When a New York Baron Became President

This article originally appeared on this site.

Early in 1881, before entering the White House, James Garfield recorded a peculiar dream about the Vice-President-elect, who would end up succeeding him before the summer was over. In “Destiny of the Republic” (2011), a surprise best-seller about Garfield’s assassination, Candice Millard explains that it was a dream

in which Chester Arthur drowned. [Garfield] and a close friend, General David Swaim, had escaped a sinking ship, only to watch Arthur, who was lying on a couch, very pale and obviously ill, disappear under the surface of the water. “I started to plunge into the water to save Arthur,” Garfield wrote, “but Swaim held me, and said he cannot be saved.”

Most nineteenth-century Vice-Presidents were too insignificant to get on a President’s calendar, let alone into his subconscious, but Garfield’s dream betrayed an anxiety about the political hack who had been chosen to balance the Republican ticket he headed. After Arthur’s unexpected ascent to the White House, it became, according to one American diplomat, “a common saying . . . among those who knew him best, ‘ “Chet” Arthur president of the United States! Good God!’ ”

A familiar question then arose, as to whether Arthur could somehow—to use latter-day political parlance—pivot, shed his crookedness, and begin to act “Presidential.” Eight months into Donald Trump’s Administration—already longer than Garfield’s—speculation about whether he might rise to the occasion has long since been discontinued. But for Arthur, another New York baron whose suspect character and surprising elevation spurred much public outcry, the story is different—a political fairy tale, contrary to Garfield’s dream, of partial but astonishing redemption.

Scott S. Greenberger’s new biography, “The Unexpected President” (Da Capo Press), mentions the whiff of birtherism that still clings to Arthur, who probably entered the world in Vermont on October 5, 1829, though some who were later desperate to prevent his succession spread rumors of a Canadian or even Irish nativity. Before Arthur’s arrival, his father, William, a teacher and law student, had been caught up in New England’s Second Great Awakening and became a Baptist minister—spellbinding, more or less itinerant, and fiercely abolitionist. Greenberger opens with a scene of William Arthur and six hundred antislavery activists inside an upstate New York church in 1835. They are waiting for a mob, led by the local congressman, to storm the premises.

Young Chester inherited some of his father’s emotionalism and none of his moral fervor. (Years later, his parents would actively disapprove of his high-and-loose living.) Like a surprising number of nineteenth-century American statesmen, he spent his undergraduate years as a big man on the little campus of Union College, in Schenectady, New York. He pursued a classical curriculum and delivered a graduation address on “The Destiny of Genius.” He lacked the second of those nouns for sure, and even his “destiny” could be better described as a matter of freakish fate. (Some would later call him “His Accidency.”) But he left college, Greenberger writes, with “soaring ambitions.” After a couple of schoolteaching stints—weirdly, the young James A. Garfield succeeded him as an instructor at Vermont’s little North Pownal academy—he went to New York to study law.

In 1855, he won a judgment for Elizabeth Jennings, an African-American schoolteacher who had been roughly thrown off a segregated New York streetcar. “For years after,” Greenberger notes, “the Colored People’s Legal Rights Association celebrated the anniversary of the verdict.” And yet one gets no sense that the case felt momentous for Arthur. When he went out to “Bleeding Kansas,” two years later, it was more for the money and the adventure than for any zeal to vote the territory into the Union as a free state. He was, in any event, soon called back to New York by the death of his fiancée’s father, Commander William Lewis Herndon, a sudden national hero who had gone down with his merchant ship after saving scores of women and children during a storm off Cape Hatteras.

Pre-Civil War New York—plush with great hotels and emporia, bursting with immigrant energy and rife with gangs—was tootling like a giant calliope when Arthur climbed aboard it for good. Patrons were essential, and he found two terrific ones: the wily old Thurlow Weed, known as the “dictator” of, first, New York State’s Whigs and then of its Republicans, a man whose smooth continuity derived from his sense that the spoils of office were more basic to politics than any position on the issues; and Edwin Morgan, a good-looking big businessman whom Weed made governor in 1858. With the outbreak of the war, Arthur’s “purely ornamental” job on Morgan’s staff turned consequential, involving as it did the acquisition of goods and supplies for many of the Union regiments which the Governor was now pledged to raise.

“General Arthur,” as he would be known for most of his life, proved an organizational whiz, his prominence a source of both pride and annoyance to his Confederate-sympathizing wife, Nell, from Fredericksburg, Virginia. When his job ended, early in 1863, with the Democrats’ capture of New York’s statehouse, Arthur succumbed to the allure of the revolving door, operational in politics a few decades before its appearance in architecture. Arthur “had become an expert in supplies, contracts and military law,” Greenberger writes. “Many people with similar skills and experience were making fortunes. Arthur set out to do the same.”

Arthur found his place in the Republicans’ non-radical wing, running the party machine’s “assessment” (i.e., kickback) operation, in which beholden political appointees returned a portion of their salaries. Arthur brought to this semi-subterranean world of cronies, cash, and cigars a bonhomie that gradually edged toward dissipation. The expensive clothes he craved were soon enveloping a comically swollen figure. Silas Burt, a Union College contemporary and an early good-government reformer—the Nick Carraway figure in any novelized version of Arthur’s story—was appalled. So was Nell, to a degree. But her own social ambitions left her more complicit than disapproving.

The Republican machine was entirely concerned with its own perpetual motion. By the eighteen-seventies, its central mechanism, the New York Custom House—a giant mouth for a manna of skimmable import duties—came under the control of Senator Roscoe Conkling. This figure of cruel and empty charisma became in some historical sense wedded to Arthur. Handsome and dandyish (no description fails to mention his “Hyperion curl”), Conkling, a fitness fanatic, had women swooning for him in the Senate gallery and pages fleeing from him on the floor. He possessed a brutal wit but no humor, a tremendous magnetism, and an aversion to being touched. He famously dallied with Kate Chase Sprague, the daughter of Lincoln’s Treasury Secretary and the wife of a Rhode Island politician who threatened to shoot him. But, as David M. Jordan, his biographer, argues, “Conkling was too enamoured of himself” to succumb to any romantic martyrdom.

Conkling had a handful of principles (racial tolerance, a touch of feminism) that he fitfully displayed, but his essential politics consisted of personal feuds, especially the one he had with his fellow-senator James G. Blaine, who had once mocked his “turkey-gobbler strut.” Most of the machine’s men saw public life as a checkerboard of toys and lucre, but Conkling regarded it as a prizefighting ring in which foes were to be bloodied and then pulped. In 1876, both he and Blaine failed to get the Republican nomination to succeed Ulysses S. Grant. Ohio’s governor, the pacific Rutherford B. Hayes—Conkling called him “Granny”—secured it on a seventh ballot, and went to the White House after an Electoral College dispute that makes the election of 2000 look like a civic model. The Republicans soon split into Conkling’s “Stalwarts”—pro-patronage and eager, after a decent interval, to restore the pliable, obliviously corrupted Grant—and Blaine’s more reform-minded “Half-Breeds,” their name one that Conkling no doubt relished.

Arthur, meanwhile, had in 1871 been appointed collector of the Custom House, a position described by Greenberger as “the most lucrative job in the entire federal government.” Well liked by the place’s minions, he supplemented Conkling’s brutal cut and thrust with his own emollient manner. His preselected employees never had to worry about the exams they sat as a matter of form. “Asked to name the three branches of the US government,” Greenberger writes, “candidate Charles F. Meserole answered, ‘the army and the navy.’ ” He passed. At home in his brownstone on Lexington Avenue (it’s still there), the new collector and his wife entertained even more grandly than before: “French servants wearing black swallowtail coats and pants, with immaculate white vests, cravats, and gloves were ‘as active as a set of monkeys’ in fetching food and drink.”

The party ended with President Hayes, who embraced reform on the first day of the single term to which he promised he would limit himself. A federal commission soon exposed the Custom House’s drolly named procedures. “Hatchets” were bribes paid by merchants; disembarking passengers who hoped to avoid scrutiny offered “bones.” Once the commission issued its report, superfluous employees (among them Herman Melville) were cashiered, and “assessments” were ended. (Custom House employees had sometimes paid them in an office on Hanover, or “Hand-Over,” Street.) Hayes succeeded in getting Arthur out of the collector’s job, but failed at replacing him with Theodore Roosevelt, Sr. Conkling killed the nomination, twice, in the Senate committee he controlled.

“Can you please just say ‘Fault,’ Gerald, and quit adding ‘is not in our stars but in ourselves’?”

Chester Arthur often gets lost in biographies of himself. He is eclipsed by the sulfuric glower of Conkling and the shining personality of Garfield. Until his last years, it’s hard to see his life from his own point of view, because he so often refused to have one, suppressing it in order to continue enjoying the feathers that others put into his nest. Greenberger’s short new book has a good deal of bounce and some genial, colorful overwriting (“The putrid carcasses kept bobbing to the surface”), but its author can seem nearly as dependent on his more definitive predecessor, Thomas C. Reeves, as Arthur was on Conkling. To say, as Greenberger does, that Reeves’s “Gentleman Boss” (1975) is “an invaluable roadmap” is not so much fulsome as inadequate. Greenberger forgivably tells the same tales as Reeves, but in places “The Unexpected President” closely mimics its antecedent with scant paraphrase and nary a quotation mark. Greenberger is not an academic historian—his previous book, written with the former senator Tom Daschle, was “Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis”—and his description of Lincoln’s “steady upward trajectory” in politics hardly gives the sense that he is steeped in the period.

Whether one sticks with Greenberger or returns to Reeves’s more thoroughgoing account, Arthur’s story attains a sudden, wild velocity from the moment he arrives with Conkling, “striding arm in arm” (same phrase, both books), at the Republicans’ June, 1880, Chicago Convention. Arthur was probably, in fact, leaning on him. Stripped of the collectorship, he was also now a grieving widower: in January, Nell, his pampered and neglected wife, had died from a sudden case of pneumonia contracted while her husband was away in Albany, wheeling and dealing.

The Stalwarts managed to prevent Blaine from getting the nomination, but Conkling’s bête noire was vanquished by a dark horse, not by Grant. The appealing Representative James A. Garfield, a bright, up-from-nothing war hero, had glimmers of Lincoln about him, without the spookiness. Through some back-channel miscommunications by Garfield’s lieutenants, the candidate’s need to mollify Conkling’s faction resulted, absurdly, in a proffer of the Vice-Presidency to the dismissed collector of the Custom House. Hayes’s Treasury Secretary, John Sherman, wrote, in amazement of Arthur’s sudden prominence, “He never held an office except the one he was removed from.”

Conkling, still in a tantrum over Grant’s loss, told Arthur he was not to accept the nod; for one thing, Garfield was bound to lose in the fall. But Arthur experienced a rare vertebrate moment, and told his benefactor, “The office of the vice-president is a greater honor than I ever dreamed of attaining. . . . In a calmer moment you will look at this differently.” He was still wearing his Grant button when he shook hands with Garfield and the delegates; he wept during the friendly reception he received back in New York. Conkling didn’t do calmer moments, but he soon enough granted Arthur an almost unique forgiveness. The deposed collector was permitted to use all his old organizational talents in New York, whose electoral votes put Garfield over the top in November. The Ohioan probably owed his Presidency to Arthur as much as vice versa.

After his moment of self-assertion in Chicago, Arthur reverted to his clubbable ways, tipsily bragging about the machine’s questionable tactics when reporters were present during a victory dinner at Delmonico’s. Once in Washington, he even moved in with Conkling. The two were soon making war on the President-elect, with Arthur present as Conkling dressed down Garfield the day before the Inauguration. Conkling had his reasons: the Cabinet contained no Stalwarts, and Blaine was now Secretary of State. Then the President appointed William H. Robertson, not a reformer but a Conkling foe, to the collector’s job. Thwarting this nomination proved to be harder than blocking Roosevelt’s. Conkling theatrically resigned his Senate seat, certain that the New York State legislature would reëlect him right away, but the plan backfired—no matter that Arthur, in grotesque revolt against his own President, went up to Albany to rally the Conkling forces. A Thomas Nast cartoon had him shining Conkling’s shoes.

This was roughly the situation on July 2, 1881, when word reached the two men just before they got off a steamboat in New York—no doubt arm in arm—that Garfield had been shot by Charles Guiteau, a man crazed with the desire for a patronage job. After shooting the President in the back, he proclaimed, “I am a Stalwart, and Arthur will be President.”

Garfield, brutalized by the incompetence of his chief physician, hung on for more than two months. Arthur’s first instinct was to sequester himself with Conkling, but he ended up spending much of this period by himself, a lonely widower often weeping inside his Lexington Avenue brownstone. His sense of inadequacy and shame impelled a transfiguration that was less political than psychological. What Reeves calls Arthur’s “deeply emotional, even romantic” nature came to the surface as he attached himself, mentally, to Garfield’s agonies. “As the President gets better, I get better too,” he told Blaine during some weeks of false hope. By the time the worst came to pass—he was reported “sobbing like a child” at the news of Garfield’s death—his summer of agitation, as Greenberger makes clear, had put him back in touch with the better angels of his nature and his more honorable, pre-machine résumé.

The change was aided by an unlikely, one-sided correspondence with a young Manhattan invalid named Julia Sand. The out-of-the-blue letters she sent Arthur were encouraging, frank, scolding, and firm: she was certain that, if he let himself, he could ride the whirlwind instead of reaping it—could travel, as Greenberger points out, toward the sort of redemption his father used to preach. She wrote:

Do what is more difficult & more brave. Reform! It is not the proof of highest goodness never to have done wrong—but it is a proof of it, sometime in one’s career, to pause and ponder, to recognize the evil, to turn resolutely against it & devote the remainder of one’s life to that only which is pure & exalted.

Sand came to call herself Arthur’s “little dwarf,” a court fool permitted to speak truth to power, but she more often sounds like the noble Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. Arthur kept her letters in a “special envelope” that would not be rediscovered until 1937. They continued to arrive throughout his Presidency, with advice that he avoid “half measures” and “smash” the machine he had driven for so long.

If the “Julia letters” exhibit a good deal of political and moral sagacity, they are also underpinned by a sad sort of longing. The idea of them is so charming that it’s easy to overestimate their effects. Both Greenberger and Millard prove susceptible to this; Reeves rather restrains himself. Arthur did surprise Sand, once, with a visit, but the occasion was spoiled for her by too many family members horning in.

One can also inflate Arthur’s transformation itself, and yet the creditable over-all record of his Presidency is undeniable. No visionary, he adopted a cautious, day-by-day approach to the job; assembled a competent Cabinet; and allowed his Secretary of State to pursue what Reeves calls a “formidable” and “expansionist” foreign policy. Frederick Douglass praised his support for civil rights, which included increased funding to black schools. He also revitalized the Navy and thoroughly redecorated the White House. (He didn’t call it a “dump,” but few Washingtonians would have objected to that description.)

Most noteworthy, perhaps, was Arthur’s support for civil-service reform. It was not quite a matter of Nixon going to China: the off-year elections of 1882 revealed a public thoroughly converted to the idea. But his signing of the Pendleton Act, through which merit began to displace politics in federal hirings, still had a vast and healthy irony to it. More important, he afterward chose not to go looking for loopholes but to implement it with considerable vigor.

He refused to make Conkling Secretary of State, and if he did offer him a seat on the Supreme Court it was because, Reeves argues, he felt “honor-bound” to give something to his by then thoroughly humiliated patron. He also knew there was a good chance that Conkling would turn it down: the Senator had refused to take the Chief Justiceship from Grant. In the end, he refused Arthur, too, and treated the President with rage when Arthur decided to keep Robertson in the collector’s job. He took to calling his onetime subordinate “the stalled ox of the White House.”

There is much that remains regrettable about Arthur’s tenure, including the Chinese Exclusion Act, a bill that he initially vetoed, with Sand’s support, only to sign later in a slightly revised form. But the net record is a fair-to-middling miracle, carried out by a man who for much of his short term was dying, in considerable discomfort. Bright’s disease, a kidney ailment, left Arthur prone to nausea, depression, and lassitude while he was in the White House. He never had any serious prospect of being nominated, in 1884, for a term of his own—the honor went to Blaine, completing Conkling’s belittlement—but his closely held awareness of his ill health made him urge supporters to desist from any efforts on his behalf. He retired to the New York brownstone, where he burned many of the papers from his machine years, an act of both shame and pride: he knew that the squalor they depicted had also been the prelude to something semi-splendid. He was dead at fifty-seven. The obituaries were respectful, and Abraham Lincoln’s eldest son was one of his pallbearers.

In Chester Arthur, the public had an homme moyen sensuel, a man ensnared by a more than ordinary chance to fulfill his ordinary appetites. (As his Tammany Hall contemporary George Washington Plunkitt supposedly put it, “I seen my opportunities and I took ’em.”) When Garfield lay dying, Julia Sand warned his impending successor:

Now your kindest opponents say: ‘Arthur will try to do right’—adding gloomily—‘He won’t succeed, though—making a man President cannot change him.’

Her own view was different—“Great emergencies awaken generous traits which have lain dormant half a life”—and it comported with the experience Arthur was already having. Guiteau’s bullet had done him a sort of collateral repair instead of damage. His story takes on a wistful contemporary glamour, as half the latter-day citizenry—no, more than half—experiences a new, burning desire for rule by mental health and, if need be, by mediocrity. ♦

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