This work has the purpose to analyze the text entitled Organic Memorial, published by Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen between the years of 1849 and 1850 in Madrid and reedited in 1851, now in Brazil, by the Guanabara Journal. In his text, Varnhagen organizes his arguments and considerations in two elements that were constantly remarked by the imperial authorities in the process of construction and consolidation of the imperial State: territory and population. To develop a management over its territory and its contents, that is, its population, in agreement with the ideals of order and civilization of those who were situated in the Government World, was a fundamental task for the Empire of Brazil to be organized in the shape of a Nation Sate. As the text´s own title indicates, Varnhagen wrote the Organic Memorial with the purpose to bring back to the memory of the imperial authorities the need of adopting certain measures capable of turning the Empire in a compact nation, emphasizing the central role played by the State in this process. The arguments developed by Varnhagen in the Organic Memorial, in turn, reveal a certain type of expansion undertaken by the imperial authorities, above all from the mid-19th century with the personal government of D. Pedro II: an inside expansion. A necessary and fundamental expansion to guarantee the association between the Empire of Brazil and the Brazilian Nation, which, in its turn, presupposed the construction and consolidation of the imperial State.