how did the role of the federal government change after the civil war

"Lady Clerks Leaving the Treasury Department at Washington," published Feb. 18, 1865, in Harper'due south Weekly, reflected the first time women had worked in government. The Treasury, needing moreclerks to cutting sheets of money, decided that hiring women was a inexpensive way to solve its labor shortage. (Courtesy of the American Civil War Heart at Historic Tredegar)

Near every bit soon equally he took office in 1862, Francis E. Spinner's job as U.S. treasurer began to spin out of control.

Many of his employees had resigned to join the Ground forces — but as a revolution in the country's money system was underway. He clamored for more than clerks.

"The work has been performed by devoting not simply about every hour of each day, (Sundays not excepted,) just many hours of night, to continuous labor across the endurance of virtually men," Spinner wrote in a report.

To help pay for the Ceremonious War, the government had abandoned the gold standard and was printing greenbacks for the showtime time. The new notes had to be cut and counted, and Spinner, a motivated bureaucrat in tight upkeep times, turned to an untapped labor pool that would piece of work for less than the going wage: women.

This is how the federal government began to remake itself into a national, wartime strength. The Civil State of war and its wartime Congresses gave birth to many of the pillars of the modern federal government.

The authorities sold bonds for the commencement time and Congress canonical the first national banking organisation. The Agriculture Department was built-in to help farmers. A national cemetery system was created to bury the Union dead.

Congress passed the nation'southward first income revenue enhancement — necessitating a whole new staff that today numbers 93,000.

Government contracting exploded, with private companies supplying weapons and gunpowder, mules and blankets in what would go a model for late 19th-century industrialists.

"Before the war, there was a federal government and a hierarchy," said Richard Bensel, an American political historian at Cornell Academy. "But at that place was no allegiance to a national government." After the war, "you have a social base that supports federal power. That'due south a big change."

The Bureau of Pensions, which opened to write checks to wounded soldiers and the families of the dead, did not just grow into i of the land's biggest bureaucracies and earliest social welfare systems; it became a sort of national retirement organisation that buoyed the Republican political machine. (The agency was folded into the new Veterans Administration in 1930.)

Without Southern Democrats to impede them, activist Congresses authorized land grants for new universities, western settlers and a transcontinental railroad. Iii cardinal amendments to the Constitution adopted shortly after the state of war — abolishing slavery, guaranteeing equal protection and giving African Americans the correct to vote — farther cemented federal power.

There were five,837 federal employees in 1861, excluding the 30,000 postal workers who represented the largest arm of government before the state of war and well after. By 1871, based on data from the start census subsequently the war, that number had grown to xv,344.

Today the workforce stands at roughly 2 million.

Jobs as patronage

Who would make full these new jobs? Connections mattered.

Correct up to the last hours earlier his inauguration, Abraham Lincoln was mobbed by crowds at the White House steps. Not all were well-wishers.

They were desperate for jobs in the new government. "I have waited some 6 hours with the view of having a five minute interview with thee," an irate man wrote, claiming his "rights" to a federal appointment. The spectacle drew this parody from humorist Artemus Ward: "Practiced God! cride Old ABE, 'they cum upon me from the skize — down the chimneys and from the bowels of the yearth!' "

After decades of generally Democratic dominion, the Republicans had plenty of spoils to dole out, from postmasters to patent examiners. In an era before transition teams, Illinois paper editor William O. Stoddard, one of the get-go to endorse Lincoln, had to appeal directly to a U.South. senator to go himself hired as a clerk in the Interior Department, signing the president's proper noun on land patents.

The new administration also had to cleanse the government of Southern sympathizers.

"A great many removals in the Pension Role, and a clamorous crowd gear up to fill vacancies," Horatio Nelson Taft, a patent examiner in Washington, wrote in his journal on March 23, 1861.

"Many are trembling expecting decapitation," he observed a week afterwards.

By August, Lincoln was alarmed that Southern sympathizers were however lurking on the federal payroll. A House Select Committee on Loyalty of Clerks produced enough show of subversion that Congress imposed a new oath affirming that all workers would uphold the Constitution and the authorities.

Once war began, the demands on the regime grew chop-chop. Soldiers streamed into Washington. To supply bread to the troops, the State of war Department rushed to open up a bakery in the basement of the Capitol, seizing flour from the mills in Georgetown.

Preparing the Union army for state of war overshadowed everything. Uniforms, blankets, gunpowder and other supplies poured in, delivered by Northern companies under contract with the Quartermaster Section.

These military bureaucrats employed more than 100,000 civilians at the height of the war, from seamstresses to gravediggers. Many were free blacks and fugitive slaves. University of North Carolina historian Marking R. Wilson, writer of "The Business of Civil War," described the operation as a sophisticated, massive supply organisation of depots and arsenals that scrupulously watched over the budget as information technology managed huge flows of money.

The government put upward new warehouses to store supplies. Cattle pens were built on the land that is now the Mall. By 1862, employment at the Navy Yard had swelled to one,700.

When the war concluded, the government's debt stood at $2.two billion, an unheard-of sum.

Ms. Smith goes to Washington

"A adult female can apply pair of scissors better than a man, and she will do it cheaper," Spinner told Treasury Secretary Salmon P. Chase when he proposed to ease his labor shortage with women.

At first, they did use scissors to cut the long sheets of money. When machines were introduced to practise the cutting, female clerks were transferred to counting the currency. They worked adjacent with men, but they were paid $600 a twelvemonth, one-half the salary of the lowest-paid male clerks.

"To do this was a huge step and a challenge to the existing order," said Cindy Aron, a historian who describes the land's get-go white-collar experiment with integrating the workforce in "Ladies and Gentlemen of the Ceremonious Service."

To go the jobs, the women needed connections. Grace Bedell, the New York girl who become famous for writing to Lincoln in 1860 to urge him to abound a beard (he did), reached out to him again four years later on.

"I take heard that a large number of girls are employed constantly and with good wages at Washington cut Treasury notes and other things pertaining to that department," she wrote in a letter discovered by the Lincoln Archives Digital Project in 2007.

"Could I not obtain a situation in that location?" Her father had lost virtually of his belongings.

Information technology is non known whether the president wrote her back or Bedell made her mode to Washington. She married and eventually settled in Kansas.

Sexual harassment speedily became an event in the National Currency Bureau. Past 1864, a special committee of Congress was investigating rumors that supervisors were extracting sexual favors from female employees. The possibility — confirmed in testimony by women and their fathers — confirmed many Americans' worst fears virtually introducing women into the hierarchy: Either the women were loose, or they were innocent and the authorities was corrupting them.

The stigma of the "Treasury Courtesans" persisted for years.

Questions of competence

The Civil War government was express to eight departments: State, Treasury, State of war, Navy, Chaser General, Interior, Post Office and Agronomics. Hours were 9 a.m. to 3 p.one thousand. The quality of the workforce shortly became a subject of controversy.

"Poets, preachers, lawyers, doctors, artists, authors, merchants, mechanics and loafers are represented in the various departments," John Ellis wrote in 1869 in "The Sights and Sounds of the National Capital letter." "Y'all may know them every bit a general rule by their affectation of superiority to the townspeople, their full general seedy advent, and their imitations of the air and way of the commencement men in the Government."

He believed that the patronage system reeked of incompetence: "Ii-thirds of the men belongings function nether the Government are incapable of discharging their official duties."

Walt Whitman tried to dispel the image of the lazy bureaucrat based on his experience during the war as a low-level copyist in 3 government departments, according to Kenneth Price, co-editor of the Walt Whitman Annal.

"I do non refer to groovy officials — the men who wear the decorations, get the fat salaries," Whitman told biographer Horace Traubel when reminiscing almost his experience. "I refer to the average clerks, the obscure crowd, who after all run the government: they are on the foursquare. . . .

"I establish the clerks mainly earnest, mainly honest, anxious to do the correct matter — very hard working, very attentive."

The jobs were routine, though, and that led to colorlessness.

"Business in the Patent part is very dull this winter every bit might be expected," Taft wrote in his periodical in early on 1861. By jump, at that place was petty work to practise because of the war, and by summer he had been riffed. Likewise few people were applying for for patents.

Taft eventually landed some other job equally a clerk in the Country Department (office of Interior), filling out land certificates to buyers. "That is certainly better than no business in this extravagant city and I shall have information technology till I tin do better," he wrote in November 1861.

Counterfeiting and corruption

In spite of their efforts to suppress counterfeiting, Treasury officials had trouble on their hands once greenbacks were issued. A congressional investigation revealed some big inside jobs: Employees were taking impressions of the lead currency plates, which bore an image of Lincoln and a baldheaded eagle, to laissez passer on to outsiders.

At the end of the war, information technology was estimated that as much as one-third of the nation'southward currency was apocryphal.

The imbroglio led in 1865 to creation of the authorities's showtime investigative agency, the Secret Service. (Its role of protecting the president was not added until 1901.)

Other scandals shook the multimillion-dollar military supply car, led at the war's outset by Simon Cameron. Lincoln's first War Secretarial assistant wasted coin on inferior supplies and rewarded dozens of friends with jobs. Contracting irregularities were legendary as companies took advantage of the Union'south ballooning needs. Shoddy, the respun wool cloth used to make uniforms, overcoats and blankets, tended to dissolve into rags. The term remains a symbol of poor quality.

Leading the endeavor to stop the corruption was a federal employee, Quartermaster General Montgomery Meigs. Lincoln appointed the West Indicate graduate to mobilize an unprecedented logistical machine to support the Union armies, an endeavor that would prove crucial to victory.

Meigs defended the varied appearance of some Union soldiers after the shoddy scandal.

"The troops were clothed and rescued from severe suffering, and those who saw sentinels walking post in the uppercase of the U.s.a. in freezing weather condition in their drawers, without trousers or overcoats, will non arraign the Section for its efforts to clothe them, even in materials not quite so durable every bit Army blue kersey."

In the cease, along with the valiant soldiers and canny generals, information technology was a bureaucrat who helped win the war.

This story was included in a Washington Mail special section, "Civil War 150: Ripples of State of war." See more than stories on the Civil War.

Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/civil-war-gave-birth-to-much-of-modern-federal-government/2011/09/22/gIQA43EFSL_story.html

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