From Pluribus to Unum? Statebuilding in 19th Century America

• In Event: State Capacity Beyond Taxation

Abstract

The centralization of authority is one of most of important aspects of political development. Sovereign authority exists when those that state purports to govern actually think of the state as sovereign. The state- and nationbuilding literature has argued that economic and political modernization explains this transformation, but these theories cannot easily be tested due to a lack of data on national sentiment.



We surmount this problem through an innovative analysis of the United States. Over the course of the 19th century, Americans stopped thinking of the United States as comprised of multiple sovereign states and started thinking of it as a single sovereign entity. This transformation in the popular imagination of sovereignty is evident in the well-documented grammatical change in which the phrase “United States” shifted from a plural noun to a singular noun.



We use this shift to test theories of modernization against an important alternative in the U.S. context: the centralizing effect of the Civil War. We analyze all Congressional speeches between 1851–1914, linking plural/singular usage to specific individuals and the characteristics of their birthplaces and constituencies. Our preliminary results find no support for the modernization arguments and challenge the conventional wisdom about the Civil War.

Authors

• Melissa M. Lee, Princeton University

• Nan Zhang, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods