1. Edling, M. M., A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of an American State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008)Google Scholar.

2. Carpenter, D. P., The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

3. Minicucci, S., “Internal Improvements and the Union, 1790–1860,” Studies in American Political Development 18 (2004): 160–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Usselman, S. W., Regulating Railroad Innovation: Business, Technology, and Politics in America, 1840–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. Novak, W. J., The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996)Google Scholar.

6. Taylor, G. R., The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860, vol. 4, The Economic History of the United States (New York: Rinehart and Company, Inc., 1951)Google Scholar.

7. Of course, the importance of railroads to the American state was not immediately apparent. Notably, early railroads co-existed with canals and it was initially not evident which transportation system would dominate nineteenth-century travel and shipping. Promoters of the two transport systems regularly competed against one another, using taxes, rules about freight and passengers, legislative influence, and even explosives in their conflict. See Goodrich, C., Government Promotion of American Canals and Railroads, 1800–1890 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1960)Google Scholar; MacGill, C. E., History of Transportation in the United States Before 1860 (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1917)Google Scholar; Stover, J. F., American Railroads, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

8. Schivelbusch, W., The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986)Google Scholar.

9. Chandler, A. D., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Gordon, S. H., Passage to Union: How the Railroads Transformed American Life, 1829–1929 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996)Google Scholar.

10. Berk, G., Alternative Tracks: The Construction of American Industrial Order 1865–1917 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Dobbin, F., Forging Industrial Policy: The United States, Britain, and France in the Railway Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Dunlavy, C. A., Politics and Industrialization: Early Railroads in the United States and Prussia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

11. A true national transportation system would not emerge until the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 (See Stover, American Railroads). Prior to the transcontinental railroad's construction, incomplete local rail systems and differing track gauges reduced the effectiveness of locally supported railroads. But, despite these flaws, the early state-supported railroads still improved the speed and reliability of national travel, shipping, and communication.

12. Evans, P. B., Rueschemeyer, D., and Skocpol, T., Bringing the State Back In (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13. Novak, W. J., “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American Historical Review 113, no. 3 (June 2008): 752–72Google Scholar; Skowronek, S., Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982)Google Scholar.

14. Bensel, R. F., Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Skowronek, Building a New American State.

15. Orren, K. and Skowronek, S., The Search for American Political Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 123CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16. Riker, W. H., Federalism: Origin, Operations, Significance (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1964)Google Scholar; Riker, W. H., The Development of American Federalism (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1987)Google Scholar.

17. John, R. R., Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995)Google Scholar.

18. Balogh, B., A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19. Rao, G., “Sailors' Health and National Wealth: Marine Hospitals in the Early Republic,” Common-Place 9, no. 1 (Oct. 2008)Google Scholar.

20. Edling, Revolution in Favor of Government.

21. Scheiber, H. N., “Federalism and the American Economic Order, 1789–1910,” Law and Society Review 10, no. 1 (Autumn 1975): 57–118CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

22. Novak, The People's Welfare.

23. Novak, “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State.”

24. Katznelson, I., “Flexible Capacity: The Military and Early American State-building,” in Shaped by War and Trade: International Influences on American Political Development, ed. Katznelson, I. and Shefter, M. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), chap. 4Google Scholar.

25. This emphasis on how federalism and decentralized action shaped American state building could be seen as yet another argument for American exceptionalism, in line with arguments about how irrational liberalism or ethnic strife undermined socialism [See Foner, E., “Why Is There No Socialism in the United States?” History Workshop Journal 17, no. 1(1984): 57–80Google Scholar; Hartz, L., The Liberal Tradition in America (New York: Mariner Books, 1991)Google Scholar]. However, the argument is not that American federalism alters the meaning or path of state building. Instead, the argument emphasizes that institutions matter. By highlighting how one American institution shaped state building, the role of other, also overlooked, institutions in non-American contexts can also be highlighted.

26. Novak, “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State.”

27. Mann, M., The Sources of Social Power: A History of Power from the Beginning to A.D. 1760, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 477CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28. See Gottdiener, M., The Social Production of Urban Space (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997)Google Scholar; Harvey, D., Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Jackson, J. B., A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Krugman, P., Geography and Trade (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Lefebvre, H., The Production of Space (Madison, WI: Blackwell Publishing, 1984)Google Scholar; Smith, A. T., The Political Landscape: Constellations of Authority in Early Complex Societies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003)Google Scholar; Soja, E. W., Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 2003)Google Scholar.

29. Goodrich, Government Promotion; Larson, J. L., Internal Improvements: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001)Google Scholar.

30. John, Spreading the News; Hill, F. G., Roads, Rails and Waterways: The Army Engineers and Early Transportation (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1957)Google Scholar; Maass, A., Muddy Waters: The Army Engineers and the Nation's Rivers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1951)Google Scholar.

31. Larson, Internal Improvements; Scheiber, H. N., Ohio Canal Era: A Case Study of Government and the Economy, 1820–1861 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1969)Google Scholar.

32. In many ways, the problems of local governments collaborating without a central actor directing them recalls the problem of the early American national state attempting to accomplish policy goals without a fully developed administrative arm (see Skowronek, Building a New American State).

33. Peterson, P. E., The Price of Federalism (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1995)Google Scholar.

34. The Pennsylvania Main Line was composed of both canal and railroad portions. The bulk of the Main Line was canals, with smaller railway connections between the waterways (see Burgess, G. H. and Kennedy, M. C., Centennial History of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Railroad Company, 1949)Google Scholar; Schotter, H., The Growth and Development of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company, 1846–1926 (Philadelphia: Allen, Lane and Scott, 1927)Google Scholar.). However, since the Main Line was such an early case of both railroad construction as well as state support for a railroad, it is included as a railroad for this analysis.

35. Goodrich, Government Promotion; MacGill, History of Transportation; Riegel, R. E., The Story of the Western Railroads (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1926)Google Scholar; Stover, American Railroads.

36. Haines, M. R., Historical, Demographic, Economic and Social Data: The United States, 1790–2000 (Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research, 2005)Google Scholar.

37. Heath, M. S., Constructive Liberalism: The Role of the State in Economic Development in Georgia to 1860 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1954)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38. Stover, J. F., History of the Illinois Central Railroad (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1975)Google Scholar.

39. While the current emphasis is on the success of state rail promotion programs in building transportation infrastructure, rail promotion efforts often had other beneficial effects. Railroad investment often sparked other areas of the economy, such as real estate, and could generate considerable wealth outside of shipping [Derrick, S. M., Centennial History of the South Carolina Railroad (Columbia, SC: The State Company, 1930)Google Scholar]. In the end, there were a multitude of reasons a state's neighbors might be interested in copying a successful rail promotion policy.

40. Local adoption of a policy is just one aspect of how state governments built national capacity via decentralized actions. The efficiency of local programs, as well as state governments' ability to coordinate with neighbors' policies, also determines just how large of an impact subnational programs had on national capacity. For railroads in particular, local decisions about rail management and connectivity with other states impacted how successfully local policies improved the national rail system. However, while issues of coordination are pertinent, the present discussion focuses only on the first step of policy adoption.

41. Campbell, B. C., Representative Democracy: Public Policy and Midwestern Legislatures in the Late Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

42. Usselman, Regulating Railroad Innovation.

43. Gray, V., “Innovation in the States: A Diffusion Study” The American Political Science Review 67, no. 4 (December 1973): 1174–85Google Scholar; Walker, J. L., “The Diffusion of Innovation among the American States,” The American Political Science Review 63, no. 3 (September 1969): 880–99Google Scholar.

44. Karch, A., Democratic Laboratories: Policy Diffusion Among the American States (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2007)Google Scholar. Though it is rarely addressed in diffusion theory, the learning process states engage in when observing other states can also be a negative process [see C. Mooney, Z., “Modeling Regional Effects on State Policy Diffusion,” Political Research Quarterly 54, no. 1 (March 2001): 103–24Google Scholar]. Hence, state legislatures may witness failed policies in neighboring states and choose to forgo a similar initiative of their own as a result. Whether positive or negative in form, social learning portrays diffusion as a purposeful action undertaken by state legislators actively aiming to improve their own economic position or local administrative capacity.

45. Karch, Democratic Laboratories.

46. Rom, M. C., Peterson, P. E., and Scheve, K. F., “Interstate Competition and Welfare Policy,” Publius: The Journal of Federalism 28, no. 3 (summer 1998): 17–39Google Scholar; Saavedra, L. A., “A Model of Welfare Competition with Evidence from AFDC,” Journal of Urban Economics 47 (2000): 248–79Google Scholar; Tweedie, J., “Resources Rather Than Needs: A State-Centered Model of Welfare Policymaking,” American Journal of Political Science 38, no. 3 (August 1994): 651–72Google Scholar.

47. Gray, “Innovation in the States”; Hwang, S. D. and Gray, V., “External Limits and Internal Determinants of State Public Policy,” The Western Political Quarterly 44, no. 2 (June 1991): 277–98Google Scholar; Peterson, P. E., City Limits (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981)Google Scholar.

48. Bailey, M. A. and Rom, M. C., “A Wider Race? Interstate Competition Across Health and Welfare Programs,” The Journal of Politics 66, no. 2 (May 2004): 326–47Google Scholar; Figlio, D. N., Kolpin, V. W., and Reid, W. E., “Do States Play Welfare Games?” Journal of Urban Economics 46 (1999): 437–54Google Scholar; Rom, Peterson, and Scheve, “Interstate Competition.”

49. Scheiber, “Federalism and the American Economic Order,” 71–72.

50. Pisani, D. T., “Promotion and Regulation: Constitutionalism and the American Economy,” The Journal of American History 74, no. 3 (December 1987): 740–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51. A related, rival explanation stresses that a great deal of rail promotion resulted from a “metropolitan mercantilism” among large, Atlantic cities such as New York and Baltimore. This slightly alternative version stresses public rail development and investment as serving one specific city, rather than a state's economic plan as a whole (Taylor, The Transportation Revolution).

52. Angevine, R. G., The Railroad and the State: War, Politics, and Technology in Nineteenth-Century America (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

53. Scheiber, Ohio Canal Era; Scheiber, “Federalism and the American Economic Order.”

54. Rubin, J., “Canal or Railroad? Imitation and Innovation in the Response to the Erie Canal in Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, New Series 51, no. 7 (1961), 1–106CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55. Ibid.

56. Volden, C., Ting, M. M., and Carpenter, D. P., “A Formal Model of Learning and Policy Diffusion,” American Political Science Review 102, no. 3 (August 2008): 319–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

57. Mooney, “Modeling Regional Effects on State Policy Diffusion.”

58. Boehmke, F. J. and Witmer, R., “Disentangling Diffusion: The Effects of Social Learning and Economic Competition on State Policy Innovation and Expansion,” Political Research Quarterly 57, no. 1 (March 2004): 39–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59. Berry, F. S. and Berry, W. D., “State Lottery Adoptions As Policy Innovations: An Event History Analysis,” The American Political Science Review 84, no. 2 (June 1990): 395–415Google Scholar; Foster, J. L., “Regionalism and Innovation in the American States,” The Journal of Politics 40, no. 1(February 1978): 179–87Google Scholar; Mintrom, M. and Vergari, S., “Policy Networks and Innovation Diffusion: The Case of State Education Reforms,” The Journal of Politics 60, no. 1 (February 1998): 126–48Google Scholar; Mooney, “Modeling Regional Effects on State Policy Diffusion.”

60. Heath, Constructive Liberalism.

61. The cautious approach of state legislatures was well founded. In the early days of the nineteenth century, many states nearly went bankrupt investing in ambitious canal projects (See Goodrich, Government Promotion of American Canals and Railroads).

62. Additionally, the political cost for a failed railroad, or abandoning a failing rail program, could be tremendous. Thus, cautious lawmakers would be expected to hesitate before rashly committing to miles upon miles of track development.

63. Mohr, L. B., “Determinants of Innovation in Organizations,” The American Political Science Review 63, no. 1 (March 1969): 111–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

64. Corliss, C. J., Main Line of Mid-America: The Story of the Illinois Central (New York: Creative Age Press, 1950)Google Scholar; Stover, History of the Illinois Central Railroad.

65. Sanders, E., Roots of Reform: Farmers, Workers, and the American State, 1877–1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

66. Pierce, H. H., Railroads of New York: A Study of Government Aid, 1826–1875 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67. Berry and Berry, “State Lottery Adoptions As Policy Innovations”; Wong, K. K. and Langevin, W. E., “Policy Expansion of School Choice in the American States,” Peabody Journal of Education 82, no. 2 (June 2007): 440–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

68. Holt, M. F., The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

69. Another key aspect of political culture that could have played a role in determining local attitudes on rail promotion was a state's age. Frontier states may have been measurably different than colonial states. Most notably, their rural nature would have compelled them to avoid rail promotion programs. However, state age, whether measured as the year the state joined the Union or years spent in the Union, would autocorrelate with numerous other measures. Hence, while a compelling variable, no measure of state age was included to avoid the autocorrelation problem.

70. Mulcare, D. M., “Restricted Authority: Slavery Politics, Internal Improvements, and the Limitation of National Administrative Capacity,” Political Research Quarterly 61, no. 4 (2008): 671–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Slavery was a major issue in its own right, and deserves a more complete theoretical discussion vis-à-vis its role in internal improvements. For instance, many southern states actually resisted federal action on railroads, in part, because they feared a stronger national state would threaten legal slavery. Hence, my own inclusion of slavery, while necessary, is also minimal and does not fully grapple with this issue. But given the magnitude of the slavery issue, any further discussion of slavery in rail promotion would distract from my own claims on state politics. Thus, the issue is, to a degree, bracketed for future research.

71. Blossfeld, H.-P., Glosch, K., and Rohwer, G., Event History Analysis With Stata (New York: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2007)Google Scholar; Box-Steffensmeier, J. M. and Jones, B. S., Event History Modeling: A Guide for Social Scientists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

72. Blossfeld, Glosch, and Rohwer, Event History Analysis With Stata.

73. Theoretically, the notion is that the critical decision was whether or not to attempt rail promotion. The method of rail promotion, such as direct investment versus tax incentive, was a distinct and separate political question. Therefore, rail promotion adoption is treated as a binary rather than an ordinal variable.

74. Goodrich, Government Promotion of American Canals and Railroads; Cline, W., Alabama Railroads (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1997)Google Scholar; MacGill, History of Transportation; Hull, C. E., Shortline Railroads of Arkansas (Normal: University of Oklahoma Press, 1969)Google Scholar; Million, J. W., State Aid to Railways in Missouri (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1896)Google Scholar; Reed, M. E., New Orleans and the Railroads: The Struggle for Commercial Empire, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966)Google Scholar.

75. In offering rail support, states may have only given a single grant to one railroad or they may have engaged in a long-term rail promotion program. Regardless of which route a state pursued, once the state gave aid it was considered as having “failed.” The data are structured in this way because states often intermittently provided rail support. For example, Missouri provided rail support in a series of discrete projects over many years. Tracking these small actions is difficult, and states are instead treated as simply either providing rail support or not. In addition, most states did offer some kind of benefit during the chartering, notably common were eminent domain powers and exemptions from taxation (Taylor, The Transportation Revolution). However, in the present analysis I am primarily interested in states offering additional, substantive aid, such as grants, banking rights, or construction funded entirely through public monies. The commonality of eminent domain powers makes them less insightful to understanding social learning diffusion processes. In addition, actions that involved a state actually spending funds or expanding a company's rights are deemed more substantive overall than the de facto eminent domain privilege. Finally, this focus on substantive aid over these more basic chartering privileges is common, as many of the historical studies that focus on the diffusion of antebellum rail promotion programs have a similar emphasis on larger rail aid plans, beyond eminent domain (Rubin, “Canal or Railroad?”; Scheiber “Federalism and the American Economic Order”).

76. Communication between states can be measured through a range of proxies, including publications that cross borders, economic ties, and citizen mobility. While all of these approaches offer insight into intrastate communication, the current analysis examines specifically connectivity through transportation infrastructure. By examining the impact of railroads and canals on policy development, the overlooked role of space and geography in policy diffusion as well as state building can be brought to light.

77. Carville, E., Cao, C., Heppen, J., and Otterstrom, S., The Historical U.S. County Boundary Files, 1790–1999 [CD-ROM] (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Department of Geography and Anthropology, 1996)Google Scholar.

78. Travel times can be estimated between a number of points, such as state capitals or the largest cities in a state, but I used the geographic center, largely because it provides an overall sense of connectivity between the two states.

79. MacGill, History of Transportation.

80. Nye, D. E., American Technological Sublime (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994)Google Scholar; Taylor, The Transportation Revolution.

81. H. Beyer, Hawth's Tools for ArcGIS, 2007, http://www.spatialecology.com/htools.

82. Haines, Historical, Demographic, Economic and Social Data.

83. In some cases, the census data point for the prior decade was not available, either because that value was not collected in an earlier census or a given state was not admitted to the Union. In those instances, the slope for projecting between the last census available and the next decade was used to predict backward as well. When that simulated value was negative, it was treated as missing data.

84. Haines, Historical, Demographic, Economic and Social Data.

85. National Governor's Association, National Governor's Association List of Historical Governors (July 2008), http://www.nga.org/portal/site/nga.

86. Box-Steffensmeier and Jones, Event History Modeling.

87. Wong and Langevin, “Policy Expansion of School Choice.”

88. Since the temporal dependence measure is primarily a control, the results for this coefficient are not reported.

89. I would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for highlighting additional rail promotion programs overlooked in the initial analysis.

90. Another potential internal economic factor driving state legislatures' decisions on rail promotion policies was local debt. For instance, Ohio's costly canal system could have prevented future state railroad promotion. However, state per capita debt is actually a poor predictor of local rail promotion choices. Utilizing state debt per capita for the year 1841, the correlation between state debt and rail policy adoption after 1841 is 0.011. This finding implies that states with higher debt were more likely to engage in rail promotion, however the relation is fairly weak (Rodden, J. A., Hamilton's Paradox: The Promise and Peril of Fiscal Federalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006Google Scholar).). Table 6 summarizes the relationship between state debt and local rail promotion policies. Significantly, there were only five states that engaged in rail promotion policies after 1841. While all five states that engaged in rail policies after 1841 tended to have low debt levels, the table also reveals that states with both high and low debt levels elected to not engage in rail promotion policies. Though it plausibly could impact local development plans, compared to other internal economic factors, internal debt was not a driving factor in states' rail promotion policy choices.

91. Cronon, W., Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1992Google Scholar.)

92. One plausible explanation for this lack of policy convergence is that rail promotion programs may only have appeared in states with large urban centers. In this scenario, rail promotion, and subsequent policy convergence, only occurred among states with the largest urban populations, and was primarily a mechanism utilized by large cities to exert control over the rural hinterland. This would explain why so many highly urbanized states, such as Pennsylvania and New York, possessed active rail promotion programs. Yet, many states with large urban centers, including Rhode Island (Providence) and Ohio (Cleveland and Cincinnati), refused to engage in rail promotion. Furthermore, many decidedly nonurban states did have rail promotion. In particular, Chicago was not an especially developed urban center when Illinois engaged in a rail promotion project in 1832 (Corliss, Main Line of Mid-America). Therefore, competition between states with large urban centers alone cannot explain state legislatures' approach to the problem of local rail development.

93. Burgess and Kennedy, Centennial History of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company; Rubin, “Canal or Railroad?”; Wilson, W. B., History of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company (Philadelphia: Henry T. Coates and Company, 1899)Google Scholar.

94. Pierce, Railroads of New York; Stevens, F. W., The Beginnings of the New York Central Railroad: A History (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1926)Google Scholar.

95. Harlow, A. F., The Road of the Century: The Story of the New York Central (New York: Creative Age Press, 1947)Google Scholar; Pierce, Railroads of New York.

96. Harlow, The Road of the Century.

97. The value mapped for 1840 is actually industrial workers per county. Manufacturing capital per county was not measured in the 1840 census, and this alternative measure is used in the figure to maintain accuracy.

98. Derrick, Centennial History of the South Carolina Railroad.

99. Heath, Constructive Liberalism.

100. Ibid.

101. Ibid.

102. Derrick, Centennial History; Heath, Constructive Liberalism.

103. Heath, Constructive Liberalism.

104. Cline, Alabama Railroads.

105. Mills, J. T., Power and Politics in a Slave Society: Alabama, 1800–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978)Google Scholar.

106. Ibid.

107. Usselman, Regulating Railroad Innovation.

108. Cline, Alabama Railroads; Griffith, L., Alabama: A Documentary History to 1900 (University: University of Alabama Press, 1972)Google Scholar.

109. Reed, New Orleans and the Railroads, 13.

110. This does not mean that local conditions were the only feature in determining local rail promotion strategies. As indicated, neighbors' did play a role in agenda setting. Furthermore, internal political conflicts between parties or regional interests also determined the odds of rail promotion adoption. Thus, while the present analysis sheds light on how local factors alone shaped state rail promotion activities, the process of local rail subsidy in the antebellum era was complex and involved a multitude of forces. Further work is needed to fully illuminate how all of these distinct processes were related to and interacted with one another.

111. Ka, S. and Teske, P., “Ideology and Professionalism: Electricity Regulation and Deregulation over Time in the American States,” American Politics Research 30, no. 3 (May 2002): 323–43Google Scholar; Menzel, D. C. and Feller, I., “Leadership and Interaction Patterns in the Diffusion of Innovations among the American States,” The Western Political Quarterly 30, no. 4 (December 1977): 528–36Google Scholar.

112. Bensel, Yankee Leviathan; Bensel, R. F., The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Skowronek, Building a New American State.

113. Katznelson, “Flexible Capacity”; Teaford, J. C., The Rise of the States: Evolution of American State Government (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002)Google Scholar.