https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122419831228
American Sociological Review
2019, Vol. 84(2) 334­–367
© American Sociological
Association 2019
DOI:10.1177/0003122419831228
journals.sagepub.com/home/asr
In the study of state-formation, a healthy
debate has developed concerning the trajectories
of organizations with ambitions to sovereignty
(Adams 1999; Gorski 1995; Kiser and
Linton 2002; Kiser and Schneider 1994,
1995; Lachmann 1989; Loveman 2005;
Novak 2008; Steinmetz 2008). This debate
has paid special attention to states’ funding
and command of physical violence (Tilly
1985), and to how organizations seek legitimacy,
come to be taken for granted as part of
the social landscape, and provide the categories
of understanding used in many other
areas of social life (Bourdieu 2014).
A remaining problem for this research concerns
the initial moments of the accumulation
of power by proto-state organizations.Acutely
articulated by Loveman (2005) in her study of
the “primitive accumulation of symbolic
power” by the Brazilian state, the puzzle can
be phrased as a question: How do would-be
states achieve an initial accumulation of
power, such that they are in a position to grow
(or shrink) as an organization, maintain their
prestige (or lose it), and be viewed, by elite
and populace, as something real and consequential
that can be argued about, supported,
or attacked?1
831228ASRXXX10.1177/0003122419831228American Sociological ReviewReed
research-article2019
a
University of Virginia
Corresponding Author:
Isaac Ariail Reed, Department of Sociology,
University of Virginia, 130 Ruppel Drive, P.O.
Box 400766, Charlottesville, VA 22904
Email: iar2c@virginia.edu
Performative State-Formation
in the Early American
Republic
Isaac Ariail Reeda
Abstract
How do proto-state organizations achieve an initial accumulation of power, such that they are
in a position to grow (or shrink) as an organization, maintain their prestige (or lose it), and be
viewed, by elite and populace, as something real and consequential that can be argued about,
supported, or attacked? This article argues that state-formation has a performative dimension,
in which the publicity of acts of violence, coercion, and negotiation made by agents of the
proto-state, and the variable interpretation of these acts, are paramount to the state’s success
(or failure) and developing character. In the model developed here, agents of a would-be state
act in response to emergencies, and when public interpretations of those actions assign their
character and effectiveness to “the state,” the state is performed into being. In particular,
public performance solves, in part, agency problems obtaining between state rulers and their
staff and elite allies. The formation of the federal government in the early American republic
(1783 to 1801), whose success is insufficiently accounted for by extant theory, provides an
opportunity to develop a model of the performative dimension of state-formation.
Keywords
agency theory, power, rebellion, federal government, political sociology
Reed	 335
Building on Loveman (2005) and other
recent arguments about states and power
emphasizing public communication and political
semiosis (Adut 2018; Norton 2014;
Santana-Acuña 2014; Wagner-Pacifici 2010),
this article argues that state-formation has a
performative dimension: the initial accumulation
of state power occurs, in part, through
“state by demonstration.” In this dimension of
the accumulation of power, the publicity of
the would-be state’s acts of violence and
coercion, and the variable interpretation of
these acts (including, as part of interpretation,
the attribution of such acts to the state), are
paramount to a state’s success (or failure) and
developing character. If the would-be state is
compelling and convincing, to certain audiences,
in its execution of violence on certain
targets, then it achieves a certain felicity condition
(Austin 1975; Goffman 1983; WagnerPacifici
2017), helping make the state into an
arbiter of social reality and an entity that orients
the actions of elites and populace. This
felicity features weaponry and finance, but its
utility for the accumulation of power is
dependent on public interpretation. Public
interpretation, when it goes well for the performative
state, helps solve agency problems
obtaining between rulers and their staff and
allies.
All states have a “public face” of some
sort. Symbols of the state, for example, are
often displayed in prominent ways, with the
result not only that people see them, but people
see other people see them, so that states
continue their existence, in part, through their
publicity (Endelman 2015), which allows the
coordination of action (Chwe [2001] 2013).
We can thus expect all processes of stateformation
to involve some aspect of performative
display. However, based on the model
developed here, we can also expect variation
in the degree to which such performances are
parasitic upon more well-known dimensions
of state-formation, on the one hand, or form
an essential hinge for the initial success or
failure of a given organization’s ambitions to
sovereignty, on the other. This article, which
is an effort in theory-building rather than
theory-testing, focuses on a case in which the
performative dimension was crucial to the
process of state-making.
First, I show why the initial accumulation
of state power is a theoretical problem for
sociology, discussing three models of stateformation
as different dimensions of the process.
I then set out a basic model of the
performative dimension of state-building,
grounded in the study of the public interpretation
of the use of violence and coercion in
emergencies by state agents. Next, I provide
an interpretation of American political development
in the years 1783 to 1801, beginning
with the relative insufficiency of extant theories
of state-formation to account for the emergence
of the federal government in the early
years of the United States of America. After
providing an empirical account of the mediation
of state action through the network of
newspapers in the early American republic, I
engage in a fine-grained tracing of the process
of performance in the key year of 1794. In that
year, the federal apparatus, amid widespread
doubt about its future, performed particularly
successfully. I then provide a contextualization
of the successes of 1794 and their effects,
drawn via a brief account of (1) a less propitiously
handled emergency in the early American
republic (Fries’s Rebellion) and (2) the
republic’s success in avoiding a civil war in
1801. Finally, I discuss the relationship of the
theory developed here to a range of other
sociological work on states and performance.
State-Formation As The
Resolution Of Agency
Problems: Three Extant
Models
All organizations with ambitions to become
states face a series of agency problems. These
are problems arising from the recruitment of
various persons and organizations into the
state building project, and the ensuing delegation
of tasks to staff, elite allies, or other versions
of a would-be state’s agents. Formal
agency theory, as a part of rational choice
336		 American Sociological Review 84(2)
sociology, often invokes strong assumptions
about the strategic nature of human action
and motivation when analyzing these problems
(Coleman 1994; Kiser 1999; Kiser and
Kane 2007).
A broader account of agency theory suggests
that the recurrence of agency problems
can serve as a theoretical frame for understanding
a wide variety of power situations
(Adams 1996, 2010, 2011; Norton 2015;
Reed 2017; Shapiro 2005). Building on this
work, we can view state-formation as the
emergence of a solution to the problem of
how a small set of principals (rulers) can
secure and ensure that their agents (staff,
allied elites) enforce the rulers’will and maintain
the rulers’ legitimacy (to some degree)
over the general population, under varying
threat from opponents (Tyson 2018).
In particular, for state-formation to succeed,
a series of intertwining agency problems
must be overcome. Corrupt tax officials
can be offered better rates to be honest and
report on their dishonest co-workers, but (particularly
if rulers lack money) they can also
be punished via imprisonment. However, the
use of physical coercion to shore up taxation
is, itself, an agency problem.2
Rulers have to
get their military officers or police chiefs—
and beyond that, the soldiers and police
assembled underneath them—to commit or
threaten violence where and when they want
them to (and soldiers, at some point, need to
be paid). Jailing tax evaders and corrupt tax
officials, or foreclosing and auctioning off
land, requires that officers, soldiers, and
policemen accept the legitimacy of the state
project in a way those who are avoiding paying
taxes do not.
As these agency problems come together,
they combine into the core organizational
problem of state-formation, namely, that what
would be the mutually reinforcing agency
relations of a successful state (e.g., tax officials
are honest because if they are not they
might be arrested by police loyal to the state)
threaten to become the mutually undermining
agency problems of a failed state (e.g., soldiers
who are not confident they will be paid
will not take physically risky actions to secure
the resources that might be used to pay them
and others). This intertwining has been discussed
extensively in the rational choice literature
(Kiser 1994; Kiser and Schneider 1994),
with particular focus on the question of how
accountability does or does not function to
resolve such problems (Ermakoff 2011); here,
I place it in the broader context of the accumulation
of state power that includes coercion,
economic interest, and legitimacy.
Exchange and Threat
Research that focuses on capital and coercion
as explanatory factors in state-formation
examines how the mix of money, guns, and
manpower initially at the disposal of would-be
rulers—and the strategic interactions between
rulers, elites, and populace—explains the
eventual outcome of rulers’ efforts to overcome
agency problems and build an effective
state apparatus. In this dimension of stateformation,
hierarchical ties are constructed out
of resources granted to, and threats of resource
depletion directed at, elites and other agents
(Brewer 1990; Kentor 2014; Tilly 1992). This
research is particularly sensitive to variations
in the external threat of war as a factor
accounting for variations in the success, failure,
and character of state-formation (Downing
1993; Ertman 1997).
Interpreted broadly, the capital-andcoercion
model can be understood as one of a
series of models that analyze the overcoming
of agency problems in state-formation in
terms of exchange and threat (for a counterpoint
to this dimension that adds trust to the
mix, see Tilly 2005). The broader family of
models extends the focus from the accumulation
of caches of weapons and money to the
organizational politics evident in the realist
strand in Weber’s political sociology (Smith
1987). In particular, Weber’s (1978:226–40,
255–65, 297–8, 1006–110) extensive work to
identify different ways rulers can recruit an
administrative staff or allies became the basis
for a wide-ranging research program on how
rulers’ ties to their staff are forged through
Reed	 337
exchange of desired goods, on the one hand,
and threats of unwanted losses (to life, health,
or wealth), on the other (Kiser 1999:157–62).
Recent examples of the exchange-andthreat
dimension include Hall’s (2015)
deployment of “patrimonial transactionalism”
to explain the United States’ Western expansion,
and, with regard to the early American
republic, Gould’s (1996) analysis of the
Whiskey Rebellion via the analysis of patronage
ties. The overall point is that in using
guns and money to become the only effective
and feared “protection racket” in a given territory
(Tilly 1985), a series of exchanges and
threats are used to forge and maintain hierarchical
ties between principals and agents, and
these ties become the organizational structure
of the emergent state.
Culture I: Subject-Formation and
Categories of Thought
One aspect of state-formation that classic
studies of exchange and threat tend to underestimate
is the degree to which states may
obtain legitimacy if social processes ensure
the creation of subjects who are inclined to
work for and with them, and if certain categories
of thought favoring this legitimacy
become naturalized and taken for granted.
Drawing on Weber’s (1978) work on legitimate
rule, and enhanced by Bourdieu’s (1994,
2014) cultural theory of the state and Foucault’s
([1975] 2012) concept of disciplinary
power (see also Garland 1986), cultural theorists
of state-formation point to religious
belief, nationalism, and the importance of
familial lineage, and they emphasize the symbolic
vision and division of the world (including
the “simplification and standardization of
measurement” [Scott 2006:30]) as essential to
explaining why the making of (certain) states
succeeded or failed.
Here too, state-formation occurs as a solution
to agency problems, although both the
explanandum and the process are reconceptualized,
and use of the language of agency in
articulating the model is less common (but
see Adams 1999, 2005b, 2010, 2011).
Symbolic power, legitimacy, and discipline
help rulers secure staff and allies who will
consistently act on their orders, and, more
generally, act in a manner consistent with
their interests, desires, and projects. For
example, Gorski (1995) argues that Prussian
civil servants were selected via the criteria of
confession, and thus the institution of the
church influenced state-formation by making
cheating less likely among tax collectors.
With both the monitoring of some agents by
other agents and self-monitoring more common,
overall enforcement was less expensive
for the rulers of the Prussian state; the interdependence
of agency problems could thus
become a virtuous rather than vicious spiral.3
Gorski (2003) made a similar argument about
religion and state-formation in the Netherlands,
citing Calvinist-inflected disciplinary
practices.
Following Weber, cultural questions about
state legitimacy and cognitive framing have
focused on the state’s staff.4
However, Adams
(2005a) makes a cultural argument about rulers,
suggesting an important cultural dimension
to patrimonial state-formation—that it is
patriarchal. In so far as the familial imagination
influenced the projects and strategies of
early-modern Dutch elites, the ruler-principals
saw themselves as agents of their family
lines, which extended before their birth and
after their death, and of which they were only
temporary manifestations. Acting on the basis
of this cultural construction, early Dutch
state-builders understood it to be in the interests
of the families they represented to arrive
at a compromise formation wherein each elite
family would permanently own a piece of the
quasi-bureaucratic Dutch state.
Thus, instead of assuming relatively
rational actors with consistent sets of preferences,
the cultural model examines the
remolding of subjectivities into docile state
actors (Ikegami 1995; Steinmetz 1999; Stuart
Brundage 2017). This means cultural accounts
of how states form often point to exogenous
institutions as the source of new subjects who
can be bound together in the state. These
accounts of the imagination of rulers and staff
338		 American Sociological Review 84(2)
tend to move discussion of states away from
overt violence,5
replacing it with the induced
self-control of docile bodies and minds in the
formation of modern states.6
Culture II: Knowledge, Logistics,
Materiality
A different manifestation of the cultural turn
in the study of state-formation emphasizes
material culture. In this dimension, the success
of binding staff and elites to rulers is
made more likely by the design of the material
world such that delegation can proceed
smoothly and loyalty secured, as both are
grounded in a techno-material comprehension
shared across sectors of a burgeoning regime.
In this model, the co-production of certain
material-and-social beings, and knowledge
about them, via state bureaucracies and other
knowledge-generating networks and structures,
is the key process. New expressions of
political power—for example, reconfigurations
of the relationship between a monarch
and nobles, or of the relationship between an
imperial presence and local elites—are
achieved, in part, by transformation of the
natural environment; projects for the articulation
of regimes are encoded into the “sciencestate
plexus” (Carroll 2006:4). As Carroll
(2006:144) notes in his study of “engineering
Ireland,” in this mode, a “new policy
replac[ed] the supposed Irish state of nature
with the planters’ culture of state.”
Mukerji’s (1997) study of the making of
French Absolutism, Territorial Ambitions and
the Gardens of Versailles, is a study of material
culture as a dimension of state-formation
(for further investigation of the relationship
between engineering and state-making, see
Mukerji 2009). Taking “French formal gardens
as laboratories of power,” Mukerji
(1997:8) traces how a certain kind of triumph
over nature, encoded into the built environment,
projected the capacity of the state to
control territory and naturalized this capacity
as the condition of political action. For Mukerji
(1997:55), the “displacement of organized
violence from the feudal nobility into a
professional army”—that is, the making of a
modern military-fiscal state in France—was
achieved, in part, by making “the French state
not just a political regime but a material entity
built into the landscape.” The collection and
placement of artworks, the design of gardens,
and even the king’s greed created a state style,
and in so doing, solved a series of intertwined
agency problems, subordinating both “huge
armies of artisans” and the nobility (Mukerji
1997:105, 150, 203).
Near the conclusion of Mukerji’s argument,
the performative aspect of state-formation
makes a brief appearance. She argues that
spectacular costumed plays at Versailles
helped to bind nobles to the new regime
(Mukerji 1997:229–33), effectively resolving
the agency problem that obtained between the
monarchy and the nobility. However, the overall
arc of her analysis favors material culture
as the driving force behind the solution to
agency problems: “material manipulations
became a means of sidestepping the conflicts
of representation by founding the legitimacy
of the regime in demonstrations of efficacy in
the world of things” (Mukerji 1997:257). My
argument inverts Mukerji’s both temporally
and analytically. In the case under study here,
the public felicity of the state preceded, and
indeed in some sense made possible, its technological
accomplishments and its materialsocial
logistics.Theoretically, the performative
is explicitly modeled as a dimension of stateformation
analytically separable from that of
material culture.
The Distinction Between
Primitive Accumulation
And Routine
Maintenance of State
Power
The processes outlined above, considered as
dimensions of state-formation, can be thought
of as overlapping, with differing time scales
and variations in how they intertwine. Nonetheless,
a similarity in these disparate models
reveals a puzzle whose solution could enhance
Reed	 339
sociological theories of state-formation. All
three models tend to point to multigenerational
timelines. The two cultural models
trace the sedimentation of meaning, the elaboration
of sociotechnical apparatuses, and the
formation of subjects across decades.7
The
exchange-and-threat model starts from different
initial conditions and then follows these
through an account of repeated mechanisms
that also unfold over decades or even centuries
(e.g., Ertman 1997; Tilly 1992).
This emphasis makes the initial moments
of state-formation a lacuna for extant models,
although such early moments may nonetheless
be recognized as moments of change or
path-dependence precisely in so far as they sit
outside the models and the theoretical expectations
they entail (Mahoney 2000). In identifying
this problem, Loveman (2005) proposed
an analytic distinction between the primitive
accumulation and the routine maintenance of
symbolic power in states. Loveman developed
this distinction with reference to the
cultural theories of state-formation then in
ascendance, but it can just as well describe
exchange and threat in state-formation
because—whether the issue is money and
guns, or lawyers and engineers—the initial
accumulation of state power can be modeled
as the problem of overcoming intertwined
agency problems.8
As a result, in situations
where the success or failure of state-building
faces a narrow timeline and an extreme precarity
of rule within that timeline, there would
appear to be a mismatch between the models
outlined earlier and the exigencies of statemaking.
This is the inspiration for the development
of a model of the performative
dimension of state-formation.
This model of “state by demonstration,” or
the “presumptive state” (Richardson 2012),9
may be introduced through a thought experiment,
whose stylized language should be
understood as deliberately unrealistic. Imagine
a small set of would-be rulers who seek to
harness and grow an organization that will
claim sovereignty, enforce laws, and accrue
capital. These rulers, however, have few and
highly uncertain fiscal and military resources
for doing so. Likewise, their legitimacy, and
the legitimacy of their organization, is not
only not well-established, but they lack any
preexisting institutions or traditions that can
clearly and directly lend them legitimacy.
In this situation, the basic state functions
of taxation, war-making, law-making, and
(social and natural) cartography (SantanaAcuña
2014) have a high probability of
devolving into a failed project due to intertwined
agency problems. To extract taxes
requires a military apparatus, which has to be
paid; to conduct a census of the population to
better extract taxes requires money, which
requires taxes; to beat opponents in war and
gain valuable territories that can be mapped
and used requires recruiting an army, but
recruiting is less likely to be successful if
previous armies have lost, and so on.
In such a situation, a “Hail Mary” solution
with some affinity to what Bentham (1864)
called “deep play”—making bets that are well
beyond what one can possibly afford (see also
Geertz 2000)—might be appealing. The rulers
could use up their (minimal) resources to secure
a small number of agency relationships, and
then hope that other potential agents of their
would-be state will decide that the state will be
successful, and thus they, too, will become a
part of it—thus making it successful.10
But how do these other potential agents
decide to join the state project? Perhaps they
can be persuaded. That is, something about
how they see and interpret the actions of the
would-be state brings them around to an
acceptance of state power as real and consequential.
Such indirect securing of agents
would be, by definition, not subject to the
usual (and costly) mechanisms of monitoring,
punishment, and reward that make up the
bulk of the literature of agency theory (for a
review, see Shapiro 2005). Instead, the widespread
public interpretation of the rulers’
actions would be highly consequential for the
future of their organization.
This stylized description renders in raw
form a dimension of the process of stateformation
that, in sociological explanations,
could be combined with the three more wellknown
and well-tested models described earlier.
It references, for state-building, the
340		 American Sociological Review 84(2)
relevance of performativity, in the precise
sense of an action creating the impression of an
entity behind the action as its “essential cause”
(Butler [1990] 1999; Wagner-Pacifici 2010;
Weber 1998). Felicity in performance provides
the basis for the solution to agency problems,
establishing hierarchy and coordination in
actors’ various responses (collective and individual,
elite and populace) to “the state.”
The performative dimension is, I propose,
a dimension of all processes of state-formation,
but its importance varies across cases. It can
come to the fore in instances where state-formation
occurs in a rush, on the cheap, and
outside the typical distribution of resources
that gives an organization a chance to become
“the state.” Indeed, in this description of persuasion
and deep play, astute readers will have
recognized the kinds of uncertain situations
that have been theorized in the literature on
revolutions, state crises, civil war, and abdication
(Ermakoff 2008; James 2001; Markoff
1995, 2010; Sewell 1996; Tilly 1964).
For example, during and after revolutions,
new leaders thrust into power and installed in
an urban center (e.g., Paris, Philadelphia) are
often presented with a chaotic, violent, and
thus difficult to manage situation, particularly
in the rural periphery. Desperate to bring their
conflicts with the general population under
control, they need a good staff, a good army,
a way to collect taxes, and so on, and they
need these to become a reality in less than a
generation. Yet precisely because the situation
is a crisis wherein the rules of the game
of political power are undergoing transformation,
there is ambiguity in the forging and
stability of agency relations.
This kind of ambiguity about agency relations
arises in crises broadly defined, including
seizures of power, abdications, and
collapse, in which norms, habits, and established
interests are no longer able to guide
decision-making and action (Ermakoff 2013;
Reed 2015; Sapiro 2013). In particular, interpretation
of the future as unpredictable makes
securing staff and elite allies difficult. In such
situations, public interpretations of state
action become acutely important; the public
face of the state, constituted in myriad
moments of interpretation carried out in front
of others who are also interpreting, emerges
as key to a state’s success or failure (Glaeser
2011).
The Performative
Dimension of StateFormation:
A Basic Model
The following model of the performative
dimension of state-formation takes an emphasis
on physical violence from the capital-andcoercion
approaches to the state, and an
emphasis on interpretation from cultural
approaches. But it adds to these the analysis
of publicity, which can transform processes of
interpretation in rapid fashion (Adut 2008,
2018). It focuses on public displays and interpretations
of violence and coercion. The
model has three interconnected elements.
Emergency. Problems emerge that
urgently demand, or appear to demand, demonstration
of the monopoly of the legitimate
use of violence over a given territory by a
would-be state.
“Acts of state” that involve violence
and coercion. In response to the emergency,
acts are taken “in the name of the
state” to kill, injure, coerce, threaten, or negotiate
with named adversaries.
Public interpretation.  Via media, these
acts of state are made widely and publicly
available for variable interpretation by elites
and the populace. These interpretations take
as their background certain horizons of understanding
(Gadamer 1989; Griswold 1993),
but they are not entirely reducible to such
backgrounds (which are themselves variable).
To some degree, these interpretations emerge
in response to the emergencies, acts of violence,
and publicity at hand—they are actions
on the scene of the emergency. Securing the
state as real in its consequences depends—in
the performative dimension—on these interpretations
of the (would-be) state’s response
to emergencies.
Reed	 341
The model is designed to be iterative: public
interpretations of acts of violence in an
emergency become an important part of the
background for the next emergency. For this
reason, contextualization is important for tracing
its dynamics: what constitutes an emergency;
how and which agents of the state enact
violence, coercion, or negotiation; how the
media generates interpretations of violence;
and how and which interpretations of the violence
become influential are all questions that
have to be answered via process-tracing.
The performative model tracks how the
justification of violence and the legitimation
of power can be created by public interpretation
of acts of the organization that claims to
be the state. This model focuses on the mediated
reception of exemplary violence and
coercion, and the felicitous or infelicitous
displays of variably gilded state agents that
accompany such moments. In the performative
dimension, the state becomes the center
of newspaper stories and the gossip they generate;
resentful and restless populations are
converted by flag and fear into overawed or
grateful citizens; and certain actors within the
proto-state seek to make the state appear
well-funded, expertly violent, and, in some
cases, judicious and fair—a force to be reckoned
with and an inevitable part of the landscape
upon which human action proceeds.
Performative state-formation succeeds, then,
in so far as public interpretations of certain
acts of violence successfully assign to the
state a reality and consequentiality that then
orients future action. Appearance and its variable
interpretation become the medium for
the accumulation and exercise of power.
The focus on emergencies of wide public
interest intentionally limits the scope of the
model. The approach proposed here does not
consider everyday policing, the response of
the would-be state to private homicide or
other violent crimes, or the overall distribution
of violence in society, all of which may
be essential aspects of the initial accumulation
or routine maintenance of state power.
Much violence in society occurs behind
closed doors, and much occurs in public without
becoming subject to publicity about the
state.11
(Indeed, in the early American republic,
a slave society, violence was constitutive
of the social order of the plantation, and everyday
policing occurred at the level of municipality
and county, with federal oversight of
such governance-of-violence a rarity).
Instead, this model elaborates on the concept
of exemplary repression (Mann 2005:16–7),
developing it into a theory of performative
violence and coercion, and asking how it connects
with the felt and perceived eventfulness
of emergency, so as to understand how public
interpretation is consequential for stateformation.
As we shall see, the use (or not) of
violence during emergencies should be understood
as a spectrum, further complicated by
conflicts of interpretation over the meaning of
the (non)violence performed.
Data And Methods
The period in U.S. history beginning with the
Treaty of Paris (1783) and ending with the
election crisis of 1801 and its resolution is a
promising site for building a theory of performative
state-formation for three reasons. First,
the period has been intensively studied by
multiple generations of historians with access
to myriad archives, and its political history has
been particularly salient to historical research
(Waldstreicher, Pasley, and Robertson 2009).
Second, it is widely understood to be a crucial
time in the formation of the U.S. government
as an organization that makes sovereign claims
(Griffin et al. 2015). Third, this period has
emerged in recent historiography as a time of
tremendous precarity and contingency for the
ambitions of the would-be rulers of the new
federal government (Freeman 2002; Hinderaker
1999; Wood 2009).
In what follows, I use secondary, and in
some cases primary, texts to trace the emergency
politics of the early American republic
during this time span. I focus on events that
rose to the level of widespread publicity and
involved the use of violence, coercion, or the
imminent threat of violence as a part of sovereign
claims made by the federal government.
Not all of these were clear performative
successes for the early U.S. government—in
342		 American Sociological Review 84(2)
particular, Harmar’s (1790) and St. Clair’s
(1791) campaigns in the Northwest Territory
and Fries’s rebellion (1799) were, as will be
discussed, failures for the men who occupied
the highest positions in the new federal government,
and the outcomes of Shays’s rebellion
(1786) and Gabriel’s Conspiracy (1800)
credited the Massachusetts and Virginia state
governments, respectively, for their handling
of the “emergencies.” The election crisis of
1801 was resolved in a way that favored the
continuity of federal power, but, as I shall
endeavor to show, this successful performance
depended on previous successes.
The most outstanding cases of successful
performance for the federal government—the
crushing of the Whiskey Rebellion and the
Battle of Fallen Timbers, both of which took
place in the late summer and early fall of
1794—form the centerpiece of the analysis
presented here, as I endeavor to elaborate a
model of how the performative dimension of
state-formation can work well and be effective.
For each emergency, I trace the three
elements of the model outlined above in
dynamic relationship to each other. Finally, I
use a reading of extensive secondary materials
on the growth of the American state after
1801 to establish the applicability of Loveman’s
(2005) distinction between initial accumulation
of state power (1783 to 1801) and
its routine maintenance (1801 to 1824, and, in
a different way, 1824 to 1861). I use government
records and militia rolls, as well as secondary
sources on military history, to assess
the size and cost of the military in the early
American republic.
The Problem of
Explaining The
Formation Of The Early
American State
Outcome: The General Government
Well-known arguments in American historiography
dispute whether the U.S. government
before the Civil War was strong or weak,
whether the federal apparatus in that period is
best characterized as a state of “courts and
parties,”12
and, perhaps most prominently,
how we should think about the relationship
between the development of federal state
capacity and recurrent strains of anti-statism
in American political culture (Baker 2002;
Ericson 2017; Freehling 1994; Gerstle 2017;
John 1997; Katznelson 2002; Novak 2008;
Opal 2013; Skowronek 1982).
Despite its many points of disagreement,
this literature reveals a consistent finding: by
the time Andrew Jackson was elected, a federal
apparatus of significant capacity and
legitimacy did exist. Consider the following
elements: the buildup of the military for, and
then continuing after, the War of 1812 (Edling
2014; Wilentz 2006); the legitimation of
Alexander Hamilton’s plan for the U.S. Bank
in the 1800s and 1810s (Hammond 1967;
Lomazoff 2012); the emergence, by 1828, of
a postal system staffed by a remarkable number
of federal agents (John 1997); and the
expansion of infrastructure projects between
1812 and 1824 (Baker 2002). All of these elements
point to the growth and solidification,
between 1801 and 1828, of a secure solution
to agency problems: “governance that
spanned extensive territory and that delegated
authority to distant agents” (Balogh 2009:6).
The antebellum United States featured a
federal state apparatus whose four points of
extensive governance and control were (1)
the commerce system and the national market,
(2) security and westward expansion, (3)
use of tariffs, and (4) use of “the law to shape
the political landscape” (Balogh 2009:381).
By the War of 1812, and certainly by the time
Jackson ran for office and repurposed the
cultural tropes of anti-statism to his own
aims, there was an apparatus to be resentful
of, something to be “political about.” That is
to say, there had been an initial accumulation
of state power. But how did this occur? The
era before 1801 creates a puzzle.
Guns, Money, and the Agency
Problems Posed by Early American
Militias
Mann (2012) cites conscription as a key innovation
of the American War of Independence,
Reed	 343
and the cozy relationship between revolutionary
leaders and large merchants and bankers
on the Eastern Seaboard is well established.
However, a war for independence and the
formation of a federal state apparatus are not
the same thing, and in the case of the former
North American colonies of the United Kingdom,
this was especially the case when it
came to military force.13
In the period between 1784 and 1801, the
U.S. federal military capacity was remarkably
small, in terms of both manpower and funds
devoted to the military. Table 1 lists the size
of the U.S. Army in number of men enlisted,
1784 to 1798, along with comparisons from
mobilizations during the War for Independence
and the War of 1812. Table 2 records
spending on the Army, 1791 to 1801, with a
comparison to 1812. However, as the rightmost
column of Table 1 indicates, more U.S.
citizens went into battle with the Ohio Indians
in 1790, 1791, and 1794 than were “in the
U.S. Army.” These more formidable numbers
come from the use of citizen militias. Citizen
militias are, I believe, what Mann (2012:151–
2) is referring to when he discusses conscription
in the American revolution, the first
“mass mobilization warfare,” and thus the
way the revolution let “the ‘people’ onstage”
in history.14
But, if militias were an option for
Table 1.  Size of the U.S. Army in Men, 1784 to 1798, 1812
Year Regulars Semi-regulars
Militia Used in
Military Events
1784 80b
700b
 
1785 80b
700b
 
1786 80b
700b
4,400e
(Shays Reb.)
1787 80b
700b
 
1788 80b
700b
 
1789 1,216b
—  
1790 1,216b
— 1,133b
(NW Terr.)
1791 1,216b
2,000b
1,000f
(NW Terr.)
1792 5,280a,b
—  
1793 5,280a,b
—  
1794 2,000c
— 1,500b,c,d
(NW Terr.)
12,950b
(Whiskey Reb.)
1795 2,000c
—  
1796 1,000g
—  
1797 5,280a,b
—  
1798 10,000a,b
—  
1812 35,000b
50,000b
100,000b
Note: Estimates for the number served in the Revolutionary War range from 184,000 to 250,000 (U.S.
Bureau of the Census 1965:731).
a
Number authorized by Congress; number recruited/conscripted unknown but estimated to be
significantly less.
Sources:
b
Millett, Maslowski, and Fries (2012:156–57, 163–68, 172, 180).
c
Anderson and Cayton (2005:194).
d
Stockwell (2018:256).
e
Condon (2015:82).
f
Nelson (1986:234).
g
Quantitative estimates have not been found for the Army in 1796 in secondary or primary sources.
Therefore, this estimate is arrived at via the reduction, by half, in funds devoted to the Army from 1795
to 1796, as found in “Series Y 350-356, Expenditures of the Federal Government, 1789 to 1957” in U.S.
Bureau of the Census (1965:718–19). Millet and colleagues (2012:94) and Kohn (1975:176–78, 184–6)
confirm that the legion structure was dismantled by Congress in 1796 and replaced with an order for
two light dragoon regiments and four infantry regiments.
344		 American Sociological Review 84(2)
the federal government, they were always
potentially a problem for that government as
well, due to the politics of organized violence
in this era and the “dual army” tradition
(Cress 1982; Herrera 2015; Higginbotham
1998; Laver 2002; Mahon 1960; Weigley
1984).
In 1790, technically, every white male
U.S. resident between the ages of 18 and 45
was in his state’s militia, organized by county
or sub-county. This meant a poorly-trained
citizenry was expected to supply their own
arms. Drilling happened once a year and
tended to be a ritualized local celebration of
manhood, not rigorous training. The political
organization of militias made them even more
problematic. Militias were fully detached
from federal oversight and subject ultimately
to the will of the governor and individual
state legislatures for all training and arming.
High positions in the militia were patronage
tools for elite politics at the state-level, and
thus they inherited their organization and
identity from the pre-revolutionary era.
Finally, the lowest level of militia officer was
elected by the white male population he was
to command (Mahon 1960).
The result was that use of organized violence
in the early American republic matched
neither the bureaucratic French model nor the
localized aristocratic model that, in sociological
narratives of European modernity, was
crushed under the wheel of Napoleonic
rationality. Rather, the early U.S. militias
were local in orientation and in their social
networks (e.g., farmers from the same county
who knew each other), democratic at the lowest
level, subject to the hierarchies and political
purposes of the separate governments of
the former colonies, and detached from any
federal-level organization.
Furthermore, these militias were wildly
non-standardized. If to “see like a state” is to
rationalize one’s military organization, the
American militia structure stood in the way of
the development of coherence and effectiveness,
because the size of a regiment varied
from state to state. For the executive in the
early United States to “call up” the militia and
turn it into an army meant handing the command
of an unknown number of soldiers to a
central commander. Even if a commander was
told how many regiments were reporting,
. . . it is clear that state militias had not that
attribute which is indispensable to a national
reserve force, that is interchangeability of
units. In other words, if a federal commander
had to build units from militia regiments
he would have to undertake elaborate
calculations, and combine and recombine,
to make his brigades and divisions uniform
. . . there was hardly any point at which any
two militias were similar. (Mahon 1960:63)
In the early American republic, every
instance of the federal government engaging in
organized violence involved the use of stateand
county-based organizations, as well as
private militias that were labeled federal, usually
just moments before their use. And every
instance of land conflict with an external
enemy involved an amalgamation of citizen
Table 2.  Federal Expenditures on the Army,
1791 to 1801, 1812
Year
Appropriations
for U.S. Army in
Thousands
of Dollars
As Percentage of
Federal Debt
1791 633 .8%
1792 1,101 1.4%
1793 1,130 1.4%
1794 2,639 3.3%
1795 2,481 3.1%
1796 1,260 1.5%
1797 1,039 1.2%
1798 2,010 2.5%
1799 2,467 3.1%
1800 2,561 3.1%
1801 1,673 2.0%
   
1812 11,818 26.1%
Source: “Series Y 350-356, Expenditures of
the Federal Government, 1789 to 1957” and
“Series Y 368-379 Public Debt of the Federal
Government: 1791 to 1957” in U.S. Bureau of the
Census (1965:718–21).
Reed	 345
militia forces with a small number of regulars,
a process that was messy and often involved
resentment, politicking, and even treachery or
sabotage (Gaff 2004). Finally, as we will see,
militias and the threat of coercion they contained
could, precisely because of their local
orientation, be used to resist federal power,
particularly the power of the legal system.
Ambiguity of National Symbols
If violence was in the hands of county militias
and the “police powers” of individual states,
perhaps the legitimacy of the federal apparatus
emerged from cultural identification?
There was not an equivalent institution, in the
early American republic, to the Church in the
Netherlands, or a tightly bound elite with a
familial imagination.15
A significant literature,
however, describes ritual and festival in the
early republic as a route to creating the American
nation as an imagined community (Neem
2011; Newman 1997; Waldstreicher 1997).
It seems clear that these and other activities
helped create a cultural substrate of sorts
for a variety of actions done in the name of
the new United States, and furthermore that
these ritualized forms of expression capped a
long eighteenth century of “becoming America”
(Butler 2001). During this period, symbols
connected to the idea of the American
nation (e.g., flags, liberty poles) emerged in
U.S. popular culture.
However, the evidence points against this
culture abetting the legitimacy of the federal
government and is highly ambiguous, at best,
when it comes to the possibility that “national
identity” trumped various local and state
identities in the 1780s and 1790s (Berkin
2017). In other words, there was no obvious
or taken-for-granted fusion between “American
nation” and “general government” before
the turn of the century. During this period,
these symbols of the nation could be used
either for or against the legitimacy of the
general government—the erection of liberty
poles, for example, could signify adherence
to, or defiance of, federal laws. Furthermore,
identities at the level of individual states, as
well as regional identities (New England
versus Mid-Atlantic, North versus South, and
Eastern Seaboard versus Western Frontier)
created a torturous amalgam of loyalties,
entirely uncertain in its relationship to the
new state project (Cayton 1992). It is thus not
surprising that Gould’s (1996, 1998) sociological
studies of the Whiskey Rebellion are
highly sensitive to regional identifiers as designators
of group membership.16
The vexed question of racial identity offers
a more promising route to understanding the
cultural dimension of early American stateformation,
given (1) the three-fifths clause
and the debates surrounding it that contributed
to the writing of the Constitution; (2) the
origins of local policing policies and governors’
emergency powers, especially in the
American south, in the need to command,
control, and violently dehumanize the
enslaved population; and (3) the racialized
elements of the ongoing guerilla war between
American settlers and members of Indian
tribes in the Northwest and Southwest Territories
after the Treaty of Paris in 1783.
However, the intertwining of race and federal
government was emergent and complex
during this period, as “in those days of turning
inward that followed the French Revolution,
the Negro Question too was pondered back and
forth in America” (Du Bois [1906] 2006:242),
rather than being a well-honed and wellinstituted
format of subject production that
could resolve agency problems for the federal
apparatus. For this reason, the longer-term
making of the racial state in the United States
requires a study of the interactions between
several different dimensions of state-formation,
including the performative dimension.17
The Emergence of The
Press As A Stage For
State Action And Its
Variable Interpretation
One form of material culture did link together
American citizens at the end of the eighteenth
century: the printing press. In the pre-Independence
era, the production of newspapers and
pamphlets had a well-established and highly
346		 American Sociological Review 84(2)
legitimated solution to agency problems as
part of its structure. The relationship between
printers and those who wrote pamphlets and
funded their publication was that of artisan
(agent) and gentleman (principal). Gentlemen
published anonymously to protect their
“honor,” and printers were highly deferential
to them. This status distinction restricted
access to the meaning-making functions of the
press to very wealthy men of standing, and it
made newspapers a straightforward instrumental
tool of a small political and economic
elite. In the lead-up to the revolution, this tool
was used more and more for anti-imperial
invective that favored independence.
It would be reasonable to suppose that this
relationship continued into the post-revolutionary
era and thus constituted a particularly
advantageous means for establishing the public
legitimacy of the federal government.
Indeed, many Federalist elites made just such a
supposition, and for this reason the first Congress
designed laws to make postal rates for
the mailing of newspapers extraordinarily low,
make the exchange of papers between printers
free, and ensure the printing of new federal
laws in the papers. Effectively, anyone who
used the U.S. postal service to mail a private
letter in the 1790s subsidized the newspaper
industry: “by 1794 newspapers accounted for
70 percent of the mail by weight, but for only
3 percent of the postage” (Pasley 2001:48–9).
But these moves did not have their expected
consequences; the press did not act as a state
organ or agent of the state in any direct sense.
Instead, the world of newspapers—particularly
in the 1790s—ballooned into a semiautonomous
field of its own (for a parallel
argument about book publishing, see Remer
1996). Printer-editors emerged as “new men
of power,” less and less responsive to the
gentlemen who ran the federal government.
Thus, gentleman principals lost their artisan
agents as the social character and positioning
of newspapers was transformed.18
The quantitative
expansion of journalism, and its emergence
as a field (which anxious elites referred
to as the “tyranny of printers”) had three
important features.
First, the press network was radically
decentralized compared to Britain or France,
where the system was centered on the word
from London or Paris. Instead, the early American
republic saw hundreds of local papers
spring up, die off, and be reinvented, in an
ever-evolving maelstrom of print culture. Second,
the reach of exciting stories was extensive,
due to the habitual process of “exchange,”
whereby faraway papers ran stories by clipping
pieces from other papers—having “an
effect akin to modern newswires” (Parkinson
2016:15).19
These stories certainly reached a
very broad and, for the era, highly literate public
that constituted the American electorate
(Monaghan 2005; Parkinson 2016). Third,
especially over the course of the 1790s, the
field of newspapers became a hyperpolarized
space of warring interpretations. Even within
Philadelphia, different readers would receive
different “spins” on news in common.
Among the most important places where
newspapers were read out loud and discussed
were the democratic debating societies and
committees of correspondence that opposed
the Federalist project, and whose form imitated
those groups that, a generation before,
had brought on the revolution (Pasley 2015;
Sisson 2014). Thus, we are compelled to
understand print media, and the “republic of
letters” (Warner 1990) that accompanied it in
the United States in the 1790s, as the stage
upon which certain moves could be made.
Because of their high visibility, papers were
subject to an intensive process of contested
public interpretation with relevance to a broad
swath of the electorate.20
This reinterpretation of the early American
press has consequences for theory. One cannot
assume that a media system in which
similar news stories are read in different quarters
of a large, spread-out society fuses nation
to state directly via the standardization of
print capitalism (Anderson [1983] 2006).
Rather, such a system may constitute an
extensive public apparatus, in which “everyone
knows that everyone knows” that this or
that event happened, but in which the interpretation
of that event is, via that same
Reed	 347
apparatus, subject to significant variation. In
other words, media may be a stage for public
performance more than a socialization mechanism
that communicates information and
perspective in a tight bundle.21
Having thus described the conditions for
the public interpretation of acts of state, we
can now delve into those emergencies by
which the early American state was, in part,
forged. I begin with the key hinge year of
1794, during which two major emergencies
were acted upon, with stunning felicity, by
the federal government and its agents.
The Whiskey Rebellion22
Emergency: Tax Resistance Becomes
a Violent and Widely Known
Subversion of Law
The Whiskey Rebellion involved the largest
troop movement on American soil between the
revolution and the Civil War. These troops
responded to a violent emergency that resulted
from resistance to an excise on whiskey. Tax
resistance, as part of a larger rural recalcitrance
to state-formation, was widespread after 1791
in the western parts of the United States. But it
flared into an emergency in Western Pennsylvania
in the summer of 1794, as a series of
tarrings-and-featherings and barn-burnings
directed at tax inspectors were followed by
violent, direct attacks on state agents.
On July 17, 500 militia men engaged in a
firefight with the head tax inspector and several
armed agents and burned his house to the
ground, and on August 1, a 7,000-man army
marched through Pittsburgh. This army flew
the “Westsylvania” flag, which denoted the
idea that the four westernmost counties of
Pennsylvania and the two northernmost counties
of Virginia (today West Virginia) should
be their own political entity.23
This march was
accompanied by the mobilization of local
militia units to take over courts and undermine
the law, as the Washington County Militia
(nicknamed the “Mingo Creek Boys”)
took over their county courthouse and
announced that all attempts to collect debts
had to be referred to them. George Washington
proclaimed a state of emergency on
August 7, 1794.
State Action: Public Speeches and
Networks of Communication Enable
Washington and His Cabinet to
Assemble an Army
To deal with the emergency, Washington referenced
the Militia Act and the emergency
powers granted to him by the Constitution,
and he began the project of amassing the
means of violence. This occurred via a series
of proclamations and rousing speeches by
Washington and the governors of the states of
Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.
Some of these performances occurred by letter,
followed by speech. Pennsylvania Governor
Thomas Mifflin, for example, sent letters
to captains of various militias concerning the
necessity of saving the republic, which they
read to their men.24
These initial “callings up” were successful
and represented a tremendous outlay of scarce
federal resources, as commitments to pay state
funds to foot soldiers were made. Furthermore,
this initial moment of state action
involved the renaming of many private
resources as “of the government,” particularly
for militia that featured cavalry (cavalrymen
usually provided their own horses, arms, and
uniforms, and such units drew their men from
the propertied classes). One payroll record for
Virginia militia participation indicates 20
scouts and spies paid by the U.S. government
in the year 1790, and 20 in 1791. In contrast,
the payroll for “the Expedition Against the
Insurgents” from the same records for Virginia
reveals 456 ground troops and 249 cavalry
from Virginia. The number of recorded New
Jersey militia men increases in the same set of
records from zero to 205.25
The extensive
military histories of the early republic confirm
these findings—the crushing of the Whiskey
Rebellion was an unprecedented marshalling
of force for the new government (Coakley
1996; Hogeland 2010; for a discussion of the
splitting of Virginia, see Barksdale 2003).
348		 American Sociological Review 84(2)
State Action: A Two-Part
Performance of Negotiation and
Magnificent Coercion
Sent ahead of the amassed troops in the
movement west from Philadelphia were two
negotiating teams—representing the federal
and Pennsylvania governments. Via face-toface
interactions and letters back and forth
with a set of 12 men who represented a set of
60 men who represented the rebels, these
teams acted out a “state solution” to the rebellion.
This was a theater of representation, of
attribution of meanings and intentions to
large sets of people and organizations who
may or may not have had them, as Washington’s
team negotiated “on behalf of the U.S.
government,” and the rebel “Committee of
Conference” negotiated on behalf of “the
people of Western Pennsylvania.” In particular,
negotiators for the United States attributed
to the federal government certain
intentions, interests, principles, and rules for
its functioning that were not fully “there”
when they were uttered. After many backand-forth
negotiations, the rebels had meetings
on August 28 and 29 where they voted to
submit to federal authority. On September 11,
in a large public event held in every town in
Pennsylvania west of the Allegheny Mountains,
white male citizens came out to sign an
oath of allegiance to the federal government.
This act of subservience was followed by
the troops’ arrival. The process of getting
approximately 12,950 troops, cobbled together
from various militias of varying size, over the
Allegheny mountain range involved a great
deal of dissembling and awkward negotiation
of agency problems. Washington wanted the
troops to behave in an upstanding manner, and
he attempted to ensure this via letters and by
meeting the army in person in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.
But the army was ill-equipped,
under-fed, and not yet paid; Henry Knox and
others in the administration thus had to hide
from Washington (and the press) soldiers’
repeated raids on local farms. Letters show
that the day-to-day process of the march was
not a pretty sight (Hogeland 2010:207–36).
Nonetheless, upon arrival in Pittsburgh,
the occupying army pulled off a dramatic and
successful performance, which quickly
became known across the United States as the
“dreadful night.” One eyewitness recorded
the scene as follows:
A large number of prisoners from Washington
county were collected together in the
county town, and taken thence to Pittsburgh.
. . . I saw them on their way. . . . They were
conducted by the Philadelphia and New
Jersey cavalry. The contrast between the
Philadelphia horsemen and the prisoners
was the most striking that can be imagined.
The Philadelphians were some of the most
wealthy and respectable men of that city.
Their uniform was blue, of the finest broadcloth.
Their horses were large and beautiful,
all of a bay color, as nearly alike that it
seemed any two of them would have made
a good span of coach horses. Their trappings
were superb. Their bridles, stirrups and martingales
glittered with silver. Their swords,
which were drawn and held elevated in the
right hand, gleamed in the rays of the setting
sun. The prisoners were also mounted on
horses, of all shapes, sizes and colors; some
large, some small, some long tails, some
short, some white, some black, some lean,
some of every color and form that can be
named. Some had saddles, some blankets,
some bridles, some halters, some with stirrups,
some with none. The riders also were
various and grotesque in their appearance.
Some were old, some young, some hale,
respectable looking men; others were pale,
meager, and shabbily dressed. . . . I have
more than once seen gangs of fifty or sixty
negroes tied to a long rope, two and two
opposite to each other, and marched to a
distant slave market, but their anguish and
indignation was not to be compared to that
manifested by these western men. (Brackenridge
1859:324–5)
The impression created by this scene is significant
for understanding the making of the
early American state. The prisoners are
Reed	 349
profaned in this observer’s imagination as
comparable to the detested category of
enslaved person. Furthermore, the wealth and
strength of the state apparatus is merged
together in the sensory impression of the
horses and their swords, held aloft to signify
the might of the new Leviathan. Yet this was
pure drama; the Philadelphia Light Horse was
privately funded, it was the public performance
that made them the avatar of the federal
government.26
As interpretations of the
Whiskey Rebellion developed, citizens would
come to see that government as both “dreadful”
and “fair,” and thus, via the performative
dimension of the accumulation of state power,
legitimate and effective.
Public Interpretation: The
Government’s Two-Part Performance
Becomes Widely Publicized and
Subject to Debate
The word spread fast. Paper after paper printed
news of the rebellion, the dreadful night, and
interpretations of it; longer tracts were published
in 1795 and 1796. All of these were
widely consumed and discussed, particularly
in the debating societies that formed in many
American towns and cities. In this process of
mediation, timing was crucial. Hamilton’s letter
to Washington from during the crisis was
published and read widely, and well before
Brackenridge’s and Findley’s accounts, which
were longer, more sympathetic to the rebels,
and appeared in 1795 and 1796.27
The aftermath
of the rebellion also included creation of
an anti-Federalist newspaper (the Tree of Liberty)
in Pittsburgh, but not until 1795.
The General Advertiser of Philadelphia
reported the “disagreeable news” about the
violence on July 25 and 26, 1794 (Owen
2015:165); Hamilton’s letter was published in
the American Daily Advertiser on August 21,
1794, and “by having this version of events
printed in the newspaper first, the administration
gained the initiative in influencing public
opinion regarding the decision to use force
against the rebels” (Davis 2000:50). Hamilton’s
letter provided a narrative history of the
events in clear moral language, and it was the
first “total” account (i.e., attributing cause,
discussing conditions and the purpose of the
excise law, placing blame) to be widely published.
Its efflorescent rhetoric denounced by
name several local elites as outside the law, a
public denunciation that influenced law and
its execution—those named were, at a later
date, not offered amnesty (Davis 2000).
Arguing about the Whiskey Rebellion
became a constitutive part of debating societies
in the fall of 1794; the rebellion became
one of the great issues of the age (see Berkin
2017; Bouton 2007; Cornell 2015; Houpt
2015; Neem 2003; Reed 2016; Slaughter
1986; Wood 2009). Amid the cacophony of
debate, widespread opinions emerged that the
rebels had gone off the rails and abandoned
the project of the republic. For example, the
General Advertiser (later the Aurora) was an
anti-Federalist, anti-Hamilton paper (the
American Daily Advertiser was pro-Federalist),
but the editor of the General Advertiser
hated the Whiskey Rebellion because the
violence of the rebels toward tax inspectors,
in his view, ruined his preferred arguments
against a strong general government: “As
soon as the General Advertiser had printed its
first report of the Pittsburgh disturbances, [the
editor] issued a stern plea that citizens engage
only in political activity that followed democratic
norms and constitutional rules” (Pasley
2015:203).
It is an ironic statement, in retrospect, for
there has been, in the historiography of the
rebellion, tremendous dispute about which
actions by which persons were and were not
within such norms and rules (see Davis 2000;
Griffin 2007; Hogeland 2010; Neem 2003).
But what emerged, in the public interpretation
of state action at the time, via arguments
and counter-arguments across the country,
was that the violence of the rebels was out of
order; the coercion of the state in response to
the rebels (relatively) understandable; and,
foremost of all, some legitimacy could be
ascribed to the exchange that occurred in the
negotiation between the government’s agents
and the rebel committee.
In this emergent baseline of argument,
which could be attached to differing opinions
350		 American Sociological Review 84(2)
(e.g., that the rebels emerged in response to
bad laws that needed to be overturned, or,
conversely, that the rebels were a subversive
and criminal element, seeking to undermine
the republic, for which the whiskey excise was
a boon), something subtle was afoot. The
magnificent coercion of the “dreadful night”
became, in the public eye, a picture of government
restraint and highly moral enforcement
of laws. The exchange between citizen and
sovereign state—of obedience for amnesty,
and a promise from Washington to try tax
resisters locally—signified, in its pragmatism,
the reality and legitimacy of the new federal
government. It thus became “the general view
that the federal government had demonstrated
to its citizens, and to the world, that it could
withstand domestic rebellion without resorting
to tyrannical measures . . . to show both
resolve and leniency” (Berkin 2017:79).
The Battle of Fallen
Timbers And Its
Performative Effects
on The American
Electorate28
Emergency: Lack of Control of, and
Military Losses within, the Northwest
Territory Becomes a Crisis for the
Funding and Legitimacy of the
Federal Government
Immediately to the west of the environs of the
Whiskey Rebellion, an ongoing calamity was
unfolding for the new American state.29
The
years between 1787 and 1794 in the Great
Lakes region were a time of “uncertainty and
terror, worse even than the peak years of the
Revolution,” for the many different populations
of the valley, and it is only in retrospect—
and because of the performative successes of
1794—that this time appears today as a leadup
to American imperial success pushing West
(Hinderaker 1999:242, 244).30
Certainly, from the perspective of the
American electorate, rich or poor, the military
adventures of the fledgling republic in 1790
and 1791 were unmitigated disasters. After
Josiah Harmar’s army was defeated in 1790,
Arthur St. Clair took his turn at the head of
the Army of the Northwest. On November 4,
1791, approximately 1,000 of St. Clair’s
1,400 troops were killed at the Battle of
Wabash, and all ammunition and supplies
were lost.
Washington’s letter to Congress about St.
Clair’s catastrophic loss tried to control the
damage, but he lost the interpretive game. An
early report in Dunlap’s American Advertiser,
a daily paper in Philadelphia, was followed
by reports in all the states:
People read how St. Clair’s soldiers first
heard cries in the distance that sounded like
wolves howling or all the bells of the packhorses
ringing at once. Suddenly hundreds of
warriors painted red and black poured out of
the woods with their muskets blazing . . .
leaving the soldiers no possible way to escape
. . . the reaction to these frightening images
was everywhere the same. How could this
have happened, especially only one year after
another American army . . . had been nearly
wiped out by Indians just south of the [same]
place? (Stockwell 2018:8)
Newspapers printed “paeans to the fallen,
and the report of the congressional committee
that investigated the causes of the catastrophe”
(Calloway 2014:24). Jefferson, always a
charismatic interpreter for his millions of
admirers, wrote from Philadelphia that “the
late calamity to the Westward has produced
great sensation here” (Calloway 2014:5).
Five weeks after the battle, the newspapers
and those who read them were still obsessing
over the loss, and the general public was full
of surprise and fear:
Indians fielding a multinational army, executing
a carefully coordinated battle plan
worked out by their chiefs, and winning a
pitched battle—all things Indians were not
supposed to be capable of doing—routed the
largest force the United States had fielded on
the frontier. . . . With the British in Canada
waiting in the wings for the American experiment
in republicanism to fail, and some
regions of the West gravitating towards
Reed	 351
alliance with Spain, the destruction of the
army . . . threatened the very existence of the
infant United States. (Calloway 2014:5)
American military elites, however, knew
quite well the capacity of Indian warriors and
alliances.31
Those elites also knew that the
government in Philadelphia simply did not
have the means to field a massive national
army to defeat their Indian opponents. They
knew, for example, that Josiah Harmar had
been selected to lead the failed 1790 campaign,
despite his mediocre military record,
because his home state of Pennsylvania had
contributed the most men to the cause—260
(Best 2015; Cayton 1990; Kohn 1975). Washington
attempted to get the Iroquois to compel
the tribes in the Northwest to negotiate
with the Americans, but this effort failed.
Congress struggled to raise funds for Indian
defense, facing a classic agency problem of
state-formation. The United States needed to
control the Northwest Territory so as to make
the state solvent via land speculation, but it
struggled to marshal sufficient funds to field
a large army with which to do so.
This failure to resolve military agency
problems reverberated through the press after
the failed campaigns of 1790 and 1791, and in
particular, it suggested that a central plank of
the argument for a strong federal apparatus—
that only such an apparatus could secure territory
for the American “empire of liberty” and
defend the country from its external enemies—
was faulty. Any anti-Federalist could argue, as
of 1793, that all the Federalists had done was
lose wars to “savages,” waste money, and thus
let British forts remain in the Northwest Territory,
in flagrant defiance of the Treaty of Paris.
State Action: The Appointment of
Anthony Wayne and the Building of
American Legions
In response to the evolving emergency, George
Washington appointed “Mad” Anthony Wayne,
also known as the “Thunderbolt of War,” to
reorganize and lead the U.S.Army. His appointment
was strange and risky vis-à-vis the Federalist
project. Wayne was a hard-drinking,
uncouth general from Georgia, whose public
reputation included his bankruptcy (he had
ruined his inherited wealth) and his removal
from Congress when it was discovered he had
rigged his election. After accepting his appointment
as Major-General, he set out to Pittsburgh
in 1792. He then engaged in a desperate effort
to build the American Legion, for upon his
arrival it was widely understood that he commanded
an army that existed only on paper.
The following two years of correspondence
between Wayne and Secretary of War
Henry Knox read as a compendium of frustrations,
difficulties of supply, and workarounds
for corruption and subversion. Reports of
“predatory Indians” are combined with complaints
about sick soldiers and defective saddles
for horses. Reports of Wayne’s attempts
to lessen the anxieties of the men in Washington
County, Pennsylvania, about Indian violence
are followed with complaints about the
“depravity of mind” that leads to a “spirit of
desertion.” Throughout, the problem of how
to wrench men out of more localized military
units looms—for example, Knox complains
that his application to the governor of Pennsylvania
for “permission” to “recruit out of
McCulley’s corps” was declined.
These early difficulties were followed by a
notorious instance, drawn out over many
months, of the agency problems that beset a
proto-state. Wayne’s brigadier and second-incommand
James Wilkinson engaged in extensive
attempts, via letters back to Philadelphia
and by spreading dissent among the recruits,
to undermine Wayne’s efforts at building an
army (Gaff 2004). But Wayne outmaneuvered
Wilkinson (and exceeded him in charisma),
made himself close to the other officers, and
built enough of an army to have approximately
1,000 men at his command for the
venture west, which started in earnest in 1793.
State Action: Defense of Fort
Recovery, Victory at the Battle of
Fallen Timbers, and Crop Destruction
On June 30, 1794, the Ohio Indians laid siege
to Fort Recovery, where Wayne’s army was
stationed. This attack did not succeed, and the
352		 American Sociological Review 84(2)
Ohio Indians changed generals, from Little
Turtle to Blue Jacket (this would prove to be
a significant mistake). Wayne’s army marched
into Indian territory on July 28, and on
August 20 they won a surprising tactical victory
against the Indians. The Battle of Fallen
Timbers was, in a pure military sense, relatively
minor—featuring 33 killed and 100
wounded for the Americans and 30 to 40
confirmed dead for the Ohio Indian Alliance,
with more suspected but not confirmed. A key
feature of the victory was the retreat of the
Indians to Fort Miami, where they were
denied entrance by the British, causing them
to retreat further.
The aftermath of the battle, however, was
unusual by the standards of eighteenthcentury
fighting. “Federal troops treated Indians
with a hitherto unknown ferocity,” and “a
racially charged fury defined some of the
fighting” (Griffin 2007:248). Wayne and his
generals razed and burned Indian fields, British
storehouses, and everything in the area
(Gaff 2004). One estimate suggests 300,000
to 400,000 bushels of grain were destroyed;
the crop destruction anticipated nineteenthcentury
tactics: “The total ruin inflicted upon
residents of the Auglaize and Maummee
River basins would not again be duplicated
on American soil until William Tecumseh
Sherman marched through the Confederacy
in 1864–1865” (Gaff 2004:332–3).
Public Interpretation: The
Glorification of Violence and Lauding
of Wayne and His Army as Evidence
of State Capacity
Initial news of the battle travelled via private
letter from Wayne to Knox, and by private
letters sent by Wayne’s soldiers to their
families. These were stories of epic heroism
and glory in battle, and Wayne’s account, in
particular, would become the basis of the
widespread news of the battle (as well as his
own heroism). “It’s with infinite pleasure
that I now announce to you the brilliant success
of the Federal army under my Command”
Wayne wrote to Knox. “The ground
being cover’d with old fallen timber probably
occasioned by a tornado,” Wayne gave a
set of complex orders that, he reported,
“were obeyed with spirit and promptitude,”
such that the “Savages with their allies abandoned
themselves to flight & dispersed with
terror & dismay.” It was, Wayne insisted, a
heroic victory of his 900 troops against
2,000 of the enemy. This letter was widely
published in American newspapers (Stockwell
2018), thus reaching the electorate at
large.
The interpretations exceeded Wayne’s own
glorifications. What Wayne preferred to call
the Battle at the Rapids was quickly rebranded
the “Battle of Fallen Timbers”—a more dramatic
sounding title—drawing on his description
of the battle’s landscape. As the news
spread, “almost with the rapidity of lightning,”
what was a minor battle became a tremendous
victory, an indication of state
capacity to direct unrelenting violence at the
Indians and thus secure white settlement.
Troops returned home “boasting of the devastation
they had visited upon the Indian country,”
and gloating that the Indians would starve
in the winter ahead with all of their crops
burnt. In response, “the people were almost
frantic with joy.” Rich and poor citizens of the
early republic received the warrior heroes in
such a way that “every portion of the army,
and every individual who had belonged to it,
was cheered in the most enthusiastic manner
by the citizens, and to have belonged to
Wayne’s army was enough to elevate any individual
(in the estimation of the field) almost to
the pinnacle of fame” (Ferris 1897:350–3,
cited in Gaff 2004:363–4).
Two years later, the memory of Wayne’s
triumph had not faded—thousands crowded
the streets of Philadelphia for a cannon salute
upon his return to the capital. Federalist elites
conceded to run the Georgian, who had
become the most compelling agent of the new
state, for governor of Pennsylvania in 1796
(Nelson 1982). Wayne—who had been
mocked by Madison and Monroe, thrown out
of congress for rigging his election, and openly
detested by the governor of Virginia—became,
Reed	 353
via the press, the hero of the republic and the
avatar of the American state.
Contextualizing 1794:
Emergency Politics, 1783
To 1801
In August and September 1794, a confluence
of performance occurred, in which the public
interpretation of the federal government congealed
into a comprehension of it as “dreadful”—to
be feared—yet somehow “fair” to
white male farmers; and, simultaneously,
capable of violent domination of enemies
(and, in particular, an enemy signified as
racially other, “savage”). This was a kind of
alchemy or “social magic” (Bourdieu
1991:119–20; Butler 1999). The legitimacy of
the general government’s crushing of the
Whiskey Rebellion was enhanced by the (sudden,
new, and highly publicized) felicity of
that government in its wars with the Indians.
Thus “the terms of the covenant to create
commonwealth were established by two
armies that moved west in 1794” (Griffin
2007:244), and the aftermath of these performances
contributed to “federal and state governments
designed to impede popular reform”
(Bouton 2007:262). In particular, opposition
became a process within the regime whereby a
certain kind of politics took place. Elite leaders
began to recognize the facticity of the state,
disavowed tax avoidance as prelude to unlawful
rebellion, and thus “redefined the means of
exercising political opposition.”Anti-Federalist
elites and their networked associates and clients
“told farmers that the rights they held
before the Revolution were now lost. Mob
action against an unresponsive regime was to
be unavailable . . . in doing so, they imposed
new legal limits to collective action on their
own constituents” (Neem 2003:277–8).
This was a matter worked out in the debating
societies and the newspapers (with strong
guidance from the new men of power, the editors).
And so, the reconfiguration of the public
interpretation of the general government in
1794 helped construe and solidify the agency
relations that granted state capacity; the new
interpretation allowed the federal project to
overcome the problem for states in formation,
that is, that “partial co-optation actually
engenders resistance” (Gould 1996:424).
This worked because the specific, emergent
interpretations of the Whiskey Rebellion
and the Battle of Fallen Timbers ran wide
(broad circulation) and deep (extended consideration
and interpretation in speech and in
print). As a result, after 1794, the former
Whiskey rebels became, with some exceptions,
other kinds of political actors, whose
very entrance onto the stage of politics would
assume as a precondition the reality and legitimacy
of the state. This was a tendency, not a
total conversion.
Nonetheless, the trend was clear, as former
rebel leaders and their constituents became the
sort of actors who would take a position vis-àvis
how the general government should be
run, to whom it was responsible, and through
which policies that responsibility was to be
enacted. “The defeat of the Whiskey rebels in
the fall of 1794 did not put an end to the political
activities of the rural people. They still
fought . . . inside the Jefferson government,
like Albert Gallatin; or on the floor of the
House, like William Findley; in the sermons
of the frontier preachers . . . in the formation
of political institutions” (Sioli 1998:32).
We can contextualize the dynamics of performative
state-formation that occurred in
1794 by noting, first, that the U.S. government
did not handle all such emergencies with such
aplomb and such success. In particular, Fries’s
rebellion became a political disaster for the
Adams administration, showing how state
performances can quickly go awry.
Fries’s Rebellion and Interpretation
of State Failure as a Failure of the
Occupants of State Office
By the beginning of 1799, Congress had
passed a progressive property tax more favorable
to the farmers in the Whiskey Rebellion,
but it was accompanied by a land tax that hit
working farms much more than undeveloped
354		 American Sociological Review 84(2)
land, and was thus perceived to favor land
speculators. This led to a buildup of tax resistance
in German-speaking eastern Pennsylvania,
and 17 resistors were arrested.
On March 7, 1799, 400 armed men, led by
John Fries, marched to Bethlehem, Pennsylvania,
and demanded the arrested tax evaders be
released on bail. Fries had clearly absorbed the
script from the public interpretation of the state
solution to the Whiskey Rebellion—that is, to
threaten, but in the end evade, violence via
exchange between citizen and (representatives
of the) sovereign state. Upon marching into
town, Fries paid the bridge toll for all of his
assembled men, and when they arrived at where
the arrested were held, Fries left the armed
crowd outside and entered unarmed to negotiate
for the prisoners’release and to demand they be
tried locally. This failed, and he brought in some
of his armed party. After some tense negotiations,
he left with the prisoners, whom the marshal
reported as “stolen” (Newman 2012:140).
Federalist elites and the Federalist press
then made a significant rhetorical mistake:
they screamed civil war. Fenno’s Gazette of
the United States explained to Philadelphians
that this was worse than the Whiskey Rebellion
(Newman 2012). The New York Daily
Advertiser traced the trouble to “Jacobin
resolves” and the “French Party,” the Philadelphia
Gazette referred to the “sans culottes
of Northampton,” and the Porcupine Gazette
predicted civil war. These papers also emphasized
the closeness of the rebellion to Philadelphia
and New York and predicted a march
on these cities (Newman 2012).
The overheated interpretation emerged
from the government as well, as President
John Adams and others made speeches about
the treasonable actions in Bethlehem, and
these proclamations ran in Federalist and
anti-Federalist newspapers. Adams raised
militias from eastern Pennsylvania to form a
federal force and sent them to the region. But
Adams’s force met no resistance (not a surprise,
since Fries’s men had gone home), and
what had been high drama in 1794 became, in
1799, farce and evidence of bad leadership—
of a piece with the much-hated Alien and
Sedition Acts of 1798.
Fries’s rebellion was a failed performance
for the federal government that reveals the
importance of the successes of 1794. State
actions in response to the emergency were
met with skepticism in many quarters, and the
ardent pro-Federalist position could not make
itself dominant. However, this skepticism was
aimed more at Adams and his party than at
the federal government per se. In other words,
Adams’s handling of the rebellion became
one more reason to vote for Jefferson in the
upcoming election. Adams’s actions were bad
political strategy in a situation that was beginning
to presume the facticity of the state. He
pardoned Fries, dividing the Federalists
against each other (Hamilton and his followers
wanted Fries to hang). The failed performance
helped Jefferson’s party win the
election and thus install a new head of state.
Counterfactual: Interpretation
of Fries’s Rebellion without the
Successes of 1794
It is not difficult to imagine a different iteration
of emergency, state action, and public
interpretation in the 1790s, with a very different
outcome for the American state. Consider
the following contextualized counterfactuals.
Wayne’s army could have (1) failed to win in
the Northwest Territory, or (2) achieved a
more ambiguously interpreted victory that
was then less well “sold” in the American
press and less well secured by treaty afterward.
(The Treaty of Greenville [1795] was
extraordinarily advantageous for U.S. settlement.)
The Whiskey Rebellion could have
ended with either (1) an insufficient army
marching to Pittsburgh, leaving the leaders of
the 7,000-man army un-arrested and no oath
of allegiance signed on September 11, or (2)
a violent conflict between a federal force and
the rebels, resulting in many dead Revolutionary
War veterans in the streets of Pittsburgh
as highly public evidence of the new
government’s “tyranny.”
Any of these possibilities, and certainly a
combination of them, would have made the
politics of violence a very different matter in
the United States. Under such conditions, an
Reed	 355
emergency elsewhere, such as Fries’s rebellion,
would have convinced sectors of the
general public, and various elites with their
own patronage networks, that the federal
apparatus was not a good bet. Less violent
emergencies or scandals (e.g., the Genet
affair) would have been interpreted differently,
as would the transition from Washington
to Adams as head of state and Hamilton’s
plan for the U.S. Bank. That is the difficulty
with deep play—losers lose big. But that is
not what happened in the 1790s.
Rather, what did happen was a combination
of the other dimensions of state-formation
(exchange and threat, cultural formation of
subjects, material culture) with a particularly
vital moment of performative success that
was, in its public interpretation, persuasive
enough to make the general government worthy
of elite investment and popular respect.
The effectiveness of this buildup of confidence
is evident not only in the state’s ability
to withstand the public relations disaster of
Fries’s rebellion, but also in the “miracle of
1801.”
The Election Crisis of 1801:
Successful Application of an
Emergent Script to Resolve a Crisis
Broadly understood by historians as the closest
the republic came to civil war before 1861
(see De Leon 2010, drawing on Dunn [2004]
and Sharp [1993]), the crisis of 1801 saw a
deadlock in the election between Burr and
Jefferson,32
which ceded to the Federalists in
Congress the ability to delay the installation
of a president until after March 4, at which
point they could appoint a member of the
Federalist Party president rather than either
Jefferson or Burr. This crisis involved a logistical
error in the democratic process, mistakes
by elites unfamiliar with the politics of parties
and campaigning, and ultimately, the threat of
state militias marching on Washington, DC.33
Thus “the constitutional miracle, if there was
one, did not happen in the Philadelphia of 1787
but in the Washington of 1801” (Ackerman
2005:93).
But 1801 was not a “miracle” or some feat
of statesmanship, even if it has been mythologized
as both. Rather, the resolution of the
crisis represented the maintenance of initially
accumulated state power achieved via a repetition
of a pattern of performance wherein
violence is avoided at the last minute, and
sovereignty respected, by the exchange of
promises and the deferral of conflict.
On February 17, the Federalists yielded
when Delaware Congressman James Bayard
wrote to Jefferson, extracted from him the
lucrative post of the Collectorship of the Port
of Wilmington, and voted to give Jefferson
the presidency. This exchange made concrete
a larger, symbolic exchange that was performed
into place at this moment: the continuation
of the state via the peaceful transfer
of power between parties. This was a result of
timing, and the use of a new, emergent script,
rather than culture and subject formation.
The widespread understanding of statesmanship
possessed by American elites at the
end of the eighteenth century was drawn from
the notion of a virtuous, gentlemanly elite
whose disinterest enabled them to rule in
enlightened fashion, distanced from necessity
and the temptation of “faction.” The reality at
hand—messy party politics that crossed lines
of class, powerful state-based militias, and a
geographically dispersed electorate—did not
match the model ofAthens or Rome so popular
among the educated elite.34
The potential
principal-rulers of the federal state did not have
a clear solution from tradition, they had fiercely
conflicting interests, and they had access to
arms. But there was a certain amount of public
confidence in state capacity, and there was a
script available for a solution to the crisis that
would maintain the legitimacy of the state.35
Conclusions: The Public
Theater Of Lawyers,
Guns, And Money
I have argued that the formation of the federal
government of the new United States
depended on the accumulation of power via
356		 American Sociological Review 84(2)
performance. The performances that helped
make the American state took place in a setting
wherein the interpretation of violence by
state actors was not certain—neither encoded
in culture and tradition, nor secured by overwhelming
finance, force, or organization.
Rather, it was through the skillful combination
of negotiation, coercion, and well-timed
publicity, in the crushing of the Whiskey
Rebellion, and the skillful combination of
violence, destruction, and well-timed publicity,
in the Battle of Fallen Timbers, that the
new federal government, via its agents, came
into being as a solid part of the social universe.
This was due to the way, in the space
between these actions and their interpretation
in newspaper reports and discussions of
newspaper reports, a certain felicity obtained.
In making this argument, the language of
agency theory has been particularly useful,
enabling me to show how performative stateformation
can be thought of as a solution to the
same organizational problems for would-be
states identified by extant sociological theories
of state-formation. As such, the argument proceeds
according to an understanding of state
power focused on the hierarchical relationships
that obtained, to varying degrees, between rulers,
staff, elite allies, and the electorate—an
understanding of state power borrowed, as it
were, from the realist strands of Weber and the
early work of Tilly. In this conclusion, I invert
the form of argument to address extant issues in
contemporary sociological theory that start
from performance and dramaturgy.
Performance in Social Theory,
Applied to State-Society Relations
In social theory, the concept of performance
allows a revision to structural accounts of
culture by emphasizing the aspects of meaningful
action and interaction that bring social
life into being by saying and doing. The dramaturgical
metaphor and its related concepts—frontstage,
backstage, actor, audience,
mis-en-scène—provide an approach to social
processes and their interpretation that emphasizes
timing, rhetorical skill, persuasion,
creativity, and publicity (Alexander 2004;
Goffman [1956] 1978; Turner 1982; WagnerPacifici
1986, 2000).
Performative power can be analytically
contrasted with cultural or discursive power,
which operates via naturalized categories and
taken-for-granted or common-sense assumptions.
In the performative dimension of power
“actions are consequential precisely because
they are not naturalized, hidden, or insidious”
(Reed 2013a:194), for example, in “the bold
and sudden giving of orders,” “speeches that,
even though someone is not well positioned to
give them, end up carrying the day,” or, as an
empirical instance, the storming of the Bastille
(Reed 2013a:194; Sewell 1996).36
Whether it
is doing gender, orchestrating a media event,
or achieving ritual-like fusion via a compelling
mis-en-scène, the utility of the dramaturgical
metaphor is its recognition of how
meaning-making can make order out of disorder
(Alexander 2004; Dayan and Katz 1994;
Heiskala 2009; West and Zimmerman 1987).
In the application of this concept of perfor-
mance37
to the sociology of states and stateformation,
we find two separate lines of
thought that are relatively well-entrenched,
and a third possibility that is just beginning to
open up. The first strand emphasizes ritual as
an aspect of state action and legitimacy. This
strain of theory, Durkheimian in orientation,
focuses on flag-raising ceremonies, the burial
of the dead (especially the war dead), recurrent
festivals, military parades, and the creation of
national myths (Giesen 1998, 2006, 2011;
Marvin and Ingle 1999; Tepora 2007). These
performances draw their felicity from the same
sources as religious ritual. The bodily and visual
appeal of repetition affirms belief in normative
order, and the recurrent public display
of state ceremony makes the coordination of
action possible (Chwe [2001] 2013).38
The
argument is that a Durkheimian theory of collectivities
as constituted through belief and
ritual can be applied to state-society relations.
The second strand of thought moves “from
ritual to theater” (Turner 1982), focusing on
state theater as the “eventful” representation
of state-society relations. Departing from
Reed	 357
Durkheim, dramaturgy is given independent
or “autonomous” power (Alexander 2004;
Reed 2013a, 2013b). Here we find studies
interested in the theater of revolution, attention
to historical variation in what makes for
good political theater, and a series of arguments
about the open-endedness of the interpretation
of events (Friedland 2002; Sewell
2005). The embrace of contingency comes to
full flourish in Wagner-Pacifici’s (2005) work
on political semiosis. Wagner-Pacifici and
her co-authors discuss sovereignty (WagnerPacifici
2005), state theatrics during times of
crisis (Perrin et al. 2006), and revolution and
emergency (Wagner-Pacifici 2017), and in so
doing theorize semiosis as analytically divided
into performative, demonstrative, and representational
aspects or “features” (WagnerPacifici
2017:22). The model developed in
this article emerges, in some ways, out of this
second strand of thinking about the performative,
in the sense that the performative dimension
of state-formation could be interpreted as
a process that makes an “event” when it produces
a coherent interpretation of a chaotic,
fragile, ambiguous, or uncertain situation.
However, there is a stark lack of realistWeberian
concerns in the fulsome embrace of
contingency and the focus on the “restlessness”
of events (Wagner-Pacifici 2010), a
lack that oddly mirrors the Durkheimian
focus on collectivity and ritual it claims to
escape—both ignore logistics and organizational
power. The theatricality of the state can
become, in this theory, distant from the
grubby work of securing funding, making
laws via the building of alliances and influence,
coercing recalcitrant taxpayers, making
sure the state’s various sub-organizations are
not subverted by malfeasance or incompetence,
and securing the loyalty of soldiers.
Given this problem, the recent research of
Matthew Norton (2014a, 2014b), in tandem
with this article, suggests a third way forward
for the study of performance and state power.
Norton’s (2014a:1539) work intertwines the
“cultural infrastructure” of the state with the
“performance of meaning” and both of these
with the solution to agency problems. He
explains the destruction of piracy in the English
Maritime system by tracing the process
whereby the cultural and performative powers
of an extant empire-state were brought
into alignment. The cultural coding of pirates
as clearly and distinctly criminal was combined
with a performance of these codes in
the trials of actual pirates.
At the level of case analysis, Norton’s
argument is the inverse of that presented here.
He traces a process in which the performative
and cultural dimensions of state-formation
come into line with each other, and thus allow
for the enhancement of state capacity.39
In
contrast, I argued that the importance of performative
power to state-formation in the
early American republic is revealed by the
way the performative and cultural dimensions
of state power were out of alignment (e.g.,
widespread distrust of general government
contrasted with elation over the victory at the
Battle of Fallen Timbers, or elite understandings
of politics during the election crisis of
1801 contrasted with the script of sovereign
exchange that was acted out). If piracy was
destroyed via a legal process of limiting the
interpretations that could be applied to violence
on the high seas, then the early American
state was made, in part, via sequences of
action and interpretation attributing capacity
and legitimacy to the state well beyond that
granted by its funding, laws, bureaucracy, and
cultural traditions—that is, by the expansion
of the performance of meaning into the basis
for a new state.
The difference between these case-specific
explanations depends, however, on an underlying
unity of theoretical concern. In both
arguments, state by demonstration is effective
precisely in so far as it aids and abets the
securing of agency relations (Adams 1996,
2010). This marks off a significantly different
arena of research than has previously been
thematized in the sociological study of performance.
The focus is less on the planned parade
than on the orchestration of arrests, more on
the degree to which soldiers are ready to fight
on command than on the inherent openness of
state texts to reinterpretation. In other words,
358		 American Sociological Review 84(2)
the concern is with lawyers, guns, and money
as themselves a form of theater.
Between Weber and Kantorowicz in
the Sociology of the State
This shift in research focus and theory can be
stated succinctly via a common reference
point for many students of the state, namely
Kantorowicz’s classic text The King’s Two
Bodies ([1957] 2016). This study in medieval
political theology is frequently mentioned in
social theories of the state and sovereignty
that depart from military, fiscal, and organizational
accounts. Kantorowicz’s careful interpretations
of art, architecture, and public
symbols are often taken by sociologists as an
indication that, in their continuity and maintenance
of power, states are ritualized and symbolic
entities (Alexander 2010; Geertz 1980;
Rogin 1979; Wagner-Pacifici 2005).40
But this
is not all there is to that classic argument.
Less often commented upon is that The
King’s Two Bodies is a study of legal decisions,
taxation, and the justification of violence.
Kantorowicz ([1957] 2016:192) sought
to understand not only kingly succession and
the myth of the state, but also the way “the
mediaeval dichotomy between sacerdotium
and regnum was superseded by the new
dichotomy of the King and the Law.” He
argues that the king’s two bodies served not
only to suggest the Christ-like nature of the
sovereign to the public, but also to secure, via
interpretation of the state as existing in perpetuity
via the king’s “second body,” the practice
of annual, rather than ad hoc, taxation
(Kantorowicz [1957] 2016:286). It also provided
justification for why the “prince” can
“shed blood without guilt” (Kantorowicz
[1957] 2016:95). In other words, The King’s
Two Bodies can be understood as a study of
how the public interpretation of state acts of
violence and extraction secured state power.41
Weberian concerns, we might say, were never
absent from the mind of the classic theorist of
political theology.
The rulers of the early American state,
having sacrificed much blood and treasure to
impugn the sovereignty of the British king,
struggled to perform into being a substitute
for the doctrine studied by Kantorowicz.
They did so with scarce resources and little
legitimacy. I have argued that, in situations
such as these, before an organization can be
taken for granted as a military and fiscal
power, and as the purveyor of the symbolic
violence that comes with naturalized categories
of thought, a different dimension of stateformation
comes to the fore. Lacking the
necessary tax men, civil servants, and military
capacity, the initial accumulation of state
power depends on ostentatious violence and
coercion, shameless publicity, and creativity
in meaning-making. We are familiar with the
phrase “agent of the state,” which encodes the
insights of agency theory into our understanding
of the fraught relationship between soldiers,
scientists, diplomats, and the entities
they claim to represent. To varying degrees,
those entities should be understood to depend
on the felicity of their actors.
Acknowledgments
The author thanks Julia Adams, Jennifer Bair, Jeffrey C.
Alexander, Ian Mullins, Richard Lachmann, Elisabeth
Clemens, Christopher Winship, Bart Bonikowski, Carly
Knight, Claire Decoteau, Andy Clarno, Andrew Perrin,
Christopher Bail, Charles Kurzman, Karida Brown, Scott
Frickel, Jose Itzigsohn, and three anonymous reviewers
for insights and commentary on this paper. The author
thanks Vasfiye Toprak, Sano Nagai, and Andrew Boyer
for research assistance. Parts of the primary research for
this paper were done during a fellowship semester funded
by the American Council of Learned Societies.
Notes
 1.	 Bourdieu (2014), upon whose work Loveman
draws, also uses the language of “initial” or “primitive”
accumulation (drawn from Marx but adapted
to his cultural theory of the state) in his lectures
on the state at the Collège de France. See Loveman
(2014) for further discussion of Bourdieu’s
approach to the state and categorization.
 2.	 This invites a sociology of corruption combined
with a sociology of extraction, see Wilson (2015,
2018); for an account of tax farming versus state
administration of taxation given in the terms of
agency theory, see Kiser (1994).
 3.	 Gorski’s argument about Prussia was initially
developed in response to the rational choice argu-
Reed	 359
ment of Kiser and Schneider (1994). For further
discussion and analysis, see Adams (1999).
  4.	 This fits with formal principal-agent theory as well,
which usually focuses on the recalcitrance, shirking,
or conflicting interests of agents, all of which
upset a principal’s ability to achieve his ends (see,
e.g., Feaver [2009] on civilian rulers and their military
“armed servants”).
 5.	 An important development in the bellicist study
of states has been the engagement with the cultural
formation of nationalism and its effect on the
processes of recruiting, fighting, and resistance to
“alien rule.” However, Hechter (2013) retains an
instrumental account of action as the baseline from
which hypotheses are developed.
  6.	 Inversely, rational choice models in political science
and economics have considered more urgent and
short-term problems of coordination and knowledge
held in common (Chwe [2001] 2013), and scholars
have applied their modeling of these problems to the
analysis of trade (Greif 2006). But it is not clear how
such formats of public coordination relate to securing
hierarchy and domination, particularly formats
of domination familiar to the sociology of the state
(but see Kiser and Kane 2007).
 7.	 An interesting question for the intellectual history
of this area of sociology is the degree to which this
emphasis is due to the diffuse but nonetheless consequential
influence on empirical studies of state
formation of Foucault’s writings. Governmentality
(Foucault 1991) is a process of the longue durée.
 8.	 Ermakoff’s (2008, 2015) approach to the abdication
of the right to rule synthesizes rational choice
theory and interactional sociology so as to engage
“eventfulness,” and thus make an argument about
strategy and communication during moments of
political unsettlement in which actors give up,
rather than accede to, power.
 9.	 In his study of early Mesopotamia, Richardson’s
(2012:32) argument attests to the methodological
implication of the performative dimension of state
power for archaeologists and historians: “Texts we
have become used to reading as historical facts must
be reinterpreted as more than idealizing or notional
in merely general terms, but more specifically with
an eye to their persuasive purposes . . . early polities
claimed sovereignty powers on the ground far
ahead of their actual abilities, both over territory
and constituents. These texts were constructed out
of will and desire; early states were talking—conjuring—themselves
into being.”
10.	 Merton’s (1948) classic essay on self-fulfilling
prophecies is interestingly split between its two
paradigmatic examples, one very short-term (a
bank run), the other very long-term (ethnic and
racial prejudices in the United States). But Merton’s
emphasis on false definitions of the situation renders
his analysis relatively insensitive to the complex
ways publicity and interpretation interact.
11.	 For the subtle difference between that which is
available to the public and that which is subject to
the scrutiny of publicity, see Adut (2018).
12.	 The phrase “a state of courts and parties” was originally
designed to characterize the state as “strong,”
but different from the twentieth-century American
states, but it has sometimes been interpreted as
meaning it was “weak” (see discussion in Skowronek
2018).
13.	 Even for the classic case of conscription and the
building of the American army during the War for
Independence, some of the issues described for the
period 1783 to 1801 were present. In particular,
conscription still went through mechanisms at the
level of the individual colony, based ultimately on
the citizen militia tradition inherited from the seventeenth
century (Kestnbaum 2000).
14.	 Mann’s classic work recognizes the somewhat
decentralized and guerilla nature of American warmaking
in the Revolutionary War; he posits that
participation in the war by men (and women) without
property created the push for citizenship that
came next and set the course of the development of
state-society relations until the Civil War. Yet Mann
provides no clear examination of how the memory
of the Revolutionary War was mobilized, or, for that
matter, of the ups and downs of American military
fortunes between 1783 and 1861. It appears he sides
with Skowronek’s argument about an early American
state of courts and parties to some degree, and
that he missed the melting away of the continental
army after 1783, as well as the agency problems
for military power created by the Western frontier
(Mann 2012).
15.	 Once the federal government was established, and
particularly beginning with the use of conscription
by the North in the Civil War, the long and more
recent arc of this story (i.e., 1861 to the present)
in the United States may indeed be a question of
nationalism and its relationship to war—particularly
when it comes to the population’s tolerance
of military casualties and conscription (Lachmann
2013; Lachmann and Stivers 2016).
16.	 A more institutionalist literature examines the
growth of civic nationalism through networked
organizations. The idea here is that the “nation of
joiners” effectively glues the federal state to the
nation. But the weight of the evidence places this
development in the decades between 1820 and
1840; this format of national identification is really
a creature of Jacksonian democracy. Even Skocpol,
Ganz, and Munson (2000) admit that the early
Masonic organizations could not agree on a national
structure in the period between the revolution and
the War of 1812.
17.	 Research in progress considers the relationship
of army recruitment during the revolution and the
early republic to news about slave conspiracy and
rebellion (see also Taylor 2013).
360		 American Sociological Review 84(2)
18.	 This came as a surprise, not least to those who had
run the numbers. Newspapers did not make money,
but they proliferated anyway, not only because
merchants needed them to list prices and track shipping,
and plantation owners needed them to catch
runaway slaves, but also because they were a route
to status for those excluded by the very well-heeled.
19.	 Effectively, what we would describe as plagiarism
was, in the early American republic, reporting the
news.
20.	 Pasley’s research, in particular, suggests a skeptical
reconsideration of the basic cultural mechanisms of
the standardization of reading and education, and
the spread of newspapers, as a pathway to “modernity”
(Anderson [1983] 2006; Gellner 2008). See
the excellent discussion of education in Neem
(2017).
21.	 Zaret (1996) argues that printing petitions publicly,
a change from medieval understandings of petitions
as secret communications, was a key feature of the
English Revolution.
22.	 This section relies on secondary sources where
cited and also on the inspection of Pennsylvania
Archives, Second Series. Published under direction
of Matthew S. Quay, Secretary of the Commonwealth;
edited by John B. Lynn and Wm. H. Egle,
MD. Vol. IV (Harrisburg, PA: B.F. Meyers, State
Printer, 1876); available at the Historical Society
of Pennsylvania, 1300 Locust Street, Philadelphia,
PA, 19107.
23.	 The long-term idea—variably attested to by different
leaders, and especially favored by David Bradford,
who compared himself to Robespierre—was
for “Westsylvania” to align with a different empire,
Spain or Britain.
24.	 Note that the argument, made widely and publicly,
that using force to repress the rebels in Western
Pennsylvania was necessary, was prepared, in part,
in a much smaller public—the mini-public of Washington’s
Cabinet, in which Alexander Hamilton, via
highly artful rhetoric, persuaded Edmund Randolph
of the necessity of using violence to uphold the
whiskey excise, and, by proxy, the Constitution.
For more on the development of the “Philadelphia
interpretation,” see Reed (2016).
25.	 These numbers are derived from Clark (1990).
26.	 It does not appear that this troop consented to wear
regulation uniforms until the Civil War; even then,
the men paid the government for them (Seymour
2008). For a general description of the officer class
in the army sent to western Pennsylvania, see Hogeland
(2010:211). For the relationship of agency
problems in the military to the politics of Federalism
and anti-Federalism in the early republic, see
Griffin (2007).
27.	 William Findley represented Westmoreland County
in the House of Representatives from 1791 to 1799
and wrote History of the Insurrection in the Four
Western Counties of Pennsylvania, published in
1796. Hugh Henry Brackenridge was a widely
known local lawyer who helped found the Pittsburgh
Gazette and wrote Incidents of the Insurrection, published
in 1795. Interestingly, Incidents of the Insurrection
contains many accounts of profane jokes and
laughing dismissals of George Washington based on
his age, infirmity, and supposed affection for Indians.
In this regard it is a document of how Washington’s
charisma—and iconic status as constant reminder
of the “glorious cause” of the Revolution—was not
enough to solve the agency problems confronting the
federal government in the 1790s.
28.	 This section relies on secondary sources where
cited, and the Wayne-Knox-McHenry-Pickering
correspondence, published as Knopf (1960).
29.	 Indeed, although Tarrow (2011) insists the Whiskey
Rebellion marks an inflection point mixing together
older, more violent forms of contentious politics
and the “peaceful march” from the repertoire
of social movements, this is, empirically for the
Whiskey Rebellion at least, a mistake—the rebel
army did not raid the federal armory in Pittsburgh
not because they thought they were engaged in a
peaceful protest, but because they understood those
weapons as “intended for the campaign against the
Indians and it would be improper to derange the
operation of that campaign” (Brackenridge [1795]
1972:107; leader David Bradford was of the same
opinion, see Bouton 2007). The ambiguity shows
just how much the coercive aspect of the federal
apparatus was a tangle of loyalties and resentments.
Repeated instances of Indian–settler violence,
along with lack of access to the Mississippi
river, were central grievances of the Whiskey rebels
against a proto-state that they wanted to be both less
and more “strong.”
30.	 For economic and political reasons, the rulers of the
early American state were always more concerned
with the Northwest Territory than the Southwest Territory,
and the struggle to secure it constituted one
of the great public dramas of the 1790s. Those years
concluded what had been, effectively, a 60-year,
multi-empire contest for the Great Lakes region.
Important for the argument of this article is that the
violence in and around the Ohio River did not cease
with the British surrender of 1783 (Cayton 1992).
31.	 Washington’s own early experience fighting both
French and Indian forces for the British Empire
taught him as much (Anderson and Cayton 2005).
32.	 One delegate to the electoral college for the JeffersonBurr
ticket was supposed to withhold his vote for
Burr, giving Jefferson the presidency and Burr the
vice presidency, but failed to do so. The ensuing
deadlock in the House of Representatives occurred
due to the preference of many Federalists for Burr
over Jefferson.
33.	Local newspapers carried threats of military
intervention, by Federalist-inclined militias in
Massachusetts and Connecticut, and by Democratic-
Reed	 361
Republican inclined ones from Pennsylvania and
Virginia. Thomas Jefferson included the latter threats
in his communication with the Federalists; he also
refused to guarantee places for Federalists within
his administration (see discussion in Sisson 2014:
425–34).
34.	 “As demonstrated by the chorus of anxiety in correspondence,
political decisions were shaped by an
ever shifting array of influences, and politicians did
not make such choices in partisan lockstep. . . . This
lack of well-defined standards in an unstable political
environment convinced many politicians that
the nation was in the throes of a moral crisis” (Freeman
2002:207–9).
35.	 In the United States from 1783 to 1801, this emergent
script could involve the same individuals in
different roles when it was played out in different
contexts. For example, during the Whiskey Rebellion,
Thomas McKean, as chief justice of Pennsylvania,
urged Washington and Hamilton not to
use military force on the rebels in a meeting with
the Cabinet; as governor of Pennsylvania in 1801,
he threatened the Federalists with military force;
in both instances, he was party to the eventual
exchange that secured order. This is the point of
social dramaturgy as a route to state power: roles
can be occupied by individuals who had occupied
other, different roles in the past, but the anatomy
of the drama creatively solves the recurrent agency
problems that attend a would-be state.
36.	 This understanding of the distinction between culture
and performance draws on a long-standing sociological
insight about action, traceable to Mead ([1932]
2002, see discussion in Abbott 2001:224–30).
37.	 In this article, although I discuss material culture
as a dimension of state-formation, I do not develop
or engage the quite different notion of the performative
one finds in the work of Latour (2005) and
MacKenzie and Millo (2003). The central difference
is that this approach to performativity does not
focus as clearly on audience interpretation as does
the model advanced in this article. Nonetheless, for
discussions that attempt to span the divide, see Callon
(2010) and Butler (2010). Callon and Latour
(1981) provide the technologists’ critique of macrosociologists’
reliance on Hobbes’ political theory of
the state.
38.	 Giesen (2005) offers an extension of the insights of
theories of ritual to the difficult conceptual problem,
influenced by the legacy of Carl Schmitt, of
“sovereign violence.” This issue takes the theory
being built here beyond the scope of this article; it
will be addressed in a subsequent study.
39.	 A slightly heterodox reading of Norton’s work
(especially 2014b) would suggest that encounters
on the high seas, especially before the destruction of
piracy, involved a great deal of performative power,
particularly by various captains who had significant
emotional power over their sailors. In this sense,
Norton’s case of the destruction of piracy might be
read as the destruction of charisma, or the “reigning
in” of performative autonomy in the execution
and interpretation of violence. For a discussion of
the relationship between Weber’s concept of charisma
and the idea of performative power, see Reed
(2013b).
40.	 I wish to be clear that this is not an unreasonable
reading of Kantorowicz’s multilayered text, a text
that has, furthermore, been criticized for its emphasis
on ritual (Buc 2009).
41.	 It is interesting to note in this regard the influence
of Kantorowicz’s text on Strayer (2005), whose
book influenced Tilly’s early work. Tilly wrote the
introduction to the reissue of Strayer’s text, and the
connection is discussed in Tarrow (2008).
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Isaac Ariail Reed is Associate Professor of Sociology at
the University of Virginia. He is the author of Interpretation
and Social Knowledge: On the Use of Theory in the
Human Sciences. In 2015 he received the Lewis A. Coser
Award for Theoretical Agenda Setting. He received his
bachelor’s degree from Swarthmore College in 2000 and
his PhD from Yale University in 2007.