The institutions of public bureaucracy—including recruitment and promotion systems, regulatory mechanisms, and opportunities for the external monitoring of bureaucratic activity—differ widely across the American states. To what extent are these substantial differences related to historical conditions? In this paper, we examine the long-term impact that colonial legal systems and configurations of economic elites had on the design of bureaucratic institutions across America. The strong divergence between colonial civil and common law systems created fundamentally different relationships among the branches of government. Similarly, variation in economic structures—often tied to geographic conditions—affected the composition of elites, with implications in terms of demands for an independent bureaucratic apparatus. We argue that both of these historical features potentially affected the development of bureaucratic systems in the American states; and we empirically assess the relative explanatory power of both arguments using several measures of bureaucratic quality and professionalism.