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Updated: June 16, 2025
Then there were the office-seekers, restless, anxious, yet confident of obtaining some place of profit; the office-holders, many of whom saw in passing events the handwriting on the wall which announced their dismissal; the verdant visitors who had come to Washington to see how the country was governed; and generally a score of Indians with gay leggings, scarlet blankets, pouches worked with porcupine quills, and the full glory of war paint.
"The honorable gentlemen came to discuss affairs of public interest with his Excellency." The office-seekers, being compelled to accept this fib, departed. After which the bell rang again. The usher then assumed his most gracious expression of face. By natural affinity, the lucky ones had gathered in a group at one end of the room.
Van Buren simply introduced at Washington the methods of the Albany Regency. The Whigs blustered bravely against this proscription. But their own President, General Harrison, "Old Tippecanoe," was helpless against the saturnalia of office-seekers that engulfed him. Harrison, when he came to power, removed about one-half of the officials in the service.
With the statesman's vision, Lincoln recognized both the use and the abuse of the patronage system. He declined to gratify the office-seekers who thronged the capital at the beginning of his second term; and they returned home disappointed. The twenty years following the Civil War were years of agitation for reform.
Hordes of office-seekers descended upon congressmen, in order to get introductions to department chiefs; they filled the waiting rooms of cabinet officers; they besieged Cleveland. Disappointed applicants and displaced officers added to the clamor and confusion. The President's policy, as it worked out in practice, was a compromise between his ideals and the wishes of the party leaders.
It was in the dark days preceding the fall of Sumter that a crowd of office-seekers gathered at Washington, most of them men who had little interest in anything but the spoils.
N. B. That corn and those potatoes which General Gr-nt looked at I will sell for seed, at five dollars an ear, and one dollar a potato. Office-seekers need not apply. Knowing the President's great desire for peas, I kept him from that part of the garden where the vines grow. But they could not be concealed. Those who say that the President is not a man easily moved are knaves or fools.
But he, at least, knew how to fall nobly. He passed, without even a change of countenance, from almost omnipotence to a position so compromising that his very life was endangered. On seeing his ante-chambers, formerly thronged with flatterers and office-seekers, empty and deserted, he laughed, and his laugh was unaffected. "The ship is sinking," said he; "the rats have deserted it."
Of the two, the office-seekers annoyed him by far the more; they came like the plague of locusts, and devoured his time and his patience. His contempt and disgust towards them were unutterable; he said that the one purpose in life with at least one half of the nation seemed to be that they should live comfortably at the expense of the other half.
Three commissioners of the Confederacy were in Washington, refused official recognition, but holding some indirect intercourse with Seward, which they apparently misunderstood and exaggerated. A swarm of office-seekers, like Egyptian locusts, beset the President amid his heavy cares. The border States, trembling in the balance, called for the wisest handling.
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