“Why is this not
about slavery?” So rang another
skeptical question during a campus visit approaching its 12th
hour. I think it was clear within the
first hour or so to both job seeker and employer that this was not the right
fit. But the show must go on. And there is nothing quite like the
experience of a campus visit gone awry to make one rethink their choice of
profession. Thankfully I already had a
good job. I muzzled my instincts to
answer combatively, and responded. In
short, the story of the federal government’s relationship to slavery deserved
its own treatment. With that I
offered a few examples of how federal customs officers dealt with slaves before
pointing to some really good books that did a better job on the broader subject
of slavery and governance (books by George Van Cleve and Sally Hadden, for
instance). I also hurriedly mentioned
that my second project was entirely about the regulation of runaway and
fugitive slaves, but nothing seemed to sway my audience, which had grown
increasingly shifty and distracted.
This was not the
first time a campus visit did not go my way.
I had thus developed an appropriately unhealthy way to deal with it: go
over every second in my head and yell at myself for not doing things
better. (As a side note, the experience
of serving on search committees over the years has taught me that most times
with searches, things are really not in any one individual’s control.) In any case, once I went through my tried and
tested bout of self-flagellation, I kept coming back to the question of why my
book was not about slavery.
The question
pointed to a difficult reality: as a matter of demand, some topics are more
marketable and desirable than others. I
do not think I will surprise anyone when I say that there is less demand in
history departments for commercial regulation, the law of administration, and
political economy, than for the history of slavery. How would I make the manuscript that became National Duties: Custom Houses and theMaking of the American State, more attractive and marketable?
The book itself
is about the relationship between the state and the marketplace between the
American Revolution and the antebellum era.
I argue that the challenge of governing Atlantic capitalism transformed
the early federal government from a diffuse structure patterned on the British
Empire toward a modern central government.
Starved for revenue and desperate for political legitimacy in the shadow
of the American Revolution, the architects of the first federal government
emulated the British Empire’s practices of governance that emerged after the
Glorious Revolution. In the nation’s
capital, Alexander Hamilton built a central Treasury and put into motion the
power to tax. But in practice, at the
customhouses on the maritime frontier, federal officers negotiated their
authority with the merchant capitalists whose taxes would constitute the lion’s
share of the federal government’s revenue. In exchange for their taxes, Atlantic
merchant capitalists secured the power to shape how federal officers collected
taxes and administered commercial regulations.
Though this negotiated authority created reliable revenue for the new
federal government, it gave merchant capitalists profound influence over the
inner workings of the state. This much
became clear during the Jeffersonian era, as waterfront communities thwarted
the embargoes and commercial restrictions that aimed to punish European commerce
during the Haitian Revolution and the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic
Wars. After the War of 1812, legal and
political reformers too aimed at the moral and material problems posed by
merchant capital’s ostensible capture of the federal state. By 1836, officeholders, jurists, and politicians
who contemplated the problem of the customhouse had established a key axiom of
the modern liberal state: the necessity of separating the state and the
marketplace. The stage was set for a
bureaucratic expansion of federal governance that would occur gradually over
the next century.
Can’t get less
sexy than that, or so my recent experiences led me to think.
During a meeting
with one of the biggest university presses the acquisition editor offered me
one solution: go ‘founders chic.’ This
would require gutting the argument and most of the evidence about the custom
houses themselves and making the stewards of federal governance in the early
republic—especially Alexander Hamilton, George Washington, Albert Gallatin, and
Thomas Jefferson—the main exhibits. What
the ‘founders’ thought about what was going on with the custom houses, in other
words, would have more appeal to readers than what was actually going on at the
custom houses. The sheer prospect of
rewriting basically every page of my book made this a most undesirable
possibility.
A second option
was to take the capitalism turn. In what
I view as a generally salutary development for the historiography of eighteenth
and nineteenth-century economic and cultural life, capitalism has returned to
the lexicon of many seeking to make sense of multiple revolutions in
transportation, communication, and market culture. This was a far more attractive option because
of the incredible quality of leading works in the field: Jonathan Levy’s Freaks of Fortune and Michael Zakim’s
works writ large for instance. But these
books seemed so different from mine because they were far more invested in
ideological and cultural problems.
Ultimately the
problem that came into view after that dismal question-and-answer-session-for-a-job-I-was-never-going-to-get
was a problem with a solution. Perhaps
it was not a problem at all. I would
have to write the book that I wanted to write and people would either be
interested in it or they would not. But
for a junior scholar in a field without a huge footprint in history departments
throughout the country it was difficult to avoid asking it nonetheless. Indeed, even now that the book is out, and I find
myself in a wonderful, supportive department, I still sometimes feel that same
insecurity.
In my next post
I’ll seek to explain why this uncomfortable feeling persists. Here’s a preview:
aside from my personality, one reason for this insecurity about my own work is
about the place of legal history within history departments.
