Conquering Space through Internal Improvements: Federal Nation-Building in Nineteenth-Century America

Early American political leaders were tasked with sustaining a representative republic on a seemingly impossible scale. Their struggle to stave off political dissolution raises an important question for scholars of federalism. How can democratic governments integrate disparate political communities across a vast—and rapidly expanding—territory? We revisit the solution most often proposed by contemporary political leaders: a nationally directed system of internal improvements. Using a dataset of nineteenth-century appropriations, we find that patterns in internal improvement funding are consistent with a nation-building strategy. Congressional districts at the fringes of the republic received disproportionate support from the federal government, even after accounting for political preferences, positions of legislative authority, and sub-national spending patterns. Our research stands in contrast to existing work on internal improvements, which is primarily interested in testing theories of distributive politics, and contributes to a diverse body of research on federalism, nation-building, congressional politics, and American political development.