Assassination and the Spoils System [pp. 145-170]

ASSASSIVATIO2V AND THE SPOILS SYSTEM.
equally friendly to liberty and the just limitation of party
activity, whether practically or philosophically interpreted.
Whatever strength and honor a party may gain by supporting sound principles, by enacting wise laws, by placing worthy
men in office, by enforcing pure and vigorous administrationall that it has free opportunity to attain under the true methods
of our Constitution. But they are repugnant to a spoils system
of administration. They forbid the use of public authority for
party despotism.
Aaron Burr laid the foundations of the spoils system, and as
early as I820 De Witt Clinton complained of the interference
,of Custom House officials with New York elections. That system very early made New York politics more corrupt and proscriptive than the politics of any other state-a distinction they
have never lost.
Brooding over his presidential prospects, General Jackson said
to a New Yorker, "I am no politician, but if I were a politician
I would be a New York politician." Van Buren made him a
New York politician. The election of Jackson, inspired by
Burr, was the work of Van Buren. Potent in Tammany Hall,
and the autocrat of the Albany Regency, Van Buren carried
the spoils system into the National Senate in I82I and extended
it to the executive departments when Jackson's Secretary of
State. He enforced it while Vice-President and President from
i832 to I840. It was a ground of attack upon him in his own
State, and of his rejection as minister to England in I832, that
he had brought that infamous system to Washington. Its
spirit is best declared in this language of Senator Marcy of New
York in the debate on Van Buren's rejection-the only public
defence of the system we believe ever made: "When they [the
New York politicians] are contending for victory, they avow
-the intention of enjoying the fruits of it. If they are defeated,
they expect to retire from office. If they are successful, they
claim as matter of right the advantages of success. They see
nothing wrong in the rule that to the victor belong the spoils of the
enemy."
Parties, therefore, according to the New York spoils-system
code, are hostile camps, under military discipline, forever engaged, not in peaceful controversies about principles, but in
deadly conflicts for offices, contracts, and all the spoils incident
I55