Before and After the Constitution

The Constitution was a revolutionary document, a remarkable and visionary way to imagine how politics and government would operate in the United States—but it did not come out of nowhere. Rather, it replaced an existing set of government agencies. Indeed, those institutions were one of the central concerns of the Constitution’s authors, who believed their work was important because they were convinced that the existing governance in the United States was so inadequate to the task.

Governance in the United States was divided between states and the central government. That was the case both before and after the Constitution. But when the framers of the Constitution gathered in Philadelphia, they sought to completely restructure that relationship.

A series of governments operated in the United States in the 1780s:

A Central Government

Many people today know that it was the Continental Congress that issued the Declaration of Independence in 1776. But many don't know that the Continental Congress remained in place in the years that followed. It was the Continental Congress which, in 1781, drafted the Articles of Confederation which were ratified by the states later that year. The Articles preserved Congress as a national body, its members selected by state legislatures. Congress in turn selected a president who quite literally “presided” over Congress. While Congress remained a national legislative body, states retained powers that affected national governance or which conflicted with the powers of Congress. As a result, the following description of each agency includes a “but” to make clear both the continuities to the Confederation period and to identify the challenges that remained.

• The Army and the Navy. These two institutions were the primary concern of the Continental Congress during the long years of the Revolutionary War. Although military operations against Great Britain declined after 1781 and ended when the Treaty of Paris recognized American independence, Congress remained a body forged by the challenges of war making.
  • But states maintained their own organized militias as well as other volunteer military units. This combination of standing armies and paramilitary organizations had been an important feature of British colonial rule and were central to military operations during the Revolutionary War. Militias and volunteer units usually reported to state governors. The result is what anybody might expect: governors had wildly varying opinions about the degree to which they should coordinate their own military planning with the central government.
• Atlantic Diplomacy. Throughout the 1770s and 1780s, the United States sought to establish diplomatic relationships with the nations of western Europe and, after independence, to normalize relations with Great Britain. It was Congress that selected the foreign ministers (now called ambassadors) and other diplomats who represented the United States overseas.
  • But states wielded considerable power in shaping foreign policy and periodically chose their own representatives to negotiate on behalf of their own interests. These representatives were few and far between.
• Continental Diplomacy. In addition to negotiating agreements and fighting wars with European powers, the United States negotiated and fought with Native American societies on the North American continent. Indeed, continental diplomacy was a far more active process than Atlantic diplomacy because the United States was in regular contact with more native societies and because Euro-American citizens were in regular contact with their Native American neighbors. The United States Army was regularly at war with Native Americans during and after the Revolution. Congress periodically dispatched representatives to negotiate with Native Americans. 
  • But states had their own Native American policies. During the Revolutionary War, state military units more often fought against Native Americans than they did against the British army. During and after the Revolution, state governments considered it their right and their responsibility to dictate policy concerning Native Americans who lived on the land claimed by those states.
• Settling Squabbles. States were regularly at odds with each other, especially when it came to what land was in which state. Congress periodically dispatched negotiators to settle disputes over interstate boundaries or contested land claims in the trans-Mississippi West.
  • But states went back and forth on whether to let Congress involve itself in their disputes. In some cases, states saw Congress as a neutral arbiter that could resolve a problem. In others, state leaders were unwilling to permit Congressional involvement if they believed the Congressional resolution worked to their disadvantage. All states worried that permitting Congressional involvement could reduce state power.
• Delivering Mail. In 1775, the Second Continental Congress established the Continental Army, with George Washington as its commander. In the same year, the Continental Congress also established a postal system with Benjamin Franklin as its postmaster general. Delivering the mail was no small affair. It was a costly commitment for a Congress with limited funding, and it was an essential service.
  • But postal service was limited. In the rural settings where most Americans lived, letters did not come to people’s homes. Rather, Americans travelled to the nearest post office to collect their mail.
• Paying for it all. Congress was responsible for funding government operations. This included the hefty price-tag of the American military. It also included the work of diplomats who secured loans from foreign countries.
  • But states were left with the bill. Congress depended on states either to provide funds or to support Congressional efforts to raise additional funds. Congress had limited ability to raise funds on its own, and efforts to do so regularly failed when state legislatures instructed their congressional delegations to oppose those efforts.

State Governments

State governments were in operation before the central government because they already had institutions in place. Every British colony that declared independence in 1776 had both governing responsibilities and public officials tasked with meeting those responsibilities. State duties were elaborate and intensive, and were complicated by the fact that central government officials sought to involve themselves in areas where states had long traditions of pursuing their own policies.

• Law and Order. States were responsible for most forms of law enforcement in the United States. Legislatures and governors enacted laws together, and states established the institutions that enforced them. The center of the legal system was the local courthouse, where judges presided over criminal and civil cases and supervised numerous daily administrative tasks ranging from wills and estates to registering certain types of business transactions.
  • But officials who maintained these laws were local officials, usually at the county level. Sheriffs responsible for daily law enforcement and for maintaining jails were usually county officials, and counties often provided the funds for these operations.
• Military/Police Enforcement. Every state maintained militias as military institutions during the Revolutionary War, and those militias continued after the war ended. The members of these militias operated under state authority, but were rarely state employees. Rather, all adult white men (age limits varied from state to state) were required by law to participate in certain forms of militia duty, usually without pay. In most states, these duties were limited and rare. And in situations where states actually did mobilize their militias, state governors found these units were better in theory than practice. While Americans might celebrate the principal of the citizen soldier who would come when called, state governments usually found that mobilization was chaotic, and absenteeism was rampant.
  • But militias were usually organized at the county level. The governor might supervise the selection of militia officers, but it was the responsibility of the officers in each county to meet recruitment, training, and mobilization requirements.
• Racial hierarchy. Every state in the union had some form of racial hierarchy, usually enforced by state law. In 1776, African American enslavement was legal in every state in the union. State law usually excluded both free people of color and Native Americans from most rights of citizenship. Most states were also actively engaged in efforts to secure Euro-American claims to Native American land. By 1787, almost half the states had begun to eliminate slavery, but this was a gradual process of emancipation that was not complete by the time the Constitution was ratified. State governments held the primary responsibility for maintaining the racial order. Courts of law and militias were critical to this process.
  • But every state’s Native American policy was complicated by the central government’s efforts to establish a nationally coordinated policy. Meanwhile, Euro-Americans placed heavy demands on state governments to enforce policies of racial supremacy more aggressively. These demands ranged from forcing Native Americans to surrender land to white settlement more quickly, to establishing stronger institutional support for capturing runaway slaves or preventing slave revolt.
• Paying for it all. In 1786, the year before the Constitution was written, if you asked an American where they paid their taxes, they would say it was the state in which they lived or in which their business was located. States faced the difficult and unpopular task of collecting revenue for public services. This was even more challenging in the aftermath of a revolution in which Americans—state leaders among them—had mobilized people for war by decrying unjust taxes. The most common form of public revenue was property taxes. State officials assessed the value of somebody’s property, whether that property was material (houses and the objects in them), animal (the number of cattle on a farm), landed (the amount of property that somebody owned), or human (the number of enslaved people on a plantation). 
  • But states also levied taxes—usually with the technical designation of “import duties”—on foreign goods arriving in the ports of the eastern seaboard. Gathering these taxes required states to maintain an extensive workforce of assessors and collectors concentrated in ports and scattered throughout individual counties.

Localities

Municipal governments had the smallest number of employees and the most limited forms of government, and remain the area of government that we know the least about today. The reason is simple: historians rarely concern themselves with local government. The Constitution itself contributed to this. By focusing on the relationship between states and the federal government, the Constitution established a complex relationship that has been central to American history, and which remains a subject of fascination to historians. Nonetheless, local governments were crucial in the early United States. The most important “localities” in the United States were counties. While we often tell the story of the United States from the perspective of people who lived in cities like Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, most Americans did not live in cities. They lived on farms (whether large plantations or small freeholds), in towns, or in rural communities. Local governance usually depended on county government.

• Law and Order. Localities selected law enforcement personnel and paid for their expenses.  
  • But while localities—especially counties—provided some law enforcement personnel, states selected judges and established the laws under which counties operated.
• Military Policy. Militia officers usually came from the leading families of each county. They were connected to each other by local social networks that were often amplified by kinship and long histories.
  • But while militias were led by local elites, these remained state militias. They were military structures that reported to governors, and state leadership determined when and how militias would operate.
• Racial Hierarchy. The reality of racial hierarchy in the United States varied from locality to locality, but in 1789 all localities had some form of racial hierarchy. These hierarchies were not just forms of social practice; they took form through local government agencies. The first uniformed police forces appeared in the early nineteenth century, all of them in southern cities like Richmond, Charleston, and New Orleans. While policing involved general law enforcement tasks, these cities took the lead because they were the home to large numbers of enslaved people, and municipal officials concluded that armed, uniformed, and often horse-mounted police forces were the best way to prevent slave revolt.
  • But local practices of racial hierarchy operated within legal systems established by states.
• Municipal Governance. A small number of large cities maintained elaborate governing institutions. Mayors and municipal councils coordinated both police forces and fire brigades. They administered limited forms of relief for the poor. They established various forms of urban management that constituted early forms of zoning and urban planning.
  • But it bears repeating that urban governance was a rare experience in the early United States. Most local government was at the county level. The extent of governance was limited, with very few public employees.
• Paying for It all. Local governments had profoundly limited financial resources. Cities pursued various means to secure funding, but counties had few options. Most local governments depended on state governments to raise public funds and, in turn, to distribute those funds to local governments.
  • But counties and, to a lesser degree, municipalities provided the structure for raising public funds. Like militias, most states organized tax collection by county, and they relied on cadres of local leaders to conduct the unpopular tasks of assessing property and levying taxes.

What did the Constitution do to this elaborate set of relationships? People often emphasize how much the Constitution changed American politics, and rightly so. In fact, this project charts how a completely new set of governing institutions took form after ratification of the Constitution. But it’s important to begin by recognizing that many of the relationships between national, state, and local governments did not change after the Constitution was ratified in 1788 and the federal government began operations in 1789. Many of the people who worked in state and local government before 1789 continued to do so after 1789.

Yet for all those caveats, the Constitution fundamentally reimagined what a central government could do. It produced what its authors intended: A central government with larger responsibilities, clearer autonomy, and clearer powers to fund its operations. All of this set in motion a process through which thousands of people became federal employees.

The best way to understand that change is to examine the principal tasks of government, most of which were already in place before 1789 but which assumed different forms after the federal government came into being.

• Paying for It all. Nowhere was the distribution of governing power—and the lives of public employees—more dramatic than in the realm of federal finance. The Constitution created a new fiscal regime in the United States. By empowering Congress to initiate a budget, the Constitution enabled the federal government to proceed without the restraints imposed by the Articles of Confederation. And while the Constitution dictated that Congress established budgets, it was the Treasury Department, located within the Executive branch, that most dramatically changed the course of public finance. Secretaries of the Treasury pursued fiscal policies that were impossible under the Articles. The consequences were both quick and profound. The unified fiscal policy under the leadership of the Executive branch was responsible for converting the United States from a country of limited revenue and seemingly insurmountable debt into a nation that could pay for expanded operations while also paying down those debts. The principal source of revenue was import duties on the foreign goods arriving in American ports. Before 1789, employees of the state governments collected that revenue. All of those revenue offices transferred from the states to the federal government, and revenue collection officials immediately began scrambling to keep their jobs in the new regime.
• The Army and the Navy. The fiscal revolution in the United States funded the military departments that were the most expensive items on the federal budget. Again, there was more to this story than the growth in the federal government’s power or resources. Rather, maintaining the United States Army and creating the United States Navy unleashed a wholesale increase in the number of federal employees. Nowhere else would the numbers change so dramatically. Both the army and the navy underwent massive expansions in 1798 (when war with France seemed likely) and 1812 (when the United States declared war on Great Britain). But there were other moments of expansion. At George Washington’s request, in the early 1790s Congress funded a significant increase to the army in order to crush Native American power and independence in present day Ohio and Indiana. Thomas Jefferson later orchestrated a wholesale mobilization of the navy from 1801 to 1805 in response to the seizure of American merchantmen by pirates acting at the behest of the Barbary Powers.
• Delivering the Mail. After the military, no agency employed more Americans than the postal service. And there was more at work in the simple act of delivering letters than patronage for postmasters or the bottom line of stamp revenues. The national postal service proved essential to bolstering the union, demonstrating to Americans that the states were, in fact, united as a cohesive network that enabled people to correspond with each other, regardless of state or region.
• Setting Squabbles Between States and Creating New States. The federal government continued to arbitrate interstate disputes, just as Congress had done under the Articles of Confederation. But one of the most important forms of settling these disputes was to convince states to cede large portions of land in the trans-Appalachian West under the assumption that the federal government could better manage that land. The territorial system—finalized by the Continental Congress in 1787, just as the federal Constitution came into being—established a process for new states to enter the union. Crucial to this system was the territorial period, in which the federal government assumed direct responsibility for western government until a region entered the union as a state. Territorial offices mirrored many of the offices in states (from governors and judges to coroners and messengers), but all of them were federal appointees, reporting up an authority chain that ended with the president.
• Law And Order. Article III of the Constitution established a federal judiciary that was independent of Congress and the Executive branch. Nonetheless, presidents found that the judiciary created important patronage opportunities. Presidents nominated all federal judges. Meanwhile, U.S. attorneys, their clerks, and U.S. marshals who operated in the federal district and circuit courts were all federal employees who took their orders from the Executive branch.

This project includes federal employees from 1789 to 1829. That start date is obvious: the government established under the Constitution came into being in 1789 and began to hire its first employees. But why end in 1829? The answers are important. They help clarify the difference between politics and policy. They also reflect both extraordinary changes in the United States as well as the profound continuities.

The American political system underwent profound changes in the 1820s. In the 1790s, political disputes within federal leadership took institutional form in the nation’s first two political parties: the Federalists and the Republicans. Sometimes called the Democratic Republicans or the Jeffersonian Republicans, this was not the present-day Republican Party, which did not take form until the 1850s. The Republicans of the early American republic prevailed in these political battles, and by the 1810s, the Federalists were disintegrating. Americans continued to identify as Federalist and vote for Federalist candidates, but the few Federalist elected officials were isolated to state-level offices in New England.

During the 1820s, the victorious Republicans endured their own political split. By 1829, that division was complete. Andrew Jackson had been part of the Republican majority throughout his career, but when he entered the White House in 1829, he was already building an entirely new political apparatus that eventually became the Democratic Party. A second party system took form, once again dominated by two parties: the Democrats and the Whigs.

The division within the Republican party that led to the creation of the Democrats and the Whigs was not just about who would rule; it reflected real disagreements about what the federal government should do and how it should operate. It also came as many of the driving policy concerns that had shaped government during the early republic faded away.

Throughout the early American republic, the nation’s foreign and domestic policies responded to the aftermath of the American Revolution and the French Revolution. Both of these political revolutions caused global military conflicts, and those wars shaped how American policymakers operated. The wars of the French Revolution came to an end in 1815. On the heels of peace of Europe, revolution in Spanish America produced a new set of independent nations in the western hemisphere. The United States normalized relations with the major powers of western Europe even as it established new relationships with its neighbors in the Americas. The result was an entirely new diplomatic and commercial landscape.

In the North American West, the policymaking apparatus of the founding fathers was transforming both population and the politics. The federal government crushed native American sovereignty in the land east of the Great Plains, and eventually subjected Native Americans into a forced migration further west. This process included a series of military victories in the 1810s in both the Northwest and Southwest as well as an ongoing effort to pressure and coerce native Americans into making land cessions. As native Americans left much of the land east of the in eastern North America, a combination of free white citizens and enslaved African Americans replaced them.

These changes all overlapped in the 1810s and 1820s. When Andrew Jackson became President in 1829, one of the federal employees he dismissed the following year was Thomas Melville, a revenue official in Boston. In a career lasting over a half-century, Melville had experienced first-hand the transformation of governance in the United States. After serving in the American Revolution, Melville became a revenue official for the State of Massachusetts. When the Constitution transferred fiscal authority from states to the federal government, Melville wrote personally to George Washington, pleading to keep his office. Melville eagerly joined the federal regime in 1789, and remained in office in the decades that followed.

Melville died in 1832. The federal system he served had been in place for over forty years, its institutions by then stable and secure. But the politics that shaped those institutions had changed forever.