Political Patronage

Political patronage was an ageless institution, well developed even in the American colonies' earliest years. The British crown routinely appointed court favorites and family to positions of place, power, and emolument. Lord Cornbury, the cross-dressing cousin of Queen Anne in the early eighteenth century, was appointed royal governor of New York, a way for the politically embarrassed monarch to put an ocean between herself and a source of scandalous behavior.

placemen in the colonial era

It was a commonplace occurrence by the time of the American Revolution for "placemen" to be appointed to lucrative positions to further political ends. A notorious example, but not an isolated one, was the designation in 1765 of Andrew Oliver as Massachusetts Bay's collector of the new and despised stamp tax. He was named to this post of vast potential profit by Governor Thomas Hutchinson; Oliver was his brother-in-law and a key figure in the Bay Colony's "Court" interest, a designation for Massachusetts's political elite.

When one of the earliest Revolutionary-era crowds reacted to the stamp tax by burning Oliver's house to the ground and then torched Governor Hutchinson's when he reacted by calling out the militia, the events stood as a symbol of many things, one of them being the mob's reaction to entrenched political power rewarding those close to it with lucrative patronage. The Revolution, and then the ensuing U.S. Constitution, which completed the establishment of the new nation, did not end this species of maintaining political privilege through high appointive office. By 1789, in fact, patronage was already a way of life in establishing a new governing network under the just-implemented Constitution. Alexander Hamilton, as secretary of the Treasury and the leader of the Federalist Party, brilliantly adapted the old patronage system to the workings of a self-governing Republic dependent on popular support. The new two-party system inaugurated in the 1790s would include party patronage as an important foundation of political control, regardless of which party was in power. This system operated in the states individually as well as in the federal government. The 1790s, then, saw the new incarnation of an old system, one that would endure for a century.

after the revolution

President George Washington was implicitly a supporter of Hamilton's Federalist Party patronage initiatives, and the second president, John Adams, was overtly complicit. Over five hundred party men found their way into federal offices in the respective states in the 1790s, and dozens more held official positions in Philadelphia, the nation's first capital. Both the U.S. Customs Service (1789) and the first Internal Revenue Service (1791) were homes to hundreds of party operatives. As the newly inaugurated President John Adams said in 1797, "if the officers of government will not support it, who will?" The appointees were politically active Federalists, members of the elite, and often veterans of the Continental Army. They worked in their home port cities for Customs and in smaller towns and villages in the backcountry for Internal Revenue in all states.

Postmasters. The most overtly political placeholders were postmasters. The number of weekly newspapers multiplied from less than one hundred in 1789 to more than eight hundred by 1800, a response to the needs of both emerging parties. The Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans both lined up printers in the states to establish gazettes overtly aligned with party. The Federalists had the upper hand initially, so perhaps fifty Hamiltonian printers were made postmasters. Party support of partisan newspapers was tangible. Under federal laws, for example, printer-postmasters could frank (send free of postal charge) their papers to subscribers each week, and post offices in print shops created built-in custom—in the form of those who picked up their newspapers weekly—by acting as booksellers and stationers as well as printers.

The nationally renowned printer and publisher, Isaiah Thomas, editor of the Worcester, Massachusetts, Spy, was a case in point. His printing establishment was made a federal post office in 1789. Already a local Federalist Party figure, he was able to expand his publishing business, and from his shop he issued a stream of Federalist-oriented publications. The business also trained journeymen printers who apprenticed with Thomas and went on to found party newspapers of their own in various towns in the Northeast; four of them were rewarded in turn with postmasterships to help them as they began their careers.

The Jeffersonian sweep. In 1801 the newly elected president, Thomas Jefferson, having turned the Federalists out of office, needed no prodding to both remove entrenched Federalists from the civil service and replace them with Republican Party men in their stead. Despite Jefferson's inaugural moderation ("We are all Republicans; we are all Federalists") he displaced scores of opponents in the federal establishment and filled the posts with his own party supporters. President Jefferson even took political patronage a giant step further, unhinging the judiciary and transforming the federal bench at all levels from entirely Federalist-oriented to a slightly more Jeffersonian character. He started with John Adams's last-minute ("midnight") appointees to the new U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sitting in the several states. The new president was able to get away with the removals of judges appointed for life because the Federalist-dominated U.S. Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Marshall felt it lacked the political clout to oppose Jefferson.

Jefferson also swept the Customs Service clean of Federalists, and did the same with the Internal Revenue Service and the Post Office. He even removed one of the nation's most skilled and experienced diplomats, John Quincy Adams, from federal service. Jefferson brought political patronage to a new level of both sophistication and scope. The Jeffersonian Republicans' "Virginia Dynasty," which ruled for the next quarter century into the Age of Jackson, firmly maintained its principle of using federal office for party purposes. Needless to say, the states, cities, and even small communities across America did the same. Jacksonian Democratic Party men at the end of the 1820s may have coined the term "spoils system," conferring on institutionalized political patronage a new national visibility, but they did not invent the party-oriented use of jobs as political rewards.

See alsoDemocratic Republicans; Federalist Party; Post Office; Presidency, The: John Adams; Presidency, The: Thomas Jefferson .

bibliography

Prince, Carl. The Federalists and the Origins of the U.S. Civil Service. New York: New York University Press, 1978.

Prince, Carl E., and Mollie Keller. The U.S. Customs Service: A Bicentennial History. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Customs Service, 1989.

White, Leonard Dupee. The Federalists: A Study in Administrative History. New York: Macmillan, 1948. Reprint, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1978.

Carl E. Prince