ABSTRACT
The early republic saw the articulation of universal rights of the Enlightenment and their entry into the founding documents of the American state. That the demos was by no means as inclusive as the language of the Constitution suggests will not be news to students of American politics. This chapter fleshes out how exactly the extractive state was more than just a decentralized apparatus of courts and parties and how, by articulating narrow definitions of the political community, it legitimized the territorial expansion and domination of the native populations against the humanistic principles on which the state itself was founded. These tropes lost their political clout with the closing of the frontier and the increase of class conflicts, giving rise to new identarian discourses, institutional reforms, and ways to reinstate indifference.
