The Federal Government and Slavery: Following the Money Trail

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to amend both the recent literature on the development of the American state and the recent literature on the impact of slavery on American public policy. In fact, with this article, I am bringing together these two bodies of literature by demonstrating how slavery contributed to the development of the American state. While the first body of literature largely ignores how slavery affected the development of the American state, the second traces the proslavery biases of federal policies without discussing how those policies positively affected the development of the American state. The assumption common to both is that, to the extent slavery affected the development of the American state, it negatively affected that development. My goal is to correct that assumption.