An analysis of American state building around the turn of the century requires a closer look at the early American state. This state was not a directive force in social affairs, nor was it an ideal reified in American culture. To Tocqueville, Hegel, and Marx, it appeared as pure instrumentality, an innocuous reflection of the society it served. Yet, this organization of coercive power was no less indispensable for its unobtrusive character. The early American state maintained an integrated legal order on a continental scale; it fought wars, expropriated Indians, secured new territories, carried on relations with other states, and aided economic development. Despite the absence of a sense of the state, the state was essential to social order and social development in nineteenth-century America.

The early American state can be described much as one would describe any other state. Readily comparable determinants of a state's mode of operations will be used here to assess this great anomaly as a working complex of institutions and personnel. These determinants are: the organizational orientations of government, the procedural routines that tie institutions together within a given organizational scheme, and the intellectual talents employed in government. Identifying the early American state along these operational dimensions will capture the distinctive way it performed the basic tasks of government. The reconstruction of state power between 1877 and 1920 will be observed in qualitative changes along each of these dimensions.