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.
“Permanent and Terrible Mischief”
Machine Politics in the Gilded Age
FOR GENERATIONS, historians have accepted a straightforward periodization of American political history: the Federalist era gave way to Jeffersonian Democracy, then Jacksonian Democracy, the antebellum struggle, the Civil War, and later Reconstruction and the Gilded Age.1 The common consensus on the Gilded Age is that it was lost to corruption, as professional politicians degraded public morals and ransacked the common weal for their own benefit. Henry Adams’s contemporary assessment still holds, more or less:
One might search the whole list of Congress, Judiciary, and Executive during the twenty-five years 1870–1895, and find little but damaged reputation. The period was poor in purpose and barren in results.2
It is not our purpose here to push back on conventional wisdom in this chapter and the next, but rather to modify it: the period after the Civil War was more corrupt than those eras that preceded it, but it did not spring forth de novo. As we shall see, there is a continuity between the corrupt practices of the first half of the nineteenth century and the perfidy of the second half. The difference is that corruption was perfected, in terms of both economic development and patronage.
The next chapter will examine the growing links between business and government in the era, as Hamiltonian notions of governmental support for the economy became increasingly corrupt. This chapter showcases the increasingly sophisticated patronage regime. Here, we will not really find politicians doing much new with the spoils system, but rather adapting and improving the practices of previous generations. There is little, for instance, that Roscoe Conkling did in New York State that Martin Van Buren did not do fifty years prior. It is just that Conkling did it better, having learned from his predecessors.3
Moreover, the nature of civil service became more complex, and thus more susceptible to corrupting influences. The president had historically dominated the appointment process, but as the size of the civilian government grew because of the Civil War, the expansion westward, and the expanding economy, it became more difficult for him to manage the public offices personally. This ultimately favored local politicians, and their patrons in the Senate, many of whom became dominant political bosses.4
In the subtext here is the idea that corruption is similar to gangrene or dry rot: if left unchecked, it inevitably spreads. What we shall see essentially demonstrates that point. Politicians initiated corrupt practices regarding the civil service in the 1830s, suffered no rebuke for their efforts, and slowly but surely expanded upon and perfected their operations.
The spoils system was firmly entrenched by the time Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated in 1861, and for all of the ways that Lincoln revolutionized American politics and society, he did nothing to alter this status quo. In fact, he reinforced existing norms by dispensing more patronage than any predecessor, which is really saying something. Of the approximately 1,500 offices at Lincoln’s disposal, he removed about 1,200 Democrats from these offices.5 Moreover, this statistic does not take into account the thousands of subpresidential offices, like local postmasters and workers at the New York Customs House, who were likewise removed. Lincoln also used the extraordinary expansion in the size of the civilian government as a form of payoff; nonmilitary posts increased from about 41,000 jobs in 1861 to 195,000 in 1865, and the Republican Party had total discretion over who would get those jobs. As Carl Russell Fish notes, “The sweep made by the Republicans . . . was the cleanest in our history. Never before did so small a proportion of officers remain to carry on the traditions of the civil service.”6
It is hard to fault Lincoln for this extensive use of patronage, even if his actions did contribute to the corruption of the civil service (which they most certainly did). The Republican Party of which he was now the leader was a hodgepodge of diverse interests: former antislavery or protariff Democrats, Free-Soilers, members of the nativist “Know-Nothing” Party, most northern Whigs, German immigrants who feared competition with slave labor, and border state Constitutional Unionists. In general, they shared a commitment to economic expansion and the containment of slavery, but there was a vast degree of diversity within these broad boundaries.7 Patronage was essential to holding this unwieldy coalition together.
With the exception of Andrew Jackson, Lincoln probably made the most successful use of the resources at his disposal. He was always ready to satisfy an important person by pulling some strings to get his son or nephew into West Point. He regularly consulted senators, governors, and House members on sensitive appointments. He vigorously courted newspapermen with patronage, displaying a keen understanding of their capacity to mold public opinion.8 One time, he even appointed a man named “Schimmelpfening” because he thought it would be “unquestionably in the interest of the Dutch.”9
In many respects, the homespun Lincoln was the embodiment of the natural aristocrat whom Alexander Hamilton might have envisioned using corruption to advance the national interest. In some instances, that meant buying off members of Congress. Charles A. Dana, editor of the New York Tribune and strong supporter of Lincoln, once recalled the challenges he faced in getting Nevada admitted to the Union as well as pushing the Thirteenth Amendment, which outlawed slavery, through Congress. The votes of two congressmen were purchased with internal tax collectorships while another was offered a $20,000 office in the New York Customs House.10
Of course, the weakness in the theory is the assumption that a natural aristocracy would be available to steer the ship of state. With Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, there began a generations-long drought in presidential leadership. Lincoln’s successors lacked either the skills or the political capital to manage the factions that he had corralled, and the predictable result was rampant corruption.
Vice President Andrew Johnson assumed the presidency upon Lincoln’s death. Johnson, first a congressmen from east Tennessee, then a senator, and later the military governor of the state during the Civil War, was a Democrat and throwback to the Jacksonian era. He despised the slaveocracy of the South, but for fundamentally different reasons than those of staunch abolitionists like Charles Sumner of Massachusetts or Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania. In his infamous inaugural speech before the Senate as vice president, a seemingly drunk Johnson shouted again and again that he was a “plebian.” That speech gravely damaged his reputation, but it was a fair statement of his political philosophy. He came from humble roots, resented those born of privilege, and saw himself as a defender of the average man. Initially, Johnson impressed the Radical Republicans who wanted to guarantee voting rights for the newly freed slaves and to disqualify scores of secessionists; it seemed as though both sides, while coming from opposite directions, had the same enemies.11
But Johnson quickly changed course as his tenure unfolded. He sought a term in his own right, and to do that he hoped to rebuild the old Jacksonian coalition of the urban ethnics, the hardscrabble farmers of the North, and the southern Democrats. He soon began promoting extremely lenient terms for the southern rebels, and moreover used his patronage power to install agents in government sympathetic to his ambitions. He removed nearly half of all the officeholders whose positions he controlled and saw to it that thousands of subpresidential positions were staffed