The Confederate Roots of the Administrative State

The administrative state has grown explosively in America over the past century, almost entirely without roots in our Constitution. Bureaucratic, unelected, managerial government in America had a surprising birthplace: the Confederate States of America. It would ultimately be imported into the theory and practice of the federal government by a son of the Confederacy: Woodrow Wilson.

The foundations of the Confederacy’s pioneering efforts in the field of democratically unaccountable big-government federal bureaucracy were laid in the design of the Confederate constitution. Confederate bureaucracy expanded significantly amid the stresses of a war for the survival of secession. It far outstripped the wartime expansion of government undertaken by the Union — creating, as Wilson himself would write, “a power centralized beyond example in the history of America.” Beyond example, at least, until Wilson’s own presidency.