A new digital archive from Washington University is helping researchers tackle one of the most persistent questions in American history: What kind of government did the Founding Fathers want?
For history professor Peter Kastor, addressing that question began in the records of more than 37,000 people who worked for the federal government between 1789 and 1829.
“The thing that interests me most about this project is that it gives us both ends of the founding era,” Kastor said. “And so we get to understand both the way these familiar, high-ranking officeholders made decisions, but also what it was like for the folks who are at the front lines of federal governance, these low-level officials.”
The project, “Creating a Federal Government, 1789-1829,” features records of employees at the highest and lowest levels of the administrations of the first six presidents. The database includes future President John Quincy Adams and Elizabeth Kelly, one of the first women ever employed by the government.
The thousands of letters and other documents left behind provide a view of how people at the time saw their new country, Kastor said. Applicants often cited their service during the Revolutionary War and their belief in representative government.
“They really give you a glimpse of what the revolution and the Constitution meant to average Americans, people applying for jobs — and they had a pretty consistent sense of what it meant. The most important thing to them, first of all, was that it meant government without monarchy,” Kastor said. “Implied in that is that they would not be agents of tyranny, that they would serve whoever was in office effectively.”
It’s an idea that people now tend to take for granted, but it wasn’t always the case.
“This is at a time when that's a very new idea, and you can just see thousands of people who somehow just understood it,” Kastor continued. “It's what they had learned and internalized in the decades since the U.S. had declared independence in 1776.”
To learn more about the growth of the early federal government, and for more insights from Washington University history professor Peter Kastor about the its first employees, listen to St. Louis on the Air on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube, or click the play button below.
“St. Louis on the Air” brings you the stories of St. Louis and the people who live, work and create in our region. The show is produced by Miya Norfleet, Emily Woodbury, Danny Wicentowski, Elaine Cha and Alex Heuer. Jada Jones is our production assistant. The audio engineer is Aaron Doerr. Send questions and comments about this story to talk@stlpr.org.
