Abstract

"A Republic of Contractors: Federal Procurement as Statecraft, 1776-1850"

Matthew Titolo, West Virginia University (matthew.titolo@mail.wvu.edu)

Historians have not examined the role of government contractors and federal procurement policies as an important aspect of early American statecraft. My current book project focuses on the use of private contractors to conduct the work of government in the long nineteenth century, with an emphasis on military and postal contracting. Government contracts were a common way to achieve national objectives then as they are today. Beginning in the late 18th century, the federal government worked with private companies and individuals to provide an array of goods and services. For example, military contractors supplied materiel and equipment for the army and navy. Steam, rail, and stagecoach contractors moved mail across the country enabling settlement, colonization, and the development of markets. The General Land Office hired contractors to create land boundaries, survey water routes, design public works projects and define the boundaries of towns and cities.

However, private contractors have always presented special governance problems within modern democratic societies. Control, service levels, and cost are always important factors in contracting. However, public contracts also present other problems that are not present in private contracting, including democratic accountability and legal, constitutional, and political norms that make public contracting distinctly political enterprise. In the early American context, contracting was often informal and weakly institutionalized through bureaucratic structures. This can be traced through government records from the late eighteenth century that indicate a flurry of claims for payment by the Treasury made by purported military and supply contractors during the Confederation period. Using archival sources, the proposed presentation will analyze Treasury practice under Alexander Hamilton, who developed mechanisms for contracting oversight and fiscal controls in an era of sovereign debt crisis and the looming threat of foreign war with England and France.