The case of internal improvements at the federal level from 1787 to 1837 suggests that American governance patterns were pragmatic and utilitarian, rather than committed to laissez-faire theory of the small state. Federal power can be used in a variety of ways to create a liberal capitalist state by building transportation and communication infrastructures. While the concessions in America’s constitutional model to small-state Republicans often thwarted the more ambitious plans, it was not laissez-faire theory that prevented the use of federal power for nation-building projects. When government in the first half of the century wanted to promote economic development, “no overriding theory held government back.” The liberal forms of governance that developed in America were not the Lockean minimal state that Louis Hartz famously imagined to be America’s continuous laissez-faire tradition. Rather, the American experience of internal improvements reveals the complicated entanglements of state, law, and capitalism in the nineteenth century and illustrates the continuing problems with neat categories of state and market, public and private, to describe the political economy of capitalism.

Nearly a million people dead and counting. More than 77 million infected, a little less than one-fifth of the total infections worldwide.1 The United States has had more deaths than any other country, and its COVID-19 death rate of 276 per 100,000 people is the highest among the world’s wealthiest nations.2 Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans are hospitalized and die at significantly higher rates than whites.3 Some bright lights exist too, one being the speedy development of vaccines and their deployment in 2021 – although there, too, both the national government and the states have sometimes stumbled.4 Another is legislative enactment of major fiscal measures which sustained individuals and businesses in the face of economy calamity.5 Still, by many public health measures, the United States’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic has been a governmental failure.

During the latter half of the Reconstruction era, Republicans in the South faced major electoral defeats due to the enfranchisement of white voters, dismal economic conditions, and Democratic Party-sponsored terror against black voters. As a result, by 1877 the Democrats won unified control of state governments across the region – and largely held it for the succeeding two decades. Yet this decline in Republican electoral strength did not reduce the South’s influence at the GOP national convention. Indeed, from 1877 to 1896, the eleven states of the former Confederacy made up around 25 percent of Republican convention delegates. There were three reasons for this. First, many Republican national leaders remained hopeful that the end of Reconstruction was not the final word on the GOP’s role in the South and believed that a winning electoral strategy could be devised for the party to remain a viable political force in the South. Second, Southern delegates passionately – and, to a large extent, correctly – argued that their states’ inability to produce electoral votes and congressional seats for the GOP was due to Democratic sabotage of the electoral process. With Southern blacks increasingly excluded from the democratic process at home, the Republican National Convention remained one of the few remaining political arenas in which they could participate. For the party of Lincoln to try and strip these delegates of their role within the party was, for some, problematic. Finally, Southern delegates were very helpful to presidential hopefuls from other parts of the country because their support could be easily acquired through patronage and other forms of bribery. Thus, whoever could afford to court the South could go into the convention with a sizable bloc of votes.