“The General Scramble for Plunder”
Patronage in Jacksonian America
AS WE HAVE SEEN, James Madison understood the framing of the Constitution as a search for republican balance. He sought to empower the national government to solve the pressing problems of the day, but he did not want to allow factionalism to overrun the system. Thus, he carefully tried to balance structures against powers to prevent any one faction from gaining too much power at the expense of the common good. As we saw in Chapter Two, the growth in the power of the national government beyond what the Framers intended threatened this balance, and led in due course to corruption. It was as if the Constitution was a scale, carefully calibrated when originally designed, but too much weight was added to one side, disrupting the equilibrium. Corruption was the inevitable result.
It was not just changes in power relations that would upend this balance. Changes in the institutions of government itself—independent of whether those institutions gained or lost power—could similarly disrupt the scale, and lend itself to corruption. Just as he carefully considered which branches of the government should possess which powers, Madison was just as attentive to how those branches should operate. As later generations altered those operations, the balance could be lost as well, creating new venues for corruption.
As we shall see, the democratization of the presidency and the rise of the two national political parties had precisely this effect.
At first blush, this might sound like a ridiculous assertion. After all, today’s Democrats and Republicans, conservatives and liberals, all celebrate the Jacksonian revolution of popularly elected presidents. And furthermore, social scientists now uniformly recognize political parties as essential ingredients in democratic republics. How can benevolent developments such as these ever have become conduits of corruption?
Ultimately, the problem is that the Framers simply did not see either trend coming; thus, our governmental charter has nothing to say about political parties and implicitly assumes a government dominated by the Congress rather than the president. Did the Framers err in overlooking these developments? Perhaps. Durable political coalitions were already in existence in every state legislature of the union by 1787, and the very same democratizing influences that contributed to the Revolution ultimately led to a popularly elected president. On the other hand, the history of republican government up to that point had indicated pretty clearly that parties were not to be tolerated and managed, but rather squashed, and that legislatures—not executives—were the most dangerous institutions to republican governance.
Regardless of what they should have done, the Framers did not make provisions for these dual trends, which means that, benevolent or malevolent, they disrupted the original balance of the Constitution, altering fundamentally the way our government functions—in unanticipated ways.
These two developments—a democratized presidency and political parties—are causally related. The presidency has always been the greatest political prize in the republic. Democraticizing it changed the calculus of politicians seeking the office; to win, they must now mount nationwide electoral campaigns. This necessity facilitated the rise of national parties, as the state-based factions that had once characterized politics were not broad enough to accomplish this. The two major paries thus unite a broad array of actors in a shared quest for electoral victory; they rally like-minded voters all across the country, and they coordinate officials across federal, state, and local governments. This makes them important centripetal forces countering a very centrifugal Constitution.
As we shall see, by disrupting the way the Constitution anticipates the government will function, the combination of political parties and mass-based presidential elections has lent itself to corruption on an enormous scale. Whereas under the Constitution members of the Congress should be on the lookout for executive encroachment upon legislative prerogatives, the parties in pursuit of electoral victory undermine these institutional rivalries. Thanks to the party system, members of Congress of the same party often overlook such executive high-handedness insofar as it facilitates the party’s electoral agenda, especially its quest for the presidency. Similarly, the president is now quite inclined to indulge members of Congress provided that they are affiliated with his own party. Because the Constitution has nothing to say about this dynamic, and indeed because this dynamic runs contrary to what Madison anticipated in Federalist #51, it is easy for such relations to devolve into corrupt devices that unbalance the republican experiment.
All of this helps us understand how the spoils system became rampant in the nineteenth century. The resources required to win a nationwide presidential election were too massive for parties to raise on their own, and so they turned to the public treasury for partisan purposes, rewarding their friends with jobs, contracts, sinecures, and so on as the spoils of victory. The Constitution anticipates that such corruption will not happen; the Congress is expected to check a president who abuses the public trust in such a fashion, or vice versa. But the political parties united these disparate entities in a shared quest for power, and therefore plunder. The result was an institutionalized form of corruption that would endure for generations, and indeed continues in one form or another to this very day.
Political parties are integral to modern American democracy. As political scientist E. E. Schattschneider puts it, “they are in the center (of modern government) and play a determinative and creative role in it.”1 And not only in the United States, either; there is no democratic republic on the face of the planet that does not have a party system of one sort or another.
The reason, as scholars have come to understand, is that parties homogenize the vast diversity of opinions and interests within society, (hopefully) harnessing them in service to a greater good. In Congress, for instance, legislators confront a series of collective action and social choice problems, all of which relate one way or the other to getting a large, diverse body to work on behalf of shared goals. Political parties solve these problems by rewarding similarly minded legislators who work together.2 Good partisans, for instance, who help advance the party’s collective goals, often receive leadership positions, or plum committee spots; bad ones are sent off to backwater committees where their influence is minimized.3
Indeed, evidence suggests that legislative parties in Congress were in existence as early as 1791, and every state assembly during the 1780s had a legislative divide between the cosmopolitan coastal areas and the rough-hewn interiors. All of this should make sense: political parties seek to unify and harmonize groups of legislators into coherent coalitions, and in so doing help the legislature actually function.
Parties have uses beyond legislatures, as well. An important service they provide is regulating political ambition; would-be politicians who want to climb the career ladder ultimately must sacrifice their own interests to the goals sought by the whole party, at least to some extent. This ensures, again to an extent, that those who reach the upper echelons are reasonably qualified and disposed to serve the public good.4
Parties also regulate the scope of political conflict in the country. A nation as large as the United States has the potential for a limitless number of fights between the citizenry. Which become part of political conflict, and which are left out of the public sphere? It depends on how the parties respond—both individually and together—to these problems. Thanks to the work of parties, certain tensions become the source of political conflict while others remain latent. As we shall see, this was an important function that the Democrats and Whigs served during the Jacksonian period. The issue of slavery was always dangerous to the union between the North and the South; neither party had an interest in severing that union, so both conspired to keep the slavery problem at bay, at least for a time.5
Additionally, they serve an important function within the electorate. Mobilizing an electoral coalition in a nation as vast and diverse as the United States is no little feat.