A Republic No More. Jay Cost

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