This article offers a new account of one of America’s earliest campaigns of state protest: the effort in Massachusetts to halt the national government’s perceived dismantling of an established Atlantic commercial order. To date, scholars have either condemned this campaign that spanned from 1803 to 1815 as a dangerous harbinger of the Civil War or vindicated it as a salutary extension of the Founding. This article steers a different course. By focusing on the specific language of protest and the complex hybrid of ideas and material realities from which this language emerged, this article presents this campaign not as a prelude to the Civil War nor as a postscript to the Founding, but as an iterative process by which Federalist lawyers in New England worked through the difficult question of how to make a thing called a “state” speak—without inciting democracy or disunion.
When Federalists first sketched out a vision of state protest in 1787, they enlisted an old Whig theory of politics that imagined society as an organic composite of the people, whose feelings would naturally flow into the state governments for refinement into virtuous sentiments. After a surge of grassroots political organizing revealed the limits of this theory in an America where elite land speculation and development had laid bare territorial and class divisions, Federalists set out in search of a new rule of state protest. Determined to preserve New England’s influence in an expanding agricultural nation of slavery yet wary of jeopardizing trade with the South, they eventually landed on a solution: the embrace of the state as a formal legal entity whose voice would be activated by procedures, not feelings, and whose constitutional arguments could help funnel people from the streets to the courts.
This account of how and why New England’s Federalist elites came to embrace the state as a means of taming a newly ascendant democracy while also safeguarding the region’s trade with the South enriches our understanding of early American federalism. Rather than seeing the state and federal governments as fixed entities, it joins recent work that recasts these governments as contested categories. But instead of focusing on the well-mapped political arena, it shows how and why the harvesting of the material world shaped the often haphazard invention of a state. In doing so, it brackets the abstract debate of which federal-state configuration produces the most “good.” Instead, it shows how, amidst a project to transform land into waterways and cotton into cloth, Federalist lawyers carefully fashioned a bespoke rule of state protest that could keep New England’s merchant ships and cotton spindles in motion.
