A Republic No More. Jay Cost
in the White House after the former died a month after his inauguration) saw the removal of more than 450 presidential officers, almost as many as every previous administration combined.37 Removals on the subpresidential level were just as dramatic. Francis Granger, postmaster general for just six months in 1841, deserves special mention. He swept out some 1,700 postal workers, and later claimed that if he had been in charge of the Post Office for a few more weeks, he would have dismissed 3,000 more. Unfortunately for Granger, Tyler—who was not a Whig in the same mold as Clay or Daniel Webster but rather an old-school Republican who hated Jackson’s heavy-handedness—had fallen out with his one-time allies, and was soon angling to win an election in his own right under the Democratic banner. Tyler thus filled the civil service with Democrats sympathetic to his cause. In one of the more outrageous tales from this period, his son leaned on sympathetic postmasters to purchase fifty to sixty copies each of a sycophantic biography, The Life of John Tyler by Alexander Abell, to distribute on their routes.38
And so it went during the period of Jacksonian Democracy, from 1828 until the Civil War. Hundreds upon hundreds of presidential-level appointees were cleaned out during the administrations of James K. Polk, Zachary Taylor, Millard Fillmore, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan. The last, a Democrat, went so far as to remove the appointees of his own predecessor, also a Democrat. Whether this advanced the agendas of these later Jacksonian-era presidents is another matter entirely. The point of this exercise was to reward party workers so that they would remain loyal and motivated for legislative battles and the upcoming campaign. But only Polk was successful in Congress, and he was notoriously stingy in offering patronage to his coalition. Furthermore, none of these incumbents was even renominated for the presidency after having secured it originally.39 Indeed, Polk perhaps came closest to the mark in recognizing that the spoils system actually weakened the president’s standing as he had to say “no” to so many greedy office-seekers, who numbered in the tens of thousands by the 1850s.
Moreover, the utility of the patronage to hold a coalition together began to diminish as the slavery issue became unavoidable. Both the Democrats and Whigs were transregional parties that sought to forge a political coalition on both sides of this issue; early in the Jacksonian era, patronage was helpful in this regard, neutralizing discontents on both sides and keeping the issue from redefining electoral politics. But with the debate over Texas annexation, then the Mexican War, the admittance of California, and finally the Kansas-Nebraska turmoil, slavery came to the forefront, and no amount of patronage could push it to the background. Indeed, sometimes—as happened with the New York Democrats during the Pierce administration—the issue split parties within states, and there was little a president could do. By the 1850s, everybody seemed to resent everything that Fillmore, Pierce, and Buchanan did with patronage; either it was too much for this group or not enough for that group.
Still, for a time the spoils system was the glue that held together two sharply divided political parties. It was a way for presidents to unite a disparate and far-flung political coalition in a shared quest for the nation’s top office, now firmly decided by the public at large. To accomplish this, the old Federalist and early Republican tradition regarding retention in office had to be tossed aside. In its stead came a system in which both parties raided the federal treasury for narrow and fractious purposes, and predictably, corruption became rampant and widespread.
There is a fine line that must be drawn when connecting patronage to political corruption. After all, a president should have the power to appoint agents who share his worldview, and who will act in good faith to carry out his instructions. Similarly, members of Congress whose districts or states are affected by a particular executive agent should have the right to make recommendations on behalf of people of ability. Moreover, if a certain campaign worker also happens to be well-suited for a job, there is nothing inherently wrong with rewarding him with that position after victory has been secured, nor in choosing him over an equally well-qualified applicant who opposed the victorious party.
The issue gets down to the public good: is it being served by a given appointment, or is it being sacrificed for the sake of a party’s electoral standing? That must be the sine qua non of our analysis. It is not sufficient to say that the patronage system was corrupt simply because the parties rewarded their friends. They must also have done so at the expense of the national interest.
For the period under discussion here, there is copious evidence to that effect, which fully justifies the conclusion that the spoils system was a corrupting influence on our government during the Jacksonian period. A few general considerations, followed by some specific cases, will demonstrate this point quite easily.
On the broadest level, the spoils system expanded politics far too wide for the public good. Too many officers were subject to removal based on changing administrations, which meant turnover was too high, and the efficiency of the civil service was accordingly reduced. That is especially true for the period under discussion, when control of the presidency changed hands every four years between 1840 and 1852 (not to mention the intraparty sweep that Buchanan conducted against Pierce’s men after his election in 1856). Ultimately, a handful of lower-level, permanent staffers had to manage the affairs of the government during this era, as every four years a new series of politically appointed agents would be brought into office with no experience of how the government was to operate.40
Additionally, the spoils system was not a one-way street. The president or his advisors did not simply hand out a partisan a job and expect nothing in return. They expected quite a bit, which meant that public resources were conscripted for the partisan campaign. We already noted above the pressure that President Tyler’s son brought to bear upon postal workers in advance of the 1844 Democratic convention, and while that might have been a particularly tacky type of abuse, it was far from unique. Government workers were regularly expected to contribute copious amounts of time for the sake of the party campaign, leaving their public duties unattended. Moreover, there was a widespread practice of party assessments, wherein the state or local party would take a kickback from the employee, the size of which usually depended on his salary.41
Another type of kickback had to do with the party presses. As mentioned above, Hamilton and Jefferson both used public resources to subsidize friendly newspapers, but starting with the Jacksonians the relationship between the press and the government began to shift. Some presses became “administration papers” that had unique access to the party in power; their editors were often integral in party decision making. To finance these operations, the government often handed administration newspapers lucrative printing contracts. After 1860, the Government Printing Office took charge of printing the legislative record, executive rules, and so on, but prior to that the administration as well as both chambers of Congress each contracted with private printers, binders, and engravers. In the Jacksonian era, these became party jobs, and the fees that the printers charged for their services usually went well beyond market value, again with the expectation that the printers would kick some of the proceeds back to the party’s electoral effort.42
Turning from general concerns to specific instances of outrageous behavior, there are a few departments that stand out above the rest in terms of venality and corruption. The Post Office is perhaps the most obvious example; unsurprising, since its massive size and geographical bigness made it a perfect source of patronage. When Washington was first inaugurated, there were only seventy-five post offices and just 1,875 miles of post road. When Jackson took office, there were more than 8,000 post offices and 115,000 miles of post road.43 As mentioned above, Van Buren and other spoilsmen quickly seized on it for rewarding their cronies, and to make full use of it they expanded the Post Office beyond what was necessary. Postmaster General McLean had managed an extensive postal service with just thirty-eight clerks in early 1829. By 1834, Postmaster General Barry had ninety clerks on his staff. The Whigs (before they won the executive branch and became staunch advocates of the spoils system) derided this, with a Whig-dominated congressional investigation declaring, “The business of the office cannot have increased since the 1st of April, 1829, in the proportion of 38 to 90.”44 Quite right.
If the Post Office was useful because it was so vast, the customs houses were useful