“There was good ground for their complaint, as the waste and peculation in some of the departments had been very great.... While they had been in power the character of the public service had deteriorated frightfully, both as regarded its efficiency and infinitely more as regarded its honesty; and under Van Buren the amount of money stolen by the public officers, compared to the amount handed in to the treasury, was greater than ever before or since. For this the Jacksonians were solely and absolutely responsible; they drove out the merit system of making appointments, and introduced the ‘spoils’ system in its place; and under the latter they chose a peculiarly dishonest and incapable set of officers, whose sole recommendation was to be found in knavish trickery and low cunning that enabled them to manage the ignorant voters who formed the backbone of Jackson’s party.” (Life of Benton, pp. 219, 230, 231.)
In 1841 Harrison succeeded Van Buren; there was a change of parties; the Democrats went out, and the Whigs, who had inveighed against the spoils system, took their places. But the expected reform did not come off; it was no longer a question of parties or policies; the electorate itself had been hopelessly degraded by manhood suffrage, and the leaders of both parties were unable, if they wished, to purify politics; they were obliged either to adopt manhood suffrage low methods, or go out of public life. In vain Clay, the great Whig leader, thundered in Congress against the spoils system.
“In solemn words of prophecy, he (Clay) painted the effects which the systematic violation of this principle (Government is a trust), inaugurated by Jackson, must inevitably bring about; political contests turned into scrambles for plunder; a system of universal rapacity, substituted for a system of responsibility; favoritism for fitness; a Congress corrupted, the press corrupted, general corruption; until the substance of free government having disappeared, some pretorian band would arise, and with the general concurrence of a distracted people, put an end to useless forms.” (Schurz, Life of Clay, p. 335, Vol. I.)
Clay’s influence in Congress was enormous, but he was powerless to cure the inherent rottenness of a manhood suffrage constituency. The pressure of the spoilsmen upon the Whig Harrison’s administration equalled or surpassed that upon the Democrat Jackson, and is said to have caused Harrison’s death. It is thus described by Ostrogorski:
“When Harrison took up his abode in the White House, the rush became tremendous; the applicants literally pursued the ministers and the president day and night; they besieged the former in their offices or in their homes, and even in the streets; a good many candidates for offices slept in the corridors of the White House to catch the president the next morning as soon as he got up.” (Democracy and the Party System in the U.S., p. 36.)
Schurz thus describes the operation of the manhood suffrage spoils system as it had developed in ten or twelve years after its introduction in 1829:
“Not only were the officers of the government permitted to become active workers in party politics, but they were made to understand that active partisanship was one—perhaps the principal one—of their duties. Political assessments upon office holders with all the inseparable scandals became at once a part of the system. The spoils politician in office grasped almost everywhere the reins of local leadership in the party.... The spoils system bore a crop of corruption such as had never been known before. Swartwout, the collector of customs at New York, one of General Jackson’s favorites, was discovered to be a defaulter to the amount of nearly $1,250,000, and the District Attorney of the U. S. at New York to the amount of $72,000. Almost all land officers were defaulters.... Officials seemed to help themselves to the public money, not only without shame, but in many cases apparently without any fear of punishment.” (Life of Clay, Vol. II, pp. 183, 184.)
This from Roosevelt referring to 1838:
“The Jacksonian Democracy was already completely ruled by a machine, of which the most important cogs were the countless office-holders, whom the spoils system had already converted into a band of well-drilled political mercenaries. A political machine can only be brought to a state of high perfection in a party containing very many ignorant and uneducated voters; and the Jacksonian Democracy held in its ranks the mass of the ignorance of the country.” (Life of Benton, p. 185.)