Cabinet and Executive Department

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CABINET AND EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENT

In 1787 the Constitution created a federal government with broad powers. But if the Constitution stated what that government could do, it did not state how it should do it. Creating a practical means for implementing the Constitution would become the daily task of the president, his cabinet, and a small but far-reaching federal workforce reporting to the executive. The federal government exercised limited powers within the states themselves; thus daily operations within the executive responded primarily to foreign relations or to matters concerning the territorial periphery.

When the first federal officials—President George Washington, Vice President John Adams, members of the House and Senate, and a small clerical staff—reached the new capital in New York in 1789, they arrived without any clear mandate for how best to distribute power within the federal government. Participants at the Constitutional Convention had spent little time on the subject of practical policymaking, nor had it been a dominant subject in the debate over ratification. Some federal leaders believed that the advice and consent clause of the Constitution not only permitted but required extensive Senate involvement in direct management of any federal bureaucracy. Others, working primarily from their belief in Washington's own leadership ability, assumed that the president himself would take direct charge of the men who served him.

Federal leaders eventually agreed that both approaches were impractical, requiring either a level of centralization that no man could run effectively and a tyrant might use dangerously, or a level of inefficient decentralization that would result from direct congressional involvement. The executive and Congress together crafted a system of cabinet officials clearly within the executive that drew most of its inspiration from European—especially British—models. But it did break from the British system in one important way. Unlike the parliamentary system operating in London, where cabinet ministers usually held seats in Parliament, the Constitution's requirement for a separation of powers prohibited service in both the cabinet and Congress.

The structure established in the Washington administration (1789–1797) underwent few changes throughout the early Republic. The administration initially consisted of State and Treasury Departments and a War Department that controlled both the small federal army and a nonexistent navy. Although technically part of the cabinet, the attorney general functioned as a legal advisor with only limited administrative duties outside the capital. Meanwhile, the Postmaster General reported to the State Department but enjoyed quasi-independent status within the cabinet because of its considerable budget and nationwide reach. The only major changes to the cabinet structure came almost a decade later. First, as the United States mobilized a fleet at sea in 1797, Congress created a separate Navy Department. Second, the open rift between President John Adams (1797–1801) and his vice president, Thomas Jefferson, replaced the dynamics within the Washington administration, where Adams chafed at the limited constitutional powers of the vice presidency but nonetheless remained an important policymaker through his personal relationship with Washington.

The situation only intensified after the election of 1800. Jefferson never forgave Aaron Burr, his own vice president during his first term (1801–1805), for his failure to disavow a last-minute bid for the presidency in 1800. Not only did this situation inspire the Twelfth Amendment, which created the system of official presidential and vice presidential candidates, but it also prompted Jefferson in his second term (1805–1809), as well as Presidents Madison (1809–1817) and Monroe (1817–1825), to choose as their running mates aging politicians of limited dynamism whose primary benefit would be to deliver regional votes.

relationships within the cabinet

The distribution of power inside the cabinet revealed a consistency that mirrored structural arrangements. After the president, the secretary of state was first among equals. In addition to its current role in foreign policy, the State Department also oversaw direct administration of the federal territories (later assigned to the Interior Department), authority over U.S. attorneys (eventually housed in the Justice Department), and liaison responsibilities with Congress and state governors (now the responsibility of a variety of White House officials). Only the Treasury Department—and its leadership—came close to rivaling the State Department.

Leading political figures naturally gravitated toward this office, and presidents recognized that the State Department was a logical appointment for their closest allies. All of the Democratic Republican presidents (Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and John Quincy Adams) served prior to their own presidencies as secretary of state for other presidents. Only the last Democratic Republican secretary of state, Henry Clay (serving under John Quincy Adams from 1825 to 1829), failed in his bid for the presidency.

Only secretaries of the Treasury came close to matching the influence of their colleagues from the State Department. This was the obvious case in the Washington administration, during which Alexander Hamilton (serving from 1789 to 1795) battled with Jefferson for influence with the president and for control over the national agenda. Likewise, during his lengthy tenure in office, from 1801 to 1814, Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin remained one of President Jefferson's and President Madison's closest confidants. William Crawford of Georgia also proved influential during his own extended tenure as secretary of the Treasury from 1816 to 1825. He left the office after coming in third out of four candidates in the divisive presidential campaign of 1824.

In sharp contrast, the War Department exercised relatively little direct influence on policymaking, this despite the United States Army's status as the largest single source of federal employment and, accordingly, the largest item in the federal budget. Henry Knox, who served as secretary of war for Washington from 1789 to 1795, and his successors concerned themselves primarily with administrative matters, implementing policies usually developed in collaboration between the president, the secretaries of state and the Treasury, and other confidants. This arrangement was also in keeping with efforts to preserve civilian authority over the military. Although John C. Calhoun brought unprecedented political power to the War Department during the Monroe administration (1817–1825), he was the exception that proved the rule. Calhoun also oversaw the final transfer of most of the State Department's responsibility for Indian affairs to the War Department. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams seemed eager to dispense with Indian affairs, part of Adams's own efforts to reorganize procedures within the State Department. Calhoun was able to use the War Department as a stepping-stone to the vice presidency (1825–1832) under both John Quincy Adams and Andrew Jackson.

If political relationships within the cabinet remained consistent, relations between the executive and Congress varied. After sharing a general consensus on many policymaking issues during the first and second Congresses, the emerging Jeffersonian opposition in Congress actively resisted the executive during the 1790s. This situation reversed itself from 1801 to 1804, after the Republicans took control of the executive but before they constructed a majority in Congress. Yet partisanship alone did not dictate these problems. Members of both parties challenged the constitutionality of executive action in negotiating the Louisiana Purchase, questioned the prudence of the Embargo of 1807–1809, and openly challenged military planning during the War of 1812.

managing the cabinet and federal agencies

Whatever the developments within the federal capital, the daily reality of executive operations was more often a product of external developments both at home and abroad. The cabinet offices that saw the greatest changes were the army and the navy, and for obvious reasons. Throughout most of the 1790s and the early 1800s, the army underwent regular restructuring and a general increase in size as the federal government struggled to establish or preserve racial supremacy over the Indians of the western frontiers. The Quasi-War with France and the embargo led to short-lived increases to the army. But it was the War of 1812 that caused the largest and most sustained military buildup in the early Republic. Equally important, the disastrous military campaigns in 1812 and 1813 led officials in Congress to demand a series of administrative reforms within the army that continued into the 1820s. The navy saw similar increases during the Quasi-War, the Tripolitan War of 1801–1805, and the War of 1812.

The State Department experienced its own growing pains. The ongoing federal governance of the Old Northwest and the subsequent acquisition of the Louisiana Purchase, the Gulf Coast, and the Florida Peninsula required the consistent expansion of the territorial system. Managing those frontier territories also forced the State Department to become actively involved in asserting white control over Indians, slaves, and free people of color in places where that power seemed most tenuous. Meanwhile, increasing commercial engagements overseas led Congress to authorize a growing number of foreign ministers and consuls.

In all these cabinet agencies, the number of administrative staff officials in the various federal capitals remained small even as the number of officials serving at home and abroad continued to grow. Weeding through the vast number of applicants seeking federal patronage was a major task for all members of the cabinet. Managing those officials after they received their appointments was no less taxing. Federal patronage also became one of the most potentially politicized activities of government. The use of patronage as a political tool only increased in the antebellum era as politicians increasingly looked on federal appointment as a means to achieving strategic party goals.

Indeed, the changing attitude toward the use of patronage represented one of the most important shifts from the Age of Jefferson to the Age of Jackson.