| In Revolutionary America, the swirl of Atlantic commerce, geopolitics, and national politics converged upon the customhouse, where merchant capitalists, national politicians, and local officials struggled to construct the sinews of a new nation-state. In particular, customs officials' coped with the problem of governance---the problem of how to tax the people---by devising legal tactics that fulfilled public imperatives while accommodating local, commercial interests. This mode of governance---the politics of accommodation---underscored the political economic foundations of the early American republic. Customhouses collected the very government revenue that filled government coffers and defrayed the costs of the early United States' expansionary activities. On the other hand, as customhouses accommodated merchant capitalists, they allowed merchant capitalists to shape the means of national authority---local customs law and practices.;However, the influence of merchant capitalists on customhouse regulation deeply problematized government legitimacy. During the Napoleonic Wars, merchant capitalists successfully used customhouses to manage risks and exploit market opportunities, even against the grain and intent of national policies. In the first decade of the nineteenth century, Jeffersonian Republicans sought to uproot local mercantile influence from the operation of the customhouses. Jefferson's struggle to replace local accommodation with uniform, centralized, national administration, however, emerged only during the War of 1812, as the Napoleonic Wars---and the unique market opportunities they created---came to an end.;This dissertation draws upon mercantile papers, government correspondence, and legal records to make an original contribution to the history of American law, American politics, the United States place in the world, and the American state. It discusses how officials interpreted national laws to facilitate the accumulation of public wealth and private capital. This tradition of legal interpretation triggered a political struggle over the location of authority---local or national---in the new republic. The political contest between local commercial interests and national official over the texture of national authority shaped the American experience of the Napoleonic Wars, and ultimately---by subverting Jeffersonian Republicans' attempts at market regulation---necessitating the War of 1812. These stories of the role of the government in the Atlantic market, and the role of the Atlantic market in the shaping of the government, suggest the foundational epoch of American statecraft, and, subsequently, the lineage of the American state. |
