This chapter insists on the centrality of state-making in American politics of the Revolutionary era. In contrast to fairly long and distinguished traditions in the social scientific and historical literatures highlighting an early American constitutional hostility to governance and perhaps even a nascent anti-statism, this paper argues that early American independence was worked out against the background assumption of a strong state and interventionist social and economic policymaking. The chapter offers two different investigations of this phenomenon. Part I features a re-examination of the political-economic origins of the Declaration of Independence. In contrast to conventional renderings of that historic document highlighting a simple liberty against tyranny, the first part of this paper argues that most of Thomas Jefferson’s words actually described failures of British statecraft--i.e., a state doing too little--and aspired to create an alternative post-revolutionary state that would do better and far more. Part II of the chapter moves from the Declaration itself into a more general exploration of early revolutionary-era legislation in a complementary effort to demonstrate the unprecedented interventionism of the original American revolutionary state across a wide set of political-economic policy concerns.