War and the Making of the American State in the 19th Century

Introduction:

From the colonial frontier to the battlefields of Gettysburg, war has been both a crucible and a mirror for the American experiment. Historians from Charles Tilly to Allan Millett have long emphasized the centrality of warfare in the formation of modern states, arguing that “war made the state and the state made war.” Yet, in the American case, this process unfolded within a republican framework that ostensibly distrusted standing armies and centralized power. The tension between libertarian ideals and the exigencies of war defined the nation’s evolution from fragile confederation to continental empire. Military conflict—whether against European empires, Indigenous nations, or itself—repeatedly expanded federal capacity, deepened debates over citizenship and liberty, and reconfigured the balance between local autonomy and national consolidation. But from a libertarian realist perspective, the pattern of U.S. warfare after 1812 reveals less a series of defensive necessities than a sequence of politically motivated expansions, driven by domestic interests rather than genuine threats to national survival. Combining Tilly’s insight into the coercive foundations of state power with public choice theory’s skepticism of “national interest” explanations, this essay argues that American wars from the colonial period through the Civil War simultaneously forged the institutions of federal authority and eroded the very principles of limited government they claimed to defend. The experience and memory of war thus shaped not only the territorial and institutional contours of the United States, but also its enduring paradox: a republic born in resistance to empire, yet remade through imperial means.

Historiography: War, State Formation, and the American Experience
Traditional interpretations of U.S. military history long presented war as both the testing ground and guarantor of American democracy. Writing in the mid-twentieth century, historians such as Allan R. Millett and Peter Maslowski emphasized how warfare forged national unity and expanded the American sense of purpose. In For the Common Defense: A Military History of the United States of America (1984), Millett and Maslowski argue that the American military tradition evolved not from militarism but from a pragmatic balance between republican skepticism of standing armies and the necessities of defense. Each conflict—from the colonial wars through the Civil War—served to strengthen national institutions, refine military professionalism, and consolidate civic identity. In this view, warfare functioned as a crucible for national maturation, channeling sacrifice and innovation toward collective progress.

Earlier generations of diplomatic and political historians—most notably Samuel Flagg Bemis and Richard Hofstadter—similarly read American wars through the lens of national consolidation. Bemis’s A Diplomatic History of the United States (1936) cast U.S. expansion and foreign policy as the natural outgrowth of republican virtue and geographic destiny. For Bemis, wars such as 1812 and Mexico were episodes in a fundamentally progressive story: a free people asserting independence and order over a continent. Hofstadter’s The American Political Tradition (1948) likewise treated the Civil War as a conflict that reaffirmed liberal-capitalist individualism rather than disrupting it. These narratives aligned with the consensus historiography of the 1950s, portraying military conflict as a mechanism of integration and the state as a neutral arbiter of democratic will.

By the 1960s and 1970s, however, revisionist historians challenged this celebratory consensus. Influenced by the Vietnam War, dependency theory, and the New Left, scholars such as William Appleman Williams reframed American military expansion as a function of internal capitalist imperatives rather than external necessity. In The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (1959), Williams argued that the ideology of the “Open Door”—the belief that prosperity depended on expanding markets abroad—drove both U.S. diplomacy and warfare. For Williams and his students, including Walter LaFeber and Lloyd Gardner, American wars reflected an enduring economic expansionism masked by democratic rhetoric. The Mexican-American War, far from a defensive conflict, represented the first major expression of this expansionist logic: a war of choice propelled by domestic political calculations and sectional ambitions.

Revisionist treatments of the early republic also reinterpreted the role of the military in state formation. Richard B. Latner’s The Presidency of Andrew Jackson (1979) and Leonard Richards’s The Slave Power (2000) emphasized how sectional interests and political patronage shaped decisions for war. Meanwhile, historians of slavery and capitalism, such as Eugene Genovese and later Sven Beckert, argued that military and territorial expansion served to entrench rather than challenge hierarchical power structures. War, in this reading, did not democratize the United States but rather deepened social inequalities and extended the coercive reach of the state.

A related strand of revisionist scholarship drew upon the “state-building” tradition associated with Charles Tilly, Theda Skocpol, and Michael Mann. Tilly’s axiom that “war made the state and the state made war” offered a comparative framework for understanding how coercion and extraction generated modern institutions. Skocpol’s Protecting Soldiers and Mothers (1992) famously applied this insight to the United States, showing that the Civil War created a vast pension bureaucracy that prefigured the American welfare state. Scholars such as Richard Franklin Bensel and Brian Balogh extended this argument, contending that war and economic mobilization forged the infrastructural capacities of the American state even in the absence of European-style bureaucracy. Though the United States lacked a standing army or centralized taxation before 1861, successive wars forced innovations in finance, logistics, and administration that laid the groundwork for later federal expansion.

The post-revisionist moment of the 1980s and 1990s sought to reconcile the insights of both traditional and revisionist schools. John M. Murrin’s essays on colonial political culture emphasized that military mobilization during the French and Indian War not only spurred colonial cooperation but also sowed the seeds of independence. Similarly, Fred Anderson’s Crucible of War (2000) reinterpreted that same conflict as the true origin of the American Revolution—an event that simultaneously strengthened British imperial power and radicalized colonial expectations. The American Revolution itself became understood less as a singular break and more as part of a continuous process of militarized state-building.
In this synthesis, the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War assumed pivotal roles. Donald R. Hickey’s The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (1989) demonstrated how the war’s failures exposed structural weaknesses in the early republic—an inefficient fiscal system, partisan divisions, and reliance on militia forces—thereby catalyzing institutional reform. Robert Johannsen’s To the Halls of the Montezumas (1985) reframed the Mexican-American War as both a triumph of American logistics and a moral crisis that transformed debates over citizenship and slavery. Post-revisionists thus viewed war as both creative and destructive: a vehicle for national consolidation that also revealed the tensions of republican empire.
By the early twenty-first century, scholars influenced by the “cultural turn” and new military history further broadened the field. Rather than focusing solely on generals and battles, historians such as Drew Gilpin Faust, Carol Reardon, and James McPherson explored the cultural, emotional, and ideological dimensions of warfare. Faust’s This Republic of Suffering (2008) recast the Civil War as a cultural trauma that redefined death, citizenship, and state responsibility. In similar fashion, Reardon’s Pickett’s Charge in History and Memory (1997) and David Blight’s Race and Reunion (2001) analyzed how collective memory of war shaped national identity and political reconciliation. The Civil War, they argued, became not only a battlefield contest but a moral theater in which competing visions of freedom and nationhood contended for permanence.

Meanwhile, the “new” social-military historians—Edward Coffman, James H. Huston, and Wayne E. Lee among them—situated American warfare within transnational and sociological contexts. Lee’s Barbarians and Brothers (2011) traced continuities between European and American modes of violence, highlighting how cultural norms of warfare informed both frontier conflicts and the Civil War. These scholars, influenced by anthropology and cultural theory, treated war as a social practice embedded in daily life, revealing how military institutions mediated gender, race, and citizenship.

More recent interpretations have returned, albeit critically, to Tilly’s thesis. Historians such as Brian DeLay, in War of a Thousand Deserts (2008), and Paul Foos, in A Short, Offhand, Killing Affair (2002), emphasize the role of indigenous resistance and frontier violence in shaping state power. Rather than a linear process of state consolidation, they depict a fragmented and contested process in which violence was both tool and symptom of sovereignty’s expansion. Within this framework, the libertarian realist interpretation finds renewed traction: wars served not merely external defense but internal political management. Viewed through the lens of public choice theory, the Mexican and Civil Wars appear less as responses to existential threats than as crises of domestic legitimacy—moments when political elites leveraged warfare to solidify authority, distribute rents, and redefine citizenship.

Thus, across the historiography, the relationship between war and state formation in the United States has moved from celebratory narrative to structural critique, and finally to a nuanced synthesis that recognizes both the coercive and constitutive power of armed conflict. Traditional accounts emphasized unity and progress; revisionists unveiled exploitation and expansion; post-revisionists sought balance; and cultural historians have restored the lived, symbolic, and contested dimensions of war. Taken together, they reveal that the American state was not forged despite war, but through it—each conflict leaving behind a deeper administrative footprint, a broader ideological justification, and a more complex legacy of freedom and coercion.

The Early Republic: State Formation and the Birth of the American Leviathan

In tracing the evolution of the United States from scattered colonies to a continental republic, it is impossible to separate the emergence of political institutions from the exigencies of war. As Charles Tilly famously observed, “war made the state and the state made war,” and nowhere was this dynamic more paradoxical than in the American experience. The same revolutionaries who condemned standing armies and imperial taxation as instruments of tyranny would, within a generation, construct a state that bore all the fiscal and administrative hallmarks of the empires they overthrew. From the Seven Years’ War to the War of 1812, conflict not only forged a sense of American identity but also strengthened the coercive and extractive capacities of the federal government—often at the expense of the libertarian ideals that animated the Revolution.

The roots of the American state lay in the imperial rivalries of the eighteenth century. The Seven Years’ War (1754–1763) was, as Daniel Baugh has argued, “the first truly global conflict,” one that forced Britain to expand its fiscal-military apparatus to unprecedented levels. In North America, the war shattered the delicate balance among European empires and Indigenous polities. Jack P. Greene and Fred Anderson have both emphasized how British victory brought not peace but administrative transformation: the extension of imperial taxation, the deployment of regular troops, and the assertion of centralized authority. These measures, designed to pay for and sustain the empire, triggered colonial resistance. As Jonathan Dull and Richard B. Morris show, the American Revolution was thus not merely an ideological rebellion but the culmination of fiscal crisis.

Charles Tilly’s insight applies neatly here: the financial burdens of war compelled London to impose new taxes, while colonial assemblies—accustomed to fiscal autonomy—resisted the encroachment. The Revolution was, in this sense, both anti-imperial and anti-fiscal. Murray Rothbard captures this duality vividly in Conceived in Liberty, describing how the Revolution’s libertarian energy sought to dismantle coercive hierarchies and replace them with decentralized governance grounded in voluntary association. Yet the very process of waging war forced the Continental Congress to erect structures of fiscal and military control—the issuance of paper money, the requisitioning of supplies, and the creation of a standing army—that presaged the centralized state to come.

If the Revolution was born of libertarian resistance, the Constitution represented, in Rothbard’s words, its “betrayal.” In Conceived in Liberty, he argues that the postwar Federalists—figures like Hamilton, Madison, and Washington—saw in the fiscal chaos of the 1780s not the price of liberty but a pretext for consolidation. The suppression of Shays’ Rebellion (1786–87) and the later Whiskey Rebellion (1794) revealed what Rothbard and later Robert Higgs identified as the “ratchet effect” of crisis: temporary measures of coercion became permanent expansions of state power. By raising troops to put down tax revolts, the early republic normalized the use of military force for domestic governance.

Alexander DeConde’s Entangling Alliance and Todd Estes’s study of the Jay Treaty debate further illuminate how these struggles over war and peace shaped the nascent state. Federalists invoked foreign threats—French Jacobinism, British depredations, and Spanish intrigues—to justify executive secrecy, standing armies, and centralized fiscal control. The Alien and Sedition Acts (1798) epitomized the paradox: liberty’s defenders using the machinery of war to suppress dissent. Marie-Jeanne Rossignol and Jeffrey Pasley have shown how Federalist fears of ideological contagion from revolutionary France produced a culture of “anti-Jacobinism,” in which foreign and domestic opposition blurred into one. War, or even the threat of it, became the engine of internal discipline.

It was also during this period that the linkage between war and political participation emerged as a defining feature of American democracy. Alexander Keyssar’s The Right to Vote argues that the expansion of suffrage in the early republic was not the product of pure egalitarianism but of the state’s pragmatic need to mobilize manpower. “The demands of militia service,” Keyssar notes, “helped to legitimate broader political inclusion.” In other words, the citizen-soldier ideal was as much a mechanism of state-building as of liberty. The willingness to fight became the justification for the right to vote—a martial foundation for democratic legitimacy.

The early republic’s wars were thus as much about consolidating domestic order as they were about resisting foreign domination. The Northwest Indian Wars (1785–1795) exemplify this continuity between external conflict and internal control. As Barbara Mann argues in President by Massacre, frontier campaigns were often “political theater,” calculated to unify fractious electorates and legitimize presidential authority through bloodshed. Washington’s and later Jefferson’s policies toward Indigenous nations fused territorial ambition with political necessity. The wars against the Shawnee, Miami, and Creek peoples created opportunities for patronage, land speculation, and military promotion—what Rothbard would call “political capitalism.”

These campaigns also entrenched the fiscal-military infrastructure of the new republic. The establishment of a standing army under the 1792 Militia Acts, the creation of the Bank of the United States (1791), and the imposition of federal excises all linked warfare to the emergence of centralized finance. Richard Bensel notes that these measures created the embryonic form of what he terms the “Yankee Leviathan”: a state that used war not merely to defend but to define its economic and political order.

Diplomatically, as Alexander DeConde and L. B. A. Hatter have shown, the consolidation of the frontier state required a national government capable of managing western lands, securing treaties, and projecting authority. The Jay Treaty (1794) and Pinckney’s Treaty (1795) were not simply diplomatic accords but assertions of territorial sovereignty—expressions of a federal government able to negotiate, tax, and enforce at a continental scale. Yet they also exposed the contradictions of republican expansion: a state claiming to limit itself while continually enlarging its reach.

By the turn of the nineteenth century, the United States had become a participant in the European system of power politics it had once repudiated. As Paul Gilje observes, American foreign relations between 1750 and 1850 were driven by the “twin imperatives of commerce and conquest.” The Jeffersonian rhetoric of peace and simplicity masked an increasingly complex economic dependence on global trade. The Embargo Act of 1807—Jefferson’s attempt at “peaceable coercion”—was, in practice, an assertion of state control over private exchange.

The War of 1812 crystallized these tensions. While later generations would celebrate it as a “second war of independence,” contemporary observers saw it as a politically motivated conflict engineered by the so-called War Hawks to consolidate domestic power. Marie-Jeanne Rossignol and Caitlin Fitz have demonstrated how nationalist enthusiasm for the war served both to assert U.S. sovereignty and to suppress internal dissent. The Republican embrace of naval construction, war loans, and protective tariffs effectively completed the Federalist program. As Robert Higgs notes in Crisis and Leviathan, wartime measures that had been denounced as monarchical—such as national banks, debt financing, and conscription—became permanent features of governance.

Dexter Perkins’s Hands Off and Ernest R. May’s The Making of the Monroe Doctrine reveal how the aftermath of the war institutionalized this new political economy of coercion. The Monroe Doctrine (1823), often mythologized as a statement of hemispheric liberty, was in fact an assertion of geopolitical dominance—what Michael Hunt would later call the ideological fusion of “liberty and power.” As the United States expanded westward and southward, the rhetoric of freedom served as cover for the projection of state authority abroad and the suppression of resistance at home.

The post-1812 transformation of the American state illustrates the Tillyan logic with striking precision. Wartime mobilization generated new fiscal tools—taxation, borrowing, and administrative capacity—that did not dissipate in peace. The so-called “Era of Good Feelings” was in fact an era of consolidation: the chartering of the Second Bank of the United States (1816), the adoption of protective tariffs, and the first national infrastructure projects. Richard Bensel interprets these developments as evidence that the American state, though lacking the formal bureaucracy of its European counterparts, had by 1820 achieved the capacity to extract resources and regulate economic life on a national scale.

For Rothbard and the libertarian realist tradition, this was the critical turning point. The Revolution’s anti-statist promise had been inverted: the very mechanisms created to defend liberty—taxation, conscription, and executive war powers—had become instruments of coercion. As Robert Higgs demonstrates, the War of 1812 produced an enduring “crisis ratchet” that normalized intervention and laid the groundwork for subsequent expansions of federal authority. The rise of the National Republicans—John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, and their followers—completed this ideological transformation. Their program of internal improvements, centralized banking, and protective tariffs represented not a temporary wartime necessity but a permanent governing philosophy: the harnessing of the state to manage economic and territorial growth.

Yet, as Alexander Keyssar reminds us, this period also saw the consolidation of a new conception of citizenship—one tied not to property but to participation in the nation’s military and political life. The expansion of the franchise, while ostensibly democratic, functioned as a means of integrating the population into the state’s project of expansion. Universal white manhood suffrage coincided with the exclusion of women, free Blacks, and Indigenous peoples—the same groups most affected by the wars that enabled the republic’s growth.

By the 1820s, the United States had become, in embryonic form, the very Leviathan its founders had feared. From the Seven Years’ War to the War of 1812, military necessity and political expediency combined to build the fiscal, administrative, and ideological foundations of modern American statehood. War financed roads, banks, and bureaucracies; it justified the suppression of dissent and the expropriation of Indigenous land; it expanded suffrage while narrowing the meaning of liberty.
If, as Tilly argued, states are organized means of coercion that compete for control over capital and men, then the early American republic was a paradoxical creation: a libertarian empire, born in resistance to tyranny yet thriving on conquest. In the process, the federal government learned what all successful states learn—that the instruments of war, once forged, are rarely surrendered.

The Politics of Conquest: Expansionism, Slavery, and the Mexican War

If the War of 1812 and its aftermath marked the ascendancy of the national state, the age of Jackson completed the fusion of democracy and empire. The paradox of American political development in the 1820s and 1830s lay in the simultaneous expansion of popular sovereignty and the intensification of coercive state power. The franchise widened, yet liberty contracted; the language of equality flourished even as the republic pursued wars of extermination and annexation. From the forced removal of Native nations to the conquest of Mexico, military expansion became the principal mechanism through which domestic factions pursued political legitimacy and material gain. The result, as Robert Higgs and Richard Bensel have argued, was the continued ratcheting-up of federal capacity—a process masked by the rhetoric of individualism but driven by the imperatives of state formation.

The rise of Andrew Jackson epitomized the militarization of American democracy. His political career rested not on legislative accomplishment but on martial reputation—the victor of New Orleans as the embodiment of national manhood. Jackson’s presidency thus redefined the relationship between military heroism and executive authority. As Richard Bensel observes, Jackson “converted the prestige of the battlefield into a justification for executive centralization,” fusing populism with command. His battles with the Bank of the United States and his liberal use of the veto are often read as assaults on elitism, yet they were equally assertions of coercive sovereignty—the prerogative of the state to define and discipline the economic order.

The irony, as Alexander Keyssar and Robert Higgs both note, is that Jacksonian democracy simultaneously expanded the franchise while narrowing the scope of political liberty. The elimination of property qualifications for white males created what Keyssar calls a “mobilized electorate,” a populace whose right to vote was increasingly bound to their role as participants in the nation’s wars and conquests. Jacksonian egalitarianism thus depended upon exclusion: women, free Blacks, and Native Americans were denied full citizenship precisely because they were cast outside the martial and racial order of the republic. In Tillyan terms, the expansion of participation functioned as a means of resource extraction—the incorporation of men into a political community defined by its willingness to fight.

Barbara Alice Mann’s President by Massacre underscores how the wars against Native nations were less spontaneous eruptions of frontier conflict than deliberate political instruments. Mann argues that Indian removal served “the dual purpose of land acquisition and electoral consolidation,” providing Jackson and his allies with both tangible spoils and symbolic capital. The Creek, Seminole, and Cherokee campaigns offered visible demonstrations of executive vigor and white unity. As Murray Rothbard warned, “when war becomes a political device rather than a defensive necessity, liberty is in mortal peril.”

The state’s growing administrative machinery made these wars possible. The Indian Removal Act of 1830, though couched in language of negotiation and civilization, required the mobilization of the Army Corps of Engineers, new transport infrastructure, and an expanding fiscal apparatus. As Robert Higgs’s Crisis and Leviathan demonstrates, such “emergency measures” invariably became permanent. The federal government’s role in surveying, financing, and redistributing land after removal presaged the later bureaucratic management of western settlement under the Homestead and Land Grant acts. The Trail of Tears thus marked not merely a humanitarian tragedy but a decisive moment in the institutionalization of federal power.

The Jacksonian revolution also intertwined expansionism with slavery. Matthew Karp’s This Vast Southern Empire demonstrates that southern elites viewed the federal government not as a threat but as the indispensable instrument of slaveholding power. Through control of the military and foreign policy apparatus, they sought to extend the geography of slavery into the Caribbean and Central America. The result, as Karp shows, was a foreign policy that conflated liberty with mastery—a perverse echo of the republican language of 1776.

Robert E. May’s Manifest Destiny’s Underworld complements this analysis by exploring the phenomenon of filibustering—the private but politically encouraged invasions of Latin America during the 1840s and 1850s. May portrays filibusters like William Walker not as rogue adventurers but as expressions of an expansionist culture deeply rooted in Jacksonian democracy. Their exploits appealed to a mass electorate accustomed to equating conquest with freedom. The rhetoric of “volunteerism” cloaked what was, in essence, state-sanctioned imperialism. As May writes, “the filibuster was democracy’s dark twin.”

Domestic politics continually shaped the use of military power in this era. Michael Hunt’s Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy argues that American leaders rationalized expansion through a triadic ideology of liberty, racial hierarchy, and national mission. These values furnished a moral vocabulary through which sectional and partisan interests could justify aggression. Yet from a libertarian realist standpoint, these ideological constructions served as convenient instruments for the pursuit of domestic political advantage. War and the threat of war mobilized constituencies, rewarded allies, and distracted from internal contradictions. The same dynamic that Tilly observed in European state-building—the use of external conflict to consolidate internal control—operated with full force in the antebellum United States.

The First Seminole War (1817–1818) offers an early case study in the political uses of aggression. Dexter Perkins and Ernest May both note that Monroe’s administration publicly disavowed Jackson’s invasion of Florida while privately recognizing its strategic and political value. The episode underscored how military initiative could drive policy from below, creating faits accomplis later ratified by diplomacy. The Adams–Onís Treaty (1819) that followed transformed conquest into legality, annexing Florida under the banner of peace. As Robert Higgs notes, such “ratchets” of executive power—temporary crises turned permanent jurisdiction—constitute the true genealogy of American expansionism.

The annexation of Texas followed a similar logic. While justified in terms of liberty and self-determination, it was, as William Appleman Williams observed, a “domestic safety valve” for sectional tensions. The prospect of new slave territory appeased southern interests while promising land to restless northern farmers. Behind the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny lay the classic public choice dynamic: the distribution of rents and offices through conquest. In Tillyan terms, the United States functioned as a “federal empire,” where the spoils of war substituted for taxation as the means of state legitimation.

The culmination of Jacksonian expansionism came with the Mexican-American War (1846–1848)—the most nakedly aggressive conflict in the nation’s history. Traditional narratives, from Samuel Flagg Bemis to John Quincy Adams’s admirers, portrayed it as an extension of continental destiny. Revisionists, however, from Williams to May, have laid bare its domestic origins. As Williams argued in The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, “the road to empire was paved not with threats from abroad but with ambitions at home.”

President James K. Polk’s deliberate provocation along the Rio Grande, the manipulation of Congress, and the suppression of antiwar dissent all fit the pattern identified by Robert Higgs: the invocation of external danger to justify the concentration of internal power. The war expanded the federal budget, introduced new forms of war finance, and permanently enlarged the army. Bensel notes that the Mexican conflict provided a “laboratory in fiscal innovation,” including the introduction of the first large-scale federal bond issues since 1812.

But its deeper significance lay in its political consequences. The conquest of northern Mexico reopened the sectional conflict that had lain dormant since the Missouri Compromise. As Don H. Doyle’s The Cause of All Nations observes, the new territories forced Americans to confront the contradiction between a republic of liberty and an empire of slaves. In this sense, the Mexican War made the Civil War inevitable: the line of expansion was the line of division.

For Rothbard and later libertarian realists, the war exemplified the degeneration of republican government into political capitalism. Territorial acquisition provided patronage opportunities for contractors, land speculators, and military officers. The press and political parties, subsidized by war spending, became instruments of mobilization rather than deliberation. The temporary unification of the nation under the flag masked the permanent erosion of its constitutional limits.

Beyond the battlefield, the Mexican War transformed American society and ideology. Alexander Keyssar’s observation that suffrage and military service were intertwined gained new salience as veterans demanded pensions, land bounties, and political recognition. The glorification of volunteerism reinforced the identification of citizenship with martial virtue. Yet as Barbara Mann notes, the same culture of militancy that exalted white soldiers dehumanized the “other”—Indigenous peoples, Mexicans, and Blacks—whose subjugation defined the boundaries of the republic.

Culturally, the war fostered what Matthew Karp calls the “global imagination of the slaveholding republic.” Southern intellectuals and diplomats saw in Mexico, Cuba, and Central America a frontier for the expansion of slavery, while northern politicians viewed conquest as a means to spread “free labor.” In both visions, the state became the arbiter of freedom’s geography—a contradiction that would explode in 1861. The rhetoric of Manifest Destiny thus functioned, as Michael Hunt suggests, as an ideological synthesis of expansion and moral mission, translating domestic hierarchies into global purpose.

Robert Higgs’s concept of the “ratchet effect” aptly describes the trajectory of American state power from 1830 to 1850. Each crisis—Indian wars, Texas annexation, the Mexican conflict—produced temporary measures that became permanent precedents. The federal government’s fiscal and administrative apparatus expanded to meet wartime needs, but it never fully contracted afterward. The creation of the Department of the Interior (1849), the codification of military pensions, and the spread of federal land offices reflected a permanent infrastructural growth under the guise of emergency.

Yet, as Bensel reminds us, this expansion did not yet yield a coherent bureaucratic state. Authority remained fragmented among regional interests, patronage networks, and party machines. The Jacksonian system, for all its dynamism, lacked the institutional integration of the later Civil War state. Still, the patterns were in place: a strong executive justified by popular mandate, a mobilized citizenry habituated to war, and a fiscal system increasingly dependent on debt and tariff revenue. The United States had learned to make war for politics and politics for war.
By the eve of the 1850s, the United States had completed its continental conquest and laid the foundations of its imperial ethos. The wars of Jacksonian democracy—against Indians, Spaniards, and Mexicans—had unified the nation geographically while dividing it morally. Each expansion of territory was accompanied by an expansion of state capacity; each appeal to liberty legitimized new forms of coercion.

From a Tillyan perspective, the American republic’s maturation followed the classic pattern of war-driven state formation: coercion funded through credit, legitimized by ideology, and stabilized through inclusion. From a libertarian realist standpoint, however, this process represented the steady corruption of a voluntary union into a coercive empire. Wars justified not by necessity but by ambition entrenched the very machinery of domination the founders had sought to avoid. As Rothbard warned, “the greatest danger to liberty lies not in the foreign enemy but in the domestic ruler who uses him as pretext.” In that sense, the Mexican War was not merely a war of choice—it was the final act in the long transformation of the United States from a confederation of republics into a nation-state built on conquest.

The Antebellum Crisis and the Civil War: Leviathan Unbound

By 1861, the United States stood as the largest continental power in the Western Hemisphere—a nation forged by conquest, yet divided by the contradictions of its own expansion. The territorial aggrandizement of the Jacksonian era had brought with it a vast new domain and a profoundly unstable equilibrium: a federal union rhetorically committed to liberty, but materially dependent on coercion. The Civil War would expose and resolve that contradiction—at the price of destroying the very decentralized republic that the Revolution had sought to preserve. As Robert Higgs and Richard Bensel both argue, the war created the fiscal, administrative, and ideological foundations of the modern American state. In Tilly’s terms, the United States at last became a “proper” state: a centralized, bureaucratized, and permanently mobilized polity capable of sustaining war through taxation, debt, and ideology. Yet from the libertarian realist perspective, the triumph of Union was also the triumph of Leviathan. The Civil War, though fought in the name of freedom, permanently altered the relationship between citizens and state, transforming a voluntary federation into a coercive nation.

The antebellum period was defined by mounting tensions between two rival political economies—one agrarian and slaveholding, the other industrial and capitalist—each claiming the mantle of republican virtue. As Matthew Karp demonstrates in This Vast Southern Empire, southern elites viewed control of federal institutions not as a defense against centralization but as the necessary condition for preserving their social order. The antebellum South wielded the machinery of the national state—diplomatic appointments, naval patrols, and territorial administration—to protect slavery as a global enterprise. Meanwhile, northern politicians increasingly regarded slavery as both a moral stain and an impediment to economic modernization.

But as Murray Rothbard observed, the deeper conflict was not moral but political: between two conceptions of state power. The northern industrialists and financiers who rallied to the Republican Party were, in many ways, the heirs of the Hamiltonian-Federalist tradition—committed to tariffs, banks, and federal infrastructure. Southern Democrats, by contrast, claimed to defend states’ rights but had long relied on federal coercion to uphold the slave system. The breakdown of the Union thus represented less a failure of governance than a collision of two incompatible state-building projects.

The crisis of the 1850s—Kansas-Nebraska, Dred Scott, John Brown—revealed that both sides had come to see violence as legitimate politics. As Barbara Mann argues, the pattern of militarized domestic policy established under Jackson reappeared with a vengeance: political leaders turned to force not to defend against invasion but to manage internal dissent. The slave power’s assaults in Kansas and the Republican Party’s militancy in response were symptoms of a political culture already habituated to war as an instrument of policy.

When secession came, it provided precisely the kind of “crisis” that Robert Higgs identifies as the engine of government growth. The Lincoln administration’s mobilization for war dwarfed all previous exercises of federal power. Congress authorized the first national income tax, the issuance of paper currency (“greenbacks”), and an unprecedented public debt. The creation of the Internal Revenue Bureau, the National Banking Acts, and the sale of government bonds through private syndicates such as Jay Cooke’s firm collectively transformed the United States into a modern fiscal-military state.

As Richard Bensel demonstrates in Yankee Leviathan, the Union war effort required the rapid integration of capital and coercion: “the organizational and fiscal capabilities of the central state were extended to every community in the North.” These institutions—taxation, conscription, centralized finance—did not disappear after Appomattox. The postwar federal government retained both the structure and the ideology of wartime mobilization. In Tillyan terms, war had not merely made the state; it had remade the relationship between state and society.

The Confederate state, ironically, followed the same trajectory. Seeking to preserve a vision of decentralized liberty, it quickly centralized power even more aggressively than its northern rival—imposing conscription, seizing private property, and printing unbacked currency. War compelled both sides to abandon their founding principles: republican voluntarism gave way to bureaucratic necessity.

From a libertarian realist perspective, the Civil War’s ideological transformation is as significant as its institutional one. As Michael Hunt observes in Ideology and U.S. Foreign Policy, the conflict crystallized a national creed combining moral mission, racial hierarchy, and faith in state power. Lincoln’s invocation of the Union as a sacred object of preservation transmuted loyalty to liberty into loyalty to government itself. His suspension of habeas corpus, suppression of dissenting newspapers, and expansion of executive authority exemplified what Rothbard called the “fatal elasticity” of constitutional power in wartime.

Yet the ideological dividends of victory were immense. The war allowed the Union to claim a moral monopoly on the meaning of freedom. As Don H. Doyle’s The Cause of All Nations shows, Northern propagandists successfully internationalized the conflict as a struggle for universal liberty—persuading European publics that the Union’s cause was humanity’s cause. The Civil War thus marks a critical juncture in the evolution of American exceptionalism: the fusion of military power and moral purpose that would later justify intervention abroad.

For libertarian thinkers, however, this moralization of state power represented the final corruption of republican ideals. Rothbard lamented that “by identifying liberty with the state, the North destroyed liberty itself.” What began as a war to preserve the Union ended as a crusade to sacralize it.

The Civil War was the first modern “total war” in American history—mobilizing the entire economy and population for the purpose of annihilation. Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering captures the social dimension of that transformation: death itself became a public institution, managed and quantified by the state. The war’s unprecedented mortality demanded bureaucratic responses—national cemeteries, pension systems, and medical administration—that permanently extended federal reach into the most intimate aspects of life.

Robert Higgs’s “ratchet effect” applies with brutal clarity. Every wartime innovation—the draft, the censorship apparatus, the income tax—was initially justified as temporary necessity but survived as permanent precedent. The result was a state habituated to emergency. As Bensel notes, the Civil War “transformed the political economy of the United States from a liberal to a developmental order.” The federal government emerged not only as the guarantor of national security but as the principal engine of economic modernization—through railroad subsidies, land grants, and industrial procurement.

Even emancipation, the war’s most celebrated achievement, carried this ambivalence. As Matthew Karp argues, the abolition of slavery under federal auspices reinforced rather than limited the ideology of national supremacy: freedom became a gift of the state. The Thirteenth Amendment’s moral triumph thus institutionalized the premise that liberty derived from centralized power. In this sense, the Civil War completed what Rothbard called the “Hamiltonian counterrevolution”—the final victory of statism over federalism.

The postwar period confirmed what Tilly’s comparative model would predict: once established, the infrastructural capacities of war finance and administration do not recede. Reconstruction required an occupying army, a national civil service, and a comprehensive legal regime. Richard Bensel observes that between 1865 and 1877, “the American state reached a level of coercive penetration previously unimaginable.” The Freedmen’s Bureau, the Reconstruction Acts, and the Enforcement Acts all extended federal power into local governance, education, and policing. Though motivated by genuine moral concern, these measures entrenched the logic of bureaucratic intervention. Robert Higgs’s analysis of “crisis and ratchet” applies once again: “wartime emergencies habituate citizens to centralized authority, rendering its postwar continuation both legitimate and inevitable.” By the 1870s, the United States possessed not only the legal capacity but the administrative expectation of national intervention. The postbellum state was, in Bensel’s words, “permanent war mobilization in peacetime.”

Even the cultural memory of the war, as David Blight has shown, served to legitimize this consolidation. The reconciliation narrative that dominated after 1877 exalted unity over liberty, valorizing both Union and Confederate soldiers as instruments of a shared national destiny. The ideological consensus that emerged—of government as guardian of national greatness—would persist well into the twentieth century.

Alexander Keyssar’s insights into the militarized origins of suffrage find their fullest expression in this era. The Civil War democratized citizenship for white men across class lines, as service became the definitive credential for political participation. Yet the same logic excluded others. African Americans gained freedom but were swiftly disenfranchised; women’s claims were deferred; Native nations faced renewed subjugation. The war thus redefined citizenship as loyalty to the state, not autonomy from it.

Culturally, the postwar years witnessed what Michael Hunt calls the “externalization of virtue”: a belief that national righteousness required continual assertion through power. The moral certainty forged in the Civil War would later justify imperial expansion in Cuba, the Philippines, and beyond. Don Doyle notes that the global applause for the Union victory “invited Americans to see themselves as agents of civilization.” The fusion of moral purpose and coercive capacity—born in the crucible of 1861–65—became the defining feature of the American Leviathan.
The Civil War completed a century-long transformation in which the United States followed, and in some ways surpassed, the European pattern of war-driven state formation. What began as a confederation of self-governing republics emerged as a consolidated nation-state, equipped with the fiscal, military, and ideological instruments of modern power. In Tilly’s schema, the process was nearly textbook: external conflict and internal repression combined to create a durable apparatus of coercion and extraction. From the libertarian realist standpoint, however, this achievement was ambiguous at best. The war that abolished slavery also institutionalized coercion; the Union that triumphed over secession did so by destroying the voluntary basis of federalism. Rothbard captured this paradox succinctly: “The victory of the North was the victory of statism; liberty won, but the state conquered.” The legacy of the Civil War, therefore, is double-edged. It fulfilled the revolutionary promise of equality before the law while extinguishing the revolutionary principle of limited government. The Leviathan born in crisis would never again sleep.

Conclusion: War, State, and the Contradictions of American Liberty

From the Seven Years’ War to Appomattox, the history of the United States reveals a paradox at the heart of its political development: a republic founded in resistance to imperial coercion became, through successive wars, the most formidable coercive power in the Western Hemisphere. Traditional military historians such as Allan Millett and Peter Maslowski have long presented this evolution as the natural outgrowth of national maturation—a narrative in which conflict forged unity, tested institutions, and advanced freedom.¹ Revisionists like William Appleman Williams and Walter LaFeber, by contrast, interpreted expansion and war as the instruments of economic imperialism, linking the nation’s external aggression to the internal imperatives of capitalism.² Post-revisionists such as Richard Bensel and Theda Skocpol have emphasized structural and institutional continuities: wars created durable fiscal and bureaucratic capacities that underpinned the rise of the modern state.³ Finally, cultural historians like Drew Gilpin Faust, David Blight, and Carol Reardon have turned to the symbolic and memorial dimensions of warfare, tracing how Americans transformed violence into myth, mourning into nationalism, and the state into a vessel of moral identity.

Each of these traditions captures an essential facet of the American experience, but taken together they obscure as much as they reveal. They tend to accept the growth of the state as either an inevitable or a benign process—either the byproduct of progress or the price of unity. The present analysis, by contrast, follows the insight of Charles Tilly while introducing a libertarian realist corrective. From a Tillyan perspective, the American republic exemplifies the axiom that “war made the state and the state made war”: conflict generated the fiscal and administrative instruments that defined modern sovereignty. Yet the libertarian realist approach—drawing on Rothbard and Higgs—insists that these processes were neither morally neutral nor historically inevitable. They were contingent political choices, often driven less by genuine threats than by domestic interests, factional rivalry, and ideological ambition.

In the colonial and revolutionary eras, war against empire created the conditions for centralization even as it proclaimed liberty. In the Jacksonian period, expansionism and Indian removal turned war into a tool of political consolidation and patronage. By the Civil War, the logic of militarized politics had matured into a comprehensive system of fiscal extraction, ideological mobilization, and executive dominance—the full American Leviathan. What Tilly saw as the universal logic of state formation thus appears, from the libertarian realist standpoint, as the progressive betrayal of the Revolution’s decentralized, voluntary ideal.

Ultimately, the United States was both made by war and unmade by it—its libertarian promise subsumed beneath the demands of mobilization, expansion, and moral mission. The enduring question for American history, and for modern liberalism more broadly, is whether a state born in coercion can ever truly serve liberty. As Rothbard warned and Tilly predicted, the instruments of defense too easily become the architecture of domination. In that tragic dialectic—the making of the state and the undoing of freedom—lies the central story of the American republic.


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