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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 December 2021
As revolutions swept across Central and South America in the 1820s and 1830s, Andrew Jackson’s administration undertook a landmark reform that transformed the US foreign policy apparatus into the nation’s first global bureaucracy. With the introduction of Edward Livingston’s 1833 consular reform bill to Congress, the nation embarked on a long path toward the modernization of its consular service in line with the powers of Europe and the new American republics. Despite the popularity of Livingston’s plan to turn a dated US consular service comprised of mercantile elites into a salaried professional bureaucracy, the Jacksonian consular reform dragged on for more than two decades before the passing of a consular bill in 1856. Contrary to Weberian models positing a straightforward path toward bureaucratization, the trajectory of Jacksonian consular reform demonstrates the power of mercantile elites to resist central government regulation just as much as it highlights how petty partisans—the protégé consuls appointed via the Jacksonian “spoils system”—powerfully shaped government policy to achieve personal advantages. In the constant tug-of-war between merchant-consuls and Jacksonian protégés, both groups mobilized competing visions of the “national character” in their correspondence with the Department of State and in the national press. Ultimately, the Jacksonian reform vision of an egalitarian and loyal consular officialdom prevailed over the old mercantile model of consulship as a promoter of national prestige and commercial expertise, but only after protégé consuls successfully exploited merchant-consuls’ perceived inability to compete with the salaried European officials across the sister-republics of the southwestern hemisphere.
I would like to thank Professor Seth Rockman for providing generous and insightful feedback on this article. And to Professor Mauricio Tenorio-Trillo and the staff at the Rockefeller Library for their generous help and guidance in writing this article.
1. Lester, C. Edwards, The Artist, the Merchant, and the Statesman of the Age of the Medici, and of Our Own Times, vol. 1 (New York: Paine and Burgess, 1845), 158.Google Scholar
2. Edward Livingston, “Report to the President of the United States,” in Andrew Jackson, Message from the President of the United States in Relation to the Consular Establishment of the United States, March 2, 1833 (Washington, DC: F. P. Blair, 1833). President Andrew Jackson supported Livingston’s consular reform plan as crucial to attaining hemispheric foreign policy objectives. Cf. Andrew Jackson, “Fifth Annual Message,” in The Principles of American Statesmanship. The Theory, Development, and Administration of Government in America as Shown in the Writings of American Statesmen, ed. Francis Newton Thorpe (New York: Tandy-Thomas, 1909), 288.
3. On Jacksonians as advocates of small or limited government, see Arthur M. Schlesinger, The Age of Jackson (Boston, 1945), 315–17; Robert V. Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Freedom (Baltimore, 1981), 116–42; Jon Meacham, American Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House (New York, 2008), 48; David S. Reynolds, Waking Giant: America in the Age of Jackson (New York, 2008), 3; Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford, 2007), 364. For a more critical appraisal of the traditional description of Jackson’s Democratic Party as a champion of “small” or “limited” government, see Sean Wilentz, Andrew Jackson (New York, 2005), 5. Wilentz’s observation that “both Jackson Democrats and their Whig Party opponents favored minimal government on some issues but not on others” is suggestive of the limits inherent in reducing the antebellum party system to a dichotomy of “small” vs. “big” government. Instead, Wilentz insists that we need to understand Jackson’s position on the role of the federal government against the backdrop of his critique of monied elites and his advocacy of democratization. “Jackson,” writes Wilentz, “sought to sever the connection of government and private business,” yet “he did so because he wanted to discourage the rise of a small elite of monied men who enjoyed disproportional political power.” This observation holds especially true in the case of the US consular system, a government branch practically monopolized by mercantile elites by the time Jackson entered office. Going beyond the question of why Jackson sought to reform government, this article investigates how he sought to achieve his reform agenda and considers the agency of other federal officials who helped shape the Jacksonian project.
4. The legislative and executive landmarks of US consular reform were Livingston’s “Report” of 1833; John Forsyth, “Consular System of the United States,” 9 July 1838, Index to the Executive Documents, 25th Congress, 2nd sess., Document 467 (Washington, DC, 1838); James Buchanan, “Report on the Consular System,” 12 December 1846, in The Works of James Buchanan, Comprising his Speeches, State Papers, and Private Correspondence, ed. John Bassett Moore, vol. 7, 1846–48 (Philadelphia/London: J. B. Lippincott, 1909), 154–66; and “An Act to regulate the Diplomatic and Consular Systems of the United States,” 18 August 1856, United States Statutes at Large, vol. 11, ed. George Minot and George Sanger (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1859), 52–64.
5. Some overview works include Charles S. Kennedy, The American consul: a history of the United States consular service, 1776–1914 (New York, 1990); Nicole Phelps, Sovereignty transformed: US–Habsburg relations from 1815 to the Paris Peace Conference (Cambridge, 2013); idem, “One Service, Three Systems, Many Empires: The US Consular Service and the Growth of US Global Power, 1789–1924,” in Crossing Empires: Taking US History into Transimperial Terrain, ed. Kristin Hoganson and Jay Sexton (Durham, 2020), 135–58; Ferry de Goey, Consuls and the institutions of global capitalism, 1783–1914 (London, 2014); Nicholas M. Keegan, US Consular Representation in Britain since 1790 (London, 2018).
6. My interrogation of Jacksonian consular reform builds on a growing body of scholarship on the early American state. See, for instance, Richard John, “Rethinking the Early American State,” Polity 40, no. 3 (July 2008), 332–39; idem, “Governmental Institutions as Agents of Change: Rethinking American Political Development in the Early Republic, 1787–1835,” Studies in American Political Development 11, no. 2 (Fall 1997): 347–80; William J. Novak, “The Myth of the ‘Weak’ American State,” American Historical Review 113, no. 3 (June 2008): 752–72; Brian Balogh, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA, 2009); Eliga Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: the American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2012); Matthew Taylor Raffety, The Republic Afloat: Law, Honor, and Citizenship in Maritime America (Chicago, 2013); Brian Rouleau, With Sails Whitening Every Sea: Mariners and the Making of an American Maritime Empire (Ithaca, 2014); Tyson Reeder, “‘Sovereign Lords’ and ‘Dependent Administrators’: Artigan Privateers, Atlantic Borderwaters, and State Building in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Journal of American History 103, no. 2 (September 2016): 323–46; Gautham Rao, National Duties: Custom Houses and the Making of the American State (Chicago, 2016); Matthew Karp, This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge, MA, 2016); Special issue on “the state,” Journal of the Early Republic 38, no. 1 (Spring 2018); David F. Ericson, “The United States Military, State Development, and Slavery in the Early Republic,” Studies in American Political Development 31, no. 1 (April 2017): 130–48; Nancy Shoemaker, “Extraterritorial United States to 1860,” Diplomatic History 42, no. 1 (2018): 36–54; Stephen W. Campbell, The Bank War and the Partisan Press: Newspapers, Financial Institutions, and the Post Office in Jacksonian America (Lawrence, KS, 2019); Lindsay Schakenbach Regele, Manufacturing Advantage: War, the State, and the Origins of American Industry, 1776–1848 (Baltimore, 2019); Johann Neem, “Social Capital, Civic Labor, and State Capacity in the Early American Republic: Schools, Courts, and Law Enforcement,” Journal of Policy History 31, no. 3 (July 2019): 326–53.
7. In line with Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 332–66; Seth Rockman, “Jacksonian America,” American History Now, ed. Eric Foner and Lisa McGirr (Philadelphia, 2011), 52–74; and Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York, 2006), 314–19, I maintain that we can only account for the specific course of the movement for Jacksonian consular reform by embedding it in the international context, by understanding its ideological commitments to a new definition of the “national character,” and by examining the way in which the introduction of political patronage ultimately transformed this reform’s meaning and trajectory.
8. Most scholars interested in the spoils system have studied its impact within the United States, but its impact on the US foreign policy apparatus was profound. On the spoils system, see Schlesinger, Age of Jackson, 45–47; Campbell, Bank War, 14–32; Richard J. Ellis, The Development of the American Presidency (London, 2012), 425–26; Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 332–66; Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 227–44; Meacham, American Lion, 81–85; Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, 314–19.
9. For more on the subject, see Edward Rugemer, The Problem of Emancipation: The Caribbean Roots of the American Civil War (Baton Rouge, 2008); Karp, This Vast Southern Empire; Caitlin Fitz, Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions (New York, 2016).
10. For an insightful approach to the politicization of “national character,” see David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill, 1997), chap. 3. Though Waldstreicher’s analysis deals with an earlier period, the 1790s, the politics of “national character” experienced a reinvigoration in the 1820s, a period in which, as this article contends, revolutionary turmoil in the Caribbean, South, and Central America powerfully reconfigured the way US foreign policy and party consolidation worked. The movement for reforming consulship was part of a larger Jacksonian phenomenon of sociopolitical reform. For an overview of Jacksonian reform, see Schlesinger, Age of Jackson, 46–47, Remini, Andrew Jackson, 116–42, 181–202, 248–56; Rockman, “Jacksonian America,” 52–74; Kyle Volk, Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy (Oxford, 2014).
11. See Weber, Max, Essays in Sociology, ed. Hans Heinrich Gerth and Charles Wright Mills (New York, 1946), 84 Google Scholar.
12. Livingston, “Report,” 6.
13. Livingston, “Report,” 7.
14. Livingston, “Report,” 10. On the importance of customs duties for the funding of the federal government, see Rao, National Duties, Introduction.
15. Keegan, US Consular Representation, 27.
16. New research on the variety of early nineteenth-century European and South American consular systems suggests that US. consuls’ depictions of uniformly salaried foreign consuls were gross exaggerations. Claiming the mantle of experts, consuls often distorted information on foreign states in order to boost their own arguments for or against a specific type of remuneration. For some instructive contemporaneous and later references on the subject, see Agustín de Letamendi, Atribuciones consulares o manual para los consules de España en paises estrangeros (Madrid: Sancha, 1835); idem, Tratado de Jurisprudencia Diplomático-Consular y Manual Práctico para la Carrera de Estado (Madrid: Repullés, 1843); Anonymous, “Outline of a consular establishment for the United States of America, in Eastern Asia,” Chinese Repository 6 (1838): 69–82; Commercial Advertiser, 28 November 1850; Leopold Neumann, Handbuch des Consulatwesens, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des Österreichischen, und einem Anhange der Verordnungen (Vienna: Tendler and Co., 1854), 60–66; E. W. A. Tuson, The British Consul’s Manual: Being a Practical Guide for Consuls … (London: Longman and Co., 1856), 4; Eli T. Sheppard, American Consular Service (Berkeley, 1901), 416–17; Flavio Mendez de Oliveira Castro, História da Organização do Ministério das Relações Exteriores (Editora Universidade de Brasília, 1983); Jesús Pradells Nadal, Diplomacia y comercio: La expansión española en el siglo XVIII (Alicante, 1992); Jorge Manuel Martins Ribeiro, “Comércio e diplomacia nas relações luso-americanas (1776–1822),” Ph.D. diss. (Porto: University of Porto, 1997); Raúl Figueroa Esquer, “La creación de la red consular española en México, 1838–1848,” in México y España en el siglo XIX: Diplomacia, relaciones triangulares e imaginarios nacionales, ed. idem and Agustín Sánchez Andrés (Morelia, 2003), 53–76; John Dickie, The British Consul: Heir to a Great Tradition (New York, 2008), 14; Tatiana Zonova, “The Consular Service in Russia: Past Problems, New Challenges,” in Consular Affairs and Diplomacy, ed. Jan Melissen and Ana Mar Fernández (Leiden, 2011), 173–98.
17. Evening Post, 26 June 1835.
18. Macpherson to Henry Clay, Cartagena, 16 May 1826, Despatches from United States consuls in Cartagena (henceforth DUSC [city]), NARA microfilm, r. 1.
19. John Macpherson to Henry Clay, Cartagena, 16 May 1826; idem to Martin Van Buren, 14 December 1829, DUSC Cartagena, r. 1.
20. William Taylor to Secretary of State, Alvarado, 4 June 1824, DUSC Veracruz, r. 1.
21. Henry Hill to Secretary of State, 1 January 1822. On Hill, see Tyson Reeder, Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots: Free Trade in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia, 2019), 138–46, 163–79. For more on Hill’s predecessors in Havana, see Simeon Andonov Simeonov, “‘With What Right Are They Sending A Consul’: Unauthorized Consulship, US Expansion, and the Transformation of the Spanish American Empire, 1795–1808,” Journal of the Early Republic 40, no. 1 (Spring 2020): 19–44.
22. Henry Hill to Secretary of State, 1 January 1822.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid.
25. The data is available in The American Almanac and Repository of Useful Knowledge (Boston: Charles Bowen, 1828; 1837; 1845; 1854; 1861). Total US consulates 1828: 118, of which Europe: 59, Spanish America, and Brazil: 29, Caribbean: 19, Asia, Africa, Pacific and Indian Oceans: 11.
1836: 163, of which Europe: 72; Americas: 47; Caribbean: 24; Asia, Africa, Pacific and Indian Oceans: 20.
1845: 167 consuls, of which Europe: 73; Americas: 46; Caribbean: 22; Asia, Africa, Pacific and Indian Oceans: 26.
1854: 205 consuls, of which Europe: 81; Americas: 54; Caribbean: 24; Asia, Africa, Pacific and Indian Oceans: 46.
1861: 233 consuls, of which Europe: 88; Americas: 72; Caribbean: 25; Asia, Africa, Pacific and Indian Oceans: 48.
26. See Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, 314–15; Campbell, Bank War, 14–15; J. Robert Moskin, American Statecraft: The Story of the US Foreign Service (New York, 2013), 120–44.
27. In 1801, for example, President Thomas Jefferson made twenty-four consular appointments while the Senate was in recess. See Annals of Congress, 13th Congress, May 24, 1813–April 18, 1814 (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1854), 2669–72.
28. The use of the masculine pronoun denotes the fact that all consular officeholders in the antebellum period were men.
29. See Brown, Matthew, The Struggle for Power in Post-Independence Colombia and Venezuela (New York, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
30. Livingston, “Report,” 38–39.
31. See Chambers, Stephen, No God But Gain: The Untold Story of Cuban Slavery, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Making of the United States (New York, 2015)Google Scholar.
32. Nicholas Trist to Louis McLane, DUSC Havana (3 May 1834); Nicholas Trist to John Forsyth, DUSC Havana (8 December 1835).
33. After Trist’s recall in 1839, the British Commissioners in Sierra Leone exclaimed that Trist’s vice-consul was “zealously endeavoring, month after month, with perfect impunity, and to a far greater extent than it was possible for Mr. Trist to have done, to degrade his national flag, and to brutalize the character of American seamen, by encouraging them to engage in a contraband and inhuman traffic.” See H. M. Commissioners
to Viscount Palmerston, Sierra Leone, 28 August 1839, British Parliamentary Papers. Class A. Correspondence With the British Commissioners at Sierra Leone, the Havana, Rio de Janeiro, and Surinam, Relating to the Slave Trade (London: Clowes and Sons, 1841), 96.
34. “Memorial of G. F. Russell and others, against the conduct of N. P. Trist, American Consul at Havana,” US House of Representatives, Committee on Commerce, 26th Cong., 1st sess., Report No. 707 (Washington, DC: US Congress, 1840), 17–18.
35. Ibid., 18–19.
36. Cf. Clement Freeman [?] to President John Tyler, Philadelphia, June 1st, 1841, DUSC Trinidad. Less than a week later, Freeman’s letter was echoed by another complaint, demanding “a new set of Consuls general and a new system of duties.” See S. Shel […] to Daniel Webster, 7 June 1841, DUSC Trinidad; Charles Con[nery?] to Daniel Webster, 18 April 1843, ibid.
37. See, for example, Masters to James Buchanan, 30 March 1846, DUSC Matanzas, in which dozens of US merchants and shipmasters in Matanzas opposed a new fee levied by consul Simeon Johnson, asking for Johnson’s recall. On another occasion, a newly appointed consul complained that a certain Francis Fabars, “a coloured gentleman of Saint Domingo,” who did “nearly half of the American business” in Santiago de Cuba, refused “to have any official or personal intercourse” with him, thereby depriving the consul of his income. See John Holding to James Buchanan, 15 February 1847, DUSC Santiago de Cuba.
38. Fritz Henry McGready to Daniel Webster, 15 November 1841, DUSC Baracoa, r. 1.
39. Charles Con[nery?] to Daniel Webster, 18 April 1843, DUSC Trinidad. In a note attached to the letter, a federal clerk noted: “The charges in the bill of the Consul (with the exception of the extra wages) do not appear to be unauthorized or unusual for such services as were rendered by [the Consul].”
40. Buchanan, “Report,” 162.
41. New York Daily Tribune, 20 December 1845.
42. Ibid.
43. New York Daily Tribune, 26 December 1845.
44. Ibid.
45. Ibid.
46. Daily National Intelligencer, 17 February 1847.
47. For a similar proposal and critique, see George Washington Montgomery, “Memorial to the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States,” 16 March 1838; John Forsyth, “Consular System of the United States,” 9 July 1838, Index to the Executive Documents, 25th Congress, 2nd sess., Document 467 (Washington, DC, 1838).
48. Edmund Watmough to John Forsyth, 9 November 1836, DUSC Trinidad.
49. Parrillo, Nicholas, Against the Profit Motive: The Salary Revolution in American Government, 1780–1940 (New Haven, 2013), 233.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
50. Dickie, British Consul, 14.
51. Clayton, John M., Speech delivered in the Senate of the United States (Washington, DC: Kirkwood and McGill, 1853), 20–21 Google Scholar.