Definition
An officer appointed by the Secretary of State to assist in the administration of the State Department. The Chief Clerk of the Department of State, as historically designated, operates under the direct superintendence of the Secretary and assumes temporary custody and charge of all records, books, and papers belonging to the department in the event of a vacancy in the Secretary's office — whether caused by presidential removal or any other circumstance. The position reflects an early structural feature of the executive branch ensuring continuity of departmental operations during leadership transitions.
Note: The source entry as preserved in Bouvier's appears to be a fragment of a longer entry, likely truncated at "The other executive departments," suggesting the original text continued with a comparative discussion of analogous positions in other cabinet-level departments.
Common Confusion
"Ment of State" as a headword does not exist as an independent legal term. It should not be treated as a defined concept separate from "Department of State." Researchers who encounter this string in a database or index should treat it as a corrupted rendering of the parent entry and consult the full Bouvier's text accordingly.
Why It Matters in Research
This entry is fragmentary. Researchers encountering "Ment of State" in historical legal sources should recognize it as an artifact of incomplete transcription or digitization of what was almost certainly the entry "DEPARTMENT OF STATE" or a sub-entry under that heading in Bouvier's Law Dictionary. The truncation at "The other executive departments" strongly suggests the original entry continued with parallel descriptions of the Chief Clerk function across the War Department, Treasury Department, and other early executive departments — a common organizational pattern in nineteenth-century administrative law commentary.
Researchers working with early federal administrative structure should be cautious when relying on digitized versions of Bouvier's and similar historical dictionaries. OCR errors, page-break artifacts, and binding damage frequently produce corrupted headwords of this kind. The substantive content here — the role of a subordinate officer holding custodial authority over departmental records during a vacancy — is a genuine and important concept in early American administrative law, but it should be traced through the intact "DEPARTMENT OF STATE" entry rather than this fragment.
The underlying legal principle (interim custodial authority over government records during an executive vacancy) retains relevance in research touching on continuity of government, acting officer doctrine, and the constitutional and statutory framework governing temporary succession in executive departments.
Historical Dictionary Support
Bouvier's Law Dictionary provides the only source material here, and the entry as preserved is plainly incomplete. The fragment describes the Chief Clerk of the Department of State in terms consistent with the Organic Act establishing the department and early federal administrative practice. Bouvier correctly identifies the dual triggering conditions for the Chief Clerk's assumption of custodial authority: presidential removal of the Secretary and any other vacancy scenario.
What the fragment does not preserve — but almost certainly addressed in the full entry — is the comparable structure in other executive departments, which followed the same basic model. Historical dictionaries of the period, including early editions of Black's, would have addressed "Department of State" as a unit; the fragmented headword here is a transcription anomaly rather than a distinct legal term of art.