Reforming the Consular System: The Fee System, Salarization, and the Transformation of the US Foreign Policy State

By the time Andrew Jackson and Edward Livingston took it upon themselves to devise a plan for consular reform, “the worst consular system in the world” had been five decades in the making. With the exception of two dated pieces of legislation from the 1780s and the early 1800s, the US consular system lacked any federal regulations outlining the rights and duties of consuls, establishing standardized fees for their services, or prescribing the duties and responsibilities of American citizens in relation to their consuls in foreign ports. The lack of federal regulation caused incessant frictions throughout the expanding US consular network. It is indeed in response to these disputes between US consuls and merchants that President Jackson ordered Edward Livingston to devise a reform plan that would serve Congress as the platform for legislative changes.

After two years of corresponding with consuls, merchants, and mariners, Livingston submitted a comprehensive plan addressing the most recurrent and conspicuous shortcomings of the consular system. Among all the grievances Livingston acknowledged in the course of his correspondence with consuls and citizens, “that which create[d] the most frequent cause of misunderstanding between the Consuls and masters of vessels,” was “the want of a bill of fees extending to all the acts which a Consul may be called on to perform.”Footnote ¹² Livingston pondered two possible solutions to this problem: the creation of a standardized table of consular fees or the introduction of salaries (“salarization”). Among the two options, he clearly advocated the latter. In his report to Congress, Livingston expressed “no hesitation in giving a decided opinion, that the exaction of fees has been the source of misunderstandings between our Consuls and the masters of vessels, injurious to the reputation of the country, that it is degrading to the officer who is obliged to wrangle for them,—is unequal in its operations,—oppressive to our commerce,—and ought either to be wholly abolished, or so modified as to make the operation of the system more equal.”Footnote ¹³

To offset these disadvantages of the fee system, the Secretary proposed instituting annual salaries of $2,000 for the thirty US consuls and, tentatively, of $1,000 for the 126 vice-consuls and commercial agents across the globe. “When it is considered that not only the respectability of the Government and security of its citizens abroad will be promoted by this change, but that it is chiefly intended for the protection and extension of that commerce from which the whole revenue of the country is derived,” argued Livingston, “the expense will not be thought too great for the objects.” The US government simply could not afford to risk leaving a large part of its revenue, which it derived from customs duties on foreign commerce, at the mercy of merchants who often placed their private interests above their official duties.Footnote ¹⁴

Livingston’s case for salarizing consular officials, then, paradoxically rested upon a rational calculation in the best spirit of cost-effective governance. And yet, despite the Secretary’s reassurance that this would end up being the least costly among the available options, his rationale for substituting consular fees with fixed salaries was a revolutionary proposition bound to create frictions with adherents to the status quo. For over half a century, the imposition of fees had been the bedrock of the US consular system, providing additional revenue for the merchants who held a practical monopoly on consular appointments. Over time, the fee system had created a lucrative source of income, especially for those consular officials holding offices in the busiest ports of Europe.

The consuls and vice-consuls in these locales became the fiercest opponents of the new reform plan, channeling their disapproval to the federal administration. In a representative correspondence to Livingston’s successor Louis McLane, the US consul in Dublin argued that the introduction of salaries—especially those attributed to vice-consuls—would not suffice to attract men “of the same class or rank in Society as those who now fill these situations.” What troubled consul Wilson was not so much that the salaries were small but that, in conjuncture with the measure of prohibiting consuls’ commercial pursuits, they would be insufficient “to induce a ‘respectable’ citizen to leave his home and settle in a strange country.” As the overwhelming majority of the US consular officials were engaged in some form of commercial enterprise, the prohibition to pursue their business interests while receiving a salary from the federal government unleashed fierce resistance from established consular officials such as Wilson.Footnote ¹⁵ To pass their consular reform agenda in spite of these entrenched private interests, federal administrators would have to rely on a new rationale for dislodging the mercantile class from its monopolistic control of consulship; something that, as we will see in the next section, Jacksonian administrations only achieved by the gradual integration of consular appointments into the “spoils system.”

Radical though it seemed to US merchant-consuls across Europe, Livingston’s salarization policy was in fact representative of a transatlantic consular reform trend. In the 1820s and the early 1830s, such powers as Great Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Russia, Brazil, and Mexico were all beginning to recognize the need for reforming their consular systems by first and foremost establishing unified consular tariffs and regular salaries. Keeping abreast of such international developments, those US consuls who resented the status quo seized an opportunity to pressure federal administrators into bringing the dated US consular system up to the standard of its Atlantic peers.Footnote ¹⁶

Not surprisingly, some of the most vocal calls for federal reform came from the comparatively marginal new US consulates in Central and South America. In 1835, for example, the influential Evening Post reported an embarrassing clash involving the issue of fees in the recently established consulate in Campeche (Mexico), mounting a “protest against [the US] government … for not placing American Consulates on a footing with the English and French officers … and for not endowing the Consuls with rank, salary, uniform and privileges equal to the highest civil or military authorities in the respective districts, in order to prevent those many grievous injuries which can never be effectually addressed.”Footnote ¹⁷ In a similar vein, John Macpherson, the first US consul to Cartagena (Colombia), claimed that while consular fees in some European ports were such “as to enable the Gentlemen holding the appointments, to support their families and make that appearance in society, which is expected from men holding high and responsible trusts,” in Cartagena these fees were “so trifling, that [he] never thought it worthwhile to keep an account of these.”Footnote ¹⁸

In another exposé on the subject, Macpherson wrote that “[n]o person who ever left the United States but must be sensible that the Consuls, should be placed on a footing, different to that on which they have stood, since the formation of the Federal government. At that time, our trade was in its infancy; we are now, in proportion to our population, the most commercial nation on Earth.” Contrasting the United States with its greatest European rival in South America, Macpherson claimed that it was “impossible duly to appreciate the advantages Great Britain derives from the Consular establishments; while the Consuls of the United States, comparatively speaking, are of little use, either to their Government or to their fellow citizens—the natural consequence of their being engaged in mercantile business and of their dependent situations.” Macpherson then drove the point home by concluding: “An American Consul, entangled in commercial pursuits (and this observation applies particularly to South America) is afraid of doing or saying anything that may possibly give offence.”Footnote ¹⁹

Ever since the establishment of the federal government, the unfair and unequal way in which the consular fee system operated had been a major source of aggravation for both merchants and consuls. This problem reached new proportions with the expansion of the US consular system to Central and South America, whose recently emancipated port cities offered more limited opportunities for sustaining consular operations from the collection of fees. In the absence of adequate regulation from the national capital, consuls across these new geographies took the initiative in crafting a more equitable regional fee system. “I have been endeavouring to establish a uniformity in the consular acts and consular charges, between this place, Tampico, and Havana,” explained the US consul to Veracruz (Mexico) in the summer of 1824, yet such attempts to unify the consular tariff system “from the outside in” faced the problems of geographic distance, disparate commercial turnovers, and unpredictable rotations in office.Footnote ²⁰ In addition, as the next section will explore in more detail, the introduction of the “spoils system” militated against these consular experimentations by establishing new consular offices filled by inexperienced and oftentimes unpopular appointees.

As a result of these institutional deficiencies, even the most entrepreneurial US consuls in Latin America found themselves advocating the abolition of the fee system. The most extensive testimony to this effect came from Henry Hill, an influential veteran with decades of consular experience in Havana, San Salvador, and Rio de Janeiro spanning the first decades of the nineteenth century. Though as a wealthy planter Hill hardly had to fear the grim prospects of US consuls dependent on their consular fees alone, he shared the opinion of his less fortunate colleagues in Mexico and Colombia that salarization was the only way for US consuls in the Americas to sustain their operations and compete with their European rivals. Unlike many other consuls who had just arrived in the wake of Latin American independence, Hill’s intimate knowledge of the region dated back to the colonial period, which lent his critique the weight of informed expertise. In 1805, Hill had assumed his first consular office in Havana from a predecessor who “had just escaped from prison as [Hill] arrived there … on a charge of contraband trade. The Consul at that time at Santiago [de Cuba], although a worthy and respectable Man previously, [had been] subjected to the same correction, upon a similar impeachment.” Hill also related the story of another “Consul so dependent and degraded as he must have been … even in his own opinion, as to have placed under the arms of the United States, inconspicuous Letters,—Commission business done here—with a shop board hung out, of the notions he had to sell.”Footnote ²¹

Hill’s tongue-in-cheek reference to James Anderson, a former consul in Havana who had subsequently assumed the consulate at Cette (France), revealed how damaging the pursuit of private gains had been to the exercise of public functions. So notorious were Anderson’s exploits, first as a commissioned trader of official information and later as a contraband smuggler of wines and spirits for federal officials, that Hill simply pointed to them without explicitly mentioning the office-holder in the probable assumption that the two federal clerks responsible for the consular correspondence would immediately identify him. Yet, amid all the notoriety of his deed, consul Anderson had “acquired a reputation for having made a fortune; the fees of office at that time, being equal to 1,200 Dollars per annum; and which,” Hill sarcastically added, “I foolishly relinquished to a sense of National right and official duty.”Footnote ²²

Coupled with the problem of creating perverse private incentives, the fee system also aggravated existing disparities among consular establishments. “[F]rom the extent and regularity of our commerce with the principal Ports of Europe, and the practices which in many places the Consuls have introduced, of charging agency—or their fees for passports, for residents certificates, for the imprisonment of Seamen, and for certificates to Invoices etc.,” Hill concluded that some consuls’ emoluments “must be very considerable, and place them beyond pecuniary necessities and dependence.” He calculated that the consulate in Liverpool might yield more than 10,000 Dollars annually, and those of “London, Hamburg, Amsterdam, Havre, Bordeaux, Cadiz, Gibraltar, and doubtless many others, must produce sufficient for dignified living.” These material considerations made the chief European ports “an object to respectable applications … in the selection of persons to fill them,” which “would appear not to be the care for many other situations, and particularly for most of the Ports in America.”Footnote ²³ The disparity of consular fees in Europe and the Americas created incentives to have a much more competitive selective process in the former than in the latter, which in turn undermined US commerce and foreign policy in the western hemisphere.

Coming from an experienced New England merchant with intimate ties to Cuban and Brazilian slaveholders, this harsh assessment of US consuls’ predilection for placing private gains above public duties was perplexing and revealing all at once. Despite his privileged mercantile background, Hill found himself in the unlikely position of having to criticize the fee system, one of the pivots of mercantile privilege in the consular system. Conscious of this tension, Hill professed “not [to] mention [him]self, any farther than to say, that [he had] necessarily been obliged to engage in Commission and other business as a Merchant, and very often in such as to feel a degradation of public character.” At its heart, the policy of allowing consuls to engage in commerce presented a significant obstacle as consuls’ commercial pursuits inadvertently tarnished their public character, which in turn was of essential importance to respectable businessmen.

In a curious mirroring of Livingston’s argument, Hill suggested that allowing merchants to monopolize the consulate was in fact bad for business. In Hill’s assessment, standardizing the fee system would help resolve discrepancies among consular offices but it would not really address the wider issue of disentangling private gain and public interest, a key component of the Jacksonian war on privilege. “The Salaries of Consuls,” Hill concluded, “may be fixed by the President, according to the relative importance of their situations, distance from their Country, climate, deprivations, characters and services, and the advantages they derive from Emoluments of office—and they should have some prospect from a routine of advancement.”Footnote ²⁴ The nuanced differences in Livingston’s and Hill’s arguments for salarization, then, led to very different policy proposals, with the former emphasizing a standardized salary as a means to assuring equal competency and greater fairness on the part of the federal government and the latter advocating a more sophisticated and competitive system attuned to geographical differences and individual merits.

Notwithstanding their disparate commercial interests, political investments, and geographic locations, US consuls across the western hemisphere painted a strikingly similar picture of a widening Atlantic chasm that placed them in a sensible disadvantage to their colleagues in the Old World. Whereas US consuls in lucrative ports across Europe could rely on a steady income from fees and certificates, the prospects for their colleagues in the recently emancipated Spanish American republics, Brazil, and the Caribbean were much more uncertain. The novelty and force of these arguments “from the south” was compounded by a changing global political geography of antebellum consulship. As US consulates spread across Latin America and new regions of the globe, they challenged the outdated Eurocentric structure of the federal administration, pushing consular reform to the front of the national political agenda. Within Andrew Jackson’s presidential tenure, US consulates in Central and South America came to equal the number of those in Europe, accentuating the hemispheric dynamics of the US foreign policy state’s formation (see Figure 2). Though no longer the focal point of the US consular system, Europe nonetheless retained a great importance in the realm of Jacksonian consular reform, becoming a ubiquitous reference point for successive reform endeavors across the Atlantic.

Figure 2. Number of US consulates. 1828–1861, select years.Footnote ²⁵

Given these disparities, it is hardly surprising that US consuls in the Americas played a crucial role in placing a more revolutionary vision of consular reform high on the federal agenda. Indeed, their strategic arguments for standardized salaries and tariffs dovetailed with Andrew Jackson’s and Edward Livingston’s interest in crafting a more coherent and advantageous US foreign policy approach to the Americans of the south. With unprecedented commercial opportunities beckoning in places such as Mexico and Cuba and Creoles eagerly embracing consular relations as a pathway toward diplomatic recognition and reciprocity, consular reform emerged not only as an “internal” state imperative but as a major marker of global prestige and an essential tool for attaining commercial advantages in a competitive global setting.

The tenor of these US consular voices from the western hemisphere was remarkably synchronous: The unfair and dated fee system had been problematic enough across Europe, but the emergence of independent Latin American nations made it simply unsustainable. The dynamics of nation-building in the western hemisphere necessitated much more energetic policy changes in Washington than the sustainment of commercial relations in Europe. First and foremost, the differentiation between the consul’s public and private functions, attainable through salarization and a ban on mercantile pursuits, was of the utmost importance in the fluid, open-ended environment in the wake of Latin American independence. If the United States desired to make the most of this historic opportunity, the federal administration and Congress had no other option but to empower US consuls into full-fledged agents of an aggressive foreign policy state eager to project its commercial vision across the continent. Only in a revolutionary setting bristling with unprecedented opportunities could merchants earnestly propagate the idea that the universal salvation for US commerce was to turn the public agent of the merchant community into a salaried federal employee. To explain why reformers were eventually successful in their pursuits, and why it took three decades to institutionalize their policy proposals on the federal level, the next section interrogates the consular reform agenda against the backdrop of a signal political development in the Jacksonian era, the institution of the “spoils system.”

The “Spoils System” and the Politics of Consular Reform

If what undermined Livingston’s consular reform plan of 1833 was the radical nature of its salarization scheme, then what militated against its subsequent adoption was its incompatibility with certain key features of the Jacksonian political patronage system commonly referred to as the “spoils system.” Scholars of the antebellum state regard President Jackson’s practice of dismissing rival office-holders and replacing them with his political protégés as an important turning point in the history of the early American state.Footnote ²⁶ This practice, they argue, sought to institute an unprecedented partisan following directly beholden to the President, and create a major power base for the establishment of Democratic hegemony in the 1830s. What remains rather vague in these scholarly accounts is how political patronage worked: Did political appointees turn into presidential underlings, and how pliant were they to pressure from the federal administration? How did the “spoils system” affect those federal officials working thousands of miles away from the national territory? Were these faraway offices tangential or impervious to partisan changes at the nation’s center?

Several aspects of the consular service make it a particularly inviting site for interrogating how the “spoils system” worked. To begin with, the practice of recalling and substituting consuls had been quite common in the decades prior to Jackson’s ascendancy.Footnote ²⁷ The seemingly low political stakes of these offices and their lower prestige vis-à-vis “domestic” appointments made them particularly suitable for a large body of men close enough to the political power-holders to warrant a federal office but not close enough to render their services indispensable to the day-to-day operations of government (or so the power-holders oftentimes thought). But the logistical intricacies of the office further complicated these general political calculations to a point where it was oftentimes unclear—both to the administrator appointing the consul and the consul himselfFootnote ²⁸—whether the appointment was a reward or a punishment. The geographic distance and the idiosyncrasies of the consular service—a tedious bureaucratic task not appealing to many elites—seemed to render consular appointments eminently feasible as a type of political ostracism rather than as a badge of loyal partisanship. Indeed, it oftentimes seemed as if the greatest practicability of assigning political protégés to the consulate was the impracticability of leaving dozens of such offices across the world, along with the compounded power they entailed, in the hands of political rivals. All these intricacies complicated the way in which the “spoils system” operated, creating new challenges and opportunities for consuls and consulship seekers to navigate a complex institutional framework whose rules, norms, and conditions were largely of the consuls’ own making.

The integration of the consular system into the political patronage apparatus instituted by Andrew Jackson therefore operated along lines fundamentally different from those of domestic politics. Nowhere else did the stakes of politicizing consulship seem higher and more threatening to the entire Jacksonian reform project than in Latin America. The political bickering among Creole nation-builders and the absence of proper diplomatic agents in the region created numerous opportunities for foreign consuls to assume, as Livingston put it, “occasionally diplomatic functions,” something that jeopardized their strictly commercial responsibilities.Footnote ²⁹ Recognizing the dangers arising from the politicization of a fundamentally commercial agency, Livingston instructed all US consuls in this region “to abstain from all participation whatever, direct or indirect, in the political concerns of the countries to which they are appointed.” Drawing attention to “the disturbed and unsettled condition of the Republics of the South American and United Mexican States,” Livingston specifically reminded US consuls in those states to “forbear intermeddling with their political or local affairs in the smallest degree whatever.”Footnote ³⁰

Despite Livingston’s admonition, the unsettled political landscape across Latin America rendered it a major site for all kinds of experiments with political appointments. In a lengthy and embarrassing series of Jacksonian protégés—some of whom we will discuss shortly—nobody came close to the notoriety of Nicholas Trist, a great-grandson of Thomas Jefferson who assumed the US consulate in Havana in 1833. In a manner that markedly differed from the established pattern of consular appointments, President Jackson personally instructed Trist in the execution of his consular duties, manifesting the political nature of his decision. In contrast to other offices in the hemisphere, the US consulate in Havana was among the most sought-after posts in the federal administration. With US-Cuban commerce booming, the consulate in the island’s capital promised a lucrative income and the opportunity to exercise political power in one of Spain’s last colonial bastions in the Americas.Footnote ³¹

Not a man to miss an opportunity of this magnitude, Trist began using his consular office as an instrument for strengthening the ties between slaveholding elites in the United States and Cuba. Away from the territorial jurisdiction of his country, Trist openly neglected Livingston’s General Instructions, an updated set of regulations that established a basic framework for the conduct of consular duties. In spite of Livingston’s attempt to update and standardize this important part of every consul’s induction into his service, the deficiencies of the General Instructions and the stagnation of consular reform in Washington left consuls with plenty of space to misinterpret or simply abuse these federal regulations as they saw fit. Conceived as a consultative body of provisions, the Instructions lacked binding character which made them practically unenforceable. Empowered by the lack of executive or legislative control over his actions, Trist began openly neglecting those of them that hampered his political goals. Chief among these was the instruction empowering consuls with the policing of the slave trade, one of the most lucrative economic activities in mid-nineteenth-century Cuba. Initially alarmed at "the unusual activity of the Slave trade, and the number of vessels brought from the United States to be put under the Spanish flag,” Trist effectively exempted himself from policing the slave trade by stating “that no man’s life would be at all safe after his appearing against [those engaged in the slave trade] as an informer.” “So well persuaded am I of this,” the consul stated, “that I should deem it a very cruel and unpardonable breach of personal confidence, to communicate to my government even, without his express sanction, the name of any individual who might have relied so far upon my discretion and honor as to put his life into my hands by making any disclosures in relation to the doings of these gentry.”Footnote ³²

Although Trist’s involvement with Cuban slavers gained international notoriety, the mandate of having a Jacksonian protégé consul in Havana seemed to outweigh the great damage Trist was inflicting upon his nation’s reputation in an Atlantic World marked by ascendant anti-slaving sentiments. Proclaiming Livingston’s instructions “a dead letter,” Trist in fact turned the inability of the federal administration to guide its consuls and enforce its will into an argument for completely disempowering the national center in all matters consular. Using the opacity of the General Instructions, and oftentimes sarcastically mocking their impotence, Trist began granting his consular certificates to Cuban slavers, who used US consular papers in their illegal transatlantic voyages. In the late 1830s, the US consul breached yet another federal regulation by assuming the office of Portuguese consul in Havana, which further augmented Cuban slavers’ ability to circumvent international agreements. After the establishment of the Republic of Texas in 1835, Trist brokered arrangements of shipping liberated Africans from Havana to this new slaveholding republic, where these unfortunate individuals faced re-enslavement and the harsh reality of plantation labor. During the 1830s, Trist’s neglect of federal regulations gradually morphed into outright hostility toward the federal administration accompanied by notorious breaches of federal and international law. For a man interested in proving how useless the federal administration was, Trist did a marvelous job by breaking as many of its regulations as he was capable of, and then blaming the administration for it. Trist’s example set an important precedent for other political protégés to push their authority beyond the limits recognized by federal or, for that matter, international law.Footnote ³³

Though Trist’s appointment to the consulate helped facilitate US slaveholding interests in Cuba, his methods deeply divided the local mercantile and maritime community. US mariners routinely complained of Trist’s and his colleagues’ divisive attempts to place private enrichment and political favoritism above the time-honored consular duty of providing for the wellbeing of the national diaspora. In 1839, 96 American mariners accused Trist of “casting [them] into hen coops or dungeons,” despotically “refusing and depriving [them] of choosing or dictating [their] place of abode,” and dividing the gains with local landlords.Footnote ³⁴ A group of sixty-one merchants and shipmasters joined their protest by claiming that Trist’s conduct had a “tendency to monopoly.”Footnote ³⁵ In the face of mounting resistance and an impending congressional investigation, Trist left Havana in 1840. His excesses in the position of US consul became a notorious example of the quandaries of the “spoils system” and the necessity of radical consular reform.

Though Trist’s case gained particular notoriety, similar clashes between merchants, mariners and protégé consuls recurred throughout a variety of locales in the antebellum period. In Trinidad, Cuba’s third major town, the consular appointment of Democratic protégé Hiram Hastings enraged local merchants who detested the politicization of their hitherto monopolistic hold of the consulate. One of them opined that Hastings was “in every way totally unfit for the situation—which every merchant and resident of the place will confirm.” On the grounds that he was “more extensively engaged in the trade to that place, than anyone else,” the merchant-petitioner believed “that any change whatsoever, that could be made in the Consulship, would tend to increase the respect of the inhabitants for the United States, and would be gladly received by every merchant and sailor that ever entered the harbor.”Footnote ³⁶ Similar to Trist’s sacking, this cross-class coalition in Trinidad successfully effected Hastings’s recall.

As these examples show, the “spoils system” complicated the Jacksonian movement for consular reform by mobilizing mercantile defiance and creating new venues for cross-class resistance. Time and again, Jacksonian consular appointees met the collective resistance of the mercantile community whose members either circumvented certain politically allocated posts or openly challenged political appointees’ consular authority.Footnote ³⁷ By depriving protégé consuls of their income in fees and certificates, merchants skillfully exploited their collective bargaining power even against their most recalcitrant rivals. By striking at consular finances, these mercantile strategies drove protégé consuls into seeking alternative sources of income via the exploitation of mariners’ labor and controversial arrangements with local authorities.

Mariners bore the brunt of the frictions precipitated by the introduction of the “spoils system” across the expanding geography of antebellum consulship. The 1840s witnessed a particularly dramatic reversal of mariners’ bargaining power in their interactions with merchants, ship masters, and federal officials. In an act regulating the shipment and discharge of seamen and the duties of consuls (July 20, 1840), a Democratic Congress revised the dated federal legislation regulating consuls’ responsibilities in relieving sailors. With the most recent acts on the subject reaching back to the War of 1812, Congress provided for a dramatic extension of consular authority over US mariners in foreign ports. Mandating the delivery of uniform ship papers to consuls and stipulating the involvement of consuls in all disputes arising from the contractual obligations of mariners, ship masters, and merchants, the act of 1840 made consuls into universal arbiters of maritime conflicts.

Mariners immediately began taking advantage of this provision by drawing on consuls’ authority in the numerous examples of shipmasters’ excesses. In 1841, for example, the US consular appointee to Baracoa, Fritz McGready, intervened on behalf of William Johnson, a free colored cook who wished to escape an abusive captain, by ensuring that the former was “taken good care of by the Governor,” and released as soon as possible. McGready did the same for several other of his unfortunate compatriots and an English doctor whom he sheltered in his house.Footnote ³⁸ On other occasions, this reconfiguration of power at the US consulate led to mercantile backlashes. In 1843, for example, a US merchant in Trinidad (Cuba) accused a Jacksonian consular appointee of “illegally discharg[ing] the cook of [a] vessel” and detaining the man for three months as a means of reimbursing outstanding consular fees and services.Footnote ³⁹ Using their newly acquired power over mariners, Jacksonian consuls were thus able to strike back at those merchants who refused to recognize their authority.

Though this tension between consuls and merchants created new opportunities for mariners to escape excessive violence and play off these groups against each other, their prospects were nevertheless circumscribed by yet another provision of the act of 1840 which freed merchants of their obligation to pay three months’ worth of wages in cases of dismissing mariners or terminating their contracts. Dating back to 1803, when the Jeffersonian administration had invested its consuls with the power to protect national sailors against the impressment of its European rivals, the provision of three months’ advance wages for discharged sailors was one of the chief protections for US mariners against the predatory practices of ship captains and merchants. Instead of merely empowering Jacksonian consuls to act as mediators between merchants and sailors, the act of 1840 thus created an inherently charged constellation in which consuls, merchants, and sailors all acquired new incentives to regard their interrelationships as a zero-sum game of opposed interests and strategic combinations.

Frustrated though they were with having to contend with a new class of protégé consuls, mercantile elites nonetheless proved remarkably adaptive to these changes in consular regulations. In less than a decade after the passing of the act of 1840, merchants effectively managed to transfer the costs of deporting US sailors to the federal treasury, prompting the protest of Secretary of State James Buchanan. “When the master of a vessel employs [seamen] on a foreign voyage,” Buchanan reasoned in his 1846 report on the consular system, “it is but fair that he should stipulate for their safe return. On him, and not upon the government, ought to devolve the charge of bringing them back to their country.”Footnote ⁴⁰ With the abolition of the three months’ wage clause, merchants were not only able to outsource the costs of relieving sailors to the federal government but also to exploit mariners’ resentment against the transformation of their ancient protector into a salaried federal employee. In cases of unpopular consular appointments such as those of Trist and Hastings, merchants used their better position at the bargaining table to conspire with mariners for the dismissal of their institutional protectors.

As merchants could not fully explore the contradictions of the “spoils system” in their correspondence with often hostile Democratic administrations, they took their fight to more receptive outlets. Exploiting reformers’ disagreements about remuneration and drawing on widespread hostility toward the “spoils system,” opponents of comprehensive consular reform argued that the policies advanced by their Jacksonian peers harmed US commerce and the ubiquitous national character instead of promoting them. In a series of articles published on the subject in several 1846 issues of the influential New York Daily Tribune¸ “A Merchant” could simply not “perceive that the merchant’s interest would be protected any better by a salaried Consul than one engaged in trade, under the present system of appointments.”Footnote ⁴¹ “Surely,” the author claimed, “a practical merchant is more fitted to be a Commercial Agent (a Consul is no more) than one of any other profession, provided always, that he be selected with strict reference to his abilities and character.” Political appointments in remote Caribbean ports, rather than the fee system, were undermining the utility of US consular representation. The editors of the newspaper agreed with the anonymous author: “The plan of making our Consuls salaried officers will increase the burdens [sic] of the People, tend to increase the number of Consuls, and depreciate the quality.” “Now we often have the right sort of men appointed, where the emoluments are no object,” the editors argued. “[U]nder the salary system,” the newspaper predicted, “they would all be hack politicians.”Footnote ⁴²

In an article published several days later, “Merchant” contended that “[t]he idea of removing or obviating the difficulties with which our countrymen are beset in the more obscure Consulates of the United States, by salaried officers, is a vagary of the imagination.”Footnote ⁴³ “Merchant” observed that “where the duties of a Consul were confided to a merchant of standing,” there “was no cause of complaint, but the moment that they devolved upon the person of an adventurer … all confidence was lost.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The writer even recollected “an instance in one of the ports of the island of Cuba of a Consul who had nothing but the perquisites of his office to depend upon for a support, and they would not suffice for the wants of a New York beggar, yet he was content to remain there and pick up a precarious subsistence by squeezing out a few extra dollars” from every mariner unfamiliar with the fee system. “[O]nce make these petty Consulates salaried officers,” the author of the letter predicted, “and there will be no end of abuses of this kind.”Footnote ⁴⁵ In response to ongoing conversations on Buchanan’s consular reform bill, the Daily National Intelligencer likewise described US consuls as “mere commissioned paupers,” whose “dependent situation” put them at a disadvantage to the “very handsome commissions” extracted by foreign consuls. The article’s author explained that consular insolvency undermined legitimacy, expressing “a sincere desire that our consuls should be rendered comfortable, and, above all, respectable, abroad, that they may have due influence, and that they may be able to protect their countrymen when occasion requires.”Footnote ⁴⁶

The various antebellum outlets provided crucial venues for merchants to voice their politically informed critique of consular reform and the structures of political patronage. To achieve greater public impact, merchants mobilized a competing version of the national character so powerfully invoked by Jacksonian reformers in their plans and memoranda. Both proponents and opponents of consular reform thus shared a common understanding of the US consular system as a chief agency promoting the “national character” abroad, and both groups recognized respectability as the foremost characteristic distinguishing American citizenship abroad. Where they differed was in identifying the chief impediments toward achieving respectability, and, accordingly, in devising appropriate solutions. The majority of Jacksonian officials and protégé consuls advanced corruption and inequality as the chief ills of the existing consular system, which they hoped to combat by introducing a uniform system of salaries that would eliminate consuls’ private interests in the discriminative extraction of fees. In one report after another, proponents of Jacksonian reform argued that only salarization would address these issues and promote the best version of an egalitarian and disinterested national character.

From a very early point, these strategic deployments of national respectability sidelined potentially powerful allies who advocated a more gradual transition to salarization. More moderate proposals seeking to offset the costs of salarization by devising elaborate schemes of channeling consular fees to a common salary fund neither solved the problem of ensuring the promotion of a respectable “national character” at commercially marginal ports nor did they address the root issue of constant fee disputes between consuls and merchants.Footnote ⁴⁷ Speaking for the majority of his peers across these more marginal locations the US consul to Trinidad (Cuba) explained: “The compensation by fees to a Consul is totally inadequate to his support, and tends to lessen him in the eyes of his countrymen; who cannot but view him in the light of an individual maintained at their expense; much of that utility and influence which his station should command, is consequently lost.”Footnote ⁴⁸ To solve this inherent and irreconcilable tension between his public duty and the trappings of commerce, the US consul needed to receive his subsistence from the federal government.

By contrast, the mercantile defenders of the status quo regarded commercial inexperience and political commitments as the gravest threats to promoting a respectable national character in foreign lands. Using the excesses of the “spoils systems” as evidence for the inability of the federal government to promote national commerce and protect the “national character” from relapsing into dependency, merchant-consuls mounted highly successful resistance against Jacksonian reform endeavors. Far from being on the defensive, this old mercantile lobby in fact saw its position strengthened in the decades following Livingston’s reform plan, both in its capacity to dismiss or co-opt sailors and in its ability to manipulate consuls. It may very well be that this old mercantile lobby, already established in the Old World but only slowly gaining a foothold in the Americas, would have emerged victorious and retracted the entire Jacksonian reform agenda. What prevented this outcome was both the unpredictable and flexible way in which the “spoils system” operated, and the constant pressure protégé consuls were able to exercise on the federal administration by forging a perception that America was lagging behind its thoroughly bureaucratized, salaried European rivals.