Meet 4 Federal Employees
John Quincy Adams
Adams provided a template for how ambitious politicos could pursue extended careers in the federal government. Although he first appears in the early federal database in 1794, it was only in 1825 that he was elected President. It was the first time he pursued an office that required popular election. For the previous two decades, diplomatic appointments dominated his career.
Adams demonstrates the occasional intersection between appointed and elected office. Most federal officials never held elected office. But federal appointed office would prove crucial to shaping the outlook of federal leaders.
William Clark
Clark is now known less through his full name than a part of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. In 1807, he joined the vast structure that the federal government had created to secure its claims to the North American West. As a territorial governor serving the State Department and an Indian agent serving the War Department, he shows how the lines between government agencies was never so clear as it now seems.
As a federal official in the West, he was one of the principal architects of white supremacy in the region. Throughout negotiation and coercion, he became a principal architect of Indian removal. As an unapologetic slaveholder, he helped to create the governing institutions that preserved Black enslavement in Missouri.
Elizabeth Kelly
One of the first women to appear on the federal registers with a salary was Elizabeth Kelly, who received $96 for her service as a nurse at the marine hospital in New Orleans in 1828. She demonstrates the employment boundaries in the federal government and serves as an important reminder that federal appointment was mostly designed to exclude women. The few women to work in the federal government served primarily as postmasters and lighthouse keepers.
Elizabeth Kelly shows us how rare women were within the federal workforce, but she also reveals the commonplace challenges to learning about federal workers. The information on her is entirely limited to five pieces of information in the register: her name, job title, place of employment, salary, and place of birth. This was the case for thousands of other federal employees, especially those in low-level positions.
Thomas Melville
Thomas Melville shows how officeholding took shape in the centers of Anglo-American settlement and also shows what job security could mean in the early republic. In 1786, he became a commercial official in Boston Harbor. He was one of those many state officials who suddenly found themselves serving the federal government in the bureaucratic shakeup that followed ratification of the Constitution. Even with tremendous upheavals in U.S. trade and the party shift in 1801, Melvill stayed. He rode out all these changes, aging in office and securing repeated reappointments.
He finally left office in 1830, one year shy of his eightieth birthday. His career had certainly shown to his family that the customs service could be a stable career, so much so that his grandson, Herman, secured his first regular employment at the New York Customs House.