtic ruling elite from conquered lands, they had never
displaced the general population and instead kept the native Irish as ag-
ricultural tenants. This framework was maintained by their descendents,
the Old English, whose nobility formed the governing class in Ireland at
the time of the Elizabethan expeditions. 17

As a result, in order to justify mass expropriation and settlement by
English colonists, the British invoked not the Norman practice vis-a-vis
the native Irish but the Norman feudal doctrine of conquest of infidel
lands. They did so by combining Christian and classical categories of sta-
tus to argue that the Irish were both pagans and savages and thus were
properly subject to extreme force. As with other Catholic communities,
the Normans held that wars conducted in the interests of the Church
were just — especially those such as the Crusades, which defended Chris-
tendom from Muslim infidels. Francis Jennings writes that in 1455, Pope
Nicholas V expanded this doctrine of just war and "empowered Portu-
gal's king to enslave the persons and seize the lands and property of 'all
Saracens and pagans whatsoever, and all other enemies of Christ what-
soever placed.' " 18 However, the Irish were difficult to categorize as hea-
thens because, like the Old English, they practiced a form of Catholi-
cism. Yet many of the English expansionists were extreme Protestants
and considered the Irish mixture of Catholic liturgy and pre-Christian
traditions to be both irreligious and clearly pagan. As Sir Henry Sidney, a
key sponsor of colonization, wrote: "They are all Papists by their profes-
sion . . . but in the same so blindly and brutishly informed for the most
part as that you would rather think them atheists or infidels." 19 Although
on shaky ground, Sidney and others sought to categorize the Irish as non-
Christians, religious enemies who could be killed or removed to make way
for new settlers.

As George Fredrickson has noted, such feudally inspired arguments
were buttressed by classical claims regarding civilization and savagery,
which provided additional moral legitimacy for practices of conquest.
As with many European communities, the English believed in a basic dis-
tinction between Christianity and civilization, namely, that peoples such as
the ancient Romans or Arab Muslims could be civil or semicivil without

being Christians. However, all Christian peoples were also civilized. The
Irish, much like the Native Indians of North and South America, appeared
to be both heathen and savage. For the English, such savagery primarily
meant that the native Irish retained political and social forms that the
colonists found unfamiliar and practiced transhumance (the seasonal
migration in search of better grazing land) rather than sedentary agricul-
ture. According to the sixteenth-century Spanish jurist, Juan Gines de
Sepulveda, savages were the "natural slaves" of civilized peoples who
could compel them by force of arms to submit to civilization. 20 English
colonists such as Peter Carew employed this logic to argue that they had
a moral duty, as well as a legal right, to raise the indigenous community
to the condition of civilization and, if they resisted, to use violence to
"suppress[] and reform[] . . . the loose, barbarous and most wicked life
of that savage nation." 21

By combining feudal and classical categories, the Crown and its colo-
nists developed an elaborate justification for Irish dispossession premised
on the belief that the "Wild Irish" could legitimately be excluded from
the political society formed by English settlers and brutally suppressed
when necessary. 22 As Walter Devereux, the first earl of Essex, opined af-
ter driving many of the Ulster Irish into the woods at the beginning of
winter, "how godly a dede it is to overthrowe so wicked a race the world
may judge: for my part I thinke there cannot be a greater sacryfice to
God." 23 The ultimate result was that in 1609, after forty years of war,
James I established a land settlement for Ulster in which "Four fifths of
the six counties of Northern Ireland were set aside for the exclusive oc-
cupancy of English or Scottish settlers; the native Irish were either driven
out of Ulster or concentrated in the residual one fifth — a series of small
reservations which they were forbidden to leave on penalty of death." 24
The similarities between the division of Ulster and the treatment of In-
dian tribes in North America are striking, both in terms of sheer brutality
as well as the legal and moral rationales given. In a sense, Ireland consti-
tuted an early test case or "rehearsal" 25 for colonial settlement, from
which the Crown exported a theory of conquest and expropriation. This
theory suggested that if indigenous communities failed to engage in proper
land use or religious worship, they in essence lost the right to claim terri-
torial sovereignty or to be governed by their own laws after conquest. For
the American colonists, just as for their English counterparts in Ulster, na-
tive groups were depicted as permanent threats to the new social order
and thus legitimately ruled by force or even eliminated.

JO

Coke, Locke, and the Ideological Basis for American Conquest
These feudal and classical arguments regarding conquest and status were
applied to North America and its peoples from the earliest efforts at sus-
tained colonization. The 1606 Royal Charter establishing the Virginia
Company provided a "Licence, to make Habitation, Plantation, and to
deduce a colony of sundry of our People into that part of America com-
monly called Virginia, and other parts and Territories in America, either
appertaining unto us, or which are not now actually possessed by any
Christian Prince or People." Under the charter, the purpose of coloniza-
tion rested on the king's duty, shared by all Christian princes, to convert
heathens to Christianity. Through a crusade of conquest, the company's
founders hoped to add to "the glory of his divine Majesty" by "propagat-
ing [the] Christian Religion to such People, as yet live in Darkness and
miserable Ignorance of the true Knowledge and Worship of God, and . . .
in time bring the Infidels and Savages, living in those parts, to human
Civility, and to a settled and quiet Government." 26

Among the likely drafters of the Royal Charter was Sir Edward Coke,
the great seventeenth-century English jurist who two years later in his
1608 decision in Calvin's Case further articulated the legal basis for im-
perial expansion. 27 The case concerned Robert Calvin, a Scotsman (prior
to the Union of Scotland and England), and his rights as an alien under
English law. However, Coke took the opportunity to address the question
of colonial conquest as well as the juridical distinction between friendly
and enemy aliens. To begin with, Coke argued that all kingly dominions
were either inherited or conquered — a distinction drawn from Roman
law — and used the Irish example as a basis for detailing the legal status
of conquered communities. He maintained that the conqueror enjoyed
an absolute power of life and death over conquered populations, a power
that included the ability to "alter and change the laws of that kingdom"
in any way that the king saw fit and "at his pleasure." 28 This meant that
Irish dispossession and harsh reservation policies were perfectly consis-
tent with a conqueror's authority over conquered subjects, since such
groups legally could be killed or enslaved.

While not specifically mentioning the American colonies, Coke clearly
viewed them as conquered dominions as well, 29 an important claim that
would become critical in the Revolutionary-era debates over the imperial
status of North America. He also took care to articulate the relevant
legal position of indigenous groups under royal dominion. He did so by

emphasizing how conquered subjects may well possess fewer legal rights
than actual foreigners, due to the differences between friendly and enemy
aliens. According to Coke, "Every man is either alienigena, an alien born, or
subditus, a subject born. Every alien is either a friend that is in league, etc.
or an enemy that is in open war, etc." Coke described Germans, French, and
Spanish, "all the Kings and princes in Christendom being now in league
with our sovereign," as friendly aliens who could acquire English goods,
land, and housing and bring suits before English courts to defend those
rights. As for enemy populations, they possessed no rights that the Crown
and its courts needed to respect, and, further, infidel peoples were the
permanent enemies of the English Crown: "All infidels are in law perpe-
tui inimici, perpetual enemies (for the law presumes not that they will be
converted, that being remota potentia, a remote possibility), for between
them, as with devils, whose subjects they be, and the Christian, there is
perpetual hostility, and can be no peace." In essence, Coke argued that as
infidels, indigenous peoples were outside the bounds of those legal or po-
litical protections afforded Christians. And once conquered, such subjects
could be treated as one would "devils" or perpetual enemies — through
harsh discipline or even extermination. Here Coke subtly transformed the
meaning of the Virginia Royal Charter's license, which originally empha-
sized the colonization of lands in order to convert Native Americans.
While an enterprise of religious conversion remained just, if conversation
failed it was also legitimate to engage in permanent war with Indian
tribes. 30

Coke continued by making explicit precisely how absolute the king's
powers were with regard to such lands. "If a Christian King should con-
quer a kingdom of an infidel, and bring them under his subjection, there
ipso facto the laws of the infidel are abrogated, for that they be not only
against Christianity, but against the law of God and of nature, contained
in the decalogue." In other words, Coke established the applicability of
the feudal law of conquest for all non-Christian peoples — including Na-
tive Americans — regardless of whether they had in fact threatened the
Crown. While holding on to the ancient categories of inherited and con-
quered dominions, he nonetheless rejected the pre-Christian Roman view
that conquered peoples could maintain their own laws and that no dis-
tinction should be made on the basis of worship. Rather, Coke concluded
that, while in conquered Christian lands previous laws remained valid
until the king chose to alter them, in infidel lands the king immediately
ruled through his absolute discretionary power: "The King by himself,

M

and such judges as he shall appoint, shall judge them and their causes
according to natural equity, in such sort as Kings in ancient time did with
their kingdoms, before any certain municipal laws were given." As articu-
lated by Coke, the feudal discourse of the Crusades provided both the
legal backbone of European colonization and underscored the unlimited
nature of imperial authority over indigenous subjects. 31

In many ways, Coke's approach to native peoples mirrored not only
the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland but also changes that were taking
place in Virginia and other colonies. While the 1606 Royal Charter for
the Virginia Company emphasized conquest as a method of religious con-
version, the new charter launched in 1609 along with the James River
colony deemphasized conversion and focused instead on subjugating In-
dian tribes through military control. Under Governor Thomas Gates's
new laws for the colony, the clear focus became compelling allegiance
from native communities through force. As conquered subjects of the
Crown, Indian tribes were to pay tribute to the colony, and any chiefs
who refused would be taken prisoner. Yet, despite owing obedience to
the same king as Anglo settlers, indigenous groups were by no means
supposed to intermingle with the Jamestown colony. According to Gates's
laws, when Indians visited Jamestown, they were to be placed under
guard, and no colonists were allowed to speak with them without the
governor's approval. Moreover, settler attempts to leave the colony and
live among Indian tribes became crimes punishable by death. Thus the
notion that Indians were subjects of the Crown carried with it little by
way of protection and rights. It simply meant that native communities
were compelled to pledge allegiance to a discretionary and absolute royal
authority or face continual warfare, with the latter an increasingly ruth-
less and persistent element of early colonial life. 32

During the seventeenth century, the moral justifications for such indig-
enous expropriation and treatment were not solely premised on the
Christian-heathen distinction. As with the Irish conquest, these arguments
utilized views about savagery and civilization. These views defined civili-
zation in large measure according to land use and also served to reinforce
narratives about the lawlessness of Indians and the legitimacy of discre-
tionary power toward them. Some seventy years after Calvin's Case, John
Locke in chapter V of his Second Treatise of Government, titled "Of
Property," crystallized the higher natural law legitimacy for both English
colonization and settler control of indigenous land. 33 Locke's personal
connections to efforts at American colonization were long-standing and

lasted until nearly the end of his life. Between 1669 and 1675 Locke was
secretary to the proprietors of the colony of Carolina; from October
1673 to December 1674 he also served as secretary and treasurer to the
English Council for Trade and Foreign Plantations; and from 1696 to
1700 he was secretary to that council's successor, the Board of Trade.
In a remarkable piece of detective work, David Armitage has provided
extensive evidence that in the summer of 1682, when Locke was most
likely writing chapter V of the Second Treatise, he was also revising the
Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina. This finding supports the so-called
colonial interpretation of chapter V and helps to explain the frequency of
examples drawn from North America. 34

In chapter V, Locke justified colonial conquest on agriculturalist
grounds, which separated savage Indians, who left America a "wild woods
and uncultivated waste," from civilized settlers who through industry
and labor transformed nature into valuable property. Locke's argument
proceeded initially from a labor theory of private property, which took
as given both that "God gave the World to Men in Common" and that all
individuals possessed a right to self-preservation. Due to this right, Locke
argued that "it cannot be supposed he [God] meant it should always
remain common and uncultivated," and Locke thus viewed private ac-
quisition as necessary for human subsistence. However, such acquisi-
tion would be legitimate only if it were the product of individual labor,
because

Every man has a property in his own person: this no body has any
right to but himself. The labour of his body, and the work of his
hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes
out of the state that nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath
mixed his labour with, and joined to it something that is his own,
and thereby makes it his property.

Critically, Locke rejected the notion that consent by others was necessary
for individuals to enclose lands, so long as there was "enough, and as
good left in common. If such consent was necessary, man would have
starved, despite God's plenty given him." 35

For Locke, North America embodied the pristine state of nature. Here
land remained uncultivated, plentiful, and open to property claims from
whoever mixed their labor with nature. Hidden in his famous phrase, "in
the beginning all the world was America," were a series of interrelated
conclusions. To begin with, because such land had not been appropriated

34

and was communally owned, native peoples had no land rights that En-
gland or its settlers were bound to respect. Since God gave property "to the
use of the Industrious and Rational, (and Labour was to be his Title to
it)," validating the idle native's claim to tenure contradicted both com-
mon sense and the higher law of nature. The implication of this point
clearly mapped Coke's view that all infidel laws were ipso facto abro-
gated. As Armitage writes, "Only after land had been appropriated in
this way could it be apportioned 'by compact and Agreement' in those
parts of the world where a monetary economy has been introduced and
land has become scarce." In other words, since America existed in a state
of nature prior to both private property and civil government, native
peoples were viewed as necessarily lawless. Mirroring arguments made
by Coke, Locke concluded that indigenous law (a contradiction in terms)
did not bind England and that Indian tribes could not be party to any
valid contract. By allowing "great tracts of ground" to lie in waste, "the
inhabitants [of America] thereof [had not] joined with the rest of man-
kind, in the consent of the use of their common money," the basis for all
legitimate land sales. As David Armitage notes, this view closely followed
the Fundamental Constitutions, which "expressly banned settlers in Car-
olina from holding or claiming any land by 'purchase or gift' from the
natives, a clear sign that contracts there could only hold among Anglo-
Americans." In essence, Locke's invocation of the civilized-savage dichot-
omy and its emphasis on sedentary agriculture as a basis for political
recognition buttressed the feudal discourse of conquest. While employing
a separate moral language, Locke provided a concurrent justification for
settler expansion and indigenous dispossession. 36

We see this even more clearly in his distinction between industry and
idleness, what Locke considered the basis for separating the settler from
the native and thus the civilized from the savage. According to him, set-
tlers' claims to American land were not just acceptable but rose to the
level of a moral necessity compelled by higher natural law:

To which let me add, that he who appropriates land to himself by
his labour, does not lessen but increase the common stock of man-
kind. For the provisions serving to support human life, produced
by one acre of inclosed and cultivated land, are (to speak much
within compasse) ten times more, than those, which are yielded by
an acre of land, of an equal richnesse, lyeing in waste in common.
And therefore he, that incloses land and has a greater plenty of the

conveniences of life from ten acres, thus he could have from a hun-
dred left to nature, may truly said to give ninety acres to mankind.
For this labour now supplys him with provisions out of ten acres,
which were but the product of an hundred lying in common. 37

Thus, in the same way that the project of heathen conversion required
English conquest, the goal of collective improvement also necessitated
Anglo settlement of uncultivated lands. Each account transformed the
externally violent character of settler society into a moral requirement.
Just as heathens unwilling to convert to Christianity should be defeated
by force, the savage incapable of productive agriculture must be removed
to make way for industrious and rational colonists.

Of course, one should note that Locke's arguments took place against
a North American backdrop in which settler property claims with re-
spect to indigenous inhabitants were in reality far more complicated. As
Stuart Banner demonstrates, throughout the colonial era, alongside direct
seizure, private purchase or gifts from native communities emerged as
common modes of acquisition. Banner comments that while seventeenth-
century settlers repeatedly asserted that their land claims did not depend
on indigenous consent, the overwhelming tendency was to acquire prop-
erty through legal processes rather than through outright conquest. He
writes that even the Virginia Company followed this norm, as "for all
the Company's theorizing about its right to take the land, in the end the
Company purchased it from the Indians." Exigent circumstances made
the reasons for purchase fairly straightforward. Colonial administrators
sought to limit warfare with still powerful native groups. In fact, the ini-
tial need to punish settler desertion by death in Jamestown suggested
the relative prosperity of local tribes by comparison with the struggling
colony. Perhaps more important over the long term, practices of pur-
chase helped to ensure that settler land titles were valid and peaceably
distributed. 38

Despite the fact that acquisition proceeded largely through legal
forms, English theories of prerogative right should not be dismissed. For
settlers, the project of land ownership was understood in moral terms,
as required by reason and as necessary to ensure that property was made
to serve the goals of industry and progress. Thus, while Locke's call to
void all contracts with native groups may have been challenged on the
ground, his underlying rationale articulated a critical basis for indigenous
dispossession. In essence, Anglo assumptions about the linkage between

.56

property and progress inevitably cast settler-native arrangements as inher-
ently temporary. Such arrangements could be revised or even rescinded
when they came into conflict with the moral or material goals of settler
society.

Royal Discretion over Settlers in Early Colonization

As the seventeenth century progressed, both the London metropole and its
local colonists largely could agree that Indians were conquered and infi-
del subjects, without a sovereign claim over the land they occupied.
But what remained uncertain was the precise legal and political status of
the settlers themselves. Were they, too, conquered subjects as a conse-
quence of living on newly seized territory, or did they enjoy a fundamen-
tally different position by virtue of English background and Protestant
religion?

Ehe earliest English response to the dilemma might be surprising
to readers today. Initially, colonial authorities in London and in North
America imposed a vision of royal power that situated settlers on a con-
tinuum of feudal subjectship alongside native groups and even African
slaves. Early Anglo settlers did not necessarily enjoy a unique plethora of
ancestral rights and privileges; rather, they were often treated legally and
politically as no different than any other conquered population, con-
fronted by martial law and coercive forms of labor discipline. Over time,
however, settlers reshaped these arrangements by drawing intellectually
on the revival of republican ideas in England and by asserting a new so-
cial framework of Anglo supremacy vis-a-vis other subject groups. Yet,
despite its replacement by new practices on the ground, this initial his-
tory of colonization (and its legal presumptions) never entirely disap-
peared. During the Revolutionary period, it provided the context for
conflicts between London and the settler colonies over the appropriate-
ness of employing discretionary royal power to control unruly Anglo
subjects.

Calvin's Case Revisited: Stratified Subjectship and the Continuum
between Settlers and Natives
At the beginning of North American colonization, the idea of royal subject-
ship did not carry with it a presumption of elevated legal or political status.
Even less did it imply notions of liberty and participation that we today
connect to terms like "citizenship." Instead, subjectship simply entailed

being under the dominion of the king and thus subject to his royal power.
For the first settlers, there was no fundamental divide separating many
Anglo colonists from non-Anglo groups. In practice, one's position as a
property owner — and thus one's social class — meant far more than eth-
nicity in determining rights and privileges. Perhaps the best way to draw
out these realities is by returning once more to Coke's landmark decision
in Calvin's Case. Along with justifying indigenous conquest, this case ar-
ticulated the Crown's vision of the ties between monarchical authority
and political membership.

At the heart of Coke's decision was an effort to clarify the meaning of
English subjectship and the relation between the various distinct com-
munities under the king's power — settler and native alike. In doing so,
Coke emphasized the natural and feudal hierarchies that existed among
all individuals. These hierarchies established relationships of inferiority
and superiority, in which the stronger provided protection for the weaker
in return for obedience. For Coke, the tie between parent and child best
exemplified the natural and immutable character of these bonds of recip-
rocal obligation. 39 Similar to a child's fealty toward a parent, a subject
owed obedience to that sovereign king who protected the individual at
the time of his birth. According to Coke, "This ligeance and obedience is
an incident inseparable to every subject: for as soon as he is born he
oweth by birth-right ligeance and obedience to his Sovereign." 40 Of criti-
cal importance, while this tie between sovereign and subject was recip-
rocal, it was by no means the product of a political contract nor did it
depend on the continued effective exercise of protection by a king. For
Coke, "ligeance" was perpetual and pre-political; it embodied a personal
bond that attached to the king himself rather than to his constitutional
status as ruler of a particular kingdom, and it therefore lasted from birth
until death.

Today we often see the foundational right of membership in a politi-
cal community as the right to vote. 41 Yet, in the seventeenth century, the
primary benefit of pre-political and perpetual subjectship involved the
protection of land or real property. The persistence of feudal allegiances
meant that property ownership provided the basis for political sover-
eignty, with landed elites often determining the rights and activity of lo-
cal inhabitants. 42 In fact, other privileges (including the franchise and
political office) usually had extensive property qualifications and thus
were at root grounded in landholding. In England, as in much of early
modern Europe, as a general policy only sovereign subjects could enjoy

the benefits of inheritance and therefore properly possess land. 43 For the
king's subjects, the common law — which served as England's land law —
provided the primary means for safeguarding one's legal right to prop-
erty. In other words, it embodied the essence of those meaningful protec-
tions offered by the Crown in return for obedience.

Still, status as a royal subject by no means necessitated that one en-
joyed the privileges conferred by the common law. This was because
just as natural inequalities justified a noncontractual and immutable alle-
giance to the Crown, these inequalities also stratified social membership
across a variety of political and legal dimensions. In the emerging empire,
the distinct constitutional status accorded different dominions under the
king's rule provided a key illustration of such stratified subjectship.
Under Coke's vision, much like a large family marked by common pater-
nity, the Crown's community of allegiance consisted of aggregating all
the individual relationships of obedience joining specific subjects to their
king. 44 Yet the actual rights accorded each subject depended not on this
natural community of allegiance but rather on the constitutional frame-
work constructed for each particular kingdom and its inhabitants. A
central implication according to Daniel Hulsebosch was that the com-
mon law, rather than being a jurisprudential structure that extended
abroad with the king's rule, was a set of institutions (including the West-
minster courts and common-law bar) that were jurisdictionally limited
to England. 45

As a result, Coke argued that subjects in other dominions did not in-
herently enjoy English liberties like trial by jury and common-law prop-
erty rights. The Crown's mandatory and remedial writs were present
only in England and could not "by any means extend into any other king-
dom, country, or nation, though that it be under the King's actual ligeance
and obedience." 46 In other words, if a subject were born in a royal I
tory, although he could hold land in England and sue in English co
the common-law framework did not automatically extend to legal prac-
tices abroad. Moreover, if a subject became naturalized in a dominion
outside of England, his rights in that dominion did not necessarily trans-
fer to other parts of the empire. 47

As one among many groups of stratified subjects, the consequences
for Anglo colonists in North America were clear. If indigenous subjects
faced a discretionary royal prerogative, early settlers did not themselves
necessarily enjoy expansive protections or treatment equal to Englishmen
at home. If anything, during the beginning stage of colonial expansion, the

treatment of settlers on conquered land was often ruthless, and they were
controlled as if they too were conquered peoples. 48 The same laws estab-
lished by Governor Gates to subjugate Indian tribes also set forth deeply
coercive forms of authority over settlers. The new colony, which quickly
exceeded the initial settlement in Jamestown, was organized into what
John Smith called a series of "forts" or "hundreds." These forts were at
root military camps largely ruled by martial law under the absolute dis-
cretion of the appointed governor. 49 In order to discipline the settler
work force, Anglo subjects were divided into work gangs, which carried
out assigned tasks with rest intervals strictly set by the beating of a mili-
tary drum. so The laws established the death penalty for a wide range of
infractions, including blasphemy, theft, and lying, and were enforced
with striking brutality. Edmund Morgan tells us, "For stealing two or three
pints of oatmeal a man had a needle thrust through his tongue and was
then chained to a tree until he starved." 51 Although the use of martial law
in England had become a political and legal scandal during this period, it
was seen as both legitimate and necessary in North America. 52 Without
harsh military authority, the new colony, which already teetered on the
edge of collapse, would be unable to feed itself, fend off Indian raids, or
avoid massive desertion.

In essence, Coke's vision of subjectship viewed Indians and settlers as
fundamentally alike in key ways. Each group owed a pre-political and
noncontractual obedience to the king, which could not be dissolved.
Moreover, the idea that different dominions enjoyed distinct constitu-
tional frameworks meant that the Crown was well within its rights to
employ coercive and arbitrary power against both conquered popula-
tions and Anglo colonists. Under this vision of stratified subjectship, all
social members were dependents of a kingly and paternal authority, and
for those on conquered territory this discretion could be quite extensive
indeed.

Degrees of Unfreedom: Indentured Servitude
and the Rise of African Slavery
Along with conquered subjects and those settlers living under martial
law, this vision of stratified subjectship also constructed modes of discre-
tionary authority over the poor generally — with the propertyless often
under coercive regimes of economic and political discipline. It empha-
sized the continuities in legal status and social experience between those
facing bondage in both North America and England, regardless of Anglo

descent, religion, or ethnicity. In other words, in the earliest stages of North
American colonization, Anglo settlers — simply by virtue of being settlers —
were not clearly demarcated as a qualitatively separate group. For the most
part, they existed along the same spectrum of often harsh control as other
nonprivileged subjects of the Crown.

While the landed gentry in England may have enjoyed the protections
of the common law, for the many landless poor, everyday life was riddled
with compulsion. Wealthy property owners viewed the propertyless as
roving masses untied to any community and a threat to the social fabric.
Not unlike their colonial counterparts in Virginia, such owners sought to
strengthen labor discipline and to transform poor peasants into produc-
tive workers. As a result, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies a variety of proposals advocating forced labor were seriously con-
sidered or adopted. In particular, workhouses and prisons, or "houses of
correction," the first established under Elizabeth I in 1576, were created
to teach the impoverished and unemployed not only the habits of work
but greater efficiency. As Sir Mathew Hale wrote, workhouses would com-
pel the poor "and their children after them into a Regular, Orderly and
Industrious course of life, which will be as natural to them as now Idleness,
and Begging, and Theeving is." 53

Advocates of forced labor believed that poor children in particular
should be put to work, at the very early age of four, according to Sir
William Temple, or at three according to none other than John Locke. 54
Such routine developed discipline and helped to minimize the likelihood
that poor laborers would revolt or threaten economic production. Many
economists went so far as to argue that these children should not be
taught to read or write at all, since it might lead to idleness or even sedi-
tion. According to one pamphlet, "for few that have once learnt to Write
and Read, but either their Parents, or themselves, are apt to think, that
they are fit for some Preferments, and in order to it, despise all Labouring
Employments and live Idle, rather than disparage themselves by Work." 55
Besides workhouses and prisons, the period also saw the creation of
measures providing mining monopolies the right to conscript workers as
well as comprehensive proposals for the introduction of slavery. 56 An-
drew Fletcher, the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher, argued in 1698
that the 200,000 unemployed in Scotland should be made slaves to prop-
erty holders in order to reduce crime, begging, and drunkenness. 57 The
emphasis on "idleness" and the fear of social disorder made poverty a
mark of profound inferiority, such that the poor were excluded and

segregated from social life in ways similar to indigenous groups or, later,
African slaves. 58 In fact, in 1697 Parliament went so far as to require re-
cipients of poor relief to wear the letter P prominently on the right-hand
shoulder. 59

A primary way England coped with this danger was by literally ship-
ping the poor to the American colonies, particularly Virginia and Mary-
land. Such a policy had also been pursued in the Elizabethan settlement
in Ireland, and a basic tenet of English expansion was the belief that colo-
nies aided the metropole by taking excess population from the mother
country. In 1683 some 12,000 indentured Anglo servants lived in Virginia,
one-sixth of the total population, which also included numerous poor
laborers who had finished their time as servants. 60 Of these servants and
ex-servants, many were once beggars and starving children in England
who had simply been kidnapped and shipped to North America in bond-
age. 61 The forms of indentured servitude that developed in the colonies
were often even more severe than the practice of forced labor at home.
As Fredrickson writes:

The usual term for English servants was one year, and they were
paid wages; whereas the indentured worker was in effect a debt
bondsman serving several years without pay to cancel the obliga-
tion owed to the master for assuming the costs of passage. Where
English service was usually based on voluntary contract enforced
by civil action, criminal penalties were prescribed for the inden-
tured servant who ran away or otherwise reneged on the term of
contract. . . . Unlike most English servants, American bondsmen
could be bought and sold. Sometimes their masters even used them
as gambling stakes. In practice, as well as in law, they appeared to
have been subjected to an even crueler and more degrading regime
than members of the dependent classes in England. 62

These widespread practices of forced labor, made even more stringent in
the colonies, underscored the compatibility between status as a natural-
born Anglo subject and an extensive system of economic and social con-
trol. It also set the stage for the colonial use of African slavery, by empha-
sizing the appropriateness of bondage as a method of creating disciplined
work forces as well as the continuity between various degrees of involun-
tary servitude.

By the mid-seventeenth century, problems of social unrest and labor
discipline had become endemic in the middle and southern colonies. The

-12

number of indentured servants had created a propertyless class of poor
and unemployed workers akin to those found in England. In the earliest
days of colonial settlement, the problem of landless poverty had not been
a serious difficulty due to the combination of high mortality rates and the
availability of cheap land. Freed servants who survived the rigors of col-
onization could purchase such land and eventually become planters and
yeoman farmers in their own right. In fact, Fredrickson points out that
the diffusion of property ownership led to the remarkable practice of
universal freeman suffrage in Virginia's earliest colonial assembly. This
right was restricted only in 1670 as reduced mortality rates and tempo-
rary land scarcity led to a large class of landless poor. As a result of these
forces, African slavery became a successful means of maintaining an
adequate labor supply while reducing the possible threats posed by land-
less settlers — threats made evident in political disturbances such as Ba-
con's Rebellion of 1676. Propertied elites hoped to replace a dangerous
class of dispossessed settlers, clamoring for land and political control,
with a potentially more docile slave population. Slavery was also con-
sistent with changing metropolitan views regarding emigration. Political
leaders in England increasingly argued that the overpopulation crisis
had subsided, and if anything England suffered from underpopulation
and needed to keep its own poor to work in the emerging industrial
economy. 63

In this context, the widespread English application of forced labor, at
home and in the colonies, created philosophical and practical space for
the development of the large-scale importation of African slaves. The
basic legal justification drew from Coke's arguments about the absolute
power of life and death that conquerors held over conquered popula-
tions. In chapter IV of the Second Treatise, titled "Of Slavery," Locke fa-
mously drew out the implications of Coke's position. He maintained that
slavery was a condition of the state of nature that persisted after the cre-
ation of the social contract and remained unaffected by the rights and
obligations arising between parties to that contract. Besides drawing
from Coke, Locke's claims followed the established European legal doc-
trine regarding slavery, namely, that it was an absolute state of unfree-
dom produced by crime or captivity in war. As such, rather than being
killed outright, the captor deferred the slave's death in favor of bondage. 64
According to Locke, "This is the perfect condition of slavery, which is
nothing else, but the state of war continued, between a lawful conqueror
and a captive.'' ' 6S Although slavery was applied on a large scale only to

Africans, it should be noted that the basic justifications for slavery com-
bined prisoner-of-war arguments with the prevailing discourse of con-
quest. As heathens, African slaves were seen as conquered infidels whose
laws were ipso facto void and whose lives were subject entirely to the
dictates of the conqueror. The fact that slavery was not initially justified
on strictly racial lines is underscored by the seventeenth-century small-
scale enslavement of Native Americans, on grounds of conquest, captiv-
ity, and heathenism, as well as by proposals for the enslavement of poor
whites back home.

If anything, relations in the seventeenth century between Africans and
Anglo settlers were remarkably fluid. They underscored how the initial
development of slavery owed more to questions of labor discipline than
to race status. For instance, during the earliest period of African bondage
in the colonies, slaves were often regarded as similar to Anglo indentured
servants and thus were freed after a definite term of service. This along
with private practices of manumission led to the growth of a sizeable free
black community, which in the mid- to late seventeenth century likely
comprised a larger portion of the African population in Virginia and other
southern slave colonies than at any other time before 1860s emancipa-
tion. 66 In places like Massachusetts, mid-seventeenth-century free blacks
were generally accorded the same rights as settler subjects and did not
appear to face systematic forms of legal and economic discrimination. 67
In Virginia, free blacks were able to acquire property, vote, hold minor
office, take legal action against Anglo settlers, and even own their own
white indentured servants. During this era, a small number became
wealthy landholders with slaves of their own. Thus, although black servi-
tude no doubt precipitated the development of racial distinctions, at the
time free blacks were by and large integrated into settler life and gener-
ally enjoyed a status similar to that of emancipated white servants. 68

In fact, the very earliest miscegenation laws seemed more concerned
with maintaining a clear labor supply than with rigidly demarcating ra-
cial lines. In 1664 Maryland's first miscegenation law punished the mar-
riage between African slaves and free Anglo women but pointedly did
not affect the marriage of such women to free blacks. Moreover, the pur-
pose of the law was not to eliminate these unions. Masters were worried
that the children of slaves would gain the free status of their mothers and
thus undermine a consistent labor force. As a result, the law stipulated that
free Anglo servants who married African slaves would themselves be-
come slaves. The law highlighted the fact that interracial marriages were

relatively common, at least common enough to warrant regulation. In
fact, after its passage masters often encouraged these marriages in order
to extend their workforce. If anything, the law further reinforced how
social distinctions in early colonial life placed greater relative weight on
one's status as a property holder than it did on the race of bonded or free

Thus, at the beginning of North American colonization, England ex-
ported abroad a vision of royal subjectship that was stratified across a
variety of hierarchies and which created a patchwork constitutional
structure. Under this account, while everyone in the king's various do-
minions was the natural and permanent subject of the Crown, only exten-
sive property owners in England could be guaranteed meaningful political
authority or fully benefit from the legal rights established by the common
law. For many colonial subjects, whether propertyless Anglo settlers,
African slaves, or Indian tribes, subjectship in practice meant the applica-
tion of discretionary and coercive forms of royal prerogative. It also
meant that settlers existed on a social continuum alongside other non-
Anglo subjects. While they no doubt enjoyed some greater privileges due
to their role in extending imperial territory and power, they were not
treated as qualitatively distinct from other communities. Fundamentally,
settlers — like indigenous groups — were "children" of a royal father and,
depending on their class position or which dominion they inhabited, may
well have found themselves facing coercive modes of authority.

Settler Supremacy and the Rise of Republican Freedom

Settlers during the earliest stages of North American expansion may have
been one group among many stratified subjects. But as time passed, con-
ditions in the colonies and political developments in England gradually
worked to restructure imperial relationships and, in the process, to en-
trench settlers' social and political supremacy over non-Anglo popula-
tions. I argue that, as a consequence, settler life diverged dramatically
from Coke's paternal framework and over time produced a local account
of membership that marked a fundamental divide between free Anglo
subjects and mere imperial subjects. While the account of pre-political
allegiance to a discretionary royal authority may have been appropriate
for conquered peoples, Anglo settlers increasingly saw their colonial so-
cieties as experiments in collective freedom. This belief drew heavily
from the writings of English republicans and critics of Stuart absolutism,

such as James Harrington, Algernon Sydney, and — for all his continuities
with Coke — John Locke himself. For such thinkers, economic and politi-
cal independence were the touchstones of liberty.

In the colonies, indigenous threats as well as the emerging experience
of diffuse land ownership radicalized these arguments and underscored
the centrality of self-rule — not only in politics but also at work and in
church — for any meaningful vision of freedom. In this section, I outline
how English republicanism was transferred and extended in the colonial
setting. I also contend that republican liberty became intertwined with
two increasingly prominent features of settler society. The first was the
belief that freedom was part and parcel of a millennial Protestant faith,
which sought to establish the kingdom of heaven on earth. Equally im-
portant was the sense that not only did internal liberty require external
domination but that freedom was under permanent siege by menacing
forces — be they French Catholics, Native Americans, or African slaves.

Colonial Social Mobility and the Emergence of the
¥ree Anglo Subject
The first crack in the early English framework developed out of dicta in
Calvin's Case itself. There Coke had argued that although the common
law was jurisdictionally limited, some English rights did in fact attach to
natural subjects who emigrated to newly conquered Christian lands. On
these lands, whenever Englishmen moved to non-English dominions, the
king still had to respect core liberties and protections — what Coke
described as "the like privileges and benefits ... as they may have in En-
gland." 70 These core liberties were essentially twofold. First, Anglo colo-
nists should enjoy property rights, which allowed them to hold land
under English tenure rules. Second, they were worthy of some degree of
political consent, and therefore local authority should be organized at least
in part through parliamentary government. 71 In laying out this argument,
Coke made clear not to include conquered infidel territory, perhaps due
to his involvement with the Virginia colony and concerns about the need
for harsh rule in order to maintain order in the New World.

Eventually, however, Coke's dicta came to apply in practice to all con-
quered dominions, often for reasons of basic imperial self-interest. In the
1620s, the Virginia colony moved to replace cooperative tenancy, which
provided dividends to farmers, with an individual property regime that
mimicked the common-law approach. Such changes were instituted in
large measure to reassure prospective settlers, who may have been wary

of emigrating to lands without these basic legal rules. 72 In essence, colo-
nists in North America began to develop a two-track approach to prop-
erty rights and consent. In place of martial law, Anglo settlers enjoyed
core liberties and common-law protections, while indigenous subjects
were governed by whatever means the Crown viewed as necessary for
maintaining authority and gaining native tribute.

These divisions between Anglo settlers and conquered populations
hardened against a backdrop in which colonists increasingly gained far
more economic and political independence than even their English breth-
ren at home. While the terms for indentured servitude were indeed harsher
in the colonies, they also offered servants a better chance of one day becom-
ing actual property owners. Those who survived the difficulties of forced
or voluntary migration and won land in America could claim a hard-fought
freedom and independence both from the landed elites and the dangers of
living on the edge of starvation. Despite the greater intensity of the work
regime, the availability of land made social mobility a lived reality for
many settlers. As a consequence, colonial life slowly entrenched a vision
of the virtuous yeoman farmer, who through industry and the cultivation of
wild land could find self-worth and social standing after the poverty and
exclusion of England.

Facilitating this development was the large-scale use of African slav-
ery, which played a central role in improving the economic and political
position of Anglo settlers. 73 While before the 1680s white indentured
servitude provided most of Virginia's labor, the colony soon became de-
pendent almost entirely on slave production, particularly for its menial
work. As African slaves replaced indentured English servants on the plan-
tations, newly freed whites began to enjoy greater prosperity, access to
land, and social standing vis-a-vis landed elites. In order to protect this
Anglo prosperity and to maintain control over slaves, colonies also be-
gan to institute systematic forms of racial discrimination. Perhaps the
very first such law was passed in 1670 and denied free blacks in Virginia
the right to own white indentured servants. By the early eighteenth cen-
tury, in various colonies, intermarriage had been outlawed, restrictions
placed on private manumission, and free blacks deprived of basic rights
(including the franchise). 74 In fact, free blacks were generally reduced from
an element within settler society to a segregated and separate caste denied
most legal protections. A primary justification was one that would recur
over the next century and a half and that gained particular prominence
in the years immediately preceding the American Revolution. Settlers

feared that a sizeable and empowered black community would promote
slave insurrections, through both their actions and mere example. 75

The hardening of this division between free settlers on the one hand
and native or black subjects on the other hand should not be understood
as coincidental. Rather, the conquest of native territory and the extension
of African slavery were conditions by which Anglo settlers sought to
strengthen their egalitarian internal relationships. While conquest opened
new land for Anglo farmers, slavery freed settlers from harsh labor disci-
pline and economic bondage. Both developments entrenched diffuse land
ownership and emphasized the position of Anglo settlers as privileged
subjects of the Crown, enjoying special status and protection. Thus this
elevation of the Anglo position undermined the framework of stratified
membership, in which settlers were placed alongside blacks and natives
on the same hierarchical continuum. Instead, based on ethnicity and Prot-
estant faith, settlers saw themselves alone as free Englishmen, a position
more akin to our ideas of citizenship or civic membership. By contrast,
non-Anglo communities were best understood as imperial subjects facing
a legitimately coercive royal prerogative. In other words, these nonsettler
groups, precisely because of their outsider status, were distinctively un-
der the power of a paternal king, who imposed differential and discre-
tionary regimes of rule depending on the necessities of colonization and
empire.

This separation between free settlers and stratified imperial subjects
was further reinforced by the British use of private and largely decentral-
ized colonial settlements to extend the Crown's authority. Such a method
of imperial rule meant that settlers steadily asserted greater practical au-
tonomy from metropolitan London, since they were the ones often mak-
ing decisions about the structure of local institutions and the future of
colonial expansion. Most ironically, this autonomy and political decen-
tralization reversed Coke's classic hierarchy between English subjects on
the island and in conquered dominions. Rather than being at the bottom
of the continuum, on a day-to-day basis a Massachusetts or Virginia set-
tler was more likely than an Englishman in London to control the condi-
tions of his own economic and political life.

As one consequence, by the mid-eighteenth century, in the chartered
colonies of New England the Crown possessed virtually no direct power,
as the governor and the executive council were both elected. Even in
royal colonies like Virginia, where these positions were Crown appoint-
ments, the colonies eventually instituted representative legislative bodies

with the plenary power to make colonial law so long as it coincided with
imperial statutes and received metropolitan consent. The colonies also
organized local government, with settlers providing the justices of peace
and even establishing municipalities with powers analogous to English
chartered boroughs. Moreover, settlers came to take as given that common-
law protection was the birthright of all Anglo subjects, no matter where
they were born or now resided. Along with property rights, this entailed
the provision of trial by jury and habeas corpus as basic privileges guar-
anteed to all English colonists and their descendents. 76

Eventually colonists began to argue that their relative freedom from
metropolitan oversight was a matter of legal right rather than simply de
facto circumstances. They did so by drawing directly from arguments
made by Locke about property holding in North America. These argu-
ments questioned whether the colonies were indeed conquered at all and
presented Anglo plantations instead as "settled" land. This category of
royal dominion had its basis in the legal principle of res nullius, or the no-
tion that "a thing with no owner belongs to the first finder." 77 For the
Crown and its administrators in London, as with other imperial officials
in Europe, res nullius had generally been ignored as a justification for
empire, because it contradicted the evident reality of indigenous presence
and conquest. Yet Locke's notion of untilled land as an "uncultivated
waste" suggested that territory could be both inhabited and still empty for
moral and political purposes. For colonists, despite metropolitan doubts,
viewing North America as settled land had important legal implications.
Unlike conquered territory, settled land enjoyed the same basic status as
provinces in England — particularly with regard to property protections
and the common law generally.

Just as critically, the legal notion of settled land further undermined
the position of Indian tribes — in a way that even outstripped arguments
derived from feudal conquest. Imagining North America as "settled" did
not merely reject indigenous property claims; it presupposed a funda-
mental erasure of Indian presence. It justified colonial acquisition as
morally necessary, because only settlers transformed the North American
wilderness into a site for social utility. By contrast, the Indian failure to
do so meant that as a moral fact they did not exist on the land. In es-
sence, the settlers were the real "natives" — who discovered a pristine and
untouched new world — and thus North America was equivalent to an
English province. Again one should note that this idea of erasure would
become a constant theme both in the independent United States and with

other settler societies, as colonists expunged the initial act of conquest
and came to see their presence as both natural and permanent.

For those very real indigenous groups on the ground, such erasure
highlighted the basic divide in colonial life between free Anglo subjects
and stratified imperial ones. One the one hand, Anglo colonists viewed
English membership as built on the protection of property rights and,
increasingly, the provision of political consent. Yet, on the other hand, for
Indians, who supposedly had never left the state of nature, to the extent
that they faced colonial administrative authority it was akin to feudal pa-
ternalism. Like African slaves, the power asserted over Indians amounted
to a continuation of the state of nature under civil society. It therefore em-
bodied a fundamentally distinct form of political authority from that
operating within settler life. As is explored more in the next section, it
was not surprising that Locke's claims were employed both to defend
Anglo privilege and to impose discretionary prerogatives over non- Anglo
groups. Despite his complementarity with feudal discourses, Locke cap-
tured the development of a new ideological current in England, the revival
of republican ideas of economic independence and political self-rule. He
did so in a way that spoke to the emerging dynamics of settler society —
internal egalitarianism and external domination.

Settler Society as an Experiment in Republican freedom
In many ways, the legal and political structures imposed by colonial ad-
ministrators in the earliest decades of English expansion in North Amer-
ica best approximated those taking root in the Spanish colonies. Like
colonization efforts pursued by absolutist Spain, "New Britain" — as im-
perial promoters called the Virginia colony — combined royal discretion
over all subjects with military discipline, violent Indian suppression, and
relative racial fluidity. Yet, just 100 years later, the North American colo-
nies diverged dramatically from their Spanish counterparts, emphasizing
settler social supremacy as well as internal self-government and decen-
tralized administrative control.

This shift was not simply due to the conditions of colonization in
North America; it also resulted from events at home. In particular, both
the English Civil War and the Glorious Revolution emphasized an ac-
count of liberty that challenged monarchical authority and checked the
rise of absolutism. With its focus on consent, economic independence,
and land ownership, this account became especially attractive in the North
American context. There Indian expropriation and African slavery made

these goals both attainable and more radical in scope. Thus, in the years
leading up to the American Revolution, ideas of economic and political
autonomy shaped the nature of internal settler society and helped to define
who was properly within and outside the social contract. I argue that, as a
result, this developing account of liberty — what I will call republicanism —
was necessarily tied in North America to the social supremacy of the
English colonist. When colonial administrators eventually began under-
mining such supremacy in the 1 760s, settlers believed not only that their
political hegemony was at stake but also that the very future of collective
freedom had come under attack.

In describing the seventeenth-century English revival and transforma-
tion of classical views regarding liberty, the state, and the individual,
Quentin Skinner assesses a set of themes that became central for Anglo
settlers and for their vision of social life. He emphasizes how English
pamphleteers and political critics came to view the meaning of freedom
as comprehensible only when contrasted with the condition of servitude
or slavery. 78 On first glance, a slave may be viewed as unfree because he
or she is compelled by threat or physical coercion to act in specific ways.
Yet Skinner argues that in Roman discussions of slavery, the experience
of actual coercion was not seen as the essential marker of servitude. 79
The essence of slavery lay not in actual force but rather in living perma-
nently under the cloud of possible compulsion and subjection to the arbi-
trary will of another. Skinner writes:

While such slaves may as a matter of fact be able to act at will,
they remain at all times in potestate domini, within the power of
their masters. They accordingly remain subject or liable to death
or violence at any time, as even the figure of Tranio is obliged to
recognise. The essence of what it means to be a slave, and hence
to lack personal liberty, is thus to be in potestate, within the power of
someone else. 80

Therefore, liberty was not simply the absence of coercion but in fact re-
quired independence from the very possibility of external control.

Inspired by Roman literature, English critics of Stuart absolutism took
up this argument, exploring the meaning of slavery and its incompatibil-
ity with freedom. As Algernon Sydney wrote in his Discourses Concern-
ing Government, although "a master's cruelty . . . may make one servi-
tude more miserable than another: ... he is a slave who serves the best
and gentlest man in the world as well as he who serves the worst." This

view pointedly rejected the legitimacy of any political authority — royal
or otherwise — that was noncontractual and perpetual, as Coke had imag-
ined. Such authority left the individual under the permanent whim of a
despot, regardless of whether that despot acted benevolently. As Locke
argued, no matter how wise the dictator, no individual would choose to
live under a political regime in which his rights were dependent on the
will of an unchecked, external power. To believe otherwise would be "to
think, that men are so foolish, that they take care to avoid what mischiefs
may be done them by pole-cats, or foxes; but are content, nay think it
safety, to be devoured by lions." 81

According to Philip Pettit, this account of liberty was distinct from
that of noninterference, which would later mark classical liberal thought
from William Paley and Jeremy Bentham to John Stuart Mill. 82 Freedom
lay in more than merely the unfettered exercise of one's immediate will;
it required actually experiencing a condition of independence from the
social control of those more powerful. In the words of Sydney, "For as
liberty solely consists in an independency upon the will of another, and
by the name of slave we understand a man, who can neither dispose of
his person nor his goods, but enjoys all at the will of his masters." 83

Freedom, therefore, included a political component and, crucially, an
economic one as well. It entailed living in a community based on consent
and free from public servitude, as well as the individual's ability to con-
trol the use of his labor. These economic implications, and the centrality
of property to any sense of political belonging, made such arguments es-
pecially resonant for American settlers. Even if the state was ostensibly
free from tyranny, an individual could still be a slave if bound by eco-
nomic necessity to assign his person or goods to the will of another.
According to James Harrington, if freedom required economic as well as
political independence, then it was possible only if one enjoyed the mate-
rial resources to be self-sufficient. For him, this meant that land own-
ership was critical to eliminating the risk of reverting to social and politi-
cal dependence. As he wrote in A System of Politics, "The man that cannot
live upon his own must be a servant; but he that can live upon his own
may be a freeman." 84

This focus on property, not unsurprising given its fundamental role in
early modern England, is what set the Anglo republican revival apart
from its classical and Machiavellian predecessors. For Machiavelli, mili-
tary participation provided the ethical foundation for social membership,
as it gave citizen-soldiers a stake in the welfare of the polity and infused

public life with manly virtues. Yet, writing in the context of the Thirty
Years War, Harrington found himself reaching radically different conclu-
sions. He was deeply troubled by the emergence of new standing armies,
which left states bankrupted and the rural countryside devastated by rov-
ing troops in search of food and bounty. In his view, a militarized public
life actually undermined republican ideals. In place of the experience of
soldiering, land ownership provided a far better ethical basis for mem-
bership. It gave individual proprietors a stake in collective life and
through farming taught them such virtues as industry, rationality, and
self-discipline. Harrington hoped to transform Europe's marauding
warriors into landholders tied to political communities and invested in
the common good. In the process, he imagined that economic and po-
litical independence would become mutually reinforcing. In a society
organized as a democracy of landholders, in which most individuals
held a relatively equal distribution of property, political authority and
decision making could be dispersed widely. The result would be a bal-
anced polity, one that was internally stable and in theory could last
forever as an "immortal commonwealth" — free of the disruptions and
tyranny marking both political absolutism and feudal land regimes. But
without an appropriate division of property, such a polity would fail.
Harrington argued that "where there is inequality of estates, there must
be inequality of power, and where there is inequality of power, there can be
no commonwealth." 85

Yet, if Harrington presented an egalitarian vision of land distribution,
this vision ultimately rested on a belief that only some forms of work were
liberating and virtuous. In particular, for republican thinkers, the life of a
servant or a wage earner was fundamentally incompatible with freedom
because his service depended on following the dictates of a master or em-
ployer. Unlike the industrious and independent landholder, who worked
his own property, the employee performed merely as the tool of another.
Philip Pettit quotes Sydney to illustrate the incompatibility between lib-
erty and the life of the wage earner or servant: "He must serve me in my
own way, or be gone if I think fit, tho he serve me never so well; and I do
him no wrong in putting him away, if either I intend to keep no servant,
or find that another will please me better." 86 Critically, such dependence
meant that servants, wage earners, and the propertyless generally could
not be included in any account of full political membership. In essence,
civil government resulted from a compact between property owners, who
alone had a stable commitment to the well-being of society. 87

At stake in such exclusion was more than just a desire to protect
social order. It also expressed the belief that the propertyless did not have
the moral character to participate in political life, because their economic
dependence would always make them subject to the dictates of others.
Rather than acting according to the common good, the landless would
either follow the will of their masters or, more dangerously, comply with
whoever offered material resources or sought to manipulate their condi-
tion of servitude. By contrast, the productive control wrought by land
ownership taught independence and self-reliance; this ensured that
when property owners joined together in political life, their collective
efforts would express virtuous and autonomous reflection. Michael San-
del points out the centrality of such economic independence to public
life and thus political membership, writing that it embodied "labor car-
ried out under conditions likely to cultivate the qualities of character
that suit citizens to self-government." 88 Without a basis in productive
control, dependent laborers were incapable of enjoying the benefits of
political self-government and persisted as a continual threat to social
stability.

For Skinner, this account of freedom is best described as neo-roman,
while for Pettit it expresses a commitment to nondomination. However,
neither term adequately captures the particular meaning such arguments
developed in the colonies. For my purposes, these arguments are prop-
erly conceived of as republican and present a view of liberty as self-rule,
one that extended over all the basic institutions of collective life. Skinner
employs the term "neo-roman" because, during the seventeenth and most
of the eighteenth centuries, monarchy was not viewed in England or the
colonies as necessarily incompatible with liberty. Although accurate, this
argument ignores that the essence of republican freedom was not a par-
ticular political or legal form but a commitment to institutions that re-
jected any application of arbitrary power — as exercised by either an indi-
vidual or a group. Moreover, by referring to these views as republican,
we can better appreciate the remarkable persistence of this ideal, long
past when settlers and their descendents were self-consciously connecting
to a Roman or classical image of politics. As for Pettit's emphasis on non-
domination, although this was clearly important, such a description ne-
glects the participatory aspects of republicanism as it emerged in the colo-
nies. Freedom was not simply the lack of an arbitrary external will but
entailed the active assertion of control over economic, political, and reli-
gious life. This account of liberty was remarkably robust and required

investing agricultural labor and social institutions with meaningful
self-rule.

Combining Republican Liberty with Protestant Millennialism
For American settlers, the republican linkage between land and liberty
was further reinforced by a strong set of religious commitments. As David
Hackett Fischer explains, the first three great migrations of English set-
tlers to North America all involved devout Protestants emigrating in large
part due to religious persecution. 89 Such settler origins created a cultural
atmosphere in which many colonists viewed North America as a "holy
experiment," a religious haven free from oppressive interference. 90 The
Puritans of Massachusetts, for instance, proclaimed their desire to create
a "Bible Commonwealth," which would serve as an example of religious
virtue to people everywhere. As John Winthrop famously declared, "wee
shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us." 91 In
melding with republican liberty, such Protestantism underscored the exclu-
siveness of the settler ideal and the view of colonial society as a historically
unique project.

This exclusiveness was most evident among Puritan settlers, who es-
pecially saw themselves as a chosen people, sent by God on "an errand
into the wilderness," to serve as a model of Christian piety and to help
precipitate the coming of heaven on earth. As Sacvan Bercovitch writes,
"Theirs was a peculiar mission, they explained, for they were a 'peculiar
people,' a company of Christians not only called but chosen, and chosen
not only for heaven but as instruments of a sacred historical design. Their
church-state was to be at once a model to the world of Reformed Christi-
anity and a prefiguration of New Jerusalem to come." From the very be-
ginning of emigration, this commitment to millennialism — the belief that
God would one day rule on earth and create a permanent condition of
peace and virtue — motivated the New England colonists. According to Ber-
covitch, John Cotton's sermons on the ship Arbella repeatedly depicted
the settlers as Israelites and America as a new Israel whose political
founding would eventually result in a millennial Utopia. In Bercovitch's
words,

Cotton chose for his text the seventh chapter of the Second Book
of Samuel: "I will appoint a place for my people Israel, and wil
plant it, that they may dwel in a place of their owne, and move no-
more" (7:10) — a passage which, as his listeners well knew, included

the promise of the millennium: "And thine house shalbe stablished
and thy kingdome for ever before thee, even they throne shalbe stab-
lished for ever" (7:16). America, Cotton explained, was the new
promised land, reserved by god for His new chosen people as the site
for a new heaven and a new earth. 92

The idea of America as a virgin wilderness was central to this millen-
nial hypothesis. As Samuel Danforth argued in his sermon, Brief Recog-
nition of New England's Errand into the Wilderness, which he gave in
1670 exactly forty years after the landing of the Arbella, the uncultivated
woods existed as the perfect site for a New Jerusalem. For the same rea-
sons that John the Baptist preached in the wilderness, the New England
settlers would also be free from luxuries such as "silken and soft rai-
ment" and thus better able to hear the word of God and to prepare for
His arrival. Just as important, the wilderness provided an ideal terrain to
pursue one's worldly calling and thereby display one's status as elect. By
transforming wasted land into productive and socially useful property,
land ownership and free labor would express both religious devotion and
one's commitment to the "city upon a hill." For the errand to be complete,
Danforth told his audience, daily life must embody "the values of piety,
frugality, and diligence in one's worldly calling." 93

In essence, Danforth reiterated the moral standing of Locke's industri-
ous and rational individuals by arguing that economic independence in-
dicated a life lived in conformity with the will of God. If property was a
precondition for republican freedom, land ownership was an even deeper
moral and spiritual necessity for radical Protestants. In North America,
by claiming land and harnessing raw nature to serve human industry, set-
tlers paved the way for the millennium and displayed their own religious
fervor. In other words, ideas of productive labor and liberty became inex-
tricably intertwined with practices of worship. This had clearly been the
case in England as well, where Puritan republicans like John Milton saw
themselves as fighting for the creation of a religiously pure political com-
munity and therefore understood free life as bound to Christian piety.
However, in North America, the settler confrontation with a harsh and
unforgiving landscape made religious and economic independence all the
more connected, and thus the act of overcoming the wilderness was as
much a spiritual as an economic obligation.

For Puritan settlers, this millennial commitment to freedom as self-rule
also underscored the link between the political defeat of Stuart absolutism

and the religious defeat of Catholicism. In making these connections,
Puritans expressed a view that had become increasingly commonplace not
simply in Massachusetts but throughout the various colonies. For Protes-
tants in England and even more so in North America (since the North
American settlers often emigrated for explicitly religious reasons and so
tended to be the most radical), Catholicism and political absolutism
were seen as inevitably joined. Just as the Catholic religion compelled
adherents to slavishly follow the dictates of a hierarchical church rather
than one's own conscience, the unchecked monarch ruled arbitrarily
and commanded complete obedience. Both conditions embodied forms
of servitude — one religious, the other political — that undermined the re-
publican vision of independence. The idea that true liberty and the Cath-
olic faith were mutually incompatible meant that just as natives and
slaves were seen as outside the social contract that bound together free
English subjects, so too were Catholics. Philip Lawson writes of eighteenth-
century Britain: "Catholicism in . . . Britain was, to official eyes, not sim-
ply a spiritual matter. Confessed religion determined what role a citizen
played in the political, social, and, often through these, economic life
of the nation." 94 In 1673 fear of a popish plot led to the enactment of
the Test Act, which systematically excluded Catholics from office by
forcing members of Parliament, officeholders, and later peers to take an
oath against transubstantiation.

More crucially, the settlement of 1689 very clearly tied the end of the
Stuart monarchy and new constitutional limitations to the permanence
of Protestant rule. Lawson continues: "The theoretical supremacy of the
Protestant constitutional world was completed with the revolutionary
settlement of 1689. In the Bill of Rights an innovatory clause, clearly
born out of the anti-popery sentiments of the time, restricted succession
to the British Crown to Protestant heirs." 95 Following such practices in
England, eighteenth-century Catholics were barred from voting in numer-
ous American colonies, including Virginia, New York, Maryland, Rhode
Island, and South Carolina. Maryland, which had the largest Catholic
population, repealed voting rights so that Catholics did not "tend to the
Discouragement and Disturbance of his Lordship's Protestant Govern-
ment," a ban that remained in effect through the Revolution. 96 The argu-
ment against Catholic political inclusion was very similar to that presented
against the landless. In the same way that the poor were dependent on
the whim of others and so incapable of the independence necessary for
autonomous reflection, Catholics too were dependent on the will of the

pope. 97 As such, each group in its own way constituted a permanent threat
to the free political existence of Protestant believers.

Connecting these political, economic, and religious dimensions, ac-
counts of republicanism provided the foundation for social standing and
political belonging in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century settler so-
ciety. The lived experience of colonization further reinforced each basic
conceptual strand and made liberty as self-rule far more accessible to An-
glo settlers than it had been in England. While relative isolation empha-
sized the political independence of the colonies, access to uncultivated land
provided the poor with the prospect of economic self-sufficiency. More-
over, the Protestant faith grounded this approach to land and liberty and
helped transform various settler communities into Protestant experiments
in collective life. In each respect — political, economic, and religious — the
settler commitment to liberty as self-rule also marked out those that were
necessarily excluded due to faith, ethnicity, or economic dependence.
From its American inception, this ideal of freedom contrasted liberty not
merely with hypothetical servitude but also with the very real and lived ex-
perience of those outside the social contract — slaves, natives, the landless,
and Catholics.

Insularity ai, tier Ideology

By the mid-eighteenth century, the British project of decentralized impe-
rial expansion produced a remarkable state of affairs in the North Amer-
ican colonies: land ownership was widely dispersed and the colonists
enjoyed extensive political and legal rights. Even more so than the Crown
intended, its settlers created uniquely self-governing polities in which —
for those included as free subjects — republican liberty was a tangible
experience. Crucially, Anglo colonists increasingly viewed their own
expansive practice of freedom as the product of British ancestry, a cul-
tural tradition of self-rule that extended back to the ancient Saxons.
This combination of extensive autonomy and cultural pride in Anglo
heritage made settlers particularly wary of threats to liberty. Surrounded
by French imperialists, Catholic settlers, African slaves, and Indian
tribes, it also bred a sense of continual crisis that sowed the seeds for
revolt.

The political autonomy that developed went hand in hand with deep
insularity within settler society. Despite the religious and cultural differ-
ences between the various colonies, settlers in general saw their ancestry
as foundational for their status as privileged subjects. They viewed this

ancestry as grounding specific and cherished liberties, as emblazoned
in the Magna Carta. 98 For many settlers, this specific cultural history of
liberty made them exceptionally suited for free political life. Thus, while a
native could become civilized and Christian through sedentary agriculture
and religious conversion, the absence of any link to Britain's ancestral
past would always make his complete inclusion impossible. The capacity
for liberty, developed over generations, made settlers — as opposed to
subjugated communities — distinctively qualified for political, economic,
and social power. As a result, and in a manner similar to numerous other
settler societies, political self-government in the colonies was premised
on an organic notion of belonging that linked ancestry and land to
membership.

Yet Anglo settlers nonetheless confronted a basic predicament that
cut against the most intense forms of insularity. For English colonies to
be economically sustainable and militarily secure from indigenous threat —
let alone to expand — they required a larger population. As discussed ear-
lier, industrialization and changes in economic production in England led
metropolitan officials to be deeply ambivalent toward increasing Anglo
emigration; these officials sought instead to maintain a sizeable work-
force for factories on the island. Since England alone could not supply
the necessary numbers, settlers promoted emigration by other European
communities, efforts that led to a substantial non-English population by
the mid-eighteenth century.

In order to attract these newcomers, colonists developed practices for
easy naturalization, which were far more open and simplified than those
at home. James Kettner writes that "neither the royal charters, nor parlia-
mentary statutes, nor common law principles explicitly conferred upon
colonial authorities the right to adopt aliens as subjects." 99 Nonetheless,
almost immediately colonies aggressively asserted their local colonial
authority to naturalize European foreigners, regardless of whether these
powers were recognized in London. Settlers employed a variety of tools
to aid quick naturalization. The most common method was the passage
of special naturalization acts by local assemblies to incorporate new
European subjects. Other means included the use of enrollment proce-
dures and group naturalizations. In New York, settlers naturalized all
resident foreigners "professing Christianity" who pledged an oath of al-
legiance by November 1, 1683. 10 ° Under Locke's Fundamental Constitu-
tions of Carolina, foreigners simply had to appear at any precinct register,
and if they pledged on a copy of the Constitutions that they would "bear

faith and true allegiance" to the king and "to the Palatine and Lords Pro-
prietors," they would be immediately naturalized. 101

Along with creating lax naturalization policies, settlers also expanded
the provision of rights traditionally offered naturalized European sub-
jects. While in England the established policy was to exclude these sub-
jects from holding high political office, in North America practices were
more flexible. In Pennsylvania, a 1706 election law permitted naturalized
subjects to vote as well as to stand for elected positions. Even more dis-
tinctively, settlers began extending rights to European foreigners, in ways
that contradicted the classic divide between subjects and aliens. In 1704 the
South Carolina legislature passed a suffrage law providing voting rights to
new immigrants as long as they met residency and property requirements.
The law simply formalized practices occurring on the ground, as wide-
spread alien voting had taken place in the colony's 1701 election, particu-
larly by French Huguenots. In 1761 Georgia, too, enacted an equivalent
measure allowing for alien voting. And in Pennsylvania, even without
such laws on the books, by the 1740s it had become commonplace for
German Protestants to vote and hold office, with or without the benefit of
naturalization. 102

Crucially, these practices were fundamentally grounded in ethnic and
religious judgments about cultural similarity. While goals of expansion
may have pressed Anglo settlers to open the colonies to heightened im-
migration, only specific foreigners were welcome. In particular, settlers
came to view colonial inclusion as appropriate for European Protestants,
whose religious practices made them particularly suitable for republican
values and English liberties. For instance, groups such as the French Hu-
guenots, who faced suppression under Louis XIV, were treated as co-
participants in the project of settlement and found a ready welcome in
the colonies. While Catholics or Indian tribes were depicted as culturally
dissimilar and ill equipped for freedom, Western European Protestants
were seen as having their own parallel history with free institutions and
thus assimilable within the settler project.

This cultural approach to who properly counted as a worthy immi-
grant was further reinforced when the English Parliament finally moved
in 1740 to standardize naturalization procedures in the colonies. For
nearly half a century, settlers had argued for the Crown to provide legal
certainty to practices emerging on the ground. The 1740 law did so by
creating an inexpensive and clear administrative process for incorporat-
ing new subjects. Yet, along with a seven-year residency provision, the

60

bill also required foreigners to profess their Christian faith and to sub-
mit a certificate swearing to have taken the sacrament in a Protestant
church in the previous three months. 103 While exemptions were provided
for groups such as the Quakers, 104 these rules pointedly disqualified
Catholics from membership. In essence, easy naturalization for co-ethnic
and co-religious foreigners went hand in hand with the continuing exclu-
sion of outsiders deemed too culturally heterodox.

In this way, colonial practices created a pattern that would later shape
immigration policies for an independent America. Immigration became a
critical means of replenishing and sustaining settler commitments to
land conquest and republican self-rule. This meant the development of
lax naturalization rules and the extension of rights (including suffrage)
to aliens in ways that differed dramatically from metropolitan practices.
Unlike colonized or imperial subjects, new Protestants were often viewed
as worthy of full membership and therefore deserving of swift economic
and political inclusion. Of course, these immigration policies were not
applied everywhere, either during the colonial period or following the
Revolution. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Rogers Smith
notes that New England tended to be "the most exclusionary" with Mas-
sachusetts and New Hampshire limiting freeman status to Englishmen
alone. 105 Still, the basic thrust of colonial practices was strikingly distinct
from that throughout Europe; such practices underscored the emerging
centrality of immigration to settler life.

This centrality also was driven by the prevailing sense of threat. Set-
tlers viewed outsiders, like French Catholics and indigenous tribes, not
simply as foreigners but as enemies that could be checked only by a bur-
geoning population and consistent expansion. Surrounded by communi-
ties seeking to destroy their ancestral and religious liberties, settlers saw
other Protestants as potential allies in a shared colonial enterprise. In this
way, the perception of danger and the role of immigration reinforced the
hardening divisions in settler life and in particular united a powerful and
expansive vision of republican freedom with a restricted account of who
was entitled to such freedom. For colonists, English republican prece-
dents, Protestant faith, and the rigors of settlement emphasized how lib-
erty was necessarily an active project of self-rule, one that included po-
litical, spiritual, and economic dimensions. Yet these factors, while
permitting some European immigrants to become co-participants, also
intensified the implications of exclusion and cast outsider groups as per-
manent threats that had to be pacified for internal domestic order. In the

1 760s and 1 770s, as the colonies and Whitehall found themselves bitterly
at odds, it was this settler defense of an exclusive and robust freedom that
increasingly seemed puzzling to colonial administrators and fundamen-
tally incompatible with imperial aims.

The Settler Revolt over Empire and Subjectship
In the wake of the French and Indian War, the English metropole em-
barked on a project of imperial reorganization in keeping with its new
and historically unprecedented global reach. These changes were experi-
enced as a fundamental assault on the basic tenets of settler life. Settlers
increasingly viewed administrators in London as questioning their politi-
cal autonomy, religious values, land rights, and social supremacy vis-a-
vis subordinated groups. For colonists deeply proud of their ancestral
heritage, conception of liberty, and economic and political independence,
metropolitan actions subjected free communities to the yoke of tyranny —
comparable to Norman and Stuart absolutism. What English administra-
tors saw as a necessary attempt to centralize imperial rule and move
away from an outdated conception of empire based on colonial settle-
ment, American settlers experienced as an attack on their birthright as
privileged British subjects. In the end, this conflict over the nature of Brit-
ish imperium led directly to revolt and transformed the ideological foun-
dations of settler colonies into a uniquely American account of republi-
canism and empire.

In this section, I begin by describing settler expectations for political,
economic, and religious life following war with France and the sheer ex-
tent to which these expectations were thwarted by metropolitan policies.
I then go on to assess the primary sources of disagreement between ad-
ministrators and colonists over the future of the British Empire. In partic-
ular, I focus on London's attempts through judicial decisions and admin-
istrative actions to develop more inclusive forms of imperial rule and to
expand the rights afforded Native Americans, Catholics, and, to a lesser
extent, slaves. For colonists, each effort suggested the willingness by
Whitehall to treat Anglo settlers as indistinct from their cultural inferiors
and to make all subjects victims of a uniform political tyranny. Ultimately, I
argue that these efforts highlighted underlying and profound disagreements
between the Crown and its colonies over the very meaning of freedom and
its role in economic and political life.

War with France and American Expectations for
an Expanding Empire
American settler enthusiasm regarding the British victory against France
was overwhelming, and colonists were among the loudest voices in favor
of imperial conquest and Canadian acquisition. Settlers considered the
victory not just as one for the metropole but also as furthering their own
independent political and religious projects, and they were eager to take
advantage of the French collapse. Therefore, victory brought with it
a series of settler expectations, which ranged from even greater political
autonomy to massive financial windfalls for land speculators to the com-
ing of the Protestant millennium for Puritans. The enormity of these ex-
pectations and the very different imperial path pursued by metropolitan
London dramatized the confrontations awaiting Britain and its Ameri-
can colonies.

For a sense of what meaning settlers attributed to the victory, one
need only turn to Benjamin Franklin's 1760 pamphlet, The Interest of
Great Britain Considered with Regard to Her Colonies and the Acquisi-
tions of Canada and Guadaloupe, which presented a powerful vision of
colonial expansion and was perhaps the most famous of all those written
during the peace. Franklin argued that the acquisition of Canada would
solve a series of key strategic and land problems and provide great eco-
nomic rewards to the metropole and its settlers. Such security benefits
included eliminating the threat to American settlers presented by French
proximity and resolving friction and conflict with Indian tribes. Acquisi-
tion would also eradicate the barrier checking the geographic and demo-
graphic growth of the American colonies as well as the advance of En-
glish traditions and liberties. 106 Clearly at stake for Franklin and many
other colonial elites were the profits to be made from speculation in new
land opened to American settlers. Expansion meant the extensive increase
of colonial territory and thus greater access to property for wealthy land-
owners and poor farmers alike.

Yet Franklin also viewed expansion as marking the spread of English
liberty to uncultivated woods and previously oppressed lands — even if
such freedom extended only to Anglo settlers moving north and west.
For Franklin, victory over France meant the growth, spiritual and ter-
ritorial, of the settler political project. Therefore, his arguments also
reinforced the prevailing North American view of the British Empire as

principally an effort of settler colonization and, in particular, the idea
that new colonies were politically free and largely autonomous. As "set-
tled" land, such colonies may have given allegiance to the Crown, but they
also shared the same basic rights and privileges accorded to Englishmen
living in the metropole. Each colony was organized around principles of
political self-government and did not exist as a dependent entity useful
solely for economic extraction. In order to emphasize the value of this
imperial vision, Franklin eloquently employed the example of Roman
expansion:

The Romans well understood that policy which teaches the secu-
rity arising to the chief government from separate states among
the governed, when they restored the liberties of the states of
Greece ... by an edict that every state should live under its own
laws. They did not even name a governor. Independence of each
other, and separate interests, tho' among a people united by com-
mon manners, language, and I may say religion, inferior neither in
wisdom, bravery, nor their love of liberty, to the Romans them-
selves, was all the security the sovereigns wished for their sover-
eignty. It is true, they did not call themselves sovereigns; they set
no value on the title; they were contented with possessing the
thing; and possess it they did, even without a standing army. What
can be stronger proof of their possession? And yet by a policy
similar to this throughout, was the Roman world subdued and
held. 107

In the eyes of Franklin, empire was a collective undertaking between
metropole and colony, in which settlers — due to British ancestry and
traditions — were free English subjects, equal in status to those on the
island.

The sense that British conquest embodied the victory of this approach
to empire was even more strongly expressed by Puritan clergy, who often
depicted colonial expansion as a world-historical event in the service of
God and the coming of millennial Utopia. As Nathan Hatch writes, "In
sermon after sermon ministers celebrated the removal of the last and great-
est obstruction to the coming kingdom." Samuel Langdon saw the moment
as anticipating the "final ruin of that spiritual tyranny and mystery of iniq-
uity" and declared, "Babylon the great is fallen, is fallen!" Jonathan May-
hew believed that God would initiate "a most signal revolution in the
civil and religious state of things in this world; and all the kingdoms

thereof are to become kingdoms of our Lord." Solomon Williams placed
French defeat and colonial expansion on the same plane as the Reforma-
tion and the Glorious Revolution, arguing that the victory was "of more
Importance than has ever been made by the English, since England was a
Nation." 108

Similar sermons had been made during earlier military and political
victories over France, such as following the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713,
which included provisions recognizing English territorial control in New-
foundland, Acadia, and elsewhere. Nonetheless what made the current
moment distinct was that for Puritan clergy, British success marked per-
haps the final defeat of Catholicism and political absolutism — two
forces necessarily connected. This was because France's North American
presence had been almost entirely eliminated, with Britain's imperial ri-
val now only governing the tiny islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon
north of the Caribbean. It meant that the errand into the wilderness
could continue with the greatest threat — French popery — removed, and
that the example of settler religious and political liberty could finally
precipitate millennial Utopia. The British victory in North America gave
sustenance to the settlers' republican and millennial views and raised the
promise of an expanding and decentralized imperial power guided by
Anglo colonists.

The Challenge of Native Land Rights in a Globalizing Empire
The settler communities' political and religious perspectives took for
granted the permanence of existing imperial practices on the ground, es-
pecially decentralization and settler control over territorial expansion. In
fact, colonists believed that these realities were more than de facto cir-
cumstances; they were the legal and legitimate status quo. As such, settlers
assumed that their own political and social customs would simply extend
into new lands as they saw fit, expanding Anglo-Protestant rule and with
it the domain of liberty. The first great attack on this settler vision of land
acquisition and imperial purpose came in the form of the Royal Procla-
mation of 1763 and metropolitan plans for the proclamation's imple-
mentation. The persistence of over 100,000 Native Americans in terri-
tory now claimed by the Crown meant that Britain found itself in the
precarious position of having to navigate between indigenous and settler
interests, in a context in which the Crown had no desire to sink yet more
resources and military personnel into removing such a substantial Indian
population. For colonists, however, the British Empire's willingness to

balance settler-native objectives fundamentally threatened the social
standing of Anglo settlers. These developments belied colonial expecta-
tions of imperial continuity and settler power and, as a result, colonists
responded with defiance — reiterating their unique status as the true Brit-
ish subjects.

Victory in the French and Indian War proved to be a mixed blessing
for the British Empire. The war had been costly and Britain had relied on
Indian alliances for its success. Now faced with an indigenous rebellion
spearheaded by the Ottawa chief Pontiac, London believed that lasting
security on the western frontier would require limiting settler access to
land. In large measure, this was because the Crown remained more fo-
cused on its various quarrels in Europe, and London administrators were
unenthused about pursuing a prolonged conflict with their erstwhile al-
lies, the Indian tribes. As an added benefit of avoiding a new war at the
edges of the empire, administrators believed that ensuring indigenous
land rights would safeguard the profitable fur trade and further link
these tribes to the British trading base. In January 1763, even before
news of Pontiac's rebellion reached England, Secretary of State Egremont
explained the government's views to General Jeffrey Amherst, commander-
in-chief of British forces in America. Egremont argued that the ministry
was attempting "to conciliate ... the Indian Nations, by every Act of
strict Justice, and by affording them . . . Protection from any Incroach-
ments on the Lands they have reserved to themselves, for their hunting
Grounds." 109

Crucially, such conciliation in practice meant compromising the ex-
tensive autonomy enjoyed by colonial settlers. In particular, the Crown
and its London ministry would have to assert much greater control over
the use and disposal of imperial territory. This centralization went hand
in hand with altering basic assumptions about the treatment of Indian
tribes. While Native Americans under the king's domain still faced an
imperial and discretionary prerogative, the Crown indicated that these
subjects nonetheless enjoyed basic privileges, including royal protection
in possessing land — regardless of how indigenous groups organized ten-
ure. In closing the old Northwest frontier to Anglo settlers, the language
used by the Royal Proclamation made these beliefs explicit:

And whereas it is just and reasonable, and essential to our interest,
and the security of our colonies, that the several nations or tribes
of Indians with whom we are connected, and who live under our

protection, should not be molested or disturbed in the possession
of such parts of our dominions and territories as, not having been
ceded to or purchased by us, are reserved to them, or any of them,
as their hunting-grounds; we do therefore, with the advice of our
Privy Council, declare it to be our Royal will and Pleasure, that
no Governor or commander-in-chief in any of our colonies of
Quebec . . . [or] our other colonies or plantations in America do
presume ... to grant warrants of survey, or pass patents for . . .
any lands whatever, which, not having been ceded to or purchased
by us as aforesaid, are reserved to the said Indians, or any of them.

According to the Proclamation, all lands west of the eastern mountain
ranges would remain in indigenous control unless Anglo settlers first re-
ceived a special royal license, and those who had claimed this land with-
out prior approval were commanded "forthwith to remove themselves
from such settlements." 110

To further ensure that indigenous rights were respected, no private
individual was authorized to bargain with Native American tribes over
land, and only colonial administrators acting in the name of the king could
claim purchase. The Proclamation concluded that in order to prevent
fraud and abuse, as previously had been common, "if at any time any of
the said Indians should be inclined to dispose of the said lands, the same
shall be purchased only for us, in our name, at some public meeting or
assembly of the said Indians." 111 In order to defend the Proclamation
line, London realized that it could not rely on colonial militias, which
had proven difficult to organize and direct during the war with France. A
successful defense would require a regular standing army supplied and
controlled by Britain. To provide for the upkeep and support of this
force, Whitehall also decided to impose a stamp act and later a series of
taxes on the colonies, so that American settlers would pay for the land
policies. Such decisions were seen as necessary requirements of main-
taining peace in the territories and binding settlers more closely to impe-
rial supervision; this closer connection would ensure that the settlers'
actions did not conflict with the material and strategic goals of the
metropole.

However, for American colonists, metropolitan policies were at root
incompatible with the premises of settler colonization and, in particular,
with the moral rationale behind territorial expansion. This shift, ex-
pressed by the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and the related military and

taxation policies, ran contrary to the long prevailing imperial status quo.
It especially challenged the belief that indigenous communities, as con-
quered subjects and heathen savages, should not be allowed to perpetu-
ate customs that conflicted with settler goals of independence and land
ownership. For Anglo colonists, empire had been grounded in a vision
of republican freedom, which held that only through settler possession
would an uncultivated wilderness be made productive for the collective
good. By entrenching respect for indigenous laws and property arrange-
ments, colonial administrators allowed the practices of native savagery
to trump those of English civilization and its industrious and rational set-
tlers. In the past, colonists had no doubt purchased land and accommo-
dated native customs in order to minimize the likelihood of warfare and
to ensure an orderly transfer of property. Yet now, administrators were
suggesting that regardless of settler expectations and goals, native prac-
tices had to be incorporated into a permanent imperial framework. 112
This ignored the fact that for many colonists, native dispossession was
more than a matter of simple material self-interest; it was the precondi-
tion for meaningful and expansive self-rule.

For settlers pushed west to stake out new territory, the prospective
loss of land compromised the very possibility of economic freedom and
with it the basic elements of republican life. The period between 1763
and 1776 saw a massive influx of new settlers (Protestants largely from
Ulster and the lowlands of Scotland), as over 150,000 people made the
journey to the colonies. 113 For the Irish Calvinists, especially, such colo-
nization amounted to a double history of settlement and indigenous
confrontation. Most of these colonists, descendents of the Elizabethan
conquerors of Ireland, were deeply religious and also relatively impover-
ished as compared with earlier waves of migrants. Such settlers emi-
grated primarily in search of land and economic opportunity, and coastal
demographics forced them toward the Proclamation line in the old North-
west frontier, or what was more commonly called "the backcountry."
They also brought with them forms of agriculture that were particularly
land intensive. Fischer writes, "By one estimate, each head of range cattle
in the southern backcountry required fifteen acres of piney woods — a
total of 1,500 acres for a herd of cattle." 114 These new colonists were
thus the frontline of colonial expansion and saw indigenous land as essen-
tial to economic betterment. Without the prospect of such land, new set-
tlers would be unable to break the cycle of poverty and dependence and
thus could not lay claim to genuine freedom. At stake for them were both

their basic economic survival and their political and social standing within
settler society.

On the issue of colonial expansion into Native American land, the
interest of propertyless settlers and wealthy colonists coincided. Large-
scale emigration had presented elites with the prospect of making huge
fortunes in land speculation. Such individuals hoped to claim indigenous
property — often through fraud — and then profitably sell this property to
land-hungry settlers. Even after the Proclamation, speculators like George
Washington believed that metropolitan policies were temporary and saw
"hunting out good land" as economic common sense. Washington wrote
to "William Crawford, his land surveyor:

For I can never look upon that proclamation in any other light
(but this I say between ourselves), than as a temporary expedient
to quiet the minds of the Indians, and must fall, of course, in a few
years . . . any person, therefore, who neglects the present opportu-
nity of hunting out good land, and in some measure marking and
distinguishing them for his own (in order to keep others from set-
tling them), will never regain it. 115

Nonetheless, in the period following 1763, Washington, Franklin, and
others were repeatedly thwarted by Whitehall in attempts to acquire and
sell indigenous land. 116 For both frontier settlers and colonial elites,
metropolitan policies were an immediate and substantial threat to finan-
cial gain.

To make matters worse, the military and taxation policies pursued by
Whitehall combined the danger to economic independence with one to
political autonomy. For settlers the primary threat to the ideal of liberty
as self-rule was no longer French popery but the absolutism of the British
Parliament. In the minds of settlers, such absolutism was analogous to
the "Norman Yoke" under which free Anglo-Saxons had labored. 117 Rob-
ert Williams summarizes the settler account of such tyranny:

[It] boiled down to the opinion that before 1066, the Anglo-
Saxons of England lived as free and equal citizens under a form of
representative government that was inspired by divine principles
of natural law and the common rights of all individuals. The Nor-
man conquest, however, had destroyed this Saxon model of gov-
ernment. But not even the Norman Yoke could destroy the Saxon
Constitution's divinely inspired universal appeal to the minds of

free English everywhere. . . . Thus historical events such as the
Magna Carta and the English Revolution's overthrow of the "ex-
ecrable race of Stuarts" were part of the continual struggle of the
English to reestablish their revered and ancient Saxon rights and
liberties. 118

Making precisely this point, James Otis, the Boston lawyer and influ-
ential pamphleteer, wrote in his 1764 tract, The Rights of the British
Colonies Asserted and Proved, that English liberty preceded the Magna
Carta and was the settler's ancestral inheritance from Anglo-Saxon fore-
fathers. According to Otis, freedom "was better understood and more
fully enjoyed by our ancestors, before the coming in of the first Norman
Tyrants than ever after, 'till it was found necessary, for the salvation of
the kingdom, to combat the arbitrary and wicked proceedings of the Stu-
arts." 119 Among the essential liberties enjoyed by Anglo-Saxons was the
right to property, and by imposing taxes without any settler representa-
tion, Parliament in one fell swoop threatened both economic and politi-
cal freedom. Not only were the Crown's ends unjust, undermining the
natural and legitimate acquisition of land by settlers; its means compro-
mised basic principles of self-rule. In fact, to the extent that political
society resulted from a Lockean social compact between individuals for
the mutual protection of their property, Whitehall's actions contravened
the very premises of government itself.

These arguments from the "Norman Yoke" were inherently tied to
the settler belief, mentioned previously, that free Anglo subjectship de-
rived from ancestry and cultural history and that diminishing these
rights in order to protect Indian tribes was anathema to liberty. As Otis
explained, those who settled North America did so "not as the common
people of England foolishly imagine, with a compound mongrel mixture
of English, Indian and Negro, but with freeborn British white sub-
jects." 120 What settlers shared with the home country was a clear blood
tie, which both inculcated a love of liberty and united metropole and
colony into a single imperial project. By trumping the rights of settlers —
the king's privileged subjects — with the supposed rights of natives, Par-
liament and its colonial administrators imposed the worst type of tyr-
anny. They used absolute power to usurp the legitimate political order,
one derived from a higher natural law, and thus reduced Anglo-Saxons to
a condition of servitude. Like conquered subjects, colonists too were now

slavishly dependent on the whim of an external will. Just as upsetting for
settlers, the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and the policies that followed
indicated that for fellow Englishmen at home, shared ancestry was no
longer relevant and colonists could be treated as akin to heathen savages.

Especially given the settler vitriol, it is worthwhile to understand pre-
cisely why London became committed to reorganizing the empire in line
with greater respect for non-English subjects. At the beginning of this
chapter, I noted that London struggled with how to govern its increas-
ingly global imperium. As a result, Whitehall ultimately determined that
in order to administer the empire efficiently it would be necessary to re-
structure colonial relations. A helpful way to tease out this rationale is by
exploring Lord Mansfield's 1774 decision for the Court of King's Bench
in Campbell v. Hall. The case itself was not a central cause of fomenting
settler unrest, but it did articulate the metropolitan consensus on settler-
native affairs that had developed over the previous decade. And it served
as one of many reasons why Mansfield was deeply unpopular in the colo-
nies. The issue at hand concerned the Crown's right of taxation in Gre-
nada, a Caribbean island acquired during the war with France. At the
time of conquest, the island was mostly composed of French plantation
owners, and, in keeping with Coke's ruling in Calvin's Case, the British
articles of surrender asserted that the island's previous laws would con-
tinue until the king chose otherwise. As a Christian country, Grenada's
laws were not ipso facto void on conquest and thus could be legitimately
enforced. These laws were finally altered by the Proclamation of 1763,
which protected local land rights and established a new government for
Grenada in keeping with the English practice of representative govern-
ment. However, following the establishment of a representative assembly,
the Crown issued by royal prerogative a new 4.5 percent tax on all sugar
produced in Grenada. Campbell, an English plantation owner who had
recently purchased land on the island, brought suit to challenge the king's
right to impose this tax unilaterally. 121

On the direct question of the case, Mansfield sided with Campbell
and argued that while the Crown enjoyed prerogative powers to intro-
duce whichever laws it saw fit in conquered lands, once such laws were
introduced the king "divested himself of that authority" and could not
simply trump established rights. 122 For this taxation scheme to be lawful,
it would either have to be enacted by Grenada's own assembly or by the
English Parliament. By striking down the tax on sugar, Mansfield followed

the basic Whig principles of the Glorious Revolution. For him the defeat
of Stuart absolutism meant the victory of parliamentary sovereignty over
unchecked monarchical power.

In unifying the defense of both parliamentary supremacy and the rights
of non-English subjects, Mansfield also presented London's emerging
vision for the British Empire. In dicta, Mansfield explicitly rejected Lord
Coke's basic proposition in Calvin's Case, that following conquest only
Christian laws were worthy of imperial respect. Mansfield argued that
the feudal distinction between infidel and Christian had no bearing on
the status of conquered peoples. He maintained instead that this status
derived from Roman law and thus existed prior to the rise of Christian-
ity: "The laws of a conquered country continue in force until they are
altered by the conqueror: the absurd exception as to pagans, mentioned
in Calvin's case, shews the universality and antiquity of the maxim. For
that distinction could not exist before the Christian era; and in all prob-
ability arose from the mad enthusiasm of the Croisades." 123 By employ-
ing the French spelling for crusade, Mansfield made clear that Coke's
distinction was the product of Norman Catholicism. 124 After the defeat
of Stuart absolutism, such a distinction should not hold in a society pre-
mised on Protestant liberty.

Even more important, Mansfield's dicta gave legal validity to imperial
practices that were commonplace and unavoidable. To declare necessar-
ily null and void all "infidel" laws would run contrary to policies emerg-
ing out of Whitehall. For instance, metropolitan London was slowly and
fitfully developing a form of administration that eventually would be
termed indirect rule and become associated with late nineteenth-century
colonial frameworks in Asia and Africa. Such frameworks employed in-
digenous elites as the bottom rung of imperial administration, with these
elites given extensive discretion to govern according to their judgments
of what constituted indigenous law. 125 In the 1760s, over a century before
the systematic implementation of indirect rule, Bengal in particular became
an early site for experimentation with new modes of British control — if for
no other reason than that sheer demographics required the English use of
local authorities and practices.

In essence, Mansfield's decision simply acknowledged these circum-
stances on the ground as well as the larger conditions necessary for
ruling a massive and culturally diverse empire. By limiting the Crown
and emphasizing instead the power of Parliament, he sought on the one
hand to centralize an inefficient and largely decentralized colonial ad-

ministration within the hands of the legislature. At the same time, by
striking down Lord Coke's dicta and giving legal backbone to incipient
ideas of indirect rule, Mansfield made explicit the basic realities of a
global empire. Only by recognizing indigenous laws and increasing the
privileges associated with native subjectship — regardless of local religion
or custom — could an imperial project of this size and scope succeed. De-
centralization and settler supremacy may have been prerequisites of re-
publican freedom in the colonies, but from the perspective of London
these practices served only to overwhelm an overstretched empire. They
promised internal instability or even outright rebellion. Thus officials
in London and colonists in North America found themselves at logger-
heads, since settler liberty and imperial order seemingly ran in different
directions.

The Quebec Act, Indirect Rule, and the Catholic Threat
For many American colonists, the Quebec Act of 1774 confirmed that
Whitehall had turned its back on historic and established principles of
settler colonization and transformed the imperial project into an exten-
sion of Norman or Stuart tyranny. Especially disconcerting for radical
Protestants in the colonies, Parliament's new measures for governing
Canada seemed to ignore the entire basis for war with France — namely,
the religious goal of ending the threat posed by French popery. In the
minds of colonial administrators in London, the Quebec Act was a neces-
sary means for ensuring the allegiance of French Catholic subjects. None-
theless, it once again forced Parliament to come to grips with the basic
tenets of English expansion. In further revising the de facto imperial sta-
tus quo, the Quebec Act underlined the growing belief among American
colonists that settler liberty and metropolitan rule were incompatible.

The act itself resulted from an intractable bind facing colonial admin-
istrators after Canadian annexation, one foreseen by the critics of expan-
sion and defenders of "little England." In the excitement over the French
defeat, hardly any thought had been given to the difficulties of effectively
governing 75,000 French Catholics. The Royal Proclamation of 1763
sought to solve this problem by simply imposing English law on the popu-
lation and with it the drastic curtailment of Catholic rights. The hope
was that enough Anglo-Protestant settlers would move to Canada to
shift the ethnic composition of the colony and that in time French Catho-
lics would appreciate the cultural and political superiority of Britain's
legal and religious customs. When this rosy scenario failed to materialize,

administrators were faced with a very difficult set of options. In the
words of Philip Lawson, "They ranged from expulsion of those refusing
to swear allegiance to George III and the Anglican creed, which could run
into thousands of people, to the immediate conversion and Anglicization
of Quebec's spiritual and civil existence — a policy that . . . would prove
quite inapplicable to the well-established French Catholic society." 126

Instead, Whitehall pursued a course of action in keeping with its gen-
eral desire to reshape imperial policy along lines that recognized the cul-
tural diversity of the empire. The Quebec Act eliminated the need for a
religious test in order to hold any public office. It placed legislative
power — although subject to royal approval and exclusive of matters of
taxation — in a Canadian council nominated by the British government
and which included both Catholic and Protestant members. The act pro-
vided Roman Catholics with complete religious freedom, even allowing
priests to collect tithes from parishioners. While enforcing British crimi-
nal law, it also omitted habeas corpus and retained French civil and prop-
erty laws. Finally, the Quebec Act sought to address continuing and ille-
gal efforts by American colonists to claim and settle indigenous lands.
Since the closure of the old Northwest frontier had failed to end Anglo
settlement or land speculation, Whitehall decided to turn over control of
the territory to Canada by extending the Canadian border south along
the Ohio River and behind the Allegheny Mountains. The ultimate goal
was to protect indigenous land access and control, since colonial admin-
istrators reasoned that Anglo settlers would avoid being subject to French
Catholic law and governance. 127

As Lawson has underscored, the Quebec Act embodied a complete
reversal of the English policies of Catholic persecution and gave French
Catholics in Canada greater political and religious rights than those en-
joyed by their fellow congregants anywhere in the empire. Once again
much of the impetus behind this reversal sprang from the basic dictates
of maintaining stability. In a territory marked by tens of thousands of
French inhabitants and only 400 Anglo-Protestant settlers, unilaterally
imposing Protestantism and English law would lay the seeds for revolt.
Thus, although Anglo settlers repeatedly argued for the creation of a rep-
resentative assembly, administrators in London as well as Governor Mur-
ray in Quebec recognized that, due to the Test Act's exclusion of Catho-
lics from all public offices, having a few hundred Protestants represent
the entire colony would be deeply problematic. 128 As for legal customs
like habeas corpus and the jury system, which many in England and the

colonies viewed as basic and inviolable liberties, they too ran contrary to
effective governance. Untrained in English law and deeply entrenched in
French practice, the Catholic population generally opposed the introduc-
tion of a new legal framework. Such opposition was strengthened by the
fact that when the jury system was employed in Quebec, the Test Act
kept French Catholics from serving. Given these practical realities, as far as
colonial administrators were concerned, only a policy premised on Catho-
lic toleration would be compatible with peace and security. In a 1772 re-
port on Quebec's future government, Alexander Wedderburn, the Crown's
solicitor general, maintained that

The safety of the state can be the only just motive for imposing
any restraint upon men on account of their religious tenets. The
principle is just but it has seldom been justly applied; for experi-
ence demonstrates that the public safety has been often endan-
gered by these restraints, and there is no instance of any state that
has been overturned by toleration. True policy dictates then that
inhabitants of Canada should be permitted freely to profess the
worship of religion. 129

Moreover, for those in Whitehall, toleration was seen as part of the
Crown's responsibility of ruling its new subjects with justice. Knox, by
then the undersecretary for the American Department, argued in his
pamphlet defending the Quebec Act that above all "benevolence and hu-
manity recommend [ed]" the plan. In his view, the Quebec Act was part of
a larger effort to avoid repeating the mistakes and inequities produced by
the Irish experience, in which a small number of Anglo Protestants denied
the majority Catholic population virtually any cognizable rights — with the
result that two centuries later the island still remained wracked by strife
and "malignant hatred." Yet, for all their tolerance, metropolitan officials
were also unwilling to allow a truly representative assembly, given its in-
evitable Catholic composition and likely role in fostering French Catholic
assertiveness. As Wedderburn also noted in his report, such an assembly
would be "an inexhaustible source of dissension" and "a dangerous ex-
periment with new subjects, who should be taught to obey as well as love
this country, and if possible, to cherish their dependence upon it." Thus, for
officials in London, the ultimate goal was to create a stable imperial order
rather than to provide real self-rule to conquered subjects. 130

In the end, the Quebec Act reinforced the importance of administra-
tive centralization and indirect rule in a culturally diverse empire. In the

same year that Lord Mansfield — himself a strong proponent of Catholic
toleration in Canada 131 — decided Campbell v. Hall, the Quebec Act sought
both to strengthen parliamentary authority over the new colony, through
control of taxation and the purse, and to protect the customs and laws of
the local population. Such toleration necessarily required limiting the au-
tonomy and power of Anglo settlers. It also meant undermining the basic
social hierarchy that had governed colonial life and thus attempting to
place French Catholics and Anglo Protestants — both ultimately royal
subjects — on a more equal footing.

South of Canada, however, the settler response to the Quebec Act was
immediate and overwhelming. 132 As discussed previously, for many An-
glo Protestants Catholic faith was at root incompatible with republican
liberty. It amounted to a servile religion useful solely for training in-
dividuals in a life of civil and spiritual tyranny. As John Adams wrote in
his 1765 pamphlet, A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, the
link between political absolutism and Catholicism embodied a "wicked
confederacy" aimed at imposing a permanent condition of oppression
throughout the world: "[This confederacy] seems to have been even
stipulated between them, that the temporal grandees should contribute
everything in their power to maintain the ascendancy of the priesthood,
and that the spiritual grandees in their turn, should employ their ascen-
dency over the consciences of the people, in impressing on their minds a
blind, implicit obedience to civil magistracy." 133 The decision, therefore,
to extend religious toleration to Canadian Catholics was taken as proof
of the metropole's basic rejection of the principles of English freedom. In
striking this note, Arthur Lee wrote to his brother Richard Henry, "what
hurts me most is the ministerial plan openly avowed, to make use of the
Canadians to enslave all America"; he further argued, "every tie of alle-
giance is broken by the Quebec Act, which is absolutely a dissolution of
this Government, the compact between the king and the people is totally
done away with." 134

For many Anglo settlers, the freedoms enshrined by the Glorious
Revolution were directly linked to Protestant ascendancy. Self-rule in
politics required both economic self-sufficiency and the independence of
mind produced by Protestant faith. By tolerating Catholicism, not only
did Parliament ignore the purpose of war with France, but it also under-
mined the political and religious consensus established a century earlier
to ensure the protection of English liberty. As Arthur Lee claimed, it dis-
solved the social contract between settlers and the British government

and made civil war "inevitable." 13 ^ In the minds of Anglo settlers, the bill
left them surrounded by an enemy population, which Parliament at any
moment could employ to strip colonists of their basic rights. Echoing
such sentiment, Philip Livingston, a prominent New York merchant and
member of the Continental Congress, described French Catholics as a
"multitude of slaves" who whenever London desired could assault settler
freedom:

But I leave it to any man ... to determine; whether a country has
no great reason to fear the loss of its liberties, when surrounded by
a multitude of slaves; especially when those slaves are imbued with
principles inimical to it, and united in one common interest, pro-
fession and faith, under one common head, and supported by all
the weight of a large empire. 136

For members of the Puritan clergy, the Quebec Act was an especially
disturbing turn of events. In his Thanksgiving sermon of 1774, William
Gordon depicted the bill as a dangerous step toward parliamentary abso-
lutism and as fundamentally overturning centuries of English tradition.
He declared, "If the British Legislature is the constitution, or superior to
the constitution, Magna Charta, the Bill of Rights, and the Protestant
Succession, these boasts of Britons are toys to please the vulgar, and not
solid securities." Gordon continued by claiming that Catholic toleration
amounted to "the reestablishment of arbitrary power and a despotic gov-
ernment in a most extensive and purposely enlarged country . . . with the
base, diabolical design of procuring their assistance, if required, in quell-
ing the spirit of freedom among the natural and loyal subjects of Great
Britain." Yet, for the clergy, the act was more than a threat to political lib-
erty; it did nothing less than strengthen the forces of the Antichrist and
diminish the possibility of millennial Utopia. In a letter to Richard Price,
Ezra Stiles, who only a decade earlier had extolled the British conquest of
Quebec as a millennial sign, wrote, "in voting for the Quebec Bill for estab-
lishing the Romish Idolatry over two Thirds of the Territories of the British
Empire," Parliament had "excit[ed] a Jubilee in Hell and throughout [the]
Pontificate." To the extent that the British Anglican Church approved of
this policy, the Episcopate had "joyned with an apostate Church and taken
part with the Mother of Harlots and Abominations in the Earth," all with
the clear intent of defeating the spiritual efforts of Puritans in America. 137

Due to the general fear of Catholic power, the bill was thus able to
unite the religious and political fervor of Protestants across the colonies

regardless of sectarian difference, 138 and it became a central grievance of
the colonists against British imperial rule. The Continental Congress re-
solved unanimously to approve the Suffolk County Resolutions, which
stipulated in Article X that the Quebec Act was "dangerous in an ex-
treme degree to the Protestant religion and to the civil rights and liberties
of all America; and, therefore, as men and Protestant Christians, we are
indispensably obliged to take all proper measure for our security." 139
Again, by unanimous vote, the Congress also approved including the bill
along with the Intolerable Acts as part of its list of colonial grievances.

Moreover, the addresses written by the Congress in October 1774 in
order to explain opposition to British imperial policies repeatedly em-
phasized the destructive links between Catholic toleration and settler
freedom. This fact is particularly telling as these documents were pro-
duced before the rebellion; they thus offer unique insight into the key
grievances of colonists at a time when many were still open to reconcili-
ation. In the Address to the People of Great Britain, written by John Jay,
with Philip Livingston and Richard Henry Lee on the drafting commit-
tee, the Continental Congress discusses the Quebec Act and the issue of
Catholicism at length, accusing the bill of reducing Anglo settlers in Can-
ada to the condition of servitude. According to its authors, Protestants
there were "now the subjects of an arbitrary government, deprived of
trial by jury, and when imprisoned, cannot claim the benefit of the Ha-
beas Corpus Act, that great bulwark and palladium of English liberty."
The Congress also saw the bill as transforming Canada into a powerful
enemy of colonial freedom, which

so extended, modeled, and governed, as that by being disunited
from us, detached from our interests by civil as well as religious
prejudices, that by their numbers daily swelling with Catholic emi-
grants from Europe, and by their devotion to an administration so
friendly to their religion, they might become formidable to us, and,
on occasion, be fit instruments in the hands of power to reduce the
ancient, free, Protestant colonies to the same state of slavery with
themselves.

The Address further declared, "Nor can we suppress our astonishment
that a British Parliament should ever consent to the establishment in that
country a religion that has deluged your island in blood, and dispersed
impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder, and rebellion through every part of
the world." 140

78

The territorial clauses of the Quebec Act clearly enhanced antipathy
to the bill. Yet it would be a mistake to view religious arguments as sim-
ply a mask for settler land interests. Rather, for colonists freedom linked
religious belief, land ownership, and political self-government in ways
that reinforced the perceived threats posed by an enlarged Canada. In the
minds of American colonists, the bill affirmed Parliament's willingness to
unilaterally deny industrious and rational settlers the land essential for
their economic independence. In one stroke, Parliament seemingly
strengthened and unified the enemies of settler freedom — both native and
Catholic — while undermining the political autonomy and economic self-
sufficiency of its proper and ancestral subjects. For settlers, the Quebec
Act's religious and territorial clauses worked in tandem and again
illustrated the inevitable confederacy that linked civil tyranny and Cath-
olic worship, just as it had done under Stuart and Norman rule. In fact,
the newly established Canadian laws were a perfect example of how
Catholic toleration and political absolutism were intertwined, since re-
spect for Catholic worship had resulted in both an arbitrary government
in Quebec and the denial of basic English rights to Anglo settlers.

Ultimately, the dispute between settlers and the metropole over Que-
bec policy underscored the larger disagreement regarding the purpose
and future of the British Empire. For Anglo Protestants in the colonies,
ancestry, religion, and land use justified political and economic suprem-
acy. It also required that colonization be premised on local autonomy for
settlers and thus the general decentralization of administrative control.
However, for the metropole, settler expectations regarding social stand-
ing and administrative freedom were inconsistent with the essential need
for imperial stability. Moreover, while decentralization might aid Anglo-
Protestant authority and independence, it inherently compromised the
rights of marginalized communities. In an increasingly global empire, ex-
tending meaningful protection owed by the Crown to new and culturally
diverse subjects necessarily entailed moving political and economic power
away from Anglo settlers. Therefore, what colonists viewed as the return
of the "Norman Yoke" and the rise of arbitrary government, the metro-
pole understood as a basic corollary to protecting the social position and
orderliness of non- Anglo subjects.

African Slavery and the Danger to Settler Liberty
This unavoidable tie between granting rights to non-Anglo subjects and
the centralization of imperial authority is most powerfully illustrated by

the English debates over slavery in the years preceding settler revolt. For
metropolitan administrators, slaves were seen as on a continuum of sub-
jectship and worthy of at least minimal British protections. Such views
and their implications for colonial life were brought to a head in the Som-
erset ruling, Lord Mansfield's famed decision on the status of slavery in
England. In it he argued that chattel slavery was inherently incompatible
with English traditions and that its practice in North America was per-
missible only because the colonies were conquered lands — legally indis-
tinct from French Canada or Indian Bengal. For colonists, Mansfield
appeared to challenge in one fell swoop both the future of slavery as a
social institution and the vision of settlers as culturally superior to non-
Anglo subjects. In a sense, the question of slavery marked yet another
decisive breach in settler-metropolitan relations and made clear the impos-
sibility of sustaining the settler vision of internal freedom under British
imperial rule.

As part of the general de facto status quo that prevailed in the British
Empire during the mid-eighteenth century, settler political autonomy
brought with it nearly unimpeded authority over the practice of slavery.
Parliament and the English courts refrained from establishing slave codes
or altering those created by colonial assemblies. As Christopher Brown

Metropolitan officials proceeded as if the local customs of slavery
established a private right upon which they agreed not to intrude.
And this tradition of near-purposeful neglect instilled an unspoken
belief among American slaveholders that imperial administrators
could not interfere in the possession and management of slaves in
the British colonies. Paradoxically, then, colonial slavery, with the
almost feudal autonomy it granted British settlers, resided sub si-
lentio. It lay outside imperial oversight while still, in principle,
within the realm of imperial authority. 141

Such imperial silence was affirmed in two holdings from the first half
of the eighteenth century. Although they differed dramatically on the ter-
ritorial status of the colonies, they never questioned the legality of chattel
slavery in North America. At the turn of the century, Chief Justice Holt
declared that "as soon as a Negro comes into England, he becomes free;
one may be a villein in England, but not a slave." Crucially, however, in
Virginia this rule did not apply because, as Holt continued, "the laws of
England do not extend to Virginia, being a conquered country their law

is what the King pleases; and we cannot take notice of it but as set forth."
Fifty years later, in 1749, Lord Chancellor Hardwicke argued by contrast
that common law did not in fact limit or undermine slaveholding rights
in England, as Holt's decision "was determined on want of proper de-
scription." According to Hardwicke, Holt's ruling resulted from the fail-
ure of the case description to read "Negro slave" rather than simply
"Negro," since not all Africans were necessarily slaves. Hardwicke further
rejected Holt's description of Virginia as conquered land, subject entirely
to the dictates of the king. Agreeing with colonial voices, he declared that
English colonies were settled lands, which carried with them all the privi-
leges of the home country:

That the moment a slave sets foot in England he becomes free, has
no weight with it, nor can any reason be found, why they should
not be equally so when they set foot in Jamaica, or any other En-
glish plantation. All our colonies are subject to the laws of England,
although to some purposes they have their own laws.

Therefore, just as chattel slavery was legally acceptable in England, it
was also acceptable in colonies settled by English subjects. In essence, the
court debate at the time assumed the full legality of chattel slavery in the
colonies and concerned only whether such legality extended to England
itself. These decisions did not put the autonomy of colonial slaveholders
in doubt, and the judicial disagreement affected only the extent to which
metropolitan administrators actually possessed the sub silentio right of
oversight. 142

Yet, just as the realities of cultural diversity in the empire led adminis-
trators to rethink the position of Anglo settlers, it also led to a reevalua-
tion of colonial autonomy with regard to slaves. Administrators were
largely uninterested in ending the practice of human bondage, which due
to the slave trade and agricultural production from the southern colonies
provided London with substantial economic gains. Still, the changing
nature of the empire led some administrators, chief among them William
Knox, to look again at the treatment of slaves. In 1768, at the exact mo-
ment when he was defending indirect rule for imperial subjects in Bengal,
Knox also asserted that slaves — just as other conquered populations —
deserved greater royal protections. Despite their condition of servitude,
they nonetheless were subjects who should enjoy "an impartial dispensa-
tion of the laws," one that prevented such daily cruelties as being "lacer-
ated by whips [and] racked by every species of torture the most wanton

tyranny can invent." For Knox, guaranteeing more humane practices re-
quired entrenching parliamentary sovereignty and explicitly reclaiming
imperial oversight. According to him, since settler slaveholding rights
were purely local and had no basis in English common law, the king's
Privy Council should examine and, if need be, overturn "all laws of the
several colonies respecting" slavery that did not conform to justice. Only
by centralizing administrative authority and reaffirming the nature of
American colonies as conquered rather than settled lands would slaves
be dealt with fairly. As long as settlers enjoyed unchallenged autonomy,
the status quo of mistreatment would persist. Thus improving the condi-
tions of slaves was part and parcel of a general reorganization of the Brit-
ish Empire, which claimed back authority from Anglo colonists and created
more just systems of control for conquered and non-English subjects. 143

These questions regarding slaveholding and colonial autonomy reached
a turning point in 1772, with Lord Mansfield's decision in Somerset v.
Stewart. 144 In October 1771, James Somerset escaped his Virginia slave
master, Charles Steuart, 145 while both were stationed in London. A month
later, Steuart's agents seized Somerset and locked him in chains aboard a
ship bound for Jamaica, where Somerset was to be sold. Before the ship
sailed, Lord Mansfield granted a writ of habeas corpus to settle the law-
fulness of Steuart's seizure. 146 In deciding the case, Mansfield reaffirmed
the anti-slavery import of Holt's earlier ruling and stated that classic
chattel slavery did not have a legal basis in English common law. Mans-
field concluded: "The state of slavery is of such a nature, that it is inca-
pable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political; but only
positive law, which preserves its force long after the reasons, occasion,
and time itself from whence it was created, is erased from memory: it's
odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive." 147 Yet,
despite this sweeping language about the "odious" nature of slavery, Mans-
field's decision was in fact quite narrow. He had pointedly not emanci-
pated all African slaves in England. Mansfield viewed such an act as rash
and unwise, because it would retrospectively subject English masters to
property loss as well as extensive litigation over back wages and other
tort claims. 148

Instead, the ruling hewed closely to the question at hand and held that
once on English soil slaves could not be forcibly transported out of En-
gland against their will. 149 Mansfield took for granted that other forms
of servitude, such as villenage, had a long-standing basis in English posi-
tive law. However, he did not believe that these laws justified so "high an

82

act of dominion" as to allow masters to exercise private force to compel
the detention and deportation of servants. 150 In other words, while slaves
in England were not emancipated, they enjoyed limited rights that ex-
tended beyond the condition of chattel slaves and more closely approxi-
mated that of other indentured servants — a condition that George Van
Cleve refers to as "near slavery." 151 Thus foreign slaveholders who brought
slaves to England did so at their own peril, because the law did not pro-
tect their capacity to use private force. In 1779 Mansfield reiterated this
point, arguing that by discharging James Somerset, "There had been no
determination that they [slaves] were free, the judgment went no further
than to determine the Master had no right to compel the slave to go into
a foreign country." 152 As such, so long as Parliament had enacted no posi-
tive law for the specific introduction of chattel slavery, slaveholding rights
in England would be checked by existing positive law.

Although Mansfield's legal holding avoided a simple declaration of
slavery's illegality in England, the significance for the colonies was obvi-
ous. In oral arguments with Somerset's attorney, Francis Hargrave, Mans-
field indicated that chattel slavery remained legal in Virginia, but only
because the colonies amounted to a foreign nation with a separate set of
positive laws. In pressing his case against the applicability of colonial
practices in England, Hargrave commented: "In England, where freedom
is the grand object of the laws, and dispensed to the meanest individual,
shall the laws of an infant colony, Virginia, or of a barbarous nation, Af-
rica, prevail? From the submission of the negro to the laws of England,
he is liable to all their penalties, and consequently has the right to their
protection." Mansfield answered by stating, "Rightly: for the laws of one
country have not whereby to condemn offences supposed to be commit-
ted against those of another." In so responding, he indicated that he too
saw the case as in part a conflict of laws question, weighing the applica-
bility of colonial law on English soil. According to Mansfield, "The ques-
tion now is, Whether any dominion, authority or coercion can be exercised
in this country, on a slave according to the American laws? The difficulty
of adopting the relation, without adopting it in all its consequences, is in-
deed extreme; and yet, many of those consequences are absolutely con-
trary to the municipal law of England." 153

The problem, however, was that the colonies were not simply foreign
nations; they were integral components of the British Empire. Thus the
question persisted: on what basis could the colonies develop local customs
that contravened not only English municipal law but also the common

law itself? In constructing his opinion, Mansfield struggled to avoid di-
rectly addressing this issue, as it would emphasize the growing political
tensions between England and her North American territories. None-
theless, the issue could not be avoided, and the status of the colonies as
conquered or as settled territory (no different than any province in En-
gland) hung heavy over the case.

Just as Holt had done, Mansfield implicitly maintained that colonies
such as Virginia were conquered and enjoyed local slaveholding rights
only as a grant from the king. These distinct "countries" were not settled
lands that carried with them all the basic privileges of English soil. In
fact, if they had been settled lands, Hardwicke's ironic claim that chattel
slavery would be nullified in "Jamaica, or any other English plantation"
would likely have held after Mansfield's decision. If travelling to Virginia
were no different than going from London to Manchester, the local col-
ony could not on its own authority enact statutes — so contradictory to
the spirit of English law — that denied hundreds of thousands of servants
any legal protections. Recall that for Mansfield, as his later ruling in
Campbell v. Hall would make explicit, even the king could not simply
overturn basic liberties once granted to imperial possessions. Only Parlia-
ment, under the theory of parliamentary sovereignty, enjoyed such remark-
able power to introduce practices so fundamentally "odious" to English

In essence, Mansfield mimicked jurist William Blackstone's well-known
position on the relationship between slavery and conquered land. Writ-
ing in the 1760s, Blackstone countered that American plantations had
been acquired "either by the right of conquest and driving out of na-
tives ... or by treaties." 154 As a consequence, colonial slaveholding rights
constituted a legal system parallel to English positive and common law,
legitimate only because it was established as a result of imperial con-
quest. Therefore, the import of Mansfield's Somerset decision was yet
again to emphasize metropolitan authority over the colonies. To the ex-
tent that slaveholding rights were acceptable at all, this was due to the
fact that American colonies did not benefit from the same status as En-
glish provinces and depended on the will of the king for their purely local
privileges. In a sense, Mansfield's opinion suggested a remarkable turn of
events. Anglo settlers — the historic engines and directors of imperial
expansion — were transformed into a foreign people, who like French
Catholics or Bengalis enjoyed indirect rule and the protection of local
customs through royal prerogative.

84

Reinforcing this idea that slaveholding settlers were a foreign group,
engaged in fundamentally un-British practices, was the fact that the deci-
sion became widely misinterpreted by the public. Despite Mansfield's at-
tempts to parse legal language and thus maintain space for slaveholding
in England, many observers believed that he had emancipated all slaves
on English soil. The case itself received extensive attention throughout
North America, with a common interpretation claiming the full emanci-
pation of slaves in England. 155 According to Patricia Bradley, virtually ev-
ery colonial newspaper covered either the oral arguments or provided an
account of Mansfield's ruling, with multiple papers extending over 2,000
words to the case and one nearly 4,000. 156 For many American settlers, the
idea that slavery was not culturally English struck them as the height of
hypocrisy. Benjamin Franklin described as truly suspect "the hypocrisy of
this country which encourages such a detestable commerce by laws for
promoting the Guinea trade; while it piqued itself on its virtue, love of
liberty, and the equity of its courts, in setting free a single negro." 157 How-
ever, for slaveholders — particularly in the southern colonies — who unlike
Franklin viewed slavery as either a necessary evil or a legitimate social
practice, Mansfield's decision was more than simple hypocrisy. It under-
scored the ideological and practical threats facing colonial life.

To begin with, it suggested that England no longer took seriously the
ethnic basis of English liberty and thus was content to jettison Anglo so-
cial supremacy. In elevating the rights of African slaves, London political
and legal elites seemed willing to corrupt republican liberty by under-
mining key racial hierarchies. One English newspaper report, widely re-
printed throughout the colonies, emphasized how a victory for Somerset
not only harmed slaveholding interests but also suggested the possibility
and horror of a racially mixed English polity. In the words of the British
"correspondent," "This cause seems pregnant with consequences, ex-
tremely detrimental to those gentlemen whose estates chiefly consist in
slaves ... if it should be determined in favour of the negroes, we are ap-
prehensive their black Gentry will visit us in too great an abundance,
inter-marry with our women and thus we shall become a nation of Mulat-
toes." 158 While no doubt hyperbolic, these concerns highlighted the worry
that metropolitan elites seemed increasingly indifferent to the Anglo-
Protestant foundation both of English liberty and indeed of any legitimate
imperial order.

Moreover, slaveholders were profoundly worried that the decision
would have a detrimental effect on their financial well-being. The case

emphasized the power of the English Parliament to intervene whenever it
saw fit to shape colonial slaveholding or to ban it entirely. Of immediate
concern, settlers viewed expansive popular and legal interpretations of
the decision as saddling them with slave flight and massive freedom suits.
One South Carolina pamphlet, anonymously authored by "A Back Set-
tler," referred to the decision as "ruin[ous]" and repeated the claim that
the case resulted in "a general Manumission of Negroes" in England. 159

Like much of the public, many slaves believed that Mansfield had in-
deed ended the practice in England and thought that they would find
freedom if they escaped abroad. In Virginia, news of the ruling led run-
away slaves to attempt to board ships bound for Britain, with one slave
master complaining that those escaping "imagine they will be free (a
Notion now too prevalent among the Negroes, greatly to the Vexation
and Prejudice of their Masters)." 160 In Massachusetts, some slaves used
the decision to sue their masters for manumission and for back wages —
precisely what Mansfield had worried would occur if he did indeed issue
a sweeping verdict in favor of emancipation. 161 More in line with Mans-
field's logic, other slaves petitioned the colonial legislature in Boston for
their freedom, arguing that without explicit positive law to the contrary,
slaves enjoyed a natural right to liberty. 162

Maybe the greatest worry for slaveholders was the prospect of insur-
rection or even race war. For over a century, southern settlers had viewed
the slave population warily, as a source of potential threat and instability.
Whitehall had long stoked these concerns through its commitment to the
slave trade, which by drastically increasing the number of slaves in the
colonies transformed the African population in Virginia from a small
minority of less than 10 percent in 1700 to approximately 40 percent by
1775. 163 Troubled by the demographic implications of such a large sub-
ordinated class, months before the Somerset decision the Virginia House
of Burgesses placed a prohibitive duty on slave imports, which was im-
mediately disallowed by the Crown. In the minds of Virginia's slavehold-
ers, especially the landed gentry, not only did the trade undermine at-
tempts to transform southern colonies into "healthy mixed economies
where farmers grew a variety of crops and purchased many of their man-
ufactures from local artisans," it also created the ever-present prospect
of racial violence. 164 The size of the slave population, often exaggerated
by colonists, was widely perceived as a growing menace to settler au-
thority and even basic survival. In 1764 Arthur Lee declared that "in the
colony of Virginia the slaves exceed the freemen by more than a third

and that two or three thousand are yearly imported. Would not this be a
fearful odds, should they ever be excited to rebellion?" 165 Moreover, even
more so than natives and Catholics, slaves were by definition a servile
population, which England could easily employ as a weapon against set-
tler liberty.

For southern slaveholders, Somerset added yet more fuel to these
anxieties. In fact, 1774 witnessed an attempted slave revolt in Virginia,
which the limited evidence suggests may have been motivated at least in
part by the case. In a letter written that year to William Bradford Jr., a
close friend in Pennsylvania, James Madison described how slaves par-
ticipating in the revolt had believed that the British would come to their
aid. The slaves expected that if the settlers finally rebelled against the
British, the British would free those slaves who in turn attacked the colo-
nists. 166 At that time, the only basis for this faith would have been the
recent Somerset decision. Madison himself was raised in a large slave-
holding family, and like many in the southern gentry he found the threat
of slave unrest deeply disturbing. Indeed, the fear that such rebellions
could at any moment sweep across southern plantations was so great
that Madison believed any news of the incident should be concealed.
Writing to Bradford, he argued, "it is prudent such attempts should be
concealed as well as suppressed." 167

These worries about racial violence and slave rebellion further under-
scored the prevailing sense of uncertainty over the future of settler insti-
tutions and colonial autonomy. When Chief Justice Holt had reached a
similar conclusion seventy years earlier, that chattel slavery did not have
a basis in English common law, metropolitan and colonial interests seemed
tightly entwined; both shared a singular vision of British expansion through
settler colonization. Now, by contrast, those links had frayed, and the impe-
rial affirmation of settlers as essentially foreign peoples, and slavery as a
privilege dependent on royal prerogative, emphasized the precariousness
of settler status. In essence, slaveholding settlers saw themselves as under
the whim of an arbitrary power; Parliament at any moment could change
its policies in ways that compromised or even destroyed their basic
livelihood.

In the wake of Mansfield's decision, colonists therefore viewed British
abolitionists' plans for emancipation, largely ignored in England, as part
of a general project of imperial oppression. In reading a 1774 anti-slavery
pamphlet published in London by William Draper, Arthur Lee saw his
fears of a race war realized. He described Draper's plan to his fellow

Virginians as "meet[ing] with approbation from ministerial People" and
designed "for emancipating your Negroes by royal Proclamation and
arming them against you." 168 Given that the colony had recently experi-
enced a limited slave rebellion in which the participants seemingly hoped
to receive British support, Lee's concerns were not necessarily outlandish.
For colonists, along with at least some of their own slaves, the assertion
by English courts that Virginia was conquered land meant that whenever
the Crown so chose, it could free African slaves and use them as a mili-
tary force against recalcitrant settlers. These fears were given tangible life
by Virginia governor Dunmore's decision in 1775 to take just such an
action. At the beginning of the American settler uprising, he granted free-
dom to all able-bodied slaves who joined with British forces against the
colonists. Indeed, the slaves who took part in the small-scale revolt only
one year earlier were not far off the mark.

Still, even before that fateful decision by Dunmore, the nature of
royal prerogative spoke to the inevitable incompatibility for settlers be-
tween more centralized forms of English subjectship and local autonomy.
In his famous 1 774 pamphlet, A Summary View of the Rights of British
America, Thomas Jefferson concluded with a plea for political compro-
mise. Yet at the root of Jefferson's argument was the belief that the colo-
nies were settled lands and thus extensions of English soil — no different
legally than any province on the island. He wrote of settlers and the proj-
ect of colonization, "Their own blood was spilt in acquiring lands for
their settlement, their own fortunes expended in making that settlement
effectual; for themselves they fought, for themselves they conquered, and
for themselves alone they have a right to hold." 169 However, if one con-
sidered the colonies as extensions of England and therefore beyond the
dictates of royal prerogative, this inevitably placed the status of slave-
holding in fundamental jeopardy. In a sense, settlers such as Jefferson
sought to transform the colonies into English provinces while at the same
time protecting the sanctity of those local customs not respected by the
metropole. The only way to provide for both outcomes would be if set-
tled lands were for all practical purposes independent. Only if colonies
were entirely autonomous from British rule, and simply shared a com-
mon legal and political tradition, could these points be reconciled. The
reality of slavery made evident the ideological impossibility of justifying
local settler autonomy while also viewing the colonies as indistinct from
provinces on the island. Thus the question of slavery's place in the empire

indicated how easily a defense of colonial autonomy could devolve into
a claim for complete independence.

Slavery and the Conflicting Accounts of Liberty
in Britain and America
When American settlers finally revolted against imperial rule, they saw
themselves as protecting republican liberty and the commitment to self-
rule from an increasingly absolute and arbitrary power. For those in
London, the idea that slave-owning colonists would decry the "slavery"
wrought by a compulsion to pay taxes or to accept other imperial poli-
cies seemed absurd. Hidden in British incomprehension was an emerging
divide between settler and metropolitan assumptions about the meaning
of liberty. For colonists, although republican freedom required a series of
exclusivities, for those socially included it provided a truly expansive vision
of collective life — in which self-rule entailed actively asserting one's au-
thority over economic, political, and religious institutions. By contrast,
for an industrializing British Empire extending its global power to reach
new territories and peoples, such an account seemed to portend instabil-
ity and disorder.

To appreciate this disconnect, one need only look at the use of slavery
in settler rhetoric and the response it elicited in London. In defending the
colonial revolt, Richard Price in 1776 presented a paradigmatic example
of such language:

But a country that is subject to the legislature of another country
in which it has no voice, and over which it has no control, cannot
be said to be governed by its own will. Such a country, therefore, is
in a state of slavery. And it deserves to be particularly considered
that such slavery is worse, on several accounts, than any slavery of
private men to one another, or of kingdoms to despots within
themselves. 170

According to Price, settlers found themselves subject to the whim of an
external authority, unable to enjoy the basic freedom of economic, reli-
gious, and political independence. Such an experience not only was the
essence of servitude but was even more enervating than actual human
bondage. For British administrators, this rhetoric seemed the height of
hyperbole, and during the American Revolution, a common English ob-
servation was to note ironically that the cries of oppression were all the

more intense in slaveholding colonies. In the opinion of Whitehall, slave
owners should be especially reticent to speak of the evils of servitude.

Edmund Burke, who was sympathetic to the colonists, sought to ex-
plain this phenomenon by reminding Parliament that wherever slavery
exists, "those who are free are by far the most proud and jealous of their
freedom." He continued:

Freedom is to them not only an enjoyment, but a kind of rank and
privilege. Not seeing there that freedom, as in countries where it is
a common blessing and as broad and general as the air, may be
united with much abject toil, with great misery, with all the exte-
rior of servitude, liberty looks amongst them like something that is
more noble and liberal.

Burke rightly perceived that the proximity to human bondage and the
constant threat of slave insurrection created a particularly fervent appre-
ciation for economic and political independence among slaveholders. Yet
more noteworthy was Burke's implicit acknowledgment that settlers and
British administrators operated from different ideological frameworks
and held competing views of liberty. According to Burke, unlike English
parliamentarians who enjoyed a "common blessing" of freedom, slave-
holding settlers were unwilling to accept that liberty should have "the
exterior of servitude." In other words, while settlers sought to create in-
ternal conditions that eliminated all the vestiges of slavery, those in Lon-
don accepted that no pure experience of freedom existed or could pro-
vide a meaningful basis for social life. 171

For settlers, such arguments suggested that the home country had in
fact abandoned the commitment to self-rule and republican freedom.
This belief that the metropole no longer adhered to the basic principles
of liberty led many Anglo colonists in the second half of the eighteenth
century to decry English "corruption" and eventually to call for an inde-
pendent American nation freed from the shackles of Old World moral
and political decay. 172 Yet the British move away from liberty as eco-
nomic and political self-rule was not an embrace of decadence. Rather, it
was the product of an alternative conception of freedom emerging from
basic economic changes in England coupled with the realities of a global
empire. As E. P. Thompson writes, the prominence of the factory helped
create a new discourse of liberty and also arrested the move in England
toward explicit labor coercion. The rise of the factory system entailed the
arduous and slow effort to reshape peasants into efficient wage earners.

The ultimate result was an industrial mode of production that combined
social discipline and economic profit in ways that far outstripped previ-
ous ones. Crucial to this system was a labor market that provided em-
ployers with sufficient numbers of wage earners such that compulsion,
seen as less rational and profitable by late eighteenth-century economists,
was no longer required. 173

This emergence of an industrial market, in which individuals out of
economic necessity sold their labor to employers, contradicted repub-
lican freedom just as directly as actual slavery had. Dependence on an
employer for one's livelihood was as enervating and oppressive as depen-
dence on any other economic or political master. Thus for English econo-
mists to view such sale as "free" and hence legitimate required altering
the meaning of freedom itself. The need for this conceptual change dove-
tailed with the requirements of managing an extensive territorial empire.
The attempt to maintain authority over so massive and diverse a set of
peoples had meant recognizing the legitimacy of native laws and cus-
toms. In addition, it had led the metropole to centralize colonial author-
ity while at the same time beginning to generate forms of indirect rule.

As with the rise of the factory, such a transformation in imperial pol-
icy could not be made consistent with republican liberty. Even if ade-
quately protected, the emphasis on royal prerogative as the basis for
local control meant that all subjects, Anglo settlers and indigenous groups
alike, were dependent on the whim of the King-in-Parliament for their
rights. Moreover, while imposing English law, religion, and political insti-
tutions on recalcitrant groups clearly would be oppressive, so too was
empowering indigenous elites to frame traditional institutions as they
saw fit. This latter choice only created what Mahmood Mamdani de-
scribes as "decentralized despotism," with imperial overseers unleashing
preferred local chiefs to entrench and enforce despotic modes of colonial
control. 174 As far as robust republicanism was concerned, both options
amounted to servitude. In other words, under the previous de facto sta-
tus quo, the subjugation or removal of non- Anglo communities allowed
colonial settlers to enjoy a high degree of political and economic inde-
pendence. Now the administrative attempt to elevate the status of non-
Anglo peoples, despite creating a more equitable division of power, made
liberty as self-rule unachievable for all.

In 1785, two years after the Paris Treaty ended Britain's war with the
American colonies, the utilitarian thinker William Paley powerfully cap-
tured Burke's basic sentiment that republican freedom was an impossible

ideal. For a large, industrializing empire, the notion that all subjects
should enjoy the fruits of independence would inevitably cause social con-
flict and potential revolt. He wrote, "Those definitions of liberty ought to
be rejected, which, by making that essential to civil freedom which is
unattainable in experience, inflame expectations that can never be grati-
fied, and disturb the public content with complaints, which no wisdom
or benevolence of government can remove." 175 Instead, as Philip Pettit
argues, for Paley and Jeremy Bentham freedom was better understood as
noninterference, or the absence of coercion. 176 A person was free to the
extent that the state or other individuals did not directly interfere with
his or her immediate ability to make choices. Therefore, regardless of the
power of royal prerogative or the dependence created by the labor mar-
ket, as long as subjects abroad and industrial wage earners at home did
not face actual compulsion, they enjoyed freedom.

This fundamental incongruence between the settler ideal of economic
and political self-rule and the imperial conception of noninterference is
usefully illustrated by the 1778 case of Knight v. Wedderburn. The ques-
tion concerned whether Joseph Knight, who had left his master John
Wedderburn while both were in Scotland, could be compelled to return.
The Court of Session, Scotland's highest tribunal, extended the Somerset
ruling and held that Knight must be set free as on Scottish soil slavehold-
ers enjoyed no legal remedies. 177 In arguing the case, Wedderburn's advo-
cates claimed that common law allowed for perpetual servitude because
of the practice in Scotland of binding laborers to coal mines and salt
works for life. Such workers did not have the right to change employ-
ment and were often sold along with the property. For slaveholders, not
only did these examples indicate the prevalence of coerced labor in Scot-
land, but they also suggested the meaninglessness of the distinction be-
tween slavery and contract labor. Both amounted to forms of subordina-
tion, to which no truly independent individual would consent. Wage labor,
like slavery, was at root coercive, and unless an individual enjoyed eco-
nomic self-sufficiency, he or she could not claim to be free.

In response, anti-slavery advocates and defenders of a contract-based
concept of freedom argued that Scottish workers were not physically
compelled to accept such employment and were free as long as they re-
ceived pay in exchange for work. As reconstructed in Howell's State Tri-
als, Joseph Knight's lawyers maintained that "A coal brewer is a profession
which is voluntarily embraced, and, like other professions, is regulated
by particular laws, which are more or less strict, according as the interest

92

of the public is thought to require." They then defended the reasonable-
ness of binding workers for life given the difficulty of finding individuals
willing to engage in such hazardous employment:

The art of working coal successfully requires long practice to at-
tain, and is prejudicial to the health of those who are not early
accustomed to it. It was, therefore, extremely natural, when coal
works were begun to be set on foot, that the proprietors should, in
return for the high wages they gave the workmen, take them bound
to continue in their service for a long term of years, or for life.

As David Brion Davis writes, "For anti-slavery advocates ... it was not
slavery's subordination or lack of mobility that ran contrary to nature. It
was rather the lack of any token of exchange which would make the
worker responsible, at least theoretically, for his own destiny." 178

In the minds of American republicans, these arguments defending the
supposed freedom of contract highlighted the metropole's abandonment
of liberty as self-rule. For the slaveholding settler, although it might re-
quire subjugating a slave population, his own freedom constituted more
than merely earning a wage. It entailed genuine personal control over one's
economic, political, and religious life. Thus the failure of imperial policy to
live up to this ideal meant that the British model of empire was incompat-
ible with true freedom. It subjected both settlers and indigenous peoples to
the dictates of an external power and was justified on an account of liberty
that described as "free" deeply oppressive forms of social life.

Ultimately, British efforts to broaden the privileges of subjectship
through policies of cultural and religious toleration entailed a reduction
in the actual value of social inclusion. To use Burke's suggestive phrase, it
meant accepting that freedom brought with it "the exterior of servitude"
and that liberty amounted only to noninterference with one's immediate
will. By contrast, for settlers a robust defense of republicanism presup-
posed fundamental hierarchies and took for granted both the perma-
nence of dependent and degraded labor and the impossibility of includ-
ing marginalized groups as full social members. It would take civil wa
for large numbers of Americans to begin imagining the possibility of uni-
versalizing membership. When they did so, political actors as diverse as
the Radical Republicans, the Knights of Labor, and the agrarian social
movement raised precisely this point: whether inclusion could mean
extending to all the emancipatory promise of American freedom as self-
rule rather than simply abandoning its substance.

Conclusion: Empire and Utopia in Settler Ideology

With the Declaration of Independence, American settlers finally and ir-
revocably committed themselves to the project of replacing English sub-
jectship with republican citizenship. For these settlers, the metropole had
come to represent the corrupt practices of the Old World, which over-
whelmed political and economic self-rule in the drive for imperial con-
quest. Parliamentary monarchy was seen as built on vassalage and as re-
ducing free citizens to wards of the state. Yet, if British imperialism
was incompatible with republican liberty, this did not imply that empire
as such should be rejected. Unlike the native or the slave, the settler was
an embodiment of the imperial metropole and therefore unavoidably
tied to the project of empire. As J. G. A. Pocock writes:

For Americans, however, there was an evident paradox in the dis-
covery that imperial conquests, which had rendered them secure
against foreign and aboriginal enemies, now faced them with the
threat of corruption by their own government. In such circum-
stances the rhetoric of the republic and Caesar was appropriate
and was used; yet were not Americans, even in their own eyes, a
system of colonies extending an empire . . . ? 179

For the settler, empire was in fact the servant of liberty; it provided
the essential foundation for a new social experiment in collective free-
dom. By extending control over territory, settlers cleared land to be har-
nessed by human industry, which gave each citizen the opportunity to
find economic and moral self-sufficiency As Pocock notes, empire prop-
erly conceived could be emancipatory: "Ehe Roman people had exercised
imperium in the sense of power over other peoples, which they had built
up as Machiavelli's 'commonwealth for expansion' and by the exercise of
Machiavellian virtu." uo What differentiated this version of imperialism
from that pursued by the British metropole was a specific relationship to
territory. Whereas empire for the Crown amounted to a site of control
and economic extraction, for the American colonist it was the basis for
the republican citizen's moral development. Expansion guaranteed a dif-
fuse distribution of land, which promoted egalitarian settler communi-
ties built on independent proprietorship and shared political decision
making.

The two failed attempts in 1775 and 1776 by the Continental Congress
to invade Canada underscored the continuing importance of empire to

settler ideology. According to General Schuyler, the military officer in
charge of the first invasion:

The only views of Congress were to restore to them those rights
which every subject of the British Empire, of whatever religious
sentiment he may be, is entitled to; and that in the execution of these
truths he had received the most positive orders to cherish every
Canadian, and every friend to the cause of liberty, and sacredly
guard their property. 181

Hidden in Schuyler's complimentary words, as well as in the 1774 con-
gressional Appeal to the Inhabitants of Quebec, 182 was a settler commit-
ment to returning Britain's North American empire to the de facto status
quo that had long governed it. Restoring rights meant reintroducing
English law and political institutions and thus ensuring the political su-
premacy of Anglo-Protestant settlers. Moreover, invasion was also seen
as a crucial means of gaining access to indigenous land, denied by the
Royal Proclamation of 1763 and then by Canadian enlargement. In a
sense, what settlers rejected was not the need for expansion but the
emerging metropolitan view that such expansion should not be di-
rected primarily by Anglo colonists. Just as they had for over a century,
settlers sought to defend their right to a decentralized and largely auton-
omous project of territorial conquest, one viewed by colonists as critical
to economic and political independence. As Franklin contended in The
Interest of Great Britain Considered and as Jefferson reiterated in A
Summary View of British America, by expanding settlements across
North America and allowing each new community freedom from cen-
tralized control over land and government, empire and liberty would
go hand in hand.

Moreover, as during the seventeenth century, for many this settler vi-
sion of territorial expansion had a clear Utopian dimension, with millen-
nial elements infusing the moral project. Ernest Lee Tuveson and Nathan
Hatch suggest that New England Puritans in particular came to view the
revolutionary struggle as part of the sequence of victories beginning with
the Reformation and leading inevitably to the rule of God on earth. Ezra
Stiles, like Winthrop, Cotton, and Danforth before him, saw America as
the new Israel and the revolution as marking the "triumph of LIBERTY
on earth," in which the "progress of society will be accelerated by centu-
ries. . . . Light spreads from the day-spring in the west; and may it shine
more and more until the perfect day." 183

As a consequence, radical Protestants in the colonies believed that
metropolitan policies and Old World corruption were tied to the machi-
nations of an Antichrist. As discussed earlier, John Adams famously
railed against the evil confederacy of Catholicism and absolutism that
engulfed most of Europe and asserted, "Thus as long as this confederacy
lasted, and the people were held in ignorance, liberty, and with her, knowl-
edge and virtue too, seem to have deserted the earth, and one age of dark-
ness succeeded another, till God in his benign providence raised up the
champions who began and conducted the Reformation." Adams pre-
sented settler communities as the ground for a future Utopia in which the
political and religious promise of the Reformation would be realized and
declared that this millennial effort was "the great struggle that peopled
America." According to such utopianism, the colonists were depicted as
the final heir of the Reformation, and the American revolutionaries were
a chosen people capable of creating a free republic of peace. 184

Critically, radical Protestants saw their redemptive mission as requiring
the complete pacification of violence, because only then would the com-
munity be liberated from internal and external threat. The sense of con-
stant crisis that had marked settler society from its inception became espe-
cially heightened during the Revolutionary War. Colonists believed that
they were surrounded by servile enemies — natives, slaves, and Catholics —
who were united to destroy their freedom, a fact that even Jefferson
noted in the Declaration of Independence. As one of the colonial griev-
ances, the Declaration argues, "He [King George] has excited domestic
insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabit-
ants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of
warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and condi-
tions." 185 The fear of slave rebellion and indigenous attack meant that to
secure freedom and to ensure peace, such enemies had to be either elimi-
nated or made completely subordinate. These needs emphasized the view
that the very future of settler life, let alone millennial tranquility, was in-
conceivable without empire. Expansion not only provided colonists with
land and the possibility of republican liberty; it also removed those for-
eign dangers that undermined domestic peace.

Ultimately, in the conflict with Britain, American colonists reaffirmed
central aspects of colonial settler society and began to articulate an ac-
count of republican empire that would ground the American political
and constitutional project for years to come. This project argued that ter-
ritorial expansion could be made compatible with a government based

96

on consent and popular participation. At the same time, this republican
settler empire viewed freedom as an exclusivist ideal, accessible only to
Anglo-Saxons and select Europeans, whose heritage, land practices, and
religion made them particularly suited to self-rule. Such exclusivism pre-
supposed that settler security, as well as more grandiose dreams of Uto-
pian peace, required the subordination of internal and external enemies,
who threatened Anglo social and political supremacy. Thus freedom and
domination were bound together, generating within the newly indepen-
dent colonies what might be called a politics of duality. Internally, settler
communities were based on legal and political limits, while the external
condition was that of conflict.

For all these reasons, the Anglo settler revolt from British rule raised
critical questions about the compatibility of empire and freedom, ques-
tions that the American political project has since struggled to answer. At
its most noble, the British vision of a global empire was premised on tol-
eration and the belief that, regardless of ethnicity or religion, the king
had a responsibility to protect the rights of each royal subject. Whether
driven by basic security, the thirst for conquest, or notions of justice, this
culturally inclusive ideal radically altered the framework of British impe-
rium in the eighteenth century and therefore threatened the social and
political hegemony of Anglo settlers. Yet this revised imperial ideal also
compromised the autonomy of all; it undermined the view that freedom
was not simply the elimination of direct coercion but a moral condition
of economic, political, and spiritual independence. In rejecting British
authority, American settlers sought to strengthen this higher ideal of free-
dom and believed that they could do so by reasserting a previous impe-
rial status quo. They imagined that empire in the hands of republican
settlers would make expansion and liberty synonymous, through decen-
tralized control and local autonomy. They also assumed that such liberty
must necessarily be exclusive. For settlers, the prevalence of forced labor
in eighteenth-century agricultural production and the existence of an
ever-present native threat emphasized the inherent limits of republican
inclusion.

However, as the new settler empire emerged, it confronted the very
questions that had plagued British imperium: Can an expanding empire
actually be governed without centralized authority, and what does such
authority imply for the possibility of self-rule? Can economic and politi-
cal liberty be universalized to include a greater share of the population
than only land-owning settlers? What happens to this ideal when faced

with the rise of industrial wage labor and the decline of agricultural pro-
duction? Is settler colonization compatible with overseas conquest, and if
not, are such conquests legitimate? More so than other political commu-
nities, American colonists and their descendents were forced to address
the fate of republican freedom in the modern age, as well as whether
liberty and empire can ever be made consistent. This effort produced an
increasingly more expansive vision of republicanism and its emancipa-
tory possibilities. But as Chapter 2 underscores, such possibilities were
bound to a citizen-subject dichotomy that presumed the necessity of both
settler supremacy and subordinated work.

2

CITIZENS AND SUBJECTS

POSTCOLONIAL AMERICA

the injustice and wretchedness of the mother country. Nor is
general emigration necessary. England, if she would be just,
could support a larger population than she now numbers.
The evil is not from over population, but from the unequal
repartition of the fruits of industry, She suffers from the over
production . . . because her workmen produce not for them-

:s Brownson, The Labouring Classes (1840)

Central to the frontier myth and popular understandings of the Ameri-
can experience is the idea that settlers were virulently opposed to govern-
ment power and were wary of any state intervention. As James Morone
writes, all of U.S history can be read as an effort by American citizens to
come to grips with their "dread" of government and to "master their anti-
statist trepidations." : Certainly, this is how the various local crises of the
late eighteenth century are usually understood. Rugged and individualistic
pioneers at the edges of American expansion, who were inherently anti-
statist, courted anarchy and reinforced the centrifugal tendencies tearing
apart the newly independent colonies. In response, the federal Constitu-
tion's founders constructed a political compact able both to maintain social
order and to give free expression to the egalitarian impulses dictating settler
practice.

Yet the conventional narrative fails in two critical respects to make
sense both of these particular historical episodes and of the larger collec-
tive project. To begin with, by exaggerating the individualism of settler
life, it ignores the way in which small farmers and townspeople actually
presented robust accounts of how energetic government could promote

republican freedom. As a consequence, the conventional narrative also
fails to explain why these accounts remained largely submerged and the
process by which ordinary citizens came to see government power as a
form of external oppression rather than as an instrument for social fulfill-
ment. In this chapter, I chart how this "dread" of state authority arose in
the post-Revolutionary period and explore the consequences for
nineteenth-century settlerism and its lasting implications for U.S. economic
and political institutions.

This story, therefore, begins with those domestic crises immediately
following the Revolution, which threatened social stability and which
have commonly been misread as early examples of a persistent and con-
genital anti-statism. In late 1786, 9,000 New England farmers took up
arms against the state of Massachusetts; nearly one-fourth of the adult
males in the region's rural countryside were in open revolt. The Shays'
Rebellion was a culmination of long-standing grievances by small farm-
ers in western villages, who were concerned with the economic inequities
between city and country and the general disregard by coastal elites for
the harshness of frontier life. The postwar credit crisis only intensified
these concerns, as rural farmers found themselves at the bottom rung
of a destructive chain of debt. In 1784 British creditors, including five of
London's largest merchant houses, ended business with American traders
and withdrew all outstanding loans. To repay British debts, New England's
wealthy merchants demanded hard currency from country retailers and
shopkeepers, who in turn passed on the demand to rural farmers. Such
farmers usually paid shopkeepers seasonally in goods or labor and had
little to no hard currency. While New England's wealthy merchants gen-
erally escaped financial difficulty, since traders had no legal duty to repay
foreign creditors, poor farmers faced economic destitution. The court in
particular came to embody the marginal status of the western yeoman, as
legal actions enforcing debt collection and utilizing debtors' jails tore
families apart and reduced many to pauperism. 2

For Shaysites and their sympathizers, the Revolutionary experience
and its language of republican freedom provided a framework for articu-
lating the oppressive nature of the credit crisis. Farmers found property
seizures and the specter of tenancy to be especially distressing, viewing
the loss of land as the loss of independence and the nullification of the
natural right to labor. Rather than simply a philosophical problem, ten-
ancy confronted farmers with the very real prospect of extreme poverty
and immiseration. Trapped in permanent debt to landlords, tenants unable

to pay rent found themselves thrown off land they had spent years culti-
vating and were left without the means for basic subsistence. As the farm-
ers of Conway, Massachusetts, noted in their petition published by the
Massachusetts Gazette, "To be tenants to landlords, we know not who,
and pay rents for lands, purchased with our money, and converted from
howling wilderness, into fruitful fields, by the sweat of our brow, seems to
carry with it in its nature truly shocking" results. For the yeomen, liberty
as self-rule consisted of land ownership and control over the activity and
produce of labor. According to Shaysites, the failure of courts and state
legislatures to ensure such productive control meant subjecting free citizens
to the yoke of slavery. George Brock, a farmer from Attleboro, Massachu-
setts, remarked that coastal elites intended to "drive out that hardy and in-
dependent spirit from among us" by imposing tenancy and wage labor
"and forg[ing] chains for our liberties so strong, that the great exertions
and convulsions will not break them." 3

A decade later, with the western frontier now racked by the Whiskey
Rebellion, small farmers and the rural poor again employed the language
of republican liberty to voice their collective grievances. For settlers on
the Appalachian frontier, life in the last decades of the eighteenth century
was violent and brutal, with families living at bare subsistence and a ma-
jority of the population in Pennsylvania counties such as Fayette landless.
Economic squalor, the threat of reprisals by Native Americans, and the
lack of access to land created an unbearable situation, in which the excise
tax on whiskey produced revolt. Just as with the Shaysites, these farmers
saw the tax as making economic independence and freedom as self-rule
impossible, as well as entrenching the political hegemony of mercantile
elites. According to pamphleteer George Logan, coastal merchants and
lawyers embodied "a dangerous aristocracy" who had introduced an op-
pressive economic and political order, "which, if not crushed in the bud,
will destroy our liberties forever." 4

In a sense, such small farmers on the western frontier, by invoking
the republican idiom, were simply reaffirming the basic contours of set-
tler empire. In describing the servitude caused by wage labor and ten-
ancy, Shaysites in New England and Whiskey Rebels in Pennsylvania
reproduced a foundational claim that had justified American indepen-
dence. During the colonial and Revolutionary eras, most settlers, eastern
and western, country and city, agreed that subjection to the political or
economic sway of another necessarily undermined freedom. No less a
champion of mercantile interests than Alexander Hamilton wrote in the

Federalist Papers, "a power over a man's subsistence amounts to a power
over bis will." 5 Moreover, western farmers, like coastal elites, also de-
fended the centrality of expansion to republican freedom. In fact, their
experience of landlessness and their proximity to native communities
emphasized the belief that economic independence rested on new terri-
tory for settlement. If anything, as the rebellions underscored, western
farmers complained that coastal elites had not done nearly enough to
reduce the threat of indigenous attacks or to expand the domain for set-
tler agriculture.

However, the Shaysites and the Whiskey Rebels did more than merely
claim the existing political language for their own purposes. They out-
lined their own distinctive formulation of republican liberty: what I will
call a populist account of self-rule. Two basic arguments separated pop-
ulism from the claims made by the colonial gentry and commercial elite.
First, it presented an identity between the common good and the interests —
properly understood — of the laboring community. As George Logan in-
dicated, the rural poor came to believe that small farmers and artisans,
as opposed to the "aristocracy" of merchants and lawyers, embodied the
people writ large, because they alone were committed to entrenching
productive control and to defending the economic independence of all set-
tlers. Second, populists argued that for the laboring community to assert
its goals, government should be structured as local producerist democra-
cies, in which legislatures responsive to ordinary settlers wielded supreme
power. This account of majoritarianism necessarily embraced a vision of
energetic state authority. It expanded on the long tradition within republi-
can thought, emphasized by thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, that to
be free polities had to be small and organized in a way that refused to
divide sovereignty across various institutions. 6 Thus, rather than rejecting
government power, laborers imagined legislatures actively promoting
economic liberty through policies as diverse as debt relief and territorial
conquest.

In the remainder of this chapter, I explore what happened to this
populist account of empire and freedom in the early American republic —
and why it slipped into the xenophobia and anti-governmentalism often
associated with rural America. The populist vision of liberty articulated a
radical promise for the collective possibilities inherent in settler life. Yet,
from its very inception in the Revolutionary period, this vision faced an
unavoidable difficulty that both shaped and constricted its development.
While revolt gave American settlers juridical independence from the British

Empire, the former colonies continued to be bound within a mercantilist
system that limited substantive independence. Just as with more recent
postcolonial societies, the emerging polity found itself embedded in a
world of competing European states, in which it played a relatively mar-
ginal and dependent role. Such postcolonial dependence placed a basic
strain on the populist vision, because this vision's conception of liberty
appeared to conflict directly with the achievement of substantive inde-
pendence from British intrusion and European power politics. In other
words, it seemed that one could have local, decentralized democracies
committed to popular rule in the interests of the many or a political state
capable of successfully navigating threats in the global arena — but perhaps
not both.

This American postcolonial predicament helped justify an elite sub-
version of populist freedom, again foreshadowing developments in later
polities of Latin America, Asia, and Africa. In the early United States, this
worked through the constitutional creation of a federal government con-
structed on grounds of institutional balance and political insulation from
democratic rule. By rejecting populist forms of authority, coastal elites
fundamentally altered the political path of populism. In particular, they
disconnected the hope of a democratic society of small producers from a
belief in an energetic government in the service of the many. Since the in-
stitutional form of the new polity departed from the populist hope for
locally centered majoritarianism, the new government's activities likely
would be incompatible with laboring interests. Thus the flipside of popu-
list faith in locally controlled politics and government intervention was a
suspicion of state power when such power was organized inappropri-
ately. Populism increasingly took on a negative form, primarily commit-
ted to policing state activity, as political developments largely nullified
populism's own positive vision — one of local democracies pursuing a
vigorous and unified collective will. Wary of government capture by
"monopoly" interests, populist sentiment came to see a self-regulating
commercial society as a better prospect for economic independence. In
short, I argue that American anti-statism became historically preemi-
nent in large part because of the demise of an alternative ideal that
combined energetic government with the direct assertion of popular
authority.

More critically, as this alternative ideal receded, populism linked the
very act of an energetic federal government to the external project of
empire building, a project that presupposed an unlimited imperial power

deriving from British royal prerogative. Aggressive federal activity thus
became synonymous with the internal application of a coercive authority
properly applied only to those outside the bounds of social inclusion,
such as natives and blacks. Under these circumstances, any internal ap-
pearance of the dreaded imperial prerogative was viewed as a dangerous
threat to liberty and an attempt to reduce free settlers to the condition of
heathens or savages — by treating free citizens as if they were colonial
subjects. In other words, despite its constitutional defeat, populism per-
sisted as a galvanizing articulation of freedom, only now in a deeply re-
duced form. Particularly xenophobic, this truncated populism upheld the
necessity of empire and simultaneously remained ever vigilant about the
possibility of imperial power seeping into settler society. Ultimately, it would
take civil war and a tumultuous reordering of social life for the Revolution-
ary promise of populist freedom to reemerge in full form.

In this chapter, I lay out the above argument in greater detail, focusing
on how populism was nullified as a positive political principle. To set the
stage for a discussion of settler contestation over the meaning of republi-
can freedom, I first outline the imperial framework that the overwhelm-
ing majority of Americans embraced. I illustrate how settlers in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries reaffirmed the previous colo-
nial status quo and constitutionalized the British imperial prerogative —
now housed in the federal Congress. This initial discussion pays particu-
lar attention to Chief Justice John Marshall's efforts to justify territorial
expansion and Anglo supremacy vis-a-vis Native Americans. It also de-
scribes how colonial distinctions between privileged European immigrants
and stratified imperial subjects defined early American politics, for instance
by distinguishing between subordinated groups formally designated as
U.S. citizens and insiders enjoying actual free citizenship. In the second
section, I draw out the populist arguments made by Thomas Paine and
William Manning, describing the vision of producerist democracy that ar-
tisans and small farmers hoped to intertwine with empire. I then highlight
how the postcolonial predicament and the concern with global weakness
undermined both the institutions of local majoritarianism and the popular
power of ordinary laborers. This discussion pays particular attention to
the debates over the federal Constitution and to how territorial expansion,
to the disappointment of western farmers, ultimately reinforced the decline
of robust populism.

In the final sections of the chapter, I detail how government power
became synonymous with imperial prerogative. As a result of this shift,

settler life found itself structured around a constitutional politics of dual-
ity, with government enjoying two separate forms of sovereign power.
While external colonial conquest was predicated on an unchecked impe-
rial right that saw all boundaries as provisional, internal state authority
was constrained by a vision of freedom as self-rule. The inherent tension
in this inescapable duality, present before independence, served as the
defining feature of postcolonial society and provided the structure for an
independent settler empire and — eventually — a straitjacket for populism.
During the early decades of the republic, social critics and reformers did
exist, especially at the edges of the workingmen's parties of the 1820s
and 1830s, who questioned the utility and moral legitimacy of this politi-
cal and constitutional framework. Thinkers such as Thomas Skidmore
called for a producerist politics unshackled from imperial pretensions
and ethnic exclusions. These critics, however, were largely voices in the
wilderness, out of step with the commitments and culture of the times.

Constitutionalizing Empire and the Politics of Duality

In order to appreciate the context within which newly independent set-
tlers argued over the substance of republican freedom and the role of
government, we need to begin by describing those imperial frameworks
that provided the foundation for these debates. While some scholars sug-
gest that empire is an inappropriate constitutional characterization of the
early American republic, I argue in this section that settlerism was con-
sciously and legally constructed as an enterprise in empire building,
though admittedly one of a particular character. The revolt by the thir-
teen colonies was an attempt to defend a lost imperial status quo, in
which local settlers directed the project of territorial expansion on the
premise that indigenous communities did not possess real legal sover-
eignty over the land they occupied. Control of such land was believed
necessary for republican and Utopian visions of empire, because expan-
sion would create a permanent condition of peace as well as the moral
and economic basis for freedom. Most early Americans viewed the inde-
pendent colonies as the proper successor to British imperial power and
held that settlers enjoyed an imperial right unchecked by native interests
to expand whenever the public good dictated. Moreover, just as with
metropolitan London, settlers believed that this imperial right granted them
prerogative authority over nonsettler subjects, such as Indians, blacks, and
later Mexicans, who were legitimately ruled by whichever methods best

promoted pacification and order. Meaningful political disagreement thus
did not center on empire per se. Rather, it concerned the role of this im-
perial prerogative power within settler society — among presumptively
free citizens — and the question of how to structure a collective project
based on the dichotomy between privileged insiders and subordinated
outsiders.

The New Republic and the Old Imperial Prerogative
The manner in which the independent colonies claimed the imperial man-
tle of the British crown is usefully illustrated by an early nineteenth-
century Supreme Court opinion by Chief Justice John Marshall. Johnson v.
MTntosh (1823) explicitly revisited the legal rights of land speculators — a
central dispute between colonial settlers and the British metropole in the
years preceding revolt. 7 The case concerned whether American courts
should respect the validity of Revolutionary-era land purchases made be-
tween the Illinois-Wabash Company and native tribes. In speaking for a
unanimous Court and holding such sales invalid, Marshall argued that pri-
vate citizens could not buy land directly from Native Americans. Rather, the
United States, in the form of the federal Congress, enjoyed ultimate title to
such land and alone could extinguish Indian occupancy. In doing so, Mar-
shall articulated the legal scope of the settler claim to British imperium and
highlighted the extent to which the United States was premised on an inher-
ent right of colonial conquest.

Marshall grounded these assertions by recasting Coke's feudal dis-
course of conquest regarding infidel lands as a "Doctrine of Discovery."
Long recognized as part of the law of nations, European states in the
New World possessed an "exclusive right to extinguish the Indian title of
occupancy, either by purchase or conquest." This customary imperial
right meant that indigenous groups did not possess legally recognizable
sovereignty, akin to European states, over their own land. "[Native] rights
to complete sovereignty, as independent nations, were necessarily dimin-
ished, and their power to dispose of the soil at their own will, to whom-
soever they pleased, was denied by the original fundamental principle,
that discovery gave exclusive title to those who made it." 8

For Marshall, this right of discovery was principally about establish-
ing which European "discoverers" could assert sole possession over spe-
cific indigenous land and thus "exclu[de] ... all other Europeans." In a
sense, he depicted the New World as a colonial scramble, in which the
only meaningful checks were conflicting claims made by European states.

According to him, the British Crown had staked its right to North Amer-
ican territories "as far west as the river Mississippi," and with indepen-
dence complete title to all these lands passed exclusively to American
power. Through the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolutionary War,
Great Britain gave over its imperial "rights to the soil," and "It has never
been doubted, that either the United States, or the several States had a
clear title to all the lands within the boundary lines described in the
treaty, subject only to the Indian right of occupying, and that exclusive
power to extinguish that right, was vested in that government which
might constitutionally exercise it." 9

Crucially, Marshall was wary of directly defending as a matter of law
the actual feudal justifications for conquest, grounded in the "superior
genius" of Europeans and the "character and religion" of native peoples.
Instead, Marshall took the history of conquest as a fact on the ground,
which could not be legally avoided, writing, "We will not enter into the
controversy, whether agriculturists, merchants, and manufacturers, have
a right, on abstract principles, to expel hunters from territory they pos-
sess, or to contract their limits. Conquest gives a title which the Courts of
the conqueror cannot deny." Still, even in evincing skepticism about the
rationales for dispossession, Marshall nonetheless accepted the inevita-
bility and indeed the necessity of colonial conquest. On the one hand, he
admitted that a right of discovery with respect to competing European
claims may not on its face validate dispossession of native inhabitants,
because it would appear only to determine which Europeans could bar-
gain over territory with local peoples. But at the same time, he argued
that in historical practice, discovery had been legally "converted" into a
right of conquest that presumed that local peoples could be removed at
will. In his view, Indian tribes were "fierce savages, whose occupation
was war," and "to leave them in possession of their country, was to leave
the country a wilderness." Given their violent character, the only solution
for rational and industrious settlers, committed to productively employ-
ing the land, was to enforce their rights of discovery "by the sword." 10

As such, the "Doctrine of Discovery" necessarily carried with it an im-
perial and discretionary prerogative over colonized groups and their terri-
tory. The link between the two embodied a "principle" that had "been as-
serted in the first instance, and afterwards sustained" such that "it [became]
the law of the land, and cannot be questioned." In essence, the settler proj-
ect was grounded not only on a right of discovery vis-a-vis other European
powers but also on one of imperial conquest over Indian tribes. This latter

right was "indispensible to that system under which the country had
been settled" and thus remained in effect even after independence. As a
consequence, Marshall indicated that with the Treaty of Paris, the
Crown passed over not only title to specific Indian lands but also those
imperial prerogatives that were "indispensible" for maintaining territo-
rial control and that provided the legal basis for future acts of indige-
nous expropriation. In Marshall's view, such authority constituted a
central fact of settler society. And despite his own moral qualms regard-
ing the treatment of native communities, he was unwilling to question
whether the new polity enjoyed these inherent rights of conquest and
Indian control as a matter of law. Marshall's arguments suggested that
few Americans — even those who found settler violence on the frontier
deeply distasteful — were willing to challenge the imperial underpinnings
of the expanding republic. 11

In his 1833 Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States,
Justice Joseph Story spelled out the implications of this tie between dis-
covery and conquest and the extent to which the Supreme Court had
constitutionalized imperial colonization. In the process, he went further
than Marshall and bluntly stated the ideological rationales, derived from
Coke and Locke two centuries earlier. Story wrote:

The title of the Indians was not treated as a right of property and
dominion, but as a mere right of occupancy. As infidels, heathens,
and savages, they were not allowed to possess the prerogatives
belonging to absolute, sovereign, and independent nations. The
territory over which they wandered, and which they used for this
temporary and fugitive purposes [sic], was, in respect to Chris-
tians, deemed as if it were inhabited only by brute animals. 12

In essence, Supreme Court jurisprudence made the colonial politics of du-
ality a central constitutional pillar. The United States asserted two respec-
tive forms of sovereign power. Internally, settler society sought to elimi-
nate all vestiges of royal prerogative in the name of casting off a "Norman
Yoke" and establishing political and economic independence. Externally,
the new polity imagined the west as vacant land and Congress as possess-
ing a right of colonial conquest still derived from this royal prerogative.
Such a duality meant that the new republic legally rejected the permanence
of its borders and imagined settler society as maintaining a basic right of
territorial expansion, in fulfillment of its colonial mandate. Rather than
casting off imperial pretension, settlers saw independence as reclaiming

empire from British corruption and reestablishing the link between colo-
nization and republican liberty.

The importance of reclaiming a lost imperial status quo is further il-
lustrated by the way in which the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 imag-
ined settler governance in the west. The ordinance, passed by the Conti-
nental Congress, provided the framework for how territory recently
ceded from Virginia would be administered. Besides asserting the royal
imperial prerogative, the law made clear that expansion would be a proj-
ect of Anglo settlement, in which American institutions necessarily
followed the flag. Although it applied only to Virginia's Northwest Terri-
tory, the ordinance envisioned a process for newly acquired lands that
eventually became the basic principle of all territorial acquisition and
governance. Congress would rule these lands directly through appointed
officials until circumstances were such that the territories could draft their
own constitution and apply for admission as a state. As a consequence, all
settlers regardless of place in the empire would eventually enjoy equal
rights, with political self-rule the ultimate basis for government and any-
thing short of it only a temporary arrangement. 13

This basic philosophical rejection of empire as a site for dependent
political possessions has led various scholars to conclude that while ex-
pansionist, the United States should not be thought of as a true empire. 14
What such arguments fail to recognize is that the constitutional equality
of various territorial possessions was a centerpiece of the previous de facto
colonial status quo, which settlers sought to reaffirm through revolution.
Just as colonists had argued before independence for a British Empire
premised on local and autonomous settler expansionism — without the
interference of a hegemonic London metropole — they now sought to en-
sure that conquest and settlement always went hand in hand. In other
words, there would be no need for permanent dependent status, because
indigenous removal and the growth of an Anglo population would en-
sure that free laws and customs would take root in the new territory.
Therefore, the failure to recognize this project as imperial results from a
perspective that views American settlerism solely through the lens of its
internal institutions. The spread of these institutions presupposed the
continuance of an imperial prerogative that took all boundaries as tem-
porary and rejected native sovereignty over the land that settlers occu-
pied. Peter Onuf, for example, explains how the internal principle of set-
tler freedom and the external condition of colonization were intimately
linked: "Implicitly, any recognition of Indian rights under treaties also

was understood to be provisional, subject to future negotiations that
would guarantee the land's highest use and the ultimate establishment of
republican government, the most civilized form of rule." 15

Thus, to speak of the new republic as a settler empire is ultimately to
recognize the way in which conquest was constitutionalized as an essen-
tial feature of American politics, and how such conquest was explicitly
constructed along the lines of a lost imperial status quo. Like their colo-
nial predecessors, early Americans viewed the west as a natural settler inheri-
tance, whose purpose was to ensure the internal freedom and permanent
peace of the new polity. William Henry Harrison, territorial governor,
military commander, and future president of the United States, conveyed
exactly these sentiments when in 1809 he asked the members of Indi-
ana's territorial legislature: "Is one of the fairest portions of the globe to
remain in a state of nature, the haunt of a few wretched savages, when it
seems destined by the Creator to give support to a large population, and
to be the seat of civilization, of science and true religion?" 16

This does not mean that every act of expansion was mutually agreed
upon within settler society; in fact, often violent internal disagreements
existed among politicians and settlers over the proper course of empire.
For instance, Alexander Hamilton was strongly opposed to the Louisiana
Purchase (which approximately doubled the size of the polity), viewing
the dispersion of settlers across a vast frontier as inimical to order and
necessarily corrosive of effective government — themes that would be as-
serted repeatedly by Federalist Party and later Whig politicians. 17 In fact,
Marshall's own hesitancy to defend the justness of conquest can be read
in these terms. A Federalist Party stalwart, Marshall, like Hamilton and
others during the Washington and Adams administrations, was also wary
of the increased political control exerted by western farmers and saw fron-
tier encroachments on native land as threatening federal authority. Even
if the new republic enjoyed imperial prerogatives as a constitutional mat-
ter, this did not make all acts of colonization either morally valid or po-
litically worthwhile.

Similarly, the eventual interjection of slavery into the question of ex-
pansion created great sectional antipathy to acts of empire seen as en-
hancing the "slave power." From the Mexican- American War through
the southern efforts at forming a Caribbean imperial basin, heated con-
tests over the route of expansion presaged the South's secession. Yet,
crucially, disagreements regarding the wisdom of conquest were funda-
mentally pragmatic rather than principled. As Robert May writes of the

1850s, "Northerners and southerners could still agree on the feasibility
of new territory, but they could not agree as to which foreign countries
were acceptable or as to what institutions would be permitted in the new
acquisitions." 18 Few questioned the legal and constitutional theory derived
from colonial settlement and articulated by Justices Marshall and Story.
The settler community, as an established fact, possessed an imperial pre-
rogative power that made both indigenous sovereignty and existing bor-
ders provisional — dependent exclusively on internal social needs.

As a consequence, the critique of empire concerned the judiciousness
of a particular act, given questions of order, slavery, or the political eleva-
tion of poor frontier farmers. As May writes, opponents often rejected ex-
pansion on the grounds that the time was not appropriate or that the
United States should wait until islands such as Cuba became "ripe fruit"
and could fall into American hands. 19 This, of course, is no different
from the experience of European imperial states, which often faced ex-
tensive internal dissent over whether specific instances of colonization
were appropriate. As in these European states, pragmatic disagreement
did not alter the basic nature of the political community. By making the
decision to colonize native lands or to expand into previously European
domains, such as the Louisiana Territory, dependent on a sovereign pre-
rogative derived from the British Crown, Americans ensured that empire
was a basic tenet of collective life. 20

Indigenous Groups and Indirect Rule
The existence of an internal project of settler freedom deeply intertwined
with an external imperial prerogative is often obscured by the very bru-
tality of American expansion. The belief — especially connected to popu-
list versions of republican freedom — that native removal was the precon-
dition for settler independence promoted a form of conquest committed
in large measure to erasing the native presence. Such systematic elimina-
tion left in its wake a politics critical of the internal use of prerogative
power; this hostility to domestic governmental prerogative thus con-
cealed the basic duality of settler life. In a sense, this concealment was most
explicitly unmasked during those moments when Americans seriously
contemplated what to do with native inhabitants when they could not
be simply ignored or eliminated. Under these circumstances, settlers
constructed a form of indirect rule virtually equivalent to how metro-
politan London structured discretionary and imperial subjectship for
conquered peoples.

One can see this development in two cases from the early 1830s concern-
ing indigenous rights, Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester
v. Georgia (1832). 21 These two Marshall decisions are often viewed as
internally inconsistent, with one noted commentator concluding that
while "Cherokee Nation emphasized the view of Indians as dependent
subjects, . . . Worcester stressed their independent status as separate sov-
ereigns." 22 Certainly the latter case, which concerned Georgia's right to
prosecute missionaries on Cherokee territory, was considered at the time
to be a defense — however partial — of indigenous rights, one that frontier
settlers and officials found suspect and unacceptable. Despite Marshall's
ruling against Georgia's right to prosecute, the state refused to release
the missionaries, and President Andrew Jackson, himself opposed to the
outcome, made clear that since the decision was not directed at the fed-
eral government it would play no role in enforcing it. The standoff was
resolved only when the governor of Georgia decided to pardon the
prisoners. 23

Yet, in order to understand fully the meaning of the decisions, it is
important to abstract oneself from the immediate political context and
appreciate the way in which Marshall's opinions suggested an answer for
how best to organize colonial relationships — one that paralleled incipi-
ent British approaches in Bengal and Canada. In the two cases, Marshall
confronted the problem of how to conceive of the ties binding settler so-
ciety to a native population, particularly when that native population
was committed to Protestantism and agricultural land use. Unlike other
indigenous groups, the Cherokee nation, a member of the so-called Five
Civilized Tribes, could not comfortably be situated within the European
conceptual framework of heathen savagery. This fact, along with the
sense that unless indigenous groups were entirely eradicated the United
States would have no choice but to develop political structures for the
native population within national territory, provided the backdrop to
Marshall's solution.

In Cherokee Nation, Marshall held that Native Americans did not
enjoy the independent sovereignty to sue as a foreign state in U.S. courts.
In line with earlier rulings, Marshall maintained that natives possessed
only a right of temporary occupancy within "a territory to which we as-
sert a title independent of their will." As such, native communities were
"domestic dependent nations" whose status with respect to the United
States resembled that of "a ward to his guardian." Given this status, any
attempt by European powers to interfere with settler-native relations or

"to acquire their lands . . . would be considered by all as an invasion of
our territory, and an act of hostility." Thus the only remedy available for
the Cherokee was "to look to our government for protection; rely upon
its kindness and its power; appeal to it for relief to their wants; and ad-
dress the president as their great father." 24 But, if indigenous groups
were the imperial subjects of the United States, what responsibilities
bound the two communities? To an important degree, the new republic
found itself facing a predicament akin to that of the British after 1763:
what should be the framework linking imperial authority to non-Anglo
subjects?

Marshall's response, found in Worcester, was to declare that indige-
nous groups enjoyed a quasi-sovereign status, solely limited by the
greater sovereignty of U.S. federal, rather than state, power. According to
the Court, "The Indian nations had always been considered as distinct,
independent political communities [who were] undisputed possessors of
the soil, from time immemorial, with the single exception of that im-
posed by [an] irresistible power [such that they could only interact with]
the first discoverer of the coast of the particular region claimed." 25 By
on the one hand allowing natives a diminished sovereignty while on the
other hand declaring them wards of the state, Marshall struck a balance
familiar in colonial history. He imagined a structure that could maintain
effective settler control over indigenous land while denying natives the
rights attaching to settler membership. This solution was simply indirect
rule by another name and exposed the dark side of such colonial prac-
tices. By claiming that native groups enjoyed a sovereign capacity to or-
ganize their own institutions, Marshall dissolved the bonds of responsi-
bility linking settler action to internal native life. However, by at the
same time viewing indigenous groups as ultimately subject to U.S. fed-
eral authority, he ensured that these communities were always con-
fronted by an unlimited coercive power in the imperial state, which at
any moment could engage in removal. At first glance, it might appear
odd that settlers who so rejected such developments by the British
metropole would produce analogous institutions. Yet one should recall
that Anglo colonists did not dislike the concept of indirect rule per se;
rather, they objected to its seemingly equal application to all subjects,
Anglo or otherwise, under Britain's increasingly global empire. For the
Revolutionary settlers, such forms of "decentralized despotism," 26 were
solely appropriate for those nonsettler groups excluded from social
membership.

In the end, Marshall's solution for the Cherokee would not be imme-
diately implemented, as antipathy to the very presence of native commu-
nities led to Jackson's Trail of Tears, in which the federal government
forcibly removed 15,000 people to land west of the Mississippi, with an
estimated 4,000 dying along the way. 27 Still, this did not mark the end of
indirect rule; it would reappear whenever native removal became a less
feasible or desirable option. As a result, what Marshall established was a
constitutional principle for how settlers should control subject popula-
tions. This principle, emphasizing both cultural separation and imperial
discretion, foreshadowed practices that eventually would become wide-
spread in Africa and Asia — embodied most starkly by the Bantustans of
Afrikaner society. In doing so, Marshall's two opinions on the status of the
Cherokee, which are properly conceived as a unified whole, provide a
moment in which the structural duality of American political and consti-
tutional life stands in sharp relief. On the one hand, the act of native dis-
possession may have been the most absolute form in which the new re-
public exercised its imperial prerogative. On the other, that very act — by
expanding settler society and its internal institutions into indigenous
land — eventually erased the evidence of a raw assertion of sovereignty. By
eliminating the untidy reality of everyday imperial rule, the growing set-
tler society could imagine itself as an "empire of liberty." 28

Free Immigrants and the Legal Stratification of Imperial Subjects
Thus, alongside the logic of colonial erasure, the basic rubric that governed
relations between settlers and excluded groups and underscored the essen-
tial legal continuity between British imperium and the independent settler
empire. This rubric presented nonsettler populations as conquered and
imperial subjects, appropriately ruled through pre-political and immuta-
ble forms of authority. Moreover, just as with Coke's patchwork imperial
framework, such authority stratified nonsettlers according to a series of
overlapping hierarchies. These hierarchies provided each community dis-
tinct structures of governance and levels of rights, depending on internal
economic needs and the dictates of political order. This meant that free
blacks or Mexicans in the Southwest could even be granted formal citi-
zenship while at the same time being denied those meaningful privileges
associated with full inclusion.

Perhaps surprisingly, these privileges were often accorded to new
European immigrants regardless of their formal nationality. As with old
colonial practices, stratified subjectship for excluded populations existed

alongside a system of swift incorporation — one developed for European
arrivals who were by contrast viewed as assimilable. This divide in treat-
ment highlights the imperial and discretionary forms of power imposed
on outsiders as well as the emancipatory implications of social member-
ship for groups incorporated as settlers. The United States not only main-
tained earlier practices of encouraging immigration; it extended these
practices to create a remarkably inclusive community for new Europe-
ans. As Hiroshi Motomura has demonstrated through his arguments
about "intending citizenship," immigrants, even before becoming formal
citizens, were integrated into the republican projects of self-rule and ex-
pansion in ways that were unimaginable on the Continent. 29 Recall that
under the European model of statecraft the legal distinction between
aliens and subjects was of central importance. According to Coke, in or-
der to protect monarchical authority one had to impose strict limits on
the rights of foreigners. Extensive rights for aliens would subvert the king's
dominion and allow other sovereigns to infiltrate the polity. In the United
States, however, the European monarchical distinction between aliens
and subjects became far less important than whether one possessed the
right ethnic and cultural background to be assimilated into settler
society.

As a result, whether an individual was a formal citizen did not neces-
sarily correlate with real social membership, or what I have called free
citizenship. Free citizens enjoyed all the prerequisites for republican lib-
erty, including complete rights to land ownership and political partici-
pation (such as through suffrage). As the nineteenth century unfolded, a
European "alien" could often live as a free citizen in the United States
even before naturalization, while subject groups such as nonslave blacks
may have been formally defined as citizens but were legally denied the
basic conditions for self-rule. In essence, free citizenship was extended on
the basis of ethnicity to co-participants in a settler project of expansion,
while colonized groups — regardless of their legal status as "citizens" —
were organized through long-standing modes of imperial subjectship.

Immigrant inclusiveness was most evident in the simplicity and ease
of the United States' new naturalization process. Under the 1802 Natu-
ralization Act, which remained in force for most of the nineteenth century,
to gain formal citizenship foreigners merely had to reside in the country
for five years, declare their intent to be naturalized at least three years
before admission to citizenship (but at any point after residence), pledge
an oath of allegiance to the federal Constitution, and give minimal proof

of good character. Critically, this process was available only to "free
white persons," a stipulation established by the very first naturalization
law in 1790 and which remained in effect until after the Civil War. 30 But
prior to formal admission, many immigrants who were still aliens enjoyed
political and economic privileges that emphasized their full standing
within settler society. For instance, European aliens who had declared
their intent to become naturalized were eligible for western land grants,
such as those under the 1850 Oregon Donation Land Act, aimed at set-
tling the Oregon Territory, and the more encompassing 1862 Home-
stead Act. 31

Throughout the nineteenth century, European noncitizens possessed
the right to vote in numerous states, particularly on the frontier. In the
years after independence, Congress explicitly included European aliens
as voting members in the Northwest Territories. 32 Vermont's first consti-
tution provided for the naturalization and enfranchisement of aliens, and
Virginia enacted similar policies through statute. Formalizing its colonial
practices, Pennsylvania also followed suit, although it added a two-year
residency requirement. 33 These efforts ebbed in the early decades of the
nineteenth century but quickly multiplied with a new phase of western
expansion during the 1840s and 1850s. In 1840, the Illinois Supreme
Court asserted that the state's constitution provided "the right of suf-
frage to those who, having by habitation and residence, identified their
interests and feelings with the citizenry . . . although they may be neither
native nor adopted citizens." 34 In 1848, Wisconsin passed a suffrage law
granting the vote to immigrants who under the naturalization process
had declared their intent to become citizens. Remarkably, the right per-
sisted regardless of whether immigrants ever actually completed the nat-
uralization process. Over the next ten years, Kansas, Minnesota, Oregon,
and Michigan all adopted similar alien suffrage laws, and after the Civil
War more than a dozen additional states in the south and west followed
the same path. 35 Especially on the frontier, alien voting, which had first
emerged during the colonial era, became routine.

The rationale driving this openness to European immigration was the
same as had long operated in the colonies. If the republican goals of eco-
nomic independence and freedom as self-rule necessitated territorial ex-
pansion, they also required enough people to work the land and to par-
ticipate in projects of conquest. Again, for an ethnically defined settler
society, not all immigrants were uniformly welcome, only those seen as
culturally assimilable and thus prospective co-participants in activities of

settlement. But, over the long term, the driving focus on the needs of ter-
ritorial and economic growth increasingly relaxed the idea of who counted
as a potential free settler citizen — a fact underscored by the consistent
provision of naturalization to all "free white persons."

Most strikingly, these demographic and material interests meant that
even Catholics came to be seen as capable of privileged membership, al-
though after an appropriate period of tutelage in Anglo-Protestant insti-
tutions and liberty. This development was dictated in part by the simple
facts of which communities were emigrating from Europe to the United
States. Between 1846 and 1855, over 70 percent of new arrivals to the
country (2,265,018 out of 3,031,339 persons) were either Irish or Ger-
man, a large percentage of whom were not Protestant. As will be discussed
later in this chapter, Catholic immigrants (and the Irish in particular) con-
fronted various modes of informal and formal discrimination, especially
at the workplace. In fact, the far greater tendency of frontier states to al-
low for alien voting was due both to their specific population needs and
to the fact that the vast majority of immigrants out west were Germans —
whom English settlers viewed as Teutons, the very ancestors of the Anglo-
Saxons. By contrast, Irish immigrants tended to congregate in already
densely populated cities back east, where they become the focal point for
Anglo fears about the cultural dissolution of settler society and with it
republican freedom. Particularly during economic downturns, these fears
produced backlashes against Catholic groups and generated more exclu-
sive definitions of settler identity. Still, as the century wore on, the over-
arching need for new immigrants meant that one's status as white became
more significant for free citizenship than whether immigrants were English
or even Protestant. 36

This background thus produced an extraordinary state of affairs, in
which the American shore was more a port of entry than a closed border
for Europeans coming from abroad. While laws existed (primarily at the
state level) for the exclusion of immigrants, these were primarily due to
public health concerns with contagious disease or to prevent paupers from
landing — the latter as part of general measures drawn from English poor
laws to restrict the movement of indigent persons. As a result, states estab-
lished regulations, in keeping with republican concerns about the depen-
dent poor, under which foreign ships were required to pay taxes for their
passengers or to provide a bond ensuring that they would not become
public charges. And some states and local authorities engaged in out-of-
county or out-of-state removal of "paupers," immigrant or otherwise, who

were deemed economically undesirable. But no federal deportations from
the United States of any immigrants took place during the entire antebel-
lum period and for the first two decades after the Civil War. Even at the
state level, Gerald Neuman tells us that in many locales removal provi-
sions were left unenforced, and where occasional enforcement took place
during the early nineteenth century, like in New York or in Massachusetts
(long a center of anti-immigrant sentiment), the tendency over time was
to replace removal with workhouses for the indigent. Therefore, while the
myth of a legally open border may never have fully existed, for European
immigrants the reality very nearly approximated the myth — given strong
presumptions in favor of entry and the fact that one's post-entry ability
to remain in the United States and participate in its political life was by
and large unquestioned. 37

Although the desire to encourage immigration west may have expanded
who counted as a republican settler and generated a de facto open border
for Europeans, it went hand in hand with the entrenchment of imperial
prerogative power over nonsettlers. If most European immigrants, who
were steadily incorporated into settler life, were free from deportation
and enjoyed complete freedom of movement, imperial subjects benefited
from no similar privilege. As described earlier, Indian tribes, such as the
Cherokee, faced wholesale removal and expulsion. Fugitive slave laws,
passed by Congress in 1793 and again in 1850, created administrative
proceedings (with minimal judicial oversight) to forcibly return slaves to
their owners. 38 As for nonslave or free blacks, despite being formal citi-
zens they too faced extensive restrictions on their movement. Slave states
generally barred the admission of free blacks who were not already resi-
dents. 39 As for newly opened land out west, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, and
Oregon prohibited altogether the entrance of the black population into
their territory. 40

Under the emerging framework, newly arrived immigrants (even prior
to naturalization) had greater privileges than communities with long his-
tories in the United States. Not only were free blacks denied entrance to
some frontier states; they were explicitly barred from claiming property
through western land grants. If the frontier was considered a national
reserve for the benefit of all social members, including noncitizen Euro-
peans, federal law denied blacks access to the public domain and thus to
economic independence and republican standing. In other words, formal
citizens who had been on American soil for generations had fewer practi-
cal rights than alien immigrants who may have only recently arrived in

the country. The treatment of Mexicans out west after the Mexican-
American War powerfully underscored this feature of settler society. With
the annexation of wide swaths of land through the Treaty of Guadalupe-
Hidalgo, 80,000 Mexicans now found themselves subjects of American
congressional power. Under the treaty, those who chose to remain on their
land were accorded formal status as citizens as well as property rights and
suffrage. 41 Yet, as Richard Griswold del Castillo writes, although Mexican
proponents of the treaty assumed that the rights of these new U.S. citizens
would be respected, "They were wrong: American local, state, and na-
tional courts later ruled that the provisions of the treaty could be super-
seded by local laws." 42 California's very first state constitution denied
voting rights for most Mexicans, stipulating that only white Mexicans were
entitled to suffrage. 43

Moreover, Congress's 1851 California Land Settlement Act forced
Mexicans to prove their land title in court. Since many had no formal
titles or did not have the financial means for long-term litigation, they
were either stripped of their property or forced to sell. The result was the
nullification of most Mexican landholding and the transfer of property
to white settlers, immigrant and native born. 44 Akin to the importation
of Africans to the New World, such transfer also strengthened internal
settler egalitarianism by expanding property ownership among whites
and by providing a dependent workforce of nonwhite tenant farmers.
Thus formal citizenship for Mexicans, just as for free blacks, did not en-
tail republican inclusion. And as with Indian tribes, it made them legal,
political, and economic outsiders on land they had long possessed while
at the same time providing extensive rights and opportunities to new im-
migrants with no ties to that land and only limited ties to the United
States.

In essence, slaves, Indians, free blacks, and Mexicans all persisted as
subjects of a royally derived and discretionary prerogative power, one
considered inappropriate for free settlers — immigrant or native born.
This prerogative power reduced each subordinated group to the status of
an imperial subject, whose rights were carefully correlated and stratified
based on settler economic interests and the necessities of maintaining
control. For slaves, these requirements entailed the denial of any meaning-
ful protections. As for free blacks and nonwhite Mexicans, such groups
enjoyed formal citizenship but were excluded from the political and eco-
nomic conditions essential for republican liberty. And with respect to In-
dian tribes, indirect rule limited federal responsibility for their welfare

while ensuring that settlers possessed an overriding authority to claim
indigenous land or to reconstruct tribal institutions if necessary.

Along with illustrating this basic structural divide between free citi-
zens and stratified subjects, the place of newly arrived Europeans in col-
lective life also helps explain the essential linkage between two founda-
tional identities in the American experience: the United States as a nation
of settlers and as a nation of immigrants. These are not opposing catego-
ries, and the settler period in American history was the heyday of both
open immigration and extensive immigrant rights. In fact, the growth and
development of settler society rested fundamentally on a continual sup-
ply of Europeans coming from abroad. As I will return to in future chap-
ters, the move toward the restriction of immigration — and with it modern
immigration policies — emerged only with the closing of the frontier and
end of settler empire. Before these developments, republican interests in
economic independence intertwined settler and immigrant identities and
created a distinctive political community, one holding out both the prom-
ise of free citizenship and the specter of imperial control.

Revolutionary Politics and the Populist Alternative

If the new republic was committed to reaffirming a past colonial status
quo, the questions persisted of whose interests it would serve and which
form of republican freedom would characterize the political community.
The immediate consequence of the Revolution was a process by which
the hierarchical character of colonial life faced intense pressure from
below. The need to protect the social status of Anglo-Protestant settlers
from the dangers of a centralizing British Empire made merchants and
landed gentry militarily and politically dependent on small farmers. In
this context, Robert Wiebe writes that the 1770s and 1780s were marked
by the diffusion of political control and the creation of "a multitude of small
political units, governmental and quasi-governmental, [which] rushed
to fill the vacuum of British authority, [and] resisted the pulls from patriot
capitals almost as stubbornly as they resisted the British." Such decentral-
ization, coupled with the social emergence of previously marginalized set-
tlers, meant that politics during the 1780s was characterized by an impres-
sive degree of popular participation and responsiveness — through elections,
petitions, protests, and outright rebellion. 45

In the wake of settler revolt, small farmers, artisans, and western yeo-
men found themselves emboldened by the discourse of republicanism

and the liberating potential of popular politics. They imagined a new set
of internal institutions that, when tied to territorial expansion, would
elevate the social status of laborers and promote participatory democ-
racy. This populist account of freedom contradicted basic tenets of re-
publicanism as understood by colonial elites, particularly its emphasis
on governmental balance and on virtuous leadership. As articulated by
agrarian pamphleteers like William Manning, liberty as self-rule instead
rested on promoting the shared interest of the laboring community and
on ensuring that ordinary settlers could assert a continuous and ener-
getic public power. While this vision ultimately failed to achieve lasting
institutional form, it nonetheless provided a basic framework of collec-
tive possibility that structured the political struggles of the nineteenth
century.

The Rise of Popular Power and Undivided Sovereignty
This popular penetration of politics did more than simply produce greater
settler inclusiveness. It altered the very content of politics and shaped the
forms of government considered to be legitimate replacements for colo-
nial rule. State legislatures were remarkably sympathetic to the interests
of rural farmers (and the poor more generally) and often trumped the
property rights of creditors in the name of debtor relief. For instance, early
legislatures tended to finance the Revolutionary War through loans re-
payable in paper rather than hard currency and even preferred depreciat-
ing the value of paper money to raising taxes in order to pay outstanding
debts. This was alongside broader debt relief measures that confiscated
and redistributed Loyalist property, limited creditor claims, or reduced liti-
gation costs. Such practices underscored the popular belief that govern-
ment had a responsibility to help citizens in economic distress. 46

Perhaps just as crucially, these practices were also part of an emerging
view that legislative action was not simply a regrettable necessity but
that the community's energetic employment of government was itself a
constitutive element of liberty. In order for all to enjoy republican free-
dom, ordinary settlers had to possess a public power that could continu-
ally enact popular laws — laws that ensured land ownership and economic
sufficiency. This idea found expression in the variety of state constitutions
framed during the Revolutionary period. These constitutions established
governments that were heavily majoritarian, in which assemblies formed
by equal representation gained institutional supremacy. Such suprem-
acy derived from a belief that government was principally a site for the

collective exercise of public power and that there existed a unity between
the popular will and the enacted laws of the legislature. As Robert
Palmer writes of Pennsylvania's constitution, artisans and small farmers
viewed the key intellectual content of the Revolution as the belief that
economic independence and "a republican form of government" required
an undivided sovereign power, with local and majoritarian institutions
"structured so as to retain an identity between the people and their rep-
resentatives in assembly." 47

These constitutions followed the intellectual lead of numerous state
declarations of rights, which argued for an inherent and collective capac-
ity of citizens to direct government in the provision of communal neces-
sity. Pennsylvania, Maryland, North Carolina, and Georgia all used
formulations analogous to Delaware's Declaration of Rights, which held
"that the people of this State have the sole exclusive and inherent Right
of governing and regulating the internal Police of the same." 48 Moreover,
popular rights enumerated by such declarations were considered essen-
tial to the framework of undivided sovereignty. Rather than checks on
majoritarian rule, these constitutional liberties acted as the "principles"
of legislative action, guiding a public power committed to enacting the
communal interest. 49

In pursuing this vision of government and of the relationship between
freedom and popular power, previously marginalized settlers broke from
the driving assumptions of many colonial elites. In particular, small farm-
ers and townspeople rejected the wariness of majoritarian rule that often
characterized gentry accounts of republican liberty and which derived in
part from classical ideas about political excellence. As Christopher Lasch
remarks, under this competing republican tradition, "virtue implied the
fullest development of human capacities and powers. [It] condemned a life
devoted to the pursuit of wealth and private comforts not because it was
selfish but because it provided insufficient scope for the ambition to excel."
Accordingly, participation in politics was both an education in virtue —
through the Aristotelian experience of ruling and being ruled in turn — and
the primary site for its display. This focus on achieving excellence through
action in the public sphere entailed deep suspicion of material self-interest.
"Republicanism condemned self-seeking when it tempted men to value
the external rewards of excellence more highly than the thing itself or to
bend the rules governing a given practice to their own immediate advan-
tage." As a result, most members of the community were considered too
dependent on economic necessity — and thus too wedded to material

self-interest — to exercise power in the name of excellence rather than
personal advantage. 50

This account of virtue thus inevitably insulated statecraft from the
public and placed decision making in the hands of an elective aristocracy,
one chosen based on character rather than class affinity. As Robert Wiebe
writes, such an ideal also necessarily established "a personalized manner
of government" that saw worthy leadership as essential to collective well-
being, since without virtue even the best constructed polities would be
destroyed. 51 However, for small farmers and townspeople emboldened
by the Revolution, the fear that popular political control would eliminate
virtue was largely irrelevant. As state constitutions and western rebel-
lions demonstrated, the goal of exercising public power was precisely to
make government implement the community's "partial" or "selfish" eco-
nomic needs. In fact, by interfering with the material interests of the ma-
jority, this classical ideal of virtue was seen as a method by which wealthy
elites undermined both popular authority and the possibility that all set-
tlers would enjoy economic self-rule. In minimizing the significance of
such personalized excellence for political life, the new yeoman politics
therefore minimized leadership as well and, especially, those deferential
modes of authority that had structured colonial society. For the yeoman
farmer, government remained legitimate through its continued unity with
the interests of the public, not through the special qualities of particular
representatives.

If newly empowered settlers chafed against the politics of virtue, they
also questioned the importance of institutional balance and the belief in
divided sovereignty. Central to most republican traditions was a concern
with the processes by which regimes degenerate into despotisms. Aristo-
tle, for instance, classified regimes based on whether they lodged power
in the one, the few, or the many, with each form embodying sources of
potential corruption. As Christopher Lasch notes, the Aristotelian tradi-
tion viewed the goal of political construction as "work[ing] out some
principle of balance that would combine the advantages of each while
nullifying the features that made them oppressive." 52 The final result, a
mixed regime that divided sovereignty across institutional settings, pro-
duced a government devoted to liberty as self-rule.

Just as with the yeoman defenders of legislative supremacy, this re-
publican account also held that law, properly conceived, was constitutive
of liberty. However, as Philip Pettit asserts, it saw the laws as liberating
only "so long as they respect[ed] people's common interests and ideas

and conformed] to the image of an ideal law: so long as they [were] not
the instruments of any one individual's, or any one group's, arbitrary
will." 53 In other words, the one, the few, and the many represented fac-
tions within society whose interests were not equivalent to the common
good. Thus true law had to result from a balancing process, which checked
the attempt by partial groups to impose arbitrarily their own will on the
collective.

Fisher Ames's son, in elucidating the political philosophy of his arch-
Federalist father, highlighted the basic disagreement between these ver-
sions of law as liberty and therefore between many small farmers and
colonial elites. For Ames, a republic could never be a simple democracy,
because strict majoritarianism imposed class rule rather than rule by the
common good:

[Fisher Ames] saw that many persons confounded a republic with
a democracy. . . . According to his creed, a republic is that struc-
ture of an elective government, in which the administration neces-
sarily prescribe to themselves the general good as the object of all
their measures; a democracy is that, in which the present popular
passions, independent of the public good, become a guide to the
rulers. 54

By contrast, for newly empowered settlers seeking political authority, it
was precisely legislative supremacy that established the common good.
This was because the common good — understood as the enjoyment by
all settlers of economic independence and productive control — was indis-
tinguishable from the interests of the many. The only meaningful threat
that legislative supremacy posed to liberty existed when legislatures were
removed from the power of ordinary citizens, either through distance or
unequal forms of representation. So long as government was primarily
local, decentralized, and based on equality, such that the community could
exercise an energetic public power, balance would be unnecessary.

In essence, what yeoman farmers and townspeople found themselves
outlining in the years during and after the Revolution was a democracy
of small property owners, which rejected both a dependent class of wage
earners and paupers as well as an "unproductive" class of moneyed inter-
ests. According to this view, true republican liberty would be assured only
if politics were organized to enhance popular rule and were structured
around principles of local, decentralized legislative supremacy. Under

such conditions, public power could produce economic independence and
eliminate the need for any settler to be subject to the arbitrary will of
another.

Thomas Paine, William Manning, and Producerist Democracy
Perhaps no one during the Revolutionary period did more than Thomas
Paine to champion the cause of small farmers, shopkeepers, and artisans
in sketching this populist variation of liberty. Paine's Common Sense
exalted the capacity of ordinary people to govern themselves and was
widely seen as helping to ensure Revolutionary support from poorer
settlers. Woody Holton writes of the pamphlet's impact in Virginia, "It
led thousands of farmers to venture upon Independence as a bridge to a
greater say in the internal government of Virginia." Paine, in general, was
little concerned with the problem of balance or the threat of majority
tyranny. In The Rights of Man, he argued that mixed governments were
in fact more liable to corruption than purer democracies. Such regimes
undermined popular accountability precisely by insulating politics from
the public and by making it difficult for the community to locate respon-
sibility in any particular institution. "In mixed governments there is no
responsibility: the parts cover each other till responsibility is lost; and the
corruption which moves the machine, contrives at the same time its own
escape." 55

Paine also argued that individuals should accumulate only the amount
of personal property produced by one's own labor and saw government
as having the duty to guarantee that acquisition by the wealthy did not
deprive those impoverished of their "natural inheritance." In Agrarian
Justice, he called for a national fund, financed by inheritance taxes, which
provided fifteen pounds to all citizens, men or women, on reaching adult-
hood, as well as an annual stipend of ten pounds to the aged. While the
pamphlet itself was a response to events in France and was directed specifi-
cally to "the Legislature and the Executive Directory of the French Repub-
lic," Paine made clear in his author's inscription that "The plan contained
in this work is not adapted for any particular country alone: the principle
on which it is based is general." He hoped that every government —
consistent with a vision of freedom as self-rule — would work not simply to
eliminate poverty but to ensure that all could reasonably enjoy economic
independence and existence as members of the productive classes. Rather
than creating individuals dependent on state beneficence, who thus would

unfree, Paine viewed his national fund as helping to eliminate
servitude and pauperism:

When a young couple begin the world, the difference is exceed-
ingly great whether they begin with nothing or with fifteen pounds
apiece. With this aid they could buy a cow, and implements to cul-
tivate a few acres of land; and instead of becoming burdens upon
society, which is always the case where children are produced faster
than they can be fed, would be put in the way of becoming useful
and profitable citizens.

Therefore, in defending a commercial society built on economic and po-
litical control by producers, Paine articulated how legislative supremacy
and an energetic government laid the foundations for meaningful repub-
lican freedom. 56

Still, despite the affinities between Paine's populism and the politics
that emerged during the Revolutionary era, there existed one important
distinction. Although he argued for government action to protect the
economic interests of those less affluent, Paine viewed this action solely
as a corrective. For him, governments primarily served a negative func-
tion, in restraining the social power of unproductive, moneyed elites. At
the beginning of Common Sense, Paine wrote, "Society is produced by
our wants and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our
happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by re-
straining our vices." To the extent that a commercial society of small
property owners could provide for everyone's wants, the need for govern-
ment disappeared. In The Rights of Man, Paine again reiterated the theme
of self-regulation and the hope of doing away with politics: "The more
perfect civilization is, the less occasion has it for government, because the
more does it regulate its own affairs, and govern itself." 57

By contrast, Revolutionary politics produced an account of govern-
ment that saw the community's continual exercise of public power through
popular law as a permanent and constitutive element of liberty. For such
a defense of energetic government we must turn to an American yeoman
whose writings vividly conveyed the new populist imagination. William
Manning was a farmer and what Gordon Wood calls "a petty business-
man" 58 of moderate status who lived in Billerica, Massachusetts, until his
death in 1814. In the late 1790s he wrote a pamphlet titled The Key of
Libberty, which in an early version he addressed to "all farmers, mechan-
ics, and laborers in America, and all others who are friends to liberty and

free government." Manning was largely self-educated, and although he
admitted that he was "not master of the arts of spelling, grammar, and
composition," he hoped that his ideas would nonetheless promote the
cause of freedom in America. Although unpublished in his lifetime, and
rejected by numerous Democratic-Republican papers, Manning's Key of
Libberty provides powerful insight into the emerging populist vision. What
makes the text so unique is the fact that most artisans, farmers, and shop
owners, not to mention the true rural poor, had limited educational means
and rarely expressed their political views in writing at all, let alone with
such clarity and depth. Moreover, Manning's very inability to publish his
piece with the Jeffersonian press suggests how these arguments, although
percolating among small landholders, remained shunned by the dominant
paradigms of republican ideology. It also highlights the retreat into more
hierarchical practices that followed the end of the Revolutionary era — and
the reduced space available for a man who was not a "master" of grammar
to have his voice heard in politics. 59

Like Paine, Manning saw himself as defending a producerist democ-
racy committed to the elimination of economic dependence and based
squarely on government by legislative supremacy. Unlike Paine, Manning
rejected the notion that commercial society ultimately could be self-
regulating and government activity minimized. He defended the need for
a permanently energetic political authority, because he believed that the
few and the many held fundamentally contradictory interests. According
to Manning, the basic divide within all societies was between the major-
ity of individuals, whose hard labor was "the sole parent of all property,"
and a select few — landed gentry, merchants, and lawyers — whose wealth
allowed them to live without labor. 60

Manning believed that no individual, regardless of class, could be
counted on to act virtuously rather than out of personal self-interest.
Luckily, when organized to think collectively, the self-interest of the many
was equivalent to the common good, because the many sought condi-
tions in which all members enjoyed economic independence and could
control the produce of their own labor. By contrast, the self-interest of
the few was inevitably oppressive. For Manning, since these elites lived
off the labor of others, they possessed a fundamental commitment to
defending inequality and social hierarchy — and, particularly, to protect-
ing a divide between a leisure class and a permanent majority of depen-
dent hirelings. Such interests led the wealthy to subvert commercial insti-
tutions in order to monopolize property and to reduce most settlers to

tenancy, wage earning, and bondage. Manning described this irreconcil-
able class conflict as "the great scuffle between the Few and the Many."
He saw this "scuffle" as making government a necessary and permanent
feature of collective life. Only if laborers used state power to counter the
economic self-interest of wealthy elites could the community's "happi-
ness" be maintained. Such happiness Manning defined as "enjoying the
good of his own labors, and feeling that his life and liberties (both civil and
religious) and his property are all safe and secure; and not in the abun-
dance he possesseth; nor in expensive and national grandeur, which have
the tendency to make other men miserable." Under this formulation, gov-
ernment must always be energetic, since the communal goal of economic
independence was under continual threat from nonproductive and ac-
quisitive elites. 61

Equally important, by exercising public power, ordinary settlers par-
ticipated in the freedom of democratic self-government and expressed
their own political independence. In other words, politics was not only a
precondition for liberty but also a central site for its manifestation. There-
fore, Manning rejected the hope of eliminating politics or of creating a
self-regulating commercial society while also arguing that popular laws
enacted by majoritarian governments were constitutive of freedom. This
defense of undivided sovereignty and legislative supremacy meant that
checks and balances were little more than attempts by wealthy elites to
undermine the political and economic independence of laborers. Man-
ning wrote, "A free government is a government of laws made by the free
consent of a majority of the whole people," and that such governments
"are commonly destroyed by the combinations of the judicial and execu-
tive powers in favor of the interests of the Few." 62

Drawing together the central strands of emergent populism (belief in
legislative supremacy and popular law making as the foundations for lib-
erty), Manning called for the creation of a "Society of Laborers" to counter
organization by the wealthy, in the form of the bench and bar, manufac-
turing associations, and the Society of Cincinnati. This Society of Labor-
ers would seek to disseminate knowledge concerning laboring interests
and to mobilize ordinary settlers to enforce their rights. It would there-
fore exist as an institutional basis for checking the actions of the few and
for promoting public happiness through government. 63

As Michael Merrill and Sean Wilentz note, Manning's Society of La-
borers was remarkable for its belief in the salutary effects of association,
considered "partial" and corruptive by many republicans, as well as for

its foreshadowing of the nineteenth-century labor union and political
party. 64 Yet, to understand fully the distinctiveness of his vision, one must
point out precisely what differentiates the Society of Laborers from these
more familiar forms. Unlike the union, the society was not primarily con-
cerned with defending the interests of a specific set of workers or artisans
confronted with a relationship of employment. And in contrast to the
party, the society was not organized around the goal of electing members
to office. Rather, Manning sought a means by which the laboring com-
munity as a whole would always be able to exercise public power. He
was searching for a way to constitute the many as a government behind
the government, which could maintain the substantive unity between the
people and the legislature. Manning believed that an association of la-
borers committed to political intervention and the expansion of knowl-
edge would fulfill this role.

Even more dramatically, he viewed this association as helping to ex-
plain where, if at all, virtue fit within an account of self-rule. Recall that
for elite republicans like Fisher Ames, virtue was the possession of a se-
lect few, whose learning and excellence equipped them to exercise practi-
cal decision making. By contrast, Manning suggested that through mech-
anisms like his society, all settlers could learn the basic conditions of
collective life as well as the best means for social improvement. In other
words, neither education nor virtue need be the exclusive domain of any
group within society; instead, both could be democratized and made
broadly accessible. Under this account, virtue was understood not as the
excellence of high statecraft or political leadership but rather as the full
awareness by producers of their own interests and of how to achieve
those goals. Thus self-interest and virtue did not embody conflicting ori-
entations to the community; rather, these orientations could be synthe-
sized through democratic knowledge and popular action. In a sense,
Manning's society crystallized the new populist ethic, one that imagined
a democratic culture that elevated the laboring community and fulfilled
republican ideals of liberty and independence. 65

Labor and Empire in the Populist Imagination
While populism offered a dramatic reconstruction of republican free-
dom, drawing from localist and Rousseauian traditions, one should still
underscore how wedded this account remained to the imperial status
quo. In fact, these arguments worked to entrench both settler supremacy
and the rigid divide between Anglo citizens and marginalized groups,

justifying a particularly intense commitment to Indian expropriation. As
suggested earlier, given the centrality for the common good of a wide dif-
fusion of property, emergent populism placed even greater focus on the
need for expansion. Among the primary grievances that would plague
the American west, from the Shays' Rebellion to the closing of the frontier,
were the lack of access to land and the fear of rural tenancy. In fact,
the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1 794, which ended indigenous control in
the Ohio country and thus opened it to Anglo settlement, was perhaps the
single largest factor in dissipating the intensity of frontier antipathy to
coastal power. As Frederick Jackson Turner famously noted, along with
free land and the possibility of economic independence, the frontier pro-
vided space removed from the confines of elite and eastern authority. For
instance, although the rebellions may have failed, the rebels themselves
often avoided state punishment, as well as land forfeiture and taxation,
simply by moving farther west and expanding the edge of settlement. The
Shays' Rebellion ended without a final confrontation largely because of
such migration and the opportunities it afforded rebels to move elsewhere,
claim land, and resume their ordinary lives. 66

The inextricable link between empire and populism was also evident
in the way that internal democratization encouraged even greater exter-
nal exclusion. The elevation of the productive laborer went hand in hand
with the denigration of the native, considered incapable of transform-
ing the rugged wilderness into a site for economic and political indepen-
dence. By locating all sources of social value in the act of labor, those
whose activity could not be reconciled with the framework of agricul-
tural and artisanal production inevitably became threats to the common
good. One can imagine this as a direct corollary of assuming a unity be-
tween the interest of laborers and the interest of all. While a properly
constituted government could limit the power of moneyed elites — by
placing checks on accumulation and ensuring that the vast majority of
settlers were small producers — the native represented a threat of a wholly
separate order. In Agrarian justice, the very pamphlet in which Paine ar-
gued on behalf of populist economic policies, he contrasted the European
laborer with the American native who persisted in a "natural and primi-
tive state of man." Lacking all civilization and appreciation for the value
of work, life for the native was "a continual holiday." 67 Such constitu-
tional idleness rejected not only the supremacy of labor but the larger
moral economy within which the laborer operated. Besides endangering
the security, economic livelihood, and political independence of western

settlers, the indigenous presence problematized the equivalence between
the interest of laborers and the interest of all.

It also questioned the assumption that social institutions should be
organized principally to promote this ostensibly collective good. In other
words, since indigenous removal grounded both the practical needs of la-
bor and its philosophical preeminence, populist empire embodied a form
of political association even more virulently exclusionary than that of the
comparatively hierarchical colonial period. This virulence gained vivid ex-
pression in Jackson's Trail of Tears and in efforts to eliminate indigenous
communities entirely. And it also helps explain why coastal elites like John
Marshall, who were wary of populist politics and concerned with the dis-
order produced by undirected frontier expansion, tended — much like
Whitehall officials before them — to be more critical of native conquest and
mistreatment. In essence, the great tragedy of populism was that as Man-
ning's hope of a producerist democracy slipped from grasp, farmers and
townspeople increasingly embraced these brutal and xenophobic features
of settler empire — a pattern that would be repeated time and again in U.S.
history.

Federalist Balance and the Specter of Neocolonialism

In 1965, Kwame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian president, published the book
Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, in which he argued
that decolonization may have altered the juridical status of African coun-
tries, but it had not produced substantive independence. In place of direct
political control, postcolonial societies now faced a variety of economic,
financial, and trade restrictions imposed by former imperial masters.
These restrictions reduced nominally sovereign states to the level of de-
pendent satellites, with limited capacity to dictate the terms of their own
collective future. Describing this condition as neocolonialism, Nkrumah
wrote, "The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject
to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of inter-
national sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political
policy is directed from outside." 68

For Nkrumah, economic dependence went hand in hand with two
other common experiences. First, neocolonialism, like direct political
control, inevitably exported those "social conflicts" that marked the ag-
gressor state. To the extent that government decisions were dictated from
abroad, the inequities embedded in foreign social systems took root locally

as well. Thus foreign states continued to perpetuate forms of corruption
and unfreedom in nominally independent societies. Second, unlike the
relatively exclusive control exercised in direct imperial relations, postco-
lonial governments now found themselves in a global arena of competing
powers; juridical independence simply meant the capacity to "change
masters" rather than to escape domination once and for all and to "exist
without a neo-colonialist master." Subject to external authority, African
states found themselves the economic and political prey of global powers
scrambling once more to divide the spoils of the continent. 69

The settler embrace of xenophobia and external violence in the early
period of the republic was provoked by a similar American experience of
global weakness and the sense that the newly independent settler society
remained bound to European power politics. While small farmers and
shopkeepers fashioned an ideal of freedom linked to an assertive collec-
tive will, such goals confronted a harsh postcolonial reality, in which
the possibilities for national independence seemed to contradict these
strong participatory aspirations. As a result, settlers developed a consti-
tutional structure that transformed the meaning of populism. Cast as
a politics wary of any prerogative authority, populism became largely
concerned with maintaining the duality separating settler insiders from
excluded outsiders — be they native, slave, or later Mexican. The deci-
sive political turning point was none other than the ratification of the
federal Constitution in 1789. By investigating the constitutional de-
bates and their aftermath, we can appreciate how populist ambitions
were contained and reified as principles of state antipathy and imperial
exclusion.

Mercantilism and the Constraints of European Hegemony
For settler elites in the United States, the first significant postcolonial soci-
ety, Nkrumah's neocolonial specter was an intense preoccupation. North
American colonies developed as mercantile appendages of the British
Crown, which dictated — although not always successfully — economic de-
velopment and settler migration around the material goals of England's
mercantile community. Although revolution produced a formal end of such
control, as Walter Licht writes, "The United States remained still in the mer-
cantile orbit. The fortunes of the now former colonialists remained in the
grips of British commercial interests; the ups and downs of economic activ-
ity during and after the 1780s reflected the abilities of British merchants to
flood the American market with goods or block American exports." For

settlers the difficulties of shedding mercantile dependence were com-
pounded by the general political weakness of the colonies and the seem-
ing fragility of independence in a world of predatory European states.
While the colonies may have been able to extract themselves from British
control, would such extraction simply replace one master with another —
perhaps even more oppressive? Robert Wiebe comments of Revolution-
ary elites:

Since 1783 they had pictured their nation as a prisoner on parole,
protecting its precarious freedom against international forces that
it might elude but never control. Even the best leaders and the most
ingenious measures, they believed, could not stop the great powers
from swaying America's citizens, corrupting its officials, or infiltrat-
ing its governments, scheming against the nation, allying against
it, or warring against it. . . . Partition, absorption: here were the apt
analogies for America's jeopardy. 70

For such settlers, the Shays' Rebellion crystallized the potential threats
of dissolution and European subjection that confronted the independent
colonies. It underscored the vulnerabilities facing semisovereign states
organized under a loose confederacy and moved those elites previously
skeptical of federal authority toward support for the Constitutional Con-
vention in May 1787. For defenders of greater centralization, such as
George Washington, no better proof existed "of the want of energy in
our government than these disorders" that racked Massachusetts, an in-
tellectual and military epicenter of settler revolt. 71 Even more important,
the Shays' Rebellion made apparent the increasing disconnect between
country and city regarding the principal threats to freedom. While both
coastal merchants and poor western farmers saw liberty as self-rule as
inherently linked to settler control over the future of American coloniza-
tion, these groups disagreed fundamentally about precisely what endan-
gered local imperial autonomy. For yeomen and the rural poor, the primary
internal threat to freedom came from colonial mercantile interests, and
the primary external threat came from Native Americans on the frontier.
Under this populist reading, wealthy coastal elites simply replaced Lon-
don merchants as the political and economic power; they did not end
mercantile dependence once and for all but rather continued to under-
mine the property rights and productive control of farmers and towns-
people. Coupled with the persistent danger to personal security and eco-
nomic independence posed by indigenous groups, the monopoly interests

that captured state government and the Continental Congress reduced
laborers to a condition of subservience not unlike that under British
rule.

By contrast, for settler elites the central constraints on local freedom
were the political passions of those previously marginalized combined
with the threat of European interference. For the founders of the new
republic, the Shays' Rebellion made apparent how external machinations
and the internal rise of popular power could allow European states to
partition and dominate the various colonies. The rebellion itself was
initially precipitated by the decision of British merchants to close their
doors to American business. The ability of a foreign power to produce
internal social strife simply by changing economic policy illustrated the
extent to which the independent colonies remained under external sway.
Moreover, the popular unrest that resulted not only imperiled effective
government but also jeopardized the very permanence of the union.
Throughout the 1780s and 1790s, frontier settlers across both New En-
gland and the Old Northwest repeatedly contemplated independence from
the United States, under the aegis of one or another European power. Per-
haps the most famous of these was the Franklin secession movement, in
which the three western counties of North Carolina declared their inde-
pendence in 1784 and sought a Spanish alliance throughout the 1780s,
so as to wrest local power away from North Carolina and the Continental
Congress. 72

As a result, in contemplating the necessity for and requirements of a
new federal Constitution, elites viewed the problems facing settler soci-
ety through a politics of neocolonialism, not unlike that described by
Nkrumah. For those participating in Philadelphia, behind closed doors
and in secret, the possibility of substantive independence rested on creat-
ing a federal structure that could both limit external control as well as
insulate political and economic decision making from the popular will.
In fact, this secrecy was seen as necessary given the potential for contin-
ued upheaval and the real and extensive antipathy to such political reor-
ganization. For supporters of the new Constitution, these exigencies were
paramount in their justifications for moving away from local sovereignty
as a basis for liberty. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison both in-
voked a postcolonial predicament in arguing for greater centralized
power. Fearing the possibility that the separate colonies might become
ensnared in competing European alliances, Hamilton warned in the Fed-
eralist Papers:

America, if not connected at all, or only by the feeble tie of a simple
league, offensive and defensive, would, by the operation of such
jarring alliances, be gradually entangled in all the pernicious laby-
rinths of European politics and wars; and by the destructive con-
tentions of the parts into which she was divided, would be likely to
became a prey to artifices and machinations of powers equally the
enemies of them all. Divide et impera must be the motto of every
nation that either hates us or fears us.

Echoing the same sentiments, Madison argued that without a stronger
federal government, the United States would remain a weak and depen-
dent satellite, unable to check powerful European states in their pursuit
of North American fiefdoms:

The fortunes of disunited America will be even more disastrous
than those of Europe. The sources of evil in the latter are confined
to her own limits. No superior powers of another quarter of the
globe intrigue among her rival nations, inflame their mutual ani-
mosities, and render them the instruments of foreign ambition,
jealousy, and revenge. In America the miseries springing from her
internal jealousies, contentions, and wars would form a part only
of her lot. A plentiful addition of evils would have their source in
that relation in which Europe stands to this quarter of the earth,
and which no quarter of the earth bears to Europe. 73

For Hamilton, Madison, and others, the primary threat to republican
freedom continued to come from the interference of a foreign metropole —
only now the colonies found themselves the potential dependency of not
merely Great Britain but of all the competing European states. Therefore,
without unity and effective government, postcolonial weakness exposed
the colonies to the very real danger of European hegemony. In order to
achieve not just juridical independence from foreign masters but substan-
tive independence as well, the defenders of the new Constitution sought
to develop a political system that was based on greater centralization and
able to limit the internal and external challenges to freedom. 74

The Federalist Response to the Postcolonial Predicament
Although many Revolutionary elites asserted the necessity of a federal
system organized around a national government, they disagreed over the
basic attributes of that government. While both Hamilton and Madison

were committed to limiting state sovereignty and to protecting the colo-
nies from neocolonial dangers, each developed critically distinct alterna-
tives. For Hamilton, substantive independence required a powerful cen-
tralized state in the European mold, one that could both claim political
control from small farmers and townspeople and extract the United States
from its dependent mercantile status. Such a national government would
act directly upon citizens and enjoy substantial institutional powers, with
states little more than organizational subunits. According to Hamilton,
effective central control "must carry its agency to the persons of the citi-
zens. It must stand in need of no intermediate legislations, but must itself
be empowered to employ the arm of the ordinary magistrate to execute
its own resolutions." 75

Moreover, so as to eliminate mercantile relations with Britain, the
colonies required an active government capable of creating an American
mercantile orbit and of enhancing national economic power. Hamilton
and his supporters imagined constructing a U.S. rival to European hege-
mony by strengthening the position of local financial elites and by pro-
moting and protecting the interests of commerce and manufacturing.
Therefore, the new federal authority had to be committed to entrenching
the property rights and commercial interests of speculators, merchants,
and manufacturers, which would thereby give the wealthy an economic
stake in national well-being. As Hamilton wrote, "The prosperity of com-
merce is now perceived and acknowledged by all enlightened statesmen to
be the most useful as well as the most productive source of national
wealth, and has accordingly become a primary object of their political
cares." 76

Yet, if the new national elites found the emergence of a populist po-
litical vision a threat to internal stability, the idea of creating an Ameri-
can mercantile empire struck many as fundamentally incompatible with
Revolutionary aspirations. Allowing commercial interests to gain control
of political power undermined freedom as self-rule and only perpetuated
the problems of popular antipathy. The rise of an established moneyed
class — of a monopoly power directing a centralized political apparatus —
would simply reproduce European social conflict in America, with an
oppressive few confronting a propertyless mob. Benjamin Franklin warned
that the growth of commerce and large-scale manufacturing brought
with it great disparities in wealth and the emergence of a landless poor,
because "it is the multitude of poor without land in a country, and who
must work for others at low wages or starve, that enables undertakers to

carry on manufacture." In fact, Thomas Jefferson's great defense of agri-
culture and small farmers should be read as an attack on mercantilism
and the Hamiltonian desire to see it take an authentically American root.
In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson wrote:

While we have land to labour then, let us never wish to see our
citizens occupied at the work- bench, or twirling a distaff. . . . Let
our workshops remain in Europe. The loss by the transportation
of commodities across the Atlantic will be made up in happiness
and permanence of government. The mobs of great cities add just
so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the
strength of the human body. 77

For both Franklin and Jefferson, not only did settler mercantilism
undermine liberty by causing wage servitude and poverty; it inevitably
produced political despotism. All previous attempts at free government
ultimately had been overwhelmed by the rise of landless mobs, subject to
the economic domination of the few and enjoying no personal stake in the
collective good. Demagogues and tyrants who promised revenge against
the ruling oligarchy could easily sway such individuals and end the dream
of republican liberty. In other words, Hamilton's solution to the problem
of postcolonial dependence was no solution at all, because rather than
checking the divisive potential of the many, it simply antagonized popular
sentiment and made majoritarian tyranny all the more likely.

In response, Madison presented a distinct picture of political power,
one able to defend American independence from both European interfer-
ence and popular resistance. Madison shared the common belief that
local and unconstrained popular rule would inevitably devolve into a po-
litical despotism, in which the divide-and-conquer policies of European
powers could predominate. He wrote to Jefferson in October 1788: "In
our Governments the real power lies in the majority of the Community,
and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended not from
acts contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the
Government is the mere instrument of the major numbers of the Con-
stituents." 78 Yet, like Franklin and Jefferson, Madison believed that a
Hamiltonian nation-state produced the same trap, because despots play-
ing to the sentiments of the masses would appropriate centralized au-
thority and trample on elite interests. Britain's system of parliamentary
supremacy offered a ready illustration of the dangers presented by cen-
tralization, as the King-in-Parliament had only recently employed the

legislature's extensive powers to undermine the social status of settlers,
place slaveholding rights in potential jeopardy, and strengthen nonsettler
enemies such as Indian tribes and French Catholics. Thus, in restraining
the sovereign power of the separate colonies, Madison came to see re-
straint itself as the proper guiding principle for a new federalist system.
He imagined a strengthened national government as part of a republican
system of institutional balance that undermined the capacity of any po-
litical site, and therefore of any competing social group, to capture politi-
cal power. Under this rubric, greater geographic scope and increased dis-
tance between representative and constituent were political assets, because
along with various checks and balances they limited the control exerted
by popular forces. 79

Madison's model of divided sovereignty, in which the creation of a
truly national government insulated statecraft from mass interests and
thus divisive social conflict, emerged as the primary theoretical frame-
work for the new federal Constitution. At the heart of Madison's vision
were elite colonial judgments about how law could be constitutive of
freedom. Under the populist account, communally enacted law produced
liberty by imposing the economic and political interests of the many and
guaranteeing that all enjoyed productive control over labor. By contrast,
for Madison law was constitutive of freedom only if it remained autono-
mous from politics and could not be reduced to the interests of any par-
ticular social faction. Madison viewed law, in the form of popularly de-
rived statutes, as undermining a higher vision of "justice" to serve the
goals of "an interested and overbearing majority":

Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and
virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith
and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too
unstable, that the public good is disgraced in the conflicts of rival
parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to
the rules of justice and the rights of the minority party, but by the
superior force of an interested and overbearing majority. However
anxiously we may wish that these complaints had no foundation,
the evidence of known facts will not permit us to deny that they
are in some degree true. 80

Yet, for law to be more than popular rule, Madison and the Federalists
had to disconnect the idea of popular will from the particular interests of
the many, made up of those small farmers and townspeople who at-

tempted through local majoritarianism and outright rebellion to seize
political control. In making this step, Madison argued that the Constitu-
tion rather than local majorities expressed the popular will. The Consti-
tution existed as a fundamental law that trumped ordinary state statutes
and allowed the national government to impose political ends in keeping
with a common good, one often inconsistent with the local interests of
the laboring community.

Although Madison questioned the extent to which the courts were
the final arbiters of this fundamental law, Hamilton went even further
and contended that only an unelected and institutionally independent judi-
ciary could protect the popular will from illegal and divisive actions by
majorities. In defending judicial review and the court's supremacy over
constitutional interpretation against a more unmediated popular rule,
Hamilton wrote:

It is far more rational to suppose that the courts were designed to
be an intermediate body between the people and legislature in or-
der, among other things, to keep the latter within the limits assigned
to their authority. The interpretation of the laws is the proper and
peculiar province of the courts. A constitution is, in fact, and must
be regarded by the judges as, a fundamental law. It therefore be-
longs to them to ascertain its meaning as well as the meaning of
any particular act proceeding from the legislative body. If there
should happen to be an irreconcilable variance between the two . . .
the Constitution ought to be preferred to the statute, the intention
of the people to the intention of their agents. 81

In essence, Hamilton sought to depoliticize the meaning of the "people"
by transforming it into an abstract category accessible only through the
practices of an unelected judiciary. This, of course, was simply an exten-
sion of Madison's effort to imagine free law as properly autonomous
from politics and thus insulated from public pressure. Ultimately, both
Madison and Hamilton attempted to rearticulate those collective senti-
ments expressed by local majorities and enacted through state legisla-
tures, which had previously been upheld as the popular will, as simply
partial interests. Whereas under the populist reading, the "people" were
a specific social entity — the laboring community — with clear collective
goals, Federalists justified divided sovereignty and the autonomy of law
by declaring that no group within settler society was more than a mere fac-
tion. This move was buttressed by reiterating how the practical attempt

by small farmers and townspeople to wield political power only deep-
ened postcolonial weakness and the specter of neocolonialism.

Although the proposed constitution precipitated serious and intense
opposition, such opposition suffered from fundamental disagreements.
Anti-Federalists often gestured toward two conflicting republican bases
for critique: one that shared some elite colonial premises and one far
closer to the populist approach. Those anti-Federalists such as Richard
Henry Lee, in his Letters from the Federal Farmer, argued against the
Madisonian solution on the grounds that a strengthened national gov-
ernment undermined institutional balance and veered too closely toward
"a consolidated system." For Lee, articulating a localist republican tradi-
tion skeptical of political size, the principle of divided sovereignty was
best fulfilled by maintaining the authority of the independent states. Lee
worried that the geographic scope of the national government, combined
with the variety of economic powers vested within it, would over time
create a centralized despotism that eliminated checks and balances:
"Unless the people shall make some great exertions to restore to the state
governments their powers in matters of internal police; as the powers to
lay and collect, exclusively, internal taxes, to govern the militia, and to
hold the decisions of their own judicial courts upon their own laws final,
the balance cannot possibly continue long." Although Lee disagreed with
Madison over the appropriate size of a just republic and consequently
placed more emphasis on state sovereignty, the two nonetheless shared
basic premises. In particular, each still saw the best political order as one
that restrained the despotic potential of energetic government. 82

This critique, predicated on institutional balance and a vision of the
law as curtailing the exercise of any one political authority, led in an es-
sentially different direction from George Bryan's anti-Federalist arguments.
Writing under the pseudonym "Centinel," Bryan, a strong proponent of
Pennsylvania's unicameral legislature, attacked the new Constitution on
grounds that it compromised popular rule and allowed the few to usurp
power from the many: "The wealthy and ambitious, who in every com-
munity think they have a right to lord it over their fellow creatures, have
availed themselves very successfully of this favorable disposition [the
turmoil caused by revolution], for the people thus unsettled in their senti-
ments have been prepared to accede to any extreme of government."
Bryan explicitly attacked the fear of European domination — what I have
called neocolonialism — hanging over arguments for the new national
government. In his view, such dire warnings were merely a ruse by which

moneyed interests entrenched their own power. Speaking of the wealthy,
Bryan wrote, "All the distresses and difficulties they experience, proceed-
ing from various causes, have been ascribed to the impotency of the pres-
ent confederation, and thence they have been led to expect full relief
from the adoption of the proposed system of government; and in the
other event, immediately ruin and annihilation as a nation." 83

Instead of searching for a new Federalist system, Bryan held that the
colonies would remain free and independent only if they strengthened
state legislatures and placed these in the hands of farmers and towns-
people. Unlike Lee, Bryan rejected the framework of balance and called
for an active and supreme parliament committed to promoting the will
of the laboring community. In making populist arguments akin to those
of Paine and reminiscent of Rousseau, Bryan defended localism not as a
check on partial interests but precisely because simple democracies were
most responsive to popular pressure:

The highest responsibility is to be attained in a simple structure of
government. ... If, imitating the constitution of Pennsylvania, you
vest all the legislative power in one body of men (separating the
executive and judicial) elected for a short period, and necessarily
excluded by rotation from permanency . . . you will create the most
perfect responsibility, for then whenever the people feel a grievance
they cannot mistake the authors and will apply the remedy with
certainty and effect, discarding them at the next election. 84

Bryan's anti-Federalism rejected the belief that laws ideally should be a
restraint on faction — a thought shared by most elites on both sides of the
debate — and reasserted the populist notion of law as a means for collec-
tive actualization through popular rule.

In the end, the ratification of the Constitution embodied the institu-
tional victory of Madison's views and the repudiation of populist princi-
ples as the governing basis for settler society. As Joyce Appleby writes,
ratification radically compromised the future of popular sovereignty:

The Constitution closed the door on simple majoritarian govern-
ment in the United States. Popular majorities animated by what
people wanted to do at a particular moment would be forever con-
strained. The Constitution created a fundamental law, and that
law severely restricted the range of government power. The same
founding document made it extraordinarily difficult to change the

distribution of power. Despite the celebration of popular sover-
eignty in America, the sovereign people were restrained once the
Constitution was ratified. 85

The extent to which ratification was a defeat for populist principles was
not lost on settlers at the economic margins. In Massachusetts, the Con-
stitution barely passed by a vote of 187 to 168, with opposition centered
overwhelmingly in rural areas and heaviest wherever the Shays' Rebel-
lion had taken hold. Of those towns known to be sympathetic to the up-
rising, ninety of ninety-seven voted no. According to one supporter of the
Constitution, "The whole opposition, in this commonwealth, is that cursed
spirit of insurgency that prevailed last year." At stake for small farmers
and townspeople was nothing less than economic independence and the
populist vision of government in the service of laboring interests. For
"Cornelius," a Massachusetts anti-Federalist, the new Constitution
would "throw[] the whole power of the federal government into the
hands of those who are in the mercantile interest; and for the landed,
which is the greatest interest of this country, to lie unrepresented, forlorn,
and without hope." For many ordinary settlers, the emerging form of
government appeared to be at root antithetical to both their economic
interests as well as their desire for meaningful control. 86

Expansion utional Demise of Pc

For an independent and imperial settler society, the institutional defeat of
populism constrained democratic possibilities in large part by granting
the national government nearly unlimited authority to direct territorial
governance wherever Anglo colonization took root. In turn, it also focused
populist energy on combating the perceived intrusion of imperial pre-
rogative into the internal structure of settler life, over time helping to
make government power synonymous with the imperial power of con-
quest and native subjection. In developing the practices for how to gov-
ern new territories, the Constitution followed the precedent established
by the Northwest Ordinance. Yet this precedent had been on very shaky
ground, as nowhere in the Articles of Confederation did the states vest
the Continental Congress with such administrative authority. In fact,
Congress's intervention into the local settler organization of political life
was fundamentally at odds with the prevailing norms of decentralized
autonomy and popular rule. Madison and numerous other political elites
believed that congressional administration, although politically necessary,

had no constitutional basis under the Articles of Confederation. In the
Federalist Papers, Madison argued that "the Western territory" was "a
mine of vast wealth to the United States" but worried that, without a
clear grant of national power, local popular control would render it un-
productive and the site for internal conflict and European aggression.
While the Continental Congress had attempted to check these trends
with proper administration, its actions were "done without the least
color of constitutional authority." 87 As such, a potentially divisive strug-
gle brewed between frontier settlers eager to assert popular rule and the
Continental Congress, operating admittedly illegally but in the interests
of national unity.

At stake for Madison and for other Federalists was the effort to ensure
that Anglo settlement and national enrichment were not held hostage by
popular passions. This involved the dual process of wresting power in the
established colonies from small farmers and townspeople and of en-
trenching the values and customs of coastal elites in new lands. Although
frontier settlers were the exponents of Anglo civilization — "agents of
progress" by which native lands could be made productive — they were
also possible threats to civilization. 88 Coastal elites viewed these settlers,
who often faced extreme destitution, as having embraced the "savagery"
of their indigenous neighbors and thus as representing a continuous
source of potential disorder. Such elites were especially horrified by the
brutality with which frontier settlers confronted native peoples and saw
the rise of their popular power as a potential attack on the progressive
aspirations of the new republic. 89 As George Fredrickson writes, although
frontier settlers were necessary for colonization, "it was usually taken for
granted that their way of life was a transitional one soon to be replaced
by the kind of orderly and industrious society that existed in the East." 90
In keeping with this belief, the new Constitution made apparent that ex-
pansion would take place under the aegis of coastal authority, by provid-
ing that "Congress shall have power to dispose of and make all needful
rules and regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging
to the United States." 91 Although the previous regime may have been lim-
ited in its legal capacity to constrain frontier behavior, no similar problem
would confront the new national authority. Congress now enjoyed the
legal right to administer western lands and through its actions could insu-
late political decision making from popular control.

The debates concerning governance and citizenship in Louisiana made
evident how the new constitutional order checked and altered populist

sentiment. The purchase treaty between France and the United States as-
sumed that inhabitants of the new territories would eventually gain full
citizenship and that the lands would achieve statehood; however, for the
time being Congress should govern the territories in accordance with basic
constitutional protections. 92 In keeping with the principles of settler empire
and the framework established by the Northwest Ordinance, political elites
never seriously contemplated maintaining permanent dependencies in the
territories. Still, if statehood would be the inevitable outcome, the new con-
stitutional order meant that the national government could set the timeta-
ble and greatly influence the eventual structure of local self-government. As
a result, congressional authority operated as the guiding force, controlling
frontier autonomy and shaping the exercise of popular power.

Following ratification, Congress authorized the president to govern
the territory until legislation could be passed, and then in February 1804
it adopted a temporary government "comprised of a governor, a legisla-
tive council of thirteen members, and judicial officers serving four-year
terms — all to be appointed by the President." Both bills deviated sharply
from the principles of popular sovereignty and were immediately con-
demned by American settlers in the Louisiana territory, with the mayor
of New Orleans resigning in protest over the lack of self-governance. The
reasons driving such interim arrangements were twofold: First, Thomas
Jefferson and others argued that the Catholicism of French and Spanish
inhabitants made them unprepared for popular governance. According
to Sarah Cleveland, "Jefferson considered the populace as 'incapable of
self-government as children' and suggested that the territorial legislature
should introduce democratic governance gradually, in accordance with
the populace's ability to adapt." For many coastal elites, although not
Jefferson himself, such ethnic and religious judgments also hid the deeper
fear that without restrictive congressional control, frontier settlers would
rule divisively through the whims of popular passion. As Senator Joseph
Anderson of Tennessee noted, anti-Catholic arguments made little sense
given that more than two-thirds of the inhabitants of Upper Louisiana
were Anglo-Protestant settlers. Politicians from frontier states overwhelm-
ingly condemned the temporary government as tyrannical, with the other
senator from Tennessee, William Cocke, describing it as "military despo-
tism" and declaring, "The people of that country are free — let them have
liberty & a free government." 93

Ultimately, Congress adopted a second, more representative form of
interim political government, with a bill of rights and a popularly elected

legislature of twenty-five members, and admitted Louisiana as a state in
1812. However, prior to statehood, Congress continued to play an ag-
gressive supervisory role, which would become routine in the adminis-
tration of future territories. While Louisiana residents could elect their
own representatives, Congress exercised a veto power over local statutes.
More important, the appointed governor continued to enjoy broad dis-
cretionary power, which included the right to determine when to convene
the elected legislature and to override its decisions if need be. Over time,
such executive authority became a staple of territorial governance, with
Congress, not unlike its British predecessor, employing the instrument of
an appointed official to limit popular rule. In the process, congressional
intervention made certain that local and unconstrained majorities would
not direct political decision making. This intervention further ensured
that statehood, when it finally arrived, was framed according to the prin-
ciples of Madisonian republicanism, complete with an independent judi-
ciary and an entrenched executive power in the form of a governor. 94

The role of Congress in establishing the parameters for self-government
also critically altered the structure of populist opposition. Most political
elites questioned the constitutionality of territorial governance under the
Articles of Confederation, because they assumed that while a royally de-
rived prerogative power may be appropriate when directed toward ex-
cluded groups, it could not be legitimately directed toward settlers. As
such, the internal community had to be predicated on free laws, guaran-
teeing that republicanism remained the basic premise of collective life.
For frontier politicians, defending the political and economic indepen-
dence of western settlers required making sure that such a prerogative
power never seeped into congressional administration of new lands. Al-
though the federal government may have been able to set the terms by
which new territories finally achieved statehood, respect for basic consti-
tutional guarantees needed to limit this authority.

As a result, Representative Andrew Gregg of Pennsylvania sought an
amendment during the debates over Louisiana ensuring that all congres-
sional acts with regard to the territory were "not inconsistent with the
Constitution of the United States." Similarly, Senator Anderson of Ten-
nessee argued that every stipulated right provided by the Constitution
immediately followed from expansion, because "the only power we have
to legislate for that country is derived from the Constitution — & we must
give them a republican government — we can give them no other." 95 If the
new Constitution undermined the power of popular rule, it also provided

a means for establishing the equal status of all settlers and for checking
the discretionary power of Congress. Although populism had been cur-
tailed as a rubric for the organization of politics, its defense of the social
position of small farmers and townspeople could still work to police the
oppressiveness of the new federal government.

As I will discuss in a later section, the most infamous variation of this
argument was presented by Jacksonian politician and Supreme Court
Chief Justice Roger Taney in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857). There he
pointedly challenged the general territorial regulatory power of Con-
gress, contending that the Constitution provided such authority only to
territories possessed by the United States at the time of ratification. For
Taney, this claim, aimed at limiting congressional discretion, was a criti-
cal means for defending not only slaveholding rights in newly annexed land
but also frontier settler rights from the federal government's coercive
authority. 96 Accordingly, any attempt by Congress to grasp at powers
beyond constitutional language represented an illegitimate penetration
of imperial prerogative into internal settler life. Just as similar asser-
tions of centralized power under British colonial rule had reduced the
settler to the status of the native, congressional discretion served to
negate basic social commitments to republican liberty and internal equal-
ity. Such encroachments by the national government risked making fron-
tier settlers, worthy of free citizenship, the political subjects of federal
tyranny.

Although Taney may have embodied its full maturation, the political
actor who best illustrated the initial populist turn toward skepticism and
a politics premised on policing imperial prerogative was Thomas Jeffer-
son. Jefferson was a gentle opponent of the new Constitution, due to its
original lack of a bill of rights and his fears regarding a strengthened
central authority. He famously wrote to Madison, "I own that I am not a
friend to a very energetic government. It is always oppressive." 97 Yet, as
Christopher Tomlins has argued, Jefferson's opposition to "energetic
government" was not an opposition to state power as such. He viewed
politics as a site for yeoman settlers to exercise local popular rule and
thus ensure both economic freedom and public happiness. Jefferson de-
clared, "I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the
rich, are our dependence for continued freedom." 98 In fact, his ward sys-
tem epitomized the populist belief in a small, producerist democracy,
structured to actualize the collective good and in which majoritarian law
was constitutive of liberty:

It is by dividing and subdividing these republics . . . until it ends in
the administration of every man's farm by himself; by placing un-
der every one what his own eye may superintend, that all will be
done for the best. . . . Where every man is a sharer in the direction
of his ward-republic . . . and feels that he is a participator in the
government of affairs, not merely at an election one day in the year,
but every day; when there shall not be a man in the State who will
not be a member of some one of its councils, great or small, he will
let the heart be torn out of his body sooner than his power be
rested from him by a Caesar or a Bonaparte."

Jefferson's defense of popular rule even led him to depict insurrections
like the Shays' Rebellion as healthy expressions of a democratic voice. In
letters to friends he wrote, "God forbid we should ever be 20 years with-
out such a rebellion" and that "The late rebellion in Massachusetts has
given more alarm than I think it should have done. Calculate that one
rebellion in 13 states in the course of 11 years, is but one for each state in
a century & a half. No country should be so long without one." 100

However, to the extent that political power became increasingly dis-
connected from local popular control, its energetic exertion was neces-
sarily suspect. Such political authority was not effectively structured to
promote producerist democracy, in which the activities of government
served the laboring community. As a result, Jefferson remained wary of
the implied powers of the new federal system; he worried that its enlarge-
ment of central authority conflicted with a robust populist vision. One
therefore can read Jefferson's strict constructionism, his view that pow-
ers not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution could not be claimed by
the national government, as expressing the fear that nontextual sources
of authority could easily devolve into an unlimited grant of power — one
that would nullify whatever persisted of popular rule.

By emphasizing a politics based on skepticism toward state power,
Jefferson embodied the shift away from focusing on how the popular
will could be actualized through government. His arguments suggested
an increasing concern with policing the basic duality that marked and sus-
tained settler life: that between an internal condition of freedom and an
external one of violence and coercion. One should note that territorial
expansion was the principal area in which Jefferson defended greater con-
gressional discretion. In doing so, he laid out the centrality for populist
sentiment of both maintaining the royally deprived imperial prerogative

and of checking its internal application, particularly after constitutional
ratification. Jefferson saw the acquisition of new territory as a precondi-
tion for settler freedom and republican peace. In the same letter to Madi-
son criticizing "energetic government," he also wrote, "I think our gov-
ernments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are
chiefly agricultural; and this will be as long as there shall be vacant lands
in any part of America. When they get piled upon one another in large
cities, as in Europe, they will become corrupt as in Europe." 101

Yet, if an "empire of liberty" required an unchecked sovereign power
that operated externally, this authority should never apply within settler
society. Even in arguing for gradual self-governance for the territories,
Jefferson's primary rationale was that since Catholic inhabitants required
a period of cultural assimilation, they could be subject temporarily to Con-
gress's discretionary authority. In other words, he justified greater federal
power by arguing that the subjects of such power were, for the time being,
not truly within the settler community. Under these circumstances, defenses
of populism became increasingly centered on delineating social member-
ship and establishing the hierarchical distinctions between settlers and non-
settlers. As the nineteenth century progressed, the xenophobic implications
of a politics built on maintaining this internal-external divide became ever
more pronounced.

The Rise of Wage Labor and Populist Xenophobia

The view that government, and particularly the national authority, was
a space not for collective actualization but for despotic control by the
wealthy transformed the means by which small farmers, townspeople,
and their political allies imagined achieving economic and political inde-
pendence. In particular, it led away from Manning's belief in an energetic
popular power and toward greater faith in a self-regulating commercial
society. Yet, as artisanal production began to collapse and industrial
wage labor became more commonplace, the free market did not produce
universal proprietorship; instead it increasingly entrenched oppressive
work relations. As early as the 1820s and 1830s, a small group of radical
social critics and labor activists began to question the compatibility be-
tween republican liberty and territorial empire. Individuals like Thomas
Skidmore even proposed a new frame for American politics, one that
entirely abandoned settler and paternal hierarchies and saw self-rule as
a universal collective right. These arguments, however prophetic about

the future of industrialization and wage labor, were broadly ignored as a
basis for reform. Rather than confront practical threats to self-rule,
populist antipathy toward government and the dreaded imperial prerog-
ative provided the backdrop for a new millennial politics — one profess-
ing a manifest destiny and committed to reaffirming the emancipatory
potential of empire. If the market could not ensure freedom, expansion
and the hardening of social exclusivities were embraced yet again as the
primary means for protecting settler status. Small farmers and artisans
retreated into a politics that defined equality not on the basis of positive
social principles but by comparison with excluded and subordinated
outsiders.

The Free Market, Economic Independence, and Populism in Retreat
The first great American conspiracy case against union organizing, Com-
monwealth v. Pullis (1806), underscores the populist move away from
energetic government action and popular power as the basis for freedom.
The case concerned Philadelphia journeymen shoemakers who in 1794
had organized to secure better wages and in 1805 went on strike. The
strike collapsed after union leaders were indicted for the common-law
crime of conspiracy, and the trial took place in the Philadelphia Mayor's
Court. In his instruction to the jury, Recorder Levy, the presiding judge,
rejected the view that the journeymen cordwainers (the name came from
the type of leather they used) enjoyed any collective right to organize or
to alter established economic relationships. He viewed such behavior as
a threat to order and an illegal form of association harmful to those who
chose not to join. 102 Critically, the arguments made on behalf of the jour-
neymen by their Jeffersonian lawyers did not seek to defend association
as a good in and of itself. If some journeymen laborers rejected the con-
spiracy law because it undermined their ability to assert explicit control
over relations of employment, the lawyers defending the case argued on
different grounds. 103 They saw the law as oppressive because it focused
exclusively on workers while allowing employers to organize collectively
in their own interests. According to this view, although unionization was
a necessary response, ideally the free market would regulate employment
relations and ensure equity without resorting to any form of combina-
tion. As attorney Caesar Rodney remarked to the jury, "If you will take
my advice, you will leave the regulation of these things to the open mar-
ket. There every article, like water, acquires its natural level: adopt this
rule and you will be more likely to get your boots much cheaper." 104

This defense of economic self-regulation, and the rejection of collec-
tive assertiveness as an end in itself, became a staple of Jacksonian poli-
tics in the 1820s and 1830s. While the Democratic Party's coalition
stitched together a variety of unlikely social groups, including Southern
slave owners, subsistence farmers, and poor workers both native born and
immigrant, it crystallized the post-constitutional turn in populist argu-
ment, with its slogan — taken from Jefferson — of "equal rights for all, and
special privileges for none." 105 Like Manning before him, Jackson fa-
mously viewed settler society as marked by conflict between "the real
people" (farmers, artisans, and laborers generally) and the wealthy few,
whom he called the "money power." These aristocratic and oppressive forces
sought to use state authority in order to undermine equality and render
economic freedom impossible. For Jackson, the battle over the National
Bank epitomized the greater class struggle:

The bank is, in fact, but one of the fruits of a system at war with
the genius of all our institutions — a system founded upon a politi-
cal creed the fundamental principle of which is a distrust of the
popular will as a safe regulator of political power, and whose great
ultimate object and inevitable result, should it prevail, is the con-
solidation of all power in our system in one central government.
Lavish public disbursements and corporations with exclusive priv-
ileges would be its substitutes for the original and as yet sound
checks and balance of the Constitution — the means by whose si-
lent and secret operation a control would be exercised by the few
over the political conduct of the many by first acquiring that con-
trol over the labor and earnings of the great body of the people.
Wherever this spirit has effected an alliance with political power,
tyranny and despotism have been the fruit. 106

Yet, as the emphasis on constitutional "checks" made clear, the solu-
tion was not direct and energetic popular rule; any consolidation of po-
litical power brought with it the specter of class oppression by the few.
Instead, competition in the free market combined with the elimination of
government interference would create a social system committed to the
well-being and liberty of ordinary citizens. As a Massachusetts Jacksonian
argued, "Too many laws and too much government are among the ten-
dencies of the age against which we must guard." Bruce Laurie writes
that even in response to greater union organizing and political participa-
tion in the early 1830s, Democrats "campaigned for less government, not

more: they pressed for the abolition of militia duty and imprisonment
for debt. They shrieked 'freedom of conscience' and 'individual liberty' at
Whigs bent on legislating evangelical morality. Democratic lawmakers,
much like Jefferson's, governed best when they governed least." This at-
tack on active government went hand in hand with the belief that a self-
regulating commercial society, stripped of any monopoly power or pater-
nalist class authority, could ensure freedom as self-rule for all settlers.
According to Democratic speechmakers, "Every avenue to distinction,
every path to wealth is open to every citizen alike, and every citizen can
make of himself what he chooses." 107

However, between 1820 and 1860, the expansion of an unchecked
market brought with it a far greater division of labor in work life and a
steady downward mobility among many previously economically suffi-
cient artisans and farmers, particularly in eastern cities. 108 "The multitude
struggled just to make ends meet. Wives bought wheat and other nonper-
ishables in bulk and made the family clothing or patronized secondhand
shops in working-class districts. They might save a few pennies on rent
by moving into cheaper flats several times a year." Faced with such reali-
ties, commercial self-regulation seemed less and less like a social panacea.
While republican liberty presupposed that no one could be free if bound
by master-servant relationships, market forces extended precisely such
conditions by breaking down artisanal and rural work structures and
promoting the development of hierarchical wage labor. Although the
choice of entering into wage contracts was one ostensibly made freely,
increasing numbers of individuals found themselves bound by rules dic-
tated exclusively by employers. These rules, at times modeled after the
eighteenth-century master-servant relations of the household, had the ef-
fect of dramatically limiting laborer independence and of enforcing
structures of economic subordination inconsistent with the republican
ideal. 109

In fact, Christopher Tomlins and Karen Orren have highlighted how
such hierarchy was legally entrenched as the backbone of the free labor
market, for instance through a series of state court decisions beginning in
1829 with Stevens v. Reeves in Massachusetts. 110 Reeves, a skilled arti-
san, made an agreement with the owner of a wool factory to use one of
its looms and to be paid by the piece. Like all skilled artisans, he saw the
factory from the perspective of a customer buying a finished product,
which he alone controlled. As such, he worked at the loom for a period
of days and then left without any notice. After some time, Reeves returned,

completed his work, and left for good, again without notifying the fac-
tory that he had found employment elsewhere. Stevens, the owner of the
factory, sued for breach of contract, claiming that Reeves had not given
the requisite two weeks' notice. Although the Supreme Judicial Court held
in favor of the defendant on the grounds that Reeves had never been told
of this rule, it concluded that employers enjoyed the right to enforce
whatever conditions they chose so long as those conditions were made
evident to employees. 111 In other words, regardless of the desire by
Reeves as a skilled artisan to maintain independent control of his own
labor, wage relations presupposed that the employer could determine the
terms and status of work. Nearly twenty years later, in Rice v. Dwight
Manufacturing Co. (1848), the same court reaffirmed that although la-
borers enjoyed the ability to choose whether to enter wage relations,
employers set the contractual terms. 112

Thus, given problems of downward mobility and the reduction of ar-
tisans into wage earners, the free market in the early to mid-nineteenth
century appeared to exacerbate economic and bargaining inequalities
between employers and laborers rather than promote broad-based self-
rule. And instead of intervening in commercial society, the courts simply
acceded to the market authority of the employer and refused to alter wage
relationships. More crucially, the principal language of economic critique,
Jacksonian populism, had no means by which to question these develop-
ments because it presupposed the equity of market forces and viewed gov-
ernmental power as the relevant threat to collective life. While defending a
belief in freedom as economic and political independence, the turn toward
political skepticism in practice rejected the collective right to transform
institutional sites of subordination.

It thus reinforced the sense that if market forces failed to eliminate
wage servitude, tenancy, and economic dependence for poor settlers, the
best alternative means was one that had long grounded society: migra-
tion and escape to the frontier. In the decades before the Civil War, Ameri-
cans built roads on the banks of the Mississippi River, opening up new
land to colonization. As Laurie writes:

The upper Midwest had about four million people by the eve of
the Civil War, and most of them had migrated from the East. Even
its reaches of rich and fertile grasslands failed to hold settlers. It no
longer took much to stir the wanderlust of the American farmer,
and the valleys farther west proved irresistible. About 250,000

migrants from Midwestern farms gathered at St. Josephs, Mis-
souri, and other staging points after 1840 for the two-thousand-
mile journey on the Overland Trail to the Pacific coast.

Like early colonists before them, those moving west generally enjoyed
access to land at relatively inexpensive prices, with the federal govern-
ment in 1820 offering a minimum of eighty acres for only $1.25 per acre.
As a result, frontier farmers were by and large able to acquire property
and build homes out of the rugged wilderness. 113

Just as important, when economic conditions deteriorated, settlers
did not hesitate to pick up and move repeatedly. Transience, not simply
migration, was a basic fact of antebellum and nineteenth-century life.
Historians tracking census data have found that by conservative estimates
more than 60 percent of individuals disappeared from the records and
that fewer than "two in five Americans stayed in their communities for
extended periods of time." 114 In addition, few people confined to wage
labor remained as long-term employees, as "more than 50 percent of
those employed stayed with their employers for periods of no longer
than six months." 115 Such transience had two key political implications.
First, it undermined the strong communal bonds that often marked
eighteenth-century settler life and that had fostered uprisings like the
Shays' Rebellion. Consequently, it made collective self-assertion in poli-
tics less feasible, because individuals moving through cities, towns, and
frontier territory did not enjoy the same local commitments and close
relationships that had mobilized popular pressure during the Revolution-
ary period. Second, and equally critical, the possibility of land ownership
and of economic escape more broadly presupposed expansion. This de-
sire to stay ahead of governmental interference and eastern hegemony
required the constant extension of the sphere of colonization. It under-
scored the centrality for poor settlers of the tie between territorial con-
quest and economic independence, how empire was the driving engine of
republican freedom.

Byllesby, Brownson, Skidmore, and the Goal
of a Universal Republic

At the margins of Jacksonian politics, there did emerge a more compre-
hensive defense of populism, one that saw an energetic government pur-
suing the communal interest as the only means by which all laborers
would enjoy productive control. Even more crucially, some reformers

began to connect this robust populism to a full-fledged critique of all set-
tler dichotomies, straightforwardly questioning the compatibility of re-
publican liberty and imperial practices. These ideas gathered force among
labor radicals who flocked to the new trade union movement in the 1830s
and especially to its various working men's parties in eastern cities like
Philadelphia and New York. For such individuals, faced on a day-to-day
basis with the rise of factory production and wage labor, commercial self-
regulation had very clearly failed to produce economic self-rule. Moreover,
reformers argued that while expansion may be a temporary solution,
over the long run industrial dependencies — unless challenged — would
take root in new territory. According to the most persistent critics, the
only lasting answer was to alter basic economic relationships and to con-
front directly the growing gulf between industrialists and wage earners.
Doing so entailed refusing to fall prey to calls for yet more western land
or to xenophobic attacks on nonsettlers.

In tying a defense of economic reorganization to a critique of con-
quest, thinkers like Langdon Byllesby, Orestes Brownson, and Thomas
Skidmore suggested a potential avenue for populist ideas, one able to sus-
tain faith in the laboring community's primacy while at the same time
questioning either the utility or justice of imperial prerogatives. In his 1826
manuscript, Observations on the Source and Effects of Unequal Wealth,
Byllesby, a Pennsylvania printer and pamphleteer, pointedly rejected the
essential settler argument that expansion promoted an empire of liberty by
ensuring enough land for all social members to become independent pro-
prietors and free citizens. Surveying the rising tide of industrialization,
Byllesby concluded that although territorial conquest may appear to offer
a respite from inequalities back home, in the end it worked primarily to
entrench commercial and manufacturing interests. This was because wars
of expansion, as with most conflicts, were at root promoted by elites in or-
der to perpetuate an unequal accumulation of wealth. According to
Byllesby, "If, as is frequently avowed, the object of a war be to gain an ex-
tension of dominion . . . these objects have no other uses, than as a source
from whence to derive the means of extracting wealth, and its accompani-
ment, power, in order to influence the condition of others." 116 Rather than
challenging practices of wage labor, one could expect that new land would
simply open more space for the growth of these economic relations.

In many ways, Byllesby's arguments presented a novel reconstruction
of long-standing republican concerns — previously evident in Harrington's

writings — regarding the effects of war on a community's moral welfare
and identity. In the 1790s, Manning had argued that one of the central
methods "by which the Few destroy [ed] free governments [was] by rais-
ing standing armies and making needless wars." 117 In his view, conquest
and the drive for territorial expansion provided a useful pretext for ex-
panding the size and power of such an army, which could be employed
internally at any time to deprive the many "of their own rights and liber-
ties." 118 Byllesby now went further and raised general questions with the
material and emancipatory effects of expansion, regardless of whether
wars served as pretexts for new standing armies. He argued that, eventu-
ally, added territory on the frontier would become a source of profit for
new industrialists, reinforcing those destructive wealth and power dis-
parities already existing within settler society.

He saw the only real solution as transforming the industrial factory
into a model of cooperative production without masters or dependent
wage earners. Byllesby therefore called for new workplace associations,
which pooled their productive labor in every industry, much as commer-
cial elites pooled their wealth into joint stock companies. 119 These bodies
would develop common policies for economic production and growth
through "a general system of conference" and over time would make
cooperation rather than commercial competition the basis for industrial
life. 120 Such ideas struck a nerve with many trade unionists, who in the
1830s coalesced around workplace cooperatives as the solution to the
demise of artisanal production and the separation of labor from capital.
But Byllesby, as well as most unionists, had difficulty imagining the state
as a potential instrument for collective self-assertion. Since government
had long been seen as the bastion of a moneyed few who were commit-
ted to insulating politics from popular rule, the idea of a positive role for
the state was difficult to fathom. As Laurie explains, when seeking ave-
nues for accumulating the capital necessary to develop cooperatives,
"Radicals did not consider banks, which were unlikely lenders in any
case, and given their view of government, they did not consider a public
creditor. The only option left was the voluntary effort of labor itself." 121
While no doubt massive in scope, this view simply reproduced the Jack-
sonian and Whig logic of self-help on a larger scale. Therefore it is
not surprising that when the economic depression of 1837 hit, ending the
possibility of laborers being able voluntarily to raise capital from among
themselves, trade union attempts at cooperative ownership collapsed.

Still, there were voices inside and outside the trade union movement
that struggled to tie Byllesby's vision to one that also challenged the pre-
vailing orthodoxy regarding commercial self-help. Orestes Brownson's
pamphlet, The Labouring Classes (1840), presented just such a recon-
struction of robust populism, which critiqued the logic of empire and
defended a constitutive and emancipatory role for energetic government.
Brownson, a New England social philosopher and supporter of the
Democratic Party, embodied the most radical elements of the Jacksonian
coalition. In essence, he attempted to take arguments from the working
men's parties and place them at the center of the Democratic platform.

In many ways, his views, like those of Byllesby, represented the senti-
ment of alienated laborers in the manufacturing cities who had fallen
from life as journeymen apprentices to that of permanent wage earners.
For these workers in the new factories, the idea — shared by most Jackso-
nian and Whig politicians — that competitive individualism in the market
would guarantee all settlers of good character economic independence
was an illusion. Brownson wrote:

We are not ignorant of the fact that men born poor become wealthy,
and that men born wealthy become poor. . . . But be this as it may,
one fact is certain; no man born poor has ever by his wages, as a
simple operative, risen to the class of the wealthy. . . . The simple
market wages for ordinary labour, has [sic] never been adequate to
raise him from poverty to wealth. This fact is decisive of the whole
controversy, and proves that the system of wages must be sup-
planted by some other system, or else half of the human race must
for ever be the virtual slaves of the other.

Hard work alone was not enough for the vast majority of people to es-
cape economic dependence. Moreover, when it did succeed, it merely
moved citizens from the class of wage earner to that of employer, rather
than to eliminate the guiding structure and create one premised instead
on equality and independence. As long as this structure remained in place,
republican freedom would be impossible, because, as Brownson declared,
wages were "a cunning device of the devil, for the benefit of tender con-
sciences, who would retain all the advantages of the slave system, without
the expense, trouble, and odium of being slave-holders." 122

Like Byllesby, Brownson also viewed territorial expansion, despite its
immediate benefits, as ultimately incompatible with protecting economic

liberty. He made this point explicitly by drawing an analogy to the Brit-
ish example:

General emigration can at best afford only temporary relief, for
the colony will soon become an empire, and reproduce all the in-
justice and wretchedness of the mother country. Nor is general
emigration necessary. England, if she would be just, could support
a larger population than she now numbers. The evil is not from
over population, but from the unequal repartition of the fruits of
industry, She suffers from the over production . . . because her
workmen produce not for themselves but for their employers.

According to Brownson, since no empire could expand indefinitely, even-
tually the community would have to confront the inequities embedded
within its own economic structure. Just as Byllesby had warned a decade
earlier, unless oppressive forms of production were addressed at their
source, they would be carried to new lands and bring with them all the
"wretchedness of the mother country." Brownson challenged poor labor-
ers to focus their energies on claiming productive control within their
own communities rather than to imagine that added territories would be
a panacea. 123

Brownson argued that the only lasting solution was broad-based indi-
vidual proprietorship, principally through the redistribution of land and
a return to artisanal production:

There must be no class of our fellow men doomed to toil through
life as mere workmen at wages. If wages are tolerated it must be,
in the case of the individual operative, only under such conditions
that by the time he is of a proper age to settle in life, he shall have
accumulated enough to be an independent laborer on his own
capital, — on his own farm or in his own shop. Here is our work.
How is it to be done?

One should note that such arguments were relatively commonplace in
postcolonial America, with a wide spectrum of settler society — not simply
trade unionists — concurring that wage labor was inconsistent with free-
dom and acceptable only as a temporary condition on the way toward
property ownership. What made Brownson's arguments distinctive was
his dismissal of those means by which Americans ordinarily believed that
independence could be achieved: through empire and self-help. 124

Given the inadequacy of these traditional approaches, and having
witnessed the collapse of voluntary workplace cooperatives, Brownson
concluded that for ordinary individuals truly to enjoy economic freedom,
they would have to assert control collectively over the instruments of
state power. He wrote, "We have no faith in those systems of elevating
the working classes, which propose to elevate them without calling in the
aid of government. We must have government and legislation expressly
directed to this end." More specifically, Brownson extended Paine's argu-
ment in Agrarian justice for a tax on inheritance to declare that govern-
ment should abolish all "hereditary descent of property" and redistribute
wealth in keeping with the goal of all individuals enjoying independent
proprietorship. Like both Paine and Manning before him, he imagined a
democracy of small producers in which laborers exercised unconstrained
popular power and intervened communally in market relations in order
to promote liberty. Unlike Jeffersonian and Jacksonian politicians, Brown-
son viewed government action and majoritarian law as essential in actu-
alizing collective freedom. 125

Brownson's concerns with territorial expansion and his account of
energetic government hinted at a reformulation of populist ambitions,
one that at its boldest could even challenge the classic settler dichotomy
between free citizen and imperial subject. Yet Brownson himself was un-
willing to develop the implications of these arguments. Although he was
an outspoken critic of slavery, he argued that abolitionists should respect
the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law — no matter how unjust — because it was ulti-
mately the law of the land. And although he rejected paternal supervision
for women and defended sexual equality, he refrained from broadening
his extensive written defenses of universal male suffrage to include women.
In a sense, Brownson was willing to accommodate himself to the hierar-
chies of settler society and pulled back from the driving logic of his own
egalitarianism.

By contrast, Thomas Skidmore, the founder of New York's Working
Men's Party, had no similar hesitancies. His 1829 work, The Rights of
Man to Property, came during the high tide of wage earner discontent in
eastern cities. It formed the basis for the party's earliest platform and
represented a comprehensive attempt to extract freedom as self-rule from
settler dichotomies. For Skidmore, as with Manning before him, a basic
social divide existed between the few and the many. But Skidmore ex-
panded the definition of the many, arguing that they were not simply la-
boring white settlers but rather all individuals, regardless of settler status,

who were denied the conditions of economic independence. An admirer
of Thomas Paine, Skidmore took his title directly from The Rights of
Man and believed that one of Paine's key contributions was his refusal to
see justice as limited by nationality or existing social membership. 126 As
a consequence, Skidmore maintained that the goal of free labor was a
universal one, as nothing about the experience of productive control sug-
gested that nonwhites or even women were inherently incapable of en-
joying it. In fact, he argued that rather than being political enemies, poor
whites shared fundamental interests with black slaves and dispossessed
Indians, as each group was confined by existing economic hierarchies to
poverty and dependence.

As with Brownson, Skidmore believed that hereditary property should
be abolished and divided among all Americans at the age of maturity (ac-
cording to Skidmore, eighteen years old). Before this age, the government
should establish measures to provide for the support and education of
children. Since this right to economic independence and thus to property
applied equally to everyone ("given to any human being ... in virtue of
his existence"), any individual under U.S. sovereignty should be embraced
as a free citizen, irrespective of race, religion, or gender. For instance,
slaves should be liberated and given the right to vote, because "the black
man's right to suffrage . . . [was] as perfect as the white man's." More-
over, according to Skidmore, the formal end of slavery alone was not
enough to eliminate the substantive vestiges of bondage, unless emanci-
pation came with individual proprietorship and productive control. In-
stead of master-slave relations persisting under new instruments of ten-
ancy and wage servitude, he hoped that freed blacks would be "presented
with lands, and other property also" and that "whites could prevail on
their own feelings not to envy and oppose, this easy and natural method
of extinguishing slavery, and its ten thousand attendant evils." With re-
gard to women, they too were "entitled to the same right of suffrage"
and an equal division of property. For Skidmore, the settler dichotomy
between free citizens (who enjoyed republican freedom) and stratified
subjects (under discretionary prerogative powers) had to give way to a
constitutional politics that treated all as liberated equals. 127

Following Byllesby, whom he avidly read, Skidmore viewed the drive
for territorial expansion as the product of basic inequities at home. While
the wealthy sought to extend their economic power, the poor viewed
conquest as a means for gaining an individual competency, either through
military allowances or land opened up by war. Precisely because some

settlers were denied property, they were willing to become "conquerors"
and employ violence to dispossess others. "Ask only at our Forts . . . and
they will tell you. They will say, that if society had given them all a com-
petence, (or rather the means of acquiring it,) such as all men might have,
under proper circumstances, they would not have consented to be where
they are." For Skidmore, the economic forces that sustained westward ex-
pansion were problematic not only because they reproduced existing de-
pendencies but also because they undermined universal respect for equal-
ity. Conquest as the engine for economic self-rule, even if successful, rested
on illegitimate modes of subordination, since it imposed violence on out-
siders who were worthy of equal consideration. In other words, coloniza-
tion instrumentalized nonsettler groups, treating conquered individuals as
dependent means useful solely for the fulfillment of internal settler ends. 128

Skidmore's anti-imperial politics led him to question directly native
treatment and dispossession. Some Americans no doubt recognized the
problems embedded in historic practices toward Indian tribes. Recall
that although Marshall, in Johnson v. M'Intosh, accepted the legal reality
of facts on the ground, he was wary of endorsing the moral validity of ar-
guments about native savagery and thus indigenous conquest. Skidmore,
however, dissented even from this purely legal recognition and maintained
instead that violence or trickery could not trump Indian claims to full sov-
ereignty. He argued provocatively that if an assessment of native-white re-
lations revealed that real equality between the two communities would
require returning to the Indians land previously expropriated, these mea-
sures should be adopted. For Skidmore, the idea that English colonists
legitimately held wide tracts of native territory because rich planters like
William Penn "gave a few beads to . . . some Indians" was absurd. 129

As for those native peoples who would formally remain under American
sovereignty, they too deserved complete rights of property and suffrage. In
fact, Skidmore called for a New York State constitutional convention to
make universal these protections. 130 But as a crucial caveat, Skidmore be-
lieved that although sovereign and independent Indian neighbors could not
be compelled by force to change their tenure practices, under American
jurisdiction free citizenship required holding land privately. 131 For Native
Americans to become internal equals, they had to conform to republican
ideas of economic and political independence and thus reproduce settler
practices of property ownership. When U.S. officials in the 1880s engaged
in just such a division of communal tribal land into private homesteads,
the result was the large-scale impoverishment and expropriation of native

societies. Like those Indian Bureau officials, Skidmore maintained a
strong republican belief in the centrality of property relations and "free
labor" for collective life. While he likely would have been deeply trou-
bled by later developments — due to his commitment to distributional
equality — he was nonetheless blind to the destructive cultural effects of
transforming native tenure. As with the rest of settler society, he persisted
in viewing white land use as the universal standard of membership, as-
similation, and ultimately freedom.

Despite this, Skidmore's reinvention of republican liberty imagined
the possibility of universalizing self-rule and eliminating the colonial du-
ality of settler institutions. It challenged the ideological as well as prag-
matic legitimacy of conquest. Skidmore argued for the shared interests of
poor settlers, women, and imperial subjects and called on white laborers
to expand their community of concern to incorporate these groups. As
part of this thoroughgoing critique of settler supremacy, he also addressed
the ethnic basis for open European immigration. According to him, all
individuals everywhere had a natural right to an equal share of property,
which could not be overcome by force. If anything, this right meant that
no one, due purely to where they happened to be born, deserved moral
priority in dividing economic spoils. Ideally, everyone, European and
non-European alike, should have the right of free movement, by ex-
changing their local property rights with residents of a foreign country.
Skidmore thus hoped that immigration no longer would be viewed as a
tool for settler expansion but would be seen instead as a means for con-
fronting the accident of birth. He argued for settlers to discard their his-
toric reliance on exclusivity and subordination and in the process to cre-
ate real conditions for external and internal peace: "And when government
shall be so constructed as to make property real and personal . . . then
shall we see governments exerting their functions, simply by indicating
their pleasure, and not by exerting force." In a sense, Skidmore main-
tained the classic settler belief in a millennial and republican project of
tranquility. But he argued that such peace could never be achieved
through violent subjugation, which only transformed citizens into con-
querors. Actual peace required focusing on internal reform and ending
unequal property and status relationships. In this way, "conquerors and
warriors would be destroyed" and collective life would truly embody goals
of tranquility. 132

As with Byllesby and Brownson, Skidmore's views emerged from
a basic sense that the settler status quo, emphasizing self-regulating

commercial life and territorial expansion, was not sustainable as a method
for providing insiders with the benefits of economic independence. Un-
fortunately, these arguments failed as a general matter to resonate during
the Jacksonian era. In fact, Skidmore soon found himself expelled from
the party he formed, due to the concerted effort of less radical editors
and politicians. His attempts to form a new party largely failed, and his
platform ultimately attracted few trade unionists willing to embrace such
comprehensive reform. 133 In many ways, arguments made by Skidmore
and others undermined the basic contours of settler life, which for most
whites continued to offer a reasonable means for avoiding dependence
and achieving economic freedom. Byllesby, Brownson, and Skidmore all
wrote in response to the rise of industrial production in the big cities. Yet
these economic practices, not to mention the consolidation of corporate
wealth, remained at a relatively incipient stage, and even most urban
workers did not appear to endorse wholesale transformation. For many,
social mobility and independent proprietorship continued to be generally
accessible experiences. And while territorial expansion may have dispro-
portionately benefited commercial and manufacturing elites, by opening
new land it still provided the engine for such mobility, independence, and
egalitarianism.

If anything, for settlers at the time greater inclusiveness presented
more of a threat to internal freedom than did fears of permanent wage
labor. As I will explore in the next section, for Jacksonians universal
white male suffrage rested not only on ideas about native idleness, but
also on claims of female incapacity and on the use of slaves for unfree
and menial forms of work. If women were no longer dependents but free
citizens with the right to vote, what did this suggest about the status of
poor white men — a status dependent on their ability to maintain a pater-
nal authority at home? Similarly, if slaves were no longer compelled to
engage in degraded forms of labor, would this require settlers to partici-
pate in such activities or to compete with blacks in the marketplace?
Given that these hierarchies sustained relative internal equality, there was
little settler willingness to reconceive status relations let alone to impose
sweeping institutional changes.

Unfree Labor, Gender and Racial Hierarchies,

and the Embrace of Xenophobia

As a result, rather than challenging industrial hierarchies, an increasingly

key method by which poor settlers defended their economic position was

by further limiting the most devalued forms of work to excluded groups
and to those often marginalized in settler life. Women, to the extent that
they became part of the labor force, found themselves confined to work
practices viewed as inherently unfree. Although some women gained em-
ployment in semiskilled jobs, resulting from the greater division of labor
in craft production, for the most part they were relegated to domestic
service and unskilled textile work. This was hardly by accident, since
advocates of manufacturing had argued as early as the late eighteenth
century that unskilled labor should come primarily from women and chil-
dren: those groups whose supposed natural incapacities warranted paternal
authority and rendered them unfit for self-rule. 134 As a consequence, in mill
towns like Lowell, Massachusetts, by mid-century as much as two-thirds
of the workforce (8,800 out of 13,200 people) was female. 135

Indeed, the tradition of Jacksonian populism tended to emphasize gen-
der differences and to suggest continuities between the status of women
within settler society and that of conquered groups at the colonial edges.
During the eighteenth century, space existed in some communities for the
inclusion of certain privileged women, particularly landholders who
were unmarried or widowed. The 1776 state constitution in New Jersey
extended the franchise to both propertied men and women; later enabling
statutes employed the pronouns "he or she" to highlight female suffrage. 136
The elevation of the productive laborer in the post-Revolutionary period,
however, went hand in hand with arguments that depicted women as
subjects of paternal authority. In line with Coke's classic formulation of
English subjectship, women and children were understood to be depen-
dents of husbands and fathers. This dependency, while viewed to be nat-
ural and permanent, was legally enforced in the common law through
coverture, which stipulated that women transferred their property and
income — the material prerequisites of independence — to their husbands
upon marriage.

The modest rights that existed for some upper-class women in the
colonial period receded as small farmers and artisans began to assert
their interests more vigorously and to reinforce a work-centered vision of
republican citizenship. The division of labor between traditionally "femi-
nine" work at home and "masculine" production on the farm or at the
bench stressed a gendered account of full participation. While men gained
independence and self-rule through homesteading and craft production,
household work (with its ties to master-servant relationships) presup-
posed the basic subordination of all women. As a result, although the

populist focus on productive labor undermined the idea that only landed
elites should enjoy meaningful political voice, it did so by compromising
those rights that existed for white women. Under the populist reading,
even individuals without extensive means deserved to take part in collec-
tive decision making — as long as they engaged in productive work and
were not destitute paupers. Yet this raised the classic republican question
of how laborers (if they did not own extensive property) could prove that
they had a fixed interest in the community's welfare. The answer became
that marriage and the husband's status as head of a household estab-
lished civic attachment. Thus, as property requirements for male suffrage
disappeared in the first half of the nineteenth century, emphasizing pater-
nal authority over women became a precondition for elevating the status
of settler men. 137

As a consequence, women were not free citizens but rather were in a
position parallel to imperial subjects, in that they faced discretionary and
hierarchical structures of authority. Nonetheless, a clear distinction did
hold between white women settlers and these outsider groups. Marriage
was understood to be a contract based on consent. In return for gaining
control over his wife's property and income, the husband had responsi-
bilities to support, protect, and represent his wife in political and eco-
nomic life. 138 Although this vision of dependency presented women as
natural inferiors to men, much like children they were integral elements
of the settler community and pointedly not conquered subjects. Their
status derived from hierarchies within family structure rather than war
or imperial colonization. Of course, in legal and political reality, women
were still excluded from free citizenship. They existed on the same contin-
uum of prerogative power as other stratified subjects, even if their status
depended on directly paternal rather than imperial dictates.

Even more explicitly than in the realm of gender, white male workers
sought to demarcate the line separating what was exclusively white labor
from that considered appropriate for blacks. In the North, because many
artisans had been slave owners, at the time of abolition free blacks were
often skilled craftsmen. But, as artisanal production began to unravel in
the early nineteenth century, white laborers repeatedly attempted to bar
black craftsmen from skilled employment. Eric Foner writes:

Hostility from white craftsmen, however, was only one among
many obstacles that kept blacks confined to the lowest ranks of the
labor market. White employers refused to hire them in anything but

menial positions, and white customers did not wish to be served
by them. The result was a rapid decline in economic status, until
by mid-century the vast majority of northern blacks labored for
wages in unskilled jobs and as domestic s

Similarly, in the South, white workers responded to their own slipping
economic position by erecting occupational color bars. In 1845, Georgia
passed a law prohibiting employers from hiring black mechanics or ma-
sons. However, due to the social power of Southern planters, such efforts
were usually thwarted, and even the Georgia statute was rendered largely
ineffective because it did not include slave artisans employed by white
contractors. 140 Nonetheless, the overwhelming social move by white
laborers throughout the country was to exclude the black population
from artisanal employment and independent proprietorship — limiting
them to menial jobs considered below the dignity of whites. 141

In essence, with a more robust vision of populism in retreat, white
laborers struggled to preserve their economic and political freedom by
consolidating the forms of discretionary power marking collective life.
Such behavior, of course, had deep roots in American settler society, with
the Revolution itself a method of defending an old status quo that pro-
tected the social supremacy of Anglo colonists. By the mid-nineteenth
century, this politics of empire and status protection hardened into a par-
ticularly virulent form of populist xenophobia. Such xenophobia justified
territorial conquest in terms of the ethnic superiority of the "Anglo-Saxon
race" and sought to extend the imperial prerogative across the continent.
Given the threat of wage servitude and tenancy, small farmers and towns-
people reaffirmed the long-standing ideological narrative of settlers as an
ethnically chosen people, members of a historically redemptive nation,
which through colonization would spread Anglo liberty and establish a
millennial republic of peace. Just as status anxiety in the waning days of
the British Empire had gone hand in hand with an intense civil millennial-
ism in the colonies, the breakdown of social communities and traditional
forms of economic activity reenergized the perceived link between empire
and the historically unique project of the American republic.

By the 1840s, the vision of settlers as a chosen people had become
encapsulated by the phrase "Manifest Destiny," which John L. O'Sullivan
coined in his editorial for the July and August Democratic Review on
the issue of Texas's admission to the Union. 142 In the debate over the an-
nexation of Texas, Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois articulated the

principle of Manifest Destiny and with it the settler goal of a free and
millennial republic spanning the continent. Describing God's redemptive
mission for the American people, Douglas wrote:

He would blot out the lines on the map which now marked our
national boundaries on this continent, and make the area of lib-
erty as broad as the continent itself. He would not suffer petty
rival republics to grow up here, engendering jealousy at each
other, and interfering with each other's domestic affairs, and con-
tinually endangering their peace. He did not wish to go beyond
the great ocean — beyond those boundaries which God of nature
had marked out. 143

This redemptive mission and its ethnic character helped justify calls for
expansion during the Mexican-American War as well as judgments that
Mexicans, as a "mongrel race," were unworthy of full inclusion and
could be treated as conquered imperial subjects. For those like Senator
William Preston, the confrontation with Mexico was a just "war of reli-
gion and liberty," waged by a "noble race" of "invincible Anglo-Saxon [s]"
against an "invader" motivated by racial backwardness and Catholic
"fanaticism." 144

The seductive appeal of xenophobia was apparent even in the lectures
of Ralph Waldo Emerson, who in 1843 gave a talk titled "The Genius
and National Character of the Anglo-Saxon Race," in which he con-
nected Manifest Destiny and internal settler freedom to the unique ethnic
attributes of the country's Saxon ancestors, attributes that gave true Amer-
icans "a general innocence and health, and with that, a general correct-
ness of thought." 145 Although Emerson largely avoided employing his
arguments about "race" to demean other communities or to justify their
subordination, for many settlers such claims about Anglo virtue and man-
liness implied precisely these judgments. 146 Under such circumstances the
populist vision of small, producerist democracies became intricately
bound up with the social exclusion of all those who endangered the na-
tional mission of settler freedom and permanent peace. While internal
liberty required ensuring that governmental discretion was never directed
toward free male settlers, it also necessitated the continuous use of impe-
rial prerogative to pacify potential threats to freedom posed by those out-
side the social compact.

In the face of such virulent xenophobia, even classic settler presump-
tions of easy European immigration and inclusion faced some challenges.

By 1860 immigrants made up one-third of the population in the forty
largest cities, and if they were more or less welcome on the frontier, in
coastal and industrial centers facing new population pressures they were
often seen as undermining native-born employment and proprietor-
ship. 147 In particular, this period saw the rise of anti-Catholic sentiment —
evident for example in Senator Preston's vision of Mexicans as driven by
religious superstition — and the ascendancy of political "nativism" such
as through the Know Nothing Party. Protestant settler denunciations
were not unlike those that existed prior to the Revolution, and they re-
vived views that Catholics, along with women, blacks, and natives, were
incapable of freedom, in the case of Catholicism due to the despotic na-
ture of their religious faith. In the end, anti-Catholicism, and anti-immigrant
proposals generally, failed to sustain a popular political movement. For all
their local electoral successes, Know Nothing leaders never succeeded in
undermining existing naturalization or suffrage frameworks. Calls to place
quotas on immigration, particularly from Catholic countries, or to extend
the waiting period before naturalization, in this case to twenty-one years,
would have to wait for over half a century to be seriously contemplated or
enacted. 148

Still, the period did produce widespread social practices of discri-
mination and helped to legitimize work relations that often reduced
immigrant labor to unskilled employment. This construction of wage
production as primarily the domain of new — and thus not yet culturally
assimilated — Europeans had long-lasting effects. One clergyman observed
in 1887 that "Not every foreigner is a workingman, but in the cities at
least, it may almost be said that every workingman is a foreigner." 149
While never truly challenging the demographic needs of territorial and
economic growth, settler xenophobia therefore generated disparities of
opportunity and treatment even among presumptively free citizens. De-
spite the fact that European immigrants and the native born each en-
joyed access to western land and were included in participatory politics,
these disparities segregated work life, fraternal associations, and neigh-
borhoods according to internal judgments about who were the "true"
settlers.

Taney and Policing the Imperial Prerogative
The individual who most powerfully expressed the importance of struc-
tural dualism and of hardening the internal-external divide for an in-
creasingly xenophobic and truncated form of populism was none other

than Chief Justice Taney. Taney had been a central political figure in the
Democratic Party, serving as Jackson's attorney general and drafting the
president's veto message, quoted earlier, when Congress renewed the Na-
tional Bank's Charter. Despite being Catholic, in his political actions and
court opinions Taney articulated the substance of the new populist faith:
a skepticism of government combined with a defense of imperial pre-
rogative. This prerogative assumed that government enjoyed an inherent
sovereign right of coercive force over all those removed from settler soci-
ety, especially natives and slaves.

In the case of American Indians, Taney explicitly upheld such royally
derived powers as a basic attribute of sovereignty and depicted indige-
nous groups as legitimately subject to all the available instruments of
federal authority. In United States v. Rogers (1845), the Supreme Court
ruled constitutional U.S. federal jurisdiction over crimes committed in
Cherokee land, regardless of treaty provisions granting such jurisdiction
to the tribes. In his unanimous opinion, Taney made clear that Congress,
through its prerogative right, held an absolute authority to dispose of na-
tive lands and indigenous groups as it alone saw fit. Moving away from
issues of statutory construction, Taney reiterated the Doctrine of Discov-
ery, although without any of Marshall's moral qualms, and declared:

The native tribes who were found on this continent at the time of
its discovery have never been acknowledged or treated as indepen-
dent nationals by the European governments, nor regarded as the
owners of the territories they respectively occupied. On the contrary,
the whole continent was divided and parcelled out, and granted by
the governments of Europe as if it had been vacant and unoccupied
land, and the Indians continually held to be, and treated as, subject
to their dominion and control. 150

In so arguing, Taney asserted the imperial basis of settler society and the
importance of an external sovereign power for internal collective free-
dom. This power served to entrench the social supremacy of Anglo set-
tlers as well as the status hierarchies governing relations between whites
and Native Americans.

Yet the decision that truly captures the xenophobic character of mid-
nineteenth-century populism was Dred Scott v. Sanford. In it Taney com-
bined the defense of an absolute sovereign power over blacks, whether free
or slave, with a remarkable critique of prerogative authority when directed
internally at settlers. As a result, he articulated the basic components of

populism after the Constitution: wariness of government, belief in em-
pire as a precondition for freedom, and a commitment to hardening the
structural duality marking settler life. Today Dred Scott is remembered
as the Supreme Court's reviled defense of slavery and racial subordina-
tion. Chief Justice Taney famously wrote of the legal status of blacks:
"They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an
inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either
in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights
which the white man was bound to respect." 151 Thus Taney declared that
blacks, whether free or slave, were entirely outside the social compact and
that the political community enjoyed an inherent and complete power to
control them as a dependent population.

However, an exclusive focus on the implications of Dred Scott for the
institution of slavery obscures the second key aspect of the decision — the
way in which such unchecked power went hand in hand with a defense
of constitutional limits and the rights of frontier settlers. As Sanford
Levinson writes, "The meta-issue, as it were, of Dred Scott, is whether
Congress possesses 'plenary,' i.e., unconstrained, power in regard to the
territories of the United States." 152 Whereas from the Northwest Ordi-
nance and the Louisiana Purchase through all the acts of American ac-
quisition, Congress had attempted, albeit temporarily, to assert discre-
tionary power in administering new territories, Taney sought to limit the
national government's coercive authority over settlers and thus to ensure
that an imperial prerogative would never be exercised within collective
life. In other words, the case was a microcosm of the intellectual ties in
populist thought between arguments for internal freedom and those for
external expansion and subordination.

The case itself raised the constitutionality of the Missouri Compro-
mise of 1820, which prohibited slavery in the northern Louisiana Pur-
chase. In his majority opinion, Taney held that the Compromise was il-
legal because the Constitution extended to all the territories and denied
Congress the power to outlaw slavery. According to him, while the Con-
stitution granted Congress the power to govern the territories as the
necessary by-product of acquisition, this "implied" authority had to be
exercised in keeping with constitutional norms and did not allow for the
plenary prohibition of slavery. Since slaves were deemed private prop-
erty, interference with such possessions infringed on the Bill of Rights,
which extended in its entirety "to the whole territory over which the
Constitution gives it power to legislate, including those portions of it

remaining under Territorial Government, as well as that covered by
States." 153

Skeptical of governmental interference, Taney sought to ensure that set-
tlers were never subject to an inherent and plenary power — one that
reduced free citizens to the status of natives or blacks. To highlight this
point, it is worth quoting the justice at length:

The powers of the Government and the rights and privileges of the
citizen are regulated and plainly defined by the Constitution itself.
And when the Territory becomes a part of the United States, the
Federal Government enters into possession in the character im-
pressed upon it by those who created it. It enters upon it with its
powers over the citizen strictly defined, and limited by the Consti-
tution, from which it derives its own existence, and by virtue of
which alone it continues to exist and act as a Government and
sovereignty. It has no power of any kind beyond it; and it cannot,
when it enters a Territory of the United States, put off its character,
and assume discretionary or despotic powers which the Constitu-
tion has denied to it. It cannot create for itself a new character
separated from the citizens of the United States, and the duties it
owes them under the provisions of the Constitution. The Territory
being a part of the United States, the Government and the citizen
both enter it under the authority of the Constitution, with their
respective rights defined and marked out; and the Federal Govern-
ment can exercise no power over his person or property, beyond
what that instrument confers, nor lawfully deny any right which
it has reserved. 154

Under Taney's approach, the Constitution immediately followed the
American flag, and to treat settlers as colonial dependents fundamentally
opposed the basic tenets of free government:

There is certainly no power given by the Constitution to the Fed-
eral Government to establish or maintain colonies bordering on
the United States or at a distance, to be ruled and governed at its
own pleasure; nor to enlarge its territorial limits in any way, ex-
cept by the admission of new States. That power is plainly given;
and if a new State is admitted, it needs no further legislation by
Congress, because the Constitution itself defines the relative rights
and powers, and duties of the State, and the citizens of the State, and

the Federal Government. But no power is given to acquire a Terri-
tory to be held and governed permanently in that character. 155

Just as frontier politicians during the Louisiana Purchase had once as-
serted, Taney stipulated not only that all possessions must eventually gain
statehood but that the Constitution also provided clear limitations on
congressional authority.

This attack on colonial dependency leads Levinson to claim that
Taney repudiated empire as such. He writes, "To speak somewhat anach-
ronistically, Taney can be viewed as a 'premature anti-imperialist' who
rejected the notion of the United States as a country that could conquer
territory and govern it indefinitely at the behest of Congress." 156 In argu-
ing that Dred Scott was an anti-imperialist decision, Levinson misses the
opinion's normative core, which was in fact a constitutional defense of
both expansionism and a commitment to policing the internal applica-
tion of prerogative power. By maintaining "colonies," the national gov-
ernment treated settlers akin to the British metropole, as simply one
among many subject populations ruled by royal fiat. For Taney, while
internal freedom required that the community enjoy a basic right of im-
perial conquest — as United States v. Rogers made evident — this imperial
prerogative disappeared as soon as Anglo settlement was established. In
other words, what made colonial dependency such an anathema was that
it allowed a royally derived prerogative to direct relations within settler
society and, in particular, to exert oppressive force on frontier communi-
ties and white laborers. In clear Jacksonian terms, Taney justified un-
checked external sovereignty — and therefore empire — but also ensured
an internal condition of constitutional limits and white independence.

Ultimately, Taney's decisions regarding natives and slaves highlight
the continuities and transformations in populist politics from the Revo-
lution to the eve of the Civil War. Like many before him, he viewed free
citizenship through the prism of ethnicity and believed that the nation
enjoyed a historically redemptive mission, one that justified both the
forced removal of Native Americans and the provision of subordinated
status for those deemed racially inferior. Such xenophobia was also inti-
mately tied to the interests of the laboring community, because only
through colonization and the rigid exclusion of all those who threatened
internal liberty would economic and political independence be main-
tained. Yet, in emphasizing a politics built on policing prerogative power
and entrenching social hierarchies, Taney also indicates what was lost in

populist belief. The institutional victory of Madisonian republicanism
made highly unfeasible a politics centered on popular rule and local, un-
divided sovereignty, in which government action was itself constitutive of
freedom. As a result, the constitutional order helped reduce to political
irrelevancy those calls in postcolonial America for a serious attempt to
imagine liberty divorced from empire and status subordination. In the
end, it would take Southern secession and war for the impulses expressed
by Skidmore or Brownson to gain political traction. Like the populist
politics of the Revolutionary period, these impulses would once more
emerge from those at the economic margins of settler life.

Conclusion: Civil War, Emancipation,
and the Future of Republicanism

Among the numerous culturally transformative implications of the Civil
War was that it reasserted the capacity of government to intervene in es-
tablished economic relationships. Taney had viewed slave property as
simply one form of ownership, a labor arrangement not unlike wage re-
lations, which created constitutionally protected rights and which could
not be made subordinate to collective interests. But through the Emanci-
pation Proclamation and, even more directly, through the use of federal
occupying soldiers in the South after 1862, congressional power very
clearly intervened to destroy a coercive labor regime. In doing so, it made
apparent the capacity of government to serve as an instrument for subor-
dinated rights.

This fact was not lost on the most radical congressional critics of slav-
ery. As Skidmore had noted thirty years previously, even if emancipation
ended direct servitude, it by no means provided freed blacks with eco-
nomic and political independence. For former slaves to participate fully
in settler liberty, the federal government would have to engage in another
great act of political intervention: the equal division of all planter land
among freedmen. Individuals like Congressman George Julian, chairman
of the House Committee on Public Lands, readily appreciated this fact
and argued for the creation of a Freedmen's Bureau committed to these
ends. In his view, Southern blacks would be truly liberated only when
they became proprietors in their own right. However, without meaning-
ful land reform, blacks would inevitably face new, perhaps even more
oppressive forms of bondage. Julian worried that in the South planter elites
would reduce blacks to tenancy and destitution, leading him to exclaim

before Congress, "land monopoly is slavery." And as for the North, Julian
further argued that industrialists would perpetuate "a system of wages
slavery," with a "dominion over freedmen and poor whites [that] will be
more galling than slavery itself." 157

Such views were a long way from the free labor orthodoxy of North-
ern society prior to the Civil War. In keeping with the idea of freedom as
self-rule, virtually all political sides in antebellum America assumed that
liberty and economic subordination were inconsistent — whether such
subordination came in the form of wage relations, tenancy, or slavery.
Yet few followed Brownson or Skidmore to move beyond the language
of self-help and competitive individualism to argue for labor's control of
government in the interests of economic freedom. Abraham Lincoln in
his speech at the Wisconsin fair in 1859 repeated the traditional free
labor themes of advancement through hard work in a laissez-faire labor
market:

The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages
awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself;
then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires
another new beginner to help him. This, says its advocates, is free
labor — the just and generous, and prosperous system, which opens
the way for all — gives hope to all, and energy, and progress, and
improvement of condition to all. If any continue through life in the
condition of the hired laborer, it is not the fault of the system, but
because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvi-
dence, folly, or singular misfortune. 158

For Lincoln, so long as the market was left to its own devices, individuals
would be able to achieve economic independence. Consequently, what
made slavery so abominable was that it was not truly a self-regulating
commercial system but one in which slaveholders coercively extracted
labor without providing pay or the semblance of choice. Now, in calling
for land redistribution, Radical Republicans like Julian suggested that the
market alone could not be counted on to ensure freedom, and that rather
than creating independent proprietors, it would leave former slaves bound
by a new "wage slavery." Such views at root conflicted with Lincoln's at-
tempt to reimagine factory life in terms of those artisanal relations that
had long held between master craftsmen and journeymen. Rather than
Lincoln's artisans who hire "new beginners" and help them on their way
to independence, factory owners were considered by Julian and others to

be economic oppressors who simply replaced one form of bondage with
another.

In a sense, the Civil War exposed the inconsistencies between free
labor incantations of inevitable proprietorship and the practical condi-
tions facing farmers and workers. Ultimately, the demise of Reconstruc-
tion undermined the hope of black independence, as new coercive labor
regimes like sharecropping developed to replace slavery. Still, Radical
Republican arguments, as well as the agitation by freed slaves themselves
for proprietorship and productive control, helped reshape populist senti-
ment yet again, by reclaiming the importance of popular mobilization as
well as the emancipatory possibilities of government action. 159 In doing so,
they also helped to set the stage for the political and economic conflicts
that would mark late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, as
settlers and historically excluded groups struggled for meaningful self-rule
and full inclusion.

In the years following the Civil War, the United States found that it
had permanently outgrown its previous status of global weakness. No
longer bound by postcolonial dependence in its material or political rela-
tions, the emerging polity was a continental empire with an industrial
economy unmatched anywhere in the world. If the founders of the Con-
stitution had viewed republican insulation from popular power as a
means for navigating a hostile international system, one characterized by
neocolonialism, such fears now seemed quaint. Although in 1860 Britain,
France, and Germany still enjoyed greater industrial production than the
United States, by 1900 American manufacturing produced more than all
three countries combined. However, along with such remarkable growth
went a fundamental change in the structure of the American workforce,
with the number of industrial wage laborers rising during the same pe-
riod from 1.5 to 5.9 million people and accounting for 25 percent of the
nation's labor force. 160

This development represented only one of a series of transformations
facing the United States by the late nineteenth century. To begin with, the
closing of the frontier raised basic questions about the future of empire
as well as whether the promise of broad individual proprietorship could
ever be achieved. It also challenged the utility of porous borders, since
with the end of expansion there no longer appeared to be any demo-
graphic need for a massive influx of new immigrants and thus for policies
such as free movement from Europe, easy naturalization, and noncitizen
voting. Moreover, the demise of slavery questioned, however haltingly,

the ethnic basis of collective life and therefore whether and to what extent
freed blacks — granted formal citizenship — would be incorporated into set-
tler society.

In a sense, all the basic components of American settlerism experi-
enced profound pressure: (1) the promise of economic independence and
productive control, (2) territorial conquest and the supply of new land
for settlement, (3) an ethnically defined vision of membership, and (4)
essentially open European immigration. As a consequence, the United
States came face to face with the very meaning of republican liberty, the
guiding principle of American social life from the early days of coloniza-
tion. It did so under circumstances in which many political and economic
elites wondered whether the principle itself was still appropriate and
started imagining alternative ways to combine empire and freedom. Such
forces faced a newly resurgent populist sentiment, one that at its most
idealistic hoped to unshackle republican values from imperial confines
and from a politics built on exclusion. If the ideas of Brownson and Skid-
more had been inconsistent with Jacksonian times, to many they ap-
peared increasingly appropriate under conditions of corporate concen-
tration, industrial wage labor, and economic destitution — for settlers and
nonsettlers alike. In the end, the struggle between these competing groups
radically altered the possibilities of American life and produced a politi-
cal framework that remains in force today.

THE POPULIST CHALLENGE AND THE
UNRAVELING OF SETTLER SOCIETY

Now the People's Party says to these two men [bl;

of your earnings. You are made to hate each other because
upon that hatred is rested the financial despotism which en-
slaves you both. You are deceived and blinded that you may
not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary
system which beggars you both." This is so obviously true it
is no wonder both these unhappy laborers stop to listen. No
they begin to realize that no change of law can ben-
efit the white tenant which does not benefit the bl
likewise; that no system which now does injustice to one of
them can fail to injure both. Their every material interest is
identical. The moment this becomes a conviction, mere self-
ishness, the mere desire to better their conditions, escape
onerous taxes, avoid usurious charges, lighten their rents, or
change their precarious tenements into smiling happy homes,
will drive these two men together.
—Tom Watso

In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, a mood of revolt once
more swept through the countryside. Faced with a coercive credit lien
system threatening debt and the loss of land, small landholders and ten-
ants organized the Farmers Alliance. Eventually numbering over 2 million
people in forty-two states and territories, the Alliance sought to free the
rural poor from dependence on local merchants and commercial banking
elites through a cooperative crusade and a subtreasury plan that would
make federal credit socially available. 1 Formed in 1892, the People's
Party expressed these economic goals as well as the larger collective am-
bition of recentering politics around the basic interests of laborers. Alli-
ance leaders and party activists linked their efforts to those of industrial

workers organized by the Knights of Labor and by the American Rail-
way Union, as well as to newly freed slaves who shared the same rural
experience of immiseration. As a result, they developed a broad-based
participatory movement, which embodied the most sustained effort since
the Revolutionary era to imagine how social conditions could be made
compatible with freedom as self-rule. In the process, these reformers, who
called themselves Populists, became the natural inheritors of the account
of republican freedom, articulated most expansively by William Manning,
Thomas Skidmore, and Orestes Brownson, and to which I have previ-
ously applied the word "populist." In this chapter, I explore the implica-
tions of their movement for American ideas of democratic practice and
membership and examine how rural and urban protest laid the ground-
work for an eventual repudiation of the institutions and premises of settler
empire.

Two features made the social movement particularly distinctive: its
historical timing and its combination of previous currents in American
political thought. To begin with, this social movement emerged at a mo-
ment prior to the entrenchment of twentieth-century modes of economic
and political authority. Rural unrest occurred before the full ascendancy
of corporate capitalism and a bureaucratic state apparatus, each hierar-
chically organized and deeply interpenetrated. It also took place when
the United States — although a growing regional and international power
and no longer in a position of postcolonial weakness — had yet to pro-
duce a clear account of its proper orientation to the globe and of the ap-
propriate uses of its newfound position. Precisely because Populist argu-
ments developed prior to the victory of today's structural and ideological
arrangements, they therefore suggested an alternative direction for the
American project — although one that ultimately was not pursued.

As for Populism's basic vision, taken in isolation none of its compo-
nent parts were novel. Earlier periods had seen mobilized publics en-
gaged in challenging collective institutions, such as in the years following
the Revolution. The United States had also witnessed the rise of a mass
political party, the Jacksonian-era Democrats, energized by the participa-
tion of various producer constituencies and claiming to speak on behalf
of the people in their entirety. 2 Previous Americans had even defended
the idea of universalizing republican freedom. As early as the 1820s,
Thomas Skidmore outlined the contours of a nonimperial American pol-
ity, which repudiated a politics of expansion and treated all groups — at
home and abroad — as worthy of meaningful self-rule. And after the Civil

War, Radical Republicans also frontally attacked the colonial duality
marking settler life and fought for full black inclusion as independent
and self-governing citizens.

But what made agrarian protest unique was that for the first time a
self-assertive social constituency unified all these elements as a basis for
popular action. Alliance members and party activists self-consciously
identified rural poverty with the problems writ large of industrial work
and sought to adapt long-standing goals of economic independence to
radically altered circumstances. They imagined a new industrial society,
nonhierarchical and popularly controlled, in which farmers and wage
earners set the terms for economic and political decision making. At its
peak in the 1890s, Populism challenged the hegemony of the two estab-
lished parties and presented the very real possibility of the collapse of the
Democratic Party in the South — an outcome that would have been un-
thinkable just years earlier. Moreover, large numbers within this mobi-
lized social base saw their material interests as necessitating the break-
down of settler exclusivities and the extension of self-rule to previously
marginalized groups, particularly blacks and women. Although these
views may have represented the movement's radical wing, they were held
by many of its most popular leaders and allied supporters: William Lamb
in Texas, Tom Watson in Georgia, Jerry Simpson in Kansas, William Nev-
ille in Nebraska, Terence Powderly at the Knights of Labor, and Eugene
Debs at the American Railway Union. Each argued that the challenge for
Populism was to create finally a cooperative commonwealth and main-
tained that settler supremacy had become a wedge to separate laborers
and to undermine meaningful self-rule.

I argue that this skepticism of settler supremacy existed in large mea-
sure because, by the late 1800s, the tie linking internal freedom to an ex-
ternal imperial prerogative had frayed badly. If the purpose of expansion
had been to promote settler freedom by ensuring property ownership and
economic independence, changes in domestic production created far dif-
ferent results. With the factory system coming to dominate industriali-
zation and capital centered in a small number of powerful corporations,
the march to the Pacific seemed to strengthen the interests of economic
elites rather than to foster settler equality and individual proprietorship.
These developments suggested to farmers and wage earners the value of
moving past the colonial dichotomies marking collective life. To the
extent that both settlers and excluded groups found themselves bound by
the same relationships of economic dependence, many questioned the

very utility of an imperial prerogative with rigid status hierarchies. For
the most radical Populists, strengthening the political power of the labor-
ing community meant linking the economic fate of all producers and
therefore rejecting enforced inequalities between settlers and nonsettlers.
It also meant ensuring that the United States' ever-increasing activities
abroad did not operate to enhance corporate interests or to reproduce
the very forms of colonial authority Populists viewed as inappropriate at
home. The agrarian movement thus outlined, often only haltingly, the po-
tential for a nonimperial American polity, one wary of formal expansion as
well as of the informal modes of intervention and coercion that appeared
to define U.S. relations with its regional neighbors. In a sense, it presented
a specific account of a postsettler society, one that made democracy an inclu-
sive social commitment and that remained vigilant against the entrenchment
of new structures of empire.

This vision of the Populist revolt and its transformative potential
stands in sharp contrast to another familiar image of the movement. For
some Americans today, the label "populism" itself is hardly complimen-
tary, suggestive of both nativism and the worst elements of mob rule.
Writing in the 1950s, Richard Hofstadter famously described the Popu-
lists as small property owners who due to economic changes and exten-
sive immigration from abroad became obsessed with their own slipping
status and imagined themselves as the "innocent pastoral victims of a con-
spiracy hatched in the distance." Writing against the backdrop of Cold
War blacklists and civil liberties violations, Hofstadter saw profound
continuities between these practices and Populist agitation, arguing that
the People's Party epitomized the "paranoid style of American politics."
Populist paranoia was not based on political reality; instead, it trans-
formed conspiracy into the primary causal mechanism of human history,
one "set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendent power."
The resulting anti-intellectualism, nostalgia, and xenophobia linked the
party to a long tradition of paranoid reform movements, from Jackso-
nian anti-monopolism to McCarthyite witch hunts. Rather than being a
project of social democracy or social equality, the agrarian movement
expressed an effort by status-conscious landholders to blame their ills on
ominous outsiders and to turn back the clock to a simpler time. 3

A common rebuttal, most powerfully developed by Lawrence Good-
wyn, has been to assert that Hofstadter's failure to appreciate the demo-
cratic impulse at the heart of Populism was because he mistook "Shadow
Populists" such as William Jennings Bryan for the real thing. 4 Shadow

Populists were primarily politicians and reformers who attached them-
selves to the movement well after it was under way and tended to thrive
in states without deep Alliance roots or the specific social concerns that
gave it such resonance. As Goodwyn writes, "where the agrarian move-
ment was strong and growing, the politics of the movement was intact;
but where the movement had never sunk genuine roots, or had become
stagnant, the third party's political stance was cooptable." 5 Instead of
pursuing the goals of cooperation and a democratic monetary system,
these shadow politicians saw free silver as both a panacea and a quick
way to win elections by echoing Populist rhetoric. In the end, the shadow
movement absorbed the original party and pressed convention delegates
toward a self-destructive 1896 nomination of Bryan for president. As
Christopher Lasch concludes, "Fusion with Democrats diluted the Popu-
list program, put an end to the Populists' efforts to break the Democratic
monopoly in the South, where Populists had achieved considerable suc-
cess, and destroyed the possibility of a new party that would unite black
and white farmers behind a program of far-reaching reforms." 6

Still, for all its flaws, Hofstadter's description of political paranoia
captures an aspect of American reformism and of the experience of the
People's Party specifically. As the previous chapter illustrated, the ante-
bellum period saw the steady transformation of democratic radicalism —
the hope that energetic government action could establish a free republic
of small producers — into a drive to defend the status of ethnic insiders by
asserting coercive government power over nonsettlers. Clearly such forces
were also evident in the People's Party and its supporters, with no better
example than that of Tom Watson, the vice presidential candidate in 1896.
During his career in Populism, the Georgia politician had been a charis-
matic champion of the need to unite white and black farmers, as both
were equally citizens and equally subject to the same economic tyranny.
Yet, after years of stolen elections, Watson became exactly the kind of
paranoid politician Hofstadter identifies. As even Goodwyn notes, by the
1910s Watson "eventually blamed blacks, Catholics, and Jews for his own,
and the nation's, political difficulties. He became a violently outspoken
white supremacist, anti-Semite, and defender of the Republic against the
papal menace." 7 The particularly disheartening experience of Tom "Wat-
son speaks to the larger process by which many mobilized white South-
erners so easily reverted to the language of settler supremacy. Despite the
movement's critique of empire and defense of social inclusion, xenophobia
was always present at the margins. And such xenophobia became more

central for poor whites as the party increasingly lost at the polls and the
larger movement disintegrated.

These realities leave us with a remarkable puzzle. How could a collec-
tive project committed — at its most emancipatory — to imagining all la-
borers, regardless of race, as sharing common bonds of interest collapse
so easily and thoroughly into a politics of exclusion? I argue that we can
make sense of these conflicting features only by once again placing the
movement within the context of settler ideology. Ultimately, the polar im-
ages of Populism — one inclusive and anti-imperial, the other closed and
status conscious — embody the competing claims of how poor settlers
could achieve equality and republican liberty in the late nineteenth cen-
tury. In its inclusive and egalitarian moments, Populism represented an
attempt to universalize settler freedom and to strip it of its colonial roots
under changed economic and cultural conditions. Populists sought to
entrench liberty not through territorial expansion or an ethnically drawn
class of dependent workers but by creating a unified popular will repre-
senting all laborers, one that would claim power over government and re-
order economic and political life. In doing so, this grand coalition would
fulfill the republican promise expressed by settler empire, but through
means that would destroy its very basis — namely, the dichotomy between
insiders and outsiders, free citizens and stratified imperial subjects. Yet,
as in the past, whenever this robust vision faltered, so too did the impulse
toward universality. Such contexts, especially those that prevailed after
the electoral defeat of 1896, heightened the willingness to retreat into
settler hierarchies and to embrace xenophobic and colonial forms of
politics. 8

In the following pages, I assess how the Populist movement and the
response it engendered from political elites dissolved the legal and ideo-
logical framework of American settlerism and provided the basis for a
fundamentally changed social community. The first section focuses on
how transformations wrought by the Civil War and its aftermath created
a climate in which the emancipatory project of the most radical Populists
could take hold. In the second section I turn to the way in which the agrar-
ian movement imagined and constructed a grand coalition of laborers.
This coalition believed that by creating a permanently mobilized body of
farmers and industrial workers, the people writ large could assert con-
tinuous power over political and economic institutions and make repub-
lican freedom the basic condition of social life. Next I discuss the ideo-
logical and political causes for Populist defeat, emphasizing the failure of

the movement to overcome its own settler limitations and the difficulties
with the movement's claim to speak on behalf of the public as a whole.

Finally, I describe how politicians and judges reacted to the Populist
threat by strengthening executive authority and steadily introducing ex-
ternal prerogative powers — which generally had not structured internal
settler life — within the domestic realm. Rather than self-consciously dis-
carding the republican idiom, these figures imagined that prerogative
powers, by quelling social unrest, were actually in the service of the old
free labor orthodoxy. The consequence, however, was to reinforce the
untenable nature of settler politics and the incompatibility between new
forms of authority and prevailing commitments to freedom as self-rule.
This systematic unraveling of settler empire meant that as the new cen-
tury dawned, the United States increasingly reproduced the bureaucratic
and legal structures of its European rivals. In the process, collective insti-
tutions moved away both from the dichotomy between free citizen and
stratified subject and from the emancipatory promise implicit in settler
society.

The Civil War and Its Aftermath

Throughout the nineteenth century, most poor settlers accepted as given
the colonial dichotomies separating social insiders and excluded out-
siders. They viewed government power, especially federal, as a coercive
force whose authority undermined constitutional rights and reduced free
citizens to the condition of stratified subjects. There did exist a compet-
ing tradition of popular politics, expressed in the Revolutionary experi-
ence of small farmers and townspeople. During the 1770s and 1780s,
these farmers gained control of state legislatures and through undivided
majority rule used government power to enact popular laws that allevi-
ated debt, depreciated the value of paper money, and sought to ensure
land ownership. This vision of local assemblies as sites for the collective
exercise of public power linked anti-Federalists like Pennsylvania's George
Bryan to later social critics like Orestes Brownson and Thomas Skid-
more. However, during the antebellum period these arguments were po-
litically marginal, and for poor settlers, government power often became
synonymous with the imperial prerogative. Only by checking its internal
intrusion into collective life could white farmers and townspeople avoid
state oppression and maintain their social supremacy over subordinated
groups.

But starting with the Civil War, this prevailing vision of settler society
and government authority came under heightened strain. To begin with,
Radical Republicans vividly demonstrated the potential of government
to restructure social and economic relations. In addition, corporate cap-
ture of state power exposed the risks involved in an anti-statist attitude,
one that maintained faith in a self-regulating commercial society. And fi-
nally, the rise of industrial capitalism limited the possibility that greater
economic freedom could be gained through frontier expansion. While
many settlers sought to protect their slipping economic status by harden-
ing colonial dichotomies once more, especially in the context of new
Chinese immigrants, others increasingly saw fundamental economic re-
alities as underscoring the incompatibility between reviving republican
freedom and holding on to settler exclusivities.

The Transformative Potential of Government Power
In countless ways the Civil War promoted political and economic prac-
tices that threatened the old settler paradigm and raised questions about
how to sustain republican freedom under conditions of corporate con-
centration and greater social inclusion. It did so in part by questioning
the simple account of state intervention as largely equivalent with impe-
rial prerogative and by illustrating its transformative potential, for good
or bad, as an instrument for reshaping collective life. Particularly in the
postwar period, the rise of new corporate hierarchies — in many cases di-
rectly aided by government action — illustrated to farmers and wage earn-
ers that the solution for new modes of dependence would be found not
by limiting the state's function but by asserting popular authority over
the ends that the state should pursue.

One key turning point was no doubt Reconstruction itself, which in-
dicated the dramatic uses to which federal power could be directed. As
we have seen, Radical Republicans like George Julian or Pennsylvania
congressman Thaddeus Stevens straightforwardly questioned the faith in
a structural duality between internal limits and external prerogative; in-
stead, they imagined federal power as a tool for remaking basic frame-
works of membership. In keeping with settler accounts of liberty, these
politicians took for granted that productive control and individual pro-
prietorship provided the ethical basis for political participation. There-
fore, including freed slaves as full members of the community required
ensuring land ownership and economic independence — conditions as es-
sential to securing freedom as ending actual bondage had been. This

commitment, however, could not be fulfilled through a laissez-faire labor
market or the operations of a self-regulating commercial society. It re-
quired energetic congressional action, which Stevens hoped would redis-
tribute slave plantations among black farmers and militarily occupy the
South to entrench permanently the political and legal equality of blacks.
As he remarked in December 1865, "This Congress is bound to provide
for them until they can take care of themselves. If we do not furnish them
with homesteads and hedge them around with protective laws; if we
leave them to the legislation of their late masters, we had better had left
them in bondage." In a sense, for Stevens, only by exercising the imperial
prerogative within settler society — complete with martial law — could the
goal of free citizenship for blacks be established. Rather than compro-
mising republican freedom, the discretionary power of government was
its necessary instrument. 9

With the collapse of Reconstruction, this effort at employing an ener-
gized state to fulfill goals of substantive equality was left largely still-
born. But government as an instrument for altering and directing eco-
nomic life did not simply disappear. During the Civil War, the Republican
Congress had enacted numerous bills committed to promoting economic
growth and to developing large-scale business enterprise. These included
the Morrill Tariff Act of 1861 to protect American industry from compe-
tition; the Homestead Act of 1862, guaranteeing free land to settlers out
west; the Morrill Land Grant College Act of 1862, providing federal land
grants for colleges; the National Banking Act of 1863, imposing a na-
tional banking system and currency; numerous railroad bills that gave
corporations federal land grants and subsidized transcontinental railway
construction; laws establishing new federal bureaucracies such as the Of-
fice of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Office of Immigration,
which aimed at centralizing government authority; and even the coun-
try's first federal income tax. 10

Such actions played a central role in facilitating postwar industrializa-
tion and began the steady process of creating a new state apparatus in-
creasingly interpenetrated by corporate interests. The consequence was
that as the United States became the foremost manufacturing power in
the world, economic life was fundamentally reorganized around an ex-
panding system of factory production. While the artisanal workshop did
not vanish entirely, "by the turn of the century, nearly half the laborers in
manufacturing worked in establishments with more than 250 employ-
ees." These new factories were controlled by hierarchically organized

corporations, "bureaucratically managed, multifunctional, capital-intensive,
and marketers of mass-produced items nationally and even internation-
ally." Such corporations directly challenged the laboring goal of produc-
tive control by asserting managerial prerogatives and moving to elimi-
nate the independence of wage earners in the workplace. 11

The rise of railroad transportation and the massive increase in rail-
way mileage (which tripled between 1860 and 1880) further entrenched
the emerging corporate form. It also consolidated national markets for
manufacturing and for capital and generally promoted heightened eco-
nomic concentration. For large numbers of farmers and workers, the result
was a highly inegalitarian industrial society, one directed both politically
and economically by corporate elites. As of 1890, 51 percent of all prop-
erty was held by the top 1 percent, and 88 percent of the population, i
eluding the vast majority of white settlers, held just 14 percent of wealth. L

For laborers long steeped in populist traditions, the results were ini-
tially paradoxical. On the one hand, it was still the case after the Civil Wai
that legislation like the Homestead Act created generations of new prop-
erty owners and fostered both settler economic independence and social
mobility. As Kerry Abrams suggests of settlement in the Washington Ter-
ritory during the 1860s and 1870s, white laborers moving west contin-
ued to see themselves in classic republican terms, and their ability to enjoy
self-rule derived from these new federal policies. 13 Yet, for many other set-
tlers, especially in more established frontier communities and in cities
back east, new economic developments increasingly embodied the classic
problem of state co-optation by moneyed interests. At virtually every
level of government during the "Gilded Age," giant corporations wielded
influence over politicians from both major parties, with railroad compa-
nies enjoying particular access and privilege. 14 Moreover, if such co-
optation played on the classic Jacksonian wariness of the state, it also
fundamentally questioned the utility of a self-regulating commercial soci-
ety. If anything, settlerism's historic suspicion of government discretion
merely reinforced the rise of corporate power. Ironically, this was due in
large measure to the anti-monopoly crusade of the Jacksonians them-
selves, who saw exclusive state and federal charters as despotic acts that
threatened republican liberty by granting economic benefits to commer-
cial elites. But as an unexpected consequence, general incorporation laws
combined with government decentralization allowed more and more com-
panies to take advantage of the legal form, in the end promoting even
greater business concentration. 15

Thus the divide between internal limitation and external prerogative
not only seemed ill suited for the rise of industrial capitalism; for many
in the new towns and cities that populated the American landscape, it
actually exacerbated those features most incompatible with freedom as
self-rule. For increasing numbers of settlers the best means for defending
economic and political independence was not to ignore state capacities, but
rather to reclaim government authority from corporate interests and to
employ it aggressively on behalf of the laboring community. In a sense, the
emerging connections between corporate and state power suggested the
quaintness of viewing energetic government as solely a destructive imperial
prerogative and of ignoring the political and economic possibilities inherent
in state action.

The Failure of Expansion and Colonial Rule to Promote Freedom
If economic concentration and industrial capitalism questioned faith in
commercial self-regulation, it also directly threatened the very frame-
work of settler empire by undermining the ability of expansion to aid
internal liberty. Dating back to the earliest days of colonization, the basic
means for settlers to enjoy republican freedom was through territorial
conquest and the extension of land ownership. It was this central link
between new land and meaningful self-rule that legitimated empire, and
with it the dispossession and control of indigenous groups. Yet, with
the growth of frontier communities in the last decades of the nineteenth
century, the essential goals of settler empire seemed as distant as ever.
During earlier periods of expansion, conquest had gone hand in hand
with a wide diffusion of property ownership among settlers and a re-
markable degree of internal equality. Due to plentiful land, free laborites
such as Lincoln had always viewed tenancy and wage earning as only
temporary conditions on the way to individual proprietorship. However,
with the rise of corporate power and the entrenchment of wide-scale
factory production, expansion appeared to extend the new industrial
order farther west rather than to create a burgeoning democracy of small
producers.

And for those individuals living in urban squalor, exploitative factory
work had become a permanent reality, one that the prospect of frontier
settlement simply did not address. Perhaps more important, over time
and even in rugged land like the Washington Territory, the march west
tended to promote rather than check economic concentration and the
strength of corporate interests. Railroad and commercial forces by and

large set the terms for expansion after the Civil War. Railroad corpora-
tions and industrial businesses saw the west as an inexhaustible fund for
extending markets and building profits rather than as territory for small
landholding and artisanal production, as many laborers believed it to be.
Alan Trachtenberg writes that these businesses "conceived of themselves
as having the entire national space at their disposal: from raw materials
for processing to goods for marketing." For settlers eager to achieve eco-
nomic independence through western land ownership, this emerging or-
der fundamentally conflicted with their goals by providing commercial
and industrial elites even greater control over productive life. For new
corporate entities, "The process of making themselves national entailed a
changed relation of corporations to agriculture, an assimilation of agri-
cultural enterprise within productive and marketing structures." 16 Thus,
while federal laws like the Republican Homestead Act provided vast
numbers of settlers with new land, it did so under conditions in which
agricultural work ultimately became regimented and supervised by mer-
chants, banks, and corporate manufacturers.

In a sense, insights by Byllesby and others about the inability of ex-
pansion to solve the problems of economic dependence had come to pass
for large numbers of settlers. These radical critics had argued that unless
the home polity addressed productive relations at their root, expansion
would not be the servant of freedom but would merely reproduce op-
pressive economic conditions in a new land. Similarly, for poor farmers
in the late nineteenth century — now burdened by debt and subject to the
dictates of furnishing merchants and industrial manufacturers — new set-
tlements over time merely seemed to enhance the westward move of
corporate power. Expansion had created a dynamic industrial economy,
but at the apparent cost of economic independence for more and more
farmers and wage earners.

Nothing better illustrated the breakdown of settler ideology than the
fact that internal equality for settlers was no longer coherently tied to
external colonial control of subject populations. If territorial conquest
appeared increasingly to clash with republican hopes of individual propri-
etorship, asserting the imperial prerogative over dependent groups also
failed to improve white economic standing. Such prerogative power had
been more than a legal justification for territorial conquest; it sustained the
basic status hierarchy at the core of settler society. Operating externally, this
discretionary authority applied to those groups, particularly blacks and In-
dian tribes, that were excluded from full social membership; prerogative

power thus had served to maintain the economic and political supremacy
of settlers and their descendents.

This exclusion had been justified historically on the grounds that out-
sider groups did not possess the basic dispositions and habits of charac-
ter necessary for republican freedom. While these arguments were often
made in ethnic and religious terms, they were also premised on a claim
about the relationship between work and liberty. Only Anglo settlers and
European co-participants, who maintained productive control over labor
through land ownership or artisanal work, were truly independent and
thus capable of participating in politics. In other words, by arguing that
a particular relationship to production provided the ethical basis for free
citizenship, settlers also presumed that all other forms of labor were in-
herently degrading. Since such degraded labor was an inevitable part of
production, ensuring internal freedom necessitated condemning ex-
cluded groups to menial jobs viewed as unfree. This intrinsic connection
between economic freedom and economic compulsion meant that for
settlers to enjoy free labor, they had to compartmentalize degraded work
along ethnic, racial, and gender lines. And once consigned to wage earn-
ing, tenancy, conscription, and various modes of peonage, social outsid-
ers then found their status justified precisely because of their relationship
to production.

Dating back to the wide-scale importation of African slaves beginning
in the mid-seventeenth century, the use of socially marginalized commu-
nities for menial tasks helped maintain a higher standard of living and
greater property ownership for settlers. In fact, the effort throughout the
nineteenth century by white laborers in both the North and the South to
establish rigid occupational color bars and to limit blacks to the least
respected forms of work was a central mode of ensuring greater eco-
nomic freedom internally. Maintaining this productive divide, considered
necessary for domestic liberty, required asserting the state's discretion-
ary power — its imperial prerogative — to control and order marginalized
groups. Therefore, along with legitimating conquest, prerogative power
also policed a productive divide between settlers who participated in free
labor and outsiders who performed menial tasks that were economically
necessary but oppressive.

After the Civil War, with the massive expansion of factory production
and the fall in agricultural prices, more and more settlers were reduced
either to wage labor or tenancy. White laborers found themselves compet-
ing with blacks, new immigrants, and Mexicans for work long considered

incompatible with liberty, under conditions in which such groups seemed
to embody an "industrial reserve" capable of constantly pressing down
white wages. Instead of protecting the economic independence of free
citizens by designating social outsiders for menial jobs, the new indus-
trial order left settlers and nonsettlers alike fighting over work tradition-
ally viewed as unfree. In essence, most laborers regardless of colonial
status were now on the wrong side of the productive divide.

Chinese Immigration and the Industrial Reserve Army
One immediate response was to reassert the duality between insiders and
outsiders, particularly in the context of Chinese workers. Yet settlers did
so in a way that illustrated the new industrial predicament. Rather than
attempting solely to confine Chinese immigrants to degraded forms of
work, they sought to exclude the community completely. This was pre-
cisely because white laborers found themselves in economic competition
with Asians, despite the fact that the jobs themselves would have been
viewed historically as inconsistent with republican self-rule. Since whites
too were increasingly on the wrong side of the productive divide, some set-
tlers hoped to protect their slipping economic position by employing dis-
cretionary congressional authority to curtail altogether the free movement
of Asians to the United States.

Chinese immigration to the west expanded dramatically in the period
following the California Gold Rush of 1849, with approximately 250,000
people making the trek to America. Of the 105,000 who resided in the
country during the 1880 census, two-thirds lived in California and 90
percent in the ten western-most states. Chinese immigrants generally
came in search of better wages and worked in the mines or building the
transcontinental railroad. For many whites, they were the quintessential
industrial reserve army, a permanent body of poorly paid workers who
were used by employers to depress white earning and to check labor
activism. Drawing from the traditional language of ethnic membership,
settlers depicted these new immigrants as not only damaging white eco-
nomic well-being but also as culturally unassimilable and unfit for
inclusion. 17

This sentiment led to the emergence of a new federal immigration
system for the Chinese, one that emphasized their ineradicable ethnic dif-
ference and incompatibility with American ideals of free labor and re-
publican independence. In 1870 during Reconstruction, Congress finally
extended the right of naturalization beyond "free white persons," but it

did so solely for "aliens of African nativity and to persons of African de-
scent." Although Radical Republicans like Senator Charles Sumner sought
to break with settler dichotomies and make naturalization universal,
anti-Chinese sentiment was too strong. As a result, Chinese immigrants
were barred explicitly by the bill and found themselves subject to a new
legal category: "aliens ineligible for citizenship." In essence, the natural-
ization law, despite attempting to incorporate blacks as free citizens,
embraced elements of social membership consistent with long-standing
practices. Although European immigrants could be naturalized and were
accorded extensive rights even before formal inclusion, this was be-
cause they were ultimately co-participants in settler empire. By contrast,
Chinese immigrants were cultural outsiders, to a degree qualitatively
different from newly freed blacks. They were thus incapable of free citi-
zenship and had to be controlled through discretionary forms of
authority. 18

Such authority was most immediately and directly expressed by Con-
gress's use of its immigration power to limit Chinese movement from
abroad. The overwhelming aim of the new legislation was to curtail
dramatically — if not eliminate — competition for white settlers from Chi-
nese labor. This power had long been understood to derive from sover-
eignty itself and to be plenary and near limitless. 19 In fact, for Jacksonian
populists like Taney, a discretionary immigration power was essential to
the capacity of state governments to control nonsettler populations,
particularly free blacks and slaves, and if need be to restrict their entry
entirely. It existed as one of the basic means by which the imperial pre-
rogative protected the internal composition of settler society and policed
the movement of subject groups. And for this very reason, European im-
migrants, as settler insiders, largely avoided the coercive brunt of such
prerogative.

As a result, much like historic dependent communities — Indians,
slaves, and free blacks — Asian immigrants now found their freedom of
movement curtailed and subject to a plenary government power. In 1875
Congress passed the Page Act, the first federal bill in American history
restricting nonslave immigration. Although it was written in general
language to bar entrance of convicted criminals and prostitutes, the bill
was understood by legislative drafters and the public at large as aimed
to keep out Chinese women — who, it was argued, may contaminate set-
tler society through race mixing. The effect was the maintenance of an
overwhelmingly male Chinese population, with a male-to-female ratio

of 27 to 1 by 1890. Congress then passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of
1882, prohibiting Chinese labor from entering the United States for ten
years and declaring that no court, state or federal, "shall admit Chinese
to citizenship." A decade later, in the Geary Act, Congress extended this
ban and made Chinese laborers deportable unless they had a certificate
proving residence in the United States prior to 1892. Those without cer-
tificates would have to show good cause for failing to acquire one and
to provide "at least one credible white witness" to establish pre-1892
habitation. 20

Taken together these bills are often viewed as ushering in a new era
of immigration policy, which over time would dramatically narrow the
"golden door" and produce a general system of restrictiveness. They also
underscored the historic move from state to federal control regarding is-
sues of entry and removal. Chinese deportations present the very first
examples in U.S. history of the federal government's legal deportation of
aliens, a practice that in the twentieth century extended far beyond Asian
laborers. Therefore, historians like Roger Daniels argue that Chinese ex-
clusion and deportation acts "became the hinge on which all American
immigration policy turned." 21 But while the Chinese case would later be
emulated in new modes of federal border control, during the Gilded Age
immigration policies were still meant for dependent groups such as Asians,
who were viewed as ethnically unfit for social membership. It was be-
cause the Chinese were considered to be unassimilable threats to settler
identity that they found themselves subject to the same forms of discre-
tionary prerogative power that had long governed imperial subjects.
Thus it was perfectly compatible to maintain a parallel system — one that
mirrored the basic colonial duality of settler life — which sustained a de
facto open door for Europeans while imposing exclusion and forced re-
moval on Chinese.

In other words, even as the end of slavery began to dissolve the classic
boundaries of settler society, a commitment remained to protecting the
divide between free republican citizens and stratified subjects. With re-
spect to Chinese immigrants, this was most powerfully expressed in Jus-
tice John Marshall Harlan's famed dissent from the Supreme Court's
ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which through the doctrine of "sepa-
rate but equal" upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation in pub-
lic accommodations. Harlan maintained that as a consequence of the
Civil War and the Reconstruction Amendments, blacks should now be
thought of as free republican citizens and therefore incorporated fully

into the political community. Yet this inclusiveness did not mean the end
of subject status for those who remained ethnically distinct and a danger
to settler ideals. For Harlan, the Chinese persisted as just such an out-
sider community, "a race so different from our own that we do not permit
those belonging to it to become citizens of the United States. Persons be-
longing to it are, with few exceptions, absolutely excluded from our coun-
try." Harlan viewed it as a profound injustice that blacks, "who risked their
lives for the preservation of the union," would be barred from riding in
coach cars while "a Chinaman can ride in the same passenger coach with
white citizens of the United States." In essence, he sought to maintain settler
narratives of identity and membership under radically shifted circum-
stances. In classic settler terms, the problem with "separate but equal" was
that it provided subordinated outsiders (the Chinese) greater rights than it
did to appropriately privileged insiders (newly incorporated blacks). 22

Harlan reaffirmed his wariness of Chinese inclusion by concurring in
Chief Justice Melville Fuller's dissent in U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark two years
later. There, the Court provided a limited constitutional constraint on ef-
forts aimed at restricting the rights of the Chinese population; it held that
although Chinese immigrants may be unable to naturalize as "aliens in-
eligible for citizenship," the U.S. -born children of Chinese parents en-
joyed birthright citizenship under the Fourteenth Amendment. According
to the dissent, the majority opinion was fundamentally "injurious to the
public interest" because it served to incorporate into settler society
"large numbers of Chinese laborers, of a distinct race and religion, [who]
remain[ed] strangers in the land, . . . unfamiliar with our institutions,
and apparently incapable of assimilating with our people." 23 Moreover,
the dissent buttressed these claims with arguments tinged with settler mil-
lennialism, which had been prevalent among politicians and laborers even
during the earliest days of Chinese immigration. These views suggested
that China embodied a threatening empire seeking to use an endless supply
of workers to expand culturally and politically into the United States. In a
claim that mirrored Revolutionary-era views of French Catholics in Que-
bec, Fuller and Harlan argued that "subjects of the emperor of China . . .
[remained] bound to him by every conception of duty and by every prin-
ciple of their religion" such that even those born in the United States were
still "pilgrims and sojourners as all their fathers were." Only by asserting
discretionary power over new immigrants would the danger imposed by
imperial China be surmounted and republican institutions survive. 24

In both Plessy and Wong Kim Ark, Harlan's concerns about the rela-
tive treatment of blacks and Chinese and about Asian inclusion, respec-
tively, were considered irrelevant by the Court's majority. This was pre-
cisely because neither emancipated blacks nor U.S. -born Chinese had
been elevated by the Court to the status of free settlers. In both instances,
formal citizenship was seen as perfectly compatible with structures of
subordination, as highlighted by the idea of "separate but equal." More-
over, the very precondition for providing small numbers of Chinese with
birthright citizenship had been exclusion laws that overwhelmingly cur-
tailed the growth of the Asian population and protected white settlers
from both economic competition and the ethnic threat posed by a large
nonwhite immigrant community. Yet, in a sense, Harlan's attempt to sus-
tain colonial dichotomies while incorporating the black community —
long presumed to be socially excluded — spoke to fundamental changes
in collective life. Like efforts by Radical Republicans, it suggested that if
settler membership could be so essentially revised, perhaps the old frame-
work in its entirety could be transformed to take into account new cir-
cumstances. For many white laborers now trapped in wage relations or
tenancy, the old settler solutions no longer worked. Even if the Chinese
were removed from the polity, this would not solve the profound social
and economic dilemmas generated by the rise of corporate wealth and
industrial production. While Chinese prohibition could halt nonwhite
immigration and defend settler supremacy, it could not alter the basic
facts of the industrial workplace or revive experiences of meaningful in-
dependence and productive control.

Out of political necessity, poor settlers began to develop an alterna-
tive response, one that embraced the shared economic interests among all
laborers, regardless of their status in the settler hierarchy. The simple re-
ality was that, with business concentration and factory production, the
settler domains of economic necessity and economic freedom could no
longer be divided according to ethnic or racial affiliation. Both insiders
and historic outsiders shared the same social experience; thus, liberating
one group from dependence necessarily entailed liberating the other. In a
sense, white laborers came face to face with a profound truth — for settler
freedom to be achieved, settler colonialism itself had to be overcome. It
was this insight that framed the return of robust populism in the 1880s
and 1890s and structured an emerging ideal of an inclusive and socially
democratic new polity.

The Grand Labor Coalition and the Return
of Robust Populism

In the spring of 1886 the country was engulfed in massive industrial strife.
Just a year earlier, workers organized through the Knights of Labor struck
Jay Gould's railway lines in order to protest wage cuts. The strike para-
lyzed rail service and effectively stopped traffic west of the Mississippi.
As Walter Licht writes, "Under financial pressure, Gould capitulated to
the strikers, a David-and-Goliath victory that would be celebrated in
working-class communities throughout the country." The immediate con-
sequence was twofold. First, the Knights saw their membership soar from
over 110,000 in July 1885 to nearly 750,000 a year later. Second, Gould
recommitted himself to crushing the union, precipitating a second walk
out that began in east Texas and spread across much of the west. This
Southwest strike set the stage for the Great Upheaval, in which over
200,000 workers from small towns and major cities chose May 1, 1886,
to declare a national general strike on behalf of an eight-hour day. For
both those who defended labor protest and those who saw it as a danger-
ous threat to social order, the United States seemed to teeter on the edge
of convulsive change. 25

It was in this context that the Farmers Alliance made its initial moves
toward reclaiming the robust populist tradition. William Lamb, the pres-
ident of the Montague County Alliance in Texas, proclaimed a boycott in
support of the Knights' Southwest strike — an act in direct conflict with
the policy of the Alliance's statewide leadership. Over time, sympathy
boycotts spread across the state and mushroomed to include the provi-
sion of direct aid to strikers through farm produce and even money.
These efforts eventually led to the staging of joint political meetings be-
tween Alliances and Knights of Labor assemblies. In the process, workers
and farmers seemed to underscore a startling new development. Rather
than being distinct constituencies with divergent interests, they were each
part of a larger laboring community — one that shared the same funda-
mental goal. For strikers and their supporters, this goal was nothing less
than the historic promise of settler freedom: the ability of all laborers,
rural as well as urban, to enjoy economic and political independence. 26

Over the next decade, members of the Alliance, and later the People's
Party, struggled to achieve such independence in large part by systemati-
cally undermining the prevailing norms of settlerism. In the years follow-
ing the Civil War, the most radical Populists increasingly realized that the

basic assumptions of settler empire were both incompatible with the
new industrial order and no longer consistent with freedom as self-rule.
Therefore, in order to build a grand labor coalition that embraced the
interests of all producers, a new form of politics was needed — one no
longer bound to the colonial dichotomies of internal freedom and exter-
nal control. This new politics involved three basic components: (1) a re-
definition of who constituted the democratic "people" entitled to full eco-
nomic and political freedom, (2) a sustained critique of territorial conquest
and new forms of expansionism, and (3) the institutional creation of a
permanently mobilized citizenry able to assert its interests immediately
and directly.

Populism and Who Counts as the "People"
In keeping with settler tradition, a relation to work provided the ground
for free citizenship and republican liberty for the Farmers Alliance and
their labor allies. In the past, the productive divide between free and unfree
labor meant that while Anglo proprietors and artisans could claim politi-
cal membership, marginalized groups who engaged in degraded work
were necessarily outside the social community or the "people." But to the
extent that industrial changes undermined the economic independence of
all farmers and workers, regardless of settler status, it led reformers to
reinscribe the terms of inclusion. Such changes focused attention less on
the form of productive labor and more on the antagonism between pro-
ducers and nonproducers, or between the "masses" of laborers both ru-
ral and urban and the "classes" of commercial and industrial elites.

In describing the threats facing economic freedom, Terence Powderly's
1878 Preamble to the Constitution of the Knights of Labor powerfully
evoked this need for labor unity across the productive divide:

The recent alarming development and aggression of aggregated
wealth, which, unless checked, will invariably lead to the pauper-
ization and hopeless degradation of the toiling masses, render it
imperative, if we desire to enjoy the blessings of life, that a check
should be placed upon its power and upon unjust accumulation,
and a system adopted which will secure to the laborer the fruits of
his toil; . . . this much-desired object can only be accomplished by
the thorough unification of labor, and the united efforts of those
who obey the divine injunction that "In the sweat of thy brow shalt
thou eat bread." 27

Such a call brought with it the related claim — directly reminiscent of the
arguments of William Manning — that the laboring community was con-
stitutive of the people and that laboring interests were necessarily the inter-
ests of all. As the 1886 Knights of Labor Preamble read, "We have formed
the Order of the Knights of Labor, for the purpose of organizing and di-
recting the power of the industrial masses, not as a political party, for it
is more — in it are crystalized [sic] sentiments and measures for the bene-
fit of the whole people." 28 Since laboring interests were consistent with
ensuring republican freedom, there necessarily existed an ideological
unity between the people writ large and the industrial masses more spe-
cifically. Rather than being one faction among many, the latter as embod-
ied by the Knights of Labor were an organized expression of the collec-
tive whole and its commitment to liberty.

This vision of unified labor as constituting the people and as sharing
a singular commitment to economic independence also struck deep roots
with the Farmers Alliance and the People's Party. Echoing the sentiments
of the Knights' Preamble, the party's inaugural Omaha Platform from
1892 declared, "Wealth belongs to him who creates it, and every dollar
taken from industry without an equivalent is robbery. 'If any will not work,
neither shall he eat.' The interests of rural and civil labor are the same; their
enemies are identical." 29 For such Populists, the problem of wage slavery
and rural tenancy were two sides of the same coin. In each case, commercial
and industrial elites had separated capital from labor and in the process
stripped producers of both profit and productive control.

In rearticulating who counted as the people, Knights activists and Al-
liance members directly challenged settler xenophobia. For Powderly, all
laborers were equally subject to wage slavery and the dangers of economic
dependence regardless of gender or racial background; as such, new Euro-
pean immigrants, freed slaves and women were all welcome. 30 In response
to race baiting at a Knights convention in Richmond, Virginia, Powderly
asserted the importance of organizing black workers, because as he bluntly
declared, "the negro is free; he is here, and he is here to stay." It was there-
fore incumbent on all laborers to appreciate their shared predicament of
industrial bondage and for whites to embrace the view that "in the field of
labor and American citizenship we recognize no line of race, creed, politics,
or color." 31

In particular, such arguments repudiated the discourse in the postwar
South of white supremacy. For Tom Watson, the need for interracial soli-
darity was a simple matter of self-interest for poor farmers trapped in the

crop-lien system and bound by debt. He argued that the People's Party
would appeal to both whites and blacks by telling each group: "You are
kept apart that you may be separately fleeced of your earnings. You are
made to hate each other because upon that hatred is rested the financial
despotism which enslaves you both. You are deceived and blinded that you
may not see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system
which beggars you both." In his view, the identical economic position of
black and white farmers meant that their fates were permanently inter-
twined and that even the most inveterate racist — if truly committed to
liberating whites from debt bondage — would necessarily have to do the
same for blacks:

This is so obviously true it is no wonder both these unhappy labor-
ers [whites and blacks] stop to listen. No wonder they begin to real-
ize that no change of law can benefit the white tenant which does
not benefit the black one likewise; that no system which now does
injustice to one of them can fail to injure both. Their every material
interest is identical. The moment this becomes a conviction, mere
selfishness, the mere desire to better their conditions, escape onerous
taxes, avoid usurious charges, lighten their rents, or change their
precarious tenements into smiling happy homes, will drive these
two men together. 32

For Powderly and Watson, solidifying labor unity required stressing
to all farmers and workers their shared self-interest. It was not high ide-
als but rather the everyday operation of economic power that would
drive previously antagonistic communities together and create produce-
rist solidarity. The centrality to Populist politics of material concerns and
concrete experience mirrored William Manning's earlier belief that all in-
dividuals, regardless of social standing, were ultimately driven by self-
interest. This premise thus continued Manning's challenge to the accounts
of political virtue previously emphasized by elite republicans. Recall that,
for Madison, too close a tie between representative and represented
made the legislator beholden to partial interests and unable to use inde-
pendent reason to act to promote the greater good. Under such a view, self-
interest — and the inability to distance oneself from concrete experience —
was exactly what reduced the rule of law to class tyranny. By contrast,
Populists argued that one's social context was inescapable and that the
call for virtuous leadership often constituted a mask for class legislation.
Even more important, self-interest was not only unavoidable but indeed

constituted the basic means by which people made sense of their condi-
tion and developed both political allies and views of the good. To Wat-
son, eager to break the Democratic Party's stranglehold on Southern
politics, making evident to blacks and whites their shared self-interest
raised the promise of a racially unified movement — one able both to end
agricultural peonage and to destroy the Democratic Party forever.

Ultimately, by emphasizing the material experiences that bound seem-
ingly disconnected laborers together, Populists sought to build labor soli-
darity and to construct a coherent and unified account of the common
good. Watson and Powderly rejected the notion that citizens would be
moved to act simply due to private conscience or their better natures;
rather, they focused on the concrete social circumstances that presented a
shared reality of subordination and a common hope of freedom. There-
fore, Populists discarded the idea, defended by Fisher Ames and Madi-
son, that only a virtuous few could rise above their partial desires and
recognize the community's larger interests. Instead, they believed that
ordinary laborers, given their daily struggle against dependence and ine-
quality, would perceive the continuity between their particular interests
and the common good (i.e., widespread republican freedom). Organized
on the basis of these interests, laborers of all stripes would then become
the prime engine for social transformation, collectively imposing liberty
as self-rule through their political and economic activity.

Still, although this emphasis on self-interest suggested a more socially
inclusive vision of the people, it nonetheless had its limits. To the extent
that shared material goals broke down or could not be clearly articu-
lated, so too did the embrace of excluded groups. In the same essay in
which Watson called for racial unity under the banner of the People's
Party and its subtreasury plan, he also defended racial segregation so
long as it was not legally enforced, commenting: "The question of social
equality does not enter into the calculation at all. That is a thing each
citizen decides for himself. No statute ever yet drew the latch of the hum-
blest home — or ever will. Each citizen regulates his own visiting list — and
always will." 33 Watson was thus no Thaddeus Stevens, who went so far
as to be buried in a black cemetery in Lancaster as a statement of prin-
ciple. 34 For Watson, since interest and not principle ruled, the Populist
project of social inclusion hesitated at extending the ideals of equality
beyond the public sphere and the workplace. 35

Moreover, the focus on solidarity through unified interest meant that
when white labor conceived of its goals as requiring exclusion, the ten-

dency persisted to fall back into the settler discourse of organic citizen-
ship and external prerogative. As mentioned earlier, this pitfall was viv-
idly demonstrated by the treatment of Chinese immigrants. Certainly
many Knights of Labor activists saw their organization as universally
inclusive. In Thirty Years of Labor (1889), Powderly wrote that the Knights
refused to include a plank in their constitution calling for the removal of
"servile races" — a specific reference to the Chinese — because the organi-
zation "recognized neither race, creed, or color" and refused to exclude
"any portion of humanity" from the benefits of republican freedom. 36
During a massive 1878 labor demonstration in Chicago, the radical
Knights leader George McNeill reiterated that the entire laboring com-
munity, regardless of ethnicity or settler status, deserved economic inde-
pendence. He declared to the great applause of the crowd that "The
present workingmen's movement was for all, without distinction of race,
color, nationality, politics, or religion. ... It mattered nothing . . . whether
a man was born in Africa or China, in Europe or America." McNeill fur-
ther added that he "wanted Chinamen in America, if they would work for
American wages." According to him, white laborers "did not want to keep
the Chinamen out"; they wanted only to eliminate exploitative practices of
contract labor, which imported workers at wages well below U.S. norms. 37
In fact, the idea that liberty of movement should be provided to all
workers, whether European or non-European, ran deep and was seen as
a cornerstone of republican independence — a right provided to every free
citizen. That same year, in response to calls for Chinese exclusion an Irish
wage earner wrote the Boston Pilot arguing that "Not many years ago a
similar war-cry, 'No Irish need apply,' was echoed and re-echoed through-
out America by bigots as blind, ungenerous and intolerant ... as any in
the world." The writer asserted that, rather than closing the door to the
Chinese, the United States should truly become "an asylum for the op-
pressed of every clime." Thus, when Powderly and the Knights of Labor
entered the debates around immigration, they initially held to a univer-
salist creed. As McNeill's comments indicated, the Knights focused on
creating rules to check the importation by corporations of contract labor-
ers, who could be used as strikebreakers or to reduce wages. Throughout
the 1870s, the Knights called for an explicit ban on the practice, which
was eventually passed as the Foran Act of 1885. As expressed by activists
like McNeill, the goal was not to create racial exclusions or to limit the
free movement of foreign nationals, which was considered by many to be
a basic republican right. 38

Yet, over time, while most Knights maintained this argument for Eu-
ropean immigrants, their members increasingly saw Asians solely through
the prism of contract labor — as new servile workers or "coolies" threat-
ening their economic livelihood. This perception derived in part from
how corporations explicitly conceived of Asian workers: as temporary
employees who could be used to crush union organizing or to reduce
wages during periods of prosperity. Given these very real practices, old
settler dichotomies made it easy to reduce all Chinese to the status of
fundamentally unfree laborers, inherently unsuited to republican prac-
tices. Many in the Knights found it simpler to embrace Chinese exclusion
than to hold firm to ideals of universal brotherhood. By 1886 even Pow-
derly was willing to declare of Asians that "the yellowman is only a
slave." He and others likely recognized that the Chinese were being scape-
goated and that immigration bans would not solve labor's basic eco-
nomic predicament. Still, for increasingly destitute white workers, the
idea that their ethnic brethren were being replaced by Asians was un-
acceptable and pointed out the limits of inclusion when material interests
diverged. 39

But despite these evident drawbacks, the engine of economic solidar-
ity played a critical role in undermining the link between membership
and ethnicity — at times even for Chinese immigrants — and expressed a
vision of citizenship far more open and culturally plural than that pre-
vailing under settler empire. Especially in the South, the willingness of
Populist Party politicians and their supporters to challenge white suprem-
acy had reverberating consequences. Edward Ayers writes, "Such pro-
nouncements were indeed remarkable in the New South. Just a few
months earlier, no white would have thought of saying them. The politi-
cal exigencies of the Populist revolt put good orthodox white men in the
position where the racial injustice of their society suddenly appeared to
them as injustice." 40

The Rise of a Populism Opposed to Empire
By redefining who counted as the people, the Populist movement not
only pressed against settler exclusion but also challenged the prevailing
norms of empire. In the process, it placed previously marginal arguments
by those like Brownson and Skidmore in the political center and under-
scored how empire actually compromised rather than promoted republi-
can freedom. Radical members of the Alliance and the People's Party saw
territorial expansion and the emerging drive for global preeminence as

combining corporate power with military might. Conquest opened up
new markets for industrial profit and promoted the need for a large
standing army, permanently ready when called upon to suppress labor
mobilization.

For Tom Watson, territorial growth did not provide economic free-
dom and collective self-rule; rather, it created precisely what it was meant
to stave off: a feudal society in the United States to mirror those in Eu-
rope. In 1893, writing derisively of U.S. imperial size and pretensions,
Watson commented, "Having become an empire in territory, and in
wealth, and in power, we seek to become an empire in outward appear-
ance, in the display of armies and navies, in the geegaws of royal ceremo-
nial and observances, and in the maintenance of splendid embassies at
foreign capitals." At a moment when American politicians were contem-
plating the annexation of Hawaii, he declared, "For the first time it is
announced that we can go twenty-one hundred miles into the ocean and
seize upon Islands which do not belong to us and are not necessary to
us." The drive for such possessions and for global power generally pre-
sented a foreboding image of a future United States. Needing to maintain
control over unruly citizens at home and to act flexibly abroad, America
would find itself with a monarchical president, no longer bound by the
popular will and acting in the name of commercial and industrial elites.
Watson wrote, "Who shall gather round himself the servile attentions,
the abject flatteries, and the degrading prostrations of the court circle?
Why, the President, of course; the man whom our masters, the corpora-
tions, set up over us." 41

Five years later, the most radical Populists viewed the Spanish-
American War and its aftermath as making evident the validity of these
fears. In the lead up to the war, Jerry Simpson — Kansas congressman and
in the words of one prominent scholar, "the unofficial voice of the party
in the House" — looked upon the prevailing mood of jingoism with deep
suspicion and argued that war should be treated as an absolute last re-
sort. Simpson was one of just nineteen congressional representatives to
vote no to the April 13, 1898 House resolution authorizing the use of
military force in Cuba. He worried that, rather than defending "the
right for a struggling people to . . . govern themselves," America would
find itself "on the low plane of stealing the territory of some other
country." 42

The political cost for Simpson was enormous. Despite his near folk
hero status among poor midwestern farmers, he lost his 1898 reelection

bid in large part due to the cresting tide of pro-war sentiment. In one of
his final speeches to Congress after his defeat, Simpson raised questions
about recent appropriations bills and measures to entrench a new profes-
sionalized military by increasing the size of the army from 25,000 to over
100,000. A consistent opponent of such legislation, he declared that sev-
eral legislators had told him that the real reason for these bills was to
establish an expanded military infrastructure, which when needed could
"suppress domestic violence." Mirroring Watson's language, Simpson as-
serted that "along with a scheme for colonial empire," corporate and po-
litical elites sought "to place on the throne in this country William McKin-
ley, President of the United States, Emperor of the West Indian Islands
and of the Philippines, and then get a standing army to enforce the power
of this new empire." 43

Outside the doors of Congress, Watson too reiterated his concerns
about corporate power and the specter of military despotism. A bitter
opponent of the war, Watson rhetorically asked one crowd during the
conflict, "Who gets the benefit of the war?" In terms reminiscent of both
Byllesby and Skidmore, he answered:

National bankers will profit by this war. The new bonds give them
the basis for new banks, and their power is prolonged. The privi-
leged classes all profit by this war. It takes the attention of the people
off economic issues, and perpetuates the unjust system they have
put upon us. Politicians profit by the war. It buries issues they dare
not meet. What do the people get out of this war? The fighting and
the taxes. 44

One should note that these pointed attacks on both territorial empire
and U.S. projections of global power did not primarily focus on the treat-
ment of indigenous groups under colonial rule. Rather, the central con-
cern for radical Populists was the way in which external assertions of
power necessarily corrupted the home country by elevating interests coun-
ter to the laboring community and by creating centralized and hierarchi-
cal institutions of despotic power. As Watson concluded, much as Har-
rington or Manning might have, "Republics cannot go into the conquering
business and remain republics. Militarism leads to military domination,
military despotism. Imperialism smooths [sic] the way for the emperor."
Institutions like a large standing army and a unitary executive directly
threatened freedom as self-rule and confronted ordinary citizens with a
vast and repressive apparatus of state power. 45

Still, if the primary focus was not external treatment, developing this
critique of empire radical voices nonetheless also hinted at broader argu-
ments about the moral illegitimacy of colonial power. Perhaps the most
full-throated formulation of such a view came at the very end of the
movement, from a Nebraska politician, William Neville, who eventually
would be the last Populist congressman in Washington. 46 In February
1900, during the war of occupation in the Philippines, Neville took to
the floor of Congress to denounce the conflict. He did so by explicitly
linking control over Filipinos to the politics of racial subjugation marking
American practices at home. For him, the occupation was of a piece with
a larger and destructive feature of collective life: the continuing treatment
of nonwhite communities — foreign and domestic — as merely instruments
for the achievement of internal settler ends. These communities were seen
as useful primarily for extracting economic profit and thus were properly
subject to coercive and discretionary power.

Speaking to Southern white supremacists in the Democratic Party,
who opposed imperial annexation, Neville stated,

It is amazing to a Populist to hear members upon this side of the
House declare in debate that "this is a white man's government,"
and justify a property and educational qualifications to exclude the
black man from the right of suffrage and at the same time denounce
the Republican party for trying to govern the brown man without
his consent. 47

For Neville, the same principle that rejected conquest in Asia or in the
Caribbean also rejected the unequal treatment of blacks, Chinese, and
Mexicans in the United States. Both forms of subordination reduced
groups worthy of republican freedom to the status of imperial subjects.

In so arguing, Neville connected his rejection of territorial empire to a
universalist vision of self-rule: "It is a real consolation to believe in the
common brotherhood of the human family; to believe that all men were
created equal, or in other words, to believe that when God made man and
woman as the source of human development, class distinction was not
decreed." Neville continued by emphasizing the essential right of self-
determination for Europeans and non-Europeans alike:

Nations should have the same right among nations that men have
among men. The right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness
is as dear to the black and brown man as to the white; as precious

to the poor as to the rich; as just to the ignorant as to the edu-
cated; as sacred to the weak as to the strong, and as applicable to
nations as to individuals, and the nation which subverts such right
by force is not better governed than the man who takes the law
into his own hands. 48

Of particular note, Neville refused to view this self-determination as re-
quiring any preceding period of white tutelage, as was increasingly ar-
gued by political leaders to defend either the Filipino occupation or to
justify new reservation policies toward Native Americans. And in reject-
ing white tutelage, Neville rejected both actual political control by the
federal government as well as those informal practices of economic and
military interference, which had long marked Western engagement with
nonwhite peoples. In other words, his call for self-determination had no
caveats.

Neville's speech thus represented a striking development: an American
politician consciously repudiating empire in all its manifestations and de-
scribing racial control at home in terms of domestic colonial rule over
dependent subjects. Neville explicitly described blacks as treated in the
United States like imperial subjects rather than proper citizens, conclud-
ing, "No government can claim the dignity of being a government by the
people when a portion of its people are subjects not having equal rights
before the law." 49 According to him, a consistent commitment to republi-
can freedom required two basic elements: equal inclusion within the
United States and the pursuit of international policies that respected in-
digenous self-rule and denied European and American authorities the
right of oversight. In a sense, for Neville and Watson, even if the United
States did not hold actual colonial territories, a foreign policy centered on
American interventionism was nonetheless unacceptable. Such a policy
would lead the United States to interfere throughout the world in local
disputes, imposing outcomes that were dictated by commercial interests
in Washington. In the process, it likely would produce far greater violence
on the ground. It is true, Watson averred, that "the Spaniards and the Cu-
bans were bushwhacking one another, and killing from three to five men at
a battle. We have gone down there and killed more men in three months
than they would have killed in thirteen years. If they were starving before,
who feeds them now?" 50

Thus, step by step, the ideology of producerism and the language of
self-interest led poor farmers and wage earners to a remarkable set of

conclusions. Reversing centuries of settler tradition, many radical partici-
pants in the Populist movement, as well as their political allies, redefined
social membership to include virtually all agricultural and industrial work-
ers; in the process, they repudiated the colonial dichotomies of settlerism
that had separated white insiders from native or black outsiders. Equally
dramatic, they rejected the long-standing defense of territorial expansion
as the precondition for economic freedom and instead came to view the
drives for conquest and, now increasingly, for global power as promising
only military despotism and further inequality at home. In their most
sweeping moments, some leaders were even willing to embrace Skid-
more's vision of indigenous self-rule free entirely from western tutelage.
And perhaps most important, these calls were not the views of Jackso-
nian outliers but rather were made by popular leaders in the context of
massive social protest — protest that challenged the political dominance
of existing parties as well as the economic dominance of industrial and
agricultural elites. Although hardly complete, such efforts expressed the
hope of greatly expanding settler freedom and therefore imagined the
United States as a producerist democracy stripped of colonial pretension
and potentially open to all.

1st Self-Rule and the Goal of Permanent Mobilization
If many in the Populist movement sought to separate settler freedom
from its historic ties to expansion and colonial rule, they did so by reas-
serting a vision of popular politics that had emerged in the years before
the federal Constitution. Motivated by the belief that self-rule required
the laboring community to exercise public power and to enact popular
laws in keeping with the collective good, this grand coalition of laborers
emphasized the importance of permanent watchfulness over government.
To the extent that elected representatives themselves seemed discon-
nected from the social experiences and material interests of the "people,"
Populists moved to create parallel institutions that would constantly mo-
bilize citizens and thus embody the collective will.

These associations hearkened back to the tradition of extralegal con-
ventions and institutions that emerged after colonial independence. Set-
tler revolt brought with it an increased skepticism about the legitimacy
of existing representative bodies to speak on behalf of the people. Espe-
cially for small farmers and townspeople, asserting self-rule and promot-
ing economic freedom meant organizing "out of doors" and developing
quasi-public associations, such as popular assemblies, that ensured direct

public control over government. 51 Similarly, during the Gilded Age, as
corporate interests appeared to capture both politics and the legal
machinery of the state, citizens developed a plethora of informal and
extralegal institutions to remedy grievances and express collective sen-
timent. These ranged from popular law courts that served as a parallel
judicial framework for members of various workingmen's groups, in-
cluding the Knights of Labor, to farmers' cooperatives in the south and
west. 52

But the greatest example of extralegal organizing was the way in which
Populists extended the Jacksonian approach to the political party. Not
unlike many 1830s Democrats, Populists viewed the party as an instru-
ment for eliminating the divide between representative and represented
and for facilitating a free society of small producers. This vision of the
party as a central instrument for will formation, and as a primary site for
the people's permanent mobilization, combined the eighteenth century's
revolutionary modes of extralegislative association with the nineteenth
century's party machinery — which had come of age during the Jackso-
nian period and that dominated politics during the Gilded Age. Along
with organizing local, state, and federal offices through intricate systems
of patronage, during this period parties even controlled the electoral pro-
cess itself. Given the remarkable pervasiveness of elections in the late nine-
teenth century, resulting from the shortness of tenure and the myriad of
local and state officials who held elective posts, this was no small mat-
ter. Mark Kornbluh writes, "Among other things, they registered voters;
printed, distributed, and counted ballots; nominated candidates; financed
and ran campaigns; and controlled the distribution of political informa-
tion through an overwhelmingly partisan press." 53

Such parties "mobilized voters as members of social groups" and cre-
ated lasting ties between party affiliation and ethnic, religious, or racial
identity. They did this through numerous social activities and popular
spectacles, including parades and picnics, as well as by providing basic
services for their supporters. For example, for newly arrived European
immigrants, party officials helped potential voters through the natural-
ization process — with party committees in each city devoted to the task.
More generally, in return for voter loyalty and support during campaigns
and elections, parties assisted with jobs and social welfare. At the federal
level, bureaucratic offices grew to 190,000 in 1896 and provided a job for
almost one voter in every hundred. Thus, the party was a critical source of
social integration, incorporating diverse communities of white immigrants,

freed slaves, and native-born settlers into both the emerging economy
and a highly participatory electoral process. 54

This party machinery had two features that made it particularly com-
patible with the Populist movement's political vision. First, to the extent
that the electoral process and government offices were both totally inter-
penetrated by the party, the clear divide between the established legal
framework and extralegal modes of organizing was dissolved. Parties
became quasi-public institutions, which served as the basic sites for will
formation and popular participation and could not be disentangled
coherently from the "official" political process. Second, the sheer
number of elections meant that not only were parties quasi-public; they
were engaged in efforts of continuous mobilization. Instead of popular
participation being consigned to the occasional vote, the centrality of
party identification meant that public involvement through a vast array
of campaign activities — "ratification meetings, pole-raisings, parades,
marches, barbeques, rallies, and bonfires" — created a permanently en-
gaged citizenry. 55

For Populists, the principal difficulty with existing parties was that
they split the laboring community across numerous social cleavages, with
none more destructive than the old sectional divide between North and
South, in which Republicans and Democrats alike "waved the bloody
shirt." 56 The party system's method of social integration, through patron-
age and the provision of social services to distinct regional and ethno-
religious communities, worked to stratify rather than to unite the public.
As Robert Wiebe famously writes, such Gilded Age politics pictured the
United States as a decentralized "society of island communities" and orga-
nized collective life by playing on the separate identities and experiences of
each community. 57 By contrast, the Populist movement, like extralegal
conventions during the Revolution or at the peak of Jacksonian mobili-
zation, imagined the party as an institutional site for all producers and
thus for the people as such. As Ignatius Donnelly wrote in the Preamble
to the Omaha Platform, rejecting sectional politics and calling for labor
unity, "We seek to restore the government of the Republic to the hands of
'the plain people,' " and "this Republic can only endure as a free govern-
ment while built upon the love of the whole people for each other." The
goal of mobilization was to create a space for the direct and continuous
expression of popular sovereignty by the entire laboring community. In
doing so, government action would become a permanently accessible
tool for the fulfillment of collective ends. As the Preamble read on, "We

believe that the power of government — in other words the people —
should be expanded ... as rapidly and as far as the good sense of an in-
telligent people and the teachings of experience shall justify, to the end
that oppression, injustice, and poverty shall eventually cease in the
land." 58

For such popular self-rule to work, the party necessarily had to be
internally democratic and nonhierarchical, embodying the collective sen-
timents of the laboring community as expressed by agricultural and in-
dustrial workers themselves. Gilded Age parties, due to decentralization
and a focus on local organizing, had undoubtedly been responsive to the
needs of their constituencies. Still, their basic structure was hierarchical,
linking support for a party boss to patronage and services rendered. By
contrast, radicals like Donnelly, William Lamb, and Tom Watson imag-
ined the party as situated within a framework of multiple and overlap-
ping labor organizations, the most important being the Farmers Alliance.
In other words, party members were also Alliance members, tested through
years of experience in the cooperative crusade and committed to a set of
political objectives. While organized for vote getting and the immediate
control of government, the party was only one element of a larger collec-
tive framework and therefore could be rooted by these parallel institu-
tions to the interests of the greater movement. Just as the party was a
government behind the government, organizations such as the Farmers
Alliance and the Knights of Labor embodied the government behind the
party. The result suggested a form of popular politics in which laborers
were multiply organized, able to assert control at various local, state, and
national sites of decision making, and thus made directly responsible for
the party and the movement. 59

In a sense, this vision of the people permanently mobilized and en-
gaged in self-rule provided concrete expression for Manning's hope of a
Society of Laborers. Manning had imagined an institutional framework
both for the dissemination of knowledge about producer interests and
for labor's collective self-assertion in politics. Nothing better expressed
the way the Farmers Alliance and People's Party pursued these objectives
than the Alliance's lecturing system and the party's National Reform
Press Association (NRPA). In every county, the Alliance established hun-
dreds of suballiances of no more than fifty people, each with a lecturer
whose purpose was to explain the cooperative crusade, to link the ac-
tions of the suballiance to the larger organization and to help farmers
articulate their grievances to the wider community. And with the NRPA

the People's Party developed thousands of journals and weeklies, which
expressed the goals of the movement to ordinary citizens and, in letters
to the editor, provided an institutional voice for poor farmers. 60

As Manning suggested a century earlier, these institutional sites em-
bodied an alternative vision of how virtue could operate within a politi-
cal community. By disseminating knowledge and incorporating the expe-
riences and views of farmers and wage earners, mechanisms like the
Alliance system provided a means for democratizing intelligence and for
ensuring that all individuals, not simply the educated few, understood
their own interests and how best to achieve them. Such associational
forms took for granted a belief in the basic competence of each laborer —
their essential capacity to connect personal self-interest to the moral
needs of the community. In this way, radical Populists within the Alliance
system and the Knights of Labor developed a clear place for virtue in
their accounts of political activity and a just society. According to Pow-
derly, for instance, the attack on the wage system and the defense of the
cooperative commonwealth rested on a fundamental belief that the for-
mer was incompatible with an ethical life grounded in self-discipline,
personal responsibility, and autonomous reflection. 61 For him, republican
freedom embodied a vision of human flourishing, since the experience of
self-rule provided a continuous practice in collective self-assertion and
moral independence. In Powderly's view, the key question was how to
make individuals move from conditions of dependence and wage slav-
ery to those of emancipation. In particular, how could workers and
farmers, attached to a vision of settler supremacy but morally degraded
by the realities of economic bondage, be made to see themselves as pos-
sessing the same basic goals and as capable of exercising popular
power? Thus instruments like the union and the party, complete with
newspapers and lecturers, were more than tools for raising wages or
challenging workplace prerogatives; they played an essential elevating
role. They provided one method by which laborers gained the cultural
and material resources — the democratic virtue — necessary for altering
their conditions.

In essence, through countless parallel institutions, the Populist move-
ment sought to combine participatory democracy with mass politics. It
imagined the interests of laborers as embodying the emancipatory goals
of society at large and, when properly organized, able to speak on behalf
of the whole community. At its most radical, the movement hoped that
by creating a political infrastructure for the continuous self-assertion of

agricultural and industrial workers, economic independence and politi-
cal freedom would become general experiences. As the Kansas populist
Frank Doster, later chief justice of the Kansas State Supreme Court, told
listeners in his 1894 Labor Day speech, the existing parties, Democrat
and Republican, "stand paralyzed" in the face of industrial transforma-
tion and corporate power, unable "to adapt the legislation of the country
to the strange conditions which this new life has forced upon us." In re-
sponse, the People's Party and its supporters would "bring the power of
the social mass to bear upon the rebellious individuals who thus menace
the peace and safety of the state" by ensuring "that the industrial system
of a nation, like its political system, should be a government of and for
and by the people alone." 62

In order to fulfill this promise, Populists demanded a plethora of po-
litical and economic reforms centered on the subtreasury plan, which by
mortgaging agricultural crops to the federal government at reduced in-
terest rates would make credit more readily available and greatly reduce
the specter of debt bondage. However, along with democratizing the
monetary system, Populists — as expressed in the Omaha Platform and
the Alliance platforms that preceded it — also called for government own-
ership of transportation and the means of communication, the free and
unlimited coinage of silver, more equitable taxation through a graduated
income tax, the reclamation of excess land from railroads and corpora-
tions, the eight-hour work day, and the abolition of private police forces
such as the Pinkertons. 63 These measures aimed to create a new eco-
nomic and political landscape that tied industrialization to freedom as
self-rule.

The Retreat from Republican Inclusion

In the end, however, the agrarian revolt collapsed, leaving this agenda
largely unfulfilled. In part, this was due to tremendous opposition from
political and corporate elites. Yet the fundamental reasons for this col-
lapse were not solely or even primarily external, but rather were derived
from basic inconsistencies within the movement itself. If anything, the
agrarian revolt remained trapped within settlerism's colonial paradigm,
such that it could not universalize its own economic and political com-
mitments. With electoral defeat, many party members reverted to ethni-
cally exclusive visions of collective life and, in the process, undermined
the legitimacy of the Populist claim to speak on behalf of all the "plain

people." These tendencies, most powerfully illustrated by the political
journey of Tom Watson — from radical egalitarian to white supremacist —
made it increasing easy for middle-class and corporate opponents to de-
pict Populism as captive to demagoguery.

Co-optation, Backlash, and Contradictions Inherent
within Populism
One should not underestimate the intensity of elite opposition to the Peo-
ple's Party and its reform agenda. For the presidential election of 1896,
McKinley drew on an unprecedented campaign war chest of $3.5 mil-
lion, generated from corporate directors and wealthy supporters of both
parties who viewed Bryan, let alone radicals like Watson, as a dangerous
threat to social order. In the South, the Democrats responded to the
Populist challenge with a systemic effort at rigging votes and intimidat-
ing voters. Even more insidiously, Democrats sought to entrench perma-
nent one-party rule by disenfranchising those voters, particularly blacks,
who were both the most marginal and the most destabilizing for the es-
tablished order. Ayers writes that after a decade in which "disenfran-
chisement pushed on relentlessly" across the South, by the time Alabama
addressed the issue of voting rights, "The way seemed clear. The disen-
franchising laws enacted by the convention when it met in 1901 were
nothing new: stringent residency requirements, a cumulative poll tax, a
literacy or property qualification, a grandfather clause." The overall ef-
fect was to crush the hope of interracial labor unity by ending black vot-
ing power in the South and, despite the notorious grandfather clause, by
restricting severely the voting rights of poor whites as well. 64

These efforts in the North and South to contain agrarian protest were
motivated in part by an intense suspicion of the men and women who
made up the rank and file of the Populist movement. To middle-class
observers, such agitators appeared as little more than an uncouth rabble.
This sentiment was most vividly captured by William Allen White's fa-
mous editorial, "What's the Matter with Kansas?" For him, the Populist
was defined by an economic desperation and a mob mentality, which
made rational discourse impossible and violence an ever-present threat.
Describing the encounter that finally convinced him to write the column,
White later recalled:

A block from the office a crowd of Populists tackled me. . . . They
surrounded me. They were older men — men in their forties and

fifties and sixties — and I was twenty-eight. They were shabbily
dressed, and it was no pose with them. They were struggling with
poverty and I was rather spick-and-span. . . . Anyway, they ganged
me — hooting, jeering, nagging me about some editorial utterance
I had made. I was froggy in the meadow and couldn't get out and
they were taking a little stick and poking me about. 65

The idea of placing public decision making in the hands of such individu-
als presented the very worst possibilities of majority rule; it meant hand-
ing over power to the demonic crowd and to whoever could play on its
weaknesses and aspirations.

For White, the poverty of Populist supporters hearkened back to the
great republican concern with economic dependence — the fear that so-
cial circumstances conditioned the poor to a life of obedience and tyr-
anny as opposed to one of reason and autonomy. Rather than promoting
collective freedom, the success of these groups could produce only dema-
gogic politics and rampant anti-intellectualism. It meant that Kansas
would be seen by sober minds as an uncivilized backwater. "Go east and
you hear them laugh at Kansas; go west and they sneer at her; go south
and they 'cuss' her; go north and they have forgotten her. Go into any
crowd of intelligent people gathered anywhere in the globe, and you will
find the Kansas man on the defensive." White's taunts indicated the depth
of class animosity toward the rural and urban poor, and especially the
degree to which economic and political elites regarded efforts at collec-
tive self-assertion with fear and disrespect. E. L. Godkin famously de-
scribed the agrarian social movement as "the vague dissatisfaction which
is always felt by the incompetent and lazy and 'shiftless' when they con-
template those who have got on better in the world." 66

Yet, for all the vote rigging and demonization, the ultimate defeat of
the Populist movement resulted in large measure from the People's Par-
ty's basic failure to institutionalize its vision of popular politics and per-
manent mobilization. Through fusion with Democrats and co-optation
by silverite politicians, the party became one more among a variety of
competing electoral forces, elite driven and hierarchically structured. The
ease with which this move occurred derived from the internal weakness
of the very labor organizations that helped make the party a mass demo-
cratic institution. By 1892 the Knights of Labor, damaged by brutal em-
ployer repression, the failure of strikes and boycotts, and competition
from the "prudential unionism" of Samuel Gompers and the American

Federation of Labor, could no longer effectively organize agricultural
and industrial workers. 67 While this task fell to the Farmers Alliance,
Lawrence Goodwyn has demonstrated that it too faced serious difficul-
ties. The move toward third-party politics had been directly caused by
the inability of Alliance cooperatives to become self-sustaining and prof-
itable. Such experiences taught farmers that only by claiming power over
corporations and private commercial banks through energetic govern-
ment would the goal of a cooperative commonwealth be achieved. But
this also meant that at the exact moment when Populism needed Alliance
institutions to infuse the new party with democratic accountability and
mass participation, the Alliance was in marked decline. With its coopera-
tives faltering, the Alliance did not have the institutional and popular
strength of its heyday in the late 1880s. 68

More fundamentally, the fact that local leaders and ordinary party
members had lost control of their own institutions spoke to a crucial
normative difficulty with Populist thinking. At the center of the Populist
account of democracy was a conception of the people. Rather than being
racially defined or a simple aggregation of voters, the people constituted
the actually existing community of laborers in their entirety. For Popu-
lists, the people were the "masses" of farmers and industrial workers who
found themselves confronted by the "classes," what one Nebraska news-
paper called "the monied aristocracy, who have set themselves up as our
dictators." 69 In essence, they rejected the old Federalist notion that no
actual body within society could represent the whole community and thus
that the people had to be an ideal abstraction — a constitutional frame-
work that gave institutional voice to competing class segments.

At a basic level, Populists appreciated that their account rested on a
fiction: in any community not all members were laborers, no matter how
broadly one understood the category. Moreover, it was also clear that the
producing classes were profoundly fragmented across a number of vec-
tors: white versus nonwhite, rural versus urban, artisan versus wage la-
borer, tenant versus land owner. The idea of labor unity was therefore
itself also a fiction, as these groups had distinct social experiences as well
as competing immediate goals. Certainly, not all positions held by labor-
ers at all times were compatible with the public good. However, Populists
and their intellectual predecessors like Manning and Brownson argued
that republican freedom ultimately could not be protected by a constitu-
tional procedure — be it legislative supremacy or governmental balance.
In the final analysis, freedom as self-rule rested on having a mobilized

popular constituency inside and outside of elected institutions, one con-
tinually engaged in ensuring that collective decision making served the
larger community. Since all laborers, regardless of their specific work re-
lationship, ideally shared a material interest in economic and political
independence, they embodied that constituency best equipped to sustain
republican liberty. When properly organized, distinct producers would
recognize the unity between their partial interests and the common good
and through collective effort would impose a democratic and popular
will. In this way, a partial constituency within society could come to rep-
resent the whole.

But for the Populist belief to succeed, its own members and leaders
had to be able to move beyond their immediate needs and prejudices.
The claim to speak on behalf of the people had to be more than an ille-
gitimate assertion of class power; it had to display a consciousness of the
interests that linked historically competing groups and of how those in-
terests could be fostered. It also required that mobilization went hand in
hand with bottom-up control and that individual Alliance or party mem-
bers dictated the terms of political intervention, in keeping with republi-
can ideals, and were not simply following their associational leaders. In
other words, this account of democratic politics took for granted that the
rural and urban poor, despite White's comments to the contrary, were not
an undifferentiated mass that could be molded by flatterers and dema-
gogues to serve any purpose. Instead, the members of the agrarian move-
ment had to be competent citizens and authors of their own political
destiny — individuals who possessed democratic virtue.

Yet events from 1896 onward suggested that influential party higher-
ups believed just the opposite. These leaders, to the consternation and
helplessness of ordinary members, were able to pursue an alliance with
William Jennings Bryan — one that ultimately destroyed the electoral vi-
ability of agrarian radicalism. Such events threatened the idea that move-
ment participants were driving agents at all, individuals who directed
and shaped their own political institutions. It also underscored the po-
tential dangers of presuming that the Populist Party represented the
people in their entirety and that its policies were synonymous with the
public will. As these institutions could be quickly co-opted, their asser-
tions of democratic legitimacy similarly could be employed by elements
within the coalition to quell dissent or to impose ends inconsistent with
republican ambitions. In other words, small groups could claim the lan-
guage of the "people" to substitute their own will for that of the public.

The Defeat of Anti-Colonial Thinking
The best example of the dark side of presuming to speak for the "people"
can be seen in the return of settler xenophobia. The overwhelming prob-
lem with the larger populist tradition, which tied Paine and Manning to
Watson and Powderly, was that throughout the nineteenth century most
white laborers usually understood their interests in the narrowest terms.
Such narrowness made the notion of an identity between part (laborers)
and political whole rest on profound modes of subordination. Due to a
pervasive politics of exclusion, the collective self-assertion of white pro-
ducers often had deeply destructive effects for social outsiders. The previ-
ous era of mass popular engagement, the Jacksonian period, may have
generated universal white suffrage, but it did so at the cost of further en-
trenching settlerism's colonial dichotomies. According to politicians and
judges like Taney, economic independence for white settlers rested on the
expropriation of native lands and the dependent work of nonwhites. By
using ethnic and gendered terms to define who counted as a free citizen,
Jacksonians drastically curtailed the liberating potential of protest and
mobilization. And during the late nineteenth century, whenever the agrar-
ian revolt faced strain or potential defeat, these tendencies reemerged.
They did so in ways that not only undermined the broadly emancipatory
claims of the movement but also made Populists appear more like a mob
than a collection of free and autonomous citizens.

Even during the heyday of the movement, old exclusivities were evi-
dent in the primary, although not sole, orientation toward the Chinese.
Due to anti-Chinese sentiment, the Omaha Platform had called for a re-
striction on "undesirable emigration" and included a ban on alien land
holding. Yet it is important to note that for radical Populists who sup-
ported the ban, its main purpose was not nativist. Men like Jerry Simp-
son saw no inconsistency between opposing alien landholding and argu-
ing against Chinese exclusion: "I believe . . . that the gates should be
thrown wide open, so that any man on the face of God's earth who de-
sires to improve his condition and better his fortune shall be permitted to
make his home here in this land." This was because in the same plank
that contained the alien ban, the party also demanded the redistribution
to poor farmers of most land currently owned by railroad companies.
Populists argued that corporations, which did not occupy or produc-
tively use land, should not be able to claim absolute title to it — a point
reiterated by the Knights of Labor who called in 1889 for an end to all

land held for speculation. Radical Populists thus saw the provision against
"aliens" as centrally aimed at foreign corporations, who like American
companies had accumulated western land illegitimately and were now ab-
sentee landlords. 70

However, in the wake of political defeat, such proposals increasingly
jettisoned their initial purpose of challenging corporate dominance, both
domestic and foreign. Instead, alien land laws became yet another way to
promote settler supremacy and to deny nonwhites the benefits of free
citizenship. As implemented in western states in the early decades of the
twentieth century, these laws did not limit corporate speculation but
rather barred possession by "aliens ineligible for citizenship." 71 They
served to disinherit Asian immigrants and to divest them — much like
free blacks under frontier land grants — of access to the nation's land
reserve and therefore of the possibility of republican inclusion. In es-
sence, rather than sustaining a robust critique of economic hierarchy
and subordination, all that remained of Populist policies appeared to be
their most troubling implications as settlers fell back on old methods of
dispossession.

In this context, so-called nativist politics flourished, with white labor-
ers steadily abandoning even the commitment to open European immi-
gration, one of the few inclusive elements of the old settler narrative.
Terence Powderly spent the final years of his life serving as U.S. commis-
sioner general of immigration from 1897 to 1902 and later as chief infor-
mation officer of the Bureau for Immigration from 1907 to 1921. An
Irish Catholic himself, to the end of his life Powderly refused to embrace
xenophobic justifications for barring southern and eastern Europeans or
measures like the literacy test. The latter he viewed as casting aspersions
on the capacity of those without formal education to be free citizens and
thus as an assault on the ideal of republican equality. Still, over time,
Powderly's concern with "imported" workers, echoed by other labor lead-
ers, developed into a general rejection of "unnatural," "induced," or
"assisted" labor and created a climate in which immigration restrictions,
particularly for culturally dissimilar groups, could grow ever more com-
prehensive. 72 In essence, Powderly was unable to make fully compatible
his desire for an open and inclusive polity with concerns about economic
competition. As a result, while he continued to defend in principle the
ideal of free movement for all Europeans, in political reality he helped set
the stage for its decisive repudiation. He did so by expanding the ratio-
nales and practices of border exclusion and postentry social control.

Even more so than issues of immigration, questions of black-white
labor unity strikingly highlighted the limits of settler freedom. The ease
with which white farmers in the South, the heart and soul of the agrarian
movement, accepted the wholesale disenfranchisement of blacks and the
rise of institutionalized segregation starkly underscored the constraints
of Populism. In 1904 Tom Watson began his long conversion from staunch
egalitarian to Democratic Party boss and white supremacist. Running as
the Populist candidate for president, Watson called for Democratic poli-
ticians in his home state of Georgia to pass a constitutional amendment
that would remove blacks from the voting rolls. Watson, a long-time op-
ponent of just such measures, defended his new position on two counts.
First, the "bugaboo of Negro domination" meant that "The white people
dare not revolt so long as they can be intimidated by the fear of the Negro
vote." Second, according to Watson black votes were routinely employed
by the powers that be in Georgia to defeat meaningful reform. "In Georgia
they do not dare disenfranchise him [black voters], because the men who
control the democratic party machine in Georgia know that a majority
of the whites are against them. They need the Negro to beat us with." 73
Watson expressed the disappointment shared by white farmers with the
tentativeness with which Southern blacks greeted the Populist Party.
Confronted by a campaign of coordinated terror organized by Demo-
crats, most blacks were hesitant to stake their personal security on an
alliance with whites, many of whom only recently had been invoking the
language of racial supremacy and defending the "lost cause" of Southern
secession. Yet, for Watson and others, the black community became an
easy scapegoat for the failures of Populism. Not unlike the colonial fear
of a subservient slave population in English hands, freed blacks were
now depicted as culturally attuned to domination. Black votes could be
manipulated and used by powerful commercial interests, it was argued,
because the group as a whole did not possess the capacity to act autono-
mously and to assert republican freedom. Once again, the presumption
that settler liberty was distinctively ethnic reinforced a willingness to fall
back on old racial exclusions.

In 1904 Tom Watson still believed that once all white laborers could
be organized to transform the prevailing status quo, blacks would then
be reenfranchised and white supremacy eliminated for good. Nonethe-
less, this willingness to sacrifice the basic rights of a million Georgians to
the long-term cause of republican freedom suggested the deep shortcom-
ings of his formulation. At the most basic level, Watson presumed that

white workers ultimately could not be counted on to think collectively in
terms of the people as a whole. Rather than pursuing the interest of all
laborers, when faced with ethnic divides most white settlers would disre-
gard the common bonds forged through productive work. This meant
that in the final analysis, even under the account offered by Watson —
once the great articulator of radical democracy — the laboring commu-
nity was exposed as a partial interest, unable truly to represent the peo-
ple in their totality.

In essence, while the settler experience suggested an egalitarian and
emancipatory discourse, it also undermined the agrarian movement's
very claim to universality. If anything, this ambiguity within Populism
discredited its vision of a mobilized popular will, one that was actually
constituted within society and armed with a sense of shared public inter-
est. By the 1910s, "Tom Watson Populism" had become a slur, little more
than a ready base of supporters who could be counted upon for acts of
violence and intimidation — be it against Catholics, Jews, or blacks. If
anything, the "people" seemed almost overnight to have been trans-
formed into a disorganized mob, pliable to leaders who played on divi-
sive animosities and an anger bred by destitution. Nothing better illus-
trated this turn of events than Watson's use of hate mongering to spur the
lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish man framed for the murder of fourteen-
year-old factory girl Mary Phagan. 74

As for the critique of empire, with Populism becoming dominated by
wealthier agrarian interests in the south and the west, Watson's own thor-
oughgoing anti-imperialism became an outlier position within the elected
party. The party leadership called for the opening of external markets to
American agriculture and defended a foreign policy structured around
economic and commercial expansion. 75 Radical leaders like Watson were
no doubt wary of this turn and believed that it served the interests of
agricultural and corporate elites rather than poor farmers or industrial
laborers. They also appreciated that in the end American commercial
expansionism would be sustained by military authority — the capacity of
the state to impose an "open door" on recalcitrant governments in Latin
America and Asia. Therefore, calls for new markets went hand in hand
with arguments for greater naval power and a larger standing army —
precisely the instruments of militarization that republicans had long
viewed as threats to a free citizenry.

Yet, especially after 1896, much of the party was deeply demoralized,
and many elected officials, to the extent that they represented the old

movement at all, were wary of going against the prevailing tide of jingo-
ism, both in its territorially acquisitive and commercially expansionist
modes. In 1898, of the twenty-two Populist members in the House of Rep-
resentatives, only two — Simpson and Milford Howard — voted against
the Spanish-American War. 76 For the others, a yes vote was in part an act
of self-preservation, a reaction to fears that Republicans and Democrats
would tar the party with charges of being unpatriotic. Such self-
preservation did not ultimately succeed, as regardless of how they voted,
in the war's aftermath Populist House membership collapsed to only five
representatives — for all intents and purposes ending the party's presence
as a legislative force.

Even more problematically, the persistent specter of settler xenopho-
bia made what remained of the call against empire ring hollow. To the
end of his life, Watson opposed imperialism abroad as well as the Ameri-
can entry into World War I, which he believed would produce only mili-
tary despotism at home and the rise of an entrenched corporate oligar-
chy, not unlike colonial adventures in the 1890s. As C. Vann Woodward
writes, "It was his opinion that 'no king that ever lived wielded more
autocratic control than President Woodrow Wilson has demanded,' and
he was using that power to 'systematize universal goose-stepping.'" 77
When such arguments had been made in the context of defending an in-
clusive republican vision, the critique of empire became part and parcel
of a broader emancipatory project. But when combined with virulent
white supremacy, the same charge rang of parochial isolationism. By con-
ceding the ground of democratic equality, these arguments increasingly
allowed defenders of global expansion to carry the torch of universalism
and inclusion. As I will discuss in Chapter 4, anti-imperial arguments ap-
peared to resound in racial terms, while American global power gradu-
ally became cast by Wilson and both Roosevelts as a forward-looking
and tolerant enterprise.

This failure to discard settler ambiguities emphasized the difficulties
inherent in claiming to represent the "people" and greatly diminished the
attractiveness of the Populist movement to twentieth-century reformers.
For those who argued over the future of American freedom after the de-
feat of agrarian radicalism, the idea of democracy had to be purified in
ways that shed its linkage to the Watson mob. And if membership was
to be extended, for many this effort had to be pursued on grounds less
transformative and more amenable to the prevailing winds of economic
centralization.

Nonetheless, such failure hinted at an important point for the social
movements that emerged over the following century. The political prob-
lems of Populism underscored that the producing classes need not be
thought of as the only constituency capable of protecting republican free-
dom or of extending its domain to excluded groups. For those unwilling
to give up the idea of a mobilized popular agent standing behind govern-
ment, this fact suggested that various constituencies, rather than laborers
alone, had the capacity to represent the larger public through their con-
certed activity and to embody a democratic base committed to imposing
the general good. Depending on the historical moment, the interests of
different groups — for instance, consumer associations during the Progres-
sive period or blacks organized through the civil rights movement — may
well coincide with a more inclusive defense of self-rule. In the end, the
great tragedy of Populism had been its own inability to sustain precisely
such a defense. While Populism succeeded in highlighting the inadequa-
cies of settler frameworks, it failed to create a new postsettler society that
made sense of which ideological components should be safeguarded and
which ones eliminated.

The Immediate Response to Populism and the Goal
of Permanent Peace

During the height of industrial unrest and Populist revolt, political and
corporate elites appreciated that settler assumptions and institutions
seemed to be under severe strain. But for them, agrarian and labor pro-
test did not offer a potential solution; rather, it indicated a profound and
deeply troubling disintegration of collective life. Confronted by internal
crisis, many viewed an aggressive application of state violence within
settler society as necessary simply to maintain a fragile stability. In the
past, the ideology of settler empire had tied together two principal proj-
ects: those of republican freedom and permanent peace. Only by pacify-
ing the continent and eliminating all foreign threats would settlers se-
curely possess the territory needed for economic independence. According
to settlerism's millennial underpinnings, this expansionist project would
create a lasting condition of tranquility and would allow social insiders
to enjoy domestic liberty free from any external danger. Now, however,
with the continent pacified, for many judges and politicians the goal of
ensuring such tranquility no longer revolved around threats posed by
Native Americans or European rivalries. Instead, it focused on the effort

to subdue political and economic disorder at home — disorder occasioned
by new industrial conditions and the increasing disjunction for farmers
and workers between the expectation of independence and the experi-
ence of hierarchy and control. Therefore, creating a permanent republic
of peace involved an internal project of pacification, one that presup-
posed the domestic use of a flexible and discretionary government power.
Judges in particular came to believe that this power was best exercised
not by legislative majorities instituting labor's collective will but by insu-
lated executives able to respond quickly and overwhelmingly to social
chaos. In other words, pacification required both the internal application
of external prerogative and far greater political centralization within the
executive branch.

As with the Populist movement, this drive for social order worked to
undermine the dual framework of free citizenship and stratified subject-
ship that marked settler colonialism. While Anglo and European settlers
participated as equals in politics and enjoyed the protection of rights
granted to full social members, nonsettler populations were to varying
degrees subjects of an imperial authority derived originally from the Brit-
ish Crown. Although this relationship between subject and sovereign
assumed that both parties possessed obligations and rights, in practice
it provided settler government with extensive discretionary power. But
faced increasingly with the specter of social collapse, the need to contain
conflict meant softening the line that separated free citizen from stratified
subject. Thus individuals, regardless of ethnicity or race, slowly found
themselves confronting forms of discretionary rule historically under-
stood to be colonial. In the late eighteenth century, Anglo colonists re-
volted against British authority on precisely the grounds that the new
global empire imposed tyrannical power on all subjects, irrespective of
settler status. These settler colonists sought instead to defend a rigidly
hierarchical social order that provided insiders with extensive economic
and political freedom. Now, 100 years later, the United States — much
like the industrializing British Empire before it — had become a massive
polyglot society. Maintaining political and economic control in this set-
ting meant starting to extend exactly those modes of government pre-
rogative that had appeared earlier to bind royal subjects to monarchical
sovereigns.

This initial move involved the rise of executive authority, as under-
scored by key Supreme Court decisions during the late nineteenth cen-
tury. Yet many judges and lawyers continued to hope that extending such

discretionary power would actually defend the old free labor commit-
ments to republican self-rule. Like Populists, they sought to develop the
contours for a postsettler society that still maintained its links to ideals of
economic independence and free citizenship. In the end, however, these
actors could not square the circle between these emerging modes of au-
thority and their commitments to free labor orthodoxy. This orthodoxy
appeared inappropriate for the modern industrial age and indicated to
new generations of businessmen and politicians the need for an alterna-
tive narrative of both freedom and empire, one largely stripped of its reli-
ance on settler ideals.

Social Unrest and the Rise of Executive Prerogative
The doctrinal development during the 1890s of emergency powers inher-
ent in government highlighted the rising belief, on the part of elites, in the
need for internal discretionary authority. Confronting domestic crises
required a strong and potentially unchecked prerogative right, which could
be applied swiftly to impose social peace. Such goals were at the heart of
Justice Samuel Miller's 1890 majority opinion for In re Neagle, which
articulated both the fear of disorder and the desire to expand the legiti-
mate domain for state coercion. 78 The case concerned a disgruntled liti-
gant, David Terry, himself a former justice of the California Supreme
Court, who threatened to kill Justice Field while he sat on the federal cir-
cuit in California. After a foiled assault attempt on Field, Terry was shot
and killed by a U.S. marshall, David Neagle, assigned by the attorney
general to protect Field. As Terry remained a popular local figure, Neagle
was then charged with murder by the California government in a defiant
show of states' rights, prompting him to file a federal habeas motion for
unlawful detention. 79

In providing relief, Miller held that while no congressional statute
specifically authorized Neagle's actions, statutory authority could be in-
ferred from federal legislation giving U.S. marshals, when operating in
the states, the same authority as local sheriffs and deputies to execute the
laws. According to Miller, "If ... a sheriff of the State of California was
authorized to do . . . what Neagle did, ... to protect a judge from assault
and murder, then Neagle was authorized to do the same thing in refer-
ence to the laws of the United States." 80

While Miller could easily have concluded there, he continued by of-
fering a sweeping reading of the President's powers under the "take care"
clause of the Constitution. These powers (which applied to executive

appointees as well) extended beyond strict constructionism to "include
the rights, duties and obligations growing out of the Constitution itself,
our international relations, and all the protection implied by the nature
of the government under the Constitution." In essence, the president en-
joyed inherent emergency authority to address moments of unrest such
as threats to federal judges. Miller wrote, "It would be a great reproach
to the system of government of the United States, declared to be within
its sphere sovereign and supreme, if there is to be found within the domain
of its powers no means of protecting the judges." In so arguing, Miller
in effect imported the language of imperial prerogative to the domestic
realm and suggested that due to necessity the executive must possess pow-
ers greater than those stipulated by either the language of treaties or con-
gressional statutes. 81

Miller defended this position by hypothesizing that if U.S. mail carri-
ers, who like Justice Field were federal officials, were being systematically
"robbed," "assaulted," and "murdered," the president unquestionably
would have an inherent right to call out the militia and provide armed
military protection. 82 While the case itself never directly addressed the
problem of social conflict, Miller saw the need to establish discretionary
power in the executive as a means for protecting government institutions
and their officials and for maintaining public order.

Yet the goal of overcoming all internal threats came at a steep price.
By invoking the necessity for a flexible and robust emergency power,
Miller in one fell swoop abandoned the basic premise of structural du-
alism. According to him, social pacification seemed to require claiming
domestically all the power embedded in the imperial prerogative, in-
cluding — as his hypothetical illustrated — even the executive right to
employ military troops at home and without specified congressional
authorization.

Five years after In re Neagle, In re Debs made explicit the need for the
domestic application of imperial prerogative in order to confront indus-
trial strife. In 1894 the American Railway Union (ARU), led by Eugene V.
Debs, at the time a staunch Populist supporter, found itself spearheading
a widespread industrial strike against the Pullman Company to protest a
20 percent wage cut. The strike produced a stream of sympathy boycotts,
with railway employees across the country detaching Pullman cars and
halting those trains carrying them. Within days of the boycott, railway
traffic heading west from Chicago had been completely shut down. Ar-
guing that the strike obstructed the transportation of U.S. mail, President

Cleveland, acting on his own authority and without any congressional
authorization, sued to enjoin the strike. Then, against the wishes of the
governor and the mayor, both of whom maintained that the situation
was stabilizing, he ordered 12,000 federal troops to Chicago to enforce
the injunction. Cleveland's attorney general, Richard Olney, himself a
longtime railway lawyer and still a board member of various lines,
claimed that the president enjoyed this authority under the 1792 Insur-
rection Act, which once had been invoked by George Washington to sup-
press the Whiskey Rebellion. As a result, Debs and other officials of the
ARU were indicted in federal court and sentenced to prison, with Debs
ultimately serving a six-month term. On the streets, the injection of fed-
eral troops escalated the clashes, leaving over fifty civilians dead across
seven states. 83

In upholding the indictments and declaring constitutional the presi-
dent's unilateral injunction, Justice David Brewer's court opinion main-
tained that:

The entire strength of the nation may be used to enforce in any
part of the land the full and free exercise of all national powers
and security of all rights entrusted by the Constitution to its care.
The strong arm of the national government may be put forth to
brush away all obstructions to the freedom of interstate commerce
or the transportation of the mails. If the emergency arises, the
army of the Nation, and all its militia, are at the service of the
Nation to compel obedience to its laws. 84

No longer a hypothetical as with In re Neagle, for the Supreme Court,
the Pullman strike and its sympathy boycotts "assaulted" mail carriers
and threatened the very operation of government and the safety of its of-
ficials. Controlling labor unrest required investing the executive with in-
herent and unchecked emergency powers and constitutionalizing not
only the injunction but also the president's unilateral and domestic use of
the military to crush the strike. In other words, rather than focusing on a
statutory basis for the latter action or judicially assessing whether labor
protest amounted to an actual "insurrection," the Court provided near
limitless presidential authority to employ federal troops as the executive
saw fit in contexts of industrial disagreement.

For many Populists, the assertion of such power epitomized the seem-
ing transformation of republican citizens into dependent subjects. In the
same essay in which Tom Watson attacked territorial expansion and the

drive for global power, he singled out judicial decisions in the spirit of In
re Neagle and In re Debs as providing the legal justification for an Amer-
ican feudal order, one based on corporate interest and unchecked presi-
dential authority. "For the first time it is boldly declared, by Judicial deci-
sion, that organized Capital can coerce Labor, and that organized labor
is forbidden to make effective protest. The old baronial right to 'bind a
laborer to the soil' finds its twin-brother in this modern corporation right
to bind the laborer to his Engine." 85 For Watson, executive injunctions
and other acts of federal emergency power, made constitutional by the
Supreme Court, were the very heart of political despotism and laid bare
the moral dangers of imperial politics.

Besides underscoring the slippage between internal restraint and ex-
ternal prerogative, In re Neagle and In re Debs also articulated a subtle
shift in who properly exercised this prerogative. From the country's revo-
lutionary founding through the Louisiana Purchase and the Dred Scott
decision, questions of prerogative primarily concerned congressional
power. These questions revolved around whether legislative majorities
enjoyed a sovereign right derived from both royal precedents and the in-
herent nature of government. The historic solution had been to limit
this congressionally exercised prerogative to matters of territorial ex-
pansion and the control of excluded groups. However, the reality of so-
cial disorder meant that government action needed to be swift and flex-
ible, capable of responding to crises immediately and armed with all the
potential instruments of state violence. Since such power was most effi-
ciently exercised by the executive rather than the legislative branch, the
two Supreme Court decisions hinted at a gradual shift in both who
should wield prerogative rights as well as who could be subject to its
force.

Therefore, along with questioning the structural dualism of settler
life, legal developments suggested a reordering of governmental institu-
tions to pacify unrest and to crush labor protest more effectively. It was
not coincidental that the rise of executive prerogative took place pre-
cisely during an era when farmers and workers were threatening to take
over state and federal legislatures and to employ public power in ways
that challenged the emerging industrial order. The move to invest greater
discretionary authority in the executive branch was a direct effort to in-
sulate the instruments of state power from popular agitation and to pro-
tect government from being overrun by the forces of social disorder. As a
consequence, at the same time as they legitimated inherent emergency

powers in the president, judges also struck down popularly enacted mea-
sures, including worker's compensation efforts and maximum hour laws,
as illegitimate forms of legislative prerogative. For Populists like Watson,
such developments ushered in an age of "monarchy," with power insu-
lated from citizens and centralized in the hands of executives now willing
even to apply military force to impose corporate interests. 86

Industrialization, Wards of the State, and the Quaintness
of Free Labor Orthodoxy
For the justices defending the newly expanded presidential powers, how-
ever, the goal of pacification and the resort to executive prerogative were
meant to ward off rather than to promote despotism. Like the agricul-
tural and industrial workers organized by the Knights of Labor, the Alli-
ance, and the People's Party, Justices Miller and Brewer still held firm to
the settler belief that liberty was inextricably tied to productive control
and that economic independence was the ethical basis for free citizen-
ship. For them, this vision of independence remained wedded to the old
free labor belief in a laissez-faire market and a self-regulating commer-
cial society. The market embodied a privileged domain for freedom; they
believed that, if left to its own devices, it would ensure that all hardwork-
ing settlers became individual proprietors. Consequently, any interven-
tion into the labor contracts agreed to by individuals turned free citizens
into wards of the state, undermining their basic right to choose the terms
under which to work and disturbing the delicate operations of the market
itself. 87

The need to expand the domestic reach of the executive's prerogative
rights resulted precisely from the view that labor protest and agrarian
revolt threatened to destroy the commercial system on which free labor
orthodoxy was built. Under this view, inherent emergency powers actu-
ally defended republican freedom and the privileged domain of the mar-
ket from the real sources of despotism — social unrest and legislatures
seeking to placate labor. In other words, many on the courts intended the
shift from congressional to executive prerogative as a defense of free
labor and as a response to crisis conditions that threatened the very future
of economic liberty.

By exploring decisions such as the Slaughterhouse Cases (1873) and
Lochnerv. New York (1905), 88 as well as Supreme Court rulings assessing
the status of women and Indians, we can appreciate the persistence during
this period of judicial arguments rooted in such republican accounts of

free citizenship. Yet these court opinions, especially Lochner, also high-
light the ideological inadequacy of free labor orthodoxy given massive
social changes. As the Populist challenge made evident, with the rise of
wage labor, tenancy, and corporate consolidation, old free labor assump-
tions about commercial self-regulation could no longer cohere collective
life. Pacification appeared as simply the despotic assertion of executive
power, and legislative constraint embodied a judicial attack on democratic
self-rule rather than an effort to reduce settlers to dependent "wards." In a
sense, for pacification to be part of an emancipatory project, social elites
would have to develop new, more compelling rationales for government
coercion — and thus a new ethical basis for membership.

Justice Stephen Field's seminal dissent in the Slaughterhouse Cases il-
lustrated that in 1873 — before the full onslaught of industrialization —
the language of free labor orthodoxy and legislative constraint could still
express the social experiences of many laborers. The case concerned an
1869 Louisiana statute of incorporation, which granted a twenty-five-year
monopoly over the landing and slaughtering of animals in New Orleans.
While authorizing the chartered company to build a large slaughterhouse,
which for a reasonable price any butcher could use, the act also banned
the maintenance of any other abattoir. In response, some 200 butchers
excluded from the monopoly challenged the statute on grounds that it
violated the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments. In the Slaughter-
house Cases, a divided Supreme Court sustained the constitutionality of
the law, with Justice Miller declaring for the five-member majority that since
the "main purpose [of the amendments] was to establish the citizenship
of the negro," to extend their equal protection privileges to white butchers
"would constitute this court [as] a perpetual censor upon all legislation
of the States." 89

In dissent, Justice Field, a War Democrat from California, articulated
a basic Jacksonian wariness of state-mandated monopoly and the power
of government to establish privileges that benefited one group at the ex-
pense of another. For Field, placing internal limits on legislative power
ensured that all free republican citizens enjoyed the chance to compete
on an equal footing in a self-regulating market and thus to achieve eco-
nomic independence. According to him, "This equality of right, with ex-
emption from all disparaging and partial enactments, in the lawful pur-
suits of life ... is the distinguishing privilege of citizens of the United States.
To them, everywhere, all pursuits, all professions, all avocations are open."
In keeping with the republican framework, freedom was intertwined with

proprietorship and demanded that individuals be able to assert produc-
tive control over labor. The loss of such control embodied a "condition
of servitude" and meant that the individual "would not possess the liber-
ties nor enjoy the privileges of a freeman." Field invoked the right to
pursue one's calling in order to defend artisans and small property own-
ers from state-sponsored privilege and to reaffirm how work provided
the ethical basis for free citizenship. By stripping individual proprietors
such as butchers of the "fruits of [their] own labor," the Louisiana law
violated the foundational right of free labor, "one of the most sacred and
imprescriptible rights of man." 90

Field's arguments embodied a full-throated defense of artisanal pro-
duction and the compatibility between a laissez-faire market and repub-
lican freedom. As with classic settler assumptions, they were also grounded
on a fundamental distinction between those worthy of full membership
and those who were properly ruled as subjects. This became clear when
the day following the Slaughterhouse decision Field joined in Justice Jo-
seph Bradley's concurring opinion in Bradwell v. Illinois (1873). There
the court found constitutionally permissible an Illinois law that rejected
a woman's right to practice law based solely on grounds of gender. While
free labor and the right to pursue one's trade may have been bedrock
features of republican citizenship, they did not apply to those deemed
unfit for proper inclusion. Reiterating well-worn claims about the na-
tural and immutable paternal authority imposed on women, Bradley
declared:

The constitution of the family organization, which is founded in
the divine ordinance, as well as in the nature of things, indicates the
domestic sphere as that which properly belongs to the domain and
functions of womanhood. . . . The paramount destiny and mission
of woman are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and
mother. This is the law of the creator. 91

As paternal subjects, a status that paralleled imperial subjectship, women
were thus excluded from the benefits of economic independence. 92 In
fact, much like in his Slaughterhouse dissent, Field's willingness to con-
cur in Bradley's separate spheres argument evinced his Jacksonian stripes:
recall that a central means by which Jacksonians extended suffrage to all
white males was by reinforcing paternal hierarchies and describing hus-
bandly control at home as proof of male capacity for self-rule.

A year later, in Minor v. Happersett, the Court once again used the
question of women's status to reassert the governing divide between for-
mal citizens and free ones. By a unanimous vote, the Court ruled that
women had no constitutionally guaranteed right to vote based on their
formal position as citizens. Chief Justice Morrison Waite asserted that as
a purely legal category "citizen" simply carried with it the "reciprocal
obligations" between state and individual, in which a person owes the
state "allegiance and is entitled to its protection." In essence, formal citi-
zenship merely indicated which sovereign a person was tied to in rela-
tions of obedience. According to Waite, as a legal matter, "subject," "in-
habitant," and "citizen" were interchangeable, a name applied depending
on "convenience." 93 Rather than a right that attended to all subjects of
sovereign power, suffrage was granted only to specific categories of citi-
zens. Waite continued by explicitly aligning citizenship for women with
Coke's old feudal definition. As paternal subjects, women, like other groups
facing discretionary power, were presumed to be outside the bounds of full
membership. As a result, the state could impose various modes of preroga-
tive authority to maintain institutional structures compatible with their
natural dependency.

New jurisprudence toward Indians further developed the implications
of being both a "citizen" and a dependent of the state. In the late nine-
teenth century, with the continent largely settled, the U.S. government
found itself faced with the difficult question of how to treat the remain-
ing population of Native Americans. Its response was the General Allot-
ment Act, or Dawes Act (1887), which sought to transform the nature
and goals of reservation policy. Previously, and as articulated by Justice
Marshall in cases like Cherokee Nation and Worcester, the purpose of
the reservation was to maintain indirect colonial rule over an outsider
population. Now, by contrast, supporters of the Dawes Act hoped that
indigenous groups could be incorporated into American society in ways
that essentially mirrored the treatment of newly freed blacks. Following
the lead of Christian reformers like Francis Amasa Walker, the commis-
sioner for Indian affairs in the 1870s, the law attempted to destroy the
tribal system entirely and to give Indians formal U.S. citizenship. Accord-
ing to Ronald Takaki,

[The Dawes Act] gave the President power, at his discretion and
without Indians' consent, to allot reservation lands to individual

Indians in the amount of 160 acres to each family head. It also
conferred citizenship upon the allottees and any other Indians
who would abandon their tribes and adopt the "habits of civi-
lized life." In addition, the law permitted the federal government
to secure tribal consent to sell "surplus" reservation land — land
which remained after the allotment had taken place — to white
settlers in 160-acre tracts, and to hold money derived from such
sales in trust for the Indians, to be used for their "education and
civilization."

As the 1889 Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs ar-
gued, "tribal relations should be broken up, socialism destroyed, and the
family and the autonomy of the individual substituted." 94

The immediate consequence was devastating for native peoples and
involved the wholesale transfer of Indian lands to white farmers, land
speculators, and railroad corporations. In 1900, only thirteen years after
Dawes was passed, Native Americans had lost almost half of their land,
holding only 78 million acres of the 138 million possessed in 1887. 9S
And with Indians stripped of their property and tribal structures, similar
questions arose to those concerning women as well as emancipated
blacks and U.S. -born Chinese. To what extent did the provision of for-
mal citizenship for Indians mean the end of imperial prerogatives and the
provision of free citizenship? In language virtually identical to Bradwell
and Minor, the Supreme Court answered by reproducing the basic com-
bination of formal citizenship and substantive dependence. In United
States v. Celestine (1909), Justice Brewer asserted that citizenship did not
exempt Native Americans from exclusive federal jurisdiction, nor did it
necessarily bring with it all the privileges and immunities accorded other
U.S. citizens. According to Brewer, Congress had not meant "by the mere
grant of citizenship to renounce entirely its jurisdiction over the individ-
ual members of this dependent race." 96 And in 1916, Justice Willis Van
Devanter in United States v. Nice declared that "Citizenship is not incom-
patible with tribal existence or continued guardianship, and so may be
conferred without completely emancipating the Indians or placing them
beyond the reach of congressional regulations adopted for their protec-
tion." 97 In classic settler terms, prerogative authority legitimately could be
applied toward subject groups like Native Americans as part of an intri-
cate structure of control suited to fit the particularities of each dependent
population.

Still, under court jurisprudence and settler ideology, if state discretion
was justified for women, Indians, and blacks, it should never be employed
against free citizens — reducing them to the status of wards. In fact, it was
this desire by judges to limit prerogative power, and thus to protect repub-
lican freedom for privileged insiders, that produced an intense judicial
critique of economic regulation. For those on the Court, safeguarding
free citizenship increasingly meant policing legislative majorities, whose
economic actions mimicked the paternalism appropriate only for nonset-
tlers or women.

Nothing better illustrated this attempt to limit what was considered
to be economic paternalism than Justice Rufus Peckham's infamous deci-
sion in Lochner v. New York. However, while Peckham advanced argu-
ments largely congruent with those offered by Field, by 1905 the implica-
tions for most laborers were quite different, and consequently the vision
offered of paternalistic danger seemed deeply out of step with emerging
realities. As a result, the decision highlighted how both the judiciary's re-
sistance to legislative power and its defense of the market as a privileged
domain no longer coincided with workplace experiences.

The case itself concerned an 1895 New York state statute placing a
ten-hour limit on the workday and a sixty-hour limit on the work week.
Convicted of employing a baker for more than sixty hours, Joseph Loch-
ner appealed his case to the Supreme Court, which in another 5-4 deci-
sion struck down the law as a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment
and the liberty of contract. In dissent, Holmes accused the majority of
replacing the Fourteenth Amendment with "Mr. Herbert Spencer's
Social Statistics" and reducing the constitution to a defense of "an eco-
nomic theory which a large part of the country does not entertain,"
namely, conservative laissez-faire economics and its accompanying social
Darwinism. 98

Yet, in contrast to Holmes's charge, Peckham's opinion did not argue
that government activity somehow violated immutable laws of econom-
ics. Rather, he sought to defend the historic republican commitment to
economic independence by rejecting the perceived prerogative powers of
the legislature. For Peckham, such powers were appropriate only for
"wards of the state," those who were incapable of free labor and thus
liberty as self-rule. By contrast with such political dependents, who were
justly governed by discretionary authority, free individuals could "care for
themselves without the protecting arm of the state, interfering with their
independence of judgment and of action." Peckham viewed the bakers as

akin to artisans, small property owners, and professionals, whose right
to control their own productive labor was illegally compromised by leg-
islative majorities. In a sense, Peckham imagined that the social position
of New York bakers in 1905 was equivalent to that of Louisiana butch-
ers in 1873: independent proprietors struggling against the assertion of
state-sponsored privilege. Listing other petty entrepreneurs, Peckham
declared that unless such laws were declared unconstitutional, "A printer,
a tinsmith, a locksmith, a carpenter, a cabinetmaker, a dry goods clerk, a
bank's, a lawyer's, or a physician's clerk, or a clerk in almost any kind of
business, would all come under the power of the legislature, on this as-
sumption. No trade, no occupation, no mode of earning one's living,
could escape this all-pervading power." Maximum hour laws would even
affect employers and, most important, limit the ability of individuals to
realize themselves in their work by laboring strenuously and for long
duration on tasks they found meaningful. "Not only the hours of em-
ployees, but the hours of employers, could be regulated, and doctors,
lawyers, scientists, all professional men, as well as athletes and artisans,
could be forbidden to fatigue their brains and bodies by prolonged hours
of exercise." 99

However, the basic problem for Peckham 's argument was that his im-
age of the baker as an independent proprietor no longer reflected social
reality. The bakers in New York were neither petty entrepreneurs nor
journeymen on their way to status as master artisans but instead were
wage earners who worked long hours in sweltering and badly ventilated
factories. 100 As a result, strenuous labor did not embody an individual
commitment to developing a craft or to finding social meaning through
productive control. These workers were part of a sweating system, in
which factory owners sought to cut down on the costs of production by
extracting as much labor as possible from wage earners. Under such cir-
cumstances, popularly enacted laws were part of efforts by laborers them-
selves to reclaim control over the conditions of work, and not an attempt
by legislatures to transform free citizens into stratified subjects or wards of
the state akin to women or Native Americans.

The disjunction between free labor orthodoxy and industrial experi-
ence left the effort to pacify collective life, and to shift the center of dis-
cretionary power from the legislative to the executive branch, bereft of
an emancipatory rationale. With free labor incantations of hard work
and self-help made quaint by social change, it became more and more
difficult for politicians, judges, and corporate businessmen to employ the

expectations of individual proprietorship and productive control to jus-
tify emerging industrial norms or to provide an ethical foundation for
free citizenship. For order to be more than an end in itself, such elites
would have to imagine alternative ways to make the defense of domestic
tranquility compatible with a compelling vision of collective possibility.
Without such a vision, the retreat into free labor orthodoxy, now no lon-
ger meaningfully tied to social experience, would eviscerate republican
ideals of self-rule and independence.

Conclusion: Citizenship after Republican Freedom?

Written originally in 1860, Walt Whitman's "Facing West from Califor-
nia's Shores" not only crystallized the energy of settler expansion but
also prophetically expressed the restlessness and sense of incompleteness
that now marked late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America.
In the poem's concluding lines, Whitman eulogized the western frontier's
passing in language similar to that of Frederick Jackson Turner thirty
years later: "Long having wander'd since, round the earth having
wander'd, / Now I face home again, very pleas'd and joyous, / (But where
is what I started for so long ago? / And why is it yet unfound?)" 101 Such
words captured the national mythology of the pioneer settler, the arche-
typal American capable of building civilization out of the New World's
rugged wilderness. Yet, unlike Jefferson before him and Turner to come,
"Whitman also questioned, however implicitly, the basic premises of set-
tler society.

In Whitman's poem, pride in settler conquest was combined with deep
uncertainties regarding the ultimate value of empire. Territorial growth
had never been viewed as an end in itself but rather as a necessary pre-
condition for both settler liberty and permanent peace. Empire was inex-
tricably linked to a Utopian project, in which expansion would ensure all
free citizens enough land to become economically self-sufficient and
would provide the political community security from external threats. By
the time Whitman wrote "Facing West," it already appeared inevitable
that the principal goals of colonization would be accomplished. The con-
tinent was increasingly pacified and European states no longer presented
any meaningful challenge to global independence let alone to American
survival. Yet Whitman's pioneer settler, as he stared out at the Pacific
Ocean, seemed to have forgotten the purpose that had long motivated
expansion. Rather than being an incubator for settler democracy, the

imperial project appeared instead to have erased its own emancipatory
impulse. For the settler, not only had colonization failed to establish eco-
nomic and political freedom, but such goals had in fact disappeared from
memory. In their place, American empire, and its continual process of con-
quest and control, had become self-perpetuating — the primary and "joy-
ous" drive of the pioneer severed from any clear link to domestic tranquility
or to settler liberty.

It was this sense of the dramatic divergence between social expecta-
tions and social experience that framed political struggle in the 1880s
and 1890s. With settler ideology in crisis, agricultural and industrial
workers sought to institute a vision of permanent mobilization and mass
democracy, one that realized the aspiration to liberty as self-rule. Judges
and politicians, however, by and large saw this Populist vision as reduc-
ing the republic to chaos and threatening the very ideal of free labor.
Their immediate response was to assert the need for domestic tranquility
and to strengthen the internal uses of prerogative power, exercised more
and more by the executive rather than the legislative branch. Although
the project of restoring order was justified by the importance of free con-
tract to republican liberty, these claims rang hollow after a generation of
corporate consolidation and social strife — not only for the industrial poor
but also for greater numbers of urban professionals and businesspeople.

As such diverse individuals as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Teddy Roose-
velt, and Josiah Strong made clear, defending the new powers of the fed-
eral state and successfully repudiating the Populist vision of mass demo-
cratic politics would entail rethinking the moral value of the market
itself. For them, a destructive commercialism lay at the root of labor
protest and agrarian revolt; this commercialism sapped political mem-
bership of social value and made Americans both unwilling to sacrifice
for the national honor and disinclined to connect their own individual
strivings to the country's larger historical mission. These public intellec-
tuals sought to reassemble the old commitments to empire, freedom, and
permanent peace, but in ways that fundamentally altered if not discarded
settlerism. Promoting economic independence and republican freedom
no longer provided the rationales for expansion or international power.
Now economic prosperity and the state's ability to project itself globally
became their own justification. Rather than having membership be tied
to productive control over labor, the ethical ground for inclusion was
one's participation — through hard work, the vote, and war abroad — in a
global project of extending American influence and industrial wealth.

From the Spanish-American War to Progressivism to the New Deal,
various politicians, social reformers, and judges in the early twentieth
century sought to align American political and legal institutions with
those prevalent in Europe and drew directly on the forms of executive
prerogative constitutionalized during the Gilded Age. These actors em-
braced the new fluidity between free citizen and imperial subject and
viewed state power as able to mold an unruly mass of impoverished and
ethnically plural individuals into a unified national citizenry. Just as gov-
ernment asserted power internationally to maintain order and protect
national interests, it asserted power domestically to contain social con-
flict and to ensure that political participation was consistent with the
nation's larger goals. In a sense, this new American polity rejected the vi-
sion of Justices Peckham, Brewer, and Miller just as radically as it did that
of most Populists. If the great struggle of the preceding years had con-
cerned how republican freedom could be made compatible with industri-
alization and the end of slavery, the political response in the twentieth
century deemphasized the very ideal of freedom as self-rule — reducing it
from a central role in collective discourse to a voice of increasingly iso-
lated dissent.

LEBISCITARY POLITICS AND THE
NEW CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER

ing to speculate what might have been the results
had we been able to link spendi: le sentimen-

)gy. If we had been able to conquer Chicago, and im-
prove it as a national asset, we might have been more sensi-
ble in our operations. It is interesting to compare what we
were able to do in the Philippines under the ideals of humani-
tarian imperialism. . . . The imperialistic ideal coupled with
our natural humanitarian impulses permitted us to treat these
primitive people better than our own. We were not a
ruining their use we did not think of them as

equals who had characters to ruin. Therefore, we were able
to do many sensible things for the comfort and peace of our
little brown brothers. . . . One wishes that it were possible to
consider our own country as an asset today.

— Thurman Arnold, The Symbols of Government (1935)

In defending the internal uses of executive prerogative and in failing to
offer a compelling narrative of republican freedom under industrial con-
ditions, Supreme Court justices like Peckham, Brewer, and Miller inad-
vertently highlighted how thoroughly removed the country had become
from its settler roots. Incantations of free labor and assertions about
the evils of paternalism and special governmental privileges may have
persisted, but in fundamental ways the United States was no longer
legally, politically, or economically constructed as a project in settler
empire. In a sense, these judges — however unwittingly — emphasized
the basic predicament that would define American collective life for the
first four decades of the twentieth century: What constitutional struc-
tures should govern a postsettler society and what account of free-
dom could justify these structures and ground a new ethical basis for
citizenship?

Settlerism as an organizing political and constitutional system disinte-
grated slowly and in stages, and therefore it would be difficult to pinpoint
a single moment that marked its final end. The clearest legal and political
means by which one could perceive the demise of the old framework was
in the treatment of European immigrants, the historic engine of conquest
and territorial expansion. With the frontier largely settled, the place for
white immigrants in collective life became increasingly uncertain. With-
out a demographic need to populate new territories, the American com-
mitment to de facto open borders waned. Thus the first sign of a retreat-
ing settler politics was the gradual elimination of alien suffrage laws,
which had promoted immigration and fostered the quick inclusion of
Europeans as free republican citizens. In the final years of the nineteenth
century, states overwhelming rejected new proposals to enfranchise for-
eigners, with the last such proposal going down in defeat in Massachu-
setts^ 1917 constitutional convention. Even more strikingly, the Idaho
territory in 1874 became the first state or territory during the era to re-
peal its declarant alien voting law. These efforts snowballed in the initial
decades of the twentieth century, after McKinley's assassination in 1901
by an immigrant and concerns during World War I with foreign loyalty.
In 1926 Arkansas, the last state in the union to allow noncitizen voting,
repealed its alien suffrage law. 1 In essence, the United States had begun
to approximate Coke's old approach to the relationship between aliens
and sovereign subjects. Rather than being co-participants in a settler
colonial enterprise, white foreigners — at least prior to naturalization —
were outsiders properly governed through a legal regime distinct from
that for full members.

This increasing American conformity to the European model was fur-
ther brought home in immigration border policy, which emphasized the
federal government's near absolute power over the entrance and move-
ment of all noncitizens, regardless of race. In Oceanic Steam Navigation
Co. v. Stranahan (1909), involving a federal statute that authorized offi-
cials to prevent the entry of individuals carrying contagious diseases, the
Supreme Court went well beyond the specific facts of the case. In matters
of immigrant entrance, the justices rejected as a general matter a mean-
ingful role for judicial review of congressional action. As Justice Edward
White declared in his opinion for the Court, "over no conceivable subject
is the legislative power of Congress more complete than it is over . . . the
right to bring aliens into the United States." In fact, according to White
this power "embrac[ed] every conceivable aspect of that subject" and

suggested the legitimacy of wide-ranging controls vis-a-vis noncitizen
aliens. 2 In the past, Chinese exclusion had been premised on their inher-
ent unfitness for republican citizenship and had gone hand in hand with
the persistence of an open door for white immigrants as well as the avoid-
ance of exercising such plenary authority over them. However, by 1917,
with the premise of territorial expansion gone, the public increasingly came
to view all new immigrants, irrespective of ethnicity, as economic competi-
tors. That year the U.S. government finally established a literacy test for
new arrivals — the very measure Powderly had long fought against — which
supporters hoped would limit entrance especially by southern and eastern
Europeans. 3

In 1921 Congress then passed its first numerical quotas, restricting
annual immigration from each country to 3 percent of "the number of
foreign-born persons of such nationality resident in the United States
as determined by the United States census of 1910." Three years later
Congress passed the National Origins Act, further limiting entrance to 2
percent of the numbers already residing in the United States according to
the 1890 census. The law's central purpose and effect was to purify eth-
nically the population of new immigrants by reducing the quota for
southern and eastern Europeans. The law also explicitly excluded from
the quota system Asian immigrants — "aliens ineligible to citizenship and
their descendents" and blacks — "the descendents of slave immigrants." As
a result, it boosted the share of entrants from northern and western
Europe to 84 percent and essentially ended the legal immigration of many
nonwhite groups. 4

The racially discriminatory elements of the 1924 National Origins
Act, which have been discussed at length by historians, certainly helped
to perpetuate the idea of whiteness as crucial to full American inclusion. 5
Yet taken together the two quota provisions carried with them another
key implication. Even if American inclusion would continue to be de-
fined in racial terms, the limitation and control of European migrants
suggested that such racial hierarchies were embedded in a very different
institutional framework. In effect, all immigrants were now subject to the
discretionary and prerogative power of the federal government. Europe-
ans too, while at the top of this stratified hierarchy, found their free
movement curtailed and their presence in the United States managed by
an increasingly intrusive state authority. Just as with the constitutional
entrenchment of executive emergency power, immigration restrictiveness
had also undermined settler dichotomies. In asserting the legitimacy of

prerogative rights over European aliens, such restrictions organized pre-
vious settler insiders under the same rubric of control that applied to-
ward Indians, blacks, Chinese, and Mexicans.

This rubric was most evident in the extension of a postentry deporta-
tion system for all immigrants, which emerged during the 1920s. As Dan-
iel Kanstroom writes: "Deportation of 'aliens' without proper documents
became a major component of an increasingly large, bureaucratized de-
portation system. The total number of deportees rose from 2,762 in
1920 to 38,796 in 1929. From 1921 to 1930, of the more than 92,000
people deported, more than 36,000 were found to have entered without
proper documents, without inspection, or by fraud." 6 In fact, this broad-
based use of prerogative powers to remove large numbers of migrants
created a new category of "illegal aliens." Again, the idea of who counted
as illegal clearly was racialized in American politics, focusing particularly
on Mexican laborers recruited to work in the fields of the Southwest. 7
But even with the racial nature of deportation efforts, these policies made
apparent that all immigrants were under a plenary regime. Like previous
subject populations, recent arrivals from Europe found not only their right
to vote denied but their life before naturalization supervised by state au-
thorities with powers of exclusion and removal. Taken as a whole, govern-
ment efforts — marked by the end of alien voting, quota restrictions, and
deportation procedures — highlighted a remarkable break with practices
that had been pervasive since the seventeenth century.

In a sense, this shift fundamentally disconnected the imperial tie be-
tween territorial expansion and the internal provision of republican free-
dom. Without land out west to settle, not only was the demographic need
for new immigrants at an end, so too was the historic expectation that
empire would spur economic independence and self-rule for settler insid-
ers. Looking back at the long trajectory of expansion, conquest and the
related subordination of subject populations had undoubtedly spurred
a remarkably egalitarian community of free white citizens. Yet, with the
rise of new forms of economic and administrative power, it was also the
case that republican freedom continued to be elusive and the emancipa-
tory hope of settler empire ever more remote. The challenge for new
generations of Americans was to determine what framework would take
its place and which, if any, of the old settler commitments were worthy
of protecting.

In this chapter, I chart the twentieth-century development of a revised
account of liberty, viewing its culmination in the constitutional order

established by the New Deal. In the first section, I argue that in the de-
cades following the collapse of Populism, social critics and reformers,
including Walter Weyl and John Dewey, attempted to rebuild the intel-
lectual foundations of republican freedom through arguments about
universal education, leisure, and meaningful work. However, such goals
were swamped by the concurrent rise of state administrative power, espe-
cially in a context devoid of an engaged and self-assertive popular con-
stituency. With the defeat of agrarian protest and the demobilization of
its social base, political participation receded from collective life and — to
the extent that it remained — became increasingly divorced from actually
wielding power. As a consequence, full membership in the community
lost its ethical basis in either economic independence or democratic self-
government. As I illustrate in the second section, expansionists like
Theodore Roosevelt and Josiah Strong sought to fill this ethical void by
focusing on the rise of U.S. global power, imagining that this power
could provide Americans with a sense of shared purpose and collective
meaning.

In the remainder of the chapter, I describe how New Deal policymak-
ers connected these imperial yearnings to emergent accounts of political
authority and the meaning of citizenship. I argue that this new order el-
evated security as society's guiding commitment, as a replacement for the
old and now increasingly distant goal of participatory control. In the
early years of the twentieth century, Dewey and other radical Progressives
had defended such security — particularly in the sense of extensive social
and economic provisions — as a central precondition for economic inde-
pendence and republican self-rule. However, with these broader ideals in
retreat, New Deal officials often transformed security into an end in it-
self. And in the process, they argued that liberal administration rather
than popular control was the best instrument for providing a stable in-
come and for serving fundamentally humanitarian ends. As for externa
relations, these policymakers also sought to reimagine territorial expan-
sion in the service of settler freedom as global hegemony in search ol
permanent peace. Over time, the institutional basis for the emerging pol-
ity became an empowered presidency, which functioned as an authorita-
tive body representing and constructing the public will. In fact, this
strengthened executive entailed the routinization of the imperial preroga-
tive within domestic politics and the everyday operations of government.

If, as I have argued, the American Revolution sought to defend repub-
lican freedom against an encroaching and centralizing metropole, the

twentieth-century polity eventually exemplified precisely the dissolution
between free citizen and stratified subject that so troubled Anglo colo-
nists. Moreover, these developments suggested a remarkable inversion of
means and ends, both at home and internationally. Whereas empire his-
torically was intended to be the servant of freedom as self-rule, American
power increasingly appeared unmoored from a guiding purpose besides
its own extension. Rather than sustaining the political or workplace au-
thority of free citizens, the imperative of maintaining the country's global
power operated primarily to reinforce internal corporate and state hier-
archies. And if Progressives had hoped that economic security would
enhance popular knowledge and capacities for self-rule, the language of
security instead became largely disconnected from a clear emancipatory
vision.

Modern Complexity and Self-Rule
in the Progressive Imagination
With Progressivism replacing Populism as the paramount reform move-
ment, activists emerged who like their predecessors struggled with the vi-
ability of republican freedom under fundamentally altered conditions.
The increasing bureaucratic complexity of government and the economy
had generated a plethora of new social groups and occupational catego-
ries, from salaried employees to lawyers, doctors, social workers, and
teachers. As members of these new middle classes, many Progressive in-
tellectuals saw a basic incompatibility between the producerism of the
nineteenth century and the institutional realities of the times. For think-
ers like John Dewey, who surveyed a political landscape that held little in
common with his Vermont youth in the 1860s and 1870s, the central
goal of social reform remained the drive to reconcile self-rule with the
industrial age. However, this could not be achieved by simply reasserting
the policy prescriptions of Jacksonian or Populist radicals. Economic in-
dependence may well have been central to republican liberty, but it
would not be achieved for the majority of Americans through small-scale
farming or by addressing factory labor without also addressing new forms
of bureaucratic employment.

For Progressives, this fact was brought home by the urban experience.
Fewer and fewer individuals were traditional "producers" in their eco-
nomic lives; furthermore, they faced no foreseeable likelihood of joining
that category. Given the changing nature of work, alternative bases had

to be found to sustain old republican goals. As a consequence, Progres-
sives sought to take advantage of new instruments of statecraft, particu-
larly redistributive tools and public education, to challenge the bureau-
cratic division of labor and to foster those qualities of character that had
long rooted free citizenship. In this section, I detail their intellectual ef-
forts to reconcile freedom as self-rule with emerging workplace and po-
litical conditions. I also illustrate how, by failing to tie their vision of in-
dependence to a mobilized and self-assertive popular constituent, they
ultimately set the stage for a robust state power increasingly untied to
democratic accountability. Over time, the Progressive effort to bind mod-
ern life to republican ideals was whittled down to its elevation of admin-
istrative authority. To the extent that a larger ideal persisted, it rested in
the transformation of security from a means for achieving self-rule into a
guiding social end.

Weyl, Croly, and Republican Freedom for a New Age
In the years before World War I, Herbert Croly and Walter Weyl, co-
editors of the New Republic, began to sketch the contours of a distinct
framework for republican freedom, one that sought to address straight-
forwardly the realities of bureaucratic complexity and to move away from
populist reliance on the producing classes as society's primary demo-
cratic agent. 8 For both Croly and Weyl, the United States stood at an
ideological and historical crossroads. The key question confronting the
country — as it had long been — was how to defend the promise of eco-
nomic independence. This independence faced intense, perhaps unsus-
tainable, pressure due to the sheer size of modern industrial life and the
steady decline of homesteading as a means for entrenching both free la-
bor and participatory citizenship.

In words reminiscent of Frederick Jackson Turner, Croly wrote of the
old settler paradigm, "The American pioneer or territorial democrats
were, according to their own lights, freemen in both the economic and
political sense." The availability of land provided the "promise of ulti-
mate economic independence" — productive control and a daily experi-
ence in moral and material autonomy. Yet, at the beginning of the twen-
tieth century, the concentration of corporate capital had "converted the
American people from a freeholding into a wage-earning democracy."
For Croly, wage earning was work stripped of self-rule and dependent on
the employer's whim. It had come to define the economic position not
merely of factory laborers but of most employees of corporate and state

institutions. Such wage earning provided no education in autonomy and
embodied a critical retreat from democratic ideals. According to Croly,
not unlike Brownson and Powderly before him, the nation's basic pre-
dicament was "How can the wage-earners obtain an amount or a degree
of economic independence analogous to that upon which the pioneer
democrat could count?" 9

In his 1912 book The New Democracy, Weyl responded to this di-
lemma by focusing on the central achievement of the industrial age, the
creation of profound economic abundance — what he called "the social
surplus." Weyl viewed such abundance as "a phenomenon of transcen-
dent importance." According to him, most of human history had been
marked by scarcity and the struggle for subsistence. But modern prosper-
ity meant that enough social wealth existed in a burgeoning industrial
society to liberate all individuals from concern with bare necessity. Just
as important, it entrenched a "moral idea" in the public imagination:
wealth should be employed not solely to eliminate abject poverty but
also to promote a "fuller life" for all. This idea of a fuller life, grounded
in political self-rule and personal development, constituted the backbone
of democracy and only now had become actually achievable for the
larger public. Weyl wrote, "Without an excess of wealth no democracy
on a large scale" could exist, no matter how "much men might dream
dreams or voices cry aloud in the wilderness." 10

Thus society's basic task was twofold: the continued generation of
this abundance and, crucially, its redistribution away from centers of ex-
cessive wealth and toward the greater community. As with the populist
tradition, Weyl argued for an energetic government authority intervening
decisively in economic relations, one which "view[ed] . . . our manifold
business life from the standpoint of society and not solely from that of
the present beneficiaries or directors of industry." This redistributive state
was necessary because "The creation of a social surplus . . . does not au-
tomatically or immediately give rise to a socialized democracy. It creates
merely the opportunity for such a democracy." In terms reminiscent of
the old Omaha Platform, Weyl imagined a variety of means for managing
national wealth, from tax policy to government ownership of selected
industries. The ultimate goal was the "attainment by the people of the
largest possible industrial control and of the largest possible industrial
dividend." 11

At the most basic level, Weyl hoped that popular oversight would cre-
ate an expansive social safety net, such that destitution would finally

disappear. Yet he also realized that actual independence — the elimination
of arbitrary authority as exercised by political and economic elites —
required more than simply freedom from necessity or a stable income.
Individuals had to gain control over new, seemingly all-powerful social
forces. This involved possessing the cultural skills and material resources
required to make sense of their condition and to intervene meaningfully
in collective life. For Weyl, social realities in the nineteenth century had
made it relatively easy for settlers to gain these skills without extensive
government involvement. Homesteading and artisanal production pro-
vided a continual training in the habits of character essential for indepen-
dence. Moreover, given the limited scale of economic and political orga-
nization, most decisions that affected an individual's daily experience
were made locally. Not only were these decisions readily apparent and
understandable to ordinary citizens; settlers had immediate access to the
primary decision-making bodies, such as legislatures and local courts. By
contrast, in the twentieth century, dramatic shifts wrought by industrial-
ization and bureaucratic hierarchy had made obsolete the social back-
drop that promoted small-scale producerist democracy. As a result, gov-
ernment would have to play more than just a redistributive role; it also
would have to revive the cultural resources necessary for self-rule.

According to Weyl, this meant that the social surplus should be em-
ployed to provide a universal and free education to all, from kindergar-
ten through university. The goal of such education was not social mobil-
ity for a talented few or enhancing the country's competitive prospects
abroad but the thorough democratization of intelligence, by which ev-
eryone developed the capacities to recognize their own interests and to
pursue personal and public goals. Just as Manning had once hoped that
a Society of Laborers would produce a virtuous and elevated laboring
constituency, Weyl imagined a new system of education "creating] a revo-
lutionary force in the community of astounding power and magnitude."
This democratic knowledge would allow ordinary men and women to
reclaim control "in their industrial pursuits, in their political activities,
and in their private life outside of industry and politics." 12

In these arguments concerning education, Weyl invoked a founda-
tional component of the nineteenth century's populist tradition: the idea
that labor and learning should not be compartmentalized between sepa-
rate classes, with a majority consigned to a life of hard work and a select
minority enjoying the privileges of culture. In the 1840s, Brownson had
asserted that liberty as self-rule would be impossible so long as there ex-

isted "a learned class and an unlearned, a cultivated class and an unculti-
vated, a refined class and a vulgar, a wealthy class and a poor." He main-
tained that the Aristotelian benefits of leisure — time for self-reflection,
political engagement, and the enjoyment of ideas — should be widely ex-
tended and, in the process, should nullify the "division of society into
workingmen and idlers, employers and operatives." 13

Weyl updated these claims by insisting that alongside education, free-
dom under industrial conditions also required the democratization of
leisure. He saw around him employees working virtually endless hours.
Factory laborers, in particular, were denied the opportunity to develop
the basic qualities of character essential for free citizenship, let alone the
time to participate fully in public life. In his view, it was "better" to live
"as 'sturdy beggar' or a vermin- infested tramp than a desiccated toiler
who works twelve hours a day, seven days a week, fifty-two weeks in a
year." To the extent that most individuals were consigned to a life of long
hours and permanent drudgery "without leisure or quiet development,"
they were fundamentally unfree. 14 Thus Weyl argued that only if equipped
with a stable income, a proper education, and enough leisure time for
self-development would individuals in the new economy have the capacity
and the opportunity to exercise meaningful political control. In essence,
Weyl presented the parameters of a Progressive reframing of republican
ideas, focused around the emancipatory possibilities offered by economic
abundance.

In responding to Weyl, Herbert Croly found one key element missing
from this account: actual and immediate self-government. In Progressive
Democracy (1914), Croly defended the importance of direct participa-
tion in economic and political life. In particular, he believed that Weyl's
approach failed to address fully the problem of dependent work — work
carried out under conditions in which the laborer or employee had lim-
ited control over his or her own activities. Croly worried that Progressive
reform had drifted increasingly toward a primary focus on social insur-
ance alone. Indeed, Weyl and others proposed

to insure [the individual] against unemployment, sickness and old
age, to guarantee to him wholesome conditions of work, and to
make it impossible for a faithful worker to be paid less than a fair
minimum wage. They expect to enable the wage-earner to keep his
head above water and to prevent him from being submerged by
the vicissitudes of his health and work.

While economic security may have been a precondition for freedom, as
long as most Americans were denied a participatory role in industrial
decision making "the relation of dependence" between employer and em-
ployee "remain[ed]." For Croly, "The emancipation of the wage-earner
demand[ed] . . . [that] the same comparative control over his own destiny
shall be attached to his position as to that of the property owner." 15

Croly asserted that over the long haul Weyl's deemphasis on work-
place participation would diminish democratic authority more generally.
Despite universal education and enhanced leisure time, if individuals
spent most of their lives consigned to executing tasks directed from above
they would hardly become free citizens fit for self-rule. As a consequence,
forces wary of democratic ideals would inevitably argue that since most
people rarely engaged in actual decision making they lacked the neces-
sary expertise for such responsibility. Social ends could be "accomplished
with less friction and delay through the agency of an authoritative repre-
sentative body." 16 Employers and politicians would therefore press for
the creation of a single, unified institution to speak on behalf of the people,
without being subject to the vicissitudes of popular disagreement or the
chaos of mob rule.

For Croly, this end result meant abandoning republican liberty and
compelling ordinary Americans to retreat from arenas of social power.
He worried that some Progressives "attach[ed] too much importance to
the accomplishment and maintenance of specific results, and too little
to the permanent moral welfare of the democracy." Democracy at root
was an experience in collective popular control, one that required indi-
viduals to exercise actual economic and political authority and to be
habituated to the rigors and responsibilities of this power. Referring to
administration from above, he wrote, "The program which is carried
out by such means will do nothing to make the people worthy of their
advantages. The result will either be popular servility or organized popu-
lar resistance or both." The only way of avoiding these outcomes was to
combine "direct democracy" in politics with "an industrial self-governing
democracy" at work. 17

Such industrial democracy required that "freedom must somehow be
introduced in the wage-system itself." Holding on to an ideal of a coop-
erative commonwealth, Croly asserted that economic independence en-
tailed nothing less than having industrial workers "being responsible as a
group of self-governing communities for the proper organization and

execution of the productive work of society." Given the complexity of
industrial life, Croly believed that a powerful new unionism, intricately
involved in all the basic decisions of economic production, offered the
best available avenue for meaningful self-rule. He hoped that unions
would become an instrument for breaking the employer's monopoly on
decision making. In this way, labor representatives and democratically
elected legislators would ensure that the community as a whole, rather
than a narrow interest, would be instrumentally involved in setting
wages, working conditions, and production goals. As a result, industrial
labor would not merely carry on the old master-servant relationship,
with employers unilaterally dictating the primary contours of work life.
Just as important, the actual struggle by workers to create powerful
unions would embody an "active effort on behalf of an increasing mea-
sure of self-government"; the process of building workplace solidarity
and union institutions would become its own unique training ground in
republican freedom. 18

Clearly Croly's industrial unionism, large scale and concentrated, had
the potential to be a potent tool for challenging the absolutism of em-
ployer rule and for pursuing economic redistribution. Yet at the same
time it did not seem as well equipped for Croly's key task, namely, for
providing all workers in their daily experience an opportunity to exercise
control over critical workplace decisions. This vision had been precisely
what the old artisanal model provided, and its loss was what Croly now
lamented. Rather than being participatory, however, Croly's industrial
unionism appeared ultimately to be a centralized and largely representa-
tive vision, with authority focused at the top in workshop leaders who
would bargain over demands and provide an agenda for industrial con-
flict. As most workers would have a limited direct role in setting the
terms of economic production, one could only wonder how concentrated
unions would promote the old cooperative ideal. In essence, Croly ap-
preciated the seeming permanence of administrative complexity but did
not imagine ways to challenge a rigid division of labor between empow-
ered decision makers and largely passive workers. His focus on unionism,
while certainly an aid in breaking employer hegemony, would not alone
make the workplace less hierarchical or less dominated by elite rule. With-
out additional measures, such unionism by itself did not actually devolve
power but simply multiplied the number of elites involved in decision
making.

Dewey, Kallen, and Democratizing Intelligence and Leisure
Taken together, Croly and Weyl suggested the diverse components of a
new republican vision — components that other reformers highlighted
and integrated. In works like Democracy and Education (1916) and The
Public and Its Problems (1927), Dewey combined Weyl's ideas about
democratizing intelligence with Croly's focus on actual participation in
all collective institutions. In the process, he attempted to respond directly
to the problems of hierarchy in the division of labor and to imagine aids
to unionism that might alter the elite-driven nature of modern work.
Dewey referred to the prevailing social paradigm of corporate power and
bureaucratic complexity as the "Great Society," an impersonal and in-
creasingly authoritarian end product of the machine age and technologi-
cal development. Yet, like Weyl and Croly, he believed it was still possible
to transform the "inchoate public" into a completely realized democratic
polity organized around republican principles. As with nineteenth-century
defenders of the cooperative commonwealth, Dewey called for continu-
ous popular self-rule, which he hoped would marry the ideal of pluralism
with personal, political, and economic autonomy:

From the standpoint of the individual, it consists in having a re-
sponsible share according to capacity in forming and directing the
activities of the groups to which one belongs and in participating
according to the need in the values which the groups sustain. From
the standpoint of the groups, it demands liberation of the potenti-
alities of members of a group in harmony with the interests and
goods which are common.

Dewey imagined as the driving social force the free citizen, who "finds
his conduct as a member of a political group enriching and enriched by
his participation in family life, industry, scientific and artistic associa-
tions." Thus the primary goal of politics was to transform the "Great
Society" into a "Great Community" where the full potential of human
achievement and democratic cooperation would be unleashed. 19

Dewey believed that a central means for achieving this goal was not
only strengthening unionism but also attacking the increasingly strict di-
vide at work between managerial jobs and those that reduced most em-
ployees to the performance of rote mechanical tasks. New economic re-
alities may have made the division of labor an unavoidable feature of
collective life, but it was still possible to reduce its inflexibility and to

provide a far greater diffusion of practical responsibility. He hoped that
by creating avenues within the daily exercise of work for employees to
act creatively and independently, new oligarchies of power would be pre-
vented from taking root. As a consequence, no group of educated elites
would be able to claim a monopoly on useful knowledge and practical
authority. Dewey thus argued that confronting the pathologies embed-
ded within a hierarchical and corporate division of labor should be at the
forefront of any republican agenda:

The price that democratic societies will have to pay for their con-
tinuing health is the elimination of an oligarchy — the most exclu-
sive and dangerous of all — that attempts to monopolize the bene-
fits of intelligence and of the best methods for the profit of a few
privileged ones, while practical labor, requiring less spiritual effort
and less initiative, remains the lot of the great majority. 20

According to Dewey, a truly democratic community had to combine
the activity of "producing commodities and rendering service" with the
experience of "self-directive thought." As a consequence, it needed an
educational system attuned precisely to these needs. This system had to
focus on intertwining "culture and utility" in a manner that provided
individuals not only with book learning but with the everyday skills to
make decisions in the workplace. 21 In essence, Dewey embraced Weyl's
vision of universal education and tied it explicitly to the question of the
modern industrial and bureaucratic life. Dewey took as given that even
truly transformative social change, what he called a "practical re-formation
of social conditions," would not bring back the Jacksonian world of pro-
ducerism and local democracy. 22 Although that world may have disap-
peared forever, it was still possible to elevate popular capacities and to
infuse work and politics with the experience of self-rule. In this way, the
Great Community — a society that refused to cleave individuals "into a
learned and an unlearned class, a leisure and a laboring class" — nonetheless
could be achieved. 23

If Dewey tied arguments about education to a restructured division of
labor, philosopher Horace Kallen suggested the radical implications of
Weyl's other hope of democratizing leisure. 24 For Weyl, expanding leisure
primarily meant reducing the hours spent working, so that individuals
had time for personal improvement and political action. Kallen argued
that such a perspective missed the implicit goal that had long been at the
heart of republican ideas of economic freedom. This implicit goal was

nothing less than transforming labor itself into an extension of leisure.
By leisure, Kallen meant those activities that individuals engaged in out
of their own intrinsic value to self and society rather than due to the dic-
tates of necessity. For labor to become leisure, he believed that two basic
problems had to be addressed. First, this aim required confronting the
fact that while some forms of work were essential, they had limited
potential for self-fulfillment. In his view, although menial jobs had to be
undertaken, social wealth should be employed to reduce the hours that
individuals spent performing these jobs to a bare minimum. Even more
important, such work should be distributed so that no individual or con-
stituency was consigned to their permanent execution — as historically
subordinated groups had long been — and therefore did not have oppor-
tunities to engage in self-fulfilling activity.

Second, Kallen held that society also needed to establish "freedom in
the factory." In keeping with both Dewey and the old cooperative ideal,
he meant that employees must be able to take part in basic decision mak-
ing and to engage creatively with the critical tasks and projects before the
company. According to Kallen, "Whatever else industrial democracy
could mean it could not mean anything less than this participative real-
ization of the entire process of production, its conditions, its means, and
its results." He hoped that by giving individuals control over their work
life and by extending the independent time they had for personal devel-
opment, the boundaries separating labor and leisure would begin to blur.
As with the broader nineteenth-century populist tradition, Kallen argued
that such a society could emerge only if social skills and knowledge were
widely distributed. Equipped with these tools, individuals would have
the basic capacities to experiment in the economic arena as well as to
collaborate in pursuing new creative and political endeavors. For Kallen
this generalized way of life was the final fulfillment of long-standing re-
publican ambitions. It meant that economic "tasks [would be] freely
chosen, illumined by understanding, and made personal ... by conscious
participation of each in all, serving to liberate [one's] powers and skills
instead of enslaving them." 25

In a sense, Dewey, Kallen, Croly, and Weyl each elaborated the out-
lines of how industrial and political complexity could remain bound to
republican freedom. They all emphasized the centrality of using economic
abundance not simply to eliminate the worst forms of social misery but
also to create an educated, economically independent, and self-assertive
public community. This community would have both the resources to

make decisions at work and in politics, as well as the time to pursue new
projects of personal and collective improvement. Although the old condi-
tions necessary for self-rule — farming and artisanal production — may have
largely disappeared, this did not mean that self-rule as such had to vanish
with them. Still a basic question remained: which groups within society
could be counted on to promote this vision of social possibility? Just as
with many active in the Populist movement, Weyl and others presumed
that democracy required the permanent and energetic involvement of its
members. Absent a galvanized and vigilant constituency, the specter ex-
isted of a society unleashing the powers of state authority without the
popular means to restrain or direct this capacity. As the following pages
underscore, the central responses provided by Progressives during this
period — the development of a "national" people and the elevation of the
consumer — did little to quell such concerns.

Nationalism and the Consumer Citizen
In confronting the future of freedom in an industrializing economy, Weyl,
Kallen, Croly, and Dewey, akin to 1890s Populists, sought to unite an
interventionist state with a mobilized public. Yet they rejected the old
focus on the laboring community and hoped to engage not merely a par-
ticular element within society but society as a whole. Instead of farmers
and wage earners alone, they believed that if properly educated all indi-
viduals could stand as a government behind the government, directing
state authority. The difficulty, however, lay in how to organize this mas-
sive and diverse public such that most Americans came to see themselves
as sharing common interests and goals. According to both Weyl and Kal-
len, the perspective of production had failed to coalesce society or to
present such a framework for collective action. The individual's relation-
ship to work was so various and conflicting that its emphasis only pro-
moted further class conflict and social disorder. Weyl wrote, "The pro-
ducer ... is highly differentiated. He is banker, lawyer, soldier, tailor,
farmer, shoeblack, messenger boy. He is capitalist, workman, money
lender, money borrower, urban worker, rural worker." 26

Thankfully, another orientation to the economy existed, which rather
than dividing the public emphasized its shared experiences: one's social
role as a consumer. For Weyl, it was when individuals acted jointly from
this perspective that they constituted the "people" and pursued the com-
mon good. "In America to-day the unifying economic force, about which
a majority, hostile to the plutocracy, is forming, is the common interest

of the citizen as a consumer of wealth." Echoing this sentiment, Kallen
similarly called for popular activity organized around this "primacy of
the consumer" and directed "to express and sustain the liberties intrinsic
to it." 27

Where the populist tradition had long appealed to the laboring masses
to assert their authority over the economic and political process, Weyl
now called on "a million inaudible consumers" to make their voices
heard. In his view, Progressivism was the maturation of Americans as
consumers and thus the creation of a new political community in which
everyone — regardless of producer status — became driving political agents.
Weyl wrote: "The consumer, disinterred from his grave, reappears in the
political arena as the 'common man,' the 'plain people,' the 'strap-hanger,'
'the man on the street,' 'the taxpayer,' the 'ultimate consumer.' Men who
voted as producers are now voting as consumers." 28

Both Weyl and Kallen hoped that if Americans thought of themselves
as consumers first, they would appreciate how concentrated wealth cre-
ated destructive new oligarchies, which prevented a proper distribution
and use of social surplus — in the process undermining republican free-
dom. Weyl imagined that an elevated populace, educated in "the wise
consumption of wealth," would employ that knowledge to assert demo-
cratic authority over industry and government. According to this view,
the emergence of the consumer outlook would facilitate self-rule, by pro-
viding the public a common frame by which to understand and challenge
structures of inequality and hierarchy. As Kallen wrote, consumer-
oriented activity, such as through consumer cooperatives, offered diverse
groups the opportunity to gain collective "power over themselves" and
thus the capacity to assert popular control over "the lawless power of
the corporation." 29

Yet this perspective faced a basic challenge. The public's primary ac-
tivities as consumers appeared to entail little more than a wise rotation
of legislators and the consumption of products. The focus on the rational
consumer created a fundamental separation between those who actually
wielded power in key institutions and most Americans, who simply re-
acted in the political and economic marketplace to the former group's
platforms and decisions. One was left to wonder whether the practice of
consuming would provide a meaningful ethical and educative grounding
in free citizenship. The risk existed that it would instead empty self-rule
of any real content by transforming most individuals into passive recipi-
ents of decisions made elsewhere.

Of particular concern was the fact that consumers as a whole, pre-
cisely because the category included everyone, constituted a remarkably
diffuse social group. Weyl himself recognized that a progressive welfare
state — as opposed to an actual social movement, political party, or civil
association — provided the institution that came closest to representing
all consumers. At its worst, this suggested a troubling unity between state
and public, in which state actors could claim that whatever they defined
as the consumer interest embodied the greater good. For all the talk of
democratic control, empowering consumers presented the distinct possi-
bility of substituting the interests of political elites for popularly derived
goals. Since the consumer outlook appeared best expressed by state actors,
the state could easily replace the consumer as the driving force of decision
making. In a sense, the public would exist as a social beneficiary but disap-
pear as a democratic agent. These ideas created the potential for dramati-
cally extending state authority while at the same time producing a far
more passive public.

Running parallel to WeyPs arguments, Croly's attempt to reshape politi-
cal identity only heightened such risks. As markets became integrated and
Americans came to think of themselves as consumers, Croly contended that
another shared perspective had emerged. This perspective joined individu-
als not on the basis of class, party, or ethnic affiliation but rather on the
basis of their commitment to a single, unified nation. He hoped that the
American nation, endowed with power and prosperity, over time would
become the defining emotional and political attachment for all social
members. Like Weyl and Kallen, Croly imagined that the new national-
ism, facilitated by cross-regional markets and consumer identities, would
strengthen democratic practice by repudiating old sectional outlooks and
fostering public cohesiveness. Croly famously wrote in The Promise of
American Life (1909) that "a people which becomes more of a nation be-
comes for that very reason more of a democracy." As James Morone re-
marks, Croly's "constituency was a single national people, mobilized in
opposition to the concentration of private power." 30

Yet Croly's call to nationalism presupposed a defense not just of ener-
getic government action but also of an increasingly hierarchical state
structure. For Americans to identify as members of a nation, there had to
exist a nationalized politics, in which government and the economy were
both centralized in specific institutions. Croly wrote, "the national advance
of the American democracy . . . demand[s] an increasing amount of cen-
tralized action and responsibility." In his opinion, this belief was a simple

recognition of the United States' transformed social landscape; central-
ization was "the natural consequence of the increasing concentration of
American industrial, political, and social life." "The growing centraliza-
tion of American activity," Croly concluded, "demand[ed] more rather
than less centralization." 31 For all his talk of self-government, the larger
implication of this trend was an inevitable diminution in the relevant
sites for economic and political decision making. It meant a further sepa-
ration of most individuals from the actual exercise of authority in their
daily lives.

Croly hoped that despite this separation, democratic control would
still be ensured through the practices of "direct democracy." He and Weyl
both defended a series of institutional reforms aimed at strengthening the
power of citizens. As Morone lists them, these included the "direct elec-
tion of senators, primaries, referenda, recall, initiative, constitutional
amendments, public review of Court decisions." One should note that
each of these institutional reforms also had been defended by radical Pop-
ulists, as instruments by which rank-and-file activists were able to shape
political outcomes. The Populist Party, with the help of agrarian and la-
bor associations, hoped to organize the sentiment of farmers and indus-
trial workers and then to employ new procedural mechanisms to impose
the collective will on recalcitrant social forces. Similarly, Croly imagined
these devices as providing the lever for democratic engagement, allowing
the people to continuously and "resolutely pursue [] a vigorous social
program." The referendum and initiative were ultimately two "of a group
of political institutions, whose object is fundamentally to invigorate and
socialize the action of American public opinion." 32

However, Croly's national public was even more diffuse than Weyl's
and Kallen's society of consumers. It remained unclear exactly how this
body would organize itself and thus on what basis it could "socialize" its
political activity. In rejecting the concrete community of laborers, and in
failing to embrace any actually existing social group (as opposed to the
Active national and unitary popular will), Croly left his theory without
an actual public to galvanize. The heart of his direct democracy, just as
for Populists, was an energetic collective agent. Yet, in refusing to focus
on a clear community engaged in actual activities of protest and reform,
he in essence denied the existence of any agent within society that could
direct political decision making. This wariness of the actual social forces
at large went hand in hand with a wariness of existing political organiza-
tions. The union clearly had a crucial role in the workplace, but neither it

nor parties should serve as political intermediaries in his nationalized vi-
sion. In a sense, Croly remained suspicious of the capacity of ordinary
Americans to control such organizations and of whether these groups
would promote a unified popular will. Therefore direct democracy meant
eliminating the barriers between a centralized government and the peo-
ple writ large and casting aside those partial associations that had previ-
ously cohered collective life.

The consequence, however, was to reduce the American people into
an undifferentiated mass and to strip real political constituencies of the
institutional bases by which they asserted their own authority. Croly re-
jected the belief that "an authoritative representative body" — such as
Congress or, more likely, the president — should shape public opinion and
determine the collective will. He imagined a bottom-up political process
of constant pressure and popular self-assertion. But his image of the
people and his skepticism of its existing modes of public expression left
little else as real political possibilities. If constituencies were dissolved
and associative ties diminished, what else but a powerful and centralized
state would dominate the political discourse? Under such circumstances,
procedural reforms would become tools for government to pursue its
own interpretation of the popular will almost regardless of the people.
While Croly held on to the dream of republican citizenship, in practice
his politics suggested the basis for something quite different — a central-
ized political authority that substituted its own agency for that of social
constituencies. Without a specific and mobilized social group, it would
be difficult for anything other than this "authoritative representative body"
to assert power.

Thus it was no coincidence that both Croly and Weyl provided an
ideological foundation for Theodore Roosevelt's 1912 platform, aptly
named the "New Nationalism." Croly's "national democracy" fit surpris-
ingly well into Roosevelt's own stewardship theory of the presidency, in
which "the President ... is the steward of the people, and ... he is bound
to assume that he has the legal right to do whatever the needs of the
people demand, unless the Constitution or the laws explicitly forbid him
to do it." 33 If all that remained of collective power were two poles, the
president and an imagined national people, only the former had the prac-
tical capacity to speak on behalf of the whole. In other words, only the
president would know what the people in all their complexity might
want and therefore in what direction state power should flow. Moreover,
while Croly viewed "nationalism" as domestic popular action aimed at

challenging the new "plutocracy," this focus on centralization and Ameri-
can prestige easily spilled over into a defense of U.S. global authority.
For individuals like Roosevelt, national pride and identification enhanced
not only strong presidential prerogatives but also their decisive use abroad
to maintain and project American power. In a sense, Croly and Weyl un-
intentionally participated in the development of a very different vision of
collective life than the vision they originally espoused. This account cen-
tralized decision making among small numbers of elites and employed
concepts of nationalism to create an identity between the public interest
and state actions at home and abroad.

As for Dewey, he took to heart the danger posed by centralized indus-
try and systems of mass communication but seemed unable to imagine
either the political constituencies or the social forces that would chal-
lenge entrenched hierarchies. While he maintained that "The Great
Community ... is conceivable," in the same breath he added, "but it can
never possess all the qualities which mark a local community." 34 Wary of
the implications of unleashing either consumerism or national sentiment,
Dewey abandoned the goal of locating the drive for republican freedom
in a defined group. Thus, when calling for the creation of a Great Com-
munity, Dewey failed to specify precisely to whom he was speaking or to
identify what social movement should emerge to construct this demo-
cratic ideal. The abstractness of his appeal to the public was in large part
the product of a deep-seated antipathy to social discord or violence in
any form. In Liberalism and Social Action (1935), Dewey recognized the
"existence of class conflicts, amounting at times to a veiled civil war,"
but refused to accept the idea that society was divided by fundamen-
tally distinct material interests. Instead, he argued that the notion of
cooperation was not only the ideal of social democracy but also the
guiding principle of history, promoting progress and technological
improvement. Although "coercion and oppression [may exist] on a large
scale," human experience was the unfolding of a "cooperatively orga-
nized intelligence." 35

In making this argument, Dewey necessarily rejected an entire tradi-
tion of American social criticism, dating back to William Manning's The
Key of Libberty, which asserted just the opposite. For Manning and oth-
ers, social conflict was a permanent feature of collective life, because the
material interests of some groups — for instance, Jackson's moneyed
aristocrats — were not consistent with the goals of economic independence
and popular participation. Recognizing such conflict, moreover, allowed

Manning and his intellectual successors to see the creation of a coopera-
tive commonwealth as directly tied to the fate of an organized social
movement. For them, this movement was grounded in the experience of
work and therefore sought to unify the laboring community in all its di-
versity. Dewey, however, not only rejected this constituency but refused
to look to those real, everyday sites of contestation that might have pro-
vided him with a relevant collective agent. In neglecting to identify dif-
ferentiated and potentially active groups within the larger nation, his
philosophy presented a politics without any social means for its fulfill-
ment. In a sense, Croly, Weyl, Kallen, and Dewey all suggested the out-
lines of a modern reframing for republican ideals. But with the collapse
of agrarian revolt, they had greater difficulty with imagining which con-
stituencies could be called upon successfully to pursue these ideals. Taken
together, they thus presented the picture of a strengthened and muscular
state without a mobilized public directing it toward clear goals.

Progressive Administration, the Decline of the Party,
and Women's Suffrage
In many ways, the increasing uncertainty about democratic agency ex-
pressed a mood prevalent in the early twentieth century. Not only did the
period see the rise of industrial hierarchy, the administrative state, and,
not unrelatedly, mass consumption; it also witnessed the steady disman-
tling of those instruments that historically had sustained popular politi-
cal activity — especially patronage parties. Although the extension of
suffrage to women indicated a new and potentially powerful political
grouping, this numerical increase in the voting public failed to counter
the general trend toward diminished participation. If anything, more and
more thinkers and policymakers began to argue that the very idea of
productive control and popular political decision making should give
way to efficient and beneficent administration.

After 1900, government reform efforts took as a key task the goal of
combating corruption and nepotism as well as party control over the
electoral process. Following Croly's logic, parties in general were seen as
impediments limiting the ability of citizens to express their political
wishes directly. Therefore, greater state authority over the party system
was believed to be an essential means of strengthening political meritoc-
racy and transparency. Commenting on the plethora of reforms, which
included the secret vote and government printing of the ballot, Chester
Lloyd Jones wrote in 1913:

The most striking development affecting parties in the last half
century had been the increasing degree to which their activities
have become subject to regulation by law. The printing of ballots,
the canvassing of votes, the regulation of the time and procedures
of caucuses, primaries, and conventions, even the choice of their
own committees, has been more and more taken from the parties
and put under public supervision. 36

The long-term consequence of such regulation was an extensive re-
duction in mass participation. In part, this can be explained by the defeat
of Populism as a social movement, which left in its wake a demobilized
political base. S. O. Daws, one of the founders of the Farmers Alliance,
noted as early as 1887, "If the Alliance is destroyed, it will be some time
before the people have confidence in themselves, and one another, to re-
vive it, or organize anything new." Still, Progressive-era reforms also
played a central role in popular demobilization. As one example, Mark
Kornbluh notes that "The Australian ballot [the secret ballot] made it sig-
nificantly more difficult ... for illiterate and non-English speaking voters
to participate in elections. Such voters had no trouble casting a party-
printed ticket, which always included party symbols . . . but they could
not read a consolidated ballot." Moreover, as previously discussed,
nineteenth-century parties had been principal mechanisms for integrat-
ing diverse social segments — such as immigrants, farmers, and industrial
workers — into the political process. With parties and partisanship greatly
diminished, the opportunities for these groups to participate diminished
as well. No doubt some Progressives had hoped such measures would
purify the electorate of marginalized groups. Along with having that con-
sequence, the reforms also made the process in general far less amenable
to popular intervention. 37

In a sense, electoral changes were simply one piece of the larger emer-
gence of a new bureaucratic state. While members of the People's Party
had sought to employ an energetic government on behalf of the laboring
community, they also had fought against the rising tide of centralization
and concentrated state power (especially in the executive). Yet, as their vi-
sion receded, the new administrative apparatus, strengthened by Progres-
sive reforms, came to regulate more and more of economic life. The bu-
reaucratic administration extended into multiple arenas, with the creation
of the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Food and Drug Administra-
tion, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Federal Trade Commission,

among many others. More important, while such commissions were
ostensibly under legislative control, these bodies enjoyed extensive in-
dependence from any electoral or participatory check. 38 The expansion
of bureaucratic power reduced the practical value of elections, and thus
the decline of mass participation went hand in hand with a decline in the
levers of meaningful influence.

This development was particularly ironic given that the greatest re-
form of the Progressive era was the Nineteenth Amendment, which in
1920 extended the right to vote to women. Thirty years earlier, Populists
had also called for such a constitutional amendment and imagined labor-
ing women as an untapped base for political mobilization through the
Alliance and the People's Party. After the collapse of Populism, many urban
reformers and political elites, wary of class and ethnic politics as well as
of partisanship generally, reached just the opposite conclusion about the
potential role of women voters. "They expected that native-born, middle-
class women would participate at higher rates than women from immi-
grant cultures, thus enabling reformers to defeat regular party organiza-
tions whose strength was lodged in the working-class and immigrant
electorate." In reality, suffrage appeared only once the new administrative
state had already become deeply entrenched, and the everyday impact of
the vote was already in retreat. Suffragist Suzanne La Follette commented
on the institutional shifts, "It is the misfortune for the woman's movement
that it has succeeded in securing political rights for women at the very pe-
riod when political rights are worth less than they have been at any time
since the eighteenth century." 39

While institutional shifts and changing social contexts undoubtedly
conspired to reduce the meaning of suffrage, this reduction was also aided
by the changing dynamics within the women's suffrage movement itself.
Not only did women receive the vote at a time when elections carried less
political leverage than at any point in the previous century, but the driv-
ing voices in the suffrage movement increasingly turned away from the
goals that motivated earlier feminists. As with those in the Populist
movement, these goals had linked the struggle for suffrage with the ca-
pacity of marginalized women to press for economic emancipation and
political self-rule. According to Charlotte Perkins Gilman, for suffrage to
reshape gender roles and experiences, it had to be tied to efforts that
provided women the same economic independence as that enjoyed by
white males. This entailed challenging the material dependency of women
on men, enforced through the prevailing sexual division of labor both

within and outside of marriage. This division left women bound to the
home in a sphere of domesticity, which denied them the possibility of con-
trolling their own labor.

Consequently, while the vote was a precondition for republican lib-
erty, Gilman asserted that it alone would not end practical subordination
unless connected to a broader reform agenda. In Women and Economics
(1898), she wrote:

The main line of progress is and has been toward economic equal-
ity and freedom. While life exists on earth, the economic condi-
tions must underlie and dominate each existing form and its activi-
ties; and social life is no exception. A society whose economic unit
is a sex-union can no more develop beyond a certain point indus-
trially than a society like the patriarchal, whose political unit was
a sex-union, could develop beyond a certain point politically.

Gilman hoped to connect the women's vote to specific policy ends, con-
cerned with equalizing pay and "socializing the household industries."
The latter would give women the opportunity to participate fully in eco-
nomic and political life, through state-supported assistance with child
rearing and housekeeping — assistance that also distributed these burdens
across both genders. In this context, "The home would cease to be to us
a workshop or a museum, and would become far more the personal
expression of its occupants — the place of peace and rest, of love and
privacy — than it can be in its present condition of arrested industrial de-
velopment." For feminists like Gilman, the movement for women's rights
was part of the general democratic effort to eliminate all forms of
dependency — paternal or otherwise — that imposed relations of inferior-
ity and control on subject groups. 40

Yet, by the time the Nineteenth Amendment was passed, women's
enfranchisement had occurred in the context of a far more truncated suf-
fragist position. Over time, feminist efforts had become directed primar-
ily by privileged elites, who in order to achieve the right to vote had no
problems abandoning larger social ambitions. Suffragists did not simply
acquiesce to ideas of a purified electorate; in fact, they linked their calls
to efforts that would disenfranchise less worthy social elements, through
literacy tests, property requirements, and black exclusion. Expressing the
prevailing sentiment, Carrie Chapman Catt, president of the National
American Women's Suffrage Association, conceded in her 1901 presiden-
tial address that hesitancy to extend the vote to white women was in part

due to the "ill-advised haste" with which states in recent decades had
enfranchised "the foreigner, the Negro, and the Indian." Agreeing with
the arguments favoring a purified electorate, Catt reasoned that "Peril-
ous conditions, seeming to follow from the introduction into the body
politic of vast numbers of irresponsible citizens, have made the nation
timid." 41 By 1910 it took an iconoclast like Emma Goldman to reiterate
the previous egalitarian vision of suffrage as bound to a universal and
transformative social project. She bemoaned how the suffrage move-
ment had become "absolutely detached from the economic needs of
the people." She saw in its sole focus on formal political rights "the nar-
rowness of the existing conception of women's independence and
emancipation." 42

Therefore, while the vote no doubt provided women with political
voice, both suffragist views and the growth of the administrative state
limited its power — by checking the goals of and opportunities for popu-
lar intervention. In essence, despite the addition of a massive block of
newly enfranchised citizens, the period witnessed the public's steady re-
moval from avenues of political decision making. While Croly may have
hoped that administrative growth would expand and focus popular in-
volvement, the ultimate consequence was that the people receded from
democratic engagement. In this context, the center of public activity moved
to the new national marketplace for mass consumer goods. According to
a Muncie, Indiana, newspaper, "The American citizen's first importance
to his country is no longer that of a citizen but that of a consumer." 43
Weyl had argued that the consumer outlook could produce a unified col-
lective interest and provide a shared basis to engage in politics and to
press for social demands. He may have welcomed a strong state, but he
also assumed that state power would remain checked by vigilant and
wise citizenship. Instead, the power of mass consumption shifted atten-
tion toward private concerns. It might have fostered a shared perspec-
tive, but the perspective appeared far more politically apathetic than
Weyl had expected or than had existed throughout the nineteenth cen-
tury. In addition, the rise of consumerism raised profound questions
about the public's ability to make rational, intelligent decisions and thus
about the viability of democracy in any form, representative or direct.
Consumers seemed easily swayed by marketing ploys and new fads and
entranced by the lowest common denominator. Nothing emphasized this
fact more than the new mass media, as journalism traded in sensational-
ism and low-content human-interest stories.

Walter Lippmann, who had once co-edited the New Republic with
Croly and Weyl, captured the emerging attitude in political life. Given
the realities of administrative and social complexity, as well as of appar-
ent popular incapacities, it was absurd to "hang[] human dignity on the
one assumption about self-government." Instead, Lippmann insisted
that

Man's dignity requires a standard of living, in which his capacities
are properly exercised. . . . The criteria which you then apply to gov-
ernment are whether it is producing a certain minimum of health,
of decent housing, of material necessities, of education, of free-
dom, of pleasures, of beauty, not simply whether at the sacrifice of
all these things, it vibrates to the self-centered opinions that hap-
pen to be floating around in men's minds. In the degree to which
these criteria can be made exact and objective, political decision,
which is inevitably the concern of comparatively few people, is
actually brought into relation with the interests of men. 44

Freedom no longer amounted to collective control over the basic sites of
decision making; rather, it comprised security from economic want. Such
security, instead of being a precondition for achieving economic and po-
litical independence, was ultimately an end in itself. For Lippmann poli-
tics segued into policy — a functionally distinct domain for experts. Par-
ticipation was reduced to a diminished vote, and the primary arena of
public concern now became the marketplace, which satisfied one's pri-
vate passions and prejudices. In a sense, Lippmann articulated growing
intuitions about the need to break firmly with old republican narratives
and to imagine both politics and freedom through a new framework of
economic security and efficient administration. If thinkers like Croly had
attempted to adapt republican ideas to modern conditions, Lippmann
suggested that commitments to productive control and popular decision
making had to be cast aside as either Utopian fantasies or unhelpful forms
of nostalgia.

From Settler Empire to Humanitarian Imperialism

This effective abandonment of the American vision of liberty as an exer-
cise in continuous self-rule — which had motivated generations of indi-
viduals since before the Revolution — left the experience of social mem-
bership with a gaping void. If work and direct political participation

had provided the ethical foundation for free citizenship under settler-
ism, what would take their place in the new polity? A stable income and
mass consumption appeared unlikely to instill the same responsibility
and autonomy that once rooted collective life. Faced with this predica-
ment, thinkers and politicians turned to the other premise of American
settlerism — the project of empire — for a solution. If property and labor
could no longer ethically entrench full social membership, perhaps the
shared enterprise of global expansion would serve as the necessary
substitute.

In lamenting the closing of the American frontier and the disappear-
ance of those sturdy pioneer democrats, Frederick Jackson Turner re-
minded readers that the basic feature of settler society was not just eco-
nomic independence but also constant territorial expansion. Turner wrote
of the national experience, "Movement has been its dominant fact, and,
unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will
continually demand a wider field for its exercise." Speaking even more
pointedly of the centrality of empire, Turner remarked in a 1910 com-
mencement address at Indiana University that conquest was the settler's
guiding principle:

The first ideal of the pioneer was that of conquest. It was his task
to fight with nature for the chance to exist. ... It has been continu-
ous to our own day. Facing each generation of pioneers was the
unmastered continent. . . . The rifle and the ax are the symbols of
the backwoods pioneer. They meant a training in aggressive cour-
age, in domination, in directness of action, in destructiveness.

Confronting a twentieth century marked by commercialism and social
conflict, Turner suggested an alternative means by which to defend "the
expansive character of American life." 45 With society teetering on the
precipice of decadence and consumer apathy, a broad array of intellectu-
als and political elites followed his lead. They saw in settlerism 's imperial
agenda the possibility of reconnecting social membership to self-discipline,
industry, and a sense of unified, national purpose.

In defending the value of "a strenuous life" (against the likes of Walter
Weyl), Theodore Roosevelt, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Josiah Strong
presented a drastic overhaul of the very meaning of American empire,
aligning what had been a settler colonial project far more consistently
with the institutions and assumptions of European imperialism. However,
the globalization of American power at the beginning of the twentieth

century was neither a solely economic venture nor an exercise in pure
power politics. Roosevelt, Holmes, and Strong also paved the way for an
emerging vision of American inclusion, one profoundly steeped in Puri-
tan millennial aspirations. Where radicals in the populist tradition from
Skidmore to Neville had hoped to make self-rule a broadly accessible
social experience, the new American globalism took as its goal the cre-
ation of a world where all equally could enjoy the benefits of permanent
peace. These ideological commitments were embodied in the territorial
acquisitions following the Spanish-American War. They were also expressed
through a major shift in legal jurisprudence that legitimated interna-
tional expansion, regardless of whether constitutional protections would
be extended to new lands.

The Strenuous Life and the Imperative of Empire
On April 10, 1899, Theodore Roosevelt gave a speech before the Hamil-
ton Club in Chicago, in which he began:

I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine
of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife;
to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man
who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink
from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of
these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.

Roosevelt looked upon the rise of mass consumption with derision, see-
ing in the desire to democratize leisure a basic rejection of the hard work
and discipline that had perpetuated American settlerism and coloniza-
tion. According to him, "When men fear work or fear righteous war,
when women fear motherhood, they tremble on the brink of doom; and
well it is that they should vanish from the earth, where they are fit sub-
jects for the scorn of all men and women who are themselves strong and
brave and high-minded." 46

He worried that a frontierless America was one without the shared
commitments that made collective life meaningful. For Roosevelt, social
membership had to be more than either a diminished vote or the provi-
sion of material needs. It required a galvanizing missionary zeal, which
fostered heroism and inspired individuals to subordinate their own pri-
vate interest for the greater good. "No country can long endure if its
foundations are not laid deep in . . . material prosperity . . . but neither
was any nation ever yet truly great if it relied upon material prosperity

alone." He reminded the public of the example provided by great warrior-
statesmen such as Lincoln and Grant, who "showed by their lives that . . .
they recognized that there were yet other and even loftier duties — duties
to the nation and duties to the race." Thus Roosevelt sought to revive
two essential aspects of the old settler imagination. He considered Amer-
ica to be a fundamentally Anglo project, despite the realities of immigra-
tion and ethnic pluralism. Although himself of Dutch background, he
maintained that the country was founded on the principles of English
liberty and that both Britain and America shared imperial destinies,
which provided the "English-speaking race" with a basic civilizing mis-
sion. In fact, like many Americans at the time, he saw a deep cultural af-
finity connecting all of Britain's settler populations, especially those of
the United States and South Africa. In both lands, colonists had over-
come threatening native groups and staked out new territory for the ex-
tension of free institutions. He called on the Anglo community at home
to throw off the weight of commercial decadence and to reclaim this
shared settler heritage and mission. Roosevelt therefore defended the
centrality of colonization for collective life and argued that although
the continental frontier may have closed, the world itself suggested a
new, far greater frontier. He acknowledged that it might be impossible
for Americans to settle other continents as it once did North America,
but citizens could still do "our share of the world's work" and "strive in
good faith to play a great part in the world." 47

Roosevelt considered the consequences of shrinking from the call to
global empire as dire, because other, more warlike nations would inevita-
bly challenge American isolationism. Given technological advances, the
oceans could no longer provide a safe barrier from the conflicts and dis-
order abroad. To sink into a fog of luxury and disinterest would leave the
nation subject to chaos outside its borders. In presenting the grim exam-
ple of China, a once great empire now carved up by competing European
powers, Roosevelt warned:

We cannot, if we would, play the part of China, and be content to
rot by inches in ignoble ease within our borders, taking no interest
in what goes on beyond them, sunk in a scrambling commercial-
ism; heedless of the higher life, the life of aspiration, of toil and
risk, busying ourselves only with the wants of our bodies for the
day, until suddenly we should find, beyond a shadow of question,
what China has already found, that in this world the nation that

has trained itself to a career of unwarlike and isolated ease is bound,
in the end, to go down before other nations which have not lost
the manly and adventurous qualities. 48

Thus global expansion was not only the natural extension of settler em-
pire; it was also necessitated by international realities and the inevitable
conflicts between competing nations.

In making these arguments, both Turner and Roosevelt stressed an
American militarism that, despite long-standing antipathies to maintain-
ing a standing army, nonetheless had deep roots in settler society. It was
through violence that Anglo colonists expanded their empire and main-
tained a system of social hierarchy, which separated privileged insiders
from indigenous, slave, or Mexican outsiders. In essence, the strenuous
life could have two parallel meanings: the hard work of homesteading
and economic autonomy or the permanent warfare of colonization. With
the former in retreat, Roosevelt presented the latter as the remaining
American path to unity and free citizenship.

By highlighting the importance of war in the national experience, Roo-
sevelt therefore indicated how one's role — as a soldier or as a worker — in
extending American authority abroad offered a new ground for shared
identity. This notion was never more eloquently emphasized than by Oli-
ver Wendell Holmes in his 1895 Memorial Day address at Harvard, titled
"The Soldier's Faith." Like Roosevelt, Holmes rejected "the longing" of
"philanthropists, labor reformers, and men of fashion" to be "comfort-
able" and "shine without much trouble or danger." Not only did com-
mercialism enervate human activity, but it also promoted a fiction that
the United States was safe beyond the oceans. The ever-present possibil-
ity of war, which demanded global action and continuous preparation,
should provide a warning to Americans that "our comfortable routine is
no eternal necessity of things, but merely a little space of calm in the
midst of the tempestuous untamed streaming of the world." Given such
danger, the soldier's faith was the last, best hope of protecting the nation
and instilling a masculine commitment to vigor and loyalty. Holmes de-
scribed this faith as that sense of purpose, "which leads a soldier to throw
away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he
little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has no notion, under
tactics of which he does not see the use." 49

While this defense of militarism may have spoken to the violent na-
ture of life on the settler frontier, it nonetheless embodied the very antith-

esis of republican freedom. Rather than rational and autonomous action
coupled with a constant vigilance directed at state power, Holmes reveren-
tially described the value of blind obedience. For him, this new colonizing
project would be built on devotion to a national purpose, almost regard-
less of what constituted that purpose. In essence, Roosevelt and Holmes
were struggling to find an alternative foundation for free citizenship, an
ethical basis that would give value to full membership and inculcate the
willingness to sacrifice personal ends for collective goals. In this search
they reversed Harrington's great republican claim that — rather than mili-
tary experience — property ownership could instill individuals with the
independence and discipline necessary for public life. Now discarding
economic autonomy, Holmes and Roosevelt returned to warfare as the
educative arena for true American citizenship.

Even anti-imperialists and self-avowed pacifists like William James
appreciated the problem posed by social membership devoid of value or
a sense of shared responsibility. James wrote, "The war-party is assur-
edly right in affirming and reaffirming that the martial virtues, although
originally gained by the race through war, are absolute and permanent
human goods." Not unlike Harrington, James asserted the need for a
"moral equivalent of war," which would reenergize a demobilized public
and shift collective energy away from the marketplace and purely private
endeavors. James's solution, which later provided the inspiration for the
New Deal's Civilian Conservation Corps, was the creation of a national
service. 50 James hoped such a program would send American youth "to
coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to
dish-washing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road-building
and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of
skyscrapers." "Instead of military conscription," James described national
service as "a conscription of the whole population to form for a certain
number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature." 51

While both militarism and James's "moral equivalent" sought to de-
velop within Americans a higher national calling, neither were authentic
visions of self-rule. If the ethical basis of republican citizenship had been
an everyday experience in independence and collective decision making,
Holmes, Roosevelt, and James all presented no alternative method for
fostering such independence. James was clearly worried about the lack of
thoughtful reflection embodied by militarized society, but his solution
was essentially to militarize the economy and imagine industrial workers
as their own army. In searching for "martial virtues," Americans such as

Holmes and James appear to have lost sense of the very purpose of those
qualities. The old settler ideal did not consider these virtues as ends in
themselves but rather held them as valuable to the extent that they pro-
moted liberty as self-rule. But with a strong account of self-government
taking more and more of a backseat, the call for discipline merely rein-
forced the hierarchical tendencies of collective life and became its own
justification. This was clearly not James's intention but rather a conse-
quence of employing a militarized discourse to describe both membership
and what was valuable in civilian life. Thus James and "the war-party"
seemingly merged, presenting complementary rather than competing
arguments. Just as imperial adventures abroad would embody "the
strenuous life," a regimented and industrious labor force at home could
help the nation unleash its economic potential. Each approach pro-
vided a nationalistic ethos, which deemphasized the old participatory
focus and instead stressed American dominance, whether at war or in
the factories.

Moreover, such nationalism fit very comfortably into a resurgent mil-
lennialism, which not unlike its Puritan forebear imagined the United
States as enjoying a historically redemptive mission. One should recall that
during the mid-nineteenth century, with republican ideals under threat due
to the rise of wage labor, settlers retreated into a xenophobic politics that
embraced Manifest Destiny and the drive for continental expansion.
Now, similar fears over the future of free citizenship and the meaning of
liberty produced an analogous turn to millennialism. In one of the best-
selling books of the late nineteenth century, Our Country: Its Possible
Future and Its Present Crisis (1885), Congregationalist pastor Josiah
Strong combined apprehension of American commercialism with a call
for reformation and a return to the great promise of Anglo colonization.
In many ways, the book was an old-fashioned Puritan jeremiad, which
exposed the weakness and sin of the body politic while at the same time
reminding the faithful of the coming Utopia. In chapter after chapter,
Strong described the perils threatening the United States, which included
Catholicism, Mormonism, intemperance, socialism, wealth, and the rise
of the city. All undermined the persistence of a settler society, premised
on Anglo-Saxon supremacy, Puritan religion, and economic equality
among social insiders. According to Strong, the United States had been
overrun by southern European immigrants, many of whom were Catho-
lic, and who by crowding the cities swelled the "dangerous classes" and
spread "ignorance" and "vice." Moreover, industrial growth had produced

a perilous gulf between the rich and the poor and a "gross materialism"
that promoted "enervation, corruption, and destruction." 52

In the past, American settlerism had been threatened primarily by
external foes: indigenous enemies and the British metropole. Now the
foes were both external and internal. Abroad, the world braced for "a
final competition between races," in which the United States would be
confronted inevitably by warlike and hostile nations — whether or not it
sought peace. At home, the settler composition of society was in retreat
and would have to be defended from impure and ethnically dissimilar
elements as well as from an all-pervading decadence. However dire, Strong
saw these crises as essentially parallel to what faced the early Anglo colo-
nists, those "first permanent settlers who impress themselves and their
character on the future." Regardless of historical changes that "produced
important modifications," Strong imagined a reenergized Anglo-Saxon
community as following the example laid by its ancestors. Puritans had
believed that continental expansion would eliminate the dangers to free-
dom and create a millennial republic of peace. Strong argued that this
goal was still within reach but should be altered in critical ways due to
new social realities. Despite controlling the continent, the United States
was no closer to peace or to a Protestant Utopia and now saw its vigor
sapped by industrialism and the massive immigration of culturally unfit
communities. Under these conditions, only if the United States as an
Anglo-Saxon nation asserted its global preeminence would the ultimate
hope of combining liberty and security be achieved. 53

Following the old Puritan settler argument, empire was a religious
duty handed down to Americans as an ethnically chosen people. Yet
Strong's millennial vision was importantly distinct in one key respect. As
he wrote, "Thus, while on this continent God is training the Anglo-Saxon
race for its mission, a complemental work has been in progress in the
great world beyond. God has two hands. Not only is he preparing in our
civilization the die with which to stamp the nations, but ... he is prepar-
ing mankind to receive our impress." For tranquility to envelop the world,
American empire had to spread Anglo-Saxon liberty to the far corners of
the globe and to ethnically distinct peoples. The original assumption of
settler colonization was that non white outsiders could not enjoy the same
freedoms as privileged insiders, and therefore continental empire would
eliminate all foreseeable enemies and create an isolated republic of peace.
In Strong's account, although empire was a project of racial hegemony,
for its success non- Anglo-Saxon groups, especially non-Europeans, had to

be included at some level — only then would they give up their warlike
disposition and enjoy the fruits of civilization. Strong remarked, "Is
there room for reasonable doubt that this race ... is destined to dispos-
sess many weaker races, assimilate others, and mold the remainder,
until, in a very true and important sense, it has Anglo-Saxonized the
world?" 54

Ultimately, and perhaps unwittingly, this adjustment to settler empire
set the stage for a decisive break with the old account. It indicated how
future Americans would combine the commitment to global power with
one to universal rights. Following Strong, Theodore Roosevelt pursued
both the particularist and universalist logic embedded in this alternative
millennial vision for American empire. In an editorial published in 1899,
titled "Expansion and Peace," Roosevelt too described the United States
as not only grounded in English traditions of liberty but also specially
situated to spread such liberty throughout the globe. This American en-
deavor to pacify the globe was thus also a call to incorporate backward
peoples into a civilized world of freedom and stability. Unlike Strong,
however, Roosevelt stripped permanent peace of its most overtly reli-
gious connotations. Instead of a Utopian effort to create the reign of God
on earth, he saw tranquility as the higher purpose around which a vigor-
ous and militarized society could focus its energy. Moreover, he con-
trasted the commercial life of decadent comfort, the "easy peace" he de-
rided, with the noble (and apparently endless) struggle to transform a
disordered world into one both pacified and free. Roosevelt wrote,
"Peace is a great good; and doubly harmful, therefore, is the attitude of
those who advocate it in terms that would make it synonymous with self-
ish and cowardly shrinking from warring about the existence of evil."
War was central to this undertaking, because as Lord Coke and English
colonists had once claimed, no peace could be permanent between the
civilized and the savaged. Tying global expansion to the settler trek
across the continent, Roosevelt asserted:

The growth of peacefulness between nations, however, has been
confined strictly to those that are civilized. . . . With a barbarous
nation peace is the exceptional condition. On the border between
civilization and barbarism war is generally normal because it must
be under the conditions of barbarism. Whether the barbarian be
the Red Indian on the frontier of the United States, the Afghan on
the border of British India, or the Turkoman who confronts the

Siberian Cossack, the result is the same. In the long run civilized
man finds he can keep peace only by subduing his barbarian
neighbor; for the barbarian will yield only to force. 55

By reclaiming the millennial politics of early settlers, Roosevelt sought
to invest the new empire with a vision that not only unified the public
but also gave social membership value. Free citizenship now entailed
participating in this global struggle to replace barbarism with civiliza-
tion. At home, Americans would see themselves as part of a great na-
tional project and would consider their hard work in factories or in the
barracks as essential for the United States to fulfill its global destiny.
Moreover, this destiny also justified industrial growth and material abun-
dance. Rather than merely providing idle comfort, such prosperity was
the driving engine for global expansion and the proof of American
supremacy.

Roosevelt did not shy away from emphasizing the centrality of vio-
lence and coercion to pacifying the globe and to conquering barbarism.
He wrote, "Every expansion of civilization makes for peace. In other
words, every expansion of a great civilized power means a victory for
law, order, and righteousness." Roosevelt argued that any lasting order
would be "due solely to the power of the mighty civilized races which
have not lost the fighting instinct, and which by their expansion are
gradually bringing peace into the red wastes where the barbarian peoples
of the world hold sway." However, just as for Strong, alongside Roose-
velt's national chauvinism there also existed a universalist premise. Amer-
ican expansion would not exterminate barbarous peoples but rather
would provide an example of stable rule such that culturally dissimilar
nations could over time become members of the civilized community.
Roosevelt may have argued that "It is only the warlike power of a civi-
lized people that can give peace to the world," but he held out hope that
all groups could enjoy the benefits of an American-generated tranquility.
Although permanent peace may require the strong arm of U.S. power, it
was nonetheless a general good. By globalizing the settler commitment
to pacification, both Roosevelt and Strong presented their own politics
of inclusion. Where Skidmore or Brownson had wanted all groups in
the United States to be incorporated as free citizens and to enjoy pro-
ductive control, Roosevelt instead imagined a world order in which all
peoples achieved the benefits of lasting stability and Anglo-American
civilization. 56

War with Spain and the Emergence of American Global Power
Roosevelt's editorial and his ruminations on the nature of expansion were
prompted by the Spanish- American War, which left the United States with
a wide-ranging overseas empire, extending from the Caribbean to East
Asia. Excluding the Alaska Purchase in 1867 and the uninhabited Guano
Islands, before the 1890s all American territories had been contiguous.
However, the turn of the century saw a flurry of expansionist policies. In
1898 Hawaii was officially annexed — five years after American sugar
planters had staged a revolt with such hopes in mind. That same year, on
December 10, the United States signed the Treaty of Paris, which for-
mally ended hostilities with Spain. Initially begun over the future status
of Cuba, Article I of the Treaty held that Spain relinquished sovereignty
over the island and gave the United States occupation authority under
international law. Article II handed over the sovereignty of Puerto Rico
and Guam to the United States, while under Article III Spain also ceded
the Philippine Islands for the price of $20 million. Moreover, in the wake
of the war, the United States acquired eastern Samoa in 1900 through
treaty with Great Britain and Germany and, in 1903, the Panama Canal
after an American intervention in Colombia. 57

This expansion embodied a clear break with the experience of settler
colonization, particularly as asserted in Dred Scott. For early colonists,
the primary motive driving empire had been new land for white settle-
ment. As such, no new possessions were to be incorporated on a perma-
nent footing of inequality. The old imperial narrative rejected lasting le-
gal distinctions between metropole and territorial periphery, instead
imagining a relatively decentralized project of settler conquest and con-
trol. This did not mean that conquered populations were treated as
equals and thus integrated into settler society. For outsider groups, above
all Indian tribes, settlers followed the example of British imperium and
established modes of stratified subjectship that protected settler su-
premacy as well as land interests. Now, however, the United States found
itself with a variety of possessions none of which could be settled by
white Americans, and whose local populations did not fit historic criteria
for ethnic and cultural assimilation. Under such circumstances, imperial
growth appeared to require a distinct framework — one that presupposed
the need for indefinite territorial and colonial dependency.

For politicians in Washington, conflict with Spain did not initially
threaten old assumptions or presuppose a new account of empire. Few

had presumed that the war would end with wholesale annexation. 58 This
reality hit home only when the Senate was faced with whether to approve
the Paris Treaty, which left to Congress the decision of how best to rule
new territories. As critics quickly appreciated, such plenary authority
raised the potential that, in contrast with settler presumptions and the
approach taken by Taney in Dred Scott, these possessions could well be
governed indefinitely as dependencies. Although the treaty was ultimately
ratified, anti-annexationists remained deeply wary of the emerging para-
digm, particularly given the insurrection unfolding in the Philippines.

It was in this context that Roosevelt wrote his editorial, providing a
vigorous defense both of expansion and of developing a new account of
empire. For Roosevelt, defending the war and its consequences was of spe-
cial personal import. He had strongly supported the conflict from the
beginning, and the war itself had helped to make him famous. At the out-
break of hostilities, Roosevelt resigned from his position at the Depart-
ment of the Navy and led a small regiment of soldiers in Cuba known as
the Rough Riders, ultimately earning the Medal of Honor for his actions.
Now faced with the outcome of war — military occupation and far-flung
territories — Roosevelt refused to question the logic of annexation. Speak-
ing of the Philippines, he argued that withdrawal was not a feasible op-
tion. It would leave the islands under the sway of General Aguinaldo and
create such chaos and disorder that a future intervention inevitably would
be necessary. Roosevelt wrote of his anti-annexationist opponents:

If the men who have counselled national degradation, national
dishonor, by urging us to leave the Philippines and put the Agui-
naldan oligarchy in control of those islands, could have their way,
we should merely turn them over to rapine and bloodshed until
some stronger, manlier power stepped in to do the task we had
shown ourselves fearful of performing.

Importantly, Roosevelt presented two intertwined arguments in support
of global imperialism. On the one hand, he maintained the need to reject
the Dred Scott view that the Constitution should follow the flag. The
imperative of international peace required keeping dependent colonies
and establishing territorial modes of authority inconsistent with full con-
stitutional protection. Settler empire had to give way to the pressing de-
mands of American global dominance and domestic security. However,
Roosevelt also asserted that imperialism was in its own way simply a
means to the greater end of pacification. Thus American control would

be temporary, and ultimately all nations would enjoy stable government
under their own leadership. Dependencies, while essential in the national
effort to impose global stability, were not to be thought of as permanent
possessions. "This country will keep the islands and will establish therein
a stable and orderly government, so that one more fair spot of the world's
surface shall have been snatched from the forces of darkness," Roosevelt
wrote, adding, "Fundamentally the cause of expansion is the cause of
peace." 59

Following Roosevelt's logic, supporters of annexation also came to
accept arguments for global expansion in the face of new international
challenges. In a famous interview in 1899 with a delegation of Methodist
clergymen, President McKinley further articulated the need for altering
the basic parameters of settler empire. In explaining his decision to main-
tain the Philippines as a colonial dependency, he commented:

I walked the floor of the White House night after night until mid-
night; and I am not ashamed to tell you, gentlemen, that I went
down on my knees and prayed [to] Almighty God for light and
guidance more than one night. And one night late it came to me
this way — I don't know how it was, but it came. (1 ) That we could
not give them back to Spain — that would be cowardly and dis-
honourable; (2) that we could not turn them over to France or
Germany — our commercial rivals in the Orient — that would be
bad business and discreditable; (3) that we could not leave them to
themselves — they were unfit for self-government — and they would
soon have anarchy and misrule over there worse than Spain's was;
and (4) that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all
and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and Christianize them, and
by God's grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow-
men for whom Christ also died. 60

McKinley saw the "Philippines Question" as providing no easy solutions.
He accepted the settler emphasis on republican freedom as a project
shared by Anglo colonists and other co-ethnic participants and so believed
that constitutional equality could not be extended to an unassimilable
nonwhite community. But he also maintained that without an American
presence in the Philippines, the United States would face a host of po-
tential threats to peace. If France or Germany claimed possession,
America inevitably would be hedged in by European powers and drawn
into greater entanglements. Perhaps worse, independence would create

anarchy and make the promise of tranquility even more distant. Con-
fronted by a changed world, McKinley argued for a new and pragmatic
imperial politics that promoted rather than curtailed the use of U.S.
power abroad.

Constitutionalizing Global Expansion
The sense that the United States' global emergence required revising the
basic assumptions of settler empire eventually found its way into the le-
gal debates of the time. Beginning in 1901 the Supreme Court finally
addressed the question of Puerto Rico's constitutional status. In a series
of landmark decisions collectively known as the Insular Cases, the Court
rejected the Dred Scott approach and critically altered the constitutional
basis for expansion. It did so in the wake of McKinley's presidential re-
election and at a moment when most politicians viewed the early settler
account as no longer tenable. The requirements of global order, not to
mention Roosevelt's and Strong's millennial aspirations, suggested a new
imperial paradigm in which the maintenance of colonial possessions ap-
peared to be essential. 61 The most important of the Insular Cases was
Downes v. Bidwell, which provided the legal framework for how new
territorial possessions would be governed. 62 The case itself involved Con-
gress's power to impose special import duties on goods from Puerto Rico,
given the Constitution's Article I, Section 8, requirement of uniform duties
throughout the United States. The Court split 5-4 in voting to uphold the
constitutionality of the measure, with no single majority opinion filed. 63
Instead, Justice Henry Brown's opinion announced the conclusion of the
Court. In it he contended that Dred Scott's rejection of Congress's ple-
nary power to govern territories was mere dicta and that such power
existed as an "incident of national sovereignty" only limited by "personal
rights which are formulated in the Constitution and its amendments." 64
Recall that Taney had made those arguments against the backdrop — in
the mid-nineteenth century — not only of slavery but also of extensive
congressional oversight of territorial governance on the frontier. Wary of
unchecked federal power and reflecting the views of frontier politicians,
Taney sought to prevent Congress from employing the old imperial pre-
rogative inside the domestic community and thus subjecting white set-
tlers to a coercive authority properly wielded against natives and slaves.
By contrast, Brown now reasserted the legality of such discretionary
oversight and, therefore, the legitimacy of exercising an imperial prerog-
ative even within the territorial nation.

Still, Brown struggled to limit the extent of this authority and to en-
sure that it did not apply to privileged insiders. In the process, he reiter-
ated the classic settler view that the imperial prerogative was appropriately
directed only at nonwhite and conquered populations. Brown maintained
that the provision for uniform duties was applicable under the Constitu-
tion to the geographic United States and did not include Puerto Rico. In
reaching this conclusion, Brown emphasized the cultural incompatibility
between colonized natives and the American ethnic community:

We are also of the opinion that the power to acquire territories by
treaty implies not only the power to govern such territory, but to
prescribe upon what terms the United States will receive its inhab-
itants, and what their status shall be in what Chief Justice Mar-
shall terms the "American Empire." There seems to be no middle
ground between this position and the doctrine that if these inhab-
itants do not become, immediately upon annexation, citizens of the
United States, their children thereafter born, whether savages or civi-
lized, are such, and entitled to all the rights, privileges and immunity
of citizens. If such be their status, the consequences will be ex-
tremely serious. Indeed it is doubtful if Congress would ever assent
to the annexation of territory upon the condition that its inhabit-
ants, however foreign they may be to our habits, traditions and
modes of life, shall become at once citizens of the United States.

Brown also claimed that fears of tyrannical power abroad were over-
drawn because, "there are certain principles of inherent justice in the
Anglo-Saxon character," which would protect new colonies from oppres-
sive treatment and "need no expression in constitutions or statutes to
give them effect." 65

In essence, Brown revised the basic settler relationship between strat-
ified subjectship and territorial governance. For settler empire, since Anglo
(and other European) colonists would eventually claim land on the fron-
tier, any period of congressional oversight had to be limited and the new
territory eventually incorporated as a state on equal footing. At the same
time, such oversight nonetheless could be applied indefinitely to nonwhite
communities — those imperial subjects organized by whichever structures
of authority were most conducive to order. Now, however, white settle-
ment was not an option with overseas possessions, and consequently the
premise of equal territorial treatment no longer held. This meant that — just

as its nonwhite population could be ruled as stratified subjects — the terri-
tory as a whole could be shaped by a lasting plenary power to fit congres-
sional needs.

Justice Edward White's concurrence, joined by Justices George Shi-
ras and Joseph McKenna, drew from an article previously published in
the Harvard Law Review by Abbott Lawrence Lowell, which proposed
an incorporation theory of territorial acquisition. Over time, this con-
currence became the constitutional law generally promulgated by the
Insular Cases. 66 For White the issue of an appropriate constitutional ap-
proach to new global possessions raised two basic questions. First, how
should the United States govern conquered communities who — due to
clear ethnic differences — could not be fully integrated within the political
body? This was the question that Brown had straightforwardly answered
by defending prerogative rights and revising the settler relationship be-
tween imperial subjectship and territorial governance. But at the same
time there existed a second key difficulty. White agreed with Roosevelt
that the purpose of empire was not the creation of permanent dependen-
cies. Rather it was the use of colonial rule to produce stability and to
provide conditions for indigenous self-government. Thus, along with
the question of how to rule imperial subjects, the Court faced the chal-
lenge of establishing constitutional arrangements that provided a work-
able framework for the end of American tutelage and for eventual
independence.

White argued that treaties of annexation established either incorpo-
rated or unincorporated territories, the latter of which left to congressional
determination the ultimate status of the new possession. This allowed the
political community to make judgments about which conquered lands
should be treated as integral to the United States and worthy of full con-
stitutional equality and which should be held indefinitely as colonial de-
pendencies. As a result, it created a legal regime by which the United
States could hold unincorporated territories until the need for imperial
supervision waned and local sovereignty could be reestablished on
grounds consistent with American interests and international order. No
doubt thinking of the Filipino example, White reasoned, "Would not the
war, even if waged successfully, be fraught with danger if the effect of oc-
cupation was to necessarily incorporate an alien and hostile people into
the United States?" Given the clear consequences for internal stability
and ethnic identity, White concluded:

It must follow, therefore, that where a treaty contains no condi-
tions for incorporation, and, above all, where it not only has no
such conditions, but expressly provides to the contrary, that incor-
poration does not arise until in the wisdom of Congress it is
deemed that the acquired territory has reached the state where it is
proper that it should enter into and form a part of the American
family. 67

As for the Puerto Rican case at hand, he asserted that as an unincor-
porated territory, while certain fundamental rights (unstated in the Con-
stitution) may not be transgressed, Congress had the discretionary power
to govern the dependency and to impose nonuniform tariffs: "Since it
[Puerto Rico] was subject to the sovereignty of and was owned by the
United States, it was foreign to the United States in a domestic sense,
because the island had not been incorporated into the United States, but
was merely appurtenant thereto as a possession." White further con-
tended that the issue of whether to incorporate new possessions should
be deemed a political question and that a limitation of congressional
authority hamstrung the nation's ability to pursue its goals on the
world stage. In his view, the political branches best understood the re-
quirements of international order and which framework — equal state-
hood or colonial dependency — rightly applied to a particular territory.
In other words, if the judiciary were to declare conquered land "in-
corporated," this would undermine Congress's ability to decide later
that permanent inclusion and full constitutional protections were
inappropriate:

Suppose Congress should determine that the millions of inhabit-
ants of the Philippine islands should not continue appurtenant to
the United States, but that they should be allowed to establish an
autonomous government, outside of the Constitution of the United
States. ... If it be that the question of whether territory is immedi-
ately fit for incorporation when it is acquired is a judicial, and not
a legislative one, it would follow that the validity of the conditions
would also come within the scope of judicial authority, and thus the
entire political policy of the government be alone controlled by the
judiciary.

Thus White held that the realities and needs of global expansion neces-
sitated both developing dual structures of territorial governance and

providing Congress the full capacity to make judgments about how to
impose these structures. 68

According to Christina Burnett, arguments about incorporation cre-
ated a federal process for "territorial deannexation." 69 They allowed
White to maintain the premise of constitutional protections within the
real "American family" of equal states and to hold colonial dependencies
abroad during a period of necessary but hopefully finite tutelage. In some
ways, the adaptations made by both Brown and White were not that
distinct from settlerism's politics of duality, which separated between a
protected realm of free citizenship and a colonial one of stratified sub-
jectship. Yet, despite this consistency, both justices saw the Dred Scott
approach, with its single framework for territorial governance, as too
inflexible; it was unable to meet new global needs and to ensure peace at
the edges of a far-flung empire. Therefore, in contrast to Dred Scott, the
new legal regime greatly broadened the scope of imperial prerogative. It
did so, in particular, by entrenching the notion that Congress could des-
ignate which American territories were dependent colonies and which
were constitutionally free land. Such authority necessarily eliminated
Taney's hope that external discretion would never apply internally, as the
federal government now explicitly enjoyed the right even to decide what
counted as internal.

This fact was not lost on members of the Court who dissented from
the Dowries majority. Chief Justice Melville Fuller, in an opinion that re-
ceived the most votes, asserted that the matter of incorporation was be-
side the point. In his view, Congress could not establish civil and admin-
istrative rules for governing Puerto Rico as an American territory and
then claim that the rest of its acts were not limited by the Constitution.
Of White's theory Fuller wrote: "That theory assumes that the Constitu-
tion created a government empowered to acquire countries throughout
the world, to be governed by different rules than those obtaining in the
original States and territories, and substitute for the present system of
republican government, a system of domination over distant provinces in
the exercise of unrestricted power."

Similarly, Justice Harlan saw the majority as rejecting the belief that
the national government could exercise only enumerated powers. By pre-
suming that the Constitution was flexible enough to justify whatever
government actions were deemed necessary for the promotion of overseas
expansion, the majority undermined the basic constraints that republican
institutions placed on political authority. According to Harlan:

Monarchical and despotic governments, unrestrained by written
constitutions, may do with newly acquired territories what this
Government may not do consistent with our fundamental law. To
say otherwise is to concede that Congress may, by action taken
outside of the Constitution, engraft upon our republican institu-
tions a colonial system such as exists under monarchical govern-
ments. Surely, such a result was never contemplated by the fathers
of the Constitution.

For both Harlan and Fuller, the dual approach to territorial governance sig-
naled the application of external discretionary power to the internal func-
tioning of republican politics and suggested that privileged settlers could
potentially find themselves facing a coercive imperial prerogative. 70

Despite these concerns, the Court in Dowries nonetheless constitu-
tionalized a new vision of empire, which allowed for the indefinite pos-
session of colonial dependencies. In doing so, the Dowries Court created
a startling state of affairs: it placed the capacities of the federal govern-
ment on an equal footing with those exercised by imperial Europe. By a
single vote, it held that the national government could legitimately claim
all powers necessary for the application of global authority, including
creating distinct regimes of territorial governance depending on political
judgments about order and security. Justice White and others, by estab-
lishing methods for "deannexation," no doubt proclaimed America's dis-
interest in global domination. They reiterated arguments that empire was
primarily aimed at pursuing international peace and presupposed that
tutelage would lead eventually to full self-governance for colonized peo-
ples. Yet, at the same time, theories of incorporation provided no sunset
provision for imperial rule and therefore potentially could last forever.

The great premise of settler colonialism had been that, rather than
promoting metropolitan hegemony, U.S. expansion went hand in hand
with decentralized and autonomous self-rule by free citizens. Empire
had served to fulfill republican ambitions by providing the conditions
for property ownership and economic independence. But under the re-
vised constitutional structures of the early twentieth century, there was
little difference between either the global ambitions or the expansionist
legal frameworks guiding the United States and its European rivals. New
dependencies — despite talk of their temporary status — appeared indis-
tinct from classic European colonies, useful primarily for economic ex-
traction and the projection of power. This had clearly been the goal for

Teddy Roosevelt, who imagined a strong, centralized bureaucracy with
the discretionary power to right wars abroad and to govern the peace as
it saw fit. Yet the closeness of the Supreme Court vote indicated a persis-
tent uncertainty with the path taken. Would the new imperial order pro-
mote international stability and a sense of national purpose, or would it
reduce the United States to the turmoil and class conflict that marked so
much of European politics? It was unclear whether an imperial preroga-
tive, extended and legitimized, could be kept from intervening in domes-
tic internal affairs.

The Inclusive Politics of American Expansion
Perhaps the most surprising development in the arguments over Ameri-
can empire was how the debate implicated notions of social inclusion
and race. Radical Populists had connected their critique of imperialism
to a rejection at home of militarism and unchecked state power. As Jus-
tices Fuller and Harlan demonstrated, these views still held a powerful
purchase on the national imagination. Yet Watson, Neville, and others
also had combined this fear of centralized despotism with an inclusive
and broad vision of social membership. Their anti-imperialist stance had
been tied to two distinctive breaks with the settler idiom: first, faith in
the capacity of nonwhites to be full American citizens and, second, re-
spect for foreign peoples — particularly in their right to noninterference.
However, the disintegration of Populism as a social movement in-
creasingly meant that mainstream critics of global empire fell back on
old settler xenophobia. New territories should not be annexed, because
according to politicians and intellectuals nonwhites lacked the funda-
mental capacity to appreciate an English-derived liberty. Writing in the
Harvard Law Review, Carman Randolph rejected the constitutionality of
holding colonial dependencies in these familiar settler terms. Witnessing
the chaos of the Filipino occupation, Randolph saw annexation of dis-
tant lands as a threat to the United States' ethnic composition as well
as to the sustainability of democratic self-rule at home. He wrote:

The United States . . . ought not to annex a country evidently and
to all appearances irredeemably unfit for statehood because of the
character of its people and where the climactic conditions forbid
the hope that Americans will migrate to it in sufficient numbers to
elevate its social conditions and ultimately justify its admission as
a State. And when a project for annexing territory is coupled with

a disclaimer of any intention of admitting it as a State now or
hereafter, when this disclaimer is necessary in order to secure a fa-
vorable consideration, the project is opposed to the spirit of the
Constitution. 71

Randolph viewed the Philippines as so culturally foreign and the popula-
tion so numerous as to undermine any hope of assimilation into the
national community. Statehood would invite social conflict and war,
while annexation as a dependent colony would eliminate whatever re-
mained of the normative divide between the United States and an auto-
cratic Europe. America would find itself ruling over an empire of diverse
foreign peoples, none of whom had the heritage or attributes to appreci-
ate settler freedom.

University of Michigan Professor J. Neal Steere, a persistent and influ-
ential opponent of global expansion, wrote of the Philippines, "I think if
we annex the islands, with our form of government and our institutions,
we will have an endless amount of difficulties. The Indians themselves
are in a state of pupilage, with no experience in self-government, and are
in no state to become citizens, less so than were the Africans in the South
after the Civil War." 72 For Steere, both Native Americans and freed slaves
were outsider groups, which presented a permanent challenge to the eth-
nic coherence and internal democracy of the American community. Simi-
larly, the inherent inferiority of nonwhite foreign populations raised grave
concerns about the new imperial politics. In his view, greater expansion
meant the inevitable "mongrelization" of a historically Anglo settler society.
This change, not unlike black incorporation or immigration by "unfit"
communities from southern Europe and Asia, threatened the ethnic basis
of social inclusion.

Confronted by anti-annexationist arguments premised on race and
xenophobia, defenders of global expansion over time came to stress the
universal attributes of empire. This was in large part also due to the focus
on permanent peace and its millennial aspirations. For the United States
to pacify the globe successfully, war making and coercive control could
not be lasting features of international relations. At some point American
tutelage would likely end, and lesser nations would become self-governing
and stable members of the world community — a fact Justice White
helped to constitutionalize as a basis for holding colonial possessions. Of
course, this hope of indigenous sovereignty did not mean that expansion-
ists were unprepared for tutelage to fail and thus for imperial control to

remain a near permanent requirement of global pacification. Still, the
logic of the new empire — its focus on civilizing non-Europeans — as well
as the stringent ethno-nationalism of opponents shifted the emphasis to-
ward a more inclusive international vision.

In Teddy Roosevelt's famous 1901 speech to the Minnesota State Fair,
in which he called on the United States to "speak softly and carry a big
stick" in global affairs, he also made clear that colonialism was simply a
means for achieving a peaceful and free world. Roosevelt wrote of the
experience in the Philippines:

The Tagalogs have a hundredfold the freedom under us that they
would have if we had abandoned the islands. We are not trying to
subjugate a people; we are trying to develop them and make them
a law-abiding, industrious, and educated people, and we hope ulti-
mately a self-governing people. In short, in the work we have done
we are but carrying out the true principles of our democracy. 73

Whereas earlier he had emphasized the centrality of violence for instill-
ing manly virtues in a decadent and commercialized society, Roosevelt
now placed more weight on America's historic mission. Militarism as an
end in itself fell into the background, and the country's role in fostering a
stable order of self-governing and free republics formed the philosophi-
cal centerpiece.

This shift was spurred by two developments, which were apparent to
defenders of expansion. The first was that the United States had appeared
on the global stage at a decidedly late moment, after the most valuable
colonial possessions already had been claimed. While the country still
sought its share of the spoils, the new American empire would necessar-
ily pale in comparison to that of European rivals. This fact limited the
usefulness of direct colonial possessions as a symbol of national power
or as a means for asserting American global dominance. In addition, the
experience in the Philippines provided a disturbing backdrop for future
imperial adventures. Although Roosevelt spoke glowingly about the
prospect of bringing "freedom" to the Filipinos, the clear reality was one
of popular unrest and brutal guerrilla war. Such hard truths questioned
the advisability of becoming ensnared in expensive and costly colonial
wars.

All these forces — the emerging universalism of America's commit-
ment to permanent peace, its late entry into the scramble for colonial
possessions, and the difficulty of imposing direct control over the

Philippines — eventually indicated an alternative focus for the nation's
imperial ambitions. The old settler empire had sought new territory for
Anglo and co-ethnic colonization, with the promise of expanding white
land ownership and thus free labor. In its wake, turn-of-the-century impe-
rialists hoped that through the struggle for colonial possessions the United
States would reclaim its warrior spirit and gain a sense of national pur-
pose and identity. However the realities of empire as well as the rhetoric
of liberty and global tranquility suggested a new mode of international
engagement. Rather than directly controlling territory, the United States
would assert constant economic and military power abroad. It would
open new markets for American domestic goods and intervene wherever
chaos threatened the possibility of peace. Such global authority would
not require extensive colonial dependencies and would be justified in the
name of stability and global self-government. It would also draw from
the discourse of tutelage the notion that American supervision was cen-
tral to the proper exercise of local self-rule, as the United States provided
a benevolent hand steering weaker nations in peaceful and prosperous
directions.

Crucially, this transition in imperial understanding made the previous
debates over annexation moot. Both sides by and large could agree on the
aim of American power, which involved imposing order on a disordered
globe, and on its means, consisting of economic expansion as a general
rule and the application of military force where necessary. During the
debates following the Spanish-American War, individuals as disparate as
Andrew Carnegie and Samuel Gompers had attacked territorial annexa-
tion. Now, however, each defended "commercial expansion" and the
spread of American global power. As Carnegie commented, "One of the
reasons why I oppose imperialism — the acquisition of the Philippines for
instance — is commercial expansion." According to him, "Without distant
possessions, the Republic, solid, compact, safe from the zone of war dis-
turbance, has captured the world's markets for many products, and only
needs a continuance of peaceful conditions to have the industrial world
at its feet." Similarly, Gompers, in a speech to peace advocates, described
the position of the American Federation of Labor:

We do not oppose the development of our industry, the expansion
of our commerce, nor the power and influence which the United
States may exert upon the destinies of the nations of the earth. On
the contrary, we realize that the higher intelligence and standard of

life of the American workers will largely contribute toward attain-
ing the highest pinnacle of industrial and commercial greatness;
and these achievements in the paths of peace will glorify the insti-
tutions of our republic.

Both Gompers and Carnegie embraced the larger project of pacification
but saw maintaining expensive foreign colonies as unnecessary to ful-
filling this goal. For them, American empire meant a modified form of
political hegemony — the extension of commercial and military power
in the service of promoting international stability and thus domestic
peace. 74

In many ways, Gompers and Carnegie saw the future of American
global power as an expansion of the long-standing Monroe Doctrine,
introduced in 1823 by then- president James Monroe during his seventh
annual State of the Union Address to Congress. Under the doctrine, any
attempts by European states to colonize land in the Americas or to de-
velop spheres of influence would be seen by the United States as acts of
aggression justifying intervention. This foreign policy approach sought
to undermine two checks on the extension of American power. The first
was the continuing commitment of European empires to sustain an eco-
nomic and political monopoly over Latin America. The second consisted
of efforts by local governments to close their doors to U.S. business or to
limit external supervision of their economies. As James Tully notes, this
U.S. defense of free trade presupposed a set of international rights and
duties. American leaders like Monroe presumed that all Western states
enjoyed a cosmopolitan right of commerce with non-Western societies,
and that non- Western societies had a correlated duty of hospitality to
open their doors to foreign companies and trade. 75

The point of this right and duty was not simply to expand markets for
American products but also to civilize non-Western peoples by entrench-
ing American legal, political, and economic institutions in neighboring
countries. 76 As a result, the right to free trade went hand in hand with a
right both to military intervention and to economic compensation if
local governments violated the duty of hospitality and closed their doors
to American companies. One should note that as the nineteenth century
progressed, open borders did not operate in both directions. While U.S.
commerce was free to flow into foreign countries, nonwhite communities
who were viewed as fundamentally unfit for settler membership were
denied U.S. admission. Thus Americans moved toward the exclusion of

Asian immigrants just at the time that political and business elites argued
for prying open previously closed Chinese markets to U.S. trade.

During much of the nineteenth century, this account of economic ex-
pansionism stood side by side with the more dominant picture of empire
as settler colonization. Yet, with the end of the frontier and in the context
of destructive efforts at creating formal dependencies (especially in the
Philippines), the Monroe Doctrine increasingly articulated the rise of
American global assertiveness. It came to be associated with an "open
door" foreign policy and especially with Secretary of State John Hay's
1899 and 1900 notes on U.S. relations with China. It also underscored a
critical new logic for American interventionism. Since free trade required
specific institutional arrangements in non- Western countries, continual in-
terference to transform indigenous societies into mirror images of the
United States was justified. America therefore had both a right and a re-
sponsibility to replace local modes of authority with institutional structures
marked by centralized political and economic power, private property, and
wage labor.

Once again, Roosevelt was among the first to grasp the full implica-
tions of this new construction of both empire and the old Puritan quest
for permanent tranquility. In his State of the Union message of December
6, 1904, in which he announced the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe
Doctrine, he straightforwardly extended the doctrine across the entire
Western Hemisphere. More important, he presented the American right
of intervention as a wide-ranging international police power, one that
protected peaceful commerce and the institutional development of weaker
neighbors. According to Roosevelt, the United States stood as the regional
safety net, ensuring that local practices conformed to democratic gover-
nance and respect for private property. In the process, he emphasized the
universal right of all nations to enjoy basic liberties as well as electoral
self-rule but tied such rights to the broadening of American economic
and military power.

Without American interventionism, the world would remain perilous
and unstable, a persistent threat to U.S. security, economic prosperity,
and the millennial hope of a pacified globe. In the basic language of
American tutelage, Roosevelt remarked, "It is not true that the United
States feels any land hunger or entertains any projects as regards the other
nations of the Western Hemisphere save such as are for their welfare. All
this country desires is to see the neighboring countries stable, orderly,
and prosperous." American intervention was therefore solely a product

of the need to ensure such order and to protect the United States from
chaos abroad. Roosevelt continued:

Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general
loosening of the ties of civilized society, may . . . require interven-
tion . . . however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing
or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power. If
every country washed by the Carribean [sic] Sea would show the
progress in stable and just civilization which ... so many of the
republics in both Americas are constantly and brilliantly showing,
all question of interference by this Nation with their affairs would
be at an end. 77

Roosevelt presented aggressive action in foreign affairs as the necessary
price of promoting democracy and collective peace. Only through Ameri-
can hegemony — namely, the extension of its global influence and re-
gional control — would the world be safe enough for Americans at home
to enjoy tranquility and prosperity.

Following Roosevelt's lead, Woodrow Wilson pursued the logical im-
plications of an inclusive commitment to global peace and self-rule. In
his 1916 address to the Railway Business Association, Wilson made clear
that the country's global ambitions did not include more colonial posses-
sions. If Roosevelt had once thought of direct control as an important
instrument for democratic tutelage, Wilson saw it as an inappropriate
means, declaring, "There is no spirit of aggrandizement in America.
There is no desire on the part of any thoughtful and conscientious
American man to take one foot of territory from any other nation in
the world." However, this did not mean that military intervention was
no longer critical to the project of pacification. In the same speech
Wilson spoke in laudatory terms of the Spanish-American War: "The
world sneered when we set out upon the liberation of Cuba, but the world
sneers no longer. The world now knows, what it was then loathe to be-
lieve, that a nation can sacrifice its own interests and its own blood for
the sake of the liberty and happiness of another people." 78 For Wilson,
just as for Roosevelt, American global dominance and the "big stick" of
military coercion were essential to the flourishing of a peaceful, civilized
world.

Wilson's activities in the Dominican Republic provide the best exam-
ple of how the emerging account of American hegemony linked an asser-
tive international police power to the old millennial aspirations. Wilson

viewed the 1914 revolt against the Dominican president, Jose Bordas
Valdes, as creating disorder and bloodshed at the American doorstep, not
unlike events in Cuba before war with Spain. In August of that year, he
sent a commission to restore order on the basis of the "Wilson Plan," a
set of instructions he himself drafted. 79 The plan created a tenuous peace
for the next year and a half and was premised on two key assumptions
of the new American position: first, instability anywhere was a potential
threat to American security; second, unless foreign nations became self-
governing democracies, peace would never be permanent.

As a consequence, the plan offered a more precise account of what
American political elites meant by freedom and democratic government
when they described the ends of foreign policy. For militarist defenders
of American empire like Strong and Roosevelt, liberty had always re-
mained a slippery term. Clearly it no longer carried the strong republican
implication of participatory control over all the relevant sites of decision
making, be they economic or political. Yet both Strong and Roosevelt
continued to emphasize the centrality of democracy to Anglo-American
civilization and thus to liberty. Over time, however, democratic self-rule
became synonymous with electoral legitimacy. In setting the Dominican
Republic on the path to liberty, Wilson saw the main stipulation of his
plan as requiring the country to hold presidential and congressional
elections — both overseen by American "representatives." Only "if the
United States Government is satisfied that these elections have been free
and fair and carried out under conditions which enable the people of the
republic to express their real choice" would America recognize the new
government and refrain from interfering further with the island's internal
affairs. 80 In the United States, the rise of bureaucratic administration had
steadily recast political self-rule as principally the act of voting. Under
these circumstances, democratic liberty became the individual's meaning-
ful ability to choose his or her representatives rather than any commit-
ment to direct and continuous participation. As typified by Wilson, these
changes meant that the activity of spreading liberty abroad became more
and more closely tied to precisely such electoral politics. As Wilson saw
it, creating self-sustaining representative systems was the central means
for promoting a peaceful world of free nations.

This commitment to electoral legitimacy by no means challenged the
interventionist premise of American foreign policy. To the extent that
foreign nations failed to live up to the representative ideal, or whenever
else disorder loomed, the United States necessarily had to assert its super-

visory authority and impose military order, as the Dominican case made
clear. In May 1916 the Wilson Plan collapsed amid popular revolt. In
response Wilson sent American Marines to restore order and launched
an extended military occupation of the country. In essence, the long-term
goals of democracy and peace required constant American interference
and if necessary even occupation. The millennial end may have been a
pacified globe, but until that end was achieved, the United States would
be compelled to impose an intrusive and coercive state power on recalci-
trant neighbors. In appealing for the ratification of the League of Nations
and championing the principles of his Fourteen Points, Wilson under-
scored the "sacredness of the right to self-determination, the sacredness
of the right of any body of people to say that they would not continue to
live under the Government they were then living under." At the same
time, however, Wilson saw the last and best instrument for defending this
universal right to be American state power and global guidance. 81

In the end, the vision promoted by Wilson and Roosevelt suggested a
remarkable break with settler empire as well as a new ethical foundation
for American citizenship: participation through hard work and military
service in the global effort to spread peace. It also reinforced the Pro-
gressive move toward administrative centralization. As the Insular Cases
made clear, an aggressive American foreign policy required bestowing the
federal government with far greater discretionary power and unleashing
the old imperial prerogative even within the boundaries of the territorial
nation. While Dowries v. Bidwell may have located such power in con-
gressional hands, the practice of increased interventionism and the ex-
ample of decisive leadership provided by Roosevelt and Wilson indicated
that this authority was best asserted by the presidency. In effect, the new
imperial politics laid the groundwork for an expansive executive,
which — following Roosevelt's stewardship theory — would act flexibly
abroad to quell disorder and impose democratic stability. Thus an increas-
ingly unified administrative apparatus had come to replace the relatively
decentralized institutions of settler expansion. If the United States did
not possess a colonial empire the size of Britain's or France's, it nonethe-
less developed an analogous bureaucratic framework in pursuing its own
global ambitions.

The fact that American foreign policy combined this increased cen-
tralization with a politics of universal right and greater inclusiveness was
not by accident. Just as with Britain before it, the precondition for imag-
ining how diverse peoples could enjoy the benefits of liberty involved a

drastic reduction in the meaning of liberty itself. Ultimately, this entailed
transforming the ideal of democracy from authentic republican self-rule
to the regular rotation of politicians through elections. In other words,
Roosevelt and Wilson placed the activity and responsibilities of freedom
on a lower plane, such that the latter's "sacred" right of self-determination
now carried with it far less import. For both presidents, respecting this
"sacred" right was even consistent with extensive periods of occupation,
in which American control would promote the habits of representative
government.

One should remember that a reduction in the value of freedom had
helped precipitate the entire global thrust in the first place. Precisely be-
cause social membership appeared devoid of substance and incapable of
promoting an ethics of responsibility or participation, Holmes, Strong,
and Roosevelt had sought the answer in a new American empire. With
the development of this empire, the United States was now confronted by
an emerging set of realities. What it promoted abroad was a greatly trun-
cated account of freedom, which emphasized electoral processes with
little sense of how such processes could give voice to the real aspirations
of local peoples or could embody ideals of participation. In the quest for
permanent peace, the actual concerns and political realities of foreign na-
tions were inevitably subordinated, with indigenous communities pri-
marily treated as instruments for the extension of American power and
blank slates for projects of electoral design. In other words, this mode of
universalism was assimilationist rather than plural. It took for granted
the uniqueness and preeminence of an Anglo-American vision and saw
the spread of rights as eliminating the cultural backwardness of local
populations. One could argue that such universalism was by its nature
incapable of taking seriously the particular contexts of the very commu-
nities it sought to uplift. Not coincidentally, then, the new millennialism
relied heavily on the application of coercive power against weaker neigh-
bors. Moreover, this application fed into the gravest concern of old Peo-
ple's Party activists; empire abroad would promote despotism at home
and the centralization of political power into fewer and fewer domestic
hands.

Bourne's Alternative: A Nonimperial and Inclusive Internat'n,
Although a commitment to international police power and regional he-
gemony may have increasingly defined the nation's constitutional and
political orientation, it was not the sole view held by Americans at the

time. Both isolationism and a more substantively inclusive international-
ism than that advocated by either Teddy Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson
emerged as alternative visions of America's place in the world. The former,
however, became ever more prominent in the post- World War I era, while
the nonimperial internationalism espoused by social critics like Randolph
Bourne remained very much at the margins.

In the wake of World War I, anti-annexationist arguments from the
debates over Filipino and Puerto Rican acquisition fed into a strength-
ened isolationism at home. Such a position, particularly within the Re-
publican Party, ultimately defeated Wilson's efforts at incorporating the
United States into the League of Nations; its champions pressed during the
1920s and 1930s for a general retreat from an aggressive global stance.
This isolationist response presented its own variation on the classic millen-
nial quest for permanent peace. Playing on previous settler concern with
external threat, many opponents of the League presumed — not unlike the
Constitution's founders — that domestic tranquility required separation
from European entanglement and wariness of foreign bodies that might
challenge American internal sovereignty. These views were powerful
enough to forestall Wilson's immediate hope of the United States taking
a clear leadership role in the postwar era, with the country directing the
peace and generating a stable international order. 82 In fact, it would
take Pearl Harbor and World War II for Wilsonian sentiment to gain a
permanent political victory and for the general drift toward global in-
terventionism to proceed unconstrained by a strong isolationist block.

Akin to the anti-annexationist position twenty years earlier, one should
note that isolationism in the interwar period also helped to underscore
the seeming connection between nativism and critiques of empire. In the
hands of individuals like Senator William Borah of Idaho, who combined
anti-imperialism with harsh anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy argu-
ments, or white supremacists like the latter-day Tom Watson, questioning
American power often appeared to operate in tandem with defenses of
racial purity and exclusion. There were those in Congress, such as Wis-
consin senator Robert La Follette, who did combine opposition to both
World War I and the League of Nations with a rejection of nativism. Yet,
even La Follette, who opposed extensive immigration restrictions, voted
for the 1917 literacy test for new arrivals and remained largely silent as
nativist sentiment gained dominance. 83

Still, at the edges of political debate there remained voices that both
embraced the emancipatory hope of republican freedom and steadfastly

connected anti-imperial arguments to an inclusive social vision. In doing
so, these radical Progressives sought to disassociate the growing tie in
public consciousness between universal ideals and American interven-
tionism. Perhaps no one fleshed out this project more fully than social
critic Randolph Bourne. Writing in the context of World War I, Bourne
described the linkages between the decline of economic and political self-
rule at home and the rise abroad of an aggressive nationalism and its re-
lated commitment to projecting global influence.

To begin with, he depicted expansionism and national war fever as cre-
ating domestic legal institutions that centralized and extended the admin-
istrative state in ways that fundamentally compromised free citizenship.
In his posthumously published text, "The State," Bourne argued that the
basic principles behind this new statecraft were those derived from medi-
eval relations of obedience and obligation that bound kings to their sub-
jects. He viewed the state's history as a political institution as

the effort to maintain these personal prerogatives of power, the ef-
fort to convert more and more into stable law the rules of order,
the conditions of public vengeance, the distinction between the
classes, the possession of privilege. It was an effort to convert
what was at first arbitrary usurpation, a perfectly apparent use of
unjustified force, into the taken for granted and the divinely
established.

According to Bourne, although the premise of American settlerism had
been a fundamental disjunction from this vision of political authority,
the simple fact was that, almost imperceptibly, American statecraft — and
in particular the presidency — had become a fitting successor to the Euro-
pean monarchy and the English Crown. 84

In keeping with Populists and many other Progressive reformers,
Bourne believed that the essence of liberty still lay in republican self-rule,
what he referred to as "a democratic cooperation in determining the
ideals and purposes and industrial and social institutions of a coun-
try." 85 In order for such cooperation to direct collective practices, one
clearly needed an energetic government to intervene in commercial life.
However, Bourne contended that the new statecraft did more than in-
tervene on behalf of popular demands; it increasingly monopolized de-
cision making entirely and gathered around political elites ever more
coercive forms of power, which could be employed to maintain their
authority.

In contrast to Herbert Croly, Bourne argued that what perpetuated
these trends was precisely the new focus on American nationalism. Ex-
pansionary policies underscored that the idea of the "nation," rather
than being a powerful force to undermine concentrated wealth, had been
captured by political and corporate elites. The concept allowed these ac-
tors to re-present popular struggles at home as threats to the common
good and to describe American interventionism abroad in patriotic terms
of prosperity and collective honor. In the process, nationalism justified
the continual extension of precisely those discretionary powers that
aided international police actions and domestic suppression. For Bourne
this both checked self-rule and further transformed the United States into
a polity indistinguishable from its European rivals. In his opinion, "To
seek no other goal than the weary old nationalism — belligerent, exclusive,
inbreeding, the poison of which we are witnessing now in Europe — is to
make patriotism a hollow sham, and to declare that, in spite of our boast-
ings, America must ever be a follower and not a leader of nations." In es-
sence, Bourne reiterated the classic republican analytical tie between war
making and the domestic emergence of military despotism. He viewed the
prevailing modes of national identification as strengthening public unity
through "coercion" and "militarism" — let loose "for domestic economic
exploitation of the workers or for predatory economic imperialism among
the weaker peoples." 86

Yet Bourne appreciated that a repudiation of such nationalism could
not mean a return to old sectional divides or purely local attachments.
He too believed that a new political identity was needed to confront pre-
vailing social problems and to cohere collective life. However, this iden-
tity had to challenge rather than strengthen the rise of militarism and
coercive state practices. Not unlike Skidmore before him, for Bourne the
solution was an identity that saw republican ideals in truly universal
terms. In articulating this position, Bourne called for a "Trans-National
America," internally inclusive and opposed to a global politics of super-
vision and police power, which treated outsiders as dependent means for
the pursuit of nationalist ends. He reminded his readers that the United
States, due to the legacies of slavery and immigration, had produced an
ethnically diverse community unparalleled in modern history. "In a world
which has dreamed of internationalism," he wrote, "we find that we have
all unawares been building up the first international nation." 87

For Bourne, this hope of an "international nation" had a series of key
implications. To begin with, it rejected the framework of racially restricted

immigration and opened the borders to all peoples regardless of race or
cultural background. Rather than an Anglo settler asserting his own so-
cial supremacy, an American "would no longer [be] the colonial of one
partial culture, but of many. He is the colonial of the world." Bourne thus
imagined a collective future in which "Colonialism has grown into cos-
mopolitanism, and [the colonial] motherland is no one nation, but all
who have anything life-enhancing to offer the spirit." In his view, only this
orientation of universality and cultural openness would protect against
bellicose nationalism. Crucially, such openness also rejected the idea of
immigration as a melting pot, in which Anglo settlers remained the cul-
tural standard and other communities were included to the extent that
they conformed to a "homogeneous Americanism." Instead, Bourne
imagined the United States as a "world federation in miniature," in which
ethnic pluralism was respected, because only then would all groups be
treated as equals. This defense of the "heterogeneous" was not meant as
a glorification of parochialism or a belief that ethnic identity should be
paramount. While Bourne maintained that ethnicity was essential to how
individuals made sense of their own condition, he imagined these diverse
backgrounds as the building blocks for a new American culture that tran-
scended all nationalisms. 88

Like Weyl, Bourne saw the tremendous generation of social wealth in
the United States as providing the country with an unparalleled opportu-
nity. This was because the national economy offered sufficient domestic
resources to incorporate plural ethnic communities on an equal footing;
as a result, the historical moment opened the possibility of creating
within American borders an "international citizenship." 89 By this, Bourne
meant developing a politics at home in which individuals saw themselves
as global rather than national partisans — precisely since they remained
culturally bound to societies from every corner of the world. He believed
that this internationalist outlook would undermine American interven-
tionism, in particular its use of military and political coercion to pry
open the markets of weak states. To the extent that the United States was
itself a world federation, its members would identify with the social posi-
tion of those outside its territory. Moreover, Bourne hoped that this iden-
tification would be sustained by policies of dual citizenship and free
movement between countries — the former facilitating the inclusion of
new immigrants, the latter strengthening ties between these immigrants
and their native communities.

Thus a nonimperial identity would emerge in place of the old political
convictions. Crucially, for Bourne, this rejection of empire was just as
thoroughly a rejection of isolationism and nativist sentiment; it rested
instead on the diffusion of borders and the cultural integration of Amer-
ica with the world at large. In effect, Bourne sketched a vision of a U.S.
metropole, economically prosperous and dynamic, which relied on no
peripheries — traditionally marked by colonized subjects or satellite
states — to maintain its position. Both noninterventionist and universally
inclusive, American identity would reject "any narrow Americanism' or
forced chauvinism." 90 As a consequence, it would disarm political and
economic elites of a central tool — parochial nationalism — in the exten-
sion of state prerogatives.

For all its similarities with previous traditions of radical populism,
Bourne's vision of a nonimperial metropole had one ultimately fatal dif-
ference. In the late nineteenth century, individuals like the egalitarian
Watson were not simply moral critics but also participants in a social
movement. The power of their arguments rested in part on the potential
for mobilized farmers and wage earners to impose these positions on col-
lective life, through concerted activity inside and outside the electoral
arena. Twenty years later, however, voices of opposition to the new state-
craft and its global pretensions no longer stood at the forefront of a gal-
vanized public. Bourne saw himself as an outsider, an "aloof" "malcon-
tent[]" reminding leading intellectuals of a lost American promise. 91 He
very consciously understood his project as swimming against the tide,
one that was potentially impossible to turn back. In a sense, while Bourne
may have railed against the implications of nationalism and discretion-
ary state power, each had become grounding features of collective life,
and opposition to them was neither systematic nor sustained by the same
degree of mass popular politics. Although Bourne's ideas suggested a
universalist alternative to those of Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt, they
represented an outlier perspective much less potent, for instance, than
nativist isolationism.

As the 1930s began, transformations in the meaning of social mem-
bership, freedom, and empire hinted at the emergence of a new mode of
politics. On one level, this political framework would be more inclusive,
extending the promise of rights to outsiders long subordinated under the
settler narrative — in both domestic and foreign relations. However, such
changes went hand in hand with a greatly limited vision of democratic

possibility and a growing defense of interventionist global power. It also
meant the final interpenetration of imperial prerogative authority within
domestic politics and therefore the steady decline in the meaning and
value of American membership. In the years since the end of the agrarian
movement, economic independence had been re-situated as economic
security, political self-rule had become electoral choice, and settler colo-
nization increasingly seemed reconfigured as global primacy. By the time
the New Deal and its aftermath established these principles as the foun-
dation for the new constitutional order, little remained of the old narra-
tives themselves, let alone their deeper premises. Today this new order
continues to dictate our thinking about the basic conditions for demo-
cratic practice as well as the purposes driving foreign policy.

The New Deal and the Plebiscitary Presidency

While the clear drift of American politics after the turn of the twentieth
century had been toward greater administrative and executive power at
home and abroad, nothing facilitated this development more than the
Great Depression. Following the stock market crash of 1929, the United
States plunged into deep economic crisis, which by 1932 had cut the
gross national product by a third and prices by half, and had left millions
of Americans without basic necessities, including housing, food, and
clothing. 92 Given such dire circumstances, Franklin Delano Roosevelt as-
sumed the presidency armed with extensive flexibility in how best to
confront the crisis. Providing an example of this latitude, Morone re-
minds readers that "Roosevelt received $3 billion in discretionary funds
in a two-year period for which the entire federal budget was $11.2 bil-
lion." 93 This discretionary power helped consolidate Progressive-era ad-
ministrative reforms and entrench the presidency as the political center
of American government. In the process, it finally provided a successor to
old settler ambitions and frameworks, replacing the basic terms of de-
bate as well as the prevailing notions of freedom and empire. Ultimately,
the New Deal cemented the emerging bond between social membership
and both economic security and global pacification.

Perhaps most startlingly, bureaucratic expansion during the New
Deal transformed the meaning of the "people" and the account of popu-
lar sovereignty at the root of national politics. In this section, I detail the
constitutional framework that eventually developed and the liberal argu-
ments that promoted these new institutional arrangements. Croly's

"authoritative representative body" had come to pass in the guise of
presidential leadership, with the executive enjoying a direct relationship
to the public at large. In the years since the New Deal, this relationship
has allowed the presidency to define and direct social ends and to be-
come the dominant political agent in collective life. In essence, FDR fos-
tered a lasting politics of substitution, in which the executive today pur-
sues security and permanent peace in the name of the people — but often
without any clear connection to a mobilized or self-assertive social con-
stituency. Thus, although silenced in practice as a meaningful political
agent, the people are still perpetually invoked as the primary source of
legitimacy justifying this new brand of presidential government.

The Legal and Institutional Framework of Executive Power
The New Deal was first and foremost noteworthy for its dizzying array
of government programs and bureaucratic agencies, which the Roosevelt
administration implemented in order to spur economic improvement. A
political pragmatist, Roosevelt referred to these programs as part of an
enterprise of "bold, persistent experimentation," driven by no economic
theories besides the reformist desire to confront urgent social problems. 94
Such experimentation created a new administrative landscape premised
on expanding the reach of bureaucratic power and centralizing govern-
ment activity in the executive. While the New Deal clearly pursued the
logic of Progressive administration, in its scope and constitutional impli-
cations it far surpassed previous state and federal efforts.

In fact, I contend that three events during the New Deal continue to
provide the parameters for our current mode of presidential government.
At the time, each event was viewed either as a political failure or as rela-
tively marginal; however, these events taken as whole established the in-
stitutional basis for the new constitutional order. The first was the re-
markable assertion by the Supreme Court that the presidency held an
elevated status vis-a-vis other branches of government. In United States
v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp., Justice George Sutherland delivered a
majority opinion, which suggested that the president enjoyed inherent
executive authority to conduct foreign affairs as a direct consequence
of the government's sovereign power to defend its interests. 95 The case
itself concerned the owners of an American company, who were in-
dicted for conspiring to sell guns to Bolivia. As requested by Roosevelt,
a Joint Resolution of Congress had delegated to the president the
power to prohibit arms sales to either Bolivia or Paraguay, which were

at the time engaged in a bloody border war. After Roosevelt's procla-
mation to that effect, the defendants were charged with violating the
executive order.

Following Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roo-
sevelt's proclamation was an attempt to quell perceived instability abroad
and to employ whatever coercive tools were needed to shape the out-
come of regional disputes. In arguing their case, the defendants saw the
congressional delegation of authority as an abdication of legislative re-
sponsibility and an unconstitutional transfer of lawmaking powers to the
executive. While these arguments were clearly supported by the text of
the Constitution, they failed to account for developing global realities, in
which a commitment to permanent peace, for instance, necessarily carried
with it more expansive presidential authority. Congressional delegation
was simply an acceptance that international police power could be wielded
effectively only by a strong and flexible executive, one able to respond im-
mediately to threats to order. Acceding to the prevailing logic, Sutherland
declared Congress's delegation of lawmaking authority constitutional:

We are here dealing not alone with the authority vested in the
President by an exertion of legislative power, but with such an
authority plus the very delicate, plenary and exclusive power of
the President as "the sole organ of the federal government in the
field of international relations" — a power which does not require
as a basis for its exercise an act of Congress, but which, of course,
like every other governmental power, must be exercised in subor-
dination to the applicable provisions of the Constitution. 96

By implication, Sutherland concluded that the Constitution was almost
infinitely flexible in matters of foreign affairs, granting the presidency
broad powers to pursue its political ends and thereby entrench American
regional and global power.

In doing so, Sutherland extended and revised the logic of Downes v.
Bidwell. In Curtiss-Wrighfs sweeping dicta, he defended the expanded
scope and legality of the old imperial prerogative, which he argued did
not depend for its legitimacy on textual authority or "affirmative grants
of the Constitution." This plenary "power of external sovereignty [had
been] passed from the Crown . . . to . . . the United States" at indepen-
dence, and was housed directly in the office of the president as opposed
to Congress — which the Downes opinions had implied — or even the two
branches jointly. 97 As a result, Sutherland explicitly linked FDR's actions

to those of the Crown, and suggested that the prerogative rights enjoyed
by the British monarch in external matters largely adhered to the Ameri-
can president as well.

In the process, the Court in Curtis s- Wright legally validated an institu-
tional arrangement, increasingly commonplace, that still had been con-
tested at the time of Dowries. In matters of foreign affairs, the executive
now enjoyed wide latitude premised on judicial deference and congres-
sional delegation. Even more crucially, Sutherland justified the constitu-
tionality of specifically tying the presidency to the powers of the British
Crown by proclaiming the unique role of the executive in collective life —
especially in fulfilling the hope of permanent peace and international
stability. He wrote of foreign affairs, "In this vast external realm, with its
important, complicated, delicate and manifold problems, the President
alone has the power to speak or listen as a representative of the nation." 98
Rather than being merely one branch of government, the executive pos-
sessed a direct relationship with the American people, and it alone was
capable of successfully pursuing the national interest and any commit-
ment to global influence and assertiveness. Precisely because no other
institution could claim either the "representative" capacity or the flexibil-
ity to impose America's international power, judicial deference was the
only legitimate response.

The next two events took place in 1937 and, perhaps surprisingly,
were notorious defeats for Franklin Roosevelt's administration. In fact,
1937 often marks what historians view as the collapse of FDR's domestic
agenda, the moment when the president exceeded his popular support."
To begin with, FDR attempted to resolve the judicial impasse over the
New Deal through a court-packing initiative, in which the president
would nominate a new Supreme Court justice whenever a sitting one
reached seventy years old — some six additional appointments at the time.
Confronted by the crisis, the Supreme Court reversed its position on
minimum wage regulation to uphold the constitutionality of a Washing-
ton state law in West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish. 100 The move, by signal-
ing greater judicial receptivity to the New Deal's larger economic agenda,
destroyed the court-packing initiative's momentum in Congress. Yet al-
though Roosevelt's effort failed and produced a noticeable drop-off in
his popular approval, it nonetheless created the precedent for what Bruce
Ackerman calls "transformative judicial appointments," the self-
conscious use of court nominations to impose constitutional change on a
recalcitrant judiciary. 101 Over time, these transformative appointments,

as employed by Roosevelt and his successors, became a central tool in
allowing the presidency to construct a federal judiciary more compatible
with its own ideological agenda. It also further reinforced the shift in insti-
tutional power toward the executive. Not only did the judiciary become
more deferential, but presidents could pick and choose judges to pursue
their own political commitments.

The final New Deal event that shaped our current mode of presiden-
tial government was Roosevelt's effort to centralize the expanding pow-
ers of the national state within the presidency and to make the executive
branch the focal point for lawmaking. In 1937 FDR established the Presi-
dent's Committee on Administrative Management, whose reform propos-
als were sent to Congress in January 1938. Widely denounced as "the dic-
tator bill" by opponents, these reforms included greatly increasing the
White House staff, making all independent commissions and administra-
tive boards responsible to the president through one of the twelve cabinet
agencies, centralizing the federal government's civil service by establishing
a single administrator appointed by the president, and transferring the
primary auditing function from Congress to an auditor-general located in
the executive. 102 In the end, the proposed reorganization bill was narrowly
defeated in the House of Representatives, and Congress eventually passed
a watered-down version in 1939.

However, once again, political failure provided the precedent for a
transformation in executive structure and authority; the principle ele-
ments of the committee's plan remain standard modes of presidential
power today. Whereas the 1939 Congress expanded the White House
staff to six senior aides, currently some 2,000 people with policymaking
responsibilities work under the Executive Office of the President. More-
over, for FDR as for later presidents, the executive's growth and adminis-
trative centralization presupposed the widespread delegation by Con-
gress of its own legislative powers in matters no longer limited to foreign
policy. Theodore Lowi writes that since 1937, "Every new program Con-
gress added in accord with its commitment to expanded government was
delegated for implementation to the executive branch. These laws were
deliberately written in the broadest and vaguest of terms in order to pro-
vide the largest amount of discretion possible to . . . the president in
making the actual policies." In fact, executive reorganization meant more
than simply taking over routine administrative tasks; it involved assert-
ing presidential leadership over the entire lawmaking process, from ini-
tiation and passage all the way through to implementation. 103

Taken together, such New Deal politics ushered in the rise of a "plebi-
scitary presidency." 104 Organized around expansive discretionary power,
judicial deference, and congressional delegation, the executive became so
instrumental to American governance that as Richard Neustadt wrote
in 1960, "Everybody now expects the man inside the White House to do
something about everything. Laws and customs now reflect acceptance
of him as the great initiator, an acceptance quite as widespread at the
Capitol as at his end of Pennsylvania Avenue." What made such author-
ity plebiscitary was a twofold development. On the one hand, American
politics witnessed the growth, as pointed out by Sutherland, of a direct
and unmediated relationship between the president and the people. Ac-
cording to Stephen Skowronek, "The plebiscitary presidents routinely
appeal over the heads of the elites of the Washington establishment, hop-
ing to use their public standing to compel that establishment into follow-
ing their lead." This vision of the president as the national representative
emerged along with an emphasis on voting as the quintessential embodi-
ment of American membership, and thus along with the election as the
key political moment when the "people" writ large expressed approval
or disapproval of presidential leadership. As a consequence, the presi-
dency, armed with its own "independent political apparatuses" and "mass
communication technologies," provided the focal point for the nation's
political energy. 105

Under the New Deal, the presidency became both the primary instru-
ment for collective change and the single agent held responsible for gov-
ernment action — good or bad. This institutional transformation of settler
empire into a highly bureaucratic system of presidential government car-
ried with it a fundamental ideological shift. In the wake of economic crisis,
intellectuals and politicians suggested their own solutions to the collapse
of settler society, which were increasingly less concerned with either the
decline of popular power or the rise of centralized hierarchies. Instead,
these solutions combined Progressive-era faith in administrative manage-
ment with a commitment to global power and permanent peace, each
organized and directed by the old imperial prerogative.

FDR, Lynd, Arnold, and the Argument for Liberalism
Among the initial signs that New Deal reformers had absorbed Walter
Lippmann's wariness of the public and his embrace of administrative
expertise was the name they gave to their political ideology: liberalism.
FDR very self-consciously refused to call himself a "Progressive," which

for all its affinity to New Deal politics still suggested Croly's old commit-
ments to direct democracy. The term also remained burdened by the
failure of past government efforts to go far enough in shaping economic
growth and redistributing social wealth. Instead, FDR reclaimed the term
"liberal" from nineteenth-century proponents of limited government
and a self-regulating commercial society. 106 In doing so, Roosevelt rei-
magined liberalism as the solution not just to the current economic crisis
but also to the end of settler politics and the closing of the frontier.

Roosevelt outlined his vision of liberalism by describing the histori-
cal goals of settler freedom. In his 1932 Commonwealth Club campaign
speech in San Francisco, FDR spoke of the western frontier as "free
land," which had ensured that American material prosperity went hand
in hand with distributive equality. He stated, "During this period of ex-
pansion, there was equal opportunity for all and the business of govern-
ment was not to interfere but to assist in the development of industry."
Crucially, Roosevelt's image of the settler past revised the basic purposes
of territorial expansion. For him, "equal opportunity" meant an equal
chance to achieve an American standard of living and avoid the vicissi-
tudes of economic turmoil. Little, however, remained of previous com-
mitments to economic independence or actual productive control. His
redefinition of "personal competency," — a concept that had been central
to Jeffersonian ideals of republican self-rule — underscored this fact.
Describing and reinscribing Jeffersonian freedom, FDR remarked, "By
'personal competency' he [Jefferson] meant the right of free thinking,
freedom of forming and expressing opinions, and freedom of personal
living each man according to his own lights." "Free thinking" was indeed
crucial to Jefferson's account, given the importance of reasoned delibera-
tion and personal autonomy for free citizenship. But FDR ignored the
second, critical definition of a competency in the republican idiom: the
ability of small farmers and artisans to gain economic self-sufficiency
through free labor and to dictate the terms of their work life. 107

By altering the historical goals of settler society, Roosevelt set the
stage for his own liberal account of freedom. He argued that as the ben-
efit of membership, all Americans were granted an equal right to share in
the nation's wealth and through work the right to be safe from destitu-
tion. According to Frances Perkins, FDR's labor secretary, the word Roo-
sevelt most often used was "decent," and thus his basic philosophy — to
the extent that one existed — was ultimately "to make human life on this

planet . . . more decent." As FDR himself declared in his Commonwealth
Club speech:

Every man has a right to life; and this means that he has also a
right to make a comfortable living. He may by sloth or crime de-
cline to exercise that right; but it may not be denied him. We have
no actual famine or dearth; our industrial and agricultural mecha-
nism can produce enough and to spare. Our government formal
and informal, political and economic, owes to every one an avenue
to possess himself of a portion of that plenty sufficient for his
needs, through his work. 108

Rather than being a site for self-rule, employment was recast as the
means by which individuals gained financial security. In fact, self-rule as
participatory control was seemingly evacuated from the public realm. If
it remained at all under liberalism, daily decision making persisted within
the sphere of Roosevelt's "personal competency." Instead of a collective
and democratic endeavor of constantly asserting the popular will, liberal
autonomy expressed the capacity to live as one chose in private — free
from any coercive interference. Thus direct control passed from being the
social practice of wielding public power to the private endeavor of "per-
sonal living."

However, for Progressives like Dewey, this focus on private noninter-
ference and especially on eliminating the worst vicissitudes of economic
life was fundamentally inadequate. Although a crucial precondition, base-
line security ultimately provided only a necessary condition for freedom
rather than constituting its actual and entire content. Writing about New
Deal frameworks in 1939, Dewey sought to remind policymakers that
"'Security' is a means, and although an indispensible means it is not an
end." In essence, FDR's quite noble focus on "decency" had lost sight of
what the appropriate end of public action should be: creating an assertive
democratic community, one able to claim control at work and in politics.
Writing of the relationship between security and liberty, Dewey argued,
"The means have to be implemented by a social-economic system that
establishes and uses the means for the production of free human beings
associating with one another on terms of equality." He worried that
FDR's approach had disconnected the project of social welfare from the
ambition of creating knowledgeable and engaged citizens. For Dewey, if
security became elevated to the guiding collective commitment, nothing

necessitated that it would remain bound to democratic authority. Far
more likely — when transformed from a means into an end — it would
liberate elites to claim power on behalf of the public and to entrench
more firmly "some form of coercive control from above and outside." 109
Therefore, Dewey maintained, if arguments about eliminating insecurity
were left to stand alone, they would never offer a compelling replace-
ment for settler independence and self-rule.

This fact was not entirely lost on FDR or other New Dealers. As Hol-
mes and James asked decades earlier, could comfortable living by itself
supply citizenship with a shared project, one that unified social member-
ship and in which Americans could meaningfully participate? In part,
FDR addressed this problem of hollowness by hoping to reinvigorate
Teddy Roosevelt's old response, rooted in American international police
power. Haltingly, FDR began to synthesize his distinctive vision of inter-
nal membership with a Wilsonian defense of greater global authority.
Given the continuing strength of isolationist sentiment during the inter-
war years, FDR very consciously sought to tread lightly in making these
arguments. Although he supported the League of Nations during his
failed vice-presidential bid in 1920, by the time of his 1932 election he
pointedly rejected American membership in the League. Still, this shift
did not mean a general rejection either of American international coop-
eration or of commitment to alternative vehicles besides the League.
Rather, it indicated a heightened awareness of whether international or-
ganizations were properly configured and whether the domestic political
conditions were right. 110

In "Our Foreign Policy: A Democratic View," FDR indicated how
American "efforts to establish and maintain the principles of peace" pro-
vided liberalism with a clear mission, which he believed could both fulfill
national ideals and instill citizenship with meaning. 111 The article, pub-
lished in 1928 in Foreign Affairs Quarterly, was written by FDR for Al
Smith's campaign for the presidency; it offered a telling preview of both
Roosevelt's own "Good Neighbor Policy," as well as his belief in America's
appropriate international role. Not unlike Wilson or even Teddy Roose-
velt, FDR defended the need for the United States to act decisively in the
interests of collective peace, and therefore to ensure that all potential
threats abroad were eliminated. Yet he also recognized the disconnect
between the ideal of self-determination and practices of occupation, not
to mention the Latin American perception of hypocrisy. In response, he
focused on the importance of multilateral means when pursuing American

international interests. Rather than rejecting military occupation or politi-
cal intervention as inherently inconsistent with local self-determination, he
argued instead for building coalitions and for ensuring regional support
prior to intervention.

Regarding the Dominican case, FDR wrote, "We have done a fine
piece of material work, and the world ought to thank us." Instead, how-
ever, Latin American neighbors "do not thank us, on the contrary they
disapprove our intervention almost unanimously. By what right, they say,
other than the right of main force, does the United States arrogate unto
itself the privilege of intervening alone in the internal affairs of another
Sovereign Republic?" For Roosevelt, in order to solve the problem of
local opposition, the United States should operate in the future primarily
with the collective backing of the international community. This meant
building regional and global institutions that would promote security
through joint rather than unilateral initiatives. Foreshadowing American
leadership at the United Nations less than two decades later, FDR be-
lieved that the promotion of national interests required more than simply
military coercion; it also necessitated that foreign countries hold the
United States in high esteem and be willing to participate in American
endeavors. This did not mean that the United States should avoid inter-
fering in the local affairs of other countries, only that when doing so it
should act as part of a coalition. Referring to "one of our sister nations,"
Roosevelt reasserted the importance of American tutelage and concurred
that "disorder and bad government may require that a helping hand be
given her citizens as a matter of temporary necessity to bring back order
and stability." As a principle, however, such efforts should be pursued
in association with neighboring states, because "with the cooperation of
others we shall have more order in this hemisphere and less dislike." 112

For scholars of the New Deal, it is conventional wisdom to think of
FDR's liberal foreign policy — particularly with respect to Latin Amer-
ica — as a marked break from the imperialist past. According to one com-
mentator, "In historical and political legend the Good Neighbor Policy has
been represented as a great, new departure in inter- American relations; the
triumph of non-intervention and respect for self-determination." 113 Yet
these arguments overemphasize the shift from unilateralism to multilater-
alism, because both approaches are ultimately policy tools. In essence,
Roosevelt's liberalism highlighted the importance of "soft power" in pur-
suing American global objectives and the need for international support
in order to ensure permanent peace. This, however, did not mean an end

to interference, only a more sophisticated method. As FDR's defense of
multilateral intervention illustrates, one can act cooperatively to pursue
coercive ends, just as one can pursue such ends while rejecting interna-
tional support. For Roosevelt, the larger project of global pacification
remained paramount and necessarily required regional hegemony and
constant global supervision. Concerned with America's public image
abroad, FDR hoped that using more cooperative means would reduce
the harshness of American interventionism. Still he did not question the
underlying importance of those goals. In a real sense, such liberal inter-
ventionism, armed with Curtiss-Wrighfs discretionary executive power,
reaffirmed the centrality of global assertiveness to American national
identity.

Obscured by the focus on economic security at home and permanent
peace abroad was the historic commitment to self-rule as a guiding social
principle. This disappearance did not occur by chance but rather resulted
from how New Dealers viewed the capabilities of the American public.
For newly empowered social scientists, academics, and reformers, events
since the Populist movement spoke to the value of administrative effi-
ciency as well as the possibility that ordinary citizens would fall victim to
demagoguery and prejudice. In 1939's Knowledge for What? Robert
Lynd crystallized the view among social scientists that making industrial
capitalism compatible with economic equality would require investing
social power in the hands of expert administrators. In the 1920s and
1930s, Helen and Robert Lynd wrote two classics of American sociology,
Middletown (1929) and Middletown in Transition (1937), which ex-
plored life in Muncie, Indiana, and described the popular hope of enjoy-
ing an "American standard of living." 114 Witnessing the crisis and social
dislocation caused by the Depression, Robert Lynd argued in his 1939
work "That laissez faire or even a policy of confining ourselves to casual
minor repairs in the machinery will not meet the situation." 115

Lynd held that the rise of unregulated capitalism had been fostered by
an outdated nineteenth-century faith in the capacity of ordinary citizens
to direct collective life without organized planning or technically in-
formed leadership. This faith was predicated on the false empirical as-
sumption that individuals behave rationally and have the basic knowl-
edge to confront complex problems. Repeating Lippmann's arguments
from a decade earlier, Lynd wrote, "So great is our reliance upon the ra-
tional, omni-competence of human beings, that we largely persist ... in
the earlier habit of leaving everything up to the individual's precarious

ability to 'use his head.' " For Lynd one of the great threats to the sustain-
ability of democratic practice in the United States resided in the overem-
phasis on democratic modes of decision making, which produced only
chaos and inefficiency. According to him, "undiscriminating adherence to
the forms of democracy operates to cripple the expert performance of
essentially democratic functions." 116

Lynd went so far as to say that for democratic politics to persist,
elected politicians in the United States would have to master propaganda
as a means for spreading information about social policies. Since most
Americans did not possess the capacity to understand complex economic
and political problems, elites would have to employ systems of mass
communication to simplify basic questions and present clear narratives
of social life. Referencing the threat of fascism, Lynd continued:

In a world bristling with dictators wielding all the arts of propa-
ganda, democracy will no longer be able to survive a laissez-faire
attitude toward public opinion. It must take the offensive in its
own behalf and use these new and potent instruments for the ends
of democracy. Already in the United States the "management of
public opinion" for private ends is highly developed. We must either
discover a way to democratize this process, or give over the pretense
of being a democracy.

According to Lynd, belief in administrative government and the im-
portance of directing public opinion resulted from a basic claim about
the technical expert. Lynd saw the reformist impulse of the New Deal as
the progressive spread of truth to social institutions and asserted that
"There is evidence that liberal attitudes are correlated with intelligence,
and there is a great deal of evidence of the correlation of conservatism
with property ownership." Therefore, as liberal social scientists and pro-
fessionals took over decision making from ordinary citizens and private
business, knowledge would itself become the guide for collective life.
Defending the need for an extensive and hierarchically managed wel-
fare state, Lynd concluded, "There is no way our culture can grow in
serviceability to its people without a large and pervasive extension of
planning and control to the many areas now left to casual individual
initiative." 117

Other New Dealers may have been reticent to embrace propaganda
or social planning so unequivocally. However, Lynd articulated a driving
feature of the new reformism. He expressed the now prevalent view that

an outdated belief in the autonomy and rationality of citizens — and
thus their ability to direct economic and political institutions — hindered
social improvement. For Lynd and similar critics of capitalism, this as-
sumption of autonomy was at the center of laissez-faire economics and
had promoted the capture of government by private wealth. But in reject-
ing the "omni-competent" individual, Lynd necessarily also rejected the
republican vision of emancipated and self-assertive free citizens. This in-
volved abandoning the republican effort, highlighted by Manning,
Brownson, and Weyl, to democratize intelligence through instruments
like universal education or the Society of Laborers and to create a public
capable both of understanding its interests and of directing its own col-
lective fate. For Lynd, citizens were no longer conceived in these terms
of robust agency but were instead presented as objects of social policy.
According to this image, although the larger public benefited from intel-
ligent administration, it had to be shaped and constructed to recognize
shared needs and respond positively to cultural progress. In fact, in
Lynd's hands, generalized education was not a method primarily for ele-
vating the body politic as a whole. Its central purpose lay in creating a
meritocratic political and economic leadership, by helping to select the
talented few whose excellence justified their rule and promoted social
progress.

As Lasch has suggested, no New Dealer better illustrated this vision
of the American citizen — regardless of ethnicity or previous standing in
the settler community — as the subject of an enlightened and socially re-
sponsive government than Thurman Arnold. A law professor at Yale and
later the head of the Antitrust Division at the Justice Department, Ar-
nold in a series of books in the late 1930s, The Symbols of Government
(1935), The Folklore of Capitalism (1937), and The Bottlenecks of
Business (1940), powerfully defended the New Deal agenda, including
Roosevelt's most radical measures, such as court packing, wealth redis-
tribution, and extensive economic regulation. 118 For Arnold, the basic
principle driving New Deal liberalism was a humanitarian one, commit-
ted to the goal of eliminating poverty and providing workers with a sta-
ble income. As he maintained in The Symbols of Government, humani-
tarianism was not interested in either the moral qualities of those aided
by charity or what individuals themselves thought of the policies. In-
stead, social welfare was the equivalent of medicine, and the relationship
between government and the public was not unlike the one tying the
hospital to its patients. All individuals desired economic security, and it

was up to the state to provide this end as a matter of basic morality. Ex-
tending the medical analogy, Arnold wrote, "Humanitarian ideals are not
defined by logic. It was the duty of the ambulance to get the men to the
hospital, not to discuss jurisprudence. . . . Once we designate a man as
'sick,' whether mentally or physically, we proceed to cure him, and are
shocked at any discussion as to whether he morally or logically deserves
to be cured." 119

Moreover, industrial complexity meant that the public did not know
how to produce humanitarian ends, and it was thus the responsibility of
the administrator to develop the appropriate "techniques" irrespective of
popular opinion. Following Lynd, Arnold polemically argued that ordi-
nary Americans were no more capable of recognizing how best to achieve
humanitarianism than patients in a mental institution. And given this
fundamental lack of capacity, Arnold maintained that the insane asylum
should serve as the model of humanitarian government. He wrote of the
asylum:

In such a government the physicians in charge do not separate the
ideas of the insane into any separate sciences such as law, econom-
ics, and sociology; nor then instruct the insane in the intricacies of
these three sciences. Nor do they argue with the insane as to the
soundness or unsoundness of their ideas. Their aim is to make the
inmates as comfortable as possible, regardless of their respective
moral deserts. 120

For Arnold, to the extent that the public existed at all as a relevant politi-
cal body, it was solely as the recipient of state largess and the beneficiary
of liberal humanitarianism. This did not mean that democracy had no
place in American politics. Arnold's vision of democracy amounted to an
elected government ensuring social welfare, with democratic voice un-
derstood to be the popular discontent that materialized when goods were
not provided. 121 This account, of course, made democracy and humani-
tarianism indistinguishable and left no place for actual participation or
any real exercise of public power.

Arnold's discussion of the Philippines further underscored his empha-
sis on all individuals, free citizens or stratified subjects, as ultimately the
"wards" of an expansive state. It therefore suggested a telling fact about
the New Deal framework: less and less separated the philosophical posi-
tion of colonized outsiders from that of social insiders, since discretion-
ary state power should shape the experience of both groups. The old

dichotomies that checked the imperial prerogative and limited its inter-
nal application should be discarded. In matters of foreign policy, Arnold
argued that "humanitarian imperialism" was the driving principle, carry-
ing with it the commitment to extending material well-being to all na-
tions and thereby ensuring permanent peace. Comparing government
programs in Chicago and the Philippines, he concluded that policies in
the latter were far more successful in fulfilling liberal ends. Arnold wrote,
"The humanitarian work done in these islands by the United States is amaz-
ing. Disease was reduced, social work carried on, living conditions made
better, until the population doubled under improved conditions." 122

This success derived from the fact that, in pursuing U.S. global influ-
ence, American politicians were far less concerned with the actual ideas
and beliefs of foreign populations. Instead of presuming a false equality
between American values and those of the local community, politicians
treated the Philippines as a "national asset" and organized government
action to improve that asset as much as possible:

The imperialistic ideal coupled with our natural humanitarian im-
pulses permitted us to treat these primitive people better than our
own. We were not afraid of ruining their character because we did
not think of them as equals who had characters to ruin. Therefore,
we were able to do many sensible things for the comfort and peace
of our little brown brothers. 123

Rather than idealizing the individual capacities of Americans at home,
the United States should make humanitarian imperialism a general basis
for social policy, both domestic and foreign. Rejecting the fiction of
omni-competent citizens, Arnold argued that government must treat the
public as a "national asset" — the proper object of aggressive and morally
committed state intervention. In other words, Arnold effectively contended
that only a fully realized imperial prerogative power, operating both at
home and abroad, could fulfill liberalism's moral ambitions.

Despite the chauvinism of Arnold's argument, at root he implied that
all individuals regardless of ethnicity were essentially equal, because every-
one sought material well-being and tranquility — universal social goods.
Moreover, all people, regardless of background, shared a common igno-
rance of how best to foster such goods. White Americans at home were
no better equipped than Filipinos in Southeast Asia to govern themselves,
and thus both communities required enlightened state supervision — the
benevolent application of imperial prerogative. Given these facts, gov-

ernment bore the responsibility of creating the institutions and programs
that promoted liberalism. Arnold's views were broadly inclusive, as his
humanitarianism was global in perspective and made no ethical distinc-
tion based on nationality, race, or religion. All were worthy of being
protected from destitution, and all should be subjected to a guiding state
power.

Security and the Implications for Popular Politics
Despite criticisms of both the institutional rise of a plebiscitary presi-
dency and the intellectual defenses of "humanitarian imperialism," FDR
himself saw the new constitutional order as the true fulfillment of de-
mocracy. When faced with Republican Party accusations that he sought
dictatorial powers during the debate over the executive reorganization
bill, Roosevelt took pains to release the following presidential pro-
nouncement: "A. I have no inclination to be a dictator. B. I have none of
the qualifications which would make me a successful dictator. C. I have
too much historical background and too much knowledge on existing
dictatorships to make me desire any form of dictatorship for a democ-
racy like the United States of America." For FDR, executive authority
was the necessary means for carrying out a clear popular mandate to
confront the economic crisis and promote material progress. He repeat-
edly spoke of the threat posed to social welfare by "economic royalists"
and unregulated capitalism and argued that presidential power would lib-
erate "the people" by "protecting the citizen in his right to work and his
right to live." Defending heightened and centralized administration, he re-
marked, "Better the occasional faults of a Government that lives in the
spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a Government frozen in
the ice of its own indifference." 124

For Roosevelt, the presidency's democratic content lay not only in the
fact that government action served the interest of the public but also in
that it directly responded to actual mobilization. Through electoral poli-
tics, but especially through labor strikes and street demonstrations, the
people writ large organized to demand social measures that improved
their basic conditions. Demobilized and passive in the decades following
the agrarian movement, the 1930s witnessed the emergence once more of
energetic mass politics. Such mobilization took two key forms: the activi-
ties of the unemployed and of unionized workers.

The Depression generated nearly wholesale joblessness as unemploy-
ment figures rose from 429,000 in October 1929 to over 15 million, or

one-third of the labor force, in 1933. Without work, men and women
were left absolutely destitute, facing eviction and foreclosure and unable
to feed their families. In the past, poor relief largely had been a haphaz-
ard enterprise, usually provided locally and through private charities.
These methods were woefully ill equipped to deal with the economic
crisis, and, as a result, the unemployed took to the streets in marches,
rent riots, and even mob looting. Cities, already nearing bankruptcy
from new municipal relief efforts, teetered on the edge of actual collapse.
As for those who still had jobs, they too faced serious financial pressures
due to a precipitous fall in wages. In response, industrial workers devel-
oped a large-scale new union movement to defend their interests, which
in 1934 involved 1.5 million people in strikes. This movement was cen-
tered in the emergent Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and
like the efforts of the unemployed called above all for social and eco-
nomic protection. One of its most popular leaders, Sidney Hillman,
spoke extensively of the "quest for security," the creation of a standard of
living complete with employment and basic welfare services. Hillman,
echoing the views of many union activists, declared that such security
embodied the "central issue in this life of modern man." 125

For all the long-term effects of the New Deal's focus on security, it is
therefore crucial to note that in the depths of the crisis this was precisely
what the public wanted from its politicians. As a consequence, in keep-
ing with broad demands, FDR oversaw a variety of legislative measures
aimed at assisting those inside and outside the labor force. New federal
insurance schemes provided for the aged and the jobless, while massive
public works programs gave millions employment. As for those already
employed, minimum wage laws ensured against the most extreme pay
cuts, and, above all, the National Labor Relations or Wagner Act strength-
ened the capacity of unions to press for higher pay and better conditions.
The bill, passed in 1935, created a new labor relations board with enforce-
ment capacities to preside over employee elections, prohibit employer in-
terference, and compel companies to negotiate labor contracts with elected
union representatives. 126 Such collective bargaining was in many ways
the central goal of the union movement, which saw the legislative actions
as finally eliminating the near-absolute power management enjoyed over
the terms of work. Since the rise of industrial wage labor a century earlier,
employers had benefited from a radically unequal bargaining position, in
which they could dictate the conditions of employment in ways that at
times mimicked feudal master-servant relationships. Now, through collec-

tive bargaining, workers — in the form of their union representatives —
were given the opportunity to participate alongside business and state
actors in shaping their own employment. 127

These achievements were dramatic popular victories, experienced on
the ground by many Americans as decisively improving their daily lives.
When the Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision in NLRB
v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. (1937), which defended the legality of
the Wagner Act, workers across the country engaged in spontaneous cel-
ebrations, with those in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, site of a massive plant
owned by Jones & Laughlin Steel, "pil[ing] into cars and parading
through town, horns blaring." 128 Yet, as the economic crisis abated, the
ultimate implications of the new order became more apparent. To begin
with, the goal of economic security itself had been left profoundly incom-
plete, in large part because of the resistance of Southern Dixiecrats to
providing universal coverage in ways that challenged white supremacy.
For instance, farm workers — often black or Mexican in the Southwest —
were entirely left out from protection by the Wagner and Social Security
Acts, and full employment measures never made it through Congress. 129

More fundamentally, the programmatic vision of security pursued
during the New Deal was itself subtly distinct from that imagined by Weyl
and others. According to Weyl, for economic wealth to provide an adequate
basis for creating elevated and self-assertive citizens, these citizens needed
to enjoy more than minimum compensations such as those provided
through the new measures. Rather, Americans required a basic income
that was high enough to eliminate one's primary focus on combating
necessity. As Dewey wrote in his critique of the New Deal, security prop-
erly understood was about "establishing the social conditions which
[would] make it possible for all who are capable to do socially productive
work," and this problem had neither "been solved" nor "systematically
faced." 130

Just as troubling, the New Deal emphasis on security — even when
more expansive — had the effect of perpetuating the basic hierarchies of
modern bureaucracy, further separating ordinary Americans from actual
decision making. Despite its vital role in checking corporate absolutism
in the workplace, this was evident even with the Wagner Act. In keeping
with Croly's earlier arguments, the CIO and industrial unionists saw col-
lective bargaining as introducing democratic self-governance into wage
labor. For John Lewis, president of the United Mine Workers, such "indus-
trial democracy" heralded the end of "company unions, controlled and

dominated by the management itself." 131 Still, while these measures were
essential to improving labor's relative bargaining power, they did not ac-
tually address the critical problem of how elite-driven industrial work
had become. In fact, to the extent that leaders in business, labor, and the
state monopolized negotiation and decision-making processes, new
frameworks underscored the degree to which most individuals were re-
moved from actual sites of power.

Recall that for radical Progressives, the ultimate purpose of reform
was to make economic independence compatible with modern condi-
tions and thus to provide most Americans with the knowledge and op-
portunity to control their own institutions. For Dewey and others, the
solution was threefold: it meant challenging the rigidity of the division
labor, democratizing intelligence, and democratizing leisure. Through a
universal education system oriented toward giving individuals the cul-
tural resources and practical skills to address workplace realities, indi-
viduals would gain the knowledge to be more than rote enforcers of ex-
ternal directives. As a result, responsibilities could be made more diffuse,
with fewer people engaged solely in executing tasks. Hedged in through
the provision of economic security and the extension of free time, work
itself would be both organized democratically and focused toward cre-
ativity and self-actualization. In this context, collective bargaining would
then serve as a powerful bulwark, limiting the reemergence of corporate
dominance and utilizing the collective strength of employees to sustain a
proper balance of power. But without the driving vision of elevated and
free citizens, Dewey believed that the likely consequence of unleashing
state authority would be the further centralization of power and diminu-
tion of ordinary responsibility. Concerned with these implications, he
asked New Deal policymakers, "What gain has been made in giving . . .
the great mass of individuals, an opportunity to find themselves and then
to educate themselves for what they can best do in work which is socially
useful and such as to give free play in development of themselves?" 132

Without a proper emancipatory vision, or the institutional mecha-
nisms to sustain popular decision making, it was inevitable that practical
authority would become focused in fewer and fewer administrative
hands. At the top, the presidency would present itself as the single insti-
tution best able to guide state involvement and to serve as the basis for
concerted political action. And as social movements receded with the end
of the Depression and the onset of World War II, collective life began to
approximate these worries. The demobilization of mass constituents and

the lack of practical outlets for public participation made it increasingly
difficult for organized groups to compete with presidential claims to
popular representation. In this context, the presidency's contention to be
the sole organ capable of acting flexibly in times of crisis and of speaking
on behalf of the whole nation appeared more and more plausible. With
popular participation largely evacuated from both political and eco-
nomic decision making, large numbers of Americans came to accept as
self-evident this view that only an expansive executive could institute
and embody shared goals. If anything, mechanisms like state-mediated
collective bargaining highlighted these developments. Under its corporat-
ist framework, labor and business were both treated as partial interests
to be weighed against each other, with the federal government — and the
president at the core — representing the public generally and making
judgments about how to balance competing claims. 133

Ultimately, the politics of security fit comfortably with the elevation
of plebiscitary institutions. Although FDR's focus on presidential leader-
ship took as given the centrality of the popular will for legitimate govern-
ment, the people were typified by "the average man," Weyl's and Kallen's
ordinary consumer of work and goods who, according to Roosevelt,
deserved "an equal opportunity in the market place." Given social seg-
mentation and diversity, only an energetic executive had the ability to
shape these consumers into a coherent body and to pursue policies in
keeping with public interests. Such presidential authority, however, left
no meaningful space for the republican politics of actual self-rule and
continuous participation. To the extent that long-term social movements
persisted at all, New Dealers rejected those views once held by Manning
and Skidmore that considered such mobilized constituents as actually
presenting an ideal of freedom and speaking on behalf of the whole com-
munity. For lawyers like Felix Frankfurter, who were crucially involved
in defending labor legislation and in arguing for its constitutional legal-
ity, union organizing did not embody the self-assertion of the people writ
large, because labor was simply one group among many. Rather, unions
were considered valuable as allies in promoting social welfare, and their
strength in numbers demonstrable proof of popular support for the

New Deal Constitutionalism and Presidential Sovereignty
Today the precise implications of executive power for American constitu-
tionalism remain largely obscured. Legal scholars persist in maintaining

that New Deal changes were consistent with the old Federalist image of
checks and balances. According to Bruce Ackerman, for the Constitu-
tion's original framers, the great concern was that the House of Repre-
sentatives would claim an authority to speak on behalf of the whole
community, given its direct electoral basis and the British tradition of
legislative supremacy. Thus, inherent in Federalism was an attempt to
disconnect democratic legitimacy from pure majority rule. While the
House may have been a place where "popular movements . . . first make
their tumultuous presence known," it alone could not articulate the pub-
lic will. As Ackerman notes, Madison and Hamilton maintained that
"Senate and President should serve as bulwarks of deliberation, demand-
ing that the hotheads submit their proposals to cool analysis from com-
peting perspectives." 135

According to this view, as a result of the New Deal the president —
and not the House — came to express the country's "principal populist
impulse," those fads and opinions publicly supported at a given moment
in time. For Ackerman, this shift did not negate Federalist ideals but
merely produced a modern spin on the basic framework of checks and
balances. Instead of mobilizing popular sentiment, today Congress pro-
vides a legislative constraint on executive proposals, offering "a bulwark
for skeptical doubts about the latest Presidential pronunciamento." Fi-
nally, the Supreme Court exists as a preservationist institution, which
defends the prevailing constitutional status quo against assaults by the
electoral branches. Although the presidency may aspire to speak on behalf
of the people, it remains bound by institutional limits — one piece within
the Federalist puzzle rather than the dominant expression of the demo-
cratic will. 136

Despite this presentation of a modern separation of powers, I argue
that the constitutional order instituted by the New Deal in essence elimi-
nated the old Federalist arrangements. Rather than posing Congress as a
skeptical bulwark, New Deal legality presupposed congressional transfer
of key lawmaking responsibilities to the executive. As for the judiciary, a
jurisprudence of deference presumed the continuity between presidential
prerogative and ordinary constitutionalism. Still, it was not only that the
executive absorbed important functions of the competing branches or
reshaped Congress and the courts in its own image. The idea of a direct
representative relationship between president and people — at the heart
of Roosevelt's democratic vision of the new social welfare state —
fundamentally undermined the Federalist theory of democracy, particu-

larly the notion that no existing body or branch of government enjoyed
sovereign power.

In this sense, New Deal democratic theory was actually an intellectual
successor to the populist tradition, in its belief that an actual political
agent could speak on behalf of the whole. Thus it is not surprising that
the closest historical parallel to the vision of presidential power constitu-
tionalized during the New Deal was the Jacksonian one from a century
earlier. Not unlike with Roosevelt, political opponents accused Andrew
Jackson of grasping after despotic powers, such as through efforts to re-
place officials in the incipient federal bureaucracy with Democratic Party
loyalists. In 1834, in the midst of disagreements over the second national
bank, Whig opponents famously passed a Senate resolution accusing
Andrew Jackson of unconstitutionally assuming presidential authority.
In his response, Jackson asserted his popularly mandated right to hire
and fire members of the executive branch, like the secretary of the trea-
sury, because "the president is the direct representative of the people." 137

Yet, despite these clear intellectual roots, what emerged during the
New Deal was nonetheless fundamentally distinct. For starters, Jackso-
nian populism was deeply wary of government action and committed
to limiting the growth of both federal authority and an administrative
civil service. Through instruments like the rotation of appointed officials
and by fostering the development of a "spoils system," Jackson hoped to
check the rise of an independent and unelected bureaucracy that would
not be controlled by popular power. As I discussed earlier, one paradoxi-
cal consequence was that the spoils system helped to integrate the fed-
eral government into collective life, especially by providing party sup-
porters with access to jobs. But at the same time, Jacksonian innovations
also undermined the creation of a strong and efficient apparatus that
could be employed by the president as a centralized tool of state au-
thority. It limited the executive's capacity to reach over Congress and to
produce and execute its own legislative agenda. Moreover, even to the
extent that Jackson asserted presidential prerogatives, such legislative
absorption was not his aim. Critically, Jackson did not apply his re-
forms (such as term limits) to Congress, and Whig antipathy often
turned on matters within the executive branch, such as Jackson's right
to dismiss appointees. 138

But perhaps just as important, the Jacksonian theory of presidential
representativeness was built on an argument about the democratic le-
gitimacy of the party. Martin Van Buren, who played a central role in

transforming the Democratic Party into a national institution, argued
that by organizing citizens across the country the party had come to rep-
resent the people as a whole. Under the Jacksonian view, the president —
while at the party's head — was in the final analysis an instrument of this
institutional structure, one that mobilized the people as active political
agents. 139 In fact, with the end of Jackson's presidency, the lasting legacy
of the period was less presidential assertiveness and more the entrench-
ment of a nationalized party politics, which ultimately dominated the
rest of the nineteenth century.

Before and after Jackson there were clearly presidents who played
crucial and defining roles in molding popular consciousness. Both Jeffer-
son and Lincoln highlight the persistence of presidential leadership in
American life. Yet in the nineteenth century no president had the admin-
istrative bureaucracy at FDR's disposal or the communicative instru-
ments afforded by mass media to speak broadly to the public. Moreover,
the patronage party mediated the direct link between the executive and the
people, such that by the late nineteenth century the actual elected presi-
dent was often of limited relevance to the governing orientations of the
major parties and to policies pursued in Washington. Despite periods of
presidential leadership, no constitutional and administrative framework
had previously existed for a plebiscitary presidency — one that absorbed
the functions of competing branches or continuously engaged in efforts
to reshape those branches in its own ideological image.

In essence, what made the New Deal order unique was that this em-
brace of direct representation meant that the presidency was now for the
first time organized as an instrument for exercising "constituent power."
Emmanuel Sieyes famously described constituent power as the sovereign
authority that creates and thus precedes any instituted government. Such
power was both democratic and legitimate because it expressed the na-
tional will, the people as a whole. Therefore, government and its consti-
tuted powers were justified only to the extent that they remained "faith-
ful to the laws imposed upon [them]. The national will, on the other
hand, simply needs the reality of its existence to be legal. It is the origin
of all legality." 140 At their core, New Deal notions of constitutional flex-
ibility and executive discretion provided the president with the capacity
to reform foundational principles — to act outside the bounds of ordinary
legality in order to regenerate legal norms. Certainly, presidential power
was not utterly unconstrained. But in the time between the Populist move-
ment and the New Deal, executive leadership and administrative hierarchy

had become routinized as central modes of political activity. The result was
a legal regime that has, in the years since the 1930s, allowed the presidency
to alter basic distributions of authority as well as foundational constitu-
tional principles. Most important, this exercise of constituent power by an
instituted branch of government cannot be described as purely illegal or
usurpatory. Under the New Deal framework, it enjoys democratic legiti-
macy, because plebiscitary politics presumes an unmediated link between
the executive and the people.

At the intellectual core of New Deal democracy was the belief that the
president pursued popular ends and would not engage in an act of politi-
cal substitution, in which he served his own interests or those of "eco-
nomic royalists" in the name of the people. In the context of social crisis
and mass mobilization, when an impoverished public demanded redistri-
bution and basic necessities, this argument carried obvious weight. Yet,
without the popular assertiveness of the 1930s, how would the executive
know which actions were truly authorized by the people and thus legiti-
mate? The arguments of liberal intellectuals, such as Lynd and Arnold,
offered a telling answer. The purpose of state power was to fulfill the
quest for economic security and permanent peace, as government had the
responsibility to provide all citizens freedom from both want and exter-
nal threat. These goals existed regardless of popular opinion, because
they embodied a set of humanitarian commitments fundamentally moral
in nature. For both Lynd and Arnold, the public had a democratic right
to protest against the inadequacy of government action, but ordinary
Americans did not have the basic knowledge to govern directly. As a re-
sult, even if mobilization disappeared and the public could no longer be
counted on to provide an actual political mandate, the executive could
still act in its name. As long as thoughtful politicians and administrators —
meritocratically selected through institutions of higher education —
continued to pursue liberal ends, such humanitarian government would
remain legitimate.

In a sense, however, allowing the executive to choose the means for
liberal ends made political substitution unavoidable, since much of the
substance of social disagreement would inevitably concern how best to
achieve broad goals such as a just distribution of wealth. And as the
United States moved further away from the convulsive economic crises
of the 1930s, the liberal ends themselves also receded in importance. The
commitment to "security" steadily lost its economic component and, as a
consequence, what remained of its Populist and Progressive connections

to economic independence and self-rule. Today the term almost exclusively
relates to the global project of pacification: the state's ability to protect the
physical safety of citizens and ultimately to assert power abroad. As a
result, alongside the effort — still far from complete — to address prob-
lems of inequality and want, New Deal presidential authority also left
Americans with the reality of a discretionary state and a lasting skepti-
cism of popular capacities. It provided the example of a wide-ranging
executive acting on behalf of the people at home and abroad, and in the
process constructing the political community in its own image — with
ordinary Americans the objects rather than the agents of their govern-
ment. Today this has meant the fulfillment of what Taney and other set-
tler politicians once dreaded: the everyday use of imperial prerogative as
an instrument for directing political life. And in the years since the New
Deal, the plebiscitary presidency has become less and less tied to any ac-
tual social constituency. Instead, New Deal constitutional changes make
it increasingly feasible for the presidency to exercise constituent power
(its imperial prerogative) in a virtual vacuum. This problem is only exac-
erbated by the tendency of citizens to retreat into private concerns, and
by the ever-growing machinery of campaign managers and public opin-
ion experts that undergird electoral and policy-making processes and
often operate from above to shape popular support.

Conclusion: Modern Subjectship and the Decline
of the Free Citizen

For Anglo settlers resisting the rise of a globalizing British Empire, re-
publican citizenship was the great promise of colonial independence.
Ethnically and religiously defined, free citizenship provided all settler
insiders with liberty as self-rule. Full inclusion meant the right to par-
ticipate in political decision making and to enjoy economic autonomy.
It repudiated long-standing monarchical structures, which established
pre-political and immutable ties between subjects and kings. Under these
structures, in return for pledging allegiance to the Crown, the imperial
metropole provided basic protections. While such protections may have
been calibrated depending on property ownership, place in the empire,
or status as native born, all individuals were ultimately on the same con-
tinuum of royal authority. For settlers, this stratified subjectship had be-
come fundamentally incompatible with Anglo supremacy as well as with
their long-standing expectations of territorial expansion and participa-

tory freedom. Under British rule, settlers found themselves facing central-
ized powers similar to those directed at conquered natives. Regardless of
ancestry or Protestant faith, all seemed subject to London's imperial
whim. At a deep level, Britain's empire of the late eighteenth century —
with its greater respect for local customs and its interest in maintaining
imperial security — was far more tolerant and humane than settler coloni-
zation had been. But this toleration came at a steep price. Rather than
providing everyone, irrespective of background, with the benefits of re-
publican freedom, London whittled away at the remaining sites of rela-
tive autonomy.

One hundred and fifty years later, the settler society forged by Anglo
colonists had slowly transformed into an apt political successor to that
far-flung empire. The United States had become a dominant global pres-
ence in its own right, claiming an international police power and seeking
stability, economic wealth, and permanent peace. For intellectuals like
Thurman Arnold, at home and abroad American statecraft should be hi-
erarchical and discretionary, its legitimacy based on the extent to which
politicians provided social members with physical well-being. The settler
commitment to participation, direct popular control, and economic inde-
pendence seemingly had disappeared. In fact, the rejection of republican
self-rule provided the foundation for a more socially inclusive politics. As
Arnold concluded, all groups sought the humanitarian end of material
prosperity and, given modern complexity, were all fundamentally inca-
pable of achieving these ends without strong state guidance. Thus the
state had an ethical responsibility to make cultural and material progress
widely enjoyable, in both its domestic politics and global dealings. Ac-
cording to him, the benefits of membership should not be granted as a
matter of individual "virtue and wisdom," based on a theory of moral
desert. Precisely such a theory had separated the industrious and rational
settler from the savage native and in doing so had justified Anglo su-
premacy. Instead, Arnold reasoned that due to popular incapacities, no
one was truly wise enough to govern him- or herself, and thus "moral
delinquency" could no longer be a basis for exclusion. 141

Given this belief in the necessity for generalized state supervision, it
was thus no coincidence that West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish (1937)
served as the legal case that ushered in New Deal constitutionalism and
ensured judicial deference to government regulation of the economy. Jus-
tice Robert's "switch in time that saved nine" not only sustained new
wage laws but also did so in a context that underscored the developing

modes of authority tying the state to political members. The case itself
concerned the special status of women as subjects of government protec-
tion, an issue that had been addressed thirty years earlier, during the
height of Lochner. In the earlier case of Muller v. Oregon (1908), the
Supreme Court effectively determined that regulations that interfered
with a woman's freedom of contract were legitimate. Like Native Ameri-
cans and freed slaves, women were properly conceived of as wards of the
state — outside the framework of free citizenship and republican liberty.
More specifically, the Court upheld a statute limiting the workday to ten
hours for women in factories, arguing, in keeping with Bradwell and
Minor, that women were inherently incapable of asserting their own po-
litical and economic independence. As Justice David Brewer wrote for
the Court:

Looking at it from the viewpoint of the effort to maintain an inde-
pendent position in life, she is not upon an equality [with men].
Differentiated by these matters from the other sex, she is properly
placed in a class by herself, and legislation designed for her protec-
tion may be sustained, even when like legislation is not necessary
for men and could not be sustained. 142

After the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, the Court reversed
itself in Adkins v. Children's Hospital (1923), maintaining that the amend-
ment extended full membership to women and ended dependent status.
Rather than being paternal subjects or wards of the state, women too
were free citizens who enjoyed the equal right to freedom of contract.
The case concerned a District of Columbia law, which established a mini-
mum wage for women but explicitly not one for men as well. Justice
Sutherland's opinion on behalf of the Court read in part:

We cannot accept the doctrine that women of mature age, sui juris,
require or may be subjected to restrictions upon their liberty of
contract which could not lawfully be imposed in the case of men
under similar circumstances. To do so would be to ignore all the
implications to be drawn from the present day trend of legisla-
tion ... by which woman is accorded emancipation from that old
doctrine that she must be given special protection or be subjected
to special restraint in her contractual and civil relationships.

For Sutherland, since women were now seen as capable of both free labor
and collective self-rule, paternalism had no constitutional justification. It

reduced free citizens to the status of dependents, considered incapable of
autonomous action and economic assertiveness. Like Lochner, the Adkins
decision defended free labor orthodoxy and maintained a clear ideological
link to the republican goal of independence, even under the transformed
economic conditions of wage labor. It rejected government regulation
because such powers were appropriately maintained solely over social
outsiders and colonized populations. 143

Yet during the height of the New Deal, when the Supreme Court
reached the exact same question of a minimum wage for women, it em-
ployed the language of paternalism to defend fundamentally new conclu-
sions about the legitimacy of such power over both insiders and outsid-
ers. In directly overruling Adkins, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes
wrote in his majority opinion for West Coast Hotel Co.:

What can be closer to the public interest than the health of women
and their protection from unscrupulous and overreaching employ-
ers? And if the protection of women is a legitimate end of the
exercise of state power, how can it be said that the requirement of
the payment of a minimum wage fairly fixed in order to meet the
very necessities of existence is not an admissible means to meet
that end? 144

In 1908 the dichotomy between external prerogative and internal limi-
tation remained relatively clear. Women, in ways similar to nonsettler
populations, were wards whose dependent status justified expansive dis-
cretionary power. By marking out the legitimate domain for prerogative
authority, the Court in Muller emphasized the divide between free citizen
and stratified subject and the inappropriateness of placing privileged
settlers under the command of extensive government control. In reaching
the same conclusion during the New Deal, Chief Justice Hughes embod-
ied the remarkable ideological shifts since the beginning of the century.
Hughes presented the historical dependence of women not as an excep-
tional status to be contrasted against republican citizenship but as typical
of the general position confronting all Americans. 145 Regardless of gen-
der or race, citizens faced assorted economic and social crises that could
be addressed only by state supervision. Instead of imagining full mem-
bership as a condition insulated from external prerogative, the reverse
had developed. The benefit of social inclusion lay precisely in state pro-
tection. In a sense, the forms of power that were once associated only
with "wards" had now become inseparable from the ordinary operation

of legal and political authority. In the process, the distinction between
free citizen and stratified subject — between republican self-rule and cen-
tralized despotism — that had so galvanized early American settlers dis-
solved into air.

However, if this dichotomy collapsed, it did not mean that all groups
found themselves treated as equals. Instead, the new constitutional order
in many ways replicated the internal class and ethnic hierarchies of the
old European model, articulated centuries earlier by Edward Coke. It
also reproduced the sharp delineations between royal subjects and for-
eign aliens, which in the U.S. context separated citizens worthy of state
security from noncitizens facing extensive immigration controls. The
consequence for twentieth-century American politics was twofold. On
the one hand, the United States became a far more meaningfully inclusive
polity, extending various rights of membership (like suffrage) to previ-
ously subordinated communities. Over time, it also came to question —
ideologically if not always institutionally — a basic premise of settler
identity: the notion that nonwhite groups were not true social insiders.
Yet the constitutional order still sustained profound racial, class, and
gender disparities, creating formal and informal inequalities between
specific categories of citizens. Rather than eliminating subordination as
such, different communities fell in different places on the continuum of
stratified subjectship. At the bottom, the most marginalized continued to
face formal discrimination or to be confronted by habitual and coercive
modes of state power. In this way, the emerging order combined inclusion
with the persistence of previous prejudices and methods of colonial rule.
And akin to the old British Empire, elevated status in the polity had far
less to do with whether one experienced authentic self-rule. Instead, high
status became bound to one's ability, especially given a particular class and
racial background, to enjoy and enforce — often informally — privileges in
the market, in politics, and through the legal system.

In the past, the vision of inclusion promoted by those like Thomas
Skidmore and Randolph Bourne had meant universalizing republican
liberty. It sought to defend participatory control against threats posed by
economic and political hierarchy and saw the extension of free citizen-
ship as the struggle to raise the status equally of all. Over time, while the
order produced by the New Deal generated its own politics of inclusion,
such inclusion took place across a drastically revised ideological and insti-
tutional landscape. The emerging polity was constitutionally organized
around a plebiscitary presidency, which enjoyed remarkable administra-

tive authority at home and a nearly limitless capacity to promote Ameri-
can power abroad. The public as an active and continuous participatory
presence had been recast as the recipient of security protection from eco-
nomic and foreign threats. Politicians courted the "people" — still the
basis of presidential legitimacy — while at the same time nullifying the
practical capacity of most Americans to wield power. This diminution of
popular authority left the executive increasingly alone as the driving po-
litical agent in collective life. The result was a politics of substitution, in
which the popular will quietly morphed into those policies implemented
by an energetic executive.

The implications would have been readily apparent to America's set-
tler founders. In ever more expansive ways, state power became orga-
nized on principles drawn from the pacification of historically subject
populations. And while efforts at inclusion extended the boundaries of
social membership, hierarchies nonetheless persisted between various
groups, strengthening new and old structures of economic and political
privilege. Without the emancipatory vision of free citizenship, all that
seemingly remained of the nation's colonial roots was its framework of
imperial subjectship. The result was that as the twentieth century un-
folded, the ordinary American — white or black — could look with awe at
U.S. military and diplomatic might as well as at the industrial achieve-
ments of its domestic economy. He or she could feel pride and a sense of
collective purpose in the working of American institutions. Yet, on a daily
basis, few opportunities existed for that same individual to guide the ap-
plication of U.S. supremacy, let alone to redirect its fundamental purposes.
Although each person may have been a social member of this global po-
litical power, the autonomy and independence that settlers had once tied
to both expansion and economic production had long vanished. If any-
thing, empire had become the master rather than the servant of freedom,
and the once powerful argument that liberty could not be traded for im-
perial security was reduced to a remnant of the distant political past.

CONCLUSION:

DEMOCRACY AND INCLUSION IN THE

AGE OF AMERICAN HEGEMONY

Today the New Deal, as an expression of FDR's very real popular man-
date and the policies he pursued to confront economic crisis, has faded
into memory. Yet the larger political order constructed during the period
continues to drive prevailing commitments and institutions. And just as
Bourne prophesied nearly a century ago, the long-term consequence of
the focus on security, global preeminence, and muscular state power has
been an erosion of that divide separating monarchical authority from the
account of republican self-government that grounded American indepen-
dence. At present, plebiscitary politics takes place against a backdrop
in which basic decision making is fundamentally centralized at the top in
state and corporate entities, with most Americans enjoying few of the
practical experiences that were meant to mark free citizenship. Perhaps
most surprising for those like Powderly or Croly would be that the
very measures that they defended — minimum wage laws, collective
bargaining provisions, regulatory mechanisms — in the hands of New
Deal and post-New Deal administrators heralded a repudiation of the
larger reformist vision. This reformist vision had seen security as only
a means to the end of substantive self-rule and energetic government
as tightly bound to the popular activities of assertive and mobilized
constituencies.

Equally disconcerting, such developments at home have been com-
bined with an entrenched commitment to expanding American global
authority — precisely what Watson believed would inevitably reduce re-
publican citizens to subjects of an imperial state. In one sense Watson's
worries were exaggerated, since the United States has no doubt refrained
from pursuing permanent colonial possessions. Still the project of global
pacification, with its roots in Protestant millennialism, remains an essen-
tial component of today's political landscape. Moreover, recent genera-

tions have largely affirmed the early twentieth-century tie between do-
mestic peace and the American imposition of global stability.

If anything, the unabated growth of this international power illus-
trates the continued centrality of these themes for national politics. One
could argue that, in the years since the New Deal, with practical con-
trol receding from the grasp of ordinary citizens, American global stand-
ing has gained heightened symbolic meaning. Collective identity is now
deeply intertwined with the idea of the United States as an international
force for peace. Furthermore, one's participation in American global
power (even if only remotely through U.S. birth and citizenship) embod-
ies a rare political moment for individuals to enjoy a sense of shared
purpose and achievement. As Teddy Roosevelt and Oliver Wendell Hol-
mes imagined a century ago, the idea that social membership involves a
larger, ethical project has become intricately linked to the fate of Ameri-
can superpower status. And as Teddy Roosevelt also recognized, the ex-
pansion of international authority has in turn underpinned the domestic
framework of plebiscitary politics. The sense of a constant U.S. preoccu-
pation with foreign crises emphasizes the need for a flexible and central-
ized executive, one that can speak on behalf of the popular will and re-
spond immediately to foreign events. Therefore, while the United States
has avoided developing a traditional empire, the historic republican
worry with the actual politics of empire has proven accurate. The exten-
sion of American power and the increased economic and political hierar-
chy of domestic practices have emerged in tandem, providing mutual
reinforcement for the basic contours of collective life. This ultimately
suggests that constitutional problems with an unchecked presidency are
not primarily legal difficulties. They are symptomatic of political judg-
ments that view foreign instability as a permanent justification for U.S.
intervention, and can be solved fully only by addressing those underlying
judgments.

Perhaps one of the most damaging effects of governing arrangements
is how they have reshaped the dominant meaning of equality and thus the
popular drive for political inclusion. In a sense, one can read the nineteenth-
century social movements of farmers and wage earners as at root con-
cerned with gaining the benefits of full membership. For these settlers,
membership meant collective self-rule and required both economic in-
dependence and actual control over political decision making. Mass
mobilization in the service of these goals provided a continual source of
pressure challenging both the rise of economic and political dependencies

as well as the subversion of popular institutions by elite rule. In the years
since, however, the project of equality has concentrated increasingly on
distributing more meritocratically the country's few positions of corpo-
rate and governmental power. It has focused on reducing those formal
barriers that hinder the ability of individuals from particular back-
grounds to achieve professional or elite status. In other words, rather
than democratizing all of collective life, inclusion has become a means
for incorporating previously subordinated communities into leadership
roles. The result — although clearly a profound reversal of settler norms —
has been mostly to alter the composition of socially privileged groups
rather than to undermine privilege as such. Thus the country can even
have a nonwhite person or a woman as president without any expecta-
tion that this individual will challenge the basic parameters of economic
hierarchy at home or of American interventionism abroad.

In essence, while inclusion has become the central reform initiative of
the last half century, its primary thrust has been stripped of the old re-
publican vision of freedom. At a basic level, the goal of reform activity
has been to take apart the stratifications separating different classes of
citizens, and by eliminating formal discrimination to create a condition
of uniform legal equality among all Americans — regardless of race or
gender. Certainly these efforts are perhaps the greatest democratic victo-
ries of the twentieth century and have radically changed U.S. culture and
the place of nonwhites and women within it. Yet, for all these dramatic
shifts, the dominant legacy of reform has not been to transform the pre-
vailing order but instead to rationalize it. Equality often has meant sim-
ply blunting the harshest implications of the state's coercive power over
marginalized groups and providing elite access for a privileged few drawn
from them. As a consequence, the tendency has been to buttress domestic
and global arrangements by involving nonwhite and female professionals
in their operation and expansion.

Even with such developments, however, the present moment is not
without its resources for confronting both the internal decline of free citi-
zenship and the globalized commitment to pacification. And these resources
are closely tied to the politics of inclusion and its implications in the
post-New Deal order. This is because the previous vision of more robust
equality has never entirely died. In fact, recent reform efforts have had a
second and competing trajectory, although this trajectory is often ob-
scured at present. For radical reformers, inclusion required overcoming
the general reduction in the meaning of citizenship and thus recovering

the historic project of independence — only now expanded to incorporate
everyone. In the process, this meant fundamentally dismantling the struc-
tures of authority at home and abroad that undermined self-rule and
made free citizenship impossible. At its most expansive, the American
civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s in particular combined
arguments about internal freedom and external power, while at the same
time claiming a popular capacity to speak for the common good. This
often-submerged legacy of the movement hints at the continued poten-
tial for thinking systemically about today's problems. It also provides the
connective historical link between nineteenth-century mass mobilization
and reform projects in the present day, which similarly would seek to
defend a universal and nonimperial ideal.

Despite the demise of settler empire, the American practice of inter-
national police power and global primacy persists in treating outsiders
as instruments for the achievement of national ends. In the nineteenth
century, these ends took the form of rich internal accounts of liberty and
political possibility. Now, however, they increasingly appear to be domes-
tic security as such and the indefinite protection of American status. In
effect, the United States' orientation to the world combines some of the
most problematic ideological features of the settler past without its
emancipatory aspirations. It continues to view outsiders — including im-
migrants within our borders — as part of a dependent periphery, to be
used for the extension of national wealth and dominance. Yet these prac-
tices have become detached from the meaningful provision of economic
and political self-rule for Americans. In a sense, the key challenge for the
present is to invert such developments, to revive accounts of self-rule,
and to dissolve their connections to external subordination at home and
abroad — to make freedom truly universal. These final pages employ ar-
guments from the civil rights period to draw out the contemporary impli-
cations of this project and to suggest current possibilities for connecting
efforts at inclusion with a broader revision of the substance and goals of
collective membership.

The Two Civil Rights Movements

Since the entrenchment of the New Deal order, the civil rights movement
has embodied the most sustained effort to revive both the vision of lib-
erty as self-rule and to connect this vision with a critique of empire. To-
day this legacy is almost entirely forgotten, in large measure because the

mid-twentieth-century struggle for black equality always had two con-
flicting dimensions. On the one hand, efforts to end racial segregation
and formal legal discrimination sought to incorporate blacks fully into
American projects of hegemony abroad and security at home. They
emphasized social mobility for middle-class blacks and inclusion for
some into arenas of corporate, professional, and political power. These
features are perhaps most tellingly illustrated by the legal prong of black
attempts to end racial inequality. The best-known civil rights litigation
of the 1950s involved segregated primary schools, but the earliest test
cases of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peo-
ple (NAACP) focused on postgraduate professional study — especially
law school. One of the first serious victories in the NAACP legal strategy
was 1938's Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada, which held that Missouri
violated equal protection guarantees by failing to provide in-state law
school education for black students. A decade later, Sweatt v. Painter
(1950) went further, holding that individuals could in no way be denied
access to law school on the basis of race. 1 For these NAACP lawyers,
equality was crucially about winning for blacks the opportunity to achieve
professional status and to participate at the highest echelons of corporate
and political leadership.

In the mid-1960s, in the wake of tremendous popular unrest and mo-
bilization across the American South, President Lyndon Johnson pressed
Congress to end legalized segregation and to provide all blacks with vot-
ing rights. In many ways, these reforms embodied a choice by white poli-
ticians at the national level to protect New Deal liberalism by removing
the eyesore of southern segregation and by making regional practices
consistent with those prevailing elsewhere in the country. In other words,
such reforms sought to preserve American domestic economic and politi-
cal stability while strengthening U.S. moral standing internationally. This
essentially preservative role was shared by many in the black middle
class, who had long viewed the civil rights struggle in terms of liberal in-
clusion and elite social mobility. In fact, much of the traditional leader-
ship within the black community was opposed to combining a critique of
legal discrimination with either more extensive domestic reform initia-
tives or with challenges to U.S. global power, particularly in the context
of Vietnam. For instance, Whitney Young, the head of the Urban League,
warned activists at the NAACP's 1966 convention that the League would
denounce any groups that tied issues of "domestic civil rights with the
Vietnam Conflict." 2

The long-term victory of these voices within the civil rights movement
not only has set the terms for today's discussions of race but also has
shaped the very meaning of those previous struggles and therefore our
political inheritance as Americans. In particular, it has meant that goals
of black equality in the United States are largely disconnected in the po-
litical imagination from broader independence struggles in Asia, Latin
America, and Africa. Racial equality is understood as a specifically Amer-
ican project of integration, one that primarily consists of providing wor-
thy elements within the black community with an equal opportunity to
achieve professional and middle-class respectability. There is no doubt
that this project has brought with it clear benefits, especially the steady
reduction of those everyday forms of humiliation — from name calling to
formal discrimination and random violence — that historically marked
the black experience. Yet the focus on incorporating black elites into the
structures of American authority has also come at a clear cost. It has
involved nothing less than ignoring our most recent collective attempt
to create a truly inclusive community premised on democratic self-
rule — to imagine inclusion as a call to elevate everyone to the status of
free citizens.

For many civil rights activists, the goal of popular mobilization and
the hope embedded in the project of black emancipation lay precisely in
the fulfillment of this vision. At the end of his life, W. E. B. Du Bois warned
civil rights leaders that simply eliminating legal segregation would not
alter the position of economic and political subordination confronting
most blacks. Shortly before leaving for exile in newly independent Ghana,
Du Bois told a college audience in North Carolina that although the
United States was "definitely approaching ... a time when the American
Negro will become in law equal in citizenship to other Americans," this
represented only "a beginning of even more difficult problems of race
and culture." Ending formalized inequality was only a prerequisite for
creating a community grounded in the substantive freedom of its mem-
bers. Such freedom required challenging corporate and governmental
hierarchies, which denied most individuals, regardless of race, economic
independence and daily control over their work life. Only if these hierar-
chies were dislodged would Americans finally "restore the democracy of
which we have boasted so long and done so little." 3

Moreover, Du Bois directly tied this project of freedom at home to
confronting empire in all its manifestations, including the persistent and
informal modes of external control wielded by powerful states. Du Bois

understood the black experience in the United States as a particular variant
of Europe's larger colonial legacy and thus believed that any meaningful
commitment to eliminating the vestiges of colonialism meant supporting
its elimination everywhere. It was no accident that Du Bois chose to live
the remainder of his life in Nkrumah's Ghana, as a symbol of anti-
imperial unity. Du Bois hoped that blacks in the United States would take
the lead in reshaping America's position in the world and in making com-
mon cause with colonized peoples throughout the globe to alter their
conditions of political and economic dependence. In the words that echoed
the United States' own postcolonial founders, he imagined a truly free
Africa, which "refuse[d] to be exploited by people of other continents for
their benefits and not for the benefit of the peoples of Africa" and that
would "stress peace and join no military alliance and refuse to fight for
settling European quarrels." 4

One leader who not only heard Du Bois's call but struggled to situate
it as the basis of an organized social movement — capable of standing as
a government behind the government — was Martin Luther King Jr. To-
day King is widely viewed as the patron saint of civil rights activism,
conceived largely as an effort to end legal discrimination and to provide
upwardly mobile blacks with an equal opportunity to achieve social power.
However, his actual views and those of many of his supporters were far
more expansive. In King's final book before his death, Where Do We Go
from Here? (1967), he explicitly joined his vision of liberty to the univer-
sal republican ideals of radical Populists and Progressives. King argued
that the black condition in the United States was that of "educational
castration and economic exploitation" and that overcoming racism re-
quired more than merely ending formal segregation; it entailed "a radical
restructuring of the architecture of American society." According to him,
black subordination drew sustenance from the same forces that concen-
trated wealth and political control in fewer and fewer hands while justi-
fying the permanent global extension of America's military footprint. In
his view, the "evils of racism, poverty and militarism" were deeply inter-
twined and had to be overcome by actions that addressed both American
international police power and the domestic elimination of popular
authority. 5

The first challenge for King was not to assert a particular program-
matic agenda but rather to reclaim collective agency, eroded by the rise
of centralized corporate and state institutions. He hoped that the civil
rights movement would develop new organizational means by which a

constituency within society could be permanently mobilized to wield
democratic control. He argued that without such a social base, govern-
ment would "elude our demands" and that whatever measures it passed
would be for "use as supplicants" rather than products of a self-actualizing
public will. According to him, for democracy to exist in practice, there
had to be more than regular elections; individuals had to participate di-
rectly in shaping collective life. As King wrote, "We must develop, from
strength, a situation in which the government finds it wise and prudent
to collaborate with us." In a sense, he hoped that civil rights groups and
their supporters would replace the nineteenth-century laboring commu-
nity as the stand-in for the public writ large. Rather than relying on the
presumed virtue of those in power, or "wait[ing] passively until the ad-
ministration had somehow been infused with . . . blessings of goodwill,"
such mobilized agency would direct politics to conform to ideals of self-
rule. Like the old collectivity of farmers and wage earners, this new con-
stituency had the potential to connect its particular interests — in eco-
nomic and political freedom — to the interests of all. It thus could serve as
a voice of popular power, compelling state and economic elites to impose
needed structural changes. 6

Like Weyl, King outlined these changes by beginning from the recog-
nition that American society was marked by tremendous abundance; in
fact, the black position in the United States was that of "poverty amid
plenty." As such, it was time to abandon prevailing efforts "to compress
our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes
until they gag with superfluity." Instead, social wealth should be employed
not simply to free individuals from the most extreme forms of immisera-
tion but also to establish the conditions for everyone to enjoy creative
and meaningful work. In calling for the abolition of poverty, especially
through measures such as a guaranteed income for all, King did not see
the provision of economic security as an end in itself. Rather, he imag-
ined it as an essential requirement for a society committed to making la-
bor an activity of personal fulfillment — or, as Kallen would have phrased
it, to transforming labor into leisure. To this end, he quoted at length
from Henry George's Progress and Poverty (1879), a classic text of the
nineteenth-century's robust populist tradition:

The fact is that the work which improves the condition of man-
kind, the work which extends knowledge and increases power and
enriches literature, and elevates thought, is not done to secure a

living. It is not the work of slaves, driven to their task either by
the lash of a master or by animal necessities. It is the work of men
who perform it for their own sake, and not that they may get
more to eat or drink, or wear, or display. In a state of society
where want is abolished, work of this sort could be enormously
increased.

For King, as for Henry George before him, freedom entailed both eco-
nomic self-rule and practical political control through mobilized and asser-
tive social constituencies. 7

Moreover, precisely because of the historic black position of exclu-
sion, King saw any project of emancipation as admitting no color line or
national barrier. At home this required imagining the civil rights move-
ment as properly a poor people's movement that incorporated blacks,
impoverished whites, and immigrant communities (particularly from
South and Central America). Since each group found itself denied both
the benefits of economic independence and basic political authority,
according to King, "only through their combined strength" would it
be possible "to overcome the fierce opposition we must realistically
anticipate." 8

Internationally, King's commitment to self-rule meant following in
Skidmore's and Bourne's footsteps and seeing the interconnections be-
tween inequality at home and continuing practices of global expropria-
tion. In King's view, "Equality with whites will not solve the problems of
either whites or Negroes if it means equality in a world stricken by pov-
erty and in a universe doomed to extinction by war." In the context of the
Cold War, he considered the ideological power of communism as in large
measure a product of Western efforts to sustain systems of formal and in-
formal rule across much of the globe. King wrote, "Communism is a judg-
ment on our failure to make democracy real and to follow through the
revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to re-
capture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world
declaring eternal opposition to poverty, racism, and militarism." 9

In practice this meant two basic transformations in American foreign
policy. First, it entailed repudiating the emerging modes of global author-
ity, which, just as Nkrumah had worried, undermined the formal sover-
eignty of newly independent states and reduced large swaths of the
global south to the de facto control of external forces. King saw the leg-
acy of the Monroe Doctrine in Latin America as "tremendous resentment

of the United States," resentment motivated by permanent U.S. interfer-
ence with local economic and political practices:

The life and destiny of Latin America are in the hands of the
United States corporations. The decisions affecting the lives of
South Americans are ostensibly made by their governments, but
there are almost no legitimate democracies alive in the whole con-
tinent. The other governments are dominated by huge and exploit-
ative cartels that rob Latin America of her resources while turning
over a small rebate to a few members of a corrupt aristocracy. 10

According to King, American complicity in local authoritarianism and
economic expropriation was ultimately due to its commitment to main-
taining an international police power. As a consequence, the second key
transformation needed in American foreign policy involved the ideologi-
cal rejection of such interventionism and the dismantling of the global
military footprint that supported it. This police power asserted the right
to intervene whenever and wherever the United States believed that demo-
cratic order was imperiled. King contended that, rather than promoting
actual self-determination, American actions had the tendency to freeze
disputes in ways that undermined lasting resolution or served external
interests rather than local publics. They also propped up regimes with
little internal legitimacy, which meant that these regimes could stay in
power only with the continual investment of yet greater economic and
military resources. King saw American support for apartheid govern-
ments across southern Africa — through corporate capital investments,
trade, and defense alliances — as stark proof of how international police
power, and its stated aims of promoting peace, had been transformed
into an instrument of popular suppression.

For King, the most explicit consequence of this American orientation
to the world was that, rather than creating an actual condition of peace,
it ultimately justified greater military adventurism. It treated local com-
munities as means to the end of U.S. ideological ambitions and as instru-
ments for the perpetual extension of global power. Precisely because of
the need to overcome international disorder no matter where it existed,
the United States was trapped in a project of endlessly extending its geo-
graphic footprint and defense commitments. According to King, such re-
alities underscored how "the leaders of nations again talk[ed] peace while
preparing for war." 11 It also meant that America found itself, as in Viet-
nam, forever subject to local insurrections and new potential dangers,

which in turn warranted even greater military spending and territorial
presence.

In his view, as in the view of republicans dating back to Harrington,
the logic of the United States' military infrastructure brought with it the
steady reduction of economic and political freedom at home. It necessi-
tated the centralization of power and entailed that America's unpre-
cedented social wealth be diverted from its appropriate task — creating
an inclusive community committed to economic independence and the
democratic elevation of all its members. Looking at an America marked
by internal inequalities and external interventionism, King remarked,
"A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on mili-
tary defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual
death." 12

In the years since King's death, his account of universal republican
freedom — let alone his stark warning to fellow Americans — has more or
less been ignored in the public discourse. While King is deified as a
twentieth-century hero, one to stand alongside the founders, his actual
views are quietly discarded. To the extent that the civil rights agenda is
pursued at all, it mostly involves further incorporating black elites into
the institutions of American economic and political power. The notion of
tying economic subordination within the United States to global patterns
of inequality, let alone the democratic ideal of a permanently mobilized
social agent, is hardly ever broached. Nonetheless, it is precisely this vi-
sion that holds out the possibility of restructuring collective institutions
and of combining a mass politics of inclusion with a broad-based com-
mitment to self-rule at home and abroad.

Humanitarian Imperialism, Immigration,
and the American Periphery

King's vision, as well as the more expansive legacy of the civil rights
movement, raises a basic question for the current moment. What spaces
exist not only for locating arguments about dependence but also for de-
veloping the popular potential to confront prevailing frameworks? An-
swering this question involves imagining the social constituencies and
reform initiatives capable of pursuing an ideal of self-rule. It therefore
means linking the concrete material interests of specific groups to the
larger common good and thus showing how experiences of inequality or
subordination illuminate a more pervasive social predicament. In partic-

ular, it involves addressing today's twin realities: the retreat of robust
ideals of collective possibility and the seemingly permanent expansion of
American power. This power, although now disconnected from internal
freedom as self-rule, continues to generate relations of external control as
well as to justify the near limitless growth of presidential authority. These
external relations both instrumentalize outsiders and transform U.S. domi-
nance into an end in itself. Such realities are most strikingly highlighted by
the dramatic alteration in the place of immigrants in collective life, from
co-ethnic participants in settler empire to nonwhite members of a depen-
dent periphery — one that exists even within our borders. In a sense, sus-
taining the expansive civil rights legacy means confronting this fact. It also
suggests a new politics of inclusion, one with the potential to rehabilitate
self-rule as a general and guiding social commitment.

As I noted in the book's opening pages, for many across the world,
particularly in the global south, political contests in the United States are
followed not simply for entertainment. In very real terms, shifts in America
carry with them shifts in local conditions. Through the selective and adap-
tive use of economic aid, trade agreements, and military assistance, U.S.
power since World War II has operated on a continual basis to intervene
in the affairs of weaker states and to construct friendly arrangements.
These arrangements continue to be motivated by global pacification, a
fact powerfully underscored by the explicit grand strategy of postwar
foreign policy elites.

No text better expresses this drive for pacification than National Se-
curity Council paper 68 (NSC-68). Generally considered the founda-
tional document of Cold War foreign policy, NSC-68, written in 1950,
not only emphasized the specific security dilemmas posed by the Soviet
Union; it also reasserted the image of the United States as enjoying a
unique historical project, one that aimed to protect national freedom by
eliminating all potential sites for foreign chaos:

In a shrinking world, which now faces the threat of atomic war-
fare, it is not an adequate objective merely to seek to check the
Kremlin design, for the absence of order among nations is becom-
ing less and less tolerable. This fact imposes on us, in our own in-
terests, the responsibility of world leadership. It demands that we
make the attempt, and accept the risks inherent in it, to bring
about order and justice by means consistent with the principles of
freedom and democracy. 13

In essence, NSC-68 echoed Arnold's ideal of "humanitarian imperialism"
and presented the pursuit of global power as a collective project (replete
with risks and sacrifices) that cohered American public life and gave value
to social membership.

Today, in order to protect its territorial reach and international pri-
macy, in many ways the United States engages in the classic hallmarks of
imperial rule. Policymakers view the country as enjoying a right to act
covertly or overtly in all parts of the world in order to quell presumed
threats or to create economic ties conducive to national interests. Yet,
precisely because the United States is not a traditional empire, local peo-
ples find themselves in an interesting predicament. During the era of co-
lonial dependency, imperial states, for all their coerciveness, remained
bound to colonized groups by relations of actual sovereignty. Simply to
maintain order over unruly populations, European empires had to be at
least partially responsive to indigenous communities — a fact illustrated
by the British decision in Canada to extend rights to French Catholics in
the years leading up to the American Revolution. By contrast, the current
moment is marked not by clear relations of control but rather by a diffu-
sion of practical authority, spread across a variety of shifting sites (from
domestic elites in the global south to international institutions and donor
countries), often ultimately reinforced by American police power. Given
this overlapping network of diffuse control and responsibility, foreign
entities, including the United States, may wield a high degree of practical
authority over the internal politics of weaker states, without any direct
means by which local publics can alter — let alone repudiate — such author-
ity. As Nkrumah, Du Bois, and King worried, despite the end of actual co-
lonial rule, formal state sovereignty remains compromised by substantive
forms of dependence.

These facts not only define the global condition and the place of
American primacy in the international order; they are also deeply inter-
twined with the very project of pursuing meaningful domestic accounts
of freedom. This is because today global relationships of dependence are
themselves reproduced even at home and, moreover, in a context devoid
of substantive ideals of self-rule for either insiders or outsiders. In other
words, collective practices continue to sustain a distinction between metro-
pole and periphery, even as this distinction serves primarily to strengthen
corporate and state hierarchies that undermine democratic possibilities
for all. As a consequence, despite the end of settlerism and the move to-
ward formal equality for blacks and women, the extension of American

power nonetheless brings with it two lasting developments: a diminu-
tion in the value of full membership and the persistence of profound
insider-outsider dichotomies. The latter both entrenches and subtly shifts
historic prejudices and modes of subordination and is most evident in the
marginal status of noncitizen immigrants in American economic and po-
litical life.

The overwhelming majority of current immigrant communities are
originally from regions in the global south (parts of Asia, Africa, the Ca-
ribbean, and Central and South America) — precisely those regions that
face the brunt of vast disparities in global wealth and practical power. As
a result, migration to the United States is not simply an arbitrary occur-
rence; it is a product of both international structures of inequality and
U.S. status within the global order as "the first among equals." Thus a
remarkable feature of today's immigration is the manner in which it re-
verses the classic settler paradigm. Recall that throughout the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, European immigrants by and large were viewed
as co-participants in an ethnically defined project of expansion, one
that secured for white settlers the precondition of republican freedom —
economic independence through land ownership. As such, white nonciti-
zens were often immediately included as social equals, with the federal
government granting them access to property out west and with many
states providing them with voting rights. This inclusion in the shared set-
tler enterprise meant that immigrants during the high tide of territorial
conquest were treated as worthy of free labor and free citizenship, while
other subordinated communities (most obviously African slaves) were
consigned to degraded forms of work.

Now, in place of European co-ethnics, immigrants to the United States
are overwhelmingly nonwhite. And instead of extending settler projects
into the frontier or "periphery" as nineteenth-century immigrants did,
today's new arrivals in essence represent the movement of this periphery
into the very center of metropolitan power. To a large extent, this move-
ment was made possible by the elimination in 1965, during the height of
the civil rights movement, of national origins quotas. But while such
policy shifts challenged the country's racial identity, present-day immi-
grants have not enjoyed anything approaching the swift and full inclu-
sion of their predecessors. By contrast, they often find themselves playing
a similar economic and political function to classic subordinated groups.
As the cheap labor at the bottom rung of the American economy, immi-
gration perpetuates new stratifications that distinguish between those

engaged in high-status work and those confined to low-skill employ-
ment. 14 If anything, confronted by extensive social disabilities and fac-
ing the constant possibility of forced removal, these immigrants' status
at the edges of collective life replicates within the U.S. border the very
dependence that governs abroad between the West and its historic
colonies.

Nothing better underscores both global hierarchies and their internal
relevance for American life than the symbiotic relationship between the
United States and Mexico. Over the last century, the American govern-
ment has repeatedly employed its immigration powers to provide busi-
ness interests with a permanent supply of inexpensive Mexican labor
that could be terminated whenever employers saw fit or deported dur-
ing periods of economic downturn. The most famous of these efforts was
the Bracero Program, which between the 1940s and the 1960s brought
200,000 temporary workers annually as agricultural laborers into the
U.S. Southwest. The program helped entrench the social and family net-
works between the two countries that today sustain the flow of new mi-
grants north. It also went hand in hand with mass deportation of Mexi-
can laborers when employers no longer needed the workforce. Earlier,
during the Great Depression, such deportation took the form of a large-
scale "repatriation" campaign that sent over 400,000 people, including
many formal American citizens, back to Mexico. And at the height of the
Bracero Program, "Operation Wetback" in 1954 apprehended 170,000
undocumented workers over the course of three months and forcibly re-
moved them by bus, train, and boat. 15

Today there are more immigrants from Mexico than from any other
country in the world, including over 100,000 lawful permanent resi-
dents who entered every year between 1988 and 1998. Alongside this
population are over 6.5 million undocumented Mexican laborers, many
of whom have worked in the United States for decades. 16 Although
these numbers are the direct product of a long-standing symbiotic rela-
tionship between the two countries, Mexican immigrants find them-
selves on the receiving end of strict border enforcement efforts and de-
portation schemes. This treatment ignores the role played by express
government programs, as well as tacit state support for corporate em-
ployers, in creating and sustaining the Mexican community in the United
States.

Such migration patterns are also illustrative of a deeper fact about
contemporary American economic life, hinted at above. At present, those

from the global south, particularly the 11 million undocumented immi-
grants, 17 often provide the labor that settlers long viewed as inconsistent
with self-rule — from women engaged in domestic service for professional
elites to unskilled factory employees in what remains of the manufac-
turing sector. The economic role played by these immigrants highlights
the profound democratic problems that radical Progressives saw with a
sharp division of labor. For thinkers like Dewey, industrial hierarchy
and bureaucratization meant that most workers were removed from
arenas of creativity and control and engaged solely in poorly paid and
repetitive tasks. For him, the best solution to these problems was to
provide workers with greater practical authority over the conditions of
their own employment and to challenge the separation between task
creation and task completion that marked bureaucratic and corporate
practices.

Similarly, feminists like Charlotte Perkins Gilman had raised compa-
rable issues with the nature of "women's work." She argued that women
primarily experienced economic dependence through the daily grind of
household activities rather than in the industrial plant or the agricultural
field. In her view, the value provided by this service was systematically
ignored. In addition, the gendered division of labor meant that many
women did not have the opportunity to choose which practices they
would engage in or to determine which work they found most personally
fulfilling. Thus republican ideals like economic independence and free
labor were in reality exclusively male privileges. According to Gilman,
confronting the gendered division of labor meant socializing responsibil-
ity for child care, by equalizing the burden between genders and by creat-
ing state institutions of support.

In contrast to these aspirations, alongside poor white and minority
citizens, immigrant nonnationals today, in ever-expanding numbers, play
the part of softening the intensity of the division of labor. Many middle-
class Americans have avoided finding themselves on the wrong side of
the productive divide precisely because of immigrant workers. In the case
of household activities, women in professional and managerial jobs in-
creasingly maintain their positions by relying on a domestic service indus-
try often, although by no means solely, staffed by transnational women
from the global south. Rather than having household labor equally
shared by all and therefore losing its gendered status, such labor is carried
out in a way that still casts it almost exclusively as women's work while
reinforcing the separation between high and low employment. At a broader

level, instead of challenging the productive divide — one that distinguishes
elevated from degraded forms of labor — contemporary arrangements have
allowed this divide to grow ever more extreme. In a sense, the end of set-
tlerism has not meant the end of using subordinated groups to engage in
the most menial and unfree practices. Thus although the settler ideals of
robust and participatory self-rule may have receded, old structures of
economic hierarchy continue in mutated form, with insider privilege sus-
taining outsider exclusion.

As in the past, a central mechanism for preserving these hierarchies
is the old imperial prerogative, unleashed against all noncitizens —
documented or undocumented. As one recent but telling illustration, in
1996 Congress used its plenary power to pass new legislation that dra-
matically restricted the basic rights of immigrants. In the words of Mae
Ngai, "The 1996 laws terminated welfare benefits for legal aliens, made
removal mandatory for a broad range of offenses, and further curtailed
judicial review and virtually eliminated administrative discretion in de-
portation cases." The ultimate consequence has been to blur the bound-
ary between legal and illegal immigrants, by creating new means for re-
voking legal status for long-term residents while further undermining the
ability of undocumented workers to ever "legalize" their position. 18 At
present, even permanent residents live in the United States on "a condi-
tion of permanent probation," since minor offenses can carry mandatory
deportation irrespective of whether immigrants have served their sen-
tences or have long-standing ties to the United States — including a his-
tory of military service. 19

At the same time, the United States has pursued these policies — as
well as its global security objectives — by bringing the full force of the
American penal system to bear on noncitizens. In the wake of the attacks
of September 11, 2001, immigration laws were employed to contain the
perceived threat posed by Arab and Muslim noncitizens, leading to the
arrest and detention of some 5,000 immigrants. 20 And as a more general
matter, migrants seeking asylum or individuals contesting deportation
are today routinely held in an elaborate network of deportation centers
and county jails, in the latter case alongside criminal offenders. Under-
scoring the extent of the state's coercive enforcement, in fiscal year 2007
the Department of Homeland Security reports that it detained 311,213
immigrants in total, for reasons that included minor violations or even
administrative mistakes. 21 In a sense, immigrants have gone from being
the engine of settler expansion and thus worthy of full incorporation to

one key and identifiable component of the dependent labor at the base of
collective life — labor that both embodies and perpetuates conditions of
privilege and structural inequality.

The Hope of a Universal and Nonimperial Republic

These developments suggest striking continuities with concerns that
troubled civil rights leaders like King and Du Bois a half century ago. For
King and Du Bois, the black predicament in the United States was a mat-
ter both of legal discrimination and of systematic economic dependence
and impoverishment. This meant that freedom for blacks involved more
than ending formal segregation; it required basic changes that provided
the entire polity with economic self-rule through meaningful work and
guaranteed income. Thus both civil rights leaders understood these goals
to be ultimately universal ones, available to all and therefore necessitat-
ing fundamental reforms that were not race specific. At the same time,
King and Du Bois also saw the black condition in the United States as
part of the larger global narrative of imperial authority. Independence
for the colonized world and liberty for African Americans were parallel
objectives, to be pursued jointly, as both remained united by the historic
fact of European empire.

Similarly, the current predicament of the immigrant ties together legal
discrimination, economic dependence, and the continuing legacy of West-
ern colonial rule. Addressing this predicament therefore involves fully
appreciating the interconnections between domestic freedom and the ap-
plication of external American power. It also offers an important collec-
tive opportunity. A project of political, legal, and economic inclusion for
immigrants would mean a basic challenge to the current structures of
internal privilege, workplace authority, and even global supervision. In a
sense, the settler approach to European immigration, which viewed these
groups as presumptive or — as termed by Hiroshi Motomura — "intending"
citizens, embodied both the best and worst of settler ideals. 22 On the one
hand, such openness rested on maintaining the exclusion of those cultur-
ally unfit for membership and thus sustaining and reproducing relation-
ships of subordination for stratified subjects. On the other hand, it none-
theless meant seeing a rich account of free citizenship as bound to the full
incorporation of outsiders. At present, reviving and universalizing this
settler approach provides a potential method of reclaiming the settler vi-
sion of freedom. It entails employing the logic of inclusion to see the

emancipatory potential of the American past as relevant for the present
and as bound neither to the dependent labor of outsiders nor to projects
of expansion. In essence, it offers one possible avenue for undermining the
prevalent ties between freedom and empire, which continue to entrench
distinctions between metropolitan privilege and peripheral subordina-
tion. And precisely because of the extreme forms of economic and politi-
cal dependence that mark elements of the immigrant experience, it also
provides a clear site for contesting the pervasive hierarchies in work life
and in collective decision making. While these hierarchies apply to the
immigrant experience, they are the more general product of heightened
bureaucratization and corporate control, developments that have under-
mined practical self-rule for many Americans, regardless of race or citi-
zenship status.

Currently, with the unabated growth of plebiscitary rule and corpo-
rate governance, we are far removed from a politics of republican free-
dom and universal openness, one that draws from the historic arguments
of radical Populists and Progressives. The opportunities for public par-
ticipation in political and economic life are deeply limited, and it remains
uncertain which social groups have the capacity to mobilize on behalf of
these ideals. The need for such constituencies is vital, because at root to-
day's problems can be addressed properly only through shifts in political
identity. For instance, one cannot expect that legal reforms aimed at curb-
ing executive authority will succeed as long as Americans accept judg-
ments that view security and the protection from external and internal
threat as society's guiding commitments. These commitments inevitably
will undermine the utility of institutional changes by reinforcing the need
for centralization and hierarchy. Before institutions can reflect and embody
reform aspirations, social constituencies must emerge in the public realm to
demand and support ideals of freedom.

In the past, agrarian protest and civil rights activism indicated how an
element within society could serve as a focal point for asserting such no-
tions of self-rule, and therefore could represent politically and symboli-
cally the interests of the community as a whole. At present, while immi-
grants are hardly alone in bearing the brunt of institutional hierarchies,
their often intensified position of exclusion — marked by the denial of po-
litical voice and economic power — and their incipient forms of mobiliz-
ing suggest the potential development of a new social base. As with pre-
vious groups, the very experience of exclusion brings with it a latent

possibility for locating arguments about subordination. It hints at a con-
crete and coherent body whose own goals could align with wider calls
for economic independence and participatory control, and which could
carry forward the legacy of past movements. In this way, immigrant ac-
tivism embodies a wedge to pry open more sustained discussions of eco-
nomic and political practice. A century ago, white agrarian radicals de-
veloped links with urban wage earners and black sharecroppers, in the
process challenging the dominance of the two established parties and
questioning the rise of presidential and corporate prerogatives. Perhaps
immigrant constituencies, over time, could begin to play a similar role,
employing their space at the intersection of internal freedom and exter-
nal power to raise structural questions about the nature of contemporary
American life.

In 2006 immigrant activism indicated the birth of a nascent popular
movement committed to challenging the marginal position of noncitizens
in the United States. In response to a congressional bill that would have
further raised penalties for undocumented workers and treated all illegal
immigrants (as well as those who assisted them in entering or staying in
the country) as felons, waves of protesters filled the streets. In March and
April of that year massive demonstrations occurred across the country,
including upwards of a million people in Los Angeles, half a million in
Dallas, and 300,000 in Chicago. Immigrant workers also staged a na-
tionwide May Day boycott in which some 3 million people went on
strike, walked out of schools, boycotted businesses, or marched in hun-
dreds of American cities. 23 The choice of May 1 for these events tied their
efforts to late nineteenth-century labor republicans in the United States,
who used that date in 1886 to launch a nationwide call for an eight-hour
day. It also suggested how participating immigrants saw their economic
position as at the center of efforts for legal and political inclusion. As one
undocumented construction worker declared, in a manner reminiscent
of old laboring critiques of "wage slavery": "The only right we have is
to work hard and not demand anything." Thus the overwhelming senti-
ment during the day combined appeals for full amnesty and an end to
criminalizing undocumented status with a call for far greater economic
power. 24

In the period since, groups have continued to march against work-
place raids and mass deportations. But government crackdowns on un-
documented workers — in part generated by the 2006 protests — as well

as internal political disagreements among organizers, have taken their
toll. In particular, the classic debate over the appropriate trajectory of an
inclusive politics — whether to rationalize or to restructure existing ar-
rangements — has once more divided activists. Worried that rallies would
lead to more sweeps, many immigrants have stayed away, and recent
protests have been considerably smaller. 25 Yet, for all these setbacks,
immigrant organizing still presents a noteworthy opening for mass mobili-
zation, which through sustained political action could press eventually for
collective demands at work and in politics. Like both the producing classes
and civil rights activists, immigrant communities have the potential — as
yet untapped — to constitute themselves as a self-assertive collective agent.

For the foreseeable future this prospect remains highly improbable
due to a number of factors. To begin with, the very conditions of margin-
alization that bind many immigrants together — fear of deportation, low
wages, limited legal protections at the workplace, the lack of voting
rights — also dramatically compromise their practical power in American
life. And quite akin to the reaction of poor whites to dependent groups
during the settler period, large numbers of U.S. citizens, particularly from
the working class, view immigrant inclusion as a direct threat to internal
order and to their own economic standing. Only recently have unions in
the United States begun to embrace immigrant workers, and to date just
a fraction of American citizens are committed to meaningfully extending
rights to noncitizens.

And even if a mass political base were to emerge more fully, as with
historic efforts at greater inclusion, reform doubtlessly could be curtailed
to limit its transformative implications. The power and energy of such
mobilization may well be directed mostly to narrow legislative objectives
and thus may avoid directly confronting the old royal separation be-
tween domestic subject and foreign alien. In other words, added rights
for immigrants simply could mean checking the most egregious elements
of coercive authority over noncitizens — for instance, reducing the num-
ber of triggers that would cause detention and deportation or establish-
ing partial amnesty programs. As with the dominant trajectory of post-
New Deal reform, the result of these policies would be to diminish the
harshness of current practices. Such a softening certainly would provide
concrete improvements, but this approach would not alter governing
dependencies, let alone connect inclusion to a broader revitalization of
economic independence and popular self-rule. If anything, it likely would
go hand in hand with reproducing external relationships in which privi-

leged insiders continue to benefit from the subordinated work and prac-
tices of those at the edges of American power. Still, all these problems
confronting possible mobilization — from a limited vision of reform to the
denial of suffrage to overwhelming insider opposition — also confounded
previous groups and popular movements. As in the past, there is no reason
they cannot be surmounted.

In the process, today's efforts could provide a critical method for ar-
ticulating a richer and more expansive ideal of both social membership
and inclusion. Such an ideal carries with it Randolph Bourne's old desire
to create within the United States nothing less than the first "interna-
tional nation," a metropole bound to no peripheries of dependent sub-
jects or territories. Rather than an isolationist retreat, this goal would
mean thinking of the United States as an experiment in political open-
ness. Such an experiment does not view communities, inside or outside
American borders, instrumentally; instead, it imagines liberty as begin-
ning not with efforts at external pacification but with the domestic re-
versal of economic and political hierarchies. This transformation would
serve both to reorient America's international role and as a basis within
the country for assessing those workplace and governmental structures
that undermine self-rule for everyone — immigrant and native born
alike.

My focus in these final pages on black emancipation and immigrant
status derives from a basic insight. In many ways, the challenges of the
present are the same as those that faced earlier Americans — from Wil-
liam Manning to John Dewey and Walter Weyl. The promise of Ameri-
can freedom has long involved the possibility of expanding widely the
capacities and experiences of self-rule, what the ancient and modern re-
publican traditions often viewed as a privileged and elite domain. This
promise has meant democratizing knowledge and reshaping economic
and political institutions to express the full and free potential of all indi-
viduals, both insiders and outsiders. For its safekeeping, freedom as self-
rule has required the existence of actually mobilized groups — organized
and willing to stand as a government behind the government — to ensure
that democratic agency did not become substituted for the will of a select
few. Perhaps the most ironic fact about the present is that today this fun-
damentally American promise seems to have escaped the attention of
large segments of the country's actual citizens — and that one of the tan-
gible opportunties that remains for sustaining these political and eco-
nomic commitments lies with those that many assume to be unworthy

of full inclusion. Then again, this fact simply connects us to our own
complicated past, in which the revival of emancipatory ambitions has for
centuries been bound not to a collective reverence for founding fathers or
for governing frameworks but rather to the concerted activity of men
and women deemed unfit.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

1. See James Tyson and Michael McKee, "Volcker Says China's Rise Highlights
Relative U.S. Decline," Bloomberg, September 29, 2009, www.bloomberg.com
(accessed February 23, 2010); and Aaron Task, "Niall Ferguson: U.S. Empire in
Decline, on Collision Course with China," Yahoo Finance, October 20, 2009, finance
.yahoo.com (accessed February 23, 2010). In a recent article in Foreign Affairs,
historian Niall Ferguson further spells out hi ling that the combination
of growing deficits and an overstretched military have felled previous empires. Niall
Ferguson, "Complexity and Collapse: Empires on the Edge of Chaos," Foreign Affairs
(March/April 2010), www.foreignaffairs.com (accessed March 18, 2010).

2. Central Intelligence Agency, "The World Factbook 2009," www.cia.gov (ac-
cessed July 7, 2009).

3. Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, "SIPRI Yearbook 2009:
Appendix 5A. Military Expenditure Data, 1999-2008," www.sipri.org (accessed
July 7, 2009).

4. See Department of Defense, Office of the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense
(Installations and Environment), Base Structure Report, Fiscal Year 2009, DOD-22;
and Department of Defense, "Active Duty Military Personnel Strengths by Regional
Area and by Country," June 30, 2009, www.globalsecurity.org (accessed May 3,
2010).

5. J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (New
York: Fox, Duffield, 1904), 54.

6. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer (New York:
Doubleday, 1969), 50.

7. See Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of
American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1955).

8. Rogers M. Smith, "Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multiple
Traditions in America," American Political Science Review 87 (1993): 549-566
(quotation on 549).

9. See Mark Tushnet, "'Our Perfect Constitution' Revisited," in Terrorism, the
Laws of War, and the Constitution: Dehati nhatant Cases, ed. Peter

Berkowitz (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institute Press, 2005), 131-158 (quotation on
132). Tushnet takes the term from an earlier piece by Henry Monaghan titled "Our
Perfect Constitution," New York Law Review 56 (1981): 353-396, and is parti-
cularly concerned by how the assumption moves constitutional decision making
away from pop on and toward court-centric interpretation.

10. Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. His-
tory (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 6.

11. Ibid.

12. Ronald Weitzer, Tn let and Inter-
nal Security in Northern Ireland and Zimbabwe (Berkeley: University of Califor-
nia Press, 1990), 26.

13. Efforts by historians and social scientists to make comparative assessments
about settler institutions have often focused on how labor regimes influence politi-
cal arrangements. For instance, D. K. Fieldhouse in the 1960s developed a typol-
ogy to delineate various forms of settlerism, which he divides into three basic cat-
egories: mixed, plantation, and pure settlement. See D. K. Fieldhouse, The Colonial
Empires: A Comparative Survey of the Eighteenth Century (New York: Delacorte
Press, 1967), 11-12. George Fredrickson also employs this typology, which he
views as providing ideal types, and ties settler modes of racial exclusion and con-
trol to the metropole's economic goals and labor practices. See George M. Fred-
rickson, "Colonialism and Racism: The United States and South Africa in Com-
parative Perspective," in The Arrogance of Race: Hist ires on Slavery,
Racism, and Soi >wn, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988),
216-235, especially 220-221.

14. Caroline Elkins and Susan Pedersen, "Settler Colonialism: A Concept and
Its Uses," in Settler Colonialism in the Twentieth Century, ed. Caroline Elkins and
Susan Pedersen (New York: Routledge, 2005), 1-20 (quotation on 2). See also
James Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the
Anglo-world, 1783-1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), for a recent
account of how New World settler colonies spread English customs and lan-
guage across the globe, focusing particularly on how migration patterns and the
onset of industrialization combined to produce booming Anglo settler econo-
mies. Another new study, Lisa Ford, Settler Soverc: ion and Indig-
enous People in America and Australia, 1 788-1836 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2010), offers an excellent comparative assessment of how
settler-native relations operated in practice in both Georgia and New South
Wales.

15. Elkins and Pedersen, "Settler Colonialism," 2.

16. Ibid., 3.

17. See Patrick Wolfe, "Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native,"
Journal of Genocide Research 8 (2006): 387-409 (quotation on 388).

18. See generally Michael Mann, "The Dark Side of Democracy: The Modern
Tradition of Ethnic and Political Cleansing," New Left Review 235 (May/June
1999): 18-45 (quotation on 26). See also Michael Mann, The Dark Side of De-
mocracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (New York: Cambridge University Press,
2004).

19. For more on historical examples and the common traits of transplanted
settler communities, see, along with the Elkins and Pedersen volume, Nicholas
Canny and Anthony Padgen, eds., Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-
1800 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987); Daiva Stasiulis and Nira
Yuval-Davis, eds., Unset i of Gender, Race, Ethnic-
ity, and Class (Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications, 1995). See also a useful
new volume, Jack Greene, ed., Exclusionary Empii >erty Overseas,
1600-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), which assesses how
English ideas of liberty and the rule of law operated across the empire, placing
New World settler societies within the context of colonial practices in British India
and Africa.

20. See Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 1986).

21. For a fuller discussion of the similarities between American and Afrikaner
frontier mythology, see George M. Fredrickson, "The Frontier in South African
and American History," in The C< Ustory of Rac-
ism, Nationalis Movements (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1997), 37-46; Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson, eds., The Frontier in His-
tory: North America an rica Compared (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1981). For more generally on the similarities between American
and South African variants of settlerism, see George M. Fredrickson, White Su-
premacy: A Comparative Study in American and Sow try (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1981).

22. Seymour Martin Lipset, "American Exceptionalism — A Doul
Sword," in American Social and Pi r, ed. Andreas Hess (New
York: New York University Press, 2003), 39-44 (quotation on 40).

23. See Fredrickson, White Supremacy, 191-195.

24. By 1914, the Ulster Volunteer Force had smuggled into Northern Ireland
some 40,000 rifles in preparation for a civil war to maintain local control by En-
glish settlers. In fact, today many Ulster nationalists celebrate their own "indepen-
dence day" on September 28.

25. Elkins and Pederson, "Settler Colonialism," 4.

26. In capturing this point, Patrick Wolfe writes of the Australian example,
"The determination 'settler-colonial state' is Australian society's primary structural
characteristic rather than merely a statement about its origins. . . . Invasion is a struc-
ture not an event." Patrick Wolfe, Settler Co/ be Transformation of An-
thropology (London: Cassell, 1999), 163.

27. Fredrickson's work as a whole and White Supremacy in particular have
been hugely instructive in the development of my own arguments. However, at
times his approach to "herrenvolk democracy" too quickly rejects the emancipa-
tory features of the republican tradition, due to their political linkage with modes
of subordination. In my view, this linkage is not philosophically essential and the
great, as yet unfulfilled, project of American life has been to sustain the rich inter-
nal accounts while mak dly accessible.

28. See Michael Walzer, Interpretation and Social Criticism (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 1987), 33-66 (quotation on 38).

353

29. See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 1971).

1. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin Books, 1963), 55, 56.

2. Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York:
A. A. Knopf, 1992), 179.

3. In the early twentieth century, the "Imperial School" of historians, particu-
larly Charles Andrews, assessed the causes of the Revolution by looking at the
changing nature of the British Empire. Andrews held that imperial economic inter-
ests and London's failure to appreciate internal developments in American life were
the primary motivating factors. See especially Charles M. Andrews, The Colonial
Background of the American Revolution: Four Essays in American Colonial His-
tory (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1924). My own "imperial" reinter-
pretation does not dismiss the charge of British tyranny, as do Andrews and his
colleagues, but rather situates these shifts in British administration in the context
of settler ideology and institutions and attempts to make explicit precisely why a
reframed empire was experienced on the ground as tyrannical. For a more recent
work in this vein, tracing the British roots of American constitutional practice, see
Daniel Hulsebosch, Coi ire: New York and the Transformation of
Constitutionalism in the New World, 1664-1830 (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 2005). Hulsebosch uses the history of New York State to
explore how early Americans adapted British legal frameworks in order to facili-
tate territorial growth and continental mobility. Unlike Hulsebosch, I draw out how
these adaptations not only sustained accounts of con: ty but also pre-
supposed arguments about external dependence.

4. The Reasons for keeping Guadaloupe at a Peace, preferable to Canada ex-
plained in five letters from a Gentleman in Guadaloupe to his Friend in London
(London: M. Cooper, 1761), 3-79.

5. See Philip Lawson, "'The Irishman's Prize': Views of Canada from the British
Press, 1760-1774," in A Taste for Empire and Glory: Studies in British Overseas
Expansion, 1660-1800 (Brookfield, Vt.: Varorium, 1997), 575-596 (quotation on
581). Lawson also remarks that Edmund Burke's kinsman William Burke is often
ascribed actual authorship of the text, although without definitive proof (ibid.,
580nl5).

6. In defending the political necessity of conquest, Jack Sosin goes so far as to
describe Bedford as the "the mos lined and perhaps the most ludi-
crous of the politicians" participating in the peace negotiations. Jack M. Sosin,
Whitehall and the Wilderness: The Middle West in British Colonial Policy, 1 760-
1775 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961), 13. For more on the political
imperatives justifying greater expansion, see Philip Lawson, The Imperial Chal-
lenge: Quebec and Britain in the Age of the American uffalo: McGill-
Queen's University Press, 1989), 3-24.

7. Lawson, "'Irishman's Prize,' "581.

8. Reasons for

9. Ibid., 31, quoted in part in Lawson, "'Irishman's Prize,' " 582.

10. D. K. Fieldhouse describes the colonial landscape in 1715 in the following

The British colonies were young; the oldest had existed for barely a cen-
tury; and in 1715 they did not cover the eastern seaboard of North America
let alone their hinterlands. For the most part they were poor, lacking the
endowments of the richer Spanish colonies — precious metals and a large
sedentary indigenous labor force. Population growth depended on immi-
gration, free or slave, and its natural increase. In 1715 the total popula-
tion of the mainland colonies was only about 400,000. Their economic
development was held back by a shortage of capital. Their exports aver-
aged about a quarter of a million pounds annually in the eighteenth cen-
tury. There were only four significant towns — Boston, Philadelphia, New
York and Charleston.

See D. K. Fieldhouse, The Colonial Empires: A Comparative Survey of the Eigh-
teenth Century (New York: Delacorte Press, 1967), 57.

11. Ibid., 55.

12. Christopher L. Brown, "Empire without Slaves: British Concepts of Eman-
cipation in the Age of the American Revolution," Wi y Quarterly 56
(1999): 273-306 (quotation on 281).

13. Ibid., 282.

14. William Knox, The Present State ofth Ith Respect to
Its Trade, Pinances, etc., etc., Addressed to the King and Both Houses of Parlia-
ment (London: J. Almon, 1768), 87, also quoted in Brown, "Empire without
Slaves," 282.

15. Similar arguments, first developed by David Beers Quinn in the 1940s, have
become very influential in the study of Irish history between the sixteenth and
eighteenth centuries. Along with David Beers Quinn, The Elizabethans and the
Irish (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1966), 106-122, see generally Nicho-
las Canny, Kingdom and Colony: Ireland in the Atlantic World, 1560-1800 (Balti-
more: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988); Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland
British, 1580-1650 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Nicholas Canny,
"The Ideology of English Colonization: From Ireland to America," William and
Mary Quarterly 30 (1973): 575-598.

16. Canny, Kingdom and Colony, 7. See also Nicholas Canny, "The Irish Back-
ground to Penn's Experiment," in The Wori nm, ed. Richard S. Dunn
and Mary Maples Dunn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986),
139-156.

17. See Canny, "The Ideology of English Colonization," 579-580.

18. Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: In. m, ami the
Cant of Conquest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 4.

19. Quoted in Canny, "The Ideology of English Colonization," 585.

20. See George M. Fr< ite Supremacy: A Comparative Study in
American and South African History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981),
7-21 (especially 7-9, 18-19).

21. Quoted in Canny, "The Ideology of English Colonization," 588.

22. Indicating the historical roots of the English depiction of the Irish as sav-
ages, Jennings comments that when Richard II in 1385 referred to the "Wild Irish,"
"The words actually written by Richard were Hrrois savages, nos enemis' — literally
'savage Irish, our enemies.' " Jennings, Invasion of America, 7.

23. Quoted in Canny, "The Ideology of English Colonization," 581.

24. Fredrickson, White Supremacy, 16.

25. Ibid., 13.

26. "The First Charter of Virginia, April 10, 1606," in Henings Statutes at
Large, vol. 1, ed. William Waller Hening (New York: R. & W. & G. Bartow, 1823),
57-66 (quotations on 57-58, 58).

27. See Robert A. Williams Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought:
Discourses of Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 201.

28. Calvin's Case, 77 Eng. Rep. 377, 398 (1608).

29. See Daniel Hulsebosch, "The Ancient Constitution and the Expanding Brit-
ish Empire: Sir Edward Coke's British Jurisprudence," Law and History Review 21
(2003): 439-482, especially 470.

30. Calvin's Case, 397.

31. Ibid., 398.

32. See generally Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Treedom:
The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975), 80-81.

33. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. C. B. MacPherson (India-
napolis: Hackett Publishing, 1980).

34. On Locke's connections to American colonization, see David Armitage,
"John Locke, Carolina, and the Two Treatises of Government," Political Theory
32 (2004): 602-627, especially 603. For more on the "colonial" interpretation and
the status of indigenous rights in Lockean thought, see also James Tully's essential
book, An Approach to Political Philosophy: Locke in Contexts (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1993), especially 137-176.

35. Locke, Second Treatise, 24, 21, 19.

36. See ibid., 21, 28; and Armitage, "John Locke," quotations on 618, 617.

37. Locke, Second Treatise, 23-24.

38. See generally Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and
Power on the Frontier (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2005), 10-48, especially 39-43 (quotation on 21).

39. See James Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608-1870
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 18.

40. Calvin's Case, 382.

41. In her account of American citizenship, Judith Shklar famously argues that
along with the right to work, the right to vote has been the defining social right in
the United States and the central basis for public standing and respect. See gener-
ally Judith Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991).

42. For more on how land was held through a "pyramid of proprietorship" that
connected the king to aristocrats and lowly tenants, see Hulsebosch, "Ancient Con-
stitution," 453.

43. Kettner, American Citizenship, 30-31. For Coke, such restrictions were nec-
essary to protect the king's control over the realm and to ensure that foreign
subjects — and with them a foreign sovereign — did not claim the wealth and power
from the territory. He argued that alien landholding was like a "Trojan horse," al-
lowing foreigners to "fortify themselves in the heart of the realm, and be ready to
set fire on the commonwealth." Calvin's Case, 399.

44. See Kettner, American Citizenship, 23.

45. Hulsebosch, "Ancient Constitution," 446.

46. Calvin's Case, 401.

47. See Craw v. Ramsey, Vaughn 274 (1670), reprinted as 174 Eng. Rep. 1072
(1823), where the Court of Common Pleas ruled that naturalization in Ireland did
not apply to England.

48. See generally David T. Konig, "Colonizing and the Common Law in Ireland
and Virginia, 1569-1634," in The an History: So-
ciety, Authority, and Ideology, ed. James Henretta, Michael Kammen, and Stanley
Katz (New York: Knopf, 1991), 70-92.

49. Ibid., 83-84.

50. Morgan, Ai, ■ in freedom, 80.

51. Ibid.

52. See Hulsebosch, "Ancient Constitution," 449.

53. On gentry views of the propertyless, see Morga avery, Ameri-
can Freedom, 320-326 (quotation on 322).

54. Ibid., 322.

55. Quoted in ibid., 322-323.

56. See Christopher Hill, The Century of Revolution, 1603-1714 (New York:
Norton, 1980), 17-21.

57. In response to objections that masters would abuse and mistreat their
slaves, Fletcher wrote: "that the most brutal man will not use his beast ill only out
of a humour; and that if such Inconveniences do sometimes fall out, it proceeds,
for the most part, from the perverseness of the Servant." Quoted in Morgan,
American Slavery, American Freedom, 325.

58. Hill, Century of Revolution, 20.

59. Morgan, America Slavery, American Freedom, 326.

60. Fredrickson, White Supremacy, 60, and see ibid., 59-63, for a discussion of
the role of American settlement in helping England address social problems of
poverty and indigence.

61. As an example of such child kidnapping, Hill writes, "In 1618 a hundred
'young boys and girls that lay starving in the streets' of London were shipped off
to Virginia." Hill, Century of Revolution, 20.

62. Fredrickson, White Supremacy, 60.

63. For more on the role of the landless poor in the rise of African slavery,
see Fredrickson, White Supremacy, 62-63; and see also T. H. Breen, "A Chang-
ing Labor Force and Race Relations in Virginia, 1660-1710," Journal of Social

357

History 7 (1973): 3-25; Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom,
215-270.

64. See David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1966), 115-121.

65. Locke, Second Treatise, 17. As for Locke's personal view, his support for
the institution of slavery can be gleaned from the fact that slavery was included
in the Fundanu ions of Carolina and that he was a private investor in
the Royal African Company. See Davis, Problem of Slavery, 118.

66. See George M. Fredrickson, "The Social Origins of American Racism," in
The Arrogance of Race: Historical Perspectives on Slavery, Racism, and Social Ine-
quality (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1988), 189-205 (quota-
tion on 197).

67. See generally Robert C. Twombly and Robert H. Moore, "Black Puritans:
The Negro in Seventeenth-Century Massac am and Mary Quarterly
24 (1967): 224-242.

68. Fredrickson, "Social Origins," 198.

69. For more discussion of the Maryland miscegenation law, see ibid., 196.

70. Calvin's Case, 398.

71. Hulsebosch, "Ancient Constitution," 466.

72. Ibid. For a more in-depth discussion, see generally Wesley F. Craven, The
Dissolution of the Virginia Company: The Failure of a Colonial Experiment (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1932), 47-80 (especially 55-64, 68-71).

73. See Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, 338-362.

74. See Fredrickson, "Social Origins," 198.

75. As Fredrickson notes, "As the slave population grew rapidly after 1700,
such fears became more intense and led not only to further efforts to limit and con-
trol the free black population but also to the elaboration of the severe slave code
that served to distinguish North American slavery from its Latin American coun-
terpart." Ibid., 199.

76. See Fieldhouse, Colonial Empires, 59-63.

77. Hulsebosch, "Ancient Constitution," 471. See also Anthony Pagden, Fords
of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France (New Haven,
Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 91-92, for European, particularly Spanish,
skepticism of the usefulness of the principle of res nullius as applied to New World
conquests.

78. See Quentin Skinner, Fiberty before Fiberalism (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1998).

79. In fact, Roman comedies are replete with situations that reverse the master-
slave relationship, in which the slave is not only more skilled and knowledgeable
than the master but faces no actual coercion. "The audacious figure of Tranio in
Plautus's Mostellaria offers perhaps the most memorable illustration of the theme.
Due to the fact that his master is benevolent and usually absent, Tranio is able to
boast that he has never suffered any direct oppression." Ibid., 40.

80. Ibid., 41.

81. Algernon Sydney, Discourses Concerning Government, ed. Thomas G.
West (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1996), 441, quoted in part in Philip Pettit,

358

Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 1997), 34; and Locke, Second Treatise, 50.

82. See Pettit, Republicanism, 17-50, for his very helpful contrast between re-
publican and liberal freedom.

83. Sydney, Discourses, 17, also quoted in Pettit, Republicanism, 33.

84. James Harrington, The Con ; Oceana and a System of Poli-
tics, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 269, also
quoted in Pettit, Republicanism, 32.

85. See Harrington, Commonwealth of Oceana, 57; and generally J. G. A. Po-

id the Atlantic
Republican Tradition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), 412, 386-
391, on Harrington's concerns about militarism and the experience of the Thirty
Years War.

86. Quoted in Pettit, Republicanism, 48.

87. In 1647, during the Putney Debates of the English Civil War, Oliver Crom-
well and his son-in-law Henry Ireton made precisely this point in arguments with
more radical officers calling for suffrage to be extended to all Anglo males as a
matter of birthright. In response, Ireton declared that since only property holders
had "a permanent fixed interest in the kingdom," they alone could be counted on
to use political voice wisely. See "The Putney Debates of the General Council of the
Army (October 29, 1647)," in The Sources and Debates in English History, 1485-
1 714, ed. Newton Key and Robert Bucholz (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), 188-
191 (quotation on 189).

88. See Michael Sandel, Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Pub-
lic Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,
1996), 169.

89. These were the Puritans from East Anglia to Massachusetts from 1629 to
1640, the Anglican Royalist elite and the indentured servants from southern En-
gland to Virginia from 1642 to 1675, and the Quakers from the North Midlands
of England and Wales to the Delaware Valley from 1675 to 1725. See generally
David Hackett Fischer, Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1989).

90. As Fischer describes, the East Anglian Puritans fled Charles I and what Whig
historians called "the eleven years of tyranny," the Anglican cavaliers of southern
England sought to escape Cromwell's Puritan rule, and the dissenting Quakers of
the North Midlands fled persecution at the hands of the Anglican clergy. See ibid.,
16,212,423.

91. John Winthrop, "A Model of Christian Charity," in Puritan Political Ideas,
1558-1794, ed. Edmund Morgan (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2003), 75-93
(quotation on 93).

92. See Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1978), 7-8, 8-9.

93. See Samuel Danforth, "Brief Recognition of New England's Errand into the
Wilderness," in The Wall and the Garden ssachusetts Election Ser-
mons, ed. A. William Plumstead (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1968), 53-77 (quotations on 59, 72).

94. Lawson, Imperial Challenge, 43.

95. Ibid., 43-44.

96. Quoted in Robert J. Dinkin, Voting in Provincial America: A Study of Elec-
tions in the Thirteen Colonies, 1689-1776 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press,
1977), 32.

97. During a town meeting in 1772, Boston's freeholders and inhabitants ex-
plained their reasons for withholding religious toleration from Catholics. In the
minds of Protestant settlers, the lack of independent religious conscience meant
that Catholics were a permanent threat to free political institutions. The inhabit-
ants declared that "The Roman Catholics or Papists are excluded, by reason of
such doctrines as these: That Princes excommunicated may be deposed, and those
they call hereticks may be destroyed without mercy; besides their recognizing the
Pope in so absolute a manner, in subversion of Government . . . leading directly to
the worst anarchy and confusion, civil discord, war and bloodshed." Quoted in
Charles H. Metzger, The Quebec Act: A Primary Cause of the American Revolu-
tion (New York: United States Catholic Historical Society, 1936), 131.

98. See generally Fischer, Albion's Seed, 810-816.

99. Kettner, American Citizens

100. Quoted in ibid., 86.

101. John Locke, "The Fundamental Constitutions of Carolina (1669)," in Po-
litical Writings, ed. David Wootton (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2003), 210-
232 (quotation on 231-232).

102. For practices in South Carolina and Pennsylvania, see Jamin Raskin, "Le-
gal Aliens, Local Citizens: The Historical, Constitutional and Theoretical Meaning
of Alien Suffrage," University of Pennsylvania Law Review 141 (1993): 1391-
1470 (quotations on 1399, 1400); and for the Georgia law, see Kettner, American

hip, 102.

103. Kettner, American Citizenship, 74-75.

104. In a real expression of toleration Jewish emigrants also received an ex-
emption. Ibid., 74-76. The limited size of the Jewish population in the colonies
certainly facilitated this move. Still, despite the 1740 exemption, one should note
that throughout the period and well into the nineteenth century Jews, as non-
Christians, faced various legal restrictions, including on holding public office and
on voting. See generally Howard M. Sachar, A History of the Jews in America (New
York: Knopf, 1992), 9-37 (especially 17-20, 27-28).

105. Rogers Smith, Civil Ideals: > in U.S. His-
tory (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 57.

106. See generally Benjamin Franklin, "The Interest of Great Britain Consid-
ered with Regard to Her Colonies and the Acquisitions of Canada and Guadal-
oupe," in Papers of Benjamin Pranklin, vol. 9, ed. Leonard W. Labaree (New Ha-
ven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1966), 51-100.

107. Ibid., 92.

108. Quotations in Nathan O. Hatch, The Sacred Cause of Liberty: Republican
Thought and ii

Yale University Press, 1977), 41, 42.

109. Quoted in Sosin, Whitehall and the Wilderness, 51.

110. "The Royal Proclamation, October 7, 1763," in Documents of Am
History, ed. Henry Steele Commager and Milton Cantor, 10th ed., vol. 1 (Engle-
wood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1988), 47-50 (quotations on 48-49, 49).

111. Ibid., 49.

112. Stuart Banner (How the Indians Lost Their Land, 35) captures this re-
markable turn in metropolitan and settler attitudes after the French and Indian
War by describing the changed dynamic between the two as "an odd reversal":

At the start of the colonial period, the imperial government had (in colonial
charters) assumed that the Indians' land could simply be taken, but the actual
colonists found themselves often purchasing it. By the end of the colonial pe-
riod, the imperial government was insisting that Indian land — even land upon
which no Indians were physically present — had to be purchased. But the colo-
nists now were much more powerful relative to the Indians than their prede-
cessors had been a century and a half before, and many saw things differently.
Much of the Indians' uncultivated land was being illegally appropriated —
"illegally" not just under the Indians' law but under the colonizers' law as well.

However, Banner misses how these shifting approaches were due to more than
relative power relationships or military capacities. Settlers had long presumed that
extending Anglo land ownership was a foundational commitment of empire, with
the means — conquest or purchase — considered largely instrumental to the moral
end of economic independence. But now the need for imperial stability indicated
that colonial administrators were increasingly disregarding such settler presump-
tions and transforming indigenous customs into permanent rights guaranteed by
British authority.

113. See Fischer, Albion's Seed, 608-612.

114. Ibid., 742-743.

115. Quoted in Williams, American Indian, 251.

116. See generally ibid., 256-265; and Sosin, Whitehall and the Wilderness,
165-210.

117. On the idea of the "Norman Yoke" and its revival in the years preceding
colonial revolt, see generally Pocock, Mad lent, 506-552; and Wil-
liams, American Indian, 251-255.

118. Williams, American Indian, 253.

119. James Otis, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (Bos-
ton: Edes and Gill, 1764), 31, also quoted in Williams, American Indian, 252.

120. Otis, Rights of the British Colonies, 24.

121. Campbell v. Hall, 1 Cowper 204, 205-212 (1774).

122. Ibid., 208.

123. Ibid., 209.

124. See Williams, American Indian, 301.

125. Regarding the idea of indirect rule and its entrenchment in late nineteenth-
century imperial thought and practice, see generally Karuna Mantena, Alibis of
Empire: Henry Maine and the Ends of Liberal Imperialism (Princeton, N.J.:

ii University Press, 2010). See also Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Sub-
ject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1996), 62-108.

126. Philip Lawson, "Sapped by Corruption: British Governance of Quebec
and the Breakdown of Anglo-American Relations on the Eve of Revolution," in A
Taste for Empire and Glory: Studies in British Overseas Expansion, 1660-1800
(Brookfield, Vt.: Varorium, 1997), 301-323 (quotation on 307). Lawson's work,
especially in The Imperii tire and Glory, provides
one of the few recent efforts to illustrate the links between settler discontent and
policies in Quebec.

127. See Quebec Act, 1774, 14 Geo. Ill, c. 83 (England).

128. See Lawson, "'Irishman's Prize,'" 588.

129. Alexander Wedderburn, "Report of the Solicitor General Alexander Wed-
derburn, December 6, 1772," in Documents Relating to the Constitutional History
of Canada, 1759-1791, ed. Adam Shortt and Arthur G. Doughty (Ottawa: S. E.
Dawson, 1907), 296-305 (quotation on 298), also quoted in Lawson, "Sapped by
Corruption," 310.

130. See William Knox, The Justice and Policy of the Late Act of Parliament,
for Making m< ovision for the Government of the Province of Que-
bec, Asserted and Proved; and the Condu Respecting that
Province, Stated and Vindicated (London: J. Wilkie: 1774), 29, 23; and Wedder-
burn, "Report of the Solicitor General," 297.

131. See Lav >e, 132-136.

132. See generally Metzger, Quebec Act, for an excellent catalogue of the ex-
tent and intensity of anti-Catholic sentiment in the colonies before and after the
Quebec Act.

133. John Adams, "A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law," in The
Works of John Adams, vol. 3, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston: Charles C. Little
and James Brown, 1851), 447-464 (quotation on 450).

134. Quoted in Lawson, "Sapped by Corruption," 314.

135. Quoted in ibid.

136. Quoted in Metzger, Quebec Act, 59nll0.

137. William Gordon, "A Discourse Preached December 15, 1774," in The
Pulpit of the American Revolution (Boston: D. Lothrop, 1876), 187-226 (quota-
tions on 201, 215-216); and Ezra Stiles, "Letter to Richard Price, April 10, 1775,"
in Letters to and from Richard Price, D.D., F.R.S. 1 767-1 790 (Cambridge, Mass.:
John Wilson and Son, University Press, 1903), 22-24 (quotations on 23), quoted in
part in Lawson, "Sapped by Corruption," 316.

138. This is best illustrated by the vehemence of anti-Catholic sentiment on
Pope Day or Guy Fawkes Day in 1774, an annual holiday held on November 5 to
commemorate the 1605 Gunpowder Plot against the king. In England, effigies of
the plot's leader were carried through the streets in processions and then ritually
burned. In New England and elsewhere in the colonies, effigies of the pope along-
side the devil usually replaced those of Guy Fawkes. As Peter Shaw writes, "These
substitutions reflected an American religious bias: a plot against the king almost

:ally suggested a popish conspiracy, and hence the devil." Peter Shaw,

362

n Patriots and the Rituals of Revol, dge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-

versity Press, 1981), 15-16. Over time the event lapsed into a general opportunity
for games and pageantry or was discontinued altogether. However, the prospect of
Catholic toleration led to a remarkable revival of the tradition, with Shaw com-
menting that "In America the Quebec Act of 1774 . . . led to far greater actions
in the streets than any political event for the rest of the decade, with the possible
exception of the Declaration of Independence" (ibid., 68). As Charles Metzger
notes, even in places such as Charleston, South Carolina, where the practice had
been suspended, "an Association of Protestant School Boys' anticipated the event
by conducting a house to house canvas for tea 'toward making a Bonfire on the
memorable 5th day of November when the old custom is intended to be revived of
exhibiting a piece of pageantry, to show their abhorrence of Pope, Pretender, etc"
(Metzger, Quebec Act, 61).

139. "Suffolk County Resolutions, September 1774," in journals of the Conti-
nental Congress 1774-1789, vol. 1, ed. Worthington C. Ford et al. (Washington,
D.C.: Library of Congress, 1904), 35.

140. See "Address to the People of Great Britain, October 1774," in Journals of
the Continental Congress 1774-1789, vol. 1, ed. Worthington C. Ford et al. (Wash-
ington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1904), 88, 87-88.

141. Brown, "Empire without Slaves," 295-296.

142. See Smith v. Brown and Cooper, 91 Eng. Rep. 556, 556 (1701); and Pearne
v. Lisle, 27 Eng. Rep. 47, 47 (1749).

143. William Knox, Three Tracts respecting the Conversion and Instruction of
the Free Indians, and Negro slaves in the Colonies; Addressed to the Venerable
Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in the Foreign Parts (London: J. Debrett,
1768), 31, 30. Christopher Brown describes how those administrative plans that
did exist for gradual emancipation all necessarily assumed the importance of re-
ducing settler power and enhancing colonial centralization. "The custom of colo-
nial autonomy, then, presented a formidable block to the prospects for emancipa-
tion, as it did more generally to the exercise of imperial authority. A metropolitan
attempt to seize and manage an institution I ministered exclusively by
the colonial legislatures threatened, by necessity, profound constitutional change"
(Brown, "Empire without Slaves," 296).

144. Somerset v. Stewart, 98 Eng. Rep. 498 (1772).

145. This appears to be the correct spelling for Steuart's name, although the
English Reports employ a different variation.

146. For more on the specifics of this case and the legal questions in dispute,
see generally David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolu-
tion, 1770-1823 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975), 469-522; Simon
Schama, Rough Crossing: Britain, the Slaves, and the American Revolution (New
York: Ecco, 2006), 44-55; and F. O. Shyllon, Black Slaves in Britain (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1974), 77-140.

147. Somerset v. Stewart, 510.

148. See George Van Cleve, "'Somerset's Case and Its Antecedents in Impe-
rial Perspective," Taw and History Review 24 (2006): 601-645 (quotation on
635).

36.;

149. As Simon Schama notes, Mansfield had gone out of his way to avoid a
simple declaration that slavery was illegal in England, and "what he had said was
that the power of a master to transport his slave against his will, out of England
and to a place where he might be sold, had never been known or recognized under
Common Law" (Schama, Rough Crossing, 55).

150. Somerset v. Stewart, 510.

151. See generally Van Cleve, ''''Somerset's Case."

152. Quoted in Shyllon, Black Slaves, 165. At the Constitutional Convention,
James Madison argued that Mansfield's opinion necessitated the U.S. Constitu-
tion's Fugitive Slave Clause, in order to ensure that complete slaveholding rights
were respected throughout the country. The clause later became the legal basis for
the Fugitive Slave Acts of 1793 and 1850. The clause reads, "No person held to
Service or Labour in one State, under the Laws thereof, escaping into another,
shall, in Consequence of any Law or Regulation therein, be discharged from such
Service or Labour, but shall be delivered up on Claim of the Party to whom such
Service or Labour may be due." U.S. Constitution, art. TV, sect. 2, cl. 3.

153. Somerset v. Stewart, 501, 509.

154. William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, vol. 1, 3rd
ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1768), 107.

155. The following discussion draws especially from George Van Cleve's ac-
count of how Anglo settlers reacted to thi ision. For instance, Van
Cleve notes that while southern slaveholders were quite reticent to discuss the case
publicly, this was not due to a lack of interest. Slaveholders worried that public
conversation might stoke slave flight and especially violent insurrections. See George
W. Van Cleve, "A Slaveholders' Union: The Law and Politics of American Slavery,
1770-1821" (PhD diss., University of Virginia, 2008), 49-66. The dissertation is
forthcoming as A Slaveholders' Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the
Early Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

156. See Patricia Bradley, "Slavery in Colonial Newspapers: The Somerset
Case," Journalism History 12 (1985): 1-7. Bradley argues that newspapers tended
to frame their coverage around spe hjectives. The "Tory" press — those
papers that were more supportive of metropolitan officials and that would eventu-
ally become loyalists — generally provided extensive coverage of the case as a way
to emphasize English liberty and the justice of the British courts. By contrast, the
"Patriot" press presented shorter descriptions that employed misinformation to
play on the racial concerns of Anglo settlers. For instance, "Patriot" newspapers
attempted to raise settler worries about the future of slaveholding in the colonies
by glossing over the limited nature of Mansfield's opinion and by suggesting that
he had simply emancipated all slaves in England. As one commonly reprinted
newspaper report declared, "A correspondent observes, that as blacks are now free
in this country [England], Gentlemen will not be so fond of bringing them here as
they used to be." Quoted in Patrii and the Ameri-
can Revolution (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998), 74.

157. Quoted in Davis, Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 387.

158. Boston News-Letter, July 23, 1772, quoted in part in Van Cleve, "Slave-
holders' Union," 56.

364

159. Quoted in Van Cleve, "Slaveholders' Union," 56.

160. Quoted in Paul Finkelman, An Imperfect Union: Slavery, federalism, and
Comity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981), 39.

161. See Van Cleve, "Slaveholders' Union," 53.

162. See Thea K. Hunter, "Publishing Freedom, Winning Arguments: Somerset,
Natural Rights and Massachusetts Freedom Cases, 1772-1836" (PhD diss., Co-
lumbia University, 2005), 129-133.

163. Woody Holton, forced Fott ;, Debtors, Slaves, and the Mak-
ing of the American Revolution in cl Hill: University of North Caro-
lina Press, 1999), 68.

164. Virginian views about the slave trade underscored internal class tensions.
Although the landed gentry by and large had stopped buying foreign slaves and
saw the long-term interests of the colony as moving away from slave labor
alone, it was primarily small and "up-and-coming growers" in the southern
Piedmont region that supported and sustained the trade. Ibid., 68-73 (quota-
tions on 68, 70).

165. Quoted in ibid., 69.

166. James Madison, "Letter to William Bradford, Jr., November 27, 1774," in
Papers of James Madison, vol. 1, ed. William T. Hutchinson and William M. E.
Rachal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962-1983), 129-130, discussed in
Van Cleve, "Slaveholders' Union," 53-54.

167. Quoted in Van Cleve, "Slaveholders' Union," 54.

168. Quoted in Holton, Forced Founders, 140.

169. Thomas Jefferson, "A Summary View of the Rights of British America," in
The Essential Jefferson, ed. Jean Yarbrough (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing,
2006), 3-17 (quotation on 4).

170. Richard Price, "Two Tracts (1778)," in Political Writings, ed. D. O.
Thomas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 14-75 (quotation on 30).

171. Edmund Burke, "Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies (March 22,
1775)," in Speeches and Letters on American Affairs (New York: E. P. Dutton,
1908), 76-141 (quotations on 94).

172. According to Bernard Bailyn's seminal account, settler fears "that corrup-
tion was ripening in the home country, sapping the foundations of that most fa-
mous citadel of liberty" motivated the drive for independence and the turn to re-
publicanism. Bernard Ba rigins of the American Revolution
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967), 87; see also
Pocock, Machiai /, 506-552.

173. See E. P. Thompson, The Making of the Ei. Class (New
York: Vintage Books, 1966), 356-361.

174. See Mamdani, Citizen and Subject, 37-61.

175. Quoted in Pettit, Republicanism, 47.

176. See Pettit, Republicanism, 45-50.

177. Knight v. Wedderburn, 20 How. St. Tr. 1 (1778). For an excellent discus-
sion of the case, see Davis, Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 489-501.

178. Quotations in Knight v. Wedderburn, 8, 8-9; and Davis, Slavery in the
Age of Revolution, 492.

365

179. Pocock, Moment, 510.

180. Ibid.

181. Quoted in James G. Wilson, The Im Sural History
of American Constitutionalism from the Colonial Era to the Beginning of the
Twentieth Century (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2002), 38.

182. This remarkably conciliatory address was written concurrently with oth-
ers condemning Catholic toleration, such as the Address to the People of Great
Britain. This disparity is best understood as an effort by the Congress to convince
Britain's Canadian subjects to join the rebellion. Of course, when French Canadian
support failed to materialize (not unsurprisingly given the virulence of anti-Catholic
sentiment in the thirteen colonies), American settlers saw fit to compel alliance by
force.

183. See Hatch, Sacred Cause, 55-96 (quotation on 90); see also Ernest Lee
Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of Ai nial Role (Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 1968), 1-25.

184. Adams, "Dissertation," 451.

185. The Declaration of Independence (U.S. 1776), para. 29.

2. CITIZENS AND SUBJECTS IN POSTCOLONIAL AMERICA

1. James A. M

its of American Government (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 1.

2. See Thomas P. Slaughter, The Hague to the
American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 48; and David
Szatmary, Shays' Rebel i ing of an Agrarian Insurrection (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 19-36.

3. Quoted in Szatmary, Shays' Rebellion, 33-34, 57.

4. See Slaughter, Whiskey Rebellion, 62-65 (quotation on 131).

5. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison, The Federalist Papers,
ed. Isaac Kramnick (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), no. 79, 443 (Hamilton).

6. See generally Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, with Geneva
Manuscript and Political Economy, ed. Roger Masters (New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1978).

7. Johnson v. MTntosh, 21 U.S. (8 Wheat.) 543 (1823).

8. Ibid., 587, 574.

9. Ibid., 573, 588, 585.

10. Ibid., 573, 588, 591, 590.

11. Ibid., 591.

12. Joseph Story, Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, vol. 1,
ed. Melville Madison Bigelow (Boston: Little, Brown, 1891), 106, also quoted in

ght: Discourses
of Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 316.

13. See Arnold Leibowitz, Defining Status: A Comprehensive Analysis of
United States Territorial Relations (Boston: Nijhoff, 1989), 6-8.

14. For instance, David Hendrickson, in his recent history of American interna-
tional relations, argues that three systems of political organization, union, nation,

and empire, have competed in the collective imagination for ideological and insti-
tutional dominance. He asserts that while some early political figures no doubt
made imperial arguments, the antebellum republic was not an empire but rather
was premised on a commitment to union — the desire to instantiate a lasting and
peaceable federative system among the distinct states. As such, isolated imperial
practices stood in contrast to a largely nonimperial constitutional project. See David
Hendrickson, Union, Nation, or Empire: The American Debate over International
Relations, 1789-1941 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009). Similarly,
Gary Lawson and Guy Seidman, in their careful and instructive account of the
constitutional structure for territorial governance, also conclude that "the Consti-
tution is not hospitable" to empire, because its founders always intended territories
"to become equal parts of the larger American polity." Gary Lawson and Guy Seid-
man, The Com pansion and American Legal His-
tory (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004), 202.

15. Peter Onuf, Jefferson's Empire: The Language of American Nationhood
(Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000), 39.

16. Quoted in Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, and Margaret Jacob, Telling the
Truth about History (New York: Norton, 1994), 114.

17. On Hamilton's views of the Purchase, see ibid., 109.

18. See Robert E. May, The Southern Dream of a Caribbean Empire, 1854-
1861 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989), 21. May argues in his seminal
text that Northern efforts to block the expansion of slavery did much to transform
Southern imperial interests into sectional ones and thus to create an environment
for war.

19. Ibid., 35.

20. For more on the process of Louisiana's territorial acquisition, see Sarah
Cleveland's valuable discussion in "Powers Inherent in Sovereignty: Indians, Aliens,
Territories, and the Nineteenth Century Origins of Plenary Power over Foreign
Affairs," Texas Law Review 81 (2003): 1-284. There Cleveland describes how
Jefferson did have legal qualms about the constitutionality of purchasing Euro-
pean territory beyond Britain's historic possessions. But few if any other politicians
shared these concerns. Virtually all saw expansion and conquest as inherent rights
of sovereignty, constitutionalized by both war and treaty powers and unimpeded
by European zones of discovery. Ultimately, even Jefferson ignored his worries,
motivated by the importance of new settler land for economic independence as
well as by a desire for quick ratification in case Napoleon changed his mind.

21. Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 U.S. (Mem.) 1 (1831); and Worcester v.
Georgia, 31 U.S. (Mem.) 515 (1832).

22. Cleveland, "Powers Inherent in Sovereignty," 35. Similarly, Lisa Ford in her
recent comparison of settler-native relations in Georgia and New South Wales con-
cludes that "The Supreme Court equivocated in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia and
Worcester v. Georgia." Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous
People in America and Australia, 1788-1836 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2010), 183.

23. See Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost Their Land: Law and Power on
ntier (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 221-223.

24. Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 17, 17-18.

25. Worcester v. Georgia, 559.

26. See again Mahmood Mamdani, Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa
and the Legacy of Late Colonialism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press,
1996), 37-61.

27. See William Gerald McLoughlin, After the Trail of Tears: The Cherokees'
Struggle for Sovereignty, 1839-1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1993), 7.

28. Thomas Jefferson famously coined the phrase to describe the intertwined
growth of American territory and its internal institutions. In an 1809 letter to James
Madison he wrote, "we should have such an empire for liberty as she has never
surveyed since the creation . . . [because] no constitution was ever before so well
calculated as ours for extensive empire and self government." Quoted in Gordon S.
Wood's comprehensive new history of the period, Empire of Liberty: A History of
the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 376.
In keeping with The Radicalism of the American Rei I's account em-
phasizes the egalitarianism of post-Revolutionary America, captured by Jefferson's
term. As with the earlier book, however, his focus on the rise of representative insti-
tutions and the decline of aristocratic deference fails to appreciate the fundamental
duality of settler society and, therefore, solely reproduces the internal dimensions of
the early republic.

29. See generally Hiroshi Motomura's essential account of the analytical
shifts from the nineteenth century through today in the relationship between
immigration and citizenship, Americans in Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigra-
tion and Citizenship in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press,
2006).

30. See James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1 608-
1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 246; and Moto-
mura, Americans in Waiting, 71, 9.

31. For an account of the use of property law to induce white settlement, see
Kerry Abrams, "The Hidden Dimension of Nineteenth-Century Immigration
Law," Vanderbilt Law Review 62 (2009): 1353-1418 (especially 1403-1414).
Abrams powerfully demonstrates how property, marriage, and voting laws in
frontier territories were employed to construct the right ethnic demographic.
For example, alongside passing anti-miscegenation statutes, territorial govern-
ments after the Civil War began the steady process of extended voting rights to
white women. Such practices jointly aimed at inducing European female migra-
tion and at preventing racial mixing — the latter a fundamental threat to settler
identity.

32. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democ-
racy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 32.

33. Jamin Raskin, "Legal Aliens, Local Citizens: The Historical, Constitutional
and Theoretical Meaning of Alien Suffrage," University of Pennsylvania Law Re-
view 141 (1993): 1391-1470.

34. Spragins v. Houghton, 3 111. (2 Scam.) 377, 408 (1840), quoted in Keyssar,
Right to Vote, 33.

35. Keyssar, Right to Vote, 33.

36. See generally Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color:
European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Uni-
versity Press, 1998), 39-90 (immigration numbers quoted on 43).

37. For a comprehensive assessment of nineteenth-century federal and state im-
migration laws, see Gerald Neuman, "The Lost Century of American Immigration
Law (1776-1875)," Columbia Law Review 93 (1993): 1833-1901, especially at
1846-1865; and generally Gerald Neuman, Strangers to the Constitution: Immi-
grants, Borders, and Fundamental Law (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1996), 19-94. On the issue of the lack of federal deportations, see Roger
Daniels, Not Like Us: Immigrants and Minorities in America, 1890-1924 (Chicago:
Ivan R. Dee, 1997), 17. In fact, the only federal deportation statute during the pe-
riod was 1798's Alien Enemies Act, passed as part of the Alien and Sedition Acts,
which excluded entry by political radicals and provided for their removal. How-
ever, no individuals were actually formally deported. See also Daniel Kanstroom,
Deportation N ts in American History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2007), 60-63.

38. Kanstroom, Deportation Nation, 77-90.

39. Neuman, "Lost Century," 1868.

40. Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: Norton, 1998),
76-77.

41. Roger Daniels, Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnic-
ity in American Life (New York: HarperCollins, 1990), 308.

42. Richard Griswold del Castillo, The Treaty of ( Ldgo: A Leg-
acy of Conflict (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990), 51.

43. Keyssar, Right to Vote, 337, table A.4.

44. See David J. Weber, ed., Foreigners in Their Ni storical Roots
of the Mexican Americans (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004),
156-157.

45. See generally Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution
(New York: Knopf, 1992); and Robert Wiebe, The Opening of American Society:
From the Adoption of the Constitution to the Eve of Disunion (New York: Knopf,
1984), 3.

46. See Christopher Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American
Republic (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 60-61. Tomlins provides
a key analysis of the rise and fall of legislative supremacy and unconstrained ma-
joritarianism in the 1770s and 1780s. See especially ibid., 60-97.

47. Robert C. Palmer, "Liberties as Constitutional Provisions 1776-1791," in
Liberty and Cm rican Republic,
ed. William E. Nelson and Robert C. Palmer (New York: Oceana Publications,
1987), 55-148 (quotation on 83). For more on the populist elements of state con-
stitutionalism during this period, see also Christian Fritz, American Sovereigns:
The People and America's Conn ; tion before the Civil War (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 9-116.

48. Quoted in Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology, 57. Tomlins argues that dur-
ing the Revolution, settlers employed the language of "police" to give voice to this

concept of government as ensuring economic independence through the collective
exercise of public power. Ibid., 55-59.

49. Palmer, "Liberties as Constitutional Provisions," 82-86; see also Tomlins,
Law, Labor, and Ideology, 55-58.

50. See Christopher Lasch, True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
(New York: Norton, 1991), 170-176 (quotations on 174).

51. Wiebe, Opening of American Society, 41.

52. Lasch, True and Only Heaven, 173.

53. Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 36.

54. Seth Ames, "Life of Fisher Ames," in Works of Fisher Ames, vol. 1, ed. Seth
Ames (Boston: Little, Brown, 1854), 1-28 (quotation on 21).

55. Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves, and the Making
of the America: (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1999), 196; and Thomas Paine, "The Rights of Man, Part I (1791)," in Po-
litical Writings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 49-143 (quotation
on 138). As for legislatures, Paine had little difficulty embracing both majoritarian
institutions as the proper repository of sovereign power and legislative supremacy
as the guiding principle. Speaking of representation, he wrote, "By ingrafting repre-
sentation upon democracy, we arrive at a system of government capable of em-
bracing and confederating all the various interests and every extent of territory
and population." Paine, "The Rights of Man, Part II (1792)," in Political Writings,
145-203 (quotation on 170).

56. Paine, "Agrarian Justice (1795)," in Tl :ader, ed. Michael Foot
and Isaac Kramnick (New York: Penguin, 1987), 471-489 (quotations on 471,
483), the latter quote also in Lasch, True and Only Heaven, 179-180.

57. Paine, "Common Sense (1776)," in Pi \s, 1-38 (quotation on
3); and Paine, "The Rights of Man, Part II," 157.

58. Wood describes Manning as the quintessential small-scale entrepreneur:
"He ran a tavern off and on, erected a saltpeter works making gunpowder during
the Revolutionary War, helped build a canal, bought and sold land, constantly bor-
rowed money . . . seeking . . . every which way to better his and his family's condi-
tion." Wood, Lmpire of Liberty, 351-352. But one should be careful to avoid read-
ing back into this personal history, as Wood appears to, support for later modes of
large-scale industrial and commercial capitalism. Rather, for many laborers during
the period, a producerist ideology was perfectly consistent with small-scale capital-
ism (particularly shop owning and manufacturing). Given that society was still
primarily agrarian and decentralized, artisans and farmers often viewed such en-
trepreneurship as one form of productive control and as consistent with the wide-
spread enjoyment of economic independence.

59. Quoted in Michael Merrill and Sean Wilentz, "William Manning and the
Invention of American Politics," in The Key of Liberty, the Life and Democratic
Writings of Wi orer," 1747-1814, ed. Michael Merrill and
Sean Wilentz (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993), 3-86 (quota-
tion on 48); and William Manning, The Key of Liberty, 122. All quotations from
The Key of Libberty refer to the 1799 version, edited by Merrill and Wilentz, with

grammatical and spelling corrections made (although I will keep the original spell-
ing of the title when discussing the pamphlet). For more on the life of William
Manning and his relationship to American politics in the late eighteenth century,
see Merrill and Wilentz's comprehensive essay introducing his collected writings.

60. Manning, Key of Liberty, 135.

61. Ibid., 137, 131.

62. Ibid., 132, 141.

63. See ibid., 167-170.

64. Merrill and Wilentz, "William Manning," 65-68.

65. For more on the idea of democratizing intelligence and virtue in early
American political thought, see Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and
the Betrayal of Democracy (New York: Norton, 1995), 50-79.

66. See Slaughter, Whiskey Rebellion, 222-231; and Szatmary, Shays' Rebel-
lion, 118.

67. Paine, "Agrarian Justice," 474.

68. Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Las cnalism (New
York: International Publishers, 1969), ix.

69. Ibid., xii, xiv, 5.

70. Walter Licht, Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 18-19; and Wiebe, Opening of American
Society, 68. In his comprehensive study of Revolutionary America, Peace Pact, David
Hendrickson also takes an internationalist orientation to events, arguing that the
founding of the federal Constitution emerged out of concerns regarding the possi-
bility of maintaining a durable and federative peace between the various colonies —
seen by settlers as a multitude of commonwealths. See David Hendrickson, Peace
Pact: The Lost World of the American Pounding (Lawrence: University Press of
Kansas, 2003). Although my own arguments share this internationalist orienta-
tion, they focus less on the challenges to cooperation between the distinct states
and far more on the competing accounts of threat motivating colonial elites and
small farmers. For elites at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, a durable
peace was most compromised by frontier rebellions and the popular penetration of
politics, which held out the potential for widespread disorder and thus European
meddling.

71. Quoted in Szatmary, Shays' Rebellion, 123.

72. See Slaughter, Whiskey Rebellion, 51-53.

73. Federalist Papers, no. 7, 113 (Hamilton); and Federalist Papers, no. 41, 269
(Madison).

74. For more on elite colonial worries about dismemberment and European
rivalries, see Hendrickson, Peace Pact, 47-54. As one example among many, he
quotes Adams in a 1787 letter to John Jay as declaring that any "but the most
short sighted must perceive such mannifest danger both from foreign Powers, and
from one another as cannot be looked upon, without terror." Quoted in ibid.,
51-52.

75. Federalist Papers, no. 16, 154 (Hamilton).

76. Ibid., no. 12, 134 (Hamilton). For more on the related desires of many of the
Constitution's founders to check popular decision making and to create a climate

•e Woody Holton, Unruly Americans and the Origii
Constitution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), 179-223.

77. Franklin quoted in Licht, In tnerica, 15; and Thomas Jeffer-
son, "The Present State of Manufactures," in The Philosophy of Manufactures, ed.
Michael Brewster Folsom and Steven D. Lubar (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1982), 15-17 (quotation on 17).

78. James Madison, "Letter to Thomas Jefferson, October 17, 1788," in The
Writings of James Madison, vol. 5, ed. Gaillard Hunt (New York: Putnam, 1904),
272.

79. See Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology, 64; see also Wiebe, Opening of
American Society, 28-30.

80. Federalist Papers, no. 10, 123 (Madison).

81. Federalist Papers, no. 78,438-439 (Hamilton).

82. See generally Richard Henry Lee, "Letter from a Federal Farmer I, October
8, 1787," in The Anti-Federalists, ed. Cecilia Kenyon (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,
1966), 197-208 (quotation on 213).

83. George Bryan, "Centinel Letter I, October 5, 1787," in The Anti-Fc,
2-14 (quotations on 4-5, 5).

84. Ibid., 7.

85. Joyce Appleby, "American Heritage: The Heirs and the Disinherited," in
The Constitution and American Life, ed. David Thelen (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Uni-
versity Press, 1988), 138-154 (quotation on 144), also quoted in Tomlins, Law,
Labor, and Ideology, 73.

86. For ratification numbers in Massachusetts, see Szatmary, Shays' Rebellion,
133; and for information generally on opposition to the new Constitution, see
ibid., 130-134 (quotations on 131, 132).

87. Federalist Papers, no. 38, 253 (Madison).

88. See Arthur K. Moore, The Frontier Mind: A Cultural Analysis of the Ken-
tucky Frontiersman (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1957), 139-158.

89. See Slaughter, Whiskey Rebellion, 28-29.

90. George M. Fredrickson, White Su ; 'ive Study in
American and South African History (New York: Oxford University Press,
1981), 36.

91. U.S. Constitution, art. 4, sec. 3, cl. 2.

92. Treaty between the United States of America and the French Republic,
April 30, 1803, U.S.-Fr., art. 3, 8 Stat. 201, 202.

93. See generally Cleveland, "Powers Inherent in Sovereignty," 174-179 (quo-
tations on 174, 178, 175nl200).

94. For more on congressional governance of the Louisiana territory and the
move toward statehood, see Peter Kastor, The Nation's Crucible: The Louisiana
Purchase and the Creation of America (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
2004), 76-108, 135-136. See also Leibowitz, Defining Status, 11-15, for a discus-
sion of the role of federal discretion in territorial governance generally.

95. Quoted in Cleveland, "Powers Inherent in Sovereignty," 175, 176.

96. See Dred Scott v. Sandford, 60 U.S. 393 (1857).

97. See Thomas Jefferson, "Letter to James Madison, December 20, 1787," in
Political Writings, ed. Joyce Appleby and Terrence Ball (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 360-363 (quotation on 362), also quoted in Tomlins, Law,
Labor, and Ideology, 86. While Tomlins employs a series of letters by Jefferson to
emphasize Jefferson's potential openness to an energetic state, Tomlins under-explores
the roots of Jefferson's skepticism and its foundational ties to growing popular
antipathy toward governmental assertiveness. As my discussion highlights, to the
extent that locally based and unconstrained majoritarianism receded, governmen-
tal power became increasingly associated with a suspect imperial prerogative rather
than a robust communal will.

98. Jefferson, "Letter to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816," in Political Writ-
ings, 210-217 (quotation on 214).

99. Jefferson, "Letter to Joseph C. Cabell, February 2, 1816," in Political Writ-
ings, 202-206 (quotation on 205).

100. Jefferson, "Letter to William Stephens Smith, November 13, 1787," in Po-
litical Writings, 109-111 (quotation on 110); and Thomas Jefferson, "Letter to
James Madison, December 20, 1787," 362.

101. Thomas Jefferson, "Letter to James Madison, December 20, 1787," 363.

102. See Commonwealth v. Pullis (1806), in A Documentary History of Ameri-
can Industrial Society, vol. 3, ed. John Commons et al. (Cleveland: Arthur H.
Clark, 1910), 59-248, 233.

103. See Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology, 137.

104. Commonwealth v. Pullis, 199, also quoted in Tomlins, Law, Labor, and
;v, 137.

105. See Marvin Meyers, The Ja Belief (Stan-
ford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1957), 3-15.

106. Andrew Jackson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents, 1789-1897, vol.
3, ed. James D. Richardson (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Congress, 1900), 165.

107. See generally Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-
Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 54-55 (quotations on 54).

108. See Licht, Industrializing America, 46-48.

109. For more on the downward mobility of poor settlers, see ibid., 46^-8; and
Laurie, Artisans into Workers, 58-63 (quotation on 59). For a discussion of the re-
emergence of master-servant relations in the early nineteenth century, and of what
differentiated t y derived common law, see Jeffrey
S. Kahana, "Master and Servant in the Early Republic, 1780-1830," Journal of the
Early Republic 20 (2000): 27-57.

110. See generally Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology, 259-292, and Karen Or-
ren, Belated Feudalism: Labor, the Law, and Libera I in the United
States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1-28.

111. See Stevens v. Reeves, 26 Mass. 198 (1829), especially 201-202.

112. Rice v. Dwight Manufacturing Co., 56 Mass. 80, 87 (1848).

113. See Laurie, Artisans into Workers, 19-21 (quotation on 20-21).

114. Licht, /

115. Ibid., 65.

116. Langdon Byllesby, Observations on the Sources and Effects of Unequal
Wealth; with Propositions toward ity of Profit in Pursuing
the Arts of Life, and Establishing Security in Individual Prospects and Resources
(New York: Lewis J. Nichols, 1826), 52.

117. Manning, Key of Liberty, 142.

118. Ibid.

119. Byllesby, Observations, 94.

120. Ibid., 100.

121. Laurie, Artisans into Workers, 90.

122. Orestes Brownson, The Labouring Classes (Boston: Benjamin H. Greene,
1842), 15, 14.

123. See ibid., 12.

124. See ibid., 15-16.

125. Ibid., 29, 30.

126. See Thomas Skidmore, The Rights of Man to Property; Being a Proposi-
tion to Make It s of the Present Generation: and to Provide
for Its Equal Transmission to Eve: Generation, on
Arriving at the Age of Maturity (New York: Burt Frankin, 1829), 12.

127. Ibid., 159, 158,270, 158.

128. Ibid., 359.

129. Ibid., 126.

130. See ibid., 145-146.

131. Ibid., 158.

132. On the issue of free movement, see ibid., 51, and for quotations see 75, 359.

133. For more on Skidmore and his relationship with the Working Men's Party
in New York, see Edward Pessen, Most Uncommon Jacksonians: The Radical
Leaders of the Early Labor Movement (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1967), 58-66. For a philosophical interpretation of Byllesby and Skidmore
as influenced by and critical of Utopian socialism, see generally David Harris, So-
cialist Origins in the United States: American Forerunners of Marx, 1817-1832
(Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1966).

134. See Licht, Industrializing America, 13.

135. Ibid., 27.

136. See Nancy F. Cott, "Marriage and Women's Citizenship in the United
States, 1830-1934," American Historical Review 103 (1998): 1440-1474 (quota-
tion on 1454); and generally Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage

• Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002), 9-23.

137. See Cott, "Marriage and Women's Citizenship," 1440-1474.

138. Ibid., 1453; and generally Cott, Public Vows, 24-55.

139. Eric Foner, American Freedom, 76.

140. Fredrickson, White Supremacy, 208.

141. See generally David R. Roediger, Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Mak-
ing of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1999).

142. See Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American History:

m (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 27.

143. Quoted in ibid., 28.

144. Quoted in Ernest Lee Tuveson, Redeemer Nation: The Idea of America's
ial Role (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 150.

145. See Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The Genius and National Character of the
Anglo-Saxon Race," in The Later Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1843-1871,
vol. 1, ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myersons (Athens: University of Georgia
Press, 2001), 7-18 (quotation on 18).

146. For more on Emerson's views of race and their place in nineteenth-century
American life, see Nell Irvin Painter, "Ralph Waldo Emerson's Saxons," The Jour-
nal of American History 95 (2009): 977-985 and The History of White People
(New York: Norton, 2010), 151-189.

147. Laurie, Artisans into Workers, 26.

148. For more on nativism and the Know Nothing Party, see Eric Foner, Free
Soil, Tree Labor, Free Ai wfore the Civil
War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 226-260; and Tyler Anbinder,
Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothing Party and the Politics of the
1850s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Both Foner and Anbinder dis-
cuss how the failure of nativists to address the question of slavery during a time of
deep sectional conflict undermined their ability to sustain national political sup-
port. Anbinder quotes one anti-slavery activist as saying, "neither the Pope nor the
foreigners ever can govern the country or endanger its liberties, but the slavebreed-
ers and slavetraders do govern it, and threaten to put an end to all government but
theirs. There is something tangible to go upon, an issue which . . . will . . . surely suc-
ceed in the long run." Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery, 278.

149. Quoted in Fredrickson, White Supremacy, 201.

150. United States v. Rogers, 45 U.S. (4 How.) 567, 572 (1845).

151. Dred Scott v. Sandford, 407.

152. Sanford Levinson, "Why the Canon Should Be Expanded to Include the
Insular Cases and the Saga of American Expansionism," Constitutional Commen-
tary 17 (2000): 241-266 (quotation on 256).

153. Dred Scott v. Sandford, 450^151.

154. Ibid., 449-450.

155. Ibid., 446.

156. Levinson, "Why the Canon Should Be Expanded," 256.

157. George Washington Julian, Speeches on Political Questions (New York:
Hurd and Houghton, 1872), 222, 220. For more on Radical Republican views of
the need for land redistribution and substantive equality between whites and
blacks, see Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's I olution, 1863-
1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 67-68, 228-280.

158. Abraham Lincoln, "Annual Address before the Wisconsin State Agri-
cultural Society, September 30, 1859," in Complete Works, vol. 1, ed. John G.
Nicholay and John Hay (New York: The Century Co., 1907), 576-584 (quotation
on 581-582).

159. As one of many examples of black popular activity, freed slaves angered
by the Freedmen Bureau's October 1865 restoration of virtually all planter land to

pardoned owners petitioned the Bureau, asserting the centrality of land redistribu-
tion for republican freedom. See Foner, Reconstruction, 159-161.
; America, 102.

1. It is difficult to ascertain the exact number of people who were mobilized
through Alliance structures. The cited figures come from historian of Populism
Lawrence Goodwyn in a speech given to commemorate the one-hundredth anni-
versary of the subtreasury plan. Lawrence Goodwyn and William Greider, "Demo-
cratic Money: A Populist Perspective," December 9, 1989, www.geocities.com/
progpop/Goodwyn. Greider.html (accessed October 8, 2009).

2. For more on the Jacksonian idea of the party as the site for an active and
sovereign "people," see for example Gerald Leonard, The Invention of Party Poli-
tics: Federalism i icnt in Jackso-
nian Illinois (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

3. See generally Richard Hofstadter, Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (New
York: Vintage Books, 1955), 3-93 (quotation on 35); and The Paranoid Style in
American Politics and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979),
3-40 (quotation on 29). For a more recent, although less hostile, version of the
Hofstadter argument, see Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American
History (New York: Basic Books, 1995), where he sees populism as an anti-elitist
American disposition — spanning both right and left — that at root never challenges
basic political structures and in the twentieth century was co-opted by demagogic
voices like McCarthy and George Wallace.

4. See Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 387-423. I will cite Demo-
cratic Promise as well as its condensed version, Lawrence Goodwyn, The Populist
Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1978). While the condensed version presents a less comprehensive
account of the agrarian movement, it includes a useful theoretical examination
of popular mobilization and the conditions that promoted mass politics.

5. Goodwyn, Populist Moment, 231-232.

6. Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
(New York: Norton, 1991), 218.

7. Goodwyn.

8. For more on the literature on American Populism, see especially, along with
Goodwyn, accounts that reject the easy placement of the movement in particular
ideological camps — petty capitalist or proto-socialist, nativist or anti-racist: Gene
Clanton, Con;.- lism and the Crisis of the 1890s (Lawrence: Univer-
sity Press of Kansas, 1998); Bruce Palmer, "Man over Money": The Southern
Populist Critique of American Capitalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Caro-
lina Press, 1981); Michael Schwartz, Radical Protest and Social Structure: The
Southern Farmers Alliance and Cotton Tenancy, 1 880-1 890 (New York: Academic
Press, 1976); Normal Po iuman Welfare

(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); and Elizabeth Sanders, Roots of Re-
form: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877-191 7 (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1999).

9. See Thaddeus Stevens, "'Reconstruction,' December 18, 1865, in Congress,"
in The Selected :i'cns, vol. 2, ed. Beverly Wilson Palmer and
Holly Byers Ochoa (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998), 44-56 (quo-
tation on 52).

10. Walter Licht, India

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 98.

11. Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: Norton, 1998),
117; and Lichi g America, 133. See also Alan Trachtenberg, The In-
corporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill
and Wang, 2007), 4-5.

12. See Foner, The Story of American Freedom, 116-117; and Licht, Industrial-
izing America, 183.

13. Abrams tells the remarkable story of efforts to attract "desirable" white
women to the Washington Territory, considered at the time rugged and inhospita-
ble land, with the hope of recreating a self-sustaining settler community — one built
on free labor and ethnic exclusion. For her story of the "Mercer Girls," who mi-
grated west on voyages planned by Asa Shinn Mercer, see Kerry Abrams, "The
Hidden Dimension of Nineteenth-Century Immigration Law," Vanderbilt Law
Review 62 (2009): 1353-1418.

14. See generally Jack Beatty, Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America
(New York: Vintage, 2008), especially 98-101, 184.

15. See Morton Horwitz, The Transformation of American haw, 1870-1960:
The Crisis of Legal Orthodoxy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992),
72-73.

16. Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, 20.

17. See Roger Daniels, Not Like Us: Immigrants and Minorities in America,
1890-1924 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1997), 5-6; Hiroshi Motomura, Americans in
Waiting: The Lost Story of Immigration and Citizenship in the United States
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 16; and Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages:
Race and Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Knopf, 1979),
236-240.

18. For the naturalization law, see Act of July 14, 1870, ch. 254, §7, 16 Stat.
254 (quotation on 256); and for more on anti-Chinese sentiment during the con-
gressional debates and the idea of "aliens ineligible for citizenship," see Motomu-
ra's illuminating assessment in Americans in Waiting, 70-75.

19. See especially the Passenger Cases, 48 U.S. (7 How.) 283 (1849). Although
Taney dissented from the ruling, like the majority he also argued that all political
communities enjoyed a plenary immigration authority that came from an inherent
"power of self-preservation" and was "paramount and absolute in the sovereignty
that possesses it." Passenger Cases, 470, 467 (1849) (J. Taney, dissenting). While
the Court ruled that the national government possessed this plenary power, Taney,
in classic Jacksonian terms, disagreed and believed that it was held by the various

20. For a discussion of the legal and historical continuities between Chinese
treatment and previous migration policies toward Indians and blacks, see Daniel
Kanstroom, D 'lion: Outsiders in American History (Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 21-23. On the Page Act and its demo-
graphic impact, see Daniels, Not Like Us, 12, 6; Motomura, Americans in Waiting,
25. For the exclusion laws, see Act of May 6, 1882, ch. 126, §14, 22 Stat. 58, 61;
Act of May 5, 1892, ch. 60, §6, 27 Stat. 25, 26.

21. Daniels, Not Like Us, 17.

22. See Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537, 561 (1896) (J. Harlan, dissenting).

23. U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark, 169 U.S. 649, 731 (1898) (J. Fuller, dissenting),
quoting Long Yue Ting v. U.S., 149 U.S. 698, 717 (1893).

24. Ibid., 725. See also Kerry Abrams's discussion of how politicians depicted
Chinese immigrants during legislative debates about the Page Act. Kerry Abrams,
"Polygamy, Prostitution, and the Federalization of Immigration Law," Columbia
Law Review 105: 641-716, especially 692-694. In classic millennial terms of crisis
and threat, the Chinese were seen as dangerous outsiders who had to be subju-
gated in order to produce lasting domestic tranquility.

25. See Lichl ig America, 169; and Bruce Laurie, Artisans into
Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989),
157 (statistics on Knights membership).

26. For more on the episode and its defining role in radicalizing the Farmers
Alliance, see Goodwyn, Democratic Promise, 52-65; see also Edward Ayers, South-
ern Crossing: A History of the American South, 1877-1906 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1995), 114-115.

27. Quoted in Terence Powderly, Thirty Years of Labor, 1 859-1889 (Colum-
bus: Excelsior Publishing House, 1889), 243.

28. "Preamble to the Platform of the Knights of Labor (1886)," www.6hourday
.org/1886.html (accessed October 7, 2009).

29. "Omaha Platform, July 1892," in A Populist Reader: Selections from the
Works of American Populist Leaders, ed. George Brown Tindall (New York: Harper
and Row, 1966), 90-96 (quotation on 93). The preamble and most of the actual
planks of the first People's Party platform were written by Minnesota Populist and
iconoclast Ignatius Donnelly.

30. On the issue of free citizenship for women, the Knights broke with Jackso-
nian views about female dependence, arguing instead that women were equally
capable of free labor and worthy of productive control. As one of its basic planks,
the 1878 Knights Constitution sought "to secure for both sexes equal pay for
equal work." Powderly, Thirty Years of Labor, 245.

31. Ibid., 657, 659.

32. Tom Watson, "The Negro Question in the South, October 1892," in The
Populist Mind, ed. Norman Pollock (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 360-374
(quotations on 371-372).

33. Ibid., 374.

34. Stevens wrote as the inscription for his tombstone, "I repose in this quiet
and secluded spot / Not from any natural preference for solitude / But, finding
other Cemeteries limited as to Race / by Charter Rules, / I have chosen this that I

might illustrate / in my death / The principles which I advocated / Through a long
life / equality of man before his creator." Quoted in Hans L. Trefousse, Thad-
deus Stevens: 1 ilitarian (Chapel Hill: University of North

Carolina Press, 1997), xi.

35. For an assessment of the racial dynamic of the Populist movement, includ-
ing the unwillingness to press for social equality, see generally Gerald H. Gaither,
Blacks and the >try in the "New South" (Tuscalo-
osa: University of Alabama Press, 1977); and Ayers, Southern Crossing, 134-156.
For more on white supremacy and Southern race relations after the Civil War,
see generally C. Vann \\ gins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951).

36. Powderly, Thirty Years of Labor, 429.

37. Quoted in Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese
Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 101.

38. See generally William Forbath, "The Borders of 'Our America': 'Race,' Lib-
eralism, and National Identity in the Law and Politics of European Immigration,
1882-1924" (unpublished manuscript, on file with the author), especially 12, 15-
20; and Gyory, Closing the Gate, quotation on 69. I am particularly grateful to
Forbath for allowing me to cite his instructive and excellent survey of labor repub-
licanism's struggle with the question of immigration.

39. See Takaki, Iron Cages, 239; and Powderly quoted in Forbath, "The Bor-
ders of 'Our America,' " 15.

40. Ayers, Southern Crossing, 145.

41. Tom Watson, "Imperial Tendencies," in The Populist Mind, ed. Norman
Pollock (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 23-26 (quotations on 25).

42. See Gene Clanton's instructive account of how elected Populists struggled
with the question of the Spanish American War in Congressional Populism, 127-
164 (quotations on 139, 141).

43. Quoted in ibid., 152.

44. See Thomas Watson, "Summary of Mr. Watson's Speech at Thomson, Geor-
gia, July 27, 1 898," in The Life and Speeches of Thomas E. Watson (Nashville, Tenn.,
1908), 229, also quoted in C. Vann Woodward, Tom an Rebel (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 334-335.

45. Watson, "Summary of Speech," 230, also quoted in Woodward, Tom Wat-
son, 335.

46. Clanton, Congressional Populism, 4.

47. William Neville, "Speech on Imperialism, February 6, 1900," www.history
.missouristate.edu/wrmiller/populism/texts/Documents/speech_on_imperialism.
htm (accessed October 7, 2009).

48. Ibid., also quoted in Clanton, Congressional Populism, 161, 4.

49. Neville, "Speech on Imperialism."

50. Watson, "Summary of Speech," 230, quoted in Woodward, Tom Watson, 335.

51. See Gordon Wood, The Creation of the Amc. , 1776-1787
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 319-328.

52. For more on popular courts, see Jonathan Garlock, "The Knights of Labor
Courts: A Case Study of Popular Justice," in The Politics of Informal Justice: The

American Experience, vol. 1, ed. Richard L. Abel (New York: Academic Press,
1982), 17-33.

53. Mark Lawrence Kornbluh, Why America Stopped Voting: The Decline of
Participatory Democracy and the Emergence of Modern American Politics (New
York: New York University Press, 2000), 41.

54. Ibid., 42, 52 (quotation on 55).

55. Ibid., 112.

56. See Ayers, Southern Crossing, 71-87, for a discussion of how the Civil War
set the terms for political cleavages and party identification during the Gilded Age.
This was particularly true in the South where choosing between Democrat and
Republican meant reaffirming secti and "often defined a man's friends,
business dealings, and even marriage prospects." Ibid., 71.

57. Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and
Wang, 1967), xiii.

58. "Omaha Platform," 92.

59. On this point, see especially Goodwyn, Populist Moment, 306-307.

60. See Ayers, 'nt, 206-212.
See generally Schwartz, Radical Protest am 'ire, 129-198, for an as-
sessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the lecturing system as a means to in-
tegrate Alliance members and to create a participatory mass movement.

61. See Mid 'nt: America in Search of a Public
Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996),
185-189, for more on the role of virtue in Powderly's political thought.

62. Frank Doster, "The Common Property of All," in The Populist Mind, ed.
Norman Pollock (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 12-13 (quotation on 13).

63. See "Omaha Platform," 92-96.

64. On McKinley's war chest, see Michael E. McGerr, The Decline of Popular
Politics: The American North, 1865-1928 (New York: Oxford University Press,
1986), 140. On Southern black disenfranchisement and the grandfather clause, see
Ayers, Southern Crossing, 171 (quotations therein). The clause was meant to ex-
empt poor whites who registered within three months of the convention and who
could prove that they, their father, or their grandfathers voted prior to Reconstruc-
tion. The term is used quite broadly today with little appreciation for its genesis
and historical meaning.

65 . William Allen White, "What's the Matter with Kansas ? " in A Populist Reader:
Selections from the Works of Ante .caders, ed. George Brown Tindall
(New York: Harper and Row, 1966), 192-199 (quotation on 195).

66. Ibid., 197; and Godkin quoted in Goodwyn, Populist Moment, 210.

67. Gompers and the AFL rejected the Knights' ambition of organizing all agri-
cultural and industrial workers into a coalition that would press for broad-based
reforms and the creation of a cooperative commonwealth. Rather, they took from
the late 1880s collapse of the Knights of Labor the belief that, for workers to se-
cure any goals at all, they needed to abandon systemic reform, organize strictly by
trade, and press employers for limited improvements. See Laurie, Artisans into
Workers, 176-210.

68. On org oblems within the Alliance institutions, particularly
interest divergence between leadership and ordinary members, see Schwartz, Radi-
cal Protest and Social Structure, 118-125. On the turn to electoral politics and the
decline of farmers' cooperatives, see ibid., 269-278; and especially Goodwyn, Pop-
ulist Moment, 230-263, 305-306.

69. Platte County Argus, "The Classes against the Masses," in The Populist
Mind, ed. Norman Pollock (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 41-^-4 (quotation
on 42).

70. "Omaha Platform," 94, 95 (quotation regarding immigration on 95); and
Simpson quoted in Clanton, Congressional Populism, 132. On the land speculation
issue, the New York Times quotes Powderly as stating, "We are opposed to land
being held for speculation, and have always favored the plan of turning the revenue
from the use of land to the use and benefit of the community." See "Farmers and
Knights: Mr. Powderly Talks about the Proposed Alliance," New York Times, No-
vember 26, 1889. While generally supportive of such sentiment, most Populists
were more equivocal than Powderly. On Alliance debates about legitimate title and
use, see James Green, "Populism, Socialism, and the Promise of Democracy," Radi-
cal History Review 24 (1980): 7-40, (quotation on 16); and also Palmer, "Man
over Money," 12-1 A.

71. See Motomura, Americans in Waiting, 69-76.

72. See generally Forbath, "The Borders of 'Our America,' " especially 51, for
Powderly's views on the literacy test.

73. Quoted in Woodward, Tom Watson, 371, 370-371.

74. See ibid., 435-447, for a fuller account of the Leo Frank trial in Georgia and
Watson's role in his ultimate killing — this after he was pardoned by the governor.

75. See generally Nancy L. O'Conner, "The Influence of Populist Legislators
upon American Foreign Policy, 1892-1898" (PhD diss., University of Oregon,
1958); and William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy
(New York: Norton, 1988), 18-57. Even Jerry Simpson could not avoid being
swept up by the prospect of new markets in foreign lands, grandiloquently stating
in 1894, "I believe, gentlemen, that the time has come for the United States as a
great nation to take its place as one of the great commercial nations of the world."
Quoted in Will nacy, 27. To the end, Simpson was
a principled critic of the Spanish-American War as well as of the use of naval vio-
lence to impose free trade on weaker neighbors, declaring "I know of nothing
more absurd than the rivalry of the nations in the matter of building unwieldy
ships of war and in the construction of guns to pierce them." Quoted in Clanton,
Congressional Populism, 139. Yet he seemed unable to appreciate the ties between
commercial expansionism and the very interventionism and gunboat diplomacy
that he abhorred.

76. See Clanton, Congressional Populism, 141.

77. Woodward, Tom Watson, 454.

78. In re Neagle, 135 U.S. 1 (1890).

79. For more information about this rather colorful episode, including the fact
that Terry had earlier sworn Field in as a fellow justice of the California Supreme

Court, see Phillip R. Urie, "Knife- Wielding Justice," Wild West Magazine 49 (Feb-
ruary 1993).

80. In re Neagle, 68.

81. Ibid., 64, 59.

82. Ibid., 65.

83. See In re Debs, 158 U.S. 564 (1895). On the strike and its aftermath, see
Laurie, Artisans into Workers, 204-210; and especially Nick Salvatore, Eugene V.
Debs: Citizen and Socialist (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 127-140,
147-161, for how the events, particularly the extent of federal repression, con-
vinced Debs that only by claiming state authority would laboring interests prevail.
It emphasized to him the need for immediate electoral and political action, such
as through the Populist Party and later through various socialist parties.

84. In re Debs, 582.

85. Watson, "Imperial Tendencies," 23-26 (quotation on 25-26).

86. Ibid., 26.

87. This interpretation of Court jurisprudence and particularly of the Lochner
decision is consistent with approaches that deemphasize the centrality of social
Darwinism for judicial thinking. Instead, arguments made by Justices about free-
dom of contract are best understood as still largely within the republican idiom,
articulating long-standing views — evident in Jackson and Lincoln — that laws pro-
viding special economic privileges demeaned the autonomy of free laborers and
amounted to unacceptable class legislation. See especially Howard Gilman, The
Constitution Besieged: The Rise and Demise of Tochner Era Police Powers Juris-
prudence (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1993); and William Forbath,
"The Ambiguities of Free Labor: Labor and Law in the Gilded Age," Wisconsin
Law Review (1985): 767-817.

88. The Slaughterhouse Cases, 83 U.S. (16 Wall.) 36 (1873); and Lochner v.
New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905).

89. The Slaughterhouse Cases, 73, 78.

90. See ibid., 109-110, 90, 110 (J. Field, dissenting). For Field, as with many in
Congress, the Reconstruction amendments had been about not only eliminating
actual bondage but also consolidating the belief that republican citizenship pre-
supposed basic control over one's own labor. Therefore, his willingness to link the
amendments to the plight of Louisiana butchers underscored that in Field's view
the case was primarily about defending free citizenship rather than a liberal theory
of economic rights. As Forbath comments on Field's position, "'Citizenship in the
republic' now protected them [the butchers] against such interferences with their
freedom to pursue their calling as the State-created monopoly in Louisiana." See
Forbath, "Ambiguities of Free Labor," 778.

91. Bradwell v. Illinois, 38 U.S. (16 Wall.) 130, 141(1873) (J. Bradley,
concurring).

92. See Gretchen Ritter, The Constitution as Social Design: Gender and Civic
Membership in the American Con ler (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford Uni-
versity Press, 2006), 21-24, for more on what she terms the "border status" of
women during this period — or as I would describe it, their position as formal citi-
zens and yet still subject to paternal authority in the household.

382

93. Minor v. Happersett, 88 U.S. 162, 166 (1874).

94. Takaki, Iron Cages, 189; quotation in Sarah Cleveland, "Powers Inherent
in Sovereignty: Indians, Aliens, Territories, and the Nineteenth Century Origins of
Plenary Power over Foreign Affairs," Texas Law Review 81 (2003): 1-284 (quota-
tion on 55).

95. Takaki, Iron Cages, 189.

96. United States v. Celestine, 215 U.S. 278, 291 (1909).

97. United States v. Nice, 241 U.S. 591, 598 (1916).

98. Lochner v. New York, 75 (J. Holmes, dissenting).

99. Ibid., 57, 59, 60.

100. See Paul Kens, Lochner v. New York: Economic Regulation on Trial (Law-
rence: University Press of Kansas, 1998), 6-14, for a discussion of the working
conditions of the late nineteenth-century bakery industry.

101. Walt Whitman, "Facing West from California's Shores," in Leaves of
Grass and Other Writings, ed. Michael Moon (New York: Norton, 2002), 95.

1. Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy
in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 138, 426n34.

2. Oceanic Steam Navigation Co. v. Stranahan, 214 U.S. 320, 339, 340 (1909).

3. Hiroshi Motomura, America; The Lost Story of American Im-
migration and Citizenship in the United States (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2006), 125.

4. Ibid., 126-128 (quotations on 126, 128).

5. See in particular Mae Ngai's excellent book, Impossible Subjects: Illegal
Aliens and the Making of Modern America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 2004), on the act's role in sustaining the idea of a white American race and in
creating a new category of "illegal" immigrants among non white communities.

6. Daniel Kanstroom, Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 158.

7. See Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 56-90, on the construction of "illegality" in
immigration policy and its racial i nd Kitty Calavita, Inside the State:
The Bracero Program, Immigration, and the I.N.S. (New York: Routledge, 1992),
4-7, 18-41.

8. In their writing on Progressivism, Christopher Lasch and Michael Sandel
overemphasize the ideological divisions between Croly and Weyl (viewing the for-
mer as a champion of industrial self-government and the latter as a defender of the
new redistributive state). See Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven:
Progress and Its Critics (New York: Norton, 1991), 340-344; and Michael Sandel,
Democracy's Discontent: America in Search of a Public Philosophy (Cambridge,
Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 219-227. This ap-
proach fails to appreciate the republican continuities shared by Croly and Weyl,
such as their continuing belief in the centrality of self-assertive and engaged citi-
zenship. In fact, if viewed as largely complementary, the thinkers together offered

the primary elements of a potential twentieth-century response to the rise of corpo-
rate and state hierarchy.

9. Herbert Croly, Progressive Democracy (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 379,
380.

10. See Walter Weyl, The New Democracy (New York: Macmillan, 1912), 191,
196,197,193.

11. Ibid., 279, 195,276.

12. Ibid., 329, 330.

13. Orestes Brownson, "Our Future Policy," in The Works of Orestes Brown-
son, vol. 15, ed. Harry Brownson (Detroit: Thorndike Nourse, 1884), 113-149
(quotations on 124).

14. Weyl, New Democracy, 334.

15. See Croly, Progressive Democracy, 380-381, 384, 385.

16. Ibid., 281.

17. Ibid., 281, 384.

18. Ibid., 384, 390.

19. See John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (New York: H. Holt, 1927),
147, 148, 126-127.

20. See John Dewey, "Education from a Social Perspective," in The Middle
Works, 1899-1924, vol. 7, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1979), 113-127 (quotation on 127).

21. See John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Introduction to the Phi-
losophy of Education (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 299, 298.

22. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 211.

23. Dewey, Democracy and Education, 298.

24. During the Progressive era, Kallen was perhaps most famous for respond-
ing to nativist attacks on new immigrant communities from southern and eastern
Europe and for defending the value of "cul i." See generally Horace
Kallen, Culture and Democracy in the United States (New York: Boni and Liver-
ight, 1924). The following discussion focuses instead on his arguments about lei-
sure and consumerist politics. Such positions were more fully developed in later
works from the 1930s and 1940s, particularly The Decline and Rise of the Con-
sumer: A Philosophy of Consumer Cooperation (New York: D. Appleton-Century,
1936) and The otn in the Modern World
(Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1948). Although my use of these later
books slightly diverges from historical chronology, the works are nonetheless con-
sistent with Kallen's earlier arguments and provide the clearest articulation of his
Progressive reconstruction of the relationship between freedom and work. For an
earlier presentation of similar themes of democratic education and self-actualization
through labor, see Horace Kallen, Education, the Machine and the Worker: An Es-
say in the Psych Society (New York: New Republic,
1925).

25. Kallen, The Eiberal Spirit, 211, 236.

26. Weyl, New Democracy, 250.

27. See ibid., 250; and Kallen, The Liberal Spirit, 238.

28. Weyl, New Democracy, 250, 251.

29. See ibid., 330; and Kallen, The Liberal Spirit, 241-242.

30. Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (New York: Macmillan,
1909), 212; and James Morone, Democrat Nation and the
Limits of American Government (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 113.

31. Croly, The Promise of American Life, 274, 274-275.

32. Morone, Democratic Wish, 112; Croly, Progressive Democracy, 270.

33. Theodore Roosevelt, The Rough Riders: An Autobiography, ed. Louis
Auchincloss (New York: Library of America, 2004), 721.

34. Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, 211.

35. John Dewey, Liberalism and Social Action (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons,
1935), 63.

36. Quoted in Mark Kornbluh, Why America Stopped Voting: The Decline of
Participatory Democracy and the Lmergence of Modern American Politics (New
York: New York University Press, 2000), 123.

37. On the tie between new procedures and the decline of mass participation,
see ibid., 118-137 (quotation on 123); and generally Michael McGerr, Decline of
Popular Politics: The American North, 1865-1928 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1986). S. O. Daws is quoted in Lawrence Goodwyn, Populist Moment: A
Short History of the Ag in America (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1978), 332.

38. See Stephen Skowronek, Bur nerican State: The Expansion of
National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (New York: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1982), 177-211.

39. See Kornbluh, Why America Stopped Voting, 131; La Follette quoted in ibid.

40. See Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Women and Economics: A Study of the Eco-
nomic Relation between Men and Women as a Factor in Social Evolution (Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 1998), 144, 247.

41. See generally Aileen S. Kraditor, The Ideas of the Woman Suffrage Move-
ment, 1890-1920 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), 163-218; Catt
quoted in ibid., 197.

42. See Emma Goldman, "Woman Suffrage," in Anarchism and Other Essays
(New York: Dover, 1969), 195-211 (quotation on 207); and "The Tragedy of
Woman's Emancipation," in Anarchism and Other Essays, 213-225 (quotation on
217).

43. Quoted in Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: Norton,
1998), 151.

44. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1922),
313,313-314.

45. See Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 1986), 37, 269.

46. Theodore Roosevelt, "The Strenuous Life," in The Strenuous Life: Essays
and Address (New York: The Century Co., 1905), 1-25 (quotations on 1, 4).

47. Quotations in ibid., 8, 7. For more on Roosevelt's views about race, see
generally Thomas G. Dyer, Theodore Roosevelt and the Idea of Race (Baton

Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992). Dyer writes that precisely because
of his Dutch background, Roosevelt avoided using "Anglo-Saxon," and instead his
"favorite term was 'the J y pregnant rubric which

implied that Britishers, Americans, South Africans, and Australians were yoked in
bonds of blood and language and also suggested that those of non-English ances-
try, such as Dutch, could still gain admission into the group which Roosevelt
believed was destined to dominate the world." Ibid., 28-29. For Roosevelt's ar-
guments about shared imperial responsibilities between Britain and the United
States, see William Tilchin, Theodore Roosevelt and the British Empire: A Study
in Presidential Statecraft (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1997). During this pe-
riod, Roosevelt had a close relationship with Alfred Thayer Mahan and strongly
supported the latter's positions on expansion and naval power, frequently refer-
encing Mahan's book, The Interest of America in Sea Power, Present and Future
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1898). In an article titled "Possibilities of an Anglo-
American Reunion," reprinted as part of that book, Mahan also argued that the
United States and Britain shared the same basic ideals and imperial fates, as the
two countries were jointly "intrusted a maritime interest, in the broadest sense
of the word, which demands, as one of the conditions of its exercise and its
safety, the organized force adequate to control the general course of events at
sea." Ibid., 111.

48. T. Roosevelt, "Strenuous Life," 6.

49. See Oliver Wendell Holmes, "The Soldier's Faith," in The Mind and Faith of
justice Holmes: His Speeches, Essays, Letters, and Ji. is, ed. Max Le-
rner (Boston: Little, Brown, 1946), 18-25 (quotations on 18, 23, 20).

50. See Lasch, True and Only Heaven, 301; and for Lasch's discussion of Hol-
mes, Roosevelt, and James as well as what James derisively saw as the focus on
"mere excitement" in the former two figures, see ibid., 296-303. In contrast to
Lasch, I question whether James actually provided a meaningful alternative to the
"war party" or if in fact his approach to national service presupposed a militarized
vision of civic engagement.

51. See William James, "The Moral Equivalent of War," in The Writings of Wil-
liam James, ed. John J. McDermott (New York: Modern Library, 1967), 660-671
(quotation on 669).

52. See generally Josiah Strong, Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Pres-
ent Crisis, rev. ed. (New York: Baker & Taylor, 1891), 56, 163, 165.

53. See ibid., 213-214, 187.

54. Ibid., 216, 216-217.

55. See Theodore Roosevelt, "Expansion and Peace," in The Strenuous Life:
Essays and Address (New York: The Century Co., 1905), 25-38 (quotations on
26,31).

56. Quotations in ibid., 32, 38, 37. For more on the resurgent millennialism of
American global ambitions and its role in structuring twentieth-century foreign
policy, see Walter McDougal's famous account of the United States as a "crusader"
nation in Promised Land, Crusader State: The American Encounter with the World
since 1776 (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), 101-146.

57. See Sarah Cleveland, "Powers Inherent in Sovereignty: Indians, Aliens, Terri-
tories, and the Nineteenth Century Origins of Plenary Power over Foreign Affairs,"
Texas Law Review 81 (2003): 207, 208; and Juan R. Torruella, The Supreme Court
and Puerto Rico: The Doctrine of Separate and Unequal (Rio Piedras: University of
Puerto Rico, 1985), 23.

58. For example, Senator Redfield Proctor of Vermont, a powerful defender
of the need to confront Spain in Cuba, took for granted that victory would not
produce extensive new territories. Before the war, he rejected outright all efforts
at expansion or the incorporation of foreign peoples, considered ethnically in-
appropriate for free citizenship. In classic settler terms he remarked, "I am not
in favor of annexation: not because I would apprehend any particular trouble
from it, but because it is not a wise policy to take in any people of foreign tongue
and training, and without any strong guiding American element." Redfield Proc-
tor, "Speech to Congress, March 17, 1898," in America as a World Power, 1872-
1945, ed. Robert H. Ferrell (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press,
1971), 59.

59. See T. Roosevelt, "Expansion and Peace," 35, 35-36.

60. Quoted in Frederick Merk, Manifest Destiny and Mission in American
History: A Reinterpretation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1995), 253.

61. For a recent account of the territorial implications of the debate over
Puerto Rico's status, see Kal Raustiala, Does the Constitution Pollow the Flag? The
Evolution of Tt American Law (New York: Oxford University Press,
2009), especially 59-91. Raustiala argues that the Insular Cases grounded within
American constitutional law the idea of "intraterritoriality," namely that distinct
legal regimes can operate in different geographical spaces within the national
territory.

62. Downes v. Bidwell, 182 U.S. 245 (1901). On the case's centrality, see San-
ford Levinson, "Why the Canon Should Be Expanded to Include the Insular Cases
and the Saga of American Expansionism," Constitutional Commentary 17 (2000):
241-266, especially 243n7.

63. Justices Brown, White, Shiras, McKenna, and Gray concurred in the
decision, with Chief Justice Fuller and Justices Harlan, Brewer, and Peckham
dissenting.

64. Downes v. Bidwell, 268 (J. Brown, concurring).

65. Ibid., 279-280, 280.

66. See Abbott Lawrence Lowell, "The Status of Our New Possessions — A
Third View," Harvard Law Review 13 (1899): 155-176; and for the doctrinal sig-
nificance of White's concurrence, see Christina Burnett, " Untied States: American
Expansion and Territorial Deannexation," University of Chicago Law Review 72
(2005): 799-800.

67. Downes v. Bidwell, 307-308, 339 (J. White, concurring).

68. Quotations in ibid., 341-342, 318.

69. See generally Burnett, "Untied States."

70. Quotations in Downes v. Bidwell, 373, 380.

71. Carman F. Randolph, "Constitutional Aspects of Annexation," Harvard
Law Review 12 (1898): 291-315 (quotation on 304). Randolph ends his piece by
further emphasizing his fear for the future of Anglo liberty if Congress pursues the
annexation of the Philippines: "Assuming that the annexation of the Philippines is
embodied in the treaty, it is the most questionable project of domestic concern that
a President has ever submitted to the senate." Ibid., 315.

72. J. Neal Steere, "Professor against Annexation, August 27, 1898," in The
Anti-Imperialist Reader: From the to the Election of 1900, vol. 1, ed.
Philip S. Foner and Richard C. Winchester (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1984),
241.

73. Theodore Roosevelt, "National Duties," in The Strenuous Life: Essays
and Address (New York: The Century Co., 1905), 279-297 (quotations on 288,
296).

74. Carnegie quoted in Murat Halstead, Pictorial History of America's New
Possessions: The Isthmian Canals and the Problem of Expansion (Chicago: The
Dominion Co. 1899), 515, 516; and Samuel Gompers, "Speech to the Chicago
Peace Jubilee, October 18, 1898," in The Anti-Imperialist Reader: From the Mexi-
can War to the Election of 1900, vol. 1, ed. Philip S. Foner and Richard C. Win-
chester (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1984), 201-208 (quotation on 205).

75. For more on the Monroe Doctrine, see especially James Tully, Pu
losophy in a New Key: I id Civic Freedom, vol. 2 (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2008), 133; and generally Ernest May, The Making of the
Monroe Doctrine (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992).

76. See Tully 's discussion of the role of Kantian notions of perpetual peace in
justifying nineteenth-century imperialism. Tully, Pub in a New Key,
143-149. For more on the historic relationship in international law between cos-
mopolitanism, commerce, and empire, see generally Antony Anghie's seminal
book, Imperiali v, and the Making of International Law (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2004).

77. Theodore Roosevelt, "State of the Union, December 6, 1904," in America
as a World Power, 1872-1945, ed. Robert H. Ferrell (Columbia: University of
South Carolina Press, 1971), 105-107 (quotations on 105, 105-106).

78. Woodrow Wilson, "Address to the Railway Business Association, New
York, January 27, 1916," in The ught of Woodrow Wilson, ed. E.
David Cronon (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965), 268-270 (quotation on 269).

79. See Woodrow Wilson, "The Wilson Plan," in The Political Thought of
Woodrow Wilson, ed. E. David Cronon (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1965),
284-287.

80. Ibid., 286.

81. For events in the Dominican Republic, see ibid., 285; and Woodrow Wil-
son, "Appeal for Support of the League of Nations at Pueblo, Colorado, September
25, 1919," in Woodrow Wilson: Essential Speeches of the Scholar-
President, ed. Mario R. DiNunzio (New York: New York University Press, 2006),
411-419 (quotation on 415).

82. On the Senate's failure to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, see David Joseph
Goldberg, Discontented America: The United States in the 1920s (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1999), 13-39; and William Appleman Williams, The
Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: World Publishing, 1959), 77-118.
See also Stanley Hoffmann, Gulliver's Troubles; or, the Setting of American For-
eign Policy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 94-143, for a discussion of isolation-
ist ideology and its relationship to unilateral and sovereigntist claims in American
foreign policy.

83. For more on the linkage between anti-imperial and nativist arguments in
the 1920s, see Goldberg, Discontented America, 23, 140-166. As for La Fol-
lette's conflicted approach to the emerging restrictionist paradigm, see ibid., 157
and Richard Lowitt, "Review: Robert M. La Follette and the Waning Insurgent
Spirit: From the New Citizenship to the New Deal," Reviews in American His-
tory 4 (1976): 244-250. However, at least in 1913, La Follette was willing to
stand on principle, opposing a proposal that required new immigrants to pro-
vide a certificate of character. According to him, supporters of the proposal were
doing the bidding of monopolists and corporate elites. European immigrants,
the Progressive senator declared, "were a menace to plutocracy, and there are
certain people in this country who do not favor encouraging a menace to
plutocracy." "Senate Turns Back Immigration Bill," New York Times, January
21, 1913.

84. See generally Randolph Bourne, "The State," in The Radical Will: Selected
Writings 1911-1918, ed. Olaf Hansen (New York: Urizen Books, 1977), 355-395
(quotation on 383-384). The piece is actually only a fragment of a longer intended
text, which was first published in 1919 as part of the collection Untimely Papers,
ed. James Oppenheim (New York: B. W Huebsch, 1919).

85. Bourne, "Trans-national America," in The Radical Will: Selected Writings
1911-1918, ed. Olaf Hansen (New York: Urizen Books, 1977), 248-264 (quota-
tion on 252).

86. Ibid., 255, 260.

87. Ibid., 248, 258.

88. Quotations in ibid., 258, 258-259, 252.

89. Ibid., 260.

90. Ibid.

91. Bourne, "A War Diary," in The Radical Will: Selected Writings 1911-1918,
ed. Olaf Hansen (New York: Urizen Books, 1977), 319-330 (quotation on 328).

92. Foner, The Story of American Freedom, 195.

93. Morone, Democratic Wish, 129.

94. Quoted in Richard Hofstadter, Age of Reform: From Bryan to FDR (New
York: Vintage Books, 1955), 315.

95. United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp., 299 U.S. 304 (1936).

96. Ibid., 319-320.

97. Ibid., 318, 316.

98. Ibid., 319.

99. See Morone, Democratic Wish, 137.

100. West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 300 U.S. 370 (1937). Justice Owen
Roberts, after previously striking down New Deal legislation as unconstitu-
tional, cast the deciding vote sustaining government wage regulations. His shift

was widely referred to as "the switch in time that saved nine," although it re-
mains unclear to what extent the justices were responding directly to Roosevelt's
court-packing plan.

101. For a fuller account of the episode and the idea of transformative judicial
appointments, see especially Bruce Ackerman, We the People: Transformations, vol.
2 (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 25-27,
213-334 (quotation on 26); see also James McGregor Burns, Roosevelt: The Lion
and the Fox (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956), 291-315.

102. Quotation in Burns, Roosevelt, 344; and see generally Theodore J. Lowi,
The Personal President: Power Invested, Promise Unfulfilled (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 1985), 2-3; Morone, Democratic Wish, 138.

103. For the current White House administrative statistics, see Miller Center of
Public Affairs, "American President: An Online Reference Resource: Administra-
tion of the White House," www.millercenter.org (accessed October 17, 2009); see
also Lowi, Personal President, 4 (for 1939 numbers), 6 (quotation).

104. Following Theodore Lowi and Stephen Skowronek, I will employ the
term to express the contemporary constitutional order, premised on executive
leadership and the view of the presidency as the single body able to represent the
nation as a whole. See generally Lowi, Personal President; Stephen Skowronek,
The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to George Bush
(Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1993), 54-55.

105. See Richard E. Neustadt, P ver and the Modern Presidents:
The Politics of Leadership from Roosevelt to Reagan (New York: Free Press,
1990), 7; and Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make, 55, 53, 54.

106. See Foner, The Story of American Freedom, 201-204. Still, one should
note that FDR very rarely in speeches and writings actually referred to himself or
the New Deal as "liberal." As I will discuss later, this can be viewed as part of FDR's
effort to depict his policies as embodiments of a general and popular interest in
economic security rather than simply as the product of partisanship. Instead of be-
ing liberal, progressive, or conservative, New Deal measures were presented as
implementing a broad political right to freedom from necessity.

107. See Franklin Roosevelt, "Commonwealth Club Campaign Speech, Sep-
tember 23, 1932," in The Roosevelt Reader: Selected Speeches, Messages, Press
Conferences, and Letters of Franklin D. Roosevelt, ed. Basil Rauch (New York:
Rinehart, 1957), 74-85 (quotations on 79, 77).

108. Frances Perkins, "FDR Was A Little Left of Center,'" in New Deal
Thought (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 379-385 (quotation on 384); and
F. Roosevelt, "Commonwealth Club," 83.

109. See generally John Dewey, "The Economic Basis of the New Society," in
The Later Works, 1925-1953, vol. 13, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: South-
ern Illinois University Press, 1988), 309-322 (quotations on 320).

110. See generally David K. Adams, "The Concept of Parallel Action: FDR's
Internationalism in a Decade of Isolationism," in From Theodore Roosevelt to
FDR: lnternat: *sm in American Foreign Policy (Stafford-
shire, U.K.: Keele University Press, 1995), 113-130 (especially 117) and Ronald E.

Powaski, Toward an Entangling Alliance: American Isolationism, International-
ists, and Europe, 1901-1950 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991), 58-88.
For more on FDR's attempts to navigate isolationist sentiment while sustaining
Wilsonian principles — such as through debates over the 1930s Neutrality Acts —
see also David M. Kenn rom Fear: The American People in Depres-

sion and War, 1929-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 381-425.
Kennedy writes that early during FDR's presidency, "As a Wilsonian, he . . . hoped
that a world of . . . international cooperation would one day emerge. . . . But dur-
ing his first term, the mood of the country, as well as Roosevelt's personal priorities
and the practical realities of New Deal politics, dictated that he promote no serious
American effort to bring that . . . world about." Ibid., 390.

111. Franklin Roosevelt, "Our Foreign Policy: A Democratic View," in The
Roosevelt Reac lessages, Press Conferences, and Letters of
Franklin D. Roosevelt, ed. Basil Rauch (New York: Rinehart, 1957), 50-55 (quota-
tion on 52).

112. Ibid., 54, 54-55, 55.

113. See Robert Freeman Smith, "The Good Neighbor Policy: The Liberal
Paradox in the United States Relations with Latin America," in Watershed of Em-
pire: Essays on New Deal Foreign Policy, ed. Leonard Liggio and Felix Morley
(Colorado Springs: Myles, 1976), 65-94 (quotation on 66).

114. See generally Helen Lynd and Robert Lynd, Middletown: A Study in
Contemporary American Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1929), and Mid-
dletown in Transition: A Study in : icts (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1937), 181.

115. Robert Lynd, Knowledge for What? The Place of Social Science in Ameri-
can Culture (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1939), 207.

116. Ibid., 234, 214. The subsequent discussion of Robert Lynd and Thurman
Arnold expands upon arguments made about the two thinkers in Lasch, Progress
and Its Critics, 412-475 (especially 424-439). There Lasch presents a similar
critique of their New Deal faith in expertise and their skepticism of popular
sensibilities.

117. Lynd, Knowledge for What? 219-220, 247, 209.

118. See Lasch, Progress and Its Critics, 430.

119. Thurman Arnold, The Symbols of Government (New Haven, Conn.: Yale
University Press, 1935), 47-48.

120. Ibid., 47-48, 232-233, the latter quoted in part in Lasch, Progress and Its
Critics, 433-434.

121. Lasch writes of democracy for Arnold, "It meant the universalization of
material well-being, engineered by 'fact-minded persons' and 'competent diagnosti-
cians.' A democratic regime . . . had to 'carry its people along with it emotionally';
but that did not imply that the people should take an active part in governing
themselves." Lasch, Progress and Its Critics, 434-435.

122. Arnold, The Symbols of Government, 111-112, 112.

123. Ibid., 112, quoted in part in Lasch, Progress and Its Critics, 433, 434.

124. Quoted in Burns, Roosevelt, 345-346, 274, 275.

125. For more on Hillman and the "quest for security," see Steve Fraser, "The
'Labor Question,' " in The Rise and Fall of the New Deal Order, 1930-1980, ed.
Steve Fraser and Gary Gerstle (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989),
55-84 (quotations on 78). For Depression-era unemployment figures, see Frances
Fox Piven and Richard A. Cloward, Poor People's Movements: Why They Suc-
ceed, How They Fail (New York: Vintage Books, 1979), 46, 108. See pages 41-45
for a discussion of poor relief and page 121 for industrial unionism and strike
statistics.

126. See National Labor Relations Act of 1935, 29 U.S.C. ch. 7, §§151-169.

127. For more on how measures like the Wagner Act undermined the forms of
"belated feudalism" that structured the wage system, see especially Karen Orren,
Belated Feudalism: Labor, the Law, and Lit tent in the United States
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 204-230.

128. James Gray Pope, "The Thirteenth Amendment versus the Commerce
Clause: Labor and the Shaping of American Constitutional Law, 1921-1957," Co-
lumbia Law Review 102 (2002): 1-122 (quotation on 97).

129. For the role of the Southern Democratic Party in curtailing the New Deal,
see William Forbath, "Constitutional Change and the Politics of History," Yale
Law Journal 108 (1999): 1917-1930 (especially 1927-1929); see also Justin Akers
Chacon and Mike Davis, No One Is Illegi tlence and State Repres-
sion on the U.S.-Mexico Border (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006), 67.

130. Dewey, "Economic Basis," 318.

131. John Lewis, "Industrial Democracy in Steel," in New Deal Thought (New
York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 204-211 (quotation on 207).

132. Dewey, "Economic Basis," 318.

133. See William Forbath, Law and the Shaping of the American Labor
Movement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991), 158-166, on
the drawbacks of the new statist paradigm for labor — especially government's
role in restricting organizing and protest activity. See also Christopher Tomlins,
The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Move-
ment in America, 1880-1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 103-
147. As Tomlins writes, "expecting to gain license to pursue privately-defined ob-
jectives unhindered," over the long term the Wagner Act instead produced a
framework in which "unions . . . found themselves vulnerable to regulation by the
very agency to which they looked for vindication of their traditional practices."
Ibid., 145.

134. Roosevelt quoted in Burns, Roosevelt, 274. On Frankfurter's vision of
the relationship between labor and business, and the emphasis of the state as
best able to articulate a common good, see Pope, "Thirteenth Amendment,"
25-30.

135. See generally Bruce Ackerman, We the People: Foundations, vol. 1 (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1991), 230-265 (quota-
tions on 259).

136. Quotations in ibid., 259.

137. Andrew Jackson, Messages and Papers of the Presidents 1789-1897, vol.
3, ed. James D. Richardson (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1900),

392

90. For more on the episode, see Brian Cook, Bureaucracy and Self-Government:
Reconsidering the Role of Public Administration in American Politics (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 54-55.

138. See Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy. Jefferson to Lincoln
(New York: Norton, 2005), 312-329, 359-424; and also Cook, Bureaucracy and
Self-Government, 49-59.

139. See Larry Kramer, The People Themselves: Poj ionalism and
judicial Review (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 189-206.

140. Emmanuel Sieyes, "What Is the Third Estate?" in Political Writings, ed.
Michael Sonenscher (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2003), 136-137 (quotation
on 137).

141. See Arnold, The Symbols of Government, 112-114 (quotations on 113).

142. Muller v. Oregon, 208 U.S. 412, 422 (1908).

143. See Adkins v. Children's Hospital, 261 U.S. 525 (1923) (quotation on
553).

144. West Coast Hotel Co. v. Parrish, 398.

145. See Gretchen Ritter's discussion of what she terms "the 'feminization' of
civic membership" for more on the relationship between Muller, Adkins, and West
Coast Hotel Co. Gretchen Ritter, The Constitution as Social Design: Gender and
Civic Membership in the American Constitutional Order (Stanford, Calif.: Stan-
ford University Press, 2006), 44-53, 79-83, 138-142 (quotation on 138).

CONCLUSION

1. See Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada, 305 U.S. 337 (1938); and Sweatt v.
Painter, 339 U.S. 629 (1950).

2. Quoted in Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second
Reconstruction in Black America, 1945-1982 (Jackson: University Press of Missis-
sippi, 1984), 105.

3. See W. E. B. Du Bois, "Whither Now and Why," in The Education of Black
People: Ten Critiques, 1906-1960, ed. Herbert Aptheker (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1973), 149-158 (quotations on 149, 157).

4. W E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on
Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2007), 259.

5. See Martin Luther King, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Commu-
nity^ (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), 112, 133.

6. Quotations in ibid., 137

7. Ibid., 112, 165; and Henry George quoted in ibid., 163-164.

8. Ibid., 165.

9. Ibid., 167, 190.

10. Ibid., 175.

11. Ibid., 182.

12. Ibid., 188.

13. U.S. Department of State, "United States Objectives and Programs
for National Security," in Foreign Relations of the United States: 1 950, vol. 1

393

(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1977), 241. Classified until 1977,
NSC-68 is generally credited to Paul Nitze, who was director of policy planning at
the State Department and chaired the National Security Council Study Group that
wrote the document.

14. See Kevin Johnson, "The End of Civil Rights as We Know It? Immigration
and Civil Rights in the New Millennium," U.C.L.A. Law Review 49 (2002):
1481-1512.

15. See generally Mae Ngai, Im\ d the Making
of Modern America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 127-166
(statistics about the Bracero Program and deportation efforts on 139, 135, and
156); Kitty Calavita, Ins, be Bracero Program, Immigration, and the
I.N.S. (New York: Routledge, 1992), 18-112; and Kevin Johnson, "Open Bor-
ders?" U.C.L.A. Law Review 51 (2003-2004): 230-232.

16. See Johnson, "Open Borders?" 231 for statistics on permanent residents;
and Michael Hoefer, Nancy Rytina, and Bryan C. Baker, Department of Homeland
Security Office of Immigration Statistics, "Estimates of the Unauthorized Immi-
grant Population Residing in the United States: January 2009," January 2010,
www.dhs.gov (accessed March 13, 2010), 4.

17. See Hoefer, Rytina, and Baker, "Estimates of the Unauthorized Immigrant
Population," 1.

18. See Ngai, Impossible Subjects, 265-270 (quotation on 268).

19. Quotation in ibid., 269. For more on the effects of mandatory deportation,
see "Group Reports That 1996 Immigration Law Separated 1.6 Million from
Families," Associated Press, July 18,2007, www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,289734
,00. html (accessed September 2, 2009); and Serena Hoy, "The Other Detainees,"
Legal Affairs, September/October 2004, www.legalaffairs.org (accessed September
2, 2009). Offenses for which immigrants have been deported include "writing bad
checks, selling $10 worth of marijuana, or pulling someone's hair during a fight at
a party." Hoy, "Other Detainees."

20. See David Cole, "Are We Safer?" New York Review of Books, March 9,
2006, www.nybooks.com (accessed October 27, 2009).

21. On the use of the penal system, see generally Mark Dow, American Gulag:
Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
For statistics on immigrant detainees, see Nina Bernstein and Julia Preston, "Better
Health Care Sought for Detained Immigrants," New York Times, May 7, 2008,
www.nytimes.com (accessed September 2, 2009).

22. See Hiroshi Motomura, An liting: The Lost Story of Immi-
gration and Citizenship in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press,
2006), 189-204 for his account of nineteenth-century "immigration as transi-
tion" and for his belief that a model of presumptive or "intending" citizenship
should be employed today regardless of changes in the ethnic composition of

23. For statistics about the protests, see Justin Akers Chacon and Mike Davis, No
One Is Illegal: nee and State Repression on the U.S.-Mexico Border
(Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2006), 292.

24. See Sarah Ferguson, "A Day without White People," The Village Voice,
April 25, 2006, www.villagevoice.com (accessed October 27, 2009).

25. Randal C. Archibold, "Crowds Are Smaller at Protests by Immigrants,"
New York Times, May 2, 2008, www.nytimes.com (accessed September 3, 2009).

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has benefited from the kindness and assistance of many people. To begin
with, I am indebted to Nancy Rosenblum, Michael Sandel, and Richard Tuck for
their encouragement and guidance from the very beginning of this project. Each
offered invalua ened patiently to my ideas, and helped to clarify the

scope and meaning of these arguments. I also owe special thanks to Bruce Acker-
man, who read numerous versions of the material and whose intellectual generos-
ity provided an essential sounding board. All four have shown immeasurable
scholarly and personal commitment, and represent a model of teaching that I hope
to follow. Countless other friends, colleagues, and mentors have contributed to this
book by providing moral support, reading drafts, or suggesting fruitful paths for
research. Many have taken time out of their busy schedules to help me with my
work, and I am deeply appreciative. I would like to thank Kerry Abrams, Jonathan
Bach, Ash Bali, Paulo Barrozo, Ken Chen, Noah Dauber, Stefan Dolgert, Aron
Fischer, Williar on Frank, Nick Frayn, Jeffrey Green, David Grewal,

Forrest Heidel, Stanley Hoffmann, Daniel Kanstroom, Devesh Kapur, Yukiko
Koga, Sharon Krause, Jedidiah Kroncke, Douglas Kysar, Darryl Li, Karuna Man-
tena, Daniel Markovits, Pratap Mehta, Daniel Moses, Hiroshi Motomura, Isaac
Nakhimovsky, Jedediah Purdy, Danya Reda, Sanjay Reddy, David Roediger, Verity
Smith, George Van Cleve, and Patrick Weil. For many years, Alex Gourevitch has
been a close friend and interlocutor; our discussions have been a source of chal-
lenge and inspiration.

Generous financial support was provided by the Charles Warren Center, a Gradu-
ate Society Fellowship at Harvard University, and the Oscar M. Ruebhausen Fund at
Yale Law School. I am very grateful to Michael Aronson, my editor at Harvard Uni-
versity Press, for his faith and unflagging commitment to this project, as well as to
the rest of his editorial team — including Heather Hughes, John Donohue, and Julie
Palmer-Hoffman. I also thank two anonymous reviewers for their careful com-
ments and incredibly instructive suggestions. In addition, I feel privileged to have
finished this book at Cornell University, and would like to thank the Law School
for its tremendous support and my colleagues in particular for their encourage-
ment during the last stages of this process.

Finally, this book would not have been possible without my family. I am for-
ever indebted to my parents, Phyllis Safiya Gabriel and Kipkorir Aly Azad Rana,

397

who have shaped me more than they know. I thank my Kenyan and American rela-
tives for their kindness and great warmth, as well as my "in-law" family, who have
welcomed me completely. I am most indebted to Odette Lienau, my companion and
intellectual partner, who read countless drafts with immense care and provided ex-
tensive feedback, all the while offering infinite patience and love. I dedicate this
book to her and to my parents, who were my first and remain my greatest teachers.

Abrams, Kerry, 185, 368n31, 377nl3,

378n24
Absolutism: Catholicism and, 56-58; of

Parliament, 69-72
Ackerman, Bruce, 299, 316
Adams, John, 76, 96
Address to the People of Great Britain (Jay),

78,366nl82
Adkins v. Children's Hospital (1923),

322-323
Africa: neocolonialism and, 131-132; W. E. B.

Du Bois on, 332

r pioneers, 11
Agrarian justice (Paine), 125, 130
Agrarian movement. See Populist movement

o, Emilio, 273
Alien Enemies Act (1798), 369n37
Alien land laws, 215-216, 381n70
Alien suffrage laws: during colonial era, 60;

repeal of, 237; territorial expansion and,

American Federation of Labor, 212-213,

284-285, 380n67
American interventionism: Franklin Delano

Roosevelt on, 304-306; Martin Luther

King Jr. on, 335-336; Neville and Watson

on, 204; Randolph Bourne on, 292-293;

Theodore Roosevelt and, 286-287;

Woodrow Wilson and, 287-290
American Railway Union, 177, 223-224
American Revolution: causes of, 14-15,

23-24, 354n3; exceptionalism of, 20-22;

producerist democracy and, 125-129; rise

of populist tradition and, 120-125; sense
of crisis during, 96-97

American set: ical basis for,

31-37; imperial expansion and, 25-28;
Irish colonization and, 28-30; justifica-
tions for, 24

Ames, Fisher, 124, 129, 198

Amherst, Jeffrey, 66

Anbinder, Tyler, 375nl48

Ancestry, liberty and, 58-59, 70-71

Anderson, Joseph, 144, 145

Andrews, Charles, 354n3

Anglo-Boer Wars, 1 1
ixons, 69-70

Anglo subjects: emergence of free, 46-50;
supremacy of, 45-46

Annexation: Spanish-American War and,
272-274, 281-284, 387n58; xenophobia
and opposition to, 281-282, 388n71

Anti-Federalists, 140-141, 182
Anti-statism: during Civil War period,
182-183; politics of duality and,

102-105; post-Revolution revolts and,

100-102
Appeal to the Inhabitants of Quebec, 95,

366nl82
Appleby, Joyce, 141-142
Arendt, Hannah, 20-21, 22
Aristotle, 123
Arkansas, 237
Armitage, David, 34, 35

Arnold, Thurman: Christopher Lasch on,

391nnll6,121; on hum;

imperialism, 236, 308-311; on statecraft,

319,321
Articles of Confederation, 142-143, 145
Australia, 11, 353n26
Ayers, Edward, 200, 211

Banner, Stuart, 35, 361nll2

Battle of Fallen Timbers, 130

Bedford, Duke of, 25, 354n6

Bentham, Jeremy, 52, 92

IVrcovitch, Sacvan, 55-56

Blackstone, William, 84

Borah, William, 291

Bourne, Randolph, 290-296, 324, 326, 347

Bracero Program, 340

Bradford, William, Jr., 87

Bradley, Joseph, 228

Bradley, Patricia, 85, 364nl56

Bradwell v. Illinois (1873), 228, 322

Brewer, David: on economic independence
and free citizenship, 226; executive
prerogative and, 236; In re Debs and,
224; rejected vision of, 235; United States
v. Celestine and, 230; on women's
equality, 322

British colonies: D. K. Fieldhouse on,
355nl0; expansion of, 67-69; as
experiment in republicanism, 50-55;
insularity and immigration in, 58-62;
social mobility in, 46-50; views on
liberty, 89-93

i
63-65; colonization of Ireland and,
28-30; indirect rule and, 73-79;
mercantilism and, 132-136; native land
rights and, 65-73; settler revolt and,
21-22; territorial expansion of, 25-28;
views on liberty, 89-93

Brock, George, 101

Brown, Christopher, 80, 363nl43

Brown, Henry, 275-277, 279

Brownson, Orestes: on expansion and
economic freedom, 99, 156-158; on
industrial production, 162; on a laboring

class versus a leisure class, 244-245;

link to anti-Federalism, 182; radical

populism of, 154; on republican freedom,

213
Bryan, George, 140-141, 182
Bryan, William Jennings, 179, 180,211,

214
Burke, Edmund, 20, 90, 91-92, 354n5
Burke, William, 354n5
Burnett, Christina, 279
Byllesby, Langdon, 154-155, 162, 187

California Land Settlement Act (1851),
119

Calvin, Robert, 31

Calvin's Case (1608), 37-40, 46, 71, 72

Campbell v. Hall (1774), 71-73

Canada: British control over, 25-26, 63;
invasion of, 94-95, 366nl82; Quebec Act
and, 73-79

Capitalism. See Industrial capitalism

Carew, Peter, 30

Carnegie, Andrew, 284

Catholicism: absolutism and, 57-58; free
citizenship and, 117; governance under
Louisiana Purchase and, 144; Guy
Fawkes Day and, 362nl38; Quebec Act
and, 73-79; settler xenophobia and,
57-58, 60-61, 76-78, 96, 117, 144,
166-167, 360n97, 362-363nl38;
Thomas Jefferson on cultural assimilation
and, 148

Catt, Carrie Chapman, 260-261

"Centinel." See Bryan, George

Charles I, 359n90

Checks and balances, 316

Cherokee Indians, 111-114

Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831),
112-113,229

Children: indentured servitude and, 41-42;
'nor and, 163

China: commercial expansion and, 286;
Theodore Roosevelt on, 265-266; as a
threatening empire, 192; as a world
power today, 2

Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), 191

Chinese immigration: alien land laws and,
215-216, 381n70; John Marshall Harlan
on, 191-193; Page Act and, 378n24;
racial exclusion and, 189-193, 199-200

Christianity: civilization and, 29-30, 31-32;
conquest of infidel lands and, 72

CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations),
312,313

Civilian Conservation Corps, 267

Civilization: Christianity and, 29-32;
"savagery" and, 29-30, 34-37, 270-271

Civil rights movement, 329-336, 343

Civil War: effects of, 15, 172-175,
183-193; government power during,
182-183; party identification and,
380n56

Cleveland, Grover, 223-224

Cleveland, Sarah, 144, 367n20

Cocke, William, 144

Coke, Edward: on alien landholding,
357n43; Anglo colonization and, 24,
31-33; Calvin's Case and, 31-33, 37-40;
on colonists' rights, 46; ethnic hierarchies
and, 324; on foreigners' rights, 115; idea
of subjectship, 37-40; on indigenous
laws, 31-33, 35; John Locke and, 43;
Joseph Story and, 108; Lord Mansfield
and, 72, 73

Cold War, 179, 334, 337-338

ism: Theodore Roosevelt on, 283;
W E. B. Du Bois on, 332. See also

colonialism
Colonies. See British colonies
Colonization: free market and, 152-153;
Langdon Byllesby on, 154-155; legal and
political basis for, 24-37; Orestes
Brownson on, 156-157; settler freedom
and, 109-110; Thomas Skidmore on,
159-160, 161-162
Commercial expansion, 284-287, 381n75
Commercialism, 234, 263, 265-266, 268
Common Sense (Paine), 125, 126
Commonwealth v. Pullis (1806), 149
Communism, Martin Luther King Jr.
on, 334

Congress, territorial government and,
145-146

Congress of I r nations (CIO),

312,313

"Connected criticism," 17

Conquered land: colonial legal status of,
31-32, 40, 46; indirect rule and, 71-73;
settled land versus, 49-50, 81-84, 88-89;
slavery and, 80-81, 84, 88. See also
Settled land

Conquest of infidel lands, 29-30, 32-36,
72-73,106-111

Constituent power, 318-319

Constitution: colonial peace and, 371n70;
constitutional perfection, 6-7; delegation
of lawmaking under, 298-299; empire
and, 106-111, 169-172, 275-281,
367nl4; neocolonialism and, 134-135;
New Deal and, 315-320; Northwest
Ordinance and, 142; political duality and,
105-106, 119-120, 147-148; populist
tradition and, 132, 133, 139-148; Roger
Taney on, 146, 167-172; "take care"
clause of, 222-223; territorial governance
and, 275-281

Constitution mary period,

121-122

Consumerism, 251-253, 261, 264-265,
268-269

Continental Congress, 78, 94-95, 142-143

Cooperative commonwealth, 178, 209, 213,
246,380n67

Cooperatives, 155, 158, 252

"Cornelius," 142

Corporations: co-optation of government
by, 185; land ownership and, 215-216;
post-Civil War rise of, 184-185

Cotton, John, 55-56, 95

Court-packing, 299-300, 390nl00

Coverture, 163

Crawford, William, 69

Credit crisis, post-Revolution, 100-101

Crevecoeur, J. Hector St. John de, 5

Croly, Herbert: on "direct democracy," 254;
idea of an "authoritative representative
body," 246, 256; Lasch and Sandel on,

Croly, Herbert (continued)

383n8; nationalism and, 253-256; New
Deal and, 296-297; Randolph Bourne
and, 293; on republican freedom,
242-243, 245-247, 250-251; Theodore
Roosevelt and, 256

Cromwell, Oliver, 359nn87,90

Danforth, Samuel, 56, 95

Daniels, Roger, 191

Davis, David Brion, 93

Dawes Act (1887), 229-230

Daws, S. O., 258

Debs, Eugene, 178, 223-224, 382n83
on of Independence, 96

Del Castillo, Richard Griswold, 119

Democracy and Education (Dewey), 248

Deportation, of aliens, 239, 342, 369n37

Devereux, Walter, 30

Dewey, John: on democratization of
ce and leisure, 248-249,
250-251; on economic independence,
314; on nationalism and consumerism,
256-257; on rebuilding foundations of
republicanism, 240; on security, 313; on
security and liberty, 303-304; on social
reform, 241

A Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal
Law (Adams), 76

Divided sovereignty, 123, 138-140

Division of labor. See Labor

Doctrine of Discovery, 106-111, 168

Dominican Republic, 287-289, 305

Donnelly, Ignatius, 207-208, 378n29

Doster, Frank, 210

Douglas, Stephen A., 165-166

Downes v. Bidwell (1901), 275-277,
279-281,289,298

Draper, William, 87-88

Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857): American
expansion and, 272, 273; congressional
power and, 225; overview, 146; populist
xenophobia and, 168-169; rejection of,
275, 279

Duality. See Politics of duality

Du Bois, W. E. B., 331-332, 338, 343

Dunmore, Fourth Earl of, 8!
Dyer, Thomas G., 384n47

Economic concentration, 183-189

Economic independence: Civil War and,
172-175; free market and, 149-154;
gender and racial hierarchies and,
162-167, 188-193, 215; Langdon
Byllesby on, 154-155; Orestes Brownson
on, 156-158; Populist movement and,
204-205; Progressivism and, 242-247,
314; republicanism and, 52-53; Thomas
Skidmore on, 158-162

Economic security, 311-315, 319-320, 333
its movement and, 330;
John Dewey on, 249; Progressivists on,
314; Robert Lynd on, 308; Walter Weyl
on "social surplus" and, 244-245

Egremont, Second Earl of, 66

Electoral process: during Great Depression,
311-312; Populist movement and,
205-210; racial discrimination in, 211,
217, 380n64; reforms in, 257-259.
See also Suffrage

Elizabeth I, 41

Elkins, Caroline, 8

Emancipation Proclamation, 172-175

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 166

Emigration. See Immigration; Territorial

Franklin's views on, 64;
commercialism and, 234-235; constitu-
tionalizing, 105-106; free citizenship and,
263-264; free market and, 148-149; free
trade and, 285-286; imperial prerogative
and, 106-111, 367nl4; liberty and,
22-23; millennialism and, 269-271;
Populist movement and, 200-205,

103-105, 129-131; Roger Taney on, 171;
in settler ideology, 94-98, 233-234;
settler revolt and, 62; Spanish-American
War and, 272-275; "strenuous life" and,
264-271; United States as, 1-4;
universalism and, 281-290. See also
"Empire of liberty"

"Empire of liberty," 114, 148, 154, 368n28
Equality/equal opportunity: American
settlerism and, 12; civil rights movement
and, 329-336; economic, 306; exception-
alism and, 5-6; Franklin Delano
Roosevelt on, 302-304; social inclusion
and, 327-329; Thurman Arnold on,
310-311

5-7; of American revolution, 20-21; in
settler ideology, 97
Executive power: economic security and,
314-315; Franklin Delano Roosevelt on,
311; New Deal constitutionalism and,
315-320; permanent peace and, 221-222
Executive prerogative, 222-226, 298-299
Expansion. See Global expansion;

Extralegal organizing, 205-210

"Facing West from California's Shores"
(Whitman), 233

Factory system, 90-92

Fallen Timbers, Battle of, 130

Farmers Alliance: decline of, 213, 258;
political mobilization and, 208-209,
376nl; Populist movement and, 15,
176-178, 194-195; unified labor and,
196

Fascism, ,>i) _

Fawkes.Guy, 362nl38

Federal government: Civil War-era views
on, 182-186; defeat of radical populist
tradition and, 142-148; populist wariness
of, 103-104; Revolutionary elites on,
135-142

Federalists, 135-143, 316-317

Federal Reserve Board, 258-259

Federal Trade Commission, 258-259

Ferguson, Niall, 351nl

Field, Stephen, 222-223, 227-228, 382n90

Fieldhouse, D. K., 27, 352nl3, 355nl0

Fischer, David Hackett, 55, 68, 359n90

Fletcher, Andrew, 41, 357n57

Foner, Eric, 164-165, 375nl48

Food and Drug Administration, 258-259

ForanAct (1885), 199

Forbath, William, 3 82n90

France, 25-26, 63-65

Frank, Leo, 218

, Felix, 1 15

Franklin, Benjamin: on British expansion,
63-65; on commerce and manufacturing,
136-137; on empire and liberty, 95;
native land rights and, 69; on Somerset v.
Stewart, 85

Franklin secession movement, 134

Fredrickson, George: on Christianity and
civilization, 29; on frontier settlers, 143;
on indentured servitude, 42; influence of,
353n27; on servitude and land ownership,
43; on settler typology, 352nl3

Free blacks: d amst, 47; free

citizenship and, 118-120; inclusion of,
44, 183-184; land ownership and,
172-173; Roger Taney on, 168-169;
unfree labor and, 164-165

Free citizenship: consumerism and,

251-257; decline of, 320-325; degraded
labor and, 188-193; gender and,
163-164, 321-324; labor market and,
382nn87,90; permanent peace and,
221-222; racial discrimination and,
115-119, 184; Roger Taney on, 171-172;
roots in colonial subjectship, 49-50,
58-61, 70; under settlerism, 95, 262-263,
280, 320-321; social inclusion and,
328-329; stratified subjectship and,
114-120, 221-222, 276-279, 320-321;
wards of the state and, 226-233

Freedmen's Bureau, 172, 375nl59

wer and, 1-4;
colonization and, 109-110; conflicting
views in Britain and America on, 89-93;
Edmund Burke on, 20, 90; land own-
ership and, 52-55; as self-rule, 22-23,
54-55; settler empire and, 12-14; slavery
and, 50-52; subordination and, 5, 14,
353n27; two faces of, 3, 13

Free labor, 172-175, 187-193, 226-233,
322-324, 378n30

Free market, 148-154, 159

Free trade, 284-287

French and Indian War, 66

French Revolution, 20

Frontier experience, 1 1

Frontier settlers: Federalist views on, 1
free market and, 152-153; Langdor
Byllesby on, 154-155; Orestes Bro
on, 156-157; Thomas Skidmore on,
159-160,161-162

Fugitive Slave Clause, 364nl52

Fugitive Slave Laws (1793 and 1850), 118,
158, 364nl52

Fuller, Melville, 192, 279, 280, 281

Gates, Thomas, 33, 40

Gender differences: free citizenship and,
163-164, 321-324; gendered division of
labor and, 341; Jacksonian populism and,
163-164; Knights of Labor and, 196,
378n30; unfree labor and, 162-165;
women as wards of the state and,
228-229, 322-324; women's suffrage
and, 257-262, 368n31

General Allotment Act (1887), 229-230

George, Henry, 333-334

George III, 74

Gilbert, Humphrey, 28

Gilded Age: corporate political control
during, 185-186; extralegal organizing
during, 206-210; immigrant and racial
exclusion during, 191-193; party
affiliation during, 206-207, 380n56

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 259-260, 341

Global expansion: constitutionalizing,
275-281; free citizenship and, 263-264;
millennialism and, 269-271; Randolph
Bourne on, 290-296; Redfield Proctor on,
387n58; Spanish- American War and,
272-275; Theodore Roosevelt on,
265-266; universalism and, 281-290

Godkin, E. L., 212

Goldman, Emma, 261

Gompers, Samuel, 212-213, 284-285,
380n67

Goodwyn, Lawrence, 179-180, 213, 376nl

Gordon, William, 77

Gould, Jay, 194

Government: Civil War-era views on,
182-186; distribution of wealth and,
243-245; of English colonies, 48-49;
Federalist views on, 135-142; Populist
mobilization and, 205-210; populist
tradition and, 121-125; Roger Taney on,
167-172; Thomas Paine on, 125-126;
William Manning on, 126-129. See also
Federal government; Territorial
governance

Grandfather clause, 211, 380n64

Grand Labor Coalition, 194-195

Grant, Ulysses S., 265

"Great Community," 248, 249, 256

Great Depression, 296, 311-312. See also
New Deal

"Great Society," 248

Great Trek, 1 1

Great Upheaval, 194

Gregg, Andrew, 145

Grenada, 71-72

Guadeloupe, 25-26, 63

Gunpowder Plot, 362nl38

Guy Fawkes Day, 362nl38

Habeas Corpus Act (1679), 78

Hale, Mathew, 41

Hamilton, Alexander: on federal govern-
ment, 134-136; on law and popular
sovereignty, 139; on Louisiana Purchase,
110; on postcolonial dependence, 137; on
property ownership, 101-102; on Senate
and presidency, 316

Hardwicke, First Earl of, 81, 84

Hargrave, Fi

Harlan, John Marshall, 191-193, 279-280,
281

Harrington, James, 46, 52, 53, 267

Harrison, William Henry, 110

Hartz, Louis, 5

Hatch, Nathan, 64, 95

Hawaii, 201, 272

Hay, John, 286

Hendrickson, David, 366nl4, 371n70

Hereditary property, 158, 159

Hill, Christopher, 357n61
Hillman, Sidney, 312
Hofstadter, Richard, 179-180
Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 231, 234,

263-264, 266-268, 327
Holt, John, 80-81, 87
Holton, Woody, 125
Homestead Act (1862), 116, 184, 18

187
House of Representatives, 316
Howard, Milford, 219
Hughes, Charles E., 323
Huguenots, 60

Hulsebosch, Daniel, 39, 354n3
Humanitarian imperiali

izing global expansion and, 275-281;

introduction, 262-264; National Security

Council paper 68 (NSC-68) and, 338;

Randolph Bourne and, 290-296;

Spanish-American War and, 272-275;

Thurman Arnold on, 309-311; universal-

ism and, 281-290, 336-343
Humanitarianism, 308-311

Idaho territory, 237

Illegal aliens, 239, 345-347

Immigrant activism, 345-347

Immigration: Alien Enemies Act, 369n37;
alien landholding and, 357n43; alien land
laws, 215-216, 381n70; alien suffrage
laws, 60, 116, 237; changes in views and
laws on, 237-239; colonial policies on,
58-62; deportation and, 117-118, 239,
369n37; division of labor and, 339-343;
free European immigrants, 114-120;
Horace Kallen defends, 384n24;
humanitarian imperialism and, 336-343;
illegal aliens and, 239, 345-347;
immigrant activism, 345-347; internal
and external authority and, 17; land
ownership and, 215-216; Randolph
Bourne on, 293-294; Robert La Follette
on, 389n83; Roger Taney on, 377nl9;
settler empire and, 12-13; social inclusion
and, 343-347. See also Chinese immigra-
tion; Office of Immigration

Imperial prerogative: British Crown and,
39-40; colonial conquest and, 36;
congressional prerogative and, 108, 226,
289; defeat of robust populist tradition
and, 142; executive prerogative and, 223,
298-299; free citizenship and, 118-120;
gender and racial hierarchies and,
342-343; government power and,
104-105; indirect rule of indigenous
groups and, 111-114; new republic and,
106-111; during Reconstruction, 184;
Roger Taney and, 167-172; territorial
expansion and, 187-188; Thomas
Jefferson on, 147-148; Treaty of Paris and,
107; xenophobia and, 165-172, 187-188

"Imperial School," 354n3

Imperial subjectship, 45^16, 48, 50, 61,
111-120, 189-193, 276-277. See also
Stratified subjectship

Inclusion: civil rights movement and,

329-336, 343; humanitarian imperialism
and, 336-343; of immigrants, 343-347;
in modern America, 326-330, 343-348;
under New Deal, 16-17, 324-325

Indentured servitude, 40-45, 47

Indians. See Indigenous groups

on of Ireland
and, 28-30; Edward Coke on, 31-33;
free citizenship and, 118, 119-120;
indirect rule and, 111-114; John Locke
on, 33-37; Johnson v. M'Intosb and,
106-111; land rights for, 65-73,
361nll2; legal implications of settled
land for, 49-50; mercantilism and,

129-131; Roger Taney on, 168; as royal

subjects, 23; settler colonialism and, 8-10;

territorial governance and, 282-283;

Thomas Skidmore on, 160-161; wards of

the state and, 229-230
Indirect rule, 72-79, 91, 111-114
Industrial capitalism: bureaucratic hierarchy

and, 244, 248-250; Gilded Age and,

184-186; New Deal critique of, 306-308;

unequal bargaining power and, 151-152,

232,312-313

Industrialism: after the Civil War, 184-185;

Progressivism and, 243; republicanism

and, 234-235; slavery and, 90-92; wage

labor and, 148-149, 174; wards of the

state and, 226-233
Industrial unionism, 247, 313-314
Infidel lands, conquest of, 29-30, 32-36,

72-73,106-111
Inherited wealth, 158, 159
In re Debs (1895), 223-224, 225
In re Neagle (1890), 222-223, 224, 225
Insular Cases, 275-277, 289, 387n61
Insularity, in settler ideology, 58-59
Insurrection Act (1792), 224
Intelligence, democratization of, 248-249
The Interest of Great Britain Considered

with Regard to Her Colonies and the

Acquisitions of Canada and Guadaloupe

(Franklin), 63
Internationalism: nonimperial, 347;

Randolph Bourne on, 290-291, 293-295;

Thomas Skidmore on, 161; Wilsonian,

287-291
International police power: American

hegemony and, 287-288, 337-338;

Martin Luther King Jr. on, 332, 335-336;

millennialism and, 337-338; Roosevelt

Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine and,

286-287; United States v. Curtiss-Wright

Export Corp. and, 297-299
Interstate Commerce Commission, 258-259
Interventionism. See American

Ireland, 11-12, 28-30, 353n24, 356n22

Ireton, Henry, 359n87

Isolationism: Franklin Delano Roosevelt
and, 304, 391nll0; nativism and, 291,
389n83; Republican Party and,
290-291

Jefferson, Th< r Tomlins on,

373n97; on Constitution, 146-148; on
empire and liberty, 95, 368n28; on English
subjectship and colonial autonomy, 88; on
governmental power, 147; Louisiana
Purchase and, 144, 367n20; on mercantil-
ism, 137; "personal competency" and,
302; politics of duality and, 147-148;
presidential leadership and, 318; on
threats posed by slaves and Indians, 96

Jennings, Francis, 29, 356n22

Jews, social inclusion of, 360nl04
, Lyndon, 330

Johnson v. M'Intosh (1823), 106-108, 160

Jones, Chester Lloyd, 257-258

Jones & Laughlin Steel Corporation, 313

Julian, George, 172-174, 183

Kallen, Horace, 249-250, 252, 257, 384n24

Kanstroom, Daniel, 239

Kennedy, David M., 391nll0

Kettner, James, 59

The Key of Libberty (Manning), 126-127,
256

King, Martin Luther, Jr., 332-336, 338, 343

Knight, Joseph, 92-93

Knights of Labor: on C i

199-200; formation of, 206; on free
citizenship for women, 378n30; labor
reform and, 194, 380n67; on land held
for speculation, 215-216; political
mobilization and, 208-209; Populist
movement and, 15, 177; social inclusion
and, 93, 196; unified labor and, 195-196,
199-200

Knight v. Wedderburn (1778), 92-93

Knowledge for What? (Lynd), 306

Know Nothing Party, 167

Knox, William, 27-28, 75, 81-82

Kornbluh, Mark, 206, 258

Jackson, Andrew, 112, 131, 150, 168, 317
James, William, 267-268
James I, 30
Jamestown, 33, 40
Jay, John, 78

Labor: Bracero Program and, 340;

consumerism and, 251-253; division of,
47-48, 162-165, 188-189, 248-250,
259-260, 339-343, 344; executive
prerogative and, 222-226, 382nn87,90;

Herbert Croly on, 245-247; Horace
Kallen on, 249-250, 384n24; influence
on political arrangements, 352nl3; John
Dewey on, 248-249; Martin Luther
King Jr. on, 333-334; nationalism and,
254-255; plebiscitary presidency and,
314-315; Populist movement and,
205-210, 213-214; populist tradition
and, 129-131; Progressivism and,
242-243, 314; racial discrimination in,
164-165, 188-193; settler empire and,
12; Walter Weyl on leisure and, 244-245;
wards of the state and, 226-233; women
and, 259-260, 322-324; xenophobia
and, 215. See also Free labor; Unfree
labor; Wage labor

Labor market, 90-92, 173-174,
382nn87,90

Labor unions, 149-151, 194

La Follette, Robert, 291, 389n83

La Follette, Suzanne, 259

Laissez-faire economics, 173, 184, 226, 228,
231, 306-308

Lamb, William, 178, 194, 208

Land ownership: alien landholding and,
357n43; Anglo rights to, 46-47;
corporate speculation and, 215-216,
381n70; for free blacks, 118, 172-173;
John Locke on, 33-37; liberty and,
52-55; native rights to, 106-111,
361nll2; Protestantism and, 56; racial
discrimination in, 118-119, 215-216,
381n70; republicanism and, 186-189;
settler revolt and, 65-73; subjectship and,
38-39; suffrage and, 359n87

Lane, Ralph, 28

Lasch, Christopher: on balance and divided
sovereignty, 123; on Croly and Weyl,
383n8; on Populist movement, 180; on
Robert Lynd, 391nll6; on Thurman
Arnold, 308, 391nnll6,121; on virtue,
122
Laurie, Bruce, 150-151, 152-153, 155
Law(s): alien land laws, 215-216, 381n70;
anti-Federalist views on, 140-142;

delegation of lawmaking, 298-299, 300;
Federalist views on, 138-140; miscegena-
tion laws, 44-45

Lawson, Gary, 367nl4

Lawson, Philip, 25, 57, 74

League of Nations, 291, 304

Lee, Arthur, 76-77, 85-86, 87-88

Lee, Richard Henry, 76, 78, 140

.28,213,316,
369n46, 370n55

Leisure: democratization of, 244-245,
249-251; Horace Kallen on labor and,
384n24; Martin Luther King Jr. on labor
and, 333-334; Theodore Roosevelt on,
264

Letters from an American Farmer (Creve-

Levinson, Sanford, 169, 171

Levy, Recorder, 149

Lewis, John, 313-314

Liberalism, 301-311, 390nl06

id I Action (Dewey), 256

Liberty. See Freedom

Licht, Walter, 132, 194

Lincoln, Abraham, 173, 186,265,318

Lippmann, Walter, 262, 301

Lipset, Seymour Martin, 11

"Little Englander" approach, 25-26

Livingston, Philip, 77, 78

Lochner, Joseph, 231

Lochner v. New York (1905), 226-227,
231-232, 322, 382n87

Locke, John: on American conquest, 33-37;
on child labor, 41; on economic and
political independence, 46; Joseph Story
and, 108; on liberty and absolute power,
52; res nullius and, 49; on slavery,
43, 358n65

Logan, George, 101, 102

Louisiana Purchase, 110, 143-145, 169,
225, 367n20

Lowell, Abbott Lawrence, 277

Lowi, Theodore, 300, 390nl04

Lynd, Helen, 306

Lynd, Robert, 306-307, 319, 391nnll6,
121

Machiavelli, Niccolo, 52-53, 94

Madison, James: on Constitution and
republican government, 134, 135-136,
137-139; on expansion and congressio-
nal administration, 142-143; on Fugitive
Slave Clause, 364nl52; on self-interest,
197, 198; on Senate and presidency, 316;
on slave rebellion, 87

Magna Carta, 70

Mahan, Alfred Thayer, 386n47

Mamdani, Mahmood, 91

Manifest Destiny, 165-166, 268

Mann, Michael, 10

Manning, William: on labor and liberty,
121; on militarism and territorial
expansion, 155; personal history of, 126,
370n58; producerist democracy and,
126-129; republican freedom and, 213;
on self-interest, 127-128, 197; on social
conflict, 127-128, 256-257; Society of
Laborers and, 128-129, 208-209

Mansfield, Lord, 71-73, 76, 80, 82-86,
364nl49

Marshall, John: on frontier expansion, 131;

imperial prerogative and, 106-108, 110;

Indian reservations and, 229; on indirect

rule of indigenous groups, 112-114;

territorial expansion and, 104
Martial virtues, 267-268
May, Robert, 110-111, 367nl8
Mayhew, Jonathan, 64-65
McKenna, Joseph, 277
McKinley, William, 202, 21 1, 237,

274-275
McNeill, George, 199
Mercantilism, 132-137
Merrill, Michael, 128-129
Metzger, Charles, 363nl38
Mexican- American War, 166

free citizenship and, 119-120; populist
ibia and, 166
Middletown (Lynd and Lynd), 306

'.. .
306

Migration: free market and, 152-153;
Langdon Byllesby on, 154-155; Orestes
Brownson on, 156-157; Thomas
Skidmore on, 159-160, 161-162

Militarism: American globalism and, 283;
Jerry Simpson and, 201-202; Martin
Luther King Jr. on, 335-336; Randolph
Bourne on, 293; "strenuous life" and,
266-268

Mill, John Stuart, 52

63-65; Manifest Destiny and, 165-166;
National Security Council paper 68
(NSC-68) and, 337-338; pacification
of threats and, 61, 96-97, 165-166,
220-226, 270-271, 282-283; republican-
ism and, 55-58; resurgence of, 268-271;
during Revolutionary period, 95-96;
territorial expansion and, 96-97,
105-106; Thomas Skidmore's alternative
vision of, 161; universalism and, 282-284

Miller, Samuel, 222-223, 226, 227, 235,
236

Milton, John, 56

Minor v. Happersett (1874), 229, 322

Miscegenation laws, 44-45

Missouri ex rel Gaines v. Canada ( 1 C >3S),

330

lion: Farmers Alliance and, 376nl;

during Great Depression, 311-312; of

immigrants, 345-347; Populist movement

and, 205-210
Monaghan, Henry, 352n9
Monroe, James, 285
Monroe Doctrine, 285-286, 334-335

, Edmund, 40
Morone, James, 99, 253, 254, 296
Morrill Land Grant College Act (1862),

184
Morrill Tariff Act (1861), 184
Mostellaria (Plautus), 358n79
Motomura, Hiroshi, 115, 343
Muller v. Oregon (1908), 322, 323
Multiple traditions thesis, 7
Murray, James, 74

NAACP (National Association for the

Advancement of Colored People), 330
National Association for the Adva

of Colored People (NAACP), 330
National Bank, 150
National Banking Act (1863), 184
Nationalism, 251-257, 293-295
National Labor Relations Act (1935),

312-313
National Origins Act (1924), 238
National Reform Press Association (NRPA),

208-209
National Security Council paper 68

(NSC-68), 337-338, 394nl3
National service, 267
Nativism, 167, 291, 375nl48, 389n83
Naturalization: for Chinese immigrants,

189-190, 192; in colonies, 59-61; politics

of duality and, 114-120
Naturalization Act (1802), 115-116
Neocolonialism, 131-132, 134-135,

140-141
Neuman, Gerald, 118
Neustadt, Richard, 301
Neville, William, 178, 203-204, 281
New Deal: Civilian Conservation Corps

and, 267; constitutional legacy of,

315-320, 326; liberalism and, 301-311;

overview, 16, 240, 296-297; plebiscitary

presidency and, 297-301; security and,

311-315; women workers under, 323
The New Democracy (Weyl), 243
New France. See Canada
"New Nationalism," 255-256
New World colonies, 8-9
Ngai, Mae, 342
Nicholas V, 29
Nitze, Paul, 394nl3
Nkrumah, Kwame, 131, 334, 338
NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp.

(1937), 313
Norman conquest, 29-30, 69-70
Northwest Ordinance (1787), 109, 142,

144, 169
NRPA (National Reform Press Association),

208-209

NSC-68 (National Security Council paper
68), 337-338, 394nl3

Obama, Barack, 1-2

Oceanic Steam Navigation Co. v. Stranahan

(1909), 237-238
Office of Immigration, 184
Office of the Comptroller of the Currency,

184
Olney, Richard, 224
Omaha Platform, 207-208, 210, 215,

378n29, 381n70
"Omni-competent" individual, 306-308
Onuf, Peter, 109-110
Orange Free State, 1 1
Oregon Donation Land Act (1850), 116
Orren, Karen, 151
O'Sullivan, John L., 165
Otis, James, 70
Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its

Present Crisis (Strong), 268-269
"Our Foreign Policy: A Democratic View"

(Franklin Delano Roosevelt), 304

Page Act (1875), 190-191, 378n24

Paine, Thomas, 104, 125-126, 130, 158,
370n55

Paley, William, 52, 91-92

Palmer, Robert, 122

Parliament, British, 69-72, 80

Paternal subjectship, 38-40, 163-164,
228-229, 322-324, 382n92. See also
Stratified subjectship

Peckham, Rufus, 231-232, 235, 236

Pedersen, Susan, 8

People's Party: critique of centralization,
258; decline of, 212-213; Frank Doster
on, 210; Ignatius Donnelly and, 378n29;
opposition to, 211; overview, 15;
political mobilization and, 209; Populist
movement and, 176-178, 180; support
for procedural reforms, 254; Tom
Watson on, 176, 197; unified labor and,
196; views on expansion, 200-201,
218-219

Perkins, Frances, 302-303

Permanent peace, 55, 95-97, 105-106,
165-166, 220-226, 270-271, 282-283

"Personal competency," 302-304, 306-307

Pettit, Philip, 52, 53, 54, 92, 123-124

Phagan, Mary, 218

Philippines: territorial annexation and,
277-278, 281-282, 388n71; Theodore
Roosevelt on, 273, 283; Thurman Arnold
on, 309-311; war of occupation in,
203-204; William McKinley on, 274-275

Pinkertons, 210

Plebiscitary presidency: conclusions on,
321-325; explanation of term, 390nl04;
legal and institutional framework of,
297-301; liberalism and, 301-315;
New Deal and, 296-297, 315-320

Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), 191-192, 193

Pocock, J. G. A., 94

Political parties, 206-208, 380n56

Politics: in Jacksonian era, 150-151,
317-318; nationalization of, 253-256;
republican, 51-52, 54-55; m Revolution-
ary era, 120-125; security and, 311-315;
social movements and, 213-214, 220,
332-333, 344-345

Politics of du vpansion and,

106-111; division of labor and, 47-48,
162-165, 188-189, 339-341; indirect
rule of indigenous groups and, 111-114;
overview, 103-106; racial discrimination
and, 114-120; territorial governance
and, 279

Pontiac (Ottawa chief), 66

Pope Day, 362nl38

Populist movement: collapse of, 210-211,
219-220, 258; contradictions inherent
within, 211-214; defeat of anti-colonial

nd, 215-220; empire and,
200-205; executive prerogative and,
222-226; overview, 176-182; "people"
under, 195-200; permanent peace and,
220-222; relation to populist tradition,
177; Richard Hofstadter on, 180;
self-rule and mobilization under,
205-210; social inclusion and, 196-197,
198-200, 281; women's suffrage and, 259

Populist tradition: Civil War and, 172-175;
commercial self-regulation and, 103,
126, 150-151, 155-158; debates over
Constitution and, 135-142; free market
and retreat of, 149-154; gender and racial
hierarchies and, 162-167; institutional
defeat of robust form, 142-148;
Jacksonian version of, 103-104, 131,
150-151, 162-172; labor and empire
in, 129-131; legislative supremacy and,
123-128; mercantilism and, 132-135;
neocolonialism and, 131-132; New
Deal democratic theory and, 316-318;
producerist democracy and, 125-129;
radical alternative during Jacksonian era,
153-162; relation to Populist movement,
177; republican foundation of, 100-103;
Roger Taney and, 167-172; role of law
under, 121-125, 141; xenophobia and,
103-104, 148-149

Poverty: English approach to, 41-43; forced
migration and, 117-118, 357n61; Martin
Luther King Jr. on, 333; republican
dependence and, 53, 136-137; Walter
Weyl and, 243-244

Powderly, Terence: on Chinese labor,
199-200; on gender and racial equality,
196, 199; immigration and, 216, 238; on
Knights of Labor, 195, 199; on land held
for speculation, 381n70; on republican
freedom, 209; unified labor and, 178,
194,196,197,198

Presidency: economic security and,
314-315; international focus on
elections, 1-2, 337; legal and institutional
framework of, 297-301; New Deal
constitutionalism and, 315-320. See also
iry presidency

President's Committee on Administrative
Management, 300

Preston, William, 166

Price, Richard, 77, 89

Proctor, Redfield, 387n58

Producerist democracy, 125-129, 147, 205,
370n58

Progress and Poverty (George), 333-334

Progressive Democracy (Croly), 245-246

Progressivism: administration and,

257-262; consumerism and nationalism
and, 251-257; democratization of
intelligence and leisure in, 248-251;
Franklin Delano Roosevelt and, 301-302;
labor and, 242-247, 314; New Deal and,
297; overview, 241-242; women's
suffrage and, 259-261

The Promise of American Life (Croly), 253

Propaganda, 307-308

Property ownership: Anglo rights to, 46-47;
gender hierarchies and, 163; hereditary
property and, 158, 159; John Locke on,
33-37; liberty and, 52-55; native rights
to, 106-111; Protestantism and, 56;
republicanism and, 186-189; settled land
versus conquered land and, 49-50; settler
revolt and, 65-73; subjectship and,
38-39; territorial laws on, 368n31;
Thomas Skidmore on, 159-161

Protestant millennialism, 55-58, 63, 95-96

Protestants, 29, 55, 60-61, 73-79, 359n89

The Public and Its Problems (Dewey), 248

Public opinion, 307-308

Puerto Rico, 275-276, 278

Pullman Company, 223-224

Puritans, 55, 57, 64-65, 77, 95

Putney Debates, 359n87

Quebec Act (1774), 73-79, 363nl38
Quinn, David Beers, 355nl5

Racial discrimination: American global
expansion and, 281-290; civil rights
movement and, 329-336, 343; in
electoral process, 211; against free blacks,
47-48, 118-119, 164-165; immigration
and, 114-120, 238-239, 339; imperial
prerogative and, 187-193; Jews and,
360nl04; Populist movement and, 198,
203-204, 217-218; property law and,
118-119, 368n31; social inclusion and,
324-325; Theodore Roosevelt and,
385-386n47; unfree labor and, 165-167;

unified labor and, 196-199. See also

Radical Republicans, 93, 173-174,

183-184
Railroads, 185, 186-187, 194, 223-224
Raleigh, Walter, 28

Randolph, Carman, 281-282, 388n71
Raustiala, Kal, 387n61
Rawls, John, 17-18
The Reasons for keeping Guadaloupe at a

Peace, preferable to Canada explained in

Guadaloupe to his Friend in London,
25-26
Reconstruction, 174, 183-184

Republicanism: colonies as experiment in,
50-55; divided sovereignty and, 123,
138-140; empire and, 22-23, 94-98,
148-149; European hegemony as threat
to, 132-135; free market and, 149-154;
industrialism and, 234-235; Langdon
Byllesby and, 154-155; legislative
supremacy and, 121-128, 172; localism
and, 140-141; Orestes Brownson and,
156-158; permanent pe
220-222; populist account of, 120-125;
Populist movement and, 213-214;
Progressivism and, 241-242; Protestant
millennialism and, 55-58; settler revolt
and, 89-93; subordination and, 12-14,
353n27; Terence Powderly on, 209;
territorial expansion and, 186-189;
Thomas Skidmore and, 158-162; William
Neville and, 204

Res nullius, 49

Revolutionary War. See American
Revolution

Rice v. Dwight Manufacturing Co. (1848),
152

Richard II, 356n22

The Rights of Man (Paine), 125, 126
'Is of Man to Property (Sk
158

Roberts, Owen, 321-322, 389nl00

Rodney, Caesar, 149

Roman Empire, 64

Roosevelt, Franklin Delano: American
n and, 219, 304-306;
c security and, 315; c
authority, 311; execi
authority under, 297-301; isolat
and, 304, 391nll0; liberalism and,
301-306, 390nl06; New Deal and,
296-297. See also New Deal

Roosevelt, Theodore: on American cultural
affinity with South Africa, 265, 385-
386n47; American interventionism and,
219, 240, 286-287, 304; commercialism
and, 234; global expansion and, 289; on
liberty, 288, 290; on millennial expan-
sion, 270-271; "New Nationalism" and,
255-256; on Philippines and colonialism,
283; on race, 385-386n47; on shared
imperial destiny with Britain, 265,
385-386n47; on social membership and
empire, 264-265, 267-268, 327;

273-274; "strenuous life" and, 263-267;
on territorial governance, 280-281;
on universalism and empire, 270, 283
Rousseau, Jean- Jacques, 102

Royal Proclamation (1763), 65-67, 69, 71,
73,95

Sandel, Michael, 54, 383n8

Schama, Simon, 364nl49

Schuyler, Philip, 95

Second Treatise of Government (Locke),
33-34, 43

Segregation, racial, 198, 330, 331, 343
, Guy, 367nl4

Self-interest, 197-198, 204-205, 209

Sepulveda, Juan Gines de, 30

Settled land: colonial autonomy and, 63-64,
70; conquered land versus, 81-84, 88-89;
res nullius and, 49-50. See also Con-
quered land

Settler colonialism: American Revolution
and, 23; comparative historical assess-
ment of, 8-14; forms of, 352nl3

Settler empire: definition of term, 3, 12-13;
disintegration of, 175, 236-239; Downes
v. Bidwell and, 275-281; Dred Scott v.
Sandford and, 169-171; early American
republic as, 109-111; free citizenship
under, 95, 262-263, 280, 320-321;
frontier settlers and, 101-102; immigra-
tion and, 59-62, 114-120; populist
tradition and, 129-131

Settler revolt: British Empire and, 21-22,
62; effects of, 97, 205-206; native land
rights and, 65-73; Quebec Act and,
73-79; slavery and, 79-93; war with
France and, 63-65

Settlers: ideology on insularity and

immigration, 58-62; republicanism and,
50-55; royal discretion over, 37-45;
social mobility and, 46-50; supremacy of
Anglo, 45-46

"Shadow Populists," 179-180

Shaw, Peter, 362nl38

Shays' Rebellion, 100-102, 130, 133-134,
142, 146

Shiras, George, 277

Shklar, Judith, 356n41

Sidney, Henry, 29

Sieyes, Emmanuel, 318

Simpson, Jerry, 178, 201-202, 215, 219,
381n75

Skidmore, Thomas: on labor in the populist
tradition, 154; link to anti-Federalism,
182; millennial ideas of, 161; as a
nommperial thinker, 177-178, 324;
rejection of settler exclusivities, 148;
views of, 158-162, 172

Skinner, Quentin, 50, 54

Skowronek, Stephen, 301, 390nl04

Slaughterhouse Cases (1873), 226-228

Slavery: Andrew Fletcher on, 357n57;
Anglo social mobility and, 47-48; in
colonial newspapers, 364nl56; Edmund
Burke on, 20; emancipation and, 86,
87-88, 172-175, 363nl43; free
citizenship and, 118, 119-120; Fugitive
Slave Clause and, 364nl52; George
Fredrickson on, 358n75; indentured

servitude and, 42-45; John Locke on,
43-44, 358n65; labor market and,
173-174; liberty and, 50-52; miscegena-
tion laws and, 44-45; nativism and,
375nl48; Orestes Brownson on, 158;
race and, 43-45, 47-48; Revolutionary
discourse of, 20, 89-91; Robert May on,
367nl8; Roger Taney on, 168-170; in
Roman comedies, 358n79; settled land
versus conquered land and, 80-81, 84,
88; settler fears of insurrection and,
47-48, 86-87; settler revolt and, 79-93;
Somerset v. Stewart and, 82-84, 364nl55;
Thomas Skidmore on, 159

Slave trade: Benjamin Franklin on, 85;
competing colonial views of, 86, 365nl64

Smith, Al, 304

Smith, John, 40

Smith, Rogers, 5-6, 7, 61

Social conflict, 256-257

Social criticism, 17-18
obility, 46-50

"Social surplus," 243-245, 252, 333

Social unrest, 222-226

Society of Laborers, 128-129, 208-209

Somerset, James, 82, 83

Somerset v. Stewart (1772), 80, 82-87,
364nl55

Sosin, Jack, 354n6

Southwest strike, 194

Sovereignty. See Di\ ided sovereignty;
Undivided so

Spanish-American War, 201, 219, 272-275,
287, 387n58

mpire, 26, 50

Spoils system, 206, 317

"The State" (Bourne), 292

Steere,J.Neal,282

Steuart, Charles, 82

Stevens, Thaddeus, 183-184, 198, 378n34

Stevens v. Reeves (1829), 151-152

Stiles, Ezra, 77, 95

Story, Joseph, 108

Stratified subjectship, 37-40, 45-48,
114-120, 221-222, 276-279, 320-321

"Strenuous life," 263-271

Strikes, 149, 194, 223-224

Strong, Josiah: American globalism and,

240, 263-264; on commercialism, 234;

on liberty, 288; millennialism and,

268-270, 271
Subjectship: of colonial settlers, 37-45,

49-50, 58-61, 70; imperial, 45-46, 48,

50, 61, 111-120, 189-193, 276-277;

modern, 320-325; paternal, 38-40,

163-164, 228-229, 322-324, 382n92;

stratified, 37-40, 45-48, 114-120,

221-222, 276-279, 320-321
Subordination: of Indians, 33; liberty and,

3, 5; republicanism and, 12-14, 353n27;

settler empire and, 13-14
Suffrage: as defining social right, 356n41;

disenfranchising laws and, 211, 380n64;

land ownership and, 359n87; politics of

duality and, 116; for women, 257-262,

368n31. See also Electoral process
A Summary View of the Rights of British

America (Jefferson), 88
Charles, 190
Suppression. See Subordination
Supreme Court, 299-300
Sutherland, George, 297-299, 301,

322-323
Sweatt v. Painter (1950), 330
Sydney, Algernon, 46, 51,52
The Symbols of Government (Arnold), 308

Takaki, Ronald, 229-230

Taney, Roger, 146, 167-172, 190, 273, 275,
377nl9

Taxation, 71-72, 74, 76

Temple, William, 41

Territorial expansion: of British Empire,
25-27; closing of American frontier and,
174; commercialism and, 234-235;
Franklin Delano Roosevelt on, 302;
Frederick Jackson Turner on, 263; free
citizenship and, 263-264; free market
and, 152-153; immigration and, 239;
Langdon Byllesby on, 154-155; Orestes
Brownson on, 99, 156-157; Populist
and, 200-205, 218-219;

relation to populist tradition, 129-131,
142-148; republicanism and, 94,
186-189; Roger Taney on, 169-171; in
settler ideology, 233-234; Thomas
Skidmore on, 159-160, 161-162; Walt
Whitman on, 233-234. See also Global
expansion

Territorial governance, 275-280, 367nl4

Terry, David, 222-223

Test Act (1673), 57, 74-75

Thompson, E. P., 90

Tocqueville, Alexis de, 5

Tomlins, Christopher, 146, 151, 373n97,
392nl33

Trachtenberg, Alan, 187

Trail of Tears, 114, 131

Transvaal, 1 1

Treaty of Gaudalupe-Hidalgo, 119

Treaty of Paris (1763), 25, 107, 108, 272

Treaty of Utrecht (1713), 65

Tully, James, 285

Turner, Frederick Jackson, 11, 130, 233,
263,266

Tushnet, Mark, 6, 352n9

Tuveson, Ernest Lee, 95

Ulster, 29, 30, 353n24

Undivided sovereignty, 121-125, 128, 172

Unemployment, mobilization and,
311-312

Unfree labor, 162-167, 188-193

Unified labor, 195-200, 217-218

Unionism, 247, 248

Union organizing: economic security and,
315; in Jacksonian era, 150-151,
153-155; Jay Gould and, 194; Jefferso-
nian politics and, 149; mobilization and,
311-312; nationalism and, 254-255;
Wagner Act and, 312-314

■ or, 272-275,
283-289, 326-327, 337-339; liberty and
authority of, 1-4; as a settler empire, 3,
12-14; social inclusion in, 343-348. See
also American settlement

United States v. Celestine (1909), 230

LI ni led Stales v. Curtiss-Wright Export

Corp. (1936), 297-299
United States v. Nice (1916), 230
United States v. Rogers (1845), 168, 171
United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898),

192-193
Universal republic: Langdon Byllesby

and, 154-155; Orestes Brownson and,

156-158; Randolph Bourne and, 293-295;

Thomas Skidmore and, 158-162,

177-178

Urban League, 330

Utopian ideals, in settler ideology, 55-56,
95-97

Valdes, Jose Bordas, 288

Van Buren, Martin, 317-318

Van Cleve, George, 83, 364nl55

Van Devanter, Willis, 230

Virginia Company, 31, 33, 35

Virtue: democratization of, 129, 214; elite
republicans on, 122-123; martial virtues,
267-268; political mobilization and, 209;
Populist movement and, 214; self-interest
and, 122-124, 127, 197-198; William
Manning on, 129, 197

Voortrekkers, 11

Wage labor: Abraham Lincoln on, 173;
courts and, 149, 151-152, 226-228,
231-233, 313, 321-323, 382n87;
Langdon Byllesby on, 154-155; Orestes
Brownson on, 156-158; Progressivism
and, 242-243; republican freedom and,
52-54, 90-93; rise of, 148-149; as wage
slavery, 173-174, 196, 209, 345; women
and, 322-324

Wagner Act (1935), 312-313, 392nl33
[omson, 229

Walker, Francis Amasa, 229

Walzer, Michael, 17

Wards of the state, 113-114, 226-233,
322-324

Washington, George, 69, 133, 224

Washington Territory, 185

Watson, Tom: on American ir

204, 281; collapse of Populism and, 211;
on executive prerogative, 224-225, 226;
on global expansion, 326; political career
of, 180; on political parties and labor
organizations, 208; on race and labor,
176, 196-197; on social inclusiveness of
Populism, 178, 198; on territorial
expansion, 201, 202, 218, 219; unified
labor and, 196-198, 217-218; views on
race compared to Thaddeus Stevens, 198;
white supremacy of, 180, 217-218

Wealth: consumerism and, 252; inherited
wealth, 158, 159; Martin Luther King Jr.
on, 333; Walter Weyl on, 243-245

Wedderburn, Alexander, 75

Wedderburn, John, 92-93

Weitzer, Ronald, 8

West Coast Hotel Co. v. Vanish (1937),
299-300, 321-322, 323, 389nl00

West Indies, 25-26

Weyl, Walter: consumerism and, 252-253,
261; on democratizing leisure, 245; on
economic security, 243-244, 313; on
education, 244-245; influence on
Theodore Roosevelt, 255-256; Lasch and
Sandel on, 383n8; on rebuilding
foundations of republicanism, 240, 257;
on republican freedom, 242-245,
250-253; on "social surplus," 243-244;
on support for procedural reforms, 254

"What's the Matter with Kansas?" (White),
211-212

Whiskey Rebellion, 101-102, 224

White, Edward, 237-238, 277-279, 280

White, Thomas, 28

White, William Allen, 211-212

White House staff, 300

Whitman, Walt, 233

Wiebe, Robert, 120, 123, 133, 207

Wilentz, Sean, 128-129

Williams, Robert, 69-70

Williams, Solomon, 65

Wilson, Woodrow: American ir

ism, 287-289, 304; isolationism and,
291; on liberty, 288, 290; millennialism
of, 287-289; Tom Watson on, 219

"Wilson Plan," 288-289

Winthrop,John,55, 95

Wolfe, Patrick, 9, 353n26

Women: free citizenship and, 159, 259-261,
322-323, 378n30; gendered division of
labor and, 259-261, 341; Knights of
Labor on, 196, 378n30; as paternal
subjects, 163-164, 228-229, 322-324;
suffrage for, 163, 257-262, 368n31

Wood, Gordon, 21, 22, 126, 370n58

Woodward, C. Vann, 219

Worcester v. Georgia (1832), 112, 113,
229

Work. See Labor

Workhouses, 41

Working men's parties, 153-154, 156,
158-159,162

Xenophobia: against Catholics, 57-58,
60-61, 76-78, 96, 117, 144, 166-167,
360n97, 362-363nl38; defeat of
anti-colonial thinking and, 215-220;
global expansion and, 281-290; imperial
prerogative and, 187-193; isolationism
and, 219, 291; Jews and, 360nl04;
nativism and, 167, 291; Populist
movement and, 180-181, 203-204;
Quebec Act and, 73-79; resurgence of
millennialism and, 268-271; rise of
populist, 148-149; Roger Taney and,
167-172; social inclusion and, 324-325;
Thomas Jefferson and, 148; Tom Watson
and, 180, 217-218; unfree labor and,
165-167; unified labor and, 196-199.
See also Racial discrimination

Young, Whitney, 330