Its my bedtime(im in asia) so I will make this brief and we can continue tomorrow. Please do some research in the meantime.
Alexander Hamilton, as opposed to Jefferson/Madison believed in a strong Federal Government. He did not get it......The country followed the Jeffersonian/STates right theme. Madison was able to succesfully convince congress that it was unconstitutional to build roads canals etc....The federal Gevernment was practically non-existant.

Henry Clay Kept kept Hamiltons Merchantilistic fantasies alive. He never succeded with his plan but he did convince a young Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln worshipped Clay. Lincoln thought the Federal Government needed to build railroads, roads, canals, kill indians faster. He wanted(and got) a Federal income tax. He wanted a national bank. (Prior to lincoln each state had its own currency.)
How did he acomlish this? By smashing the constitution into little pieces at the barrel of a gun using slavery as a pretext for war. The civil was an illegal war. States had a constitutional right to suceed..(read) Lincoln was so out of control, that he sent the national guard into the Maryland legislature to keep them from suceeding. He suspended Habeous corpus laws without any legal authority. He threatened to incarcerate the chief justice of the united states supreme court because he complained. (read the link for more anti-lincoln stuff)
If you know anything about history, you know that nationalizing such a large area of land at that time was empire in itself. Once it was done, people in washington had control of all americans. The 9th and tenth amendments were circumvented. thirty years after the war, with the indian wars coming to a close they could not stop expanding....thus the spanish America war(conquest/imperilism) then World War one with Woodrow Wilson the great lincoln wannabe and WW two and about thirty little wars since. We now have hegemony and within our countries borders lawmakers have nowhere else to expand so they expand their power into us. We are all the new indians. They trim our rights and pass drug laws.

I know thats a half ass definition but I cant teach all of American History in 15 minutes. I assumed you knew some of this stuff. Read about AMerican Imperilism since the Civil war.