While federal civil service reform is generally dated from the post–Civil War period, the political roots of the reform effort go back much earlier—to the beginning of the republic. Thomas Jefferson was the first president to face the problem of a philosophically hostile bureaucracy. While sorely pressed by his supporters to remove Federalist officeholders and replace them with Republican par-tisans, Jefferson was determined not to remove officials for political reasons alone. He maintained in a letter in 1801 to William Findley that “Malconduct is a just ground of removal, mere difference of political opinion is not.” With occasional defections from this principle, even by Jefferson himself, this policy was the norm rather than the exception down through the administration of Andrew Jackson. President Jackson’s rhetoric on the nature of public service was far more influential than his adminis-trative example. In claiming that all men, especially the newly enfranchised who did so much to elect him, should have an equal opportunity for public office, Jackson played to his plebeian constituency and put the patrician civil service on notice that they had no natural monopoly on public office. The spoils system, used only modestly by Jackson, flourished under his successors. The doctrine of rota-tion of office progressively prevailed over the earlier notion of stability in office.