About the Early Federal Government

The Constitution established a particular type of republican political system. It determined how people were represented and how political leaders attained office. But ultimately, this political system was supposed to constitute a policymaking system. In the years immediately after ratification, the first federal leaders quickly determined the general structure of the government.

They decided that the federal workforce would consist of appointed officials under the authority of the Executive branch. The Constitution stated that the President would nominate candidates for appointed office, but they would not actually hold office until receiving the “advice and consent” of the Senate. The Constitution established advice and consent for only a small number of offices, but over time the system applied to almost all federal employees except clerks, postmasters, and enlisted personnel in the Army and Navy.

Separate from the question of how the federal government selected its employees was the question what these people would do. Federal leaders (Presidents, cabinet officials, and members of Congress) identified a lengthy list of policymaking priorities. These priorities changed over time, but they all tended to fall into the following general categories:

• Preserve national unity. It is difficult to recapture now just how anxious Americans were about the fate of the union. Many worried that internal disputes would inevitably lead to disunion, which in turn would cause warfare between states or regions while also inviting European empires to undo the Revolution and reduce the United States to colonies.
• Provide national security. American leaders were convinced that their country was surrounded by threats in all directions: European empires that might seek to conquer the United States and European wars that threatened to consume the United States, native nations that sought to restrain white settlement, and enslaved people seeking liberation in the wake of the Haitian Revolution.
• Promote fiscal solvency. The end of economic connections with Great Britain and the eight-year war for American independence had left the US economy in shambles. And in the years since 1783, neither the Continental Congress (operating under the Articles of Confederation) nor the individual states had been able to develop a workable solution. The federal government was supposed to settle long-standing debts, foster commercial prosperity, and create an environment of economic opportunity for US citizens.
• Establish a racial order. The federal government was established with a complex combination of equality and inequality. The federal system was supposed to provide equality among states, and the Constitution was supposed to protect the equality of white citizens. But implicit in this arrangement was a mandate for white supremacy. Federal leaders and white settlers alike sought to extinguish Native American sovereignty and later to forcibly remove Native Americans from their homelands. The federal government played a crucial role in securing African American slavery in western territories, and in creating a legal system that preserved slavery in existing states.
• Take care of the miscellany. There were a variety of tasks that no state government could or wanted to handle. These responsibilities--such as managing western lands, providing a census, and establishing patents--eventually fell into the hands of the federal government.

The general structure of the federal government in the early republic was the nucleus of the federal government that exists today. Many of the federal agencies will appear familiar.

• The Federal Judiciary. While the Constitution established the Judiciary as a co-equal branch of the federal government, it took shape through the actions of Congress and the Executive branch. They sought to fill the gaps left by Article III of the Constitution through the Judiciary Act of 1789. This act established the federal judiciary as we know it today. The act clarified the role of the Supreme Court. It also established a set of district courts tasked with implementing federal law, as well as circuit courts which not only handled appeals from the district courts but also adjudicated certain types of federal cases. Alone among federal agencies, the judges of the Judiciary did not report to the president—the Judiciary was a co-equal branch of government. But like all federal agencies, its members came to office through nomination by the president and advice and consent by the Senate. Federal district judges played a crucial role in implementing laws in support of other federal agencies. And the US attorneys and federal marshals—whose budget came through the Judiciary—took their orders from the president and his cabinet.
• The State Department. The first agency head nominated by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, served as the first Secretary of State. Originally established to supervise foreign affairs—a task it holds to this day—the State Department also had significant domestic responsibilities. All of the federal territories reported to the State Department, and it was responsible for administering the Census every ten years. The Patent Office and even the Mint initially reported to the State Department. Most of these domestic duties were eventually reassigned.
• The War Department. The United States Army employed more people than any other federal agency during the early American republic. Throughout the early republic, the Army moved between two different locations that reflected its two primary goals. When war with European powers seemed likely (as was the case with France from 1797 to 1800 and with Britain from 1807 to 1809) or when it actually occurred (as was the case with Britain during the War of 1812), the bulk of US troops were located in the states along the eastern seaboard. The army’s task in those situations was to defend against the organized militaries of European empires. But during the intervening years—the bulk of the early republic—the army was located primarily in the West, and its task was one of establishing racial supremacy. The army played a crucial role in the federal government’s efforts to extinguish Native American sovereignty and to remove native peoples from lands coveted by white settlers. The army was also an important player in establishing a secure system of African American enslavement in southern federal territories.
• The Navy Department. Unlike the United States Army, which remained in operation at a reduced level throughout the 1780s, Congress eliminated the Continental Navy after the Revolutionary War. In 1794, the federal government began plans for a new United States Navy. The fleet initially fell under the jurisdiction of the War Department, but when that fleet went to sea in 1798, Congress established the Navy Department. Warships were the government’s most costly assets. That price tag, combined with the fiscal limitations of the US treasury, explains why the United States maintained a smaller naval force than the European fleets that served as their model for naval organization.
• The Postal Service. Mail delivery was one of the most important functions of the federal government, yet it remains an oft-forgotten part of the early republic. The Postal Service was a large, complex, and expensive organization. Federal leaders devoted so many resources to the mail because they knew that postal delivery provided evidence that the United States were indeed united, and that citizens could write to each other regardless of distance or the state in which they lived.

• The Treasury Department. Funding all these government operations was the responsibility of the Treasury Department. The vast majority of the federal budget came from import duties, and it was the responsibility of the Treasury to levy fees on the foreign goods coming into American ports. But like the State Department, the Treasury Department had other duties. The surveyors and commissioners who oversaw the organization and sale of federal lands in the West were Treasury Department officials. Even the precursor to the Coast Guard—the Revenue Cutter Service—was part of the Treasury Department; it was established to prevent smugglers from bringing goods into the United States without paying import duties.

  Within these federal agencies, individual divisions were never so neatly organized as they are today. This was a pre-bureaucratic government, meaning that it lacked the systematized organizational structures that now exist in governments, corporations, and other large institutions. All of these agencies had central offices in the nation’s capital and regional offices or establishments scattered across the nation and around the globe. Absent from much of this structure were the middle managers that connected peripheral offices to the administrative center. Likewise, central offices tended to consist of a very small number of senior officials supported by a set of clerks (in an age before computers or even typewriters, sending instructions and keeping records all required a lot of hand-writing). What might at first glance appear efficient (keeping the government roles small) often proved to be tremendously inefficient, as cabinet officers found themselves drafting low-level communications.

Federal employment followed many of the same racial and gendered restrictions as other forms of officeholding in the United States. 

Elected offices at the state and federal level were limited to white men, and many included age, property, citizenship, and residency requirements. That said, federal appointment worked slightly differently. Even though almost all federal employees were white men, a small number of white women also held federal office (primarily as lighthouse keepers, postmasters, and nurses). Likewise, written records include a few federal employees who were of mixed European and Native American ancestry, most of them involved in Indian affairs. The number of mixed-race people is more difficult to determine because people may have hidden the existence of non-white ancestry in order to increase their chances of employment. A small number of federal offices had age or property requirements, but most did not.

Even before he was sworn in, George Washington was inundated with requests for appointment. Washington and those writing to him understood federal appointment as a distinctly political act, one in which the president could reward friends and colleagues, cultivate potential allies, and exclude opponents.

The political nature of appointment became increasingly important as the nation’s parties took form. And when a new Presidency also meant a party change, it could mean a purge of federal officeholders. Thomas Jefferson attempted one such purge when the Republicans displaced the Federalists in 1801, and Andrew Jackson did so again when the Democrats defeated the National Republicans in 1829.

Partisanship wasn’t the only reason to appoint someone to a federal position. Presidents and their advisors saw a direct linkage between the status of an office and the social class of an officeholder. The most prestigious positions—diplomats, judges, and, in some cases, generals—went to men of high social class, usually a class into which they had been born. Mid-level positions—customs officials, consuls, territorial officials—went to men of middling circumstances. In most cases, positions like clerk or postmaster went to men of low social status or low family background. In an era when election promised the possibility that people who had never held power might attain public office, appointment functioned primarily to reinforce existing social hierarchies, not to challenge them.

The image above and to the right is a revealing case in point. The largest number of federal employees were postmasters and military personnel. One of those military personnel was Charles Stewart. His life and career straddled all the tumultuous changes in the early United States. He was born in Philadelphia in 1778, the capital of the revolutionary republic. Twenty years later, the threat of war with France led the United States to mobilize its navy, in the process producing a vast increase in personnel. Already an experienced sailor in the merchant marine, Stewart was among the first commissioned officers in the United States Navy. He rose quickly, in part through talent but also a result of international crisis that fueled the growth of the United States Navy and created opportunities for its officers. He was among a cohort of navy captains to receive national celebration for defeating British ships during the War of 1812. 

As his contemporaries retired and died, Stewart remained. By 1851, he was the senior officer in the navy. He officially retired in 1861 at the age of 84, only to be become one of the first rear admirals in the United States Navy the following year while remaining on the retired list. Stewart died in 1869 at the age of 91, having lived through both the American Revolution and the Civil War. A federal employee from 1798-1861--63 years--he had remained in office despite transformations in American politics and upheavals in federal policy.  

See Charles Stewart's employment record in the Archive.