What happens to our story of the American founding when we shift the focus from the pursuit of electoral office and toward the actions of appointed officials? Recapturing the realities of daily governance is crucial to our understanding of both the nation’s past and its present.

 

This project offers a way to understand a series of factors vital to the founding of the 
United States:

  • Electing legislators to pass legislation was one thing, but the government’s ability (and inability) to convert that legislation into policy depended on the unelected personnel in the federal workforce.
  • The Founding Fathers created a federal government that was larger and more ambitious than many contemporary conservatives have often concluded, but more clearly limited in its role than many progressives would wish.
  • The federal government was founded on the principles of both equality and inequality: equality for states and for white citizens; inequality based on race and gender. The institutions of government were designed to enforce these distinctions.

Moving Governance to the Center

Studying the early federal workforce forces people to reconsider how they understand the founding of the United States.

Academic historians and the general public alike have long been fascinated by the creation of the federal system.  But instead of a substantive analysis of policymaking, sweeping generalizations have led to the assumption that political economy (in the form of limited federal finances), ideology (in the form of fears about centralized power), and federalism itself (in the form of state political and constitutional prerogatives) combined to create a federal apparatus of extremely limited capacities.  In sum, this outlook claims that the United States was not a “state,” at least in the institutional and bureaucratic meanings of that term.  But this portrait of the scope and operations of that government is the result of impressionistic deduction rather than substantive research. 

It may seem odd that historians have devoted so little attention to the functional realities of governance in the early republic.  After all, a near-endless series of books have explored the Founding Fathers and the federal system they created.  But much of that work—whether for public or academic audiences—has tended to focus on individual biography, political theory, party operations, or political culture, rather than the institutions of governance.

What we learn: A focus on federal employees reveals that the U.S. did indeed possess a state, but not the kind we live with today. 

Day in and day out, the Founding Fathers were consumed with managing the thousands of employees in the federal government. Much as we might now prefer reading their most high-minded writings about the meaning of representative government, once the Founders moved into federal leadership they were far more concerned with day-to-day matters. This does not mean they lost sight of the big picture or pressing national goals. Rather, they understood that their ability to realize their goals for the nation depended on their ability to organize and mobilize the personnel and resources of the federal government. 

This task was all the more difficult because they did not possess the organizational tools that we have today. First and foremost, the federal government was highly decentralized. Although each federal agency did possess a central office in the nation’s capital, they had the most limited staff. Nothing reveals this state of affairs more clearly than the fact that so much of the minutiae of managing the federal government appears in the familiar handwriting of people like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. As cabinet members and later as Presidents, they devoted much of their time to appointing subordinates and drafting specific instructions to them.

Equality and Inequality, Slavery and Freedom

The organization of the federal workforce demonstrated all the contradictions of the American experience.  The Constitution established a federal government premised in high-minded ideals of freedom, equality, and national development.  The federal workforce was supposed to secure that system. 

Federal courts established the rule of law, with its promise of due process and equal protection.  Territorial officials were supposed to orchestrate the speedy transition to statehood, avoiding the subordinate status of colonial rule that Americans had rejected in the Constitution.  Federal revenue officials secured the funds for the federal budget, all the while avoiding whenever possible the direct taxes that were so unpopular in the United States.  Diplomats, army officers, and navy officers protected the republic with peaceful and military practices.

These same personnel also revealed how inequality, enslavement, and dispossession extended across the United States.  The same territorial officials who helped achieve the equality among states helped to secure the institution of African American enslavement as it expanded into the Southwest.  Those officials likewise sought to extinguish Native American autonomy and secure Native lands for white settlement.  When Native Americans or the enslaved resisted, it was the army that preserved the racial order.

What we learn: The organization, the locations, the job duties, and even the personnel of the federal government embodied the extent and limitations of freedom in the United States. 

The federal government was organized in a way to protect individual opportunity for U.S. citizens and to limit the risks of tyranny. The simple requirement of Senate advice and consent for most federal employees was designed to create accountability and prevent the sort of oppressive power that Americans associated with European empires. Customs officials were supposed to provide the federal revenue that would establish a prosperous economy that benefitted all. Territorial officials were supposed to create new opportunities in the West. Diplomatic officials were supposed to preserve the peace and to secure American commercial access around the world. The Judiciary not only established the rule of law, but also served as a safeguard alongside Congress to prevent executive overreach. The United States Army proved essential both to extinguish Native American sovereignty and to extend African American enslavement. Customs officials were active participants in the international slave trade. In the years before Congress ended U.S. participation in the slave trade in 1808, customs personnel officiated over the orderly arrival of enslaved Africans arriving in the United States. 

Nothing captured these tensions more than the federal employees themselves. Thousands of Americans believed that joining the federal government could create opportunity for themselves or their families. In the application letters they wrote to federal leaders, they celebrated the federal system and the possibilities that came with it. Those possibilities echoed citizenship itself. Citizens in the United States enjoyed unprecedented political and economic rights. But those rights were limited primarily to white men, just as employment in the federal government was limited almost excl to white men.

Whose Big Government, Whose Small Government?

Among the most pressing and controversial questions in American public debate has been the debate over the appropriate size, scope, and expense of the federal government.  Consider how often the Founding Fathers are enlisted in that argument.  Some emphasize the Founders’ stated commitment to a “small” government.  Others have emphasized the Founders’ repeated claims that the federal government needed to expand to meet new demands.  But lost in all of this is an understanding of how the federal government actually operated and how its scale and scope took shape.

Creating a Federal Government provides the first complete reconstruction of federal operations and the federal workforce during this period.

What We Learn: The Founding Fathers were far more comfortable with increasing the scale and the capacity of the federal government then many people now believe. But they also did so with uncertainty and with limits on the range of government services. 

Every President in the early American republic came into office with a set of priorities, and they all knew that the federal workforce was essential to achieving those priorities. To that end, they wanted to make certain that Congress authorized a robust set of federal institutions. 

At only one brief period did a President seek to retract the government’s capacity. That President was Thomas Jefferson, and the period was 1801-1803. Jefferson came into office convinced that the federal government had become too large and expensive. He also suspected that many in the federal workforce shared dangerous ideas that put them at risk of violating the commitment to republican government that was at the core of the government’s mission. So Jefferson fired a number of personnel and eliminated a small number of federal offices. The result was to produce a brief reduction in the total number of federal employees. But the combination of the Louisiana Purchase (which expanded the federal domain), international tension, and ongoing domestic challenges led Jefferson to hire new officials and create new offices. As a result, he left office with a federal government larger and more powerful than the one he inherited. 

Jefferson’s successors—James Madison, James Monroe, and John Quincy Adams—shared political and personal connections. They all sought to maintain the existing institutions of government, and each sought small increases that reflected their priorities and circumstances. 

Yet even as the Founding Fathers sought to increase federal capacity, they did so in more limited areas. Consider the mandate of the federal agencies: diplomacy, finance, the army, the navy, and the post office. Many of the largest federal expenditures now are for social services: social security, Medicare and Medicaid, veterans’ benefits. Others are for transportation and infrastructure. These programs were unimaginable in the early American republic. While the federal government had occasional programs to support public health or to support veterans or to build roads, they involved only a fraction of the federal workforce or the federal budget.

Seeing the State on its Own Terms

This archive captures the federal government not as we may want it to have been, but rather as it was.  That is a crucial distinction, and not only for the debate over what the federal government should be doing now.

In the late nineteenth-century, academics and government officials together imagined what they considered an ideal government, a set of institutions they often referred to as “the state.”  They created a set of bureaucratic concepts and an organizational vocabulary that they believe would provide efficient and effective government services.  Those principles, now over a century old, continue to shape the underlying principles of most governments, and especially the public employees who constitute those governments.

The federal government came into being before those principles were in place.  There was a certain basic organizational structure to the federal government that appears familiar to us now: the government was divided into distinct agencies with internal subdivisions; officials generated paperwork for their superiors; Americans worried about how elected officials could execute oversight of appointed personnel.  But in many other ways, this government functioned differently.  In an era of more limited formal education, there had to be different prerequisites to determine who could hold public office.  In an era before rapid communication or transportation, public officials executed greater autonomy, and not always for the better.  Most importantly, in an era before modern bureaucratic structures, the government was more distributed and less hierarchical.

What we learn: The federal government of the early American republic reminds us that whenever we look at the past, we run the risk of seeing it through the distortions of the present. 

Understanding how the government operated in the early American republic is often challenging because we try to see it through the way government operates now. That makes sense because it still operates under the same structure and because so many of the basic responsibilities—diplomacy and the military, budget and finance, law and order—remain the same. Those similarities can lead people to assume that government must have operated then as it does now. 

Because the government itself was so much more limited in its scope and operated in such different ways, at first glance it does not appear to be a state. That is certainly the conclusion that many people have reached when they study the early United States. 

Yet this investigation into the early workforce of the young republic reveals that, from the beginning, the United States did indeed have a state. Its leaders certainly believed that it did, and their critics were quick to condemn the actions of that state. It was not a state as we define the term today, at least not in the extent of its mandate or in the day-to-day management of affairs. But when we think about what government did in the early American republic—implementing the goals of its leadership, enacting both laws and policy decisions, succeeding and failing in ways that shape the entire nation—it no longer appears quite so stateless. And when we look at federal employees themselves—thousands of individuals located around the world, operating within a hierarchy designed to implement policy and respond to unforeseen circumstances—government on its terms begins to come into focus.

Public Careers, Private Lives

The vast majority of federal employees are not the sort of people who usually receive their own biographies.  After all, with figures like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton, the early American republic is replete with leading national figures whose extraordinary lives monopolize most of our understanding of the early United States.

Meanwhile, biographers continue to make the case for “forgotten founders,” political figures who usually operate just under the radar of public recognition and who have not received due credit for what they achieved.  Many of them—men like Robert R. Livingston, Gouverneur Morris, and Charles Pinckney—are in this archive. 

Yet most federal appointees are definitively not forgotten founders, at least if that title is supposed to mean they were somehow significant leaders in the early American republic.  Most of them appear to have treated federal appointment just like any other form of employment.  As they contemplated whether to accept a position in the federal government, there primary concerns were whether that employment was steady and reliable or how it might shape their lives.

The federal government was a political institution, and therefore is a facet of American political history.  But by recapturing all these public careers, we have what is often called social history, which chronicles the lived reality of human experience.

Consider the case studies in “Meet Four Federal Employees.”  John Quincy Adams certainly imagined himself as both a politician and a national leader, and his biographers have treated him that way.  In contrast, Thomas Melvill and Elizabeth Kelley were employees for whom federal appointment delivered an important source income.  William Clark was somewhere in between.  Clark demonstrated a certain political ambition that included an unsuccessful bid for governor in Missouri’s first election after statehood, but his appointment as an Indian official was a source of steady income for half his life.

What we learn: How ordinary and extraordinary people made sense of what it meant to be American. 

The men who lead the federal government had big ambitions, both for themselves and for their nation. 

Most federal employees were far more modest. Many wanted what they hoped would be steady employment. Many had come of age during the American Revolution and saw service in the federal government as their way to protect the principles of the Revolution. Some served for decades in one place, while others traveled throughout the country and around the world.

Most federal employees did all of this without ever once running for elected office. 

Many of the first historians of the United States focused exclusively on politics and elite political figures. Social and cultural historians pushed back, decrying the limited perspective of this approach. They recognized that most Americans never served in Congress or the cabinet or on the Supreme Court, but instead struggled to secure more modest opportunities in very difficult circumstances. 

Most federal employees lived at the convergence of these two worlds. Few achieved high office or wealth, and fewer still are remembered to this day. Their experiences reflected the ongoing process through which Americans made sense of the Revolution, the Constitution, and their aftermath.