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4. During the past several decades, the nineteenth-century American state has been resuscitated as stronger than once thought, or at least than popularly imagined. Novak, William J., “The Myth of the Weak American State,” American Historical Review, 113 (2008): 752–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Evans, Peter B., Rueschemeyer, Dietrich, and Skocpol, Theda, eds., Bringing the State Back In (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Crenson, Matthew A., The Federal Machine: Beginnings of Bureaucracy in Jacksonian America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975)Google Scholar; John, Richard R., “Affairs of Office: The Executive Departments, the Election of 1828, and the Making of the Democratic Party,” in The Democratic Experiment: New Directions in American Political History, ed. Jacobs, Meg, Novak, William J., and Zelizer, Julian E. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 50–84Google Scholar; Skowronek, Stephen, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877–1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Orren, Karen and Skowronek, Stephen, The Search for American Political Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Keller, Morton, America's Three Regimes: A New Political History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Richard R. John, “Governmental Institutions as Agents of Change: Rethinking American Political Development in the Early Republic, 1787–1835,” Studies in American Political Development 11 (Fall 1997): 37–80. Although some scholars have continued to note the stubborn, if puzzling, notion of the United States as stateless, historians have done much to explore various facets of the early American state. King, Desmond and Lieberman, Robert C., “Ironies of State Building: A Comparative Perspective on the American State,” World Politics 61 (2009): 547–88CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Larson, John Lauritz, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular Government in the Early United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001)Google Scholar; Edling, Max M., A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Edling, Max M., “The Strange Hybrid of the Early American State,” in The Benefits of Broad Horizons, ed. Joas, H. and Klein, B. (Leiden, The Netherlands: Brill, 2010), 15–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Balogh, Brian, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Einhorn, Robin, American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2007)Google Scholar; Ericson, David F., Slavery in the American Republic: Developing the Federal Government, 1791–1861 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2011)Google Scholar; Jensen, Laura, Patriots, Settlers, and the Origins of American Social Policy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003)Google Scholar. Richard John posits that because department heads were powerful under Presidents James Monroe and John Quincy Adams, we have assumed that the presidency, and thus the executive, was weak. John, Richard R., “Farewell to the ‘Party Period’: Political Economy in Nineteenth-Century America,” Journal of Policy History 16 (2004): 117–25CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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8. Carpenter, Daniel P., The Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy: Reputations, Networks, and Policy Innovation in Executive Agencies, 1862–1928 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 15Google Scholar. A legal study of early American state building in fact suggests that Thomas Jefferson and his successors created a fairly strong administrative apparatus, especially around commercial policy and public land sales. Mashaw, Jerry L., “Reluctant Nationalists: Federal Administration and Administrative Law in the Republican Era, 1801–1829,” The Yale Law Journal 116 (2007): 1636–740CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a fuller treatment of the development of political administration, see Mashaw, Jerry L., Creating the Administrative Constitution: The Lost One Hundred Years of American Administrative Law (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012)Google Scholar. For the history of the administrative state, see also the work of Parrillo, Nicholas, “Leviathan and Interpretive Revolution: The Administrative State, the Judiciary, and the Rise of Legislative History, 1890–1950,” Yale Law Journal 123, no. 2 (November 2013)Google Scholar; Post, “‘Liberalizers’ versus ‘Scientific Men’ in the Antebellum Patent Office,” 24–54; Daniel Preston, “The Administration and Reform of the U.S. Patent Office, 1790–1836,” Journal of the Early Republic (1985): 353. Challenges to bureau duties occurred for customs officials, as well. Rao, Gautham, National Duties: Customs Houses and the Making of the American State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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20. Mashaw, “Reluctant Nationalists,” 1739.

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23. Pamela Haag attributes the creation of American gun culture to arms makers’ marketing campaigns in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Pamela Haag, The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture (New York: Basic Books, 2016).

24. ASP, “Militia,” December 29, 1794, House of Representatives, 3rd Congress, 2nd Sess., no. 23, 107; Annals of Congress, “Arms for the Militia,” June, 1798, House of Representatives, 5th Congress, 2nd Sess., 1927–33.

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28. Annals of Congress, House of Representatives, April 18, 1808, 10th Congress, 1st Sess., 2197. For a discussion of congressional debates over this act, see Fagal, “The Political Economy of War,” 228–32.

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36. “Report of the Secretary of War upon the Subject of the Expenses of the Military Peace Establishment of the United States,” December 14, 1818 (Washington, DC, 1823), 5; ASP, “Ordnance Department,” December 30, 1823, House of Representatives, 18th Congress, 1st Sess., 905–906; Journal of the Senate 13 (December 2, 1823), 18th Congress, 1st Sess., 14; L. D. L. D. Ingersoll, A History of the War Department (Washington, DC: Francis B. Mohun, 1879); Decius Wadsworth to Roswell Lee, November 11, 1818, box 1, Target 2, Letters Received from Officials and Officers of War and Treasury Departments, Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, RG 156, National Archives, Waltham, MA; Hampden Federalist [Springfield, MA], July 17, 1817.

37. “A Report of the Secretary of War of the Expenses of the Ordnance Department,” 13; ASP, “Statement of the Arms Made,” 167.

38. Annals of Congress, “Reduction of the Army,” December 11, 1818, 15th Congress, 2nd Sess., 391; ASP, “Western Armory,” December 7, 1818, House of Representatives, 15th Congress, 2nd Sess., no. 166, 773.

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43. Benjamin Moore to William Eustis, Secretary of War, November 24, 1812, Moore to Eustis, June 30, 1813, MS 101435, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, CT; Benjamin Moore to John Chaffee, Paymaster and Storekeeper, Springfield Armory, May 1, 1813, Benjamin Moore, Letters about Guns, 1812–13, MS 101435, Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford, CT.

44. John Morton to Roswell Lee, November 14, 1817, box 1, Target 2, Letters Received from Officials and Officers of the War and Treasury Departments, box 1, Target 3, Records of the Springfield Armory, RG 156, National Archives, Waltham, MA.

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48. Alfred Chandler argues that the Springfield Armory pioneered rational bookkeeping and management. Chandler, The Visible Hand. For the rise of bookkeeping as an ideology in the nineteenth century, see Zakim, Michael, Accounting for Capitalism: The Business Clerk as Social Revolutionary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016)Google Scholar; Rosenthal, Caitlin C., “From Memory to Mastery: Accounting for Control in America, 1750–1850,” Enterprise & Society 14 (2013): 732–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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50. “An Act for the Better Regulation of the Ordnance Department,” 203–204; Decius Wadsworth to Roswell Lee, July 25, 1818, Letters Received from Officials and Officers of the War and Treasury Departments, box 1, Target 2, Records of the Springfield Armory; “Decius Wadsworth to John C. Calhoun, September 28, 1818,” in United States Senate, Documents Presented to the Committee on Finance in Relation to Sundry Estimates of Money Required for the Expenses of the War Department, and Military Service of the United States, for the Year 1819 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1819), 58; Smith, Military Enterprise and Technological Change, 57; John Morton to Roswell Lee, August 30, 1817, folder 9, box 3, Letters Received Miscellaneous, Records of the Springfield Armory.

51. Act of March 3, 1825 (4 Stat. 127), “An Act to Authorize the Sale of Unserviceable Ordnance, Arms, and Military Stores,” in Thian, Legislative History of the General Staff, 582.

52. Henry W. Huntington, Natchez, to Roswell Lee, Superintendent, September 20, 1818, folder 1, box 4, Letters Received Miscellaneous, Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, RG 156, National Archives, Waltham, MA. Elton Atwater describes the law of neutrality as a working set of agreements between nations regarding behavior toward belligerents, in Elton Atwater, American Regulation of Arms Exports (Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1941), 7, n.2; John Missall and Mary Lou Missall, The Seminole Wars: America's Longest Indian Conflict (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida 2004), 52; Winfield Scott to Daniel Parker, November 19, 1815, folder 11, box 4, Daniel Parker Papers (Collection 466), Historical Society of Pennsylvania; William Cramond to Roswell Lee, Superintendent, Springfield Armory, July 15, 1815, folder 4, box 1, Letters Received Miscellaneous, Records of the Springfield Armory, RG 156, National Archives, Waltham, MA; “Memorial on Behalf of the Owners of the Schooner Highflier, Having a Claim on the Mexican Government Addressed to the Board of Commissioners under the Convention of the 11th of April, 1839 between the United States of America and the Mexican Republic,” Case No. 24, Thomas Tenant, Case Files for Cases Heard, August 25, 1850–1851, Records of Boundary and Claims Commissions and Arbitrations, 1716–1994, RG 76, National Archives, College Park, MD; John Morton to William Cramond, February, 1816, William Cramond Correspondence, Mercantile Miscellany (1140), The Hagley Museum and Library.

53. Mark B. Wilson counters Ira Katznelson's argument about Congressional checks on U.S. military power in Mark B. Wilson, “The Politics of Procurement: Military Origins of Bureaucratic Autonomy,” Journal of Policy History, 18 (2006): 45–75; “Jesse Slocumb (NC), February 22, 1819,” in Circular Letters of Congressmen to Their Constituents, 1789–1829, ed. Noble E. Cunningham Jr. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 1055–56. John C. Calhoun to Edmund Gaines, December 24, 1819, Records of the Office of the Secretary of War, Confidential and Unofficial Letters Sent, RG 107, National Archives, Washington, DC.

54. Heidler, “The Politics of National Aggression,” 529.

55. Annals of Congress, May 6, 1821, 16th Congress, 2nd Sess., p. 1864.

56. Niven, John C. Calhoun, 79.

57. Decius Wadsworth to Roswell Lee, July 13, 1817, folder 8, box 2, Letters Received Miscellaneous, Records of the Springfield Armory, MA; ASP, “Reduction of the Army Considered,” 779.

58. Belko, “John C. Calhoun and the Creation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs,” 184.

59. ASP, “Statement of the Expenditures of the United States’ Armory at Springfield, Mass., and of the Arms Made and Repaired Therein, from Its Establishment to the Close of the Year 1821,” and “Statement of the Expenditures of the United States’ Armory at Harpers Ferry, Va. and of the Arms Made and Repaired Therein, from Its Establishment to the Close of the Year 1821,” November 30, 1822, House of Representatives, 17th Congress, 2nd Sess., no. 111, 84.

60. Nathan Starr Sr. to Nathan Starr Jr., March 24, 1818, folder 1, box 1, Arms Correspondence, Starr Family Collection, Middlesex County Historical Society.

61. ASP, “Ordnance Department,” 905–906.

62. Ibid., 906–908.

63. Congress appropriated $44,600 for arsenals in 1824, up from $20,715 spent in 1822. ASP, “Register of Debates,” December 6, 1824, 18th Congress, 2nd Sess., 85; ASP, “Message from the President of the United States, Transmitting the Information in Relation to Expenditures on the Ordnance Department,” February 17, 1823, 17th Congress, 2nd Sess.

64. Congress, “Military Peace Establishments,” December 29, 1829, in Register of Debates in Congress (Washington, DC: Gales & Seaton, 1829).

65. George Bomford to Roswell Lee, March 12, 1824, box 2, Letters Received from Officials and Officers of War and Treasury Departments, Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, RG 156, National Archives, Waltham, MA.

66. George Bomford to Roswell Lee, August 18, 1825, box 2, Letters Received from Officials and Officers of War and Treasury Departments, Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, RG 156, National Archives, Waltham, MA.

67. William Wade to Roswell Lee, [n.d.], box 2, Letters Received from Officials and Officers of War and Treasury Departments, Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, RG 156, National Archives, Waltham, MA.

68. George Bomford to Roswell Lee, August 18, 1825; William Wade to Roswell Lee, November 30, 1828, Letterbook, vol. 1, Letters Received from Officials and Officers of War and Treasury Departments, Records of the Springfield Armory, MA, RG 156, National Archives, Waltham, MA.

69. ASP, “Statement of the Expenditures of the United States Armory at Springfield, Mass.,” 84.

70. Roswell Lee to Adonijah Foot, August 6, 1823, folder 5, box 9, Letters Received Miscellaneous, Records of the Springfield Armory, RG 156, National Archives, Waltham, MA.

71. William Wade to Roswell Lee November 30, 1828.

72. Ingersoll, A History of the War Department.

73. ASP, “Report of the Committee of Ways and Means,” January 16, 1822, 17th Congress, 1st. Sess., no. 15, 8.

74. ASP, “Register of Debates,” December 17, 1828, House of Representatives, 20th Congress, 2nd Sess., 112; ASP, “Ordnance Department,” 905–906; Journal of the Senate 13 (December 2, 1823), 18th Congress, 1st Sess., 14; Ingersoll, A History of the War Department.

75. ASP, Register of Debates, February 1, 1827, 19th Congress, 2nd Sess., 901–902; Register of Debates, “The Army,” April 14, 1830, 21st Congress, 1st Sess., 788.

76. Register of Debates, “Message of the President at the Opening of the Session,” July 16, 1832, 22nd Congress, 1st Sess., 9.

77. ASP, “Ordnance Department,” 905–906; Journal of the Senate 13 (December 2, 1823), 18th Congress, 1st Sess., 14; ASP, “Ordnance Bill,” March 22, 1832, Register of Debates, House of Representatives, 22nd Congress, 1st Sess., 2239; Register of Debates, House of Representatives, December 17, 1828, 20th Congress, 2nd Sess., 112; “An Act to Reduce and Fix the Military Peace Establishment of the United States,” March 2, 1821, in Cross, Trueman T., Military Laws of the United States (Washington, DC: Templeton, 1838), 213Google Scholar; “An Act Providing for the Organization of the Ordnance Department,” Stat. I, April 5, 1832, 22nd Congress, 1st Sess., ch. 67, 504. ASP, “Ordnance Bill,” 2237–38.

78. U.S. Congress, Reports of Committees of the House of Representatives (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1973), 125–26.

79. New York Daily Advertiser, January 20, 1825; Deyrup, Felicia Johnson, Arms Makers of the Connecticut Valley: A Regional Study of the Economic Development of the Small Arms Industry, 1798–1870 (Northampton, MA: Smith College Studies in History, 1948), 58Google Scholar; William Cramond, Philadelphia, to Roswell Lee, Superintendent, Springfield Armory, November 6, 1816, folder 9, box 1; Nixon Walker and George McCallmint to Roswell Lee, Springfield Armory, September 20, 1816, folder 8, box 1, Letters Received Miscellaneous, Records of the Springfield Armory, RG 156, National Archives, Waltham, MA; William Cramond to Roswell Lee, Springfield Armory, April 11, 1817, folder 6, box 2, Letters Received Miscellaneous, Records of the Springfield Armory, RG 156, National Archives, Waltham, MA. For the link between military and civilian arms production, see Regele, Lindsay Schakenbach, “Industrial Manifest Destiny: American Firearms Manufacturing and Antebellum Expansion,” Business History Review 92 (Spring 2018): 57–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Waters, Asa H., Biographical Sketch of Thomas Blanchard and his Inventions (Worcester, MA: L.P. Goddard, 1878), 13Google Scholar.

80. U.S. Congress, Reports of Committees of the House of Representatives (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1973), 125.

81. Taylor, Alan, The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772–1832 (New York: Norton, 2013), 91, 150Google Scholar.

82. ASP, “Ordnance Bill,” 2238; ASP, “Annual Report of the Secretary of War, Showing the Condition of That Department in 1831,” November 21, 1831, 22nd Congress, 1st Sess., no. 485, 718; Congressional Record Bound, Register of Debates, February 5, 1833, 1627.

83. ASP, “Message from the President of the United States,” January 25, 1831, 21st Congress, 2nd Sess., no. 39, 2.

84. Annals of Congress, “Indian Fur Trade,” March 29, 1824; ASP, “Message from the President of the United States,” December 6, 1831, 22nd Congress, 1st Sess.; ASP, “Report from the Indian Bureau,” November 19, 1831, 22nd Congress, 1st Sess., 18.

85. “Letter from General Ashley to the Secretary of War,” March 1829, 21st Congress, 2nd Sess., xcii–xciii, in “Appendix to the Register of Debates,” Congressional Record Bound, March 3, 1831.

86. ASP, “Annual Report of the Secretary of War, Showing the Condition of That Department in 1831,” 711.

87. ASP, “Ordnance Bill,” 2237–38.

88. “Memorandum,” April 19, 1832, folder: Ordnance Officers Qualifications of, box 25, Thomas Sidney Jesup Papers, 1780–1907, MMC 0318C, Library of Congress.

89. ASP, “Report of the President of a Board of Officers on Improvements in Fire-Arms by Hall, Colt, Cochran, Leavitt, and Baron Hackett, as Compared with the United States Musket,” October 3, 1837, 25th Congress, 1st Sess., no. 743, 525–29.

90. “Memorandum,” April 19, 1832.

91. ASP, “Ordnance Bill,” 2239.

92. Ingersoll, A History of the War Department, 309; Stearns, Charles, The National Armories: A Review of the Systems of Superintendency, Civil and Military, Particularly with Reference to Economy and General Management at the Springfield Armory (Springfield, MA: George Wilson's Steam Power Presses, 1853), 7–8Google Scholar, 309.

93. Stearns, The National Armories, 7.

94. ASP, “Documents from War Department,” November 14, 1842, 27th Congress, 3rd Sess., no. 2, 208; Stearns, The National Armories, 13, 74; Brown, M. L., “Notes on U.S. Arsenals, Depots, and Martial Firearms of the Second Seminole War,” Florida Historical Quarterly 61 (1983): 453Google Scholar.

95. ASP, “To Restore Civil Superintendencies in National Armories at Harper's Ferry and Springfield, with Appendix and Minority Report,” June 13, 1854, 33rd Congress, 1st Sess.

96. Ibid., 18.

97. Stearns, The National Armories, 9–12.

98. For scholarship on these wars, see Ellisor, John T., The Second Creek War: Interethnic Conflict and Collusion on a Collapsing Frontier (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Monaco, C. S., The Second Seminole War and the Limits of American Aggression (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018)Google Scholar.

99. Ingersoll, A History of the War Department of the United States, 309–11.

100. Abraham Eustis to Joel Roberts Poinsett, September 17, 1837, folder 5, vol. 9, Joel Roberts Poinsett Papers (Collection 0512), Historical Society of Pennsylvania.

101. J. Paulding to Joel Roberts Poinsett, June 8, 1838, folder 12, vol. 10, Joel Roberts Poinsett Papers (Collection 0512), Historical Society of Pennsylvania.