"American Autarky: Edward B. Hunt and the Political Economy of Organic State Theories in the Civil War Era"

This paper focuses the political and economic thought of Edward Bissell Hunt, a U.S. Army engineer who articulated a striking organic vision of the American state in the wake of the Civil War. Fusing natural history with physical geography, Hunt mapped biological structures—ganglia, nerve trunks, and cerebral cortex—onto the federal system while identifying the entire North American continent as the nation’s “needed space” for organic growth. He countered secessionist arguments with a biological and geographical defense of Union, depicting the United States as an “earth individual,” a “state-organism” evolving through functional specialization—from simplicity of structure to increasing complexity and interdependence—until it encompassed “total life.” In arguing for the indivisibility of the American state in the context of civil war, Hunt gave organic form to a growing nineteenth-century emphasis on territory and territorial control over raw materials, markets, and industry—the integration of an industrial core and peripheral resource extraction. It amounted to an organic rationalization of territoriality, in which racial, political and economic spaces converged within an imperial-national state. This principle was deployed not only refuted secession, but also redefine national development, rejecting the “two Atlantic voyages” that separated American farmers from British factories as a sin against nature. While it has not been explored before, Hunt’s fusion of race, territory, and economic interdependence—his insistence that continental unity was the precondition of economic success—not only reveals the depth of nineteenth-century reflection within the military on American state development, but also anticipates the developmental and territorial logics later articulated as “Lebensraum.”