Support for Nationalization and State Building in the Early American Republic

Abstract

House deliberations over healthcare legislation in 1798 show members of the Fifth US Congress debating the constitutional basis of small government assumptions about states’ rights and federal power, asking why the regime’s principles should not be understood as requiring direct federal intervention in the lives of socially and economically vulnerable groups irrespective of states’ authority. Extending the current scholarly debate over nationalization and state building in early American thought, I suggest that questions alleged by many scholars to have been excluded from political and constitutional debate in the early republic were, in cases like this, robustly contested.