Jackson took office with the firm intention of punishing the “vile wretches” who had attacked him so viciously during the campaign. (Rachel Jackson died shortly after the election, and her devoted husband was convinced that the indignities heaped on her by Adams partisans had hastened her decline.) The new concept of political office as a reward for victory seemed to justify a housecleaning in Washington. Henry Clay captured the fears of anti-Jackson government workers. “Among the official corps here there is the greatest solicitude and apprehension,” he said. “The members of it feel something like the inhabitants of Cairo when the plague breaks out; no one knows who is next to encounter the stroke of death.”
Eager for the “spoils,” an army of politicians invaded Washington. Such invasions were customary, for the principle of filling offices with one’s partisans was almost as old as the republic. However, the long lapse of time since the last real political shift, and the recent untypical example of John Quincy Adams, who rarely removed or appointed anyone for political reasons, made Jackson’s policy appear revolutionary. His removals were not entirely unjustified, for many government workers had grown senile and others corrupt. A number of officials were found to be short in their accounts; a few were hopeless drunks. Jackson was determined to root out the thieves. Even Adams admitted that some of those Jackson dismissed deserved their fate.
Aside from going along with the spoils system and eliminating crooks and incompetents, Jackson advanced another reason for turning experienced government employees out of their jobs: the principle of rotation. “No man has any more intrinsic right to official station than another,” he said. Those who hold government jobs for a long time “are apt to acquire a habit of looking with indifference upon the public interests and of tolerating conduct from which an unpracticed man would revolt.” By “rotating” jobholders periodically, more citizens could participate in the tasks of government, and the danger of creating an entrenched bureaucracy would be eliminated. The problem was that the constant replacing of trained workers by novices was not likely to increase the efficiency of the government. Jackson’s response to this argument was typical: “The duties of all public officers are. . . so plain and simple that men of intelligence may readily qualify themselves for their performance.”
Contempt for expert knowledge and the belief that ordinary Americans can do anything they set their minds to became fundamental tenets of Jacksonian democracy. To apply them to present-day government would be to court disaster, but in the early nineteenth century it was not so preposterous, because the role that government played in American life was simple and nontechnical.
Furthermore, Jackson did not practice what he preached. By and large his top appointees were anything but common men. A majority came from the same social and intellectual elite as those they replaced. He did not try to rotate civil servants in the War and Navy Departments, where to do so might have been harmful. In general, he left pretty much alone what a modern administrator would call middle management, the backbone of every organization.
Nevertheless, the spoilsmen roamed the capital in force during the spring of 1829, seeking, as the forthright Jackson said, “a tit to suck the treasury pap.” Their philosophy was well summarized by a New Yorker: “No d—d rascal who made use of his office. . . for the purpose of keeping Mr. Adams in, and Genl. Jackson out of power is entitled to the least lenity or mercy. . . . Whether or not I shall get anything in the general scramble for plunder, remains to be proven, but I rather guess I shall.”
•••-[Read the Document Jackson, First Annual Message to Congress at myhistorylab. com
World History
