The Federal Government and Slavery: Following the Money Trail.

The historiography on the relation between slavery and American political development has shifted markedly in the last ten years to show how much the federal government was implicated in the continued existence of slavery during the 1789-1861 period (Fehrenbacher 2001). But we still lack any quantification of that relationship. In this exploratory study, I attempt to rectify that shortcoming by showing how much the federal government spent on such slavery-related items as interdicting illegal slave trading, subsidizing African colonization, and enforcing fugitive-slave law. The many financial connections between the federal government and slavery provide a more concrete picture of the way the two institutions were entangled together. They also suggest that slavery had a positive impact on the development of the early American state. This finding ?amends? studies that argue it had a negative impact (Einhorn 2000) as well as studies that argue the early American state was ?weak? (Benzel 1990). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]