This project tells the story with the people selected by the president or the president’s subordinates, not the members of Congress. The story of Congressmen and Senators has been told many times and in many ways. The story of federal employees has not. This project tells their story, and in the process reconstructs the federal government at the moment of its creation.
What did the Federal Government Do?
The Constitution established a particular type of republican political system. It determined how people were represented and how political leaders attained office. But ultimately, this political system was supposed to constitute a policymaking system. In the years immediately after ratification, the first federal leaders quickly determined the general structure of the government.
They decided that the federal workforce would consist of appointed officials under the authority of the Executive branch. The Constitution stated that the President would nominate candidates for appointed office, but they would not actually hold office until receiving the “advice and consent” of the Senate. The Constitution established advice and consent for only a small number of offices, but over time the system applied to almost all federal employees except clerks, postmasters, and enlisted personnel in the Army and Navy.
Separate from the question of how the federal government selected its employees was the question what these people would do. Federal leaders (Presidents, cabinet officials, and members of Congress) identified a lengthy list of policymaking priorities. These priorities changed over time, but they all tended to fall into the following general categories:
- Preserve national unity. It is difficult to recapture now just how anxious Americans were about the fate of the union. Many worried that internal disputes would inevitably lead to disunion, which in turn would cause warfare between states or regions while also inviting European empires to undo the Revolution and reduce the United States to colonies.
- Provide national security. American leaders were convinced that their country was surrounded by threats in all directions: European empires that might seek to conquer the United States and European wars that threatened to consume the United States, native nations that sought to restrain white settlement, and enslaved people seeking liberation in the wake of the Haitian Revolution.
- Promote fiscal solvency. The end of economic connections with Great Britain and the eight-year war for American independence had left the US economy in shambles. And in the years since 1783, neither the Continental Congress (operating under the Articles of Confederation) nor the individual states had been able to develop a workable solution. The federal government was supposed to settle long-standing debts, foster commercial prosperity, and create an environment of economic opportunity for US citizens.
- Establish a racial order. The federal government was established with a complex combination of equality and inequality. The federal system was supposed to provide equality among states, and the Constitution was supposed to protect the equality of white citizens. But implicit in this arrangement was a mandate for white supremacy. Federal leaders and white settlers alike sought to extinguish Native American sovereignty and later to forcibly remove Native Americans from their homelands. The federal government played a crucial role in securing African American slavery in western territories, and in creating a legal system that preserved slavery in existing states.
- Take care of the miscellany. There were a variety of tasks that no state government could or wanted to handle. These responsibilities--such as managing western lands, providing a census, and establishing patents--eventually fell into the hands of the federal government.