The party battles of the Jackson period

by Claude G. Bowers

Meanwhile there is no question but that Jackson was eager to serve his friends, if not to punish his enemies. From the moment of his election, he had entertained no illusions as to the character of the opposition his Administration would encounter. It was an open secret that his enemies, long before the inauguration, had begun to organize for the discrediting of his Administration. He was familiar with the bitterness of Clay. And, with the determination to make his Administration a success, from his point of view, he turned his attention to preparations for the fight. His military training told him that it was fatal to enter a campaign with traitors in the camp. The disloyalty from which Adams had suffered had not been lost upon him.[181] And he had fixed convictions as to political organization. “To give effect to any principles,” he said, “you must avail yourself of the physical force of an organized body of men. This is true alike in war, politics, or religion. You cannot organize men in effective bodies without giving them a reason for it. And when the organization is once made, you cannot keep it together unless you hold constantly before its members why they are organized.”[182] Thus party politics, in the modern sense, began with Jackson, and the spoils system grew out of the exigencies of party politics. Vicious though it may be, it is significant of its appeal to the rank and file of party workers, upon whom party success depends, that politicians of all parties, including Lincoln, have adopted it without shame.

It does not appear that Jackson was greatly influenced in his course by his advisers, of either his constitutional or Kitchen Cabinet. Van Buren, who has been wrongfully accused of so many things, and among others, of having been the dominating influence as to the spoils system, heard of the plan for sweeping changes with grave misgivings. “If the General makes one removal at this time,” he said in a letter to Hamilton written from Albany, “he must go on. So far as depends on me, my course would be to restore by a single order every one who has been turned out by Mr. Clay for political reasons, unless circumstances of a personal character have since arisen to make the appointment in any case improper. To ascertain that will take a little time. There I would pause.” This, from the head of his official family.

And the most intimate of his advisers, of the Kitchen Cabinet, Major Lewis, is reported to have written to the President: “In relation to the principle of rotation in office, I embrace this occasion to enter my solemn protest against it; not on account of my office, but because I hold it to be fraught with the greatest mischief to the country. If ever it should be carried out in extenso, the days of this Republic will, in my opinion, be numbered; for whenever the impression shall become general that the Government is only valuable on account of its offices, the great and paramount interests of the country will be lost sight of, and the Government itself ultimately destroyed.” With the possible exception of Eaton, who was a practical politician in the modern sense, and Van Buren, to the extent just indicated, none of the members of the Cabinet were spoilsmen at heart; and Amos Kendall, the genius of the Kitchen Cabinet, would unquestionably have preferred to be spared the pain of turning men out of office. To be sure, the jovial but vindictive Duff Green, who spent much time at the elbow of Jackson in the early months of the Administration, was insistent upon the punishment of enemies, but the responsibility for the adoption of the policy rests upon the President himself.

And the result was that the spring and summer months of 1829 were filled with the clamor of importunate pleas, not unmixed with threats and curses, from the office-seekers. In many instances the wives and daughters of the applicants fluttered down upon Washington to reënforce the husband and the father.[183] One of the General’s most ardent supporters left the capital two days after the inauguration bitterly denouncing him for his failure to appoint the irate one to a position not then vacant.[184] Cabinet officers were harassed, bombarded, followed from their offices to their homes and back again, until several of them confessed that life had become a burden, and they were forced to close their doors to applicants until a late hour in the afternoon to find time for the transaction of public business.[185] Such aspirants as were not upon the ground in person were either represented by friends who were, or they peppered the members of the Cabinet with letters. One peculiarly offensive candidate for the collectorship of customs in New York wrote to an equally disreputable friend: “No damn rascal who made use of an office or its profits for the purpose of keeping Mr. Adams in and General Jackson out of power is entitled to the least leniency save that of hanging. Whether or not I shall get anything in the general scramble for plunder remains to be seen, but I rather guess I shall. I know Mr. Ingham slightly, and would recommend that you push like the devil if you expect anything from that quarter.”[186] And in the letter from Ingham to the seeker of “plunder” we have abundant evidence that the advice was accepted: “These [his duties] cannot be postponed; and I do assure you that I am compelled daily to file away long lists of recommendations, etc., without reading them, although I work eighteen hours out of the twenty-four with all diligence. The appointments can be postponed; other matters cannot; and it was one of the prominent errors of the late Administration that they suffered many important public interests to be neglected, while they were cruising about to secure or buy up partisans. This we must not do.”[187] The same man, having written an insolent letter to Van Buren, was sharply rebuked by him. “Here I am,” wrote the Secretary of State, “engaged in the most intricate and important affairs, which are new to me, and upon the successful conduct of which my reputation as well as the interests of the country depend, and which keep me occupied from early in the morning until late at night. And can you think it kind or just to harass me under such circumstances with letters which no man of common sensibility can read without pain?... I must be plain with you.... The terms upon which you have seen fit to place our intercourse are inadmissible.”[188]

Nor was this clamor for office confined to the more important positions—it reached down to the most menial places, to those of the gardener, the janitor, and messenger. Worse still—men in position to serve were even appealed to for place by members of their immediate families. Thus we find Amos Kendall writing to his wife: “I had thought before of trying to get some place for your father, but I cannot do anything until I am myself appointed. I hope in a year or two, and perhaps sooner, to find some situation that will enable him to live near us, and comfortably.”[189]

Meanwhile the clerks in Washington lived in a state of terror. Men who had long worked in harmony, and on terms of intimacy, were afraid to talk to one another. Every one suddenly assumed the aspect of a spy and an informer. “All the subordinate officers of the Government, and even the clerks are full of tremblings and anxiety,” wrote one woman to a correspondent. “To add to this general gloom, we have horrible weather, snowstorm after snowstorm, the river frozen up and the poor suffering.”[190] The majority of the subordinates and clerks, many the ne’er-do-wells of distinguished families, assuming that they were assured of a life position, had lived up to, and beyond, their meager incomes, and suddenly found themselves unfit for other employment and confronted with dismissal.[191] And slowly, but surely, the dismissals came, leaving many in desperate straits, without sufficient funds to reach their homes, and unfit to earn a livelihood if they did. Some were driven to desperation. One dismissed employee of the Custom House in Boston went “in a transport of grief” to Ingham with a plea to be informed of the cause of his dismissal, only to be told that offices were not hereditary.[192] One clerk in the War Department cut his throat from ear to ear; another in the State Department went stark mad. But all appeals for sympathy were met by the proscriptionists with the stern reminder: “The exclusive party who were never known to tolerate any political opponent raise and reiterate the cry of persecution and proscription at every removal that takes place. They have provoked retaliation by the most profligate and abandoned course of electioneering; the most unheard-of calumny and abuse was heaped upon the candidate of the people; he was called by every epithet that could designate crime, and the amiable partner of his bosom was dragged before the people as worse than a convicted felon. What sympathy do men of such a party deserve when complaining that the places which they have abused are given to others?”[193]

A dark picture—and yet only darker than similar pictures in years to follow because, in 1829, the policy was new and caught the office-holders unprepared. So gloomy has the picture been painted that the student of the times is prepared to learn of a general massacre of the placemen. There was no such massacre—no such massacre as followed the election of Lincoln. One is prepared to hear that all the enemies of Jackson were driven from office, but, as a matter of fact, the majority of the Federal office-holders during his régime were unmolested. This could not be said of Roosevelt’s Administration, nor of Cleveland’s. The exact number of removals during the first year of Jackson’s Administration cannot be determined with precision. Schouler,[194] while making no attempt definitely to fix the number, says that “some have placed the number as high as two thousand.” In view of the evidence of contemporaries available, it does seem that a fairly accurate idea should be obtained. It is interesting to observe in this connection that while Jackson’s enemies were dealing in sweeping generalities, his defenders were furnishing figures.

And among the defenders none is more reliable than Thomas H. Benton, whose veracity or personal honesty has never been impeached or questioned, and he tells us[195] that there were whole classes of office-holders that were not molested; that those whose functions were of a judicial nature were not disturbed, and that in the departments at Washington a majority remained opposed to Jackson through his two Administrations. More important still—he tells us that Jackson not only left a majority of his enemies in office, but that in some instances he actually reappointed personal and political enemies where they were “especially efficient officers.” And he lays stress upon the point that where men, who had bitterly fought Jackson in the election, were not reappointed, a hue and cry was raised that they had been denied a right. Corroborating this, we have the evidence of Amos Kendall,[196] who wrote, after the Administration had been in power a year and a half: “He [Jackson] is charged with having turned out of office all who were opposed to him, when a majority of the office-holders in Washington are known to be in favor of his rivals. In that city the removals have been but one seventh of those in office, and most of them for bad conduct and character. In the Post-Office Department, toward which have been directed the heaviest complaints, the removals have been only about one sixteenth; in the whole Government, one eleventh.” And to the evidence of both Benton and Kendall, either one of whom would have been incapable of deliberate falsehood, we may add the less reliable, because more prejudiced, evidence of Isaac Hill, given in a public speech at Concord in the late summer of 1829. “It is worthy of observation,” he said, “that at least two thirds of the offices of profit at the seat of the National Government, after the removals thus far made, are still held by persons who were opposed to the election of General Jackson.”[197] A more detailed study of the removals actually made show that, while there were 8600 post-offices in 1829, less than 800 postmasters were removed, and these, largely, in the more important centers, leaving 7800 undisturbed.

One of the most serious charges against Jackson in connection with these removals is that he practiced duplicity, reassuring a trembling office-holder one day only to remove him, without warning, on the next; and this story is based upon what the officer in charge of Indian affairs under Adams declares to have been his personal experience. According to his story, Eaton, his superior officer, suggested that he should see the President to meet some charges that had been made against him; that on visiting Jackson he had made a solemn denial, satisfied the President, and been presented by him to the members of his household; that on the next day a gentleman entered the Indian Office, and, after looking around, explained that the place had been offered him by the President that morning, but that he did not intend to accept; that the position was afterwards offered to others, and that the dismissal finally reached him in Philadelphia while there on official business. This places Jackson in a sinister light; but our commissioner adds, that one close to the Administration said: “Why, sir, everybody knows your qualifications for the place, but General Jackson has been long satisfied that you are not in harmony with his views in regard to the Indians.”[198] This raises the question whether a President chosen by the people is entitled to his own governmental policies or should be forced to accept such as may be handed to him by subordinates who received their appointments by preference, and not from the hands of the people. That this removal was the President’s own idea may be gathered from the fact that Eaton, Secretary of War, under whom Indian affairs came, was not in favor of the dismissal.

It is worth recording that Van Buren kept his department comparatively free from the spoils idea. But even the most intense partisan of Jackson will be hard pressed to find any proper reason for the spiteful recall of William Henry Harrison from Bogota, where he had just presented his credentials as United States Minister to Colombia. This recall was opposed very earnestly by Postmaster-General Barry, who frankly said to the President: