This essay investigates the eighteenth‐century origins of the federal administrative state through the prism of customs collection. Until recently, historians and legal scholars have not closely studied collection operations in the early federal custom houses. Gautham Rao's National Duties: Custom Houses and the Making of the American State (2016) offers the most important and thoroughly documented historical analysis to date. Joining a growing historical literature that explains the early development of the US federal political system with reference to imperial models and precedents, Rao shows that the seductive power of commerce over the state within eighteenth‐century imperial praxis required the early federal customs officials to “negotiate” their authority with the mercantile community. A paradigm of accommodation dominated American customs collection well into the nineteenth century until Jacksonian centralizers finally began to dismantle it in the 1830s. The book brings welcome light to a long‐neglected topic in American history. It offers a nuanced, historiographically attentive interpretation that rests on a broad archival source base. It should command the sustained attention of legal, social, economic, and constitutional historians for it holds the potential to change the way historians think about early federal administration. This essay investigates one of the central questions raised in National Duties: How were the early American custom houses able to successfully administer a comprehensive program of customs duties when their imperial predecessors had proved unable to collect even narrowly tailored ones? Focusing on the Federalist period (1789–1800), I develop an answer that complements Rao's, highlighting administrative change over continuity and finding special significance in the establishment of the first federal judicial system.
bestiality cases (periodically with brief, and not always entirely accurate, asides about witchcraft). We know how, why, and how often New England authorities prosecuted and executed people for having sex with animals, but is not clear that those who were involved in the Farrell and Washburn cases were similarly aware of their ancestors' actions and attitudes. We tend to associate executions for bestiality with the Puritans, but did their late eighteenth-century ancestors? The authors are quite clear that eighteenth-century New Englanders did not want to return to the spartan material culture of the 1630s, initiate witch hunts, or hang Quakers. A better sense of which aspects of these imagined Puritans they did want to revive (however briefly) would give the reader a better sense of precisely what this "Puritan flashback" entailed. Nevertheless, Taming Lust makes a valuable contribution to the histories of both sexuality and the early republic. Historians have long interpreted the 1790s as the beginning of a period of retrenchment and relative conservatism compared with the Revolutionary years, but rarely has that interpretation been extended to the policing of sexual morality. Historians have noted the general trend toward effective decriminalization of fornication in the eighteenth century. Some, such as Richard Godbeer (Sexual Revolution in Early America, [Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002]) have written about the development of a sexualized pleasure culture in urban areas, such as Philadelphia, in the years following the Revolution. Ben-Atar and Brown dispute neither of these findings. They do remind us, however, that the prosecution of those seen as sexual deviants was a common response to threatening political developments, and that people in rural areas were as likely to define themselves in opposition to urban culture as they were to be led by it. Litchfield and Leverett's flashback may have been brief, but it demonstrates quite viscerally the depth of the anxiety with which many in the New England interior responded to the political and cultural turmoil of the post-Revolutionary years.
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