About the Sources

Anybody reviewing the internal records of federal agencies could well emerge concluding that somebody had absconded with all of the personnel files. But the answer is almost more startling: there were almost no personnel files to begin with. This fact is a particularly useful starting point for recapturing an era before bureaucratic organizations, before human resources offices, before personality testing and uniform academic transcripts.

It is difficult to imagine a time before personnel files. Employers now—governments, corporations, non-profit organizations—keep track of their employees. They usually do by constructing a single record for each employee, one that includes basic personal information, educational information, and employment history. Those personnel files include topics like date of birth, Social Security number, date of employment, offices and promotions, etc.

Now imagine a world in which organizations gathered almost none of this information, and one in which the limited information they gathered was never organized in a systematic way for each employee. That is the world of the early federal government.

Most federal offices recorded when they hired people, but it was usually in idiosyncratic ways. For example, the Post Office maintained logbooks that recorded the appointment of postmasters in chronological order. Likewise, West Point, the nation’s first military academy, kept lists of incoming cadets. Yet absent from all of this were individual dossiers that told one person’s story over time.

This project creates those dossiers by combining records from numerous sources. While these dossiers enable us to understand the careers of individual federal employees, they are not the reconstruction of something that existed in the past and was later lost. They are a construction of information that was never singularly captured in the pre-bureaucratic age, pieced together with information from across multiple sources.

Though there are tremendous possibilities in using sources from the early American republic, it’s important to be clear about the limitations of those sources, especially how they varied over time. The data in this collection tends to cluster in two distinct areas: before and after 1816. Not only is the data very different on either side of that divide, but the impact varies considerably from one agency to another.

In 1816, Congress passed a continuing resolution requiring the administration to publish a list of all federal employees every two years. The publications that resulted are the subject of a more detailed discussion in the review of published sources below [link]. These registers were highly regularized, meaning the information within them was organized in similar ways that make for a relatively straightforward process of capturing who served in a given office. Yet, equally importantly, they included many of the offices that other publications did not, such as what we would now call “office workers”: clerks, low-level customs officials, security guards, messengers, etc. Better yet, these registers often listed those personnel by name. None of the other sources match this level of breadth and detail. As a result, this archive contains fewer people before 1816 not because the federal employed fewer people, but because the sources do not contain that information.

Before 1816 is entirely different matter. Two similar registers—one in 1792 and the other in 1802—provide limited snapshots of the government at those moments in time. Beyond that, however, tracking the careers of those office workers becomes far more difficult.

The 1816 dividing line applies primarily to civil officials serving in domestic administrative roles. Fortunately, other sources provide more comprehensive details of the officers in the United States Army and Navy, the nation’s diplomatic representatives overseas, and the thousands of postmasters who distributed the mail.

Whenever possible, this project draws on the work of other researchers who have constructed authoritative lists of federal employees. The data used in this project is sourced from collections in the public domain, or sources owned by individuals or organizations for which the writers received use permissions.

Canonical Collections 

This project benefits from a variety of historical research projects, documentary editing projects, and government agency histories that have compiled information on various components of the early federal government.  These projects present their information in various forms ranging from narrative histories to published lists to regularized digital content.  These definitive collections each usually concern an individual federal department or subagency. These collections are either in the public domain or are the subject of agreements for use in Creating a Federal Government.  They are as follows:

• Principal Officers and Chiefs of Mission (Washington: U.S. Department of State). Maintained by the U.S. Department of State, this database records the appointment history and limited biographical information for secretaries of state, chief clerks in the State Department, and senior U.S. diplomats.
  • Digitization Process. The Office of the Historian at the U.S. Department of State exported the data with a set of regularized fields.
• America’s Diplomats and Consuls of 1776-1865, ed. Walter B. Smith II (Washington: Foreign Service Institute, U.S. Department of State, 1986). This directory of State Department employees includes all the senior diplomats contained in Principal Officers and Chiefs of Mission, but it also includes consuls, commercial officials, and miscellaneous State Department personnel. Dossiers includes records from both Principal Officers and from America’s Diplomats, but Principal Officers is the canonical source for determining start and end date of appointments, place of birth, etc. This publication is in the public domain.
  • Digitization Process. Manual transcription of individual State Department personnel.
• Biographical Directory of Article III Federal Judges, 1789-present (Washington: Federal Judicial Center). This collection compiles biographical information (date of birth and death, education, etc.), appointments, and service histories for all U.S. federal judges and Supreme Court justices.
  • Digitization Process. The Federal Judicial Center exported the data into a set of regularized fields.
• Bicentennial Celebration of the United States Attorneys (Washington: U.S. Department of Justice, 1989). This narrative history of the U.S. attorney system concludes with a list of federal district courts and their U.S. attorneys, including years in office. Other sources revealed a small number of errors in this publication due primarily to the complexities of district court appointments in the early 1800s.
  • Digitization Process. Manual transcription.
• State-by-State Chronological Listing of United States Marshals (Washington: U.S. Marshals Service). The Marshals Service maintains a list of all U.S. marshals since 1789 in PDF format.
  • Digitization Process. Manual transcription.
• List of Officers of the United States Navy and of the Marine Corps, 1775-1900, ed. Edward W. Callahan (New York: L.R. Hammersly & Co, 1901). The Naval History and Heritage Command hosts a digitized version of this collection.
  • Digitization Process. The Naval Historical Center (the predecessor to the Naval History and Heritage Command) coordinated a form of early crowdsourcing to digitize this collection, enlisting volunteers to transcribe and provide additional information. Data is separated by entry using a standardized format, but individual fields were not separate. This data was downloaded from the NHHC website and converted into regularized fields.
• Historical Register and Dictionary of the United States Army, from its Organization, September 29, 1789, to March 2, 1903, Francis B. Heitman ed. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1903). This source contains brief service records for U.S. Army officers, including birth state when available.
  • Digitization Process. Manual transcription by outside vendor followed by organizing data into regularized fields. Bryan Ciccarello, a Washington University undergraduate at the time, conducted the data organization before beginning his own career as an officer in the United States Army.
• Territorial Papers of the United States, Clarence E. Carter, et al. eds., 28 vols. (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1932-1969). Volume 1 contains a summary listing of senior territorial offices (governors, territorial secretaries, etc.), including terms of office.
  • Digitization Process. Manual transcription.
• Lighthouse Employee Records, Lighthouse personnel data provided by Kraig Anderson, lighthousefriends.com webmaster and US Lighthouse Society board member. 
  • Digitization Process. This database is the product of research and web design by Kraig Anderson. Anderson exported the data into regularized fields. Anderson maintains this data as part of a larger project on lighthouse history available at lighthousefriends.com.  Anderson generously shared this material with Creating a Federal Government.

Historic Records

Central to this project has been the process of digitizing large collections of historic records.  All of these records are in the public domain.  This was also the most labor-intensive area of work, usually involving manual transcription (optical character recognition and other forms of machine analysis produced high error rates, while human transcription and document review proved both more efficient and more accurate).

Postmaster Records.  

Postmasters constitute almost half the people in Creating a Federal Government. Most records concerning postmasters come from Notes on the Appointment of Postmasters and the Establishment of Post Offices, 1776-1832, National Archives Record Group 28. This collection was an internal project within the U.S. National Archives under the supervision of Arthur Hecht and Karen Forgrave. Archivists used the appointment books from the Post Office to create an individual sheet for each post office, organized by state, county, and locality. Beginning with a typewriter on lined loose-leaf paper, the archivists recorded the first known appointment. As they found later appointments, they would return to that sheet and add the appointment, sometimes by typewriter but usually by hand, in pencil.

• Digitization Process. Lauren Henley (now an accomplished academic historian in her own right) served as a research assistant on this project while an undergraduate at Washington University. She photographed over 14,000 records in this collection. Additional research assistants transcribed the results.

Senate Records.  Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution states that the president “shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States.” That sentence specifies certain offices (i.e. ambassadors and judges). Subsequent legislation also mandated that certain offices be subject to Senate approval. George Washington interpreted the term even more expansively to mean that almost all federal employees should be subject to advice and consent. He began a commonplace practice of regularly submitting to the Senate lists of the personnel he wanted for federal office. His successors did the same, often scribbling the lists in their own hand on whatever paper was available. Some nominations arrived by themselves, others in long lists.  Every one of these nominations arrived at the Senate, there to be captured in the Senate record. 

In 1828, Duff Green, a Washington, DC, publisher, printed the Journal of the Executive Proceedings of the Senate of the United States, more commonly referred to by historians as The Senate Executive Journal. In 2003, the Library of Congress produced a digitized version of this collection as part of its landmark digital project, A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates 1774-1875 

• Digitization Process. A Century of Lawmaking included both scanned images of The Senate Executive Journal as well as a highly accurate transcription including elaborate SGML markup. But the data is not in a regularized form, nor does any of the markup record nominations. Processing this information was the work of a team of research assistants, who reviewed the entire run of The Senate Executive Journal from 1789 to 1829, identifying all nominations, recording the outcome of the nomination, and, whenever possible, determining when and why the officeholder left office. Following this initial data review, research assistants conducted a second review of the original source.

Published Registers

The closest the federal government came to providing a clear record of its employment practices is in a series of published registers. 

In 1792, Congress instructed the Washington administration to produce a list of all federal employees. Since the federal government came into being in 1793, the administration had set about creating or reorganizing government offices, often with the effect of hiring new personnel. Members of Congress worried that they did not know the scale of the government they had authorized. They were particularly worried by price tag of the United States Army and the power of Alexander Hamilton’s Treasury Department, which included not only a large cohort of revenue officials, but also the seaborn Revenue Cutter Service, an anti-smuggling force that became the precursor to the U.S. Coast Guard. 

The administration rushed to meet Congress’s request. The results are informative but hardly complete. Several key listings include the states but not the localities in which people worked. Postmaster General Timothy Pickering did not prepare a list in time, so his name was the only name from the Post Office. 

Congress requested a similar accounting ten years later. The 1802 register of federal employees came in the second year of the Jefferson administration. This was a more detailed and descriptive account. And this time it included the postmasters. 

The 1792 and 1802 registers went to Congress but were not released to the public until 1834, when they were published as part of American State Papers, a multi-volume collection of documents that the first six presidential administrations had provided to Congress since 1789. 

Meanwhile, Congress had decided on a more regular accounting. In 1816, Congress passed a continuing resolution requiring the federal leadership to publish a register of federal employees every two years. The first of these, published in 1816, included a lengthy title that would remain in place in the years that followed: A Register of Officers and Agents, Civil, Military, and Naval, in the Service of the United States. 

The registers from 1816 on constitute the most comprehensive list of federal employees. Most importantly, they include many of the officials who do not appear in the canonical source collections or The Senate Executive Journal. First among these are clerical personnel, ranging from the staffs in the central offices located in the nation’s capital to administrative personnel in local offices. The registers also include birth location, whether a U.S. state or a foreign nation. 

• Digitization Process. Research assistants manually transcribed the entries from PDFs of the original registers.