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Print shows a slightly elevated view of Wall Street and Federal Hall as it appeared circa 1791, with pedestrians on the sidewalk and in the street, and Trinity Church in the background.
New York was the nation’s capital when George Washington was first inaugurated as president, and at least some federal office holders would have worked in Federal Hall. Cornelius Tiebout, “Federal Hall, Wall Street and Trinity Church, New York in 1789,” [1879?] Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

George Washington and the Federal Workforce

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When George Washington took office as the first president of the United States in 1789, people seeking jobs flooded him with applications for positions in the newly established federal government. More applications streamed in as new jobs were created during Washington’s two terms in office. Today these applications fill thirty-two volumes constituting Series 7 in the George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress. Dating mostly from 1789 to 1796, they consist of application letters, each neatly docketed with a summary of the applicant’s name and his desired position, together with letters of recommendation (or “certificates”), some signed by multiple recommenders. There are 960 dossiers primarily arranged in alphabetical order by name of applicant, with a few filed by the name of a recommender, such as vice president John Adams and treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton. The letters have been digitized as part of Washington’s papers at the Library of Congress, and transcriptions of most of them are also available on Founders Online.

Washington didn’t enjoy this relentless deluge of applications, telling former General John Armstrong that dealing with them was “difficult & painful in the extream. . . . the most irksome part of the Executive trust.” But he was also a careful and deliberate recordkeeper, and he had his secretaries keep and file each one. The result is a select record of American lives, some prominent, many not, at the end of the eighteenth century.

Who were these job seekers and what did they want? Some were men who held positions they were anxious to keep after the new government began. Joseph Nourse, who had kept the books at the Treasury Department since the Revolutionary War, assured Washington, using the deferential, self-effacing language that was typical of these letters, of the “zeal” and “diligence” with which he would continue to “contribute his mite to the public welfare under the New Government over which you preside.”

Ebenezer Sproat was in a more precarious situation. Thomas Hutchins, the geographer of the United States, had offered him a job in a western land office, and Sproat had uprooted his family and was on his way there when Hutchins died and the new government began. Sproat wrote Washington to confirm that he could keep the job, noting that it would be “Greatfully acknoledged.” This request and a second for a command in the army were declined although Washington did eventually appoint him to a position as a revenue inspector in December 1794.

Hutchins’s death led to several applications for his position, including one from Andrew Ellicott, a multitalented surveyor, mathematician, astronomer, scientific instrument maker, and teacher whose papers are held by the Library of Congress. As a surveyor, Ellicott helped determine the boundaries of several states and the District of Columbia. Ultimately Washington picked no one for the job, since the office of Geographer of the United States was not continued.

Another applicant who thought that death might open a place for him was James Puglia of Philadelphia, who hoped for a job as a clerk. Writing in November 1793, as a devastating yellow fever epidemic retreated from the city, he began, “Viewing with sorrow the large number of victims in all ranks and professions fallen by the late distressing desease, I suppose that some vacancies have taken place amongst the persons employed in public offices.” No one wrote in support of this ghoulish application.

Applicants asked for jobs in the military (Thomas Posey, Jonathan Titcomb), in the newly formed federal judiciary (Thomas Bee, David Brearley or Brearly), as clerks (Hugh West, this is a letter of recommendation Washington wrote himself, probably for the son of a neighbor), and in other federal offices. A few wanted to be United States consuls in foreign ports (Cork, Ireland; the French colony of Ste. Domingue; Oporto, Portugal; and St. Petersburg, Russia). Many wanted lucrative posts as customs officers in American ports. Benjamin Franklin’s son-in-law, Richard Bache, applied to be postmaster general, and Franklin’s grandson, William Temple Franklin, asked for “Foreign Affairs or any suitable office.” Lewis Nicola, a former military officer now serving as keeper of Philadelphia’s workhouse, a poorly paid job he found “degrading,” asked Washington for a position “inspecting & paying the Pensioners.” During the war Nicola had outraged Washington when he suggested that the United States might consider appointing Washington as king. Washington declined to help him.

Many of the applicants were, like Nicola, Revolutionary War veterans who were down on their luck. They represented themselves, or were represented by their references, as entitled to the assistance that a steady salary from a federal job could provide. Abraham Bancker of New York, who was looking for “some office of Emolument” in “our new Government,” explained that his studies “for one of the learned Professions” were interrupted by the war, and now both he and his parents were in financial distress. James Craig, who wanted a job at the Seaman’s Hospital in Norfolk, Virginia, wrote that he never would have “asked for any place had it not been [for] misfortunes in the late war.”

Many of these men associated federal service with charity. They were sometimes described as “placemen,” a derogatory term that imputed dependency to holders of federal jobs. Benjamin Harrison, a Virginia legislator and former governor of Virginia, then looking for a job in a naval office, wrote: “When I had the pleasure of seeing you last, I had little thoughts of ever being reduced to the necessity of wishing to become a placeman; but the depredations of the enemy during the war, and the great fall of property in this country, owing to the scarcity of money, will in a very short time, bring on me and my deserving family, very deep distress.”

Despite their hardships, these veterans were the lucky ones. Most Americans were ineligible for federal jobs. People bound by slavery or indentured servitude could not apply. Those who were illiterate or lacked influential connections to vouch for them would have found it difficult to apply. There was very little professional training and no civil service to provide some degree of structure and fairness in the federal employment selection process.

Cartoon showing office-seekers kneeling at base of equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson, with one saying, "St. Jackson, can't you save us? Can't you give us something?"
By the time Andrew Jackson became president, federal service was closely associated with the political spoils system, as satirized by Thomas Nast in his cartoon “Civil Service Reform,” 1877. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.

Most appointments were not open to women applicants. Two women in these files, Rachel Levy of Baltimore and Eliza Carter of Fredericksburg, Virginia, applied to Washington for jobs not for themselves, but for their sons. One exception was Baltimore printer, newspaper publisher, and postmaster Mary Katherine Goddard. Goddard had been Baltimore’s postmaster since 1775, but several months after the new government began she was fired to make way for a man. She wrote to Washington to ask for her job back, and she was supported by more than two hundred Baltimore businessmen—more than any other applicant in Series 7. Her letter is preserved at the National Archives, but a copy of Washington’s reply (to “Catherine Goddard”) is in one of his letterbooks at the Library of Congress. “Madam,” he wrote evasively, “I have uniformly avoided interfering with any appointments which do not require my official agency.” The postmaster general, he asserted, had the right to appoint his own officials, so he would forward her letter there. She didn’t get the job.

“helped determine…” Silvio A. Bedini, “Ellicott, Andrew (1754-1820), Mathematician, Astronomer, and Surveyor,” American National Biography (2000). Accessed 25 November 2024. https://www.anb.org/view/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.001.0001/anb-9780198606697-e-1300482. Available onsite at the Library of Congress or at another library that subscribes to this database.

“One exception…” Ward L. Miner, “Mary Katherine Goddard (June 16, 1738-August 12, 1816),” Notable American Women, ed. Edward T. James, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1971), 55-56.

 

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