Jacksonian Spoils

When Andrew Jackson entered the White House in March 1829, he brought with him a revolutionary idea that would define American governance for the next half-century: that government jobs belonged to the victorious political party, and that rotating officeholders was not corruption but democracy. "To the victor belong the spoils," declared Jackson's ally Senator William Learned Marcy of New York in 1832, giving the system its enduring name. What followed was the wholesale transformation of the federal government into a patronage machine; one that would breed embezzlement, customs fraud, and institutional rot on a scale the founders could scarcely have imagined.

The Spoils System did not emerge from nowhere. As described in Chapter 1, patronage practices had existed since Washington's administration, and Jefferson had engaged in substantial partisan replacement of Federalist officeholders. But Jackson took the practice to an entirely new level. He removed approximately 10% of all federal officeholders in his first year; a massive purge that replaced experienced administrators with loyal partisans whose primary qualification was their political support. The principle was clear: competence was secondary to loyalty.

The consequences were immediate and severe. Unqualified appointees filled critical positions in customs houses, land offices, post offices, and revenue collection agencies. The predictable result was a wave of embezzlement, theft, and fraud that dwarfed anything the republic had previously experienced. The most spectacular case was that of Samuel Swartwout, Jackson's own appointee as Collector of the Port of New York, who stole at least $1.2 million before fleeing to Europe; the first large-scale federal embezzlement in American history.

Beyond the direct financial losses, the Spoils System created a culture of corruption that permeated every level of government. Federal employees understood that they owed their positions not to competence but to political connections, and that they would lose those positions when the next administration took power. This created powerful incentives to extract as much personal profit as possible during their tenure. The system also required officeholders to "assess"; that is, to kick back a percentage of their salaries to the political party that had appointed them, effectively creating a permanent party tax on government employment.

The era between 1820 and 1860 also saw corruption intersect with the greatest moral crisis in American history: slavery. The defense of slavery corrupted every institution it touched. Congress through the gag rule, the courts through decisions like Dred Scott, the postal system through the suppression of abolitionist literature, and the territorial governments through the fraudulent elections in "Bleeding Kansas." The corruption of the antebellum era was not merely financial; it was the systematic subversion of democratic institutions in service of a fundamentally unjust social order.

Jackson Formalizes the Spoils System (1829)

Andrew Jackson justified the Spoils System in democratic terms. In his first annual message to Congress in December 1829, he argued that "the duties of all public officers are, or at least admit of being made, so plain and simple that men of intelligence may readily qualify themselves for their performance." This was a direct assault on the idea that government service required expertise, and it opened the door to replacing experienced officials with untrained loyalists.

Jackson's purge was systematic. He replaced 919 federal officeholders in his first eighteen months; approximately 10% of the total federal workforce and a far higher percentage of senior positions. Customs collectors, postmasters, land office agents, U.S. marshals, and federal attorneys were all swept out and replaced with Jackson supporters. In many cases, the replacements had no relevant experience. Jackson's Secretary of State, Martin Van Buren, managed the patronage machine with extraordinary efficiency, building the first modern political organization by linking government appointments to party loyalty.

The system quickly became self-perpetuating. Appointees were expected to contribute to the party through "assessments", mandatory payments typically ranging from 2% to 6% of their annual salary. These assessments funded party operations, campaign activities, and the personal coffers of party bosses. Refusal to pay meant dismissal. The system thus created a closed loop: party loyalty produced government jobs, government jobs produced party revenue, and party revenue funded the campaigns that produced electoral victories and more government jobs.

Samuel Swartwout: The First Great Federal Embezzler

The case of Samuel Swartwout perfectly illustrates the dangers of the Spoils System. In 1829, President Jackson appointed Swartwout as Collector of the Port of New York; the single most lucrative federal appointment in the country. The Collector oversaw all customs duties at the nation's busiest port, handling millions of dollars annually. The position paid a generous salary, but far more importantly, it gave the Collector enormous discretion over the assessment and collection of duties, the warehousing of goods, and the management of vast sums of public money.

Jackson appointed Swartwout despite explicit warnings. Vice President Martin Van Buren personally advised Jackson against the appointment, writing that Swartwout was unqualified and untrustworthy. Other advisors raised similar objections. Jackson overruled them all, citing Swartwout's early and enthusiastic political support. Swartwout had been one of Jackson's first backers in New York, and Jackson valued loyalty above all other qualifications.

Over the next nine years, Swartwout systematically looted the customs house. He manipulated the accounts to conceal shortfalls, delayed remitting collections to the Treasury, diverted funds into personal land speculation and other investments, and exploited the weak oversight mechanisms of the era. The total embezzlement eventually reached at least $1,225,705.69; a staggering sum at a time when the entire annual federal budget was approximately $25 million. Adjusted for inflation, Swartwout's theft would be equivalent to roughly $38 million today.

When a Treasury audit finally revealed the scale of the theft in 1838, Swartwout was already preparing to flee. He sailed for Europe, where he remained beyond the reach of American law. He eventually returned to the United States but was never criminally prosecuted. His case became a rallying point for advocates of civil service reform, who cited it as proof that the Spoils System invited corruption. The phrase "Swartwout the defaulter" became a political epithet, and his name was invoked for decades as a symbol of patronage gone wrong.

A Pattern of Customs House Corruption

Swartwout was the most spectacular case, but he was far from the only one. His successor as Collector of the Port of New York, Jesse Hoyt, was also found to have a significant shortage in his accounts. Across the country, customs collectors appointed through the Spoils System were discovered to have embezzled, mismanaged, or simply lost public funds. In the decade following Swartwout's flight, Treasury audits revealed shortfalls at customs houses in Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans, and other major ports. The total losses ran into the millions.

Mexican-American War Profiteering (1846–1848)

The Mexican-American War (1846–1848) provided the second major occasion for military procurement fraud, following the pattern established during the War of 1812. The rapid mobilization of volunteer forces, the long supply lines stretching into Mexico, and the minimal oversight of wartime contracts created abundant opportunities for corruption.

Supply contractors routinely delivered substandard goods at inflated prices. Cattle contractors in northern Mexico delivered diseased and emaciated animals, charging the government for healthy beef. Sutlers, licensed civilian merchants who sold goods to soldiers, charged extortionate prices for basic necessities, often with the tacit approval of officers who received a share of the profits. Transport contracts were riddled with fraud: mule teams that existed only on paper, wagons billed at double their actual cost, and voyage charters that charged for phantom cargo.

The most systemic corruption involved the quartermaster system. Quartermasters were responsible for procuring supplies, managing logistics, and disbursing funds, with minimal independent oversight. Several quartermasters were later found to have awarded contracts to friends and relatives, accepted kickbacks from contractors, and submitted fraudulent expense reports. The army's accounting systems were so primitive that much of the fraud was never detected, and the cases that were uncovered rarely resulted in significant punishment.

Customs House Corruption Across Port Cities

In the antebellum era, customs duties constituted the overwhelming majority of federal revenue; typically 85% to 95% of total government income. This made the customs houses, particularly in major ports like New York, Boston, Philadelphia, New Orleans, and Charleston, the nerve centers of federal finance. It also made them irresistible targets for corruption.

The corruption took multiple forms. Collectors accepted bribes to undervalue imported goods, reducing the duties owed by importers and pocketing a share of the savings. Warehouse keepers allowed merchants to remove goods before duties were paid, in exchange for kickbacks. Customs inspectors were bribed to overlook smuggled goods. And as the Swartwout case demonstrated, Collectors themselves could embezzle enormous sums by exploiting the gap between collections and remittances to the Treasury.

The New York Custom House was the most important and the most corrupt. It employed over a thousand workers by the 1850s, making it the largest federal office in the country. Every employee owed his job to political patronage and was expected to perform political work, distributing pamphlets, organizing rallies, getting out the vote, in addition to his official duties. The Custom House was, in effect, a political machine funded by the federal government. This pattern was replicated, on a smaller scale, at customs houses throughout the country.

Slavery's Intersection with Institutional Corruption

The defense of slavery corrupted American institutions more thoroughly than any financial scandal. From the 1830s through 1860, pro-slavery interests systematically subverted democratic processes to maintain and expand the institution; a form of institutional corruption that ultimately brought the nation to civil war.

In Congress, the "Gag Rule" (1836–1844) prohibited the reading or discussion of antislavery petitions, suppressing the fundamental right of petition guaranteed by the First Amendment. Pro-slavery members controlled the key committees and used their power to block any legislation that threatened slaveholder interests. The three-fifths clause of the Constitution gave slave states disproportionate representation in Congress and the Electoral College, creating a structural advantage that pro-slavery interests leveraged ruthlessly.

The postal system was corrupted when Postmaster General Amos Kendall, a Jackson appointee, tacitly permitted southern postmasters to seize and destroy abolitionist literature beginning in 1835. This federal censorship, carried out by political appointees of the Spoils System, violated both the First Amendment and federal postal laws, but was never prosecuted. The territorial governments were corrupted most dramatically in Kansas, where pro-slavery "Border Ruffians" from Missouri crossed into the territory to stuff ballot boxes in 1855 and 1856, producing fraudulent pro-slavery territorial legislatures that passed draconian slave codes. Federal authorities did little to prevent or punish the fraud.

The judiciary was corrupted by the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision of 1857, in which Chief Justice Roger Taney and the Supreme Court's pro-slavery majority ruled that African Americans could never be citizens and that Congress had no power to prohibit slavery in the territories. The decision was widely seen, then and now, as a political act designed to settle the slavery question in favor of slaveholders, rather than a legitimate exercise of judicial interpretation. It destroyed the Court's credibility in the North and accelerated the march toward civil war.

Timeline of Key Events

Sources