had yet been made, being
forced to an unusually high percentage of new appointments by the
necessity of removing Southerners. In his hands the patronage became an
additional weapon for the Union, upholding the leaders in Congress, and
striking at the backsliders. In the election of 1864 the Union party
carried all the branches of the Government, and it had a vision of four
years of complete control of the offices when the death of Lincoln
brought a Tennessee Democrat into the White. House.

The discussion of civil service reform, on theoretical grounds, began
about 1865, when the evil of removals for party purposes was shown to
the Senate. Johnson was trying to use the patronage for his own ends, in
opposition to the will of the radicals in Congress. Reformers who
maintained the iniquity of this custom now found temporary converts
among the Republicans. They got a committee appointed on the civil
service in 1866, and President Grant announced his conversion to the
principle early in his Administration.

In 1871 Congress tried the experiment of a modest appropriation
($25,000) for a reform of the civil service, and Grant placed the test
in the hands of George William Curtis, a leader of the new reform. The
commission breasted the whole current of politics, found that Grant
would not support it in critical cases, and was abandoned by Congress
after a short trial. The demand, however, increased, receiving the
support of the independents who were Liberal Republicans in 1872, and
who thereafter constituted a menace to party regularity. Schurz, Godkin,
and Curtis were their admitted leaders. In 1872 and 1876 they persuaded
the great parties to put general pledges for civil service reform into
their platforms. Schurz, as Secretary of the Interior under Hayes, put
their ideal partly into practice. In 1881 they were a well-recognized
body of advocates, with a definite doctrine of non-partisan efficiency,
which few politicians denied in principle or liked in fact.

Public attention was focused upon the civil service by the events of
1881. The fight between Garfield and Conkling raised not only the
question of the relative rights of President and Senate in appointments,
but that of the use of offices for the support of political machines.
The frauds uncovered in postal administration by the star-route
investigations could hardly have occurred in a department administered
by experienced and competent officials. The murder of Garf