The Pendleton Act and the Assassination That Created the Civil Service

On the morning of July 2, 1881, President James Garfield walked into the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington to catch a train out of the summer heat. He had been in office for four months. Waiting for him was a slight, rumpled man named Charles Guiteau, who had spent much of that spring haunting the White House and the State Department. Guiteau had convinced himself that a rambling speech he had written in support of Garfield's campaign had helped win the election, and that he therefore deserved a reward: an appointment as American consul in Paris, or perhaps Vienna. He had written letters. He had waited in anterooms. He had been told, finally and firmly, to stop asking. That morning he stepped up behind the president and fired twice with a revolver he had chosen, among other reasons, because he thought it would look good in a museum. As police seized him, he announced that he was a Stalwart, a member of the Republican faction that hated Garfield's reformers, and that Vice President Chester Arthur would now be president. Arthur, of all people, would go on to sign the law that ended the system Guiteau believed he had earned his way into.

In short: For most of the nineteenth century, federal jobs were handed out as political rewards. The assassination of President Garfield by a disappointed office-seeker in 1881 turned years of reform agitation into a national demand, and in January 1883 Congress passed the Pendleton Act, creating a merit-based civil service. That system, much expanded, is what debates over firing federal workers are about today.

The spoils system, and why it lasted

The practice of handing government jobs to political supporters has a long history, but it took its American shape in the 1820s and 1830s. Andrew Jackson defended what he called rotation in office: the idea that ordinary citizens could do government work and that regular turnover would prevent a permanent class of officials. A New York senator, William Marcy, gave the system its name when he defended it with a line about the victors being entitled to the spoils.

There was a democratic argument for it, and it is worth taking seriously. Before Jackson, federal offices had often been held by a narrow group of educated, well-connected men. Rotation opened jobs to people outside that circle and tied government more closely to the voters' choices.

But the system had costs that grew with the country. Every new administration faced a flood of applicants. Abraham Lincoln complained about the office-seekers who lined the halls of the White House even as the Civil War began. Officials hired for loyalty were often unqualified. And jobs came with obligations. Federal employees were expected to work for the party at election time and to kick back a share of their salaries, known as assessments, to the party that had hired them.

The machine depended on this money and labour. Party bosses controlled appointments to the most lucrative offices, and the most lucrative of all was the New York Custom House, which collected a large share of the government's revenue and carried a very large payroll. For several years its collector was a polished machine Republican named Chester Arthur, until President Rutherford Hayes, a reformer, removed him in 1878.

Stalwarts, Half-Breeds and a convention compromise

By 1880 the Republican Party was split. The Stalwarts, led by Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York, defended patronage and wanted Ulysses Grant to have a third term. Their rivals, called Half-Breeds by the Stalwarts, were more open to reform. Neither faction could win the nomination at the party's convention in Chicago, and after many ballots the delegates turned to Garfield, an Ohio congressman and Civil War general who had not been a candidate. To placate the Stalwarts, the convention put Arthur, Conkling's protégé, on the ticket as vice president.

Garfield won narrowly. Then the fight over appointments resumed almost at once. When Garfield nominated a Conkling rival to run the New York Custom House, Conkling treated it as a declaration of war. In May 1881 he and the other senator from New York, Thomas Platt, resigned their seats, expecting the state legislature to reelect them as a show of strength. The legislature declined. The Stalwarts were humiliated, and the press was full of their bitterness when Guiteau fired his shots.

Guiteau acted alone. Nobody in the Stalwart leadership had any part in the crime. But his words at the station linked the assassination, in the public mind, to the patronage fight, and that link would make the case for reform.

Seventy-nine days

Garfield did not die quickly. The bullet that struck his back lodged deep in his body, and his doctors could not find it. They probed the wound repeatedly, often with unwashed fingers and instruments, at a time when the germ theory of infection was gaining acceptance in Europe but not yet among many American physicians. Alexander Graham Bell, the inventor of the telephone, rigged up an electrical device to locate the bullet; it failed, possibly because of the metal springs in the president's bed.

Through the hot summer the country followed bulletins on the president's condition. In September he was moved to a cottage on the New Jersey shore, at Elberon, in the hope that sea air would help. He died there on September 19, 1881. Many historians and physicians have since concluded that infection introduced by his doctors, more than the bullet itself, killed him.

Arthur became president under a cloud. Many Americans assumed that a product of the Conkling machine would bring the spoils system back with a vengeance. Among those worried was a woman in New York named Julia Sand, who did not know him and who wrote him a series of letters urging him to rise above his past. He kept them.

The trial that kept the story alive

Guiteau's trial opened in Washington in November 1881 and ran into January 1882. It was one of the great public spectacles of the century, and it kept the question of patronage in the newspapers for months after the president's death.

His lawyers argued that he was insane, and there was plenty of evidence that he was deeply disturbed: a history of failed schemes, a stint in a utopian religious community, delusions that God had commanded the shooting. Guiteau himself rejected the idea that he was legally insane while insisting that he had acted under divine inspiration. He interrupted witnesses, insulted his own lawyers, read poems and solicited support from spectators. The prosecution argued that he knew what he was doing and knew it was wrong, which was the legal test of the day.

The jury convicted him in January 1882. The case became a landmark in arguments over the insanity defense, and physicians debated his mental state for years afterward.

For the reform movement, the trial did something more specific. Day after day, the country heard a man explain that he had expected a government job as payment for political work, and that when he did not get it he had decided the president must go. Guiteau was an extreme case. But the expectation he described, that public office was a reward owed to party workers, was the ordinary logic of the spoils system, spoken aloud in a courtroom by the man who had killed the president.

A reform movement waiting for its moment

The idea of a merit-based civil service did not begin with Garfield's death. Reformers had argued for it since the end of the Civil War, pointing to the British civil service, which had moved toward competitive examinations in the 1850s. A Civil Service Commission had even existed briefly under Grant, before Congress stopped funding it. Reformers in New York had organized an association to press the cause, and the lawyer Dorman Eaton helped draft a bill.

Its Senate sponsor was George Pendleton of Ohio, an unlikely champion. He was a Democrat, a party that had hoped to enjoy the spoils of federal power after decades out of the White House, and he had been the vice-presidential nominee on the Democratic ticket in 1864. He saw that reform had become popular.

What moved Congress, in the end, was the 1882 midterm elections. Republicans lost heavily in the House. Reform had become a political issue, and Republican leaders saw two reasons to act quickly in the lame-duck session: voters wanted it, and protecting the federal employees their party had appointed from being thrown out by a future Democratic administration had its attractions too. The bill passed both houses by large margins, and Arthur, surprising many people who had expected him to resist, signed it on January 16, 1883.

What the law actually did

The Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act was modest in scope, but its design was clever.

• Competitive examinations. Certain federal jobs would be filled through open, competitive exams testing practical fitness for the work, not party loyalty.
• A bipartisan commission. A three-member Civil Service Commission, with no more than two members from the same party, would run the system.
• No forced contributions. Federal employees could not be required to contribute to political campaigns or be fired for refusing, and political fundraising in federal offices was restricted.
• Protection from political firing. Employees in covered jobs could not be dismissed for refusing to do political work or make political contributions.

At first the law covered only about one in ten federal jobs, mostly in large customs houses and post offices and in Washington. But it allowed presidents to extend coverage to more positions by executive order. Here self-interest helped. Presidents leaving office found it attractive to move their own appointees into the protected service, so that the next administration could not fire them. Over the following decades coverage expanded steadily, and by the middle of the twentieth century most federal civilian jobs were in the merit system.

One of the commissioners who made the system work was a young New York politician named Theodore Roosevelt, who served on the Civil Service Commission from 1889 to 1895 and fought with members of his own party over enforcing the rules.

The honest case against it, then and now

The opponents of 1883 were not all corrupt. Some made the same democratic argument Jackson had: that a permanent class of officials, protected from removal, would become arrogant and unresponsive, an aristocracy of office. Others worried that examinations would favour people with formal education, shutting out the working men who had benefited from patronage.

Those concerns have modern echoes. Today's critics of the civil service argue that protections make it hard to remove poor performers and allow career staff to resist the policies of elected leaders. Some argue for making large numbers of policy-related federal positions at-will, so that presidents have more control over the people who carry out their agenda.

The reformers' answer in 1883 still seems right to me. The question is not whether elected leaders should direct the government; they should. It is whether the clerk processing a veteran's pension, the inspector checking a ship's cargo or the scientist reviewing a drug should owe their job to a party. The spoils system did not produce a government more responsive to voters. It produced a government responsive to party bosses, staffed by people who were hired for loyalty and spent part of their time raising money and votes.

From Pendleton to now

The civil service system has been changed many times since 1883. The Hatch Act of 1939 limited federal employees' partisan political activity. The Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 replaced the old commission with separate agencies, including the Office of Personnel Management to run the system and the Merit Systems Protection Board to hear appeals. Over the years Congress added protections for whistleblowers and against discrimination.

In 2020 and again in 2025, President Trump issued orders creating a new category of federal jobs, first called Schedule F and later Schedule Policy/Career, that would make career employees in policy-related positions easier to fire. Supporters see it as restoring democratic control; critics see it as a return toward the spoils system. That debate is the latest chapter in an argument that began in a railway station in 1881.

What you can do

• Follow the fight over the federal workforce. Our coverage of the government being gutted tracks reclassifications, firings and court cases involving career civil servants.
• Speak up on personnel rules. Changes to civil service rules usually go through public comment. Our open comments page lists federal rules open now, closing soonest first, grouped by issue, with tips on writing a useful comment.
• Ask Congress to put protections in law. Use our representative lookup to find your representative and senators, their phone numbers and their latest votes, and ask whether they support writing merit protections into statute.
• Look for bipartisan work. The common ground page lists bills both parties passed together, a reminder that the Pendleton Act itself passed with support from both sides.

Charles Guiteau was hanged on June 30, 1882, convinced to the end that he had done God's work. The system he thought owed him a job outlived him by only a few months. The law that replaced it has protected generations of public servants who never met a party boss, and it is worth knowing how it was won before deciding whether to give it up.