Читать книгу A Republic No More - Jay Cost - Страница 14

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AS WE HAVE SEEN, James Madison understood the framing of the Constitution as a search for republican balance. He sought to empower the national government to solve the pressing problems of the day, but he did not want to allow factionalism to overrun the system. Thus, he carefully tried to balance structures against powers to prevent any one faction from gaining too much power at the expense of the common good. As we saw in Chapter Two, the growth in the power of the national government beyond what the Framers intended threatened this balance, and led in due course to corruption. It was as if the Constitution was a scale, carefully calibrated when originally designed, but too much weight was added to one side, disrupting the equilibrium. Corruption was the inevitable result.

It was not just changes in power relations that would upend this balance. Changes in the institutions of government itself—independent of whether those institutions gained or lost power—could similarly disrupt the scale, and lend itself to corruption. Just as he carefully considered which branches of the government should possess which powers, Madison was just as attentive to how those branches should operate. As later generations altered those operations, the balance could be lost as well, creating new venues for corruption.

As we shall see, the democratization of the presidency and the rise of the two national political parties had precisely this effect.

At first blush, this might sound like a ridiculous assertion. After all, today’s Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, all celebrate the Jacksonian revolution of popularly elected presidents. And furthermore, social scientists now uniformly recognize political parties as essential ingredients in democratic republics. How can benevolent developments such as these ever have become conduits of corruption?

Ultimately, the problem is that the Framers simply did not see either trend coming; thus, our governmental charter has nothing to say about political parties and implicitly assumes a government dominated by the Congress rather than the president. Did the Framers err in overlooking these developments? Perhaps. Durable political coalitions were already in existence in every state legislature of the union by 1787, and the very same democratizing influences that contributed to the Revolution ultimately led to a popularly elected president. On the other hand, the history of republican government up to that point had indicated pretty clearly that parties were not to be tolerated and managed, but rather squashed, and that legislatures—not executives—were the most dangerous institutions to republican governance.

Regardless of what they should have done, the Framers did not make provisions for these dual trends, which means that, benevolent or malevolent, they disrupted the original balance of the Constitution, altering fundamentally the way our government functions—in unanticipated ways.

These two developments—a democratized presidency and political parties—are causally related. The presidency has always been the greatest political prize in the republic. Democraticizing it changed the calculus of politicians seeking the office; to win, they must now mount nationwide electoral campaigns. This necessity facilitated the rise of national parties, as the state-based factions that had once characterized politics were not broad enough to accomplish this. The two major paries thus unite a broad array of actors in a shared quest for electoral victory; they rally like-minded voters all across the country, and they coordinate officials across federal, state, and local governments. This makes them important centripetal forces countering a very centrifugal Constitution.

As we shall see, by disrupting the way the Constitution anticipates the government will function, the combination of political parties and mass-based presidential elections has lent itself to corruption on an enormous scale. Whereas under the Constitution members of the Congress should be on the lookout for executive encroachment upon legislative prerogatives, the parties in pursuit of electoral victory undermine these institutional rivalries. Thanks to the party system, members of Congress of the same party often overlook such executive high-handedness insofar as it facilitates the party’s electoral agenda, especially its quest for the presidency. Similarly, the president is now quite inclined to indulge members of Congress provided that they are affiliated with his own party. Because the Constitution has nothing to say about this dynamic, and indeed because this dynamic runs contrary to what Madison anticipated in Federalist #51, it is easy for such relations to devolve into corrupt devices that unbalance the republican experiment.

All of this helps us understand how the spoils system became rampant in the nineteenth century. The resources required to win a nationwide presidential election were too massive for parties to raise on their own, and so they turned to the public treasury for partisan purposes, rewarding their friends with jobs, contracts, sinecures, and so on as the spoils of victory. The Constitution anticipates that such corruption will not happen; the Congress is expected to check a president who abuses the public trust in such a fashion, or vice versa. But the political parties united these disparate entities in a shared quest for power, and therefore plunder. The result was an institutionalized form of corruption that would endure for generations, and indeed continues in one form or another to this very day.

Political parties are integral to modern American democracy. As political scientist E. E. Schattschneider puts it, “they are in the center (of modern government) and play a determinative and creative role in it.”¹ And not only in the United States, either; there is no democratic republic on the face of the planet that does not have a party system of one sort or another.

The reason, as scholars have come to understand, is that parties homogenize the vast diversity of opinions and interests within society, (hopefully) harnessing them in service to a greater good. In Congress, for instance, legislators confront a series of collective action and social choice problems, all of which relate one way or the other to getting a large, diverse body to work on behalf of shared goals. Political parties solve these problems by rewarding similarly minded legislators who work together.² Good partisans, for instance, who help advance the party’s collective goals, often receive leadership positions, or plum committee spots; bad ones are sent off to backwater committees where their influence is minimized.³

Indeed, evidence suggests that legislative parties in Congress were in existence as early as 1791, and every state assembly during the 1780s had a legislative divide between the cosmopolitan coastal areas and the rough-hewn interiors. All of this should make sense: political parties seek to unify and harmonize groups of legislators into coherent coalitions, and in so doing help the legislature actually function.

Parties have uses beyond legislatures, as well. An important service they provide is regulating political ambition; would-be politicians who want to climb the career ladder ultimately must sacrifice their own interests to the goals sought by the whole party, at least to some extent. This ensures, again to an extent, that those who reach the upper echelons are reasonably qualified and disposed to serve the public good.⁴

Parties also regulate the scope of political conflict in the country. A nation as large as the United States has the potential for a limitless number of fights between the citizenry. Which become part of political conflict, and which are left out of the public sphere? It depends on how the parties respond—both individually and together—to these problems. Thanks to the work of parties, certain tensions become the source of political conflict while others remain latent. As we shall see, this was an important function that the Democrats and Whigs served during the Jacksonian period. The issue of slavery was always dangerous to the union between the North and the South; neither party had an interest in severing that union, so both conspired to keep the slavery problem at bay, at least for a time.⁵

Additionally, they serve an important function within the electorate. Mobilizing an electoral coalition in a nation as vast and diverse as the United States is no little feat. It requires tremendous effort by thousands of activists, not to mention the expenditure of vast fortunes. Who has the personal incentive to contribute so much? The answer is: nobody besides those who get to serve in office should the party win. That is certainly not going to cut it, and thus the challenge of party mobilization is a kind of public goods problem. The parties solve this similar to the way that the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) does. Why donate during PBS pledge drives? It makes much more sense not to donate and enjoy the programming for free. This is why PBS offers you a tote bag, CDs, DVDs, or something, depending on your contribution. This is exactly what a political party does as well: it rewards people with private benefits when they contribute to the collective good of the party. In the modern era, contributors to the party often enjoy special access to officeholders; in Jacksonian America, many of them expected rewards like jobs or contracts. While the benefits have changed over time, the function of such benefits remains the same: for the donor, it is a private gift that only he can enjoy, thus giving him an incentive not to free ride and allow others to do the heavy lifting for the party.

Despite the many uses of political parties, the Framers of the Constitution were deeply suspicious of them. In Madison’s view, the factionalism that had rent the state governments during the 1780s—between the coastal, commercial elites and the yeoman interior class—had nearly brought the nation’s experiment in self-government to an end.⁶ Political parties are, after all, organized factions, and Madison spoke for many when, in Federalist #10, he writes:

By a faction, I understand a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or a minority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community. There are two methods of curing the mischiefs of faction: the one, by removing its causes; the other, by controlling its effects.⁷

In other words, no political party could have a truly public-spirited nature; inevitably, every last one of them was bound to favor some group over another, thus undermining the public interest.

An important purpose of the Constitution, per Madison in Federalist #10, is to “break and control the violence of faction.” Rather than acknowledge the inevitability of political parties, the Constitution seeks to keep them from coalescing, by dispersing power far and wide. The hope was that no faction, or party, could possibly grab all the levers of political power for their own selfish purposes. While factions would inevitably form, they would not be able to attach themselves permanently to the government. Somewhere, somehow, an opponent would retain a toehold in the government to veto the designs of fractious majorities, and in time the partisan fever would break. This is why historian Richard Hofstadter calls the founding document a “Constitution against parties.”⁸

It is thus quite surprising that the Framers would themselves become the originators of the party system. Why the change of heart? In fact, there was not really a change of heart at all, at least among the Republicans. They saw themselves as representing a truly public interest, that of the great majority of the country, and the Federalists as a minority faction, utilizing the preeminence of George Washington and, later, fear of war with the French, to confuse and beguile the public. Ultimately, the Republicans believed that they, and only they, were the representatives of the people, while the Federalists were suspicious of public opinion, and sought to separate the management of the government from the people. This is why Thomas Jefferson, Madison, and their allies could flip-flop so seamlessly from antiparty to proparty. They did not really see themselves as a party in the sense that we think of them today, and they certainly did not think of the Federalists as being a mass-based party like today’s Democrats and Republicans. For them, Jefferson’s triumph in 1800 heralded a restoration of the republican spirit of the Founding rather than the victory of one faction over another.⁹

Even though they would have denied that they were a party in the way we think of them today, they nevertheless acted like one. For instance, President Jefferson exercised tight control over his allies in Congress, prompting Federalist senator Timothy Pickering to complain, not without merit, that Jefferson “secretly dictates every measure which is seriously proposed and supported” in the Congress. The Republicans also developed a party organization that was a prototype of the modern variety. They believed that their restoration of constitutional principles required an active organization that would spur on the public; the Federalist threat, as they saw it, lay in the idleness of the great mass of people who were true Republicans. And so it was that the contest for the presidency in 1800 did more than any electoral battle in a generation to encourage the growth of party organizations in the states. While few states at this point had popular elections for the Electoral College, a series of battles for state government control in New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia served as proxy battles for the presidency, and in these states the Republicans sought to organize a unified front.¹⁰

After Jefferson’s victory, the Republican leadership hoped to separate the Federalist electorate from the party leadership. In his first inaugural, Jefferson declares, “We are all Federalists; we are all Republicans.”¹¹ This was not meant as some kind of new age, gooey pabulum; instead, it signaled a policy of conciliation, an integral aspect to the Jeffersonian project. Much of this was covered in the previous chapter, as the Republicans increasingly adopted the Federalist domestic program. As we shall see later in this chapter, Jefferson and his Republican successors were relatively subdued (compared to the Jacksonians) in removing Federalist officeholders from the government. They hoped that they could peel off enough of their opposition to render this two-party system a dead letter.

While this strategy bore political fruit—as the Federalist position in Congress shriveled to virtually nothing and its capacity to contest presidential elections disappeared—not everybody on the Republican side was satisfied. John Randolph of Virginia and his “Quids” faction believed that the party’s leadership had sold out its principles for the sake of political expedience. More often than not, the peculiar Quids were on the outside looking in during Madison and James Monroe’s tenures, but New York political maven Martin Van Buren was a rising star who felt that the fusion policy of Monroe, which worked to further integrate Republicans with old Federalists, was handing power over to a crypto-Federalist contingency.

Van Buren has since been remembered as a founder of the two-party system, but like the early Republicans he denied the popular legitimacy of his opponents. The National Republicans, and later the Whigs (as his opponents would be called), in his view, were merely rebranded Federalists, who beguiled the public into voting against their own interests. As far as Van Buren was concerned, there was one party that represented the people’s interests, the Republican Party. Where he differed from his predecessors was his opposition to reconciliation with the Federalists, believing that this weakened the party organization and thus undermined principled Republican governance. A robust party organization, clearly delineating what the party stands for and who are its standard-bearers, was the only true protection for the principles that Jefferson had rescued in 1800.¹²

The events of the 1820s seemed to vindicate Van Buren’s suspicions. The “amalgamating policies of Mr. Monroe”—as Van Buren once put it—led to a collapse in party discipline on the national level in the early part of the decade, culminating in the death of the party caucus in 1824.¹³ The Republicans could not agree on a presidential nominee, and so four candidates—John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, William Crawford, and Andrew Jackson—all ran as Republicans, and all sought the White House via a personal following largely predicated on regional ties. The result was the election of Quincy Adams, himself a former Federalist whose ambitious political program would have been music to the ears of Alexander Hamilton.¹⁴

Van Buren had faced a similar situation in his home state of New York. Once essential to the Republican alliance, New York had fallen prey to factional rivalries predicated upon family ties. The Schuylers, the Livingstons, and the Clintons variably dominated New York politics during Van Buren’s lifetime, which inevitably meant a corruption of the pure Republican faith as Federalists often held the balance of power. Van Buren and his “Bucktail” faction in New York lacked the family pedigree of their principal opponent, DeWitt Clinton, but they more than made up for it in political organization. By building a network of party operatives that stretched from the state capitol in Albany all the way down to the local precincts, they captured power in 1820 and even succeeded in rewriting the state constitution in 1821. The tight organization of this “Albany Regency” ensured that there would be no heresies to pervert the true Republican faith. When the New York legislature sent Van Buren to Washington as a senator in 1821, he resolved to take his ideas of party organization nationwide.¹⁵

But how to do that? In 1824, Van Buren thought that Secretary of the Treasury Crawford was the best candidate for the old Jeffersonian faith, but Crawford suffered a stroke before the election and ultimately finished third in the balloting. The surprising strength of Jackson pushed Van Buren and the Regency toward Old Hickory’s side in the wake of the disputed outcome, and he worked behind the scenes to deliver the Crawford faction to Old Hickory. Twenty years earlier, Jackson’s popularity might not have counted for much in the presidential contest, but by 1824 two-thirds of the states cast popular votes for the presidency, and the political power of Jackson’s appeal was undeniable.

What Van Buren wished to do, and indeed what he basically accomplished, was unite the political popularity of Jackson to the old alliance of “the planters of the South and the plain Republicans of the North.” Moreover, this new coalition would be solidified and maintained by an elaborate party organization, a nationwide version of what the Regency had already built in the Empire State, binding political elites to the grassroots in a shared quest for office.¹⁶

And the glue that would hold this new organization together? Political patronage. Van Buren and the Democrats (as this coalition would come to be called) would use the public treasury to reward their loyal supporters with jobs, contracts, considerations, and anything and everything they could to incentivize as many people as possible to help elect Jackson president. And in so doing, they would ring in a new era of political corruption, unlike anything the nation had seen before.

Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution declares:

[The president] shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.

This power, divided between the Senate and the president, was not handed over lightly by the Framers. In the lead-up to the Revolution, the colonists faced extreme hardship at the hands of royal agents. The Declaration of Independence argues that King George III “has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries. He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.” It is little wonder, then, that the Framers sought to spread the power of appointment across two branches, and to give the lion’s share of authority to the president, an agent they thought would be sufficiently dissociated from politics.

Little wonder as well that, during the administration of George Washington, the appointment power was not misused for political purposes. The great “Father of His Country” did not face the voters in either 1788 or 1792; his larger-than-life reputation meant that he was immune from the ebbs and flows of politics more than any of his successors; and the fact that he had well and truly earned his sterling reputation meant that his top priority as president was establishing the legitimacy of the new government, not enriching his friends and family. While he excluded opponents of the new Constitution, many of his appointees sided with Jefferson over Hamilton on the most consequential policy questions, without fear of reprisal from Washington. He also refused to allow special consideration for military officers or relatives; his highest priority was finding fit people to fill available positions.¹⁷ Executive heads—like the postmaster general—who had the power to appoint inferior officers also followed Washington’s lead in this regard.¹⁸

John Adams generally followed the same policy, although the increasing tensions between the Federalists and the Republicans meant that political considerations were more prominent.¹⁹ As Adams wrote, “Washington appointed a multitude of Democrats and Jacobins of the deepest dive. I have been more cautious in this respect.”²⁰ In particular, the Provisional Army the Federalists created to prepare for a potential war with France was dominated by supporters of the president, with Republicans on the outside looking in. Even so, patronage was not, by any stretch, a normative rule during this period; it is one thing to staff the government with those who view the world similarly to yourself, quite another to do so as a form of political payoff.

That concept first appeared on the national stage with the Jefferson administration, who not coincidentally was the first president to triumph in a competitive electoral contest. Granted, there were few direct ballot battles between Adams and Jefferson in 1800, but nevertheless many voters made a choice between the two, largely via a series of state-level proxy battles, especially in New York and Pennsylvania. This meant Jefferson faced a burden that his predecessors did not; he owed his victory, in part, to the campaign efforts of his supporters. How to repay them?

Electoral considerations were a key reason why Aaron Burr, a shady character by the standards of the day, was elevated to the position of vice president. He developed one of the first electoral machines in the city of New York to contest the state legislative seats that would determine whether the Empire State’s electors would go for Adams or Jefferson. Burr was even influential in creating the Manhattan Company, an alternative financial institution to the pro-Federalist Bank of New York and the local chapter of the Bank of the United States. This pro-Jefferson institution made credit available to Republican business owners, paving the way for an all-out party effort in the spring of 1800. Little wonder, then, that Burr was rewarded with the vice presidential slot on the Republican ticket.²¹

There is also strong circumstantial evidence to suggest that Jefferson handed rewards to a key member of Congress in the wake of his election. The final tally in the Electoral College left Burr and Jefferson in a tie, even though the former was intended to be vice president. The Constitution requires the House to select a president whenever no candidate has an Electoral College majority. Burr refused to give way to Jefferson, and to create a ruckus, the Federalist representatives voted for Burr on ballot after ballot. Although Jefferson denied making any political deals, it seems probable that Federalist Richard Bayard, Delaware’s lone member of Congress, received special consideration for his important vote. Each state receives one vote when the House chooses the president, so Bayard alone was as important as the entire New York or Virginia delegation. Bayard requested through intermediaries that a new administration retain local port collectors, who ultimately were indeed retained. Bayard later informed one collector, “I have taken good care of you.”²²

This would not have been the first time Jefferson used his official capacity for a partisan purpose. While the circumstances surrounding Jefferson and Bayard are somewhat hazy, the deal between the “Sage of Monticello” and Philip Freneau is clear as day. In 1791, as the battle between Jefferson, Madison, and Hamilton became increasingly partisan, the former were concerned that Hamilton was using Treasury Department printing contracts to subsidize John Fenno’s proadministration Gazette of the United States. Jefferson and Madison countered by tasking Freneau to run a Republican newspaper, the National Gazette. To cover some of these costs, Jefferson secured Freneau a job as a translation clerk in the State Department.²³

With Jefferson installed as president in 1801, he faced a conundrum. On the one hand, the precedents set by Washington and Adams clearly put limits on the extent that federal jobs could be used for political purposes. Moreover, as noted above, Jefferson honestly believed that the mass of the Federalist Party could be separated from its leadership, and widespread removal of Federalist officeholders would only impede that goal. On the other hand, the clamor for offices among Republicans was great, and Jefferson, as the first unabashed president/party leader, could not ignore such demands. And, anyway, Federalists greatly outnumbered Republicans in office (by Jefferson’s estimate there were only six Republicans out of hundreds of presidential appointees, “and those were chiefly ‘half-breeds’”), far out of proportion to their relative strengths in the public at large.²⁴

Thus, rather than make a series of flat-out removals, Jefferson adopted several half measures for the first two years of his administration to achieve a balance of roughly 3:1 in favor of the Republicans. First, he refused to sanction Adams’s last-minute appointments, or indeed any that went through after it was clear he had lost the election. He replaced Federalists who retired from office exclusively with Republicans. He fired the most obnoxious and politically active Federalists. He also dismissed marshals and attorneys to counter at least in part the Federalist control of the judicial branch. In all, Jefferson made about 100 nonmilitary removals on the presidential level from a total corps of roughly 400, with most of the removals coming from diplomatic consuls, attorneys, tax collectors, and justices of the peace.²⁵ That is more than double what Washington and Adams combined had done, but nevertheless many Federalists remained comfortably ensconced in office during the rule of the Republicans.

After roughly two years in office, Jefferson achieved the balance that he was seeking, and the removals process by and large stopped. Six more years of Jefferson as president, plus eight of Madison, then another eight of Monroe meant the temporary end of partisan politics, at least on the national level, so the Federalist tradition of keeping the appointing power separate from politics was basically restored. Over the course of sixteen years in office, Madison and Monroe made a combined total of just fifty-four civilian, presidential-level removals. Quincy Adams made just twelve during his troubled four years in the White House.²⁶

This tradition of retention in office from administration to administration came to an end with the election of Jackson in 1828, the first candidate since Jefferson to take power from the opposition party via an electoral contest. Indeed, the increasing democratization of the presidency since 1800 made Old Hickory more of the people’s choice than even Jefferson, which in turn created enormous political pressure from Jackson’s coalition. After all, the electoral effort was absolutely enormous. Some 1.5 million people had voted in 1828, with ballots spread out over twenty-four states from Maine to Louisiana. Jackson’s victory was not due to a private affair among elites in the Electoral College, nor a triumph in a few, localized proxy battles; the entire nation had placed him in office, via a popular vote that was three times the size of the total ballots cast in 1824. And while that had afforded the president a new source of power—he could claim to be the only tribune of the people—it also meant he had a new set of obligations, particularly to his campaign workers and agents who now expected to reap some of the spoils of victory.²⁷

Importantly, Jackson brought with him to Washington politicos whose statewide political authority depended on tightly structured organizations that were built, in part, around political patronage. Van Buren’s Regency was a prime example of such an organization, but to him could be added Thomas Ritchie of Virginia’s “Richmond Junto,” Isaac Hill of New Hampshire, and John Eaton of Tennessee’s “Nashville Junto.” All of them were established spoilsmen in their home states, and all of them would become influential in the new Jackson administration.²⁸

But it was Old Hickory himself who promulgated a (somewhat passable) moral justification for raiding the federal government to pay off party workers. He judged rotation in office a principle in keeping with the republican founding. In his first annual message to the Congress, Jackson writes of long-tenured employees:

[T]hey are apt to acquire a habit of looking with indifference upon the public interests and of tolerating conduct from which an unpracticed man would revolt. Office is considered as a species of property, and government rather as a means of promoting individual interests than as an instrument created solely for the service of the people. Corruption in some and in others a perversion of correct feelings and principles divert government from its legitimate ends and make it an engine for the support of the few at the expense of the many. . . .

In a country where offices are created solely for the benefit of the people no one man has any more intrinsic right to official station than another. Offices were not established to give support to particular men at the public expense. No individual wrong is, therefore, done by removal, since neither appointment to nor continuance in office is a matter of right. The incumbent became an officer with a view to public benefits, and when these require his removal they are not to be sacrificed to private interests.²⁹

Jackson, as we saw in the last chapter, had a unique talent for linking his own political interests to the public good, then defending his “principles” with unmatched zeal. So it was during the Bank War, and, as the above quotation indicates, so it was with the spoils system.

In all, Jackson removed roughly one-quarter of the presidential-level workforce, with the dismissals centered around federal attorneys, marshals, and counsels, as well as tax collectors, receivers, and public land agents.³⁰ Subpresidential appointees were also dismissed in large numbers, too. For instance, by the spring of 1830 Van Buren had been instrumental in ousting 131 postmasters in all of New York State, while Hill had ensured that 55 postmasters were removed from his tiny state of New Hampshire.³¹ These removals were made possible after Jackson promoted the honest and able John McLean from the postmaster generalship to the Supreme Court, after McLean refused to play patronage games with the offices under his control. In McLean’s stead, Jackson named William Barry, a loyalist whose incompetent six-year rule ultimately led to scandal, inefficiency, and embarrassment, until Old Hickory finally named him ambassador to Spain, a post where he could do much less damage.³²

Soaring rhetoric about these offices belonging to the people aside, the intention of this activity should be obvious: by securing jobs for their own side, the Jacksonians held together and expanded their voting coalition in advance of the next election. This spoils system was their solution to the public goods problem they faced; it provided the hardest campaign workers with private benefits in exchange for their continued service to the party.

There were limits to the spoils system in its earliest incarnation, in no small part because Jackson was unpredictable and always independent-minded. Additionally, there were many strong Jacksonians already in the federal workforce by the time he took control. Moreover, his political opponents were a strong force in the Senate for most of Old Hickory’s tenure, even controlling the upper chamber during the twenty-third Congress of 1833 to 1835.

Still, the turnover was substantial, unparalleled in comparison to his predecessors, and remarkable in and of itself. Roughly 40 percent of the presidential-level civilian workforce was removed during Jackson’s tenure, with some departments facing more removals than others.³³ Of the thirty-seven district attorneys in office in 1830, only seven were left by the end of the decade. Only eight of the thirty-six district marshals remained. Among the diplomatic corps, just 35 of 131 original consuls held their jobs by the end of the decade. Only eighteen of the fifty-seven presidential-level customs officers in New York City, Virginia, Boston, and Charleston still held their jobs, and scores more subpresidential appointments in the customs offices were similarly wiped out. Ditto the post offices, land offices, and more.³⁴

Van Buren followed Jackson in the White House, and with the government full of Democrats, he had little need to make removals, which is not to say that he abandoned the spoils system.³⁵ He just maintained the program that Jackson put in place. In fact, the real fate of the new spoils system would be decided by the anti-Jacksonian Whigs. They swept into the White House with William Henry Harrison that year, and enjoyed a 29-22 majority in the Senate, after years of complaining about how the Jacksonians had defrauded the public by paying off their most ardent supporters. With a firm grip on power, what would they do?

The Whigs had won the election that year in much the same way that the Democrats had in the previous three cycles: by mastering the art of the mass campaign.³⁶ As a consequence, the Whig leadership had scores of loyal campaign workers to reward, and the lust for office proved too much, previous caterwauling about the spoils system notwithstanding. What would they do instead of raiding the public treasury to pay back all those who helped pave the way to victory? Find private money? Hope that their campaign workers would be happy with a pat on the back and a “job well done”? Of course not.

Thus, the combined administrations of Harrison and John Tyler (who succeeded Harrison 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 because of the money that flowed through them. This was a perfect place to install less-than-scrupulous agents who would skim a little off the top, taking care to kick back something to the party. By 1858, the collection of customs duties was a continental affair, stretching from Maine all the way to California. The major cities would have hundreds of customs officials, and New York had nearly 1,000 by the time of the Civil War. As Leonard White argues in his landmark study of public administration in the Jacksonian period: “The office of collector of the Port became one of the principal prizes in the patronage lottery.”⁴⁵ And little wonder why: that officer had tens of millions of dollars pass through his office every year.

Little wonder as well that the New York collectors were outright crooked through much of this period. Jackson appointed Samuel Swartwout to the position in 1829, and in a letter to a colleague Swartwout wondered, “whether or not I shall get anything in the general scramble for plunder.” He sure did. Swartwout pulled off a defalcation so great that it would make the Sopranos green with envy. By the time the federal government finally figured out what was going on, Swartwout escaped to England, having embezzled approximately $1.2 million in federal funds (or $25 million in today’s dollars). Van Buren appointed in Swartwout’s stead Jesse Hoyt—the recipient of the above-mentioned letter from Swartwout, no less!—who treated government investigators in a supercilious manner and was also guilty of embezzlement.⁴⁶

The land offices were a locus of similar fraud, because they—like the ports—were far-flung outlets where money changed hands with little oversight from Washington. Land officers would borrow federal dollars to speculate in public lands, take advantage of exchange rates to engage in arbitrage, and loan government money out for their own purposes.⁴⁷ The most outrageous example of such fraud came from one W. P. Harris, a land receiver in Mississippi, who lost over $100,000 in government money by speculating. Harris recommended that his friend, Gordon Boyd, replace him, and the latter ended up losing $50,000 in a similar venture!⁴⁸

Corruption was not confined to the bottom of the rung, either. The Buchanan administration serves as a good case in point. Buchanan had to deal with the new Republican Party. Formed after the Whig Party collapsed, it won a House majority in 1858 and undertook an extensive investigation of the administration. The report of the Covode Committee (named after Congressman John Covode) was controversial in its day, but has since generally been accepted.⁴⁹

The Covode Committee found a widespread abuse of the patronage system, some of which is consistent with frauds already mentioned, others that went above and beyond. It accused the Buchanan administration of greatly overcharging on printing and bundling, at a loss to the government of tens of thousands of dollars per year, with kickbacks naturally delivered back to the party. It found that the collector of the port of Philadelphia used patronage to advance the Pennsylvania Democratic Party, and gave his own brother a shadow job (where he received a paycheck for no apparent work). It also discovered evidence of levies placed upon customs officials to help Buchanan carry Pennsylvania in 1856. In several of these instances, it suggested that President Buchanan knew what was going on, and even approved of some of these actions.⁵⁰

The most salacious charge from the Covode Committee, which if true would go beyond the sort of corruption discussed above, was that the Buchanan administration was responsible for distributing $30,000 to $40,000 worth of patronage to buy votes in Congress to pass the Lecompton Bill. This highly controversial measure would have approved the proslavery constitution written by a faction within Kansas; southern Democrats generally supported it, but northern Democrats and the Republicans were staunchly opposed. The main pieces of evidence in support of the Covode Committee’s accusation were the bank records and testimony of Cornelius Wendell, a disgruntled former press agent of the Buchanan administration. Additionally, two House Democrats opposed to the Lecompton Bill claimed to have rebuffed bribes made to them.⁵¹

Whether the Buchanan White House was particularly corrupt, or if it just faced an intensely partisan opposition in the new Republican majority, is difficult to say. It is worth noting that one of the two minority Democrats on the committee agreed with the merits of the majority’s charges, though he did not sign on to its report.⁵² Even so, the broader story to tell here is how much patronage had corrupted the everyday functions of the government. Widespread inefficiency, the installation of second-rate characters in important positions, the skimming of government resources by party operatives, the many thefts, large and small, by governmental agents—all of this became par for the course by the time of the Civil War. The two parties had totally coopted the civil service, perverting public resources for their own ends. Buchanan and his henchmen might have quibbled at the margins of the Covode Committee’s discoveries, but there is no denying these fundamental truths.

The story told in this chapter is a straightforward one. The rise of the two party system, combined with the popular election of the president, put enormous pressure on the Democrats and the Whigs to mobilize tens of thousands of people for the quadrennial campaign. To do that required some way around the public goods problem that such mobilization faces: how do you incentivize somebody to work for a collective goal when his own interests suggest he should merely free ride, leaving others to do the work? The most effective answer the parties came up with was patronage. Let the government foot the bill for the party effort in the form of jobs, sinecures, contracts, and other gratuities. This, in turn, upended the old, highly ethical system of retention in office across one administration to another, and led to widespread inefficiency and theft. Put simply, it corrupted the bureaucracy. As we shall see in Chapter Four, this type of corruption would last for half a century before the first reforms began to clean up the mess.

There is a larger lesson to be learned from this story, as well as the story told in Chapters One and Two. In those earlier chapters, we saw the power of the government expand in ways that the Framers of the Constitution did not anticipate. Indeed, in the case of a federal power to charter corporations, the Framers had explicitly voted down such an authority. And for all of those innovations, there were no amendments to the Constitution ratified, which again was the mechanism by which the Framers anticipated the document would be altered. Even Madison himself came to adopt this attitude toward the Hamiltonian system, deciding that the precedent of a generation had vindicated the Bank. This bred corruption, as the original institutions were not capable of handling these new powers responsibly.

Here, we have seen how ad hoc institutional changes can also disrupt the Madisonian balance, even if they may seem sensible at first appearance. A democratized presidency sounds like an essential ingredient of any republic to modern ears, and indeed it had an ineluctable appeal as early as the 1820s. But even so, it was not something the Framers anticipated; in 1787, they had designed an executive branch based on very different premises. The succeeding generation altered this without a full consideration for what that would do to the Newtonian design of the Constitution. As we saw, it bred a two-party system—something the Framers thought was antithetic to republican government—as well as the spoils, which was really the first of many instances of institutionalized, broad-based corruption. In other words, altering the presidency in seemingly benevolent ways meant that the constitutional regime was unable to balance properly the vast array of social factions to ensure a public-spirited outcome. Checks and balances began to break down.

Thus, the story here is deeply consistent with our thesis. One cannot go altering this or that provision of the Constitution without serious consideration of how the change will affect the rest of the regime, for checks and balances are in fact quite delicate. This is true of creating new federal powers, like a national chartering authority, or altering structures, like democratizing the presidency. When these break down, corruption has room to grow.

And, as we shall learn, political corruption is like a cancer. Once it is introduced into a system, it tends to spread. The public eventually becomes used to certain corrupt innovations, which empowers politicians to introduce more innovations that spread the corruption, which are often accepted in turn, and therefore encourage even more innovations. We saw a hint of that here, as the spoils system became progressively worse. Jackson’s use of the appointment power for political purposes was relatively limited, but twenty-five years later the fraud and abuse under the Buchanan administration was widespread.

Similarly, as we turn in the next chapter from Jacksonian America to the Gilded Age that spans the end of the Civil War to the rise of the progressive movement, we see politicians finding new and more wicked ways to undermine the public good for the sake of their own interests. In fact, politicians during this period will combine the abuses discussed in the last two chapters, using old-fashioned patronage along with tariffs and internal improvements to build impenetrable political machines that perpetrated widespread frauds against the public good.

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