This dissertation examines the social, political, and gendered components of public office and government employment during the antebellum era. Historians have invoked Andrew Jackson's system of spoils to demonstrate the rise of political democratization and the emergence of a federal bureaucracy. But few studies have attempted to examine at any length the public servants and citizens who were implicated into political parties and connected to government institutions through patronage. My research on public servants shows that officeseeking was a highly complex and contested phenomenon that was intimately connected to nineteenth-century political and moral economy. Its connection to the rise of partisan politics and its lure of men from more independent and manly professions worked to create a popular perception of government employment as a social evil. What is more, public office was regularly sought through elite Washington political networks accessible only to applicants with a relative close proximity to political power. My dissertation argues that these developments created a common ambivalence toward public life and a cultural hurdle to the development of a professional ideal within the federal government. How government clerks understood this dynamic and how they made sense of their place within the unique political and social environment of the nation's capital, is of central importance to this study. Officeseeking emerged as a gendered middle-class experience, and clerking in the federal government offered an alternative livelihood to the diverse antebellum labor market. Many government officeseekers experienced decreased opportunities for independent employment and hoped to protect their family's financial future with a clerk's salary. In their efforts to claim a respectable professionality, Washington clerks articulated an understanding of the relationship between the federal government and its employees that challenged popular patronage rationality, setting the tone for future debates regarding civil service reform in the years following the Civil War.
Read
