Chester A. Arthur: The Accidental President

By John M. Pafford

Chester Alan Arthur, surely our unlikeliest president, may have been saved from complete obscurity only by the mutton-chop whiskers that stand out among the full-bearded visages of late-nineteenth-century presidents. But as this highly readable portrait of Arthur and his age reveals, duty’s unexpected call turned the quintessential patronage politician into a statesman who skillfully guided America’s first steps on the road to becoming a world power.

No one is likely to follow Arthur’s path to the White House again. A product of the spoils system that once governed the federal civil service, Arthur had been rewarded for his loyalty to the Republican machine with the most lucrative patronage position in the country—customs collector of the Port of New York. In 1880, having never held elective office, he was chosen as James Garfield’s running mate in a bid to heal a factional rift in the party. When Garfield’s death from an assassin’s bullet early in his term made Arthur president, dismayed observers expected the worst.

Instead, this “accidental” president rose to an unexpected level of principle and accomplishment and led his country to the threshold of greatness. In John Pafford’s absorbing study, you’ll learn:

• Why the wounded President Garfield’s incapacity sent Vice President Arthur and the U.S. government into uncharted constitutional waters
• Why a president who owed his career to the patronage system championed civil service reform and remade the federal government
• How Arthur’s far-sighted determination to rebuild America’s shriveled navy changed the course of U.S. history
• Why massive immigration from Asia inflamed American politics and how Arthur used his veto power to moderate Congress’s response
• How dramatic developments in the 1880s in theology, science, economics, and political philosophy set the stage for sweeping cultural change in America

Only fifteen years after the United States emerged from the rubble of civil war, Chester Arthur—to all appearances the embodiment of unreformed machine politics—emerged from obscurity to lead the nation through one of the most dynamic stretches of its history. And though his career was cut short by a fatal disease diagnosed after his first year in office, his quiet prudence and devotion to duty earned him the respect of his contemporaries and an honored place among American presidents.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Regnery History
• Release date: Sep 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9781621576228

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

The Unexpected

Saturday, July 2, 1881, dawned more pleasant than the steamy, typical Washington, D.C., summer day it would become. James Garfield, who had been president for just under four months, planned to leave on the train at nine thirty in the morning from the Baltimore and Potomac station at Sixth and B Streets, N.W. (today the site of the National Gallery of Art), a short distance from the Executive Mansion, commonly called the White House. (Theodore Roosevelt would make that name official in 1901.)

Garfield looked forward to vacationing with his family and avoiding the unhealthy heat and humidity of midsummer Washington. They would travel north to New York City, sail up the Hudson River on the yacht of Cyrus Field, an entrepreneur known for promoting the transatlantic telegraph line, and spend the night at Field’s Irvington mansion. The party then would cross into western Massachusetts for graduation ceremonies at Williams College, the president’s alma mater, where he hoped eventually to send his two older sons. Next they would continue to Augusta, Maine, for the weekend with Secretary of State James G. Blaine. After a brief return to Washington, Garfield and his family then would spend August at their comfortable home on 160 acres in Mentor, Ohio, not far from Cleveland. The president looked forward to getting his administration into higher gear after the summer vacation. But it was not meant to be.

At about nine o’clock in the morning, Garfield left by carriage for the train station with Blaine but without security personnel. The Secret Service had been established a few years earlier after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, but presidential security came after fighting counterfeiting in the agency’s priorities. The passage of fifteen years since Lincoln’s death—considered a wartime aberration—had brought complacency. But political assassinations were a worldwide danger. During the 1870s, presidents José Balta of Peru, Gabriel García Moreno of Ecuador, and Juan Bautista Gill of Paraguay were slain, as was Sultan Abdul Aziz of Turkey. A few days after Garfield took office in March 1881, Tsar Alexander II of Russia fell victim to an assassin. Attempts had been made in recent years on the lives of Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom, King Alfonso XII of Spain, Emperor Napoleon III of France, and King Victor Emmanuel II of Italy. Yet on this day in July 1881, Garfield entered the train station accompanied only by the secretary of state and his sons—Harry, who was seventeen years old, and James, who was two years younger.

Inside the station waited Charles Julius Guiteau, a deluded, frustrated office-seeker, a ne’er-do-well who dreamed of distinction but always fell short and blamed his failures on others. In recent weeks he had stalked Garfield, getting close to him during a service at the Vermont Avenue Christian Church and while the president and Blaine walked the short distance from the White House to the secretary of state’s house. Each time, Guiteau held back from striking. Now he was determined not to miss this opportunity to change history. He drew his weapon, a .44 caliber British Bulldog revolver, and as the two men passed him he fired two bullets at short range from behind. The first struck Garfield in the right arm. As he turned, Guiteau fired the second and fatal shot, hitting him in the back. As he tried to flee, Guiteau was grabbed by Robert Parker, a ticket agent, and Washington police officer Patrick Kearney.

Garfield’s wound need not have been fatal. The bullet penetrated his back to the right of his spine, broke two ribs, and came to rest ten inches into his body without hitting any vital organs or severing any major blood vessels. But because he was president, Garfield attracted medical attention—not always healthy in those days. Doctors determined to find the bullet probed with unsterilized hands—introducing the infection which would kill him—without ever locating the bullet. This was infuriatingly bad practice by prominent physicians such as Smith Townsend, a District of Columbia health officer, and Doctor Willard Bliss (Doctor was his first name), a celebrated surgeon who had tended the dying President Lincoln. Many physicians, including these, still rejected Joseph Lister’s antiseptic practices. Had Garfield’s wounds been cleaned and left alone, he most likely would have survived the attack. But the attending doctors, stubbornly resistant to Lister’s discoveries, caused the fatal infection to develop and spread.

The famed inventor Alexander Graham Bell was brought in to find the bullet using his new induction balance machine, which could detect metal within a human body. The machine failed to locate the bullet, probably because of the metal springs in Garfield’s bed and because Dr. Bliss mistook where the bullet had lodged.1

Garfield’s suffering was exacerbated by the humid heat of Washington. The navy did provide an early type of air conditioner for his room in the White House, but the temperature still was in the eighties and the air was heavy. After enduring these conditions for several weeks, Garfield insisted on being moved to Elberon on the northern New Jersey shore near Long Branch, a location he had enjoyed previously. He left Washington by special train on September 6, staying at the twenty-two-room summer home of his friend Charles G. Franklyn, a New York financier. At first, Garfield improved, buoyed by the fresh salt air and the views of the ocean, but given the wrongheaded medical treatment inflicted on him, the end was inevitable. He died at 10:35 p.m. on September 19, 1881.

The autopsy showed how wrong the doctors had been about the bullet’s location. Dr. D. S. Lamb of the Army Medical Museum led the procedure, assisted by six of Garfield’s medical men, including Dr. Bliss. The bullet was found, but not where the attending doctors thought it would be. It had entered the back and gone left, causing only limited damage. It was the unsterilized probing that had killed him.2

During the weeks after the shooting, Arthur spent most of the time at his home in New York City, staying away from Washington to avoid giving the impression that he was power-hungry or keeping a death watch. Arthur was hit hard by Garfield’s death, but he rose to be president in fact, not just in name. Summoned to Arthur’s home at a quarter past two in the morning on September 20, Judge John Brady of the New York Supreme Court administered the oath of office. Arthur then proceeded to Elberon and accompanied Garfield’s body to Washington. There Chief Justice Morrison Waite of the U.S. Supreme Court administered the oath of office to the new president in an official ceremony.

Chester Alan Arthur now was president of the United States, arguably the most unlikely of the men who have held this office. Although he faced no major international or domestic crisis such as war or depression, he proved to be a president of intelligence and ability, one who deserves to rise in the esteem of the American people. The account of his transformation is fascinating and surprising.

CHAPTER 2

Early Years

Arthur was born on October 5, 1829, in North Fairfield, Vermont, near the border of Quebec, the fifth child and first son of Reverend William Arthur and Malvina Arthur, née Stone. William Arthur, born in County Antrim in northern Ireland in 1796, had immigrated as a young man to Canada, settling for a while in Quebec before moving south into Vermont. He was studying law when a dramatic conversion to Christ as Savior and Lord led to a new career as a Baptist pastor. Malvina was born in 1802 on a farm just south of the Canadian border.

Firm in his Christian profession, William Arthur tended to be imperious, sharp-tongued, and irritable, traits that resulted in a number of moves for the family—seven during Chester’s early years—which ended in upstate New York. Chester responded well to his father’s pushing him educationally, but in a more limited way to his spiritual expectations. Little is known about his religious beliefs, but it seems that the future president remained in the Christian fold while adopting a less rigorous, more private faith than that in which he was raised.

In September 1845, just short of his sixteenth birthday, Arthur entered Union College in Schenectady, New York, one of the first colleges to offer students curricular options. Instead of the standard classics, students could focus on natural science or engineering. Arthur, however, chose classics, studying Homer, Xenophon, Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, Cicero, and Tacitus, along with algebra, plane and solid geometry, trigonometry, chemistry, political economy, moral philosophy, astronomy, botany, geology, and physiology.1 The ordinary rigorous day began with breakfast and prayers at six thirty in the morning, continuing until the final study period at seven o’clock in the evening.2 Foreshadowing his later career in law and then in politics, Arthur was president of the debating society.

He completed his degree requirements in three years, graduating in July 1848 as a member of Phi Beta Kappa, a distinction shared by only three other presidents: John Quincy Adams (Harvard 1787), Theodore Roosevelt (Harvard 1880), and George H. W. Bush (Yale 1948). Herbert Hoover had the requisite grades at Stanford, but engineering students were not honored with membership.3 Arthur certainly did well at Union, although among the high caliber student body, he did not stand out.

To defray college expenses, he had taught school during the lengthy winter vacations. Now, degree in hand, Arthur returned to teaching to earn a living while studying privately for the bar examination. He spent a few months at the State and National Law School in Ballston Spa, New York. It is not clear why he did not complete the program there, but the most likely explanation was his need to generate income. He moved on to teach school in North Pownal in the southwestern corner of Vermont, and then served as principal of the academy in Cohoes, New York, near Albany.

During these years, he was studying privately for the bar, as was the option at that time for those unable or unwilling to attend a law school. To complete his preparation, Arthur moved to New York City, studying and working at the law office of E. D. Culver. In May 1854, he passed the bar examination and joined what then became the firm of Culver, Parker, and Arthur. He was a sharp young man on the rise in a growing part of the country during a dramatic time in American history. His handsome appearance, charming personality, and impressive stature (six feet, two inches) opened doors for him, and his intelligence and ability solidified his position, furthering his rise professionally and politically.

By the mid-1850s, the political party system had been torn apart by the failure of the Whigs to resolve their deep divisions over slavery. Northern Whigs favored ending the practice, while Southern Whigs supported its continuation. The party tore itself apart. Northern Whigs became the core of the new antislavery Republican Party, while Southern Whigs joined the Democrats, who called for each state to set its own policy on slavery.

Arthur had been a Whig, but he saw that the party’s failure to take a clear stand on slavery doomed it to irrelevance. His own opposition to slavery, which he shared with his father, led him into the Republican Party in 1854, shortly after its organization. He would soon have an opportunity to put his principles into practice.

In 1854, Lizzie Jennings, a black school teacher, was ousted from a New York City streetcar that was reserved for whites only. She protested through the legal system. Arthur took the case, arguing that nothing his client had done warranted her being expelled from the streetcar. The jury agreed and awarded Jennings $250, and the case prompted the decision later that year to desegregate public transportation in New York City. The tide of freedom was rising slowly, but perceptibly.

On the national stage, 1854 was the year of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, a disastrously flawed attempt to placate the South and avoid conflict by opening more territory to the possible expansion of slavery. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 had excluded slavery from the Louisiana territory north of the 36° 30’ parallel except for Missouri, where slavery would be legal. Southern opinion considered it too restrictive and pushed for this new arrangement. The new law allowed the Kansas and Nebraska territories, although north of the Missouri Compromise line, to vote for or against slavery. It was bitterly opposed by those who considered slavery wrong but was supported by key Democratic Party leaders such as President Franklin Pierce and the increasingly prominent senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois. With the Democrats calling for compromise and the Whigs unable to unite on a stance, the way was clear for a new party. Northern Whigs were the core of the Republican Party—born in 1854, a major political force by 1856, and the dominant party by 1860. An enthusiastic Republican, Arthur was a young man clearly on the rise.

Ellen Lewis Herndon Arthur, 1837–1880

Courtesy of the Library of Congress

His personal life too was brightening. In 1856, Arthur fell in love with Ellen Lewis Herndon of Fredericksburg, Virginia. Known as Nell, she was the daughter of the famed explorer and ship captain William L. Herndon. While visiting New York, she was introduced to Arthur by Dabney Herndon, her cousin and his friend. The spark was evident, but she was only seventeen at the time. In the interim, Arthur headed west to Kansas with his friend and fellow attorney, Henry G. Gardiner, attracted by the opportunity of land speculation. Arthur had purchased land near Leavenworth.

A letter he wrote to Nell on August 30, 1857, from St. Joseph, Missouri, reveals a side of Arthur seen by few. This is the only surviving missive from him to her written during their three years of courtship. He mentions his business in Kansas, but most of the letter expresses his love and longing for Nell. Also evident is his spiritual faith and a rather poetic side:

This is your birth-day—my own precious darling—my own Nell. The remembrance came with my first awaking in the early morning—as the thought of you always does and as I kissed your dear image, darling, my heart was full to overflowing with love and prayer for you! And when I looked out, and saw it was a glad, bright morning and everything looked fresh & beautiful, I thought it a happy omen! How full of joy & happiness the world seemed to me, for I felt that you are my own Nell—that you love me! I said I am content. I was happy and thanked God that he had so blessed me!

The day has fulfilled its morning promise, it has been most bright and beautiful even to the last rays of its gorgeous sunset, still lingering in the sky.

Who is there, dear, darling, Nell, who can, today, so anxiously & lovingly wish you all earthly happiness—richer blessings with each returning year & God’s blessing and protecting care, here & hereafter—as your own loving Chester—May these blessings all be yours and, oh, if any part of that earthly happiness be in my keeping, my darling, my precious one, it is a precious, sacred trust dearer than life itself!

Arthur continues in the same manner, ending with an outpouring of his love for her:

I know you are thinking of me now. I feel the pulses of your love answering to mine. If I were with you now, you would go & sing for me: Robin Adair—then you would come & sit by me—you would put your arms around my neck and press your soft sweet lips over my eyes—I can feel them now.

Yes darling, my heart is indeed full to night, full of love for you, of happiness and gratitude for your love. Swelling with all these recollections & with the thought, that with God’s blessing, I shall soon hold you to my heart again! The hours grow longer every day.

Good night. May God bless & keep you always my darling.

Your own Chester.4

This feeling was real and lasting. There would be strains on their relationship as Arthur became absorbed in his career, but Nell was his true love; that never changed.

While they were probing their prospects, word arrived that Nell’s father had perished in the worst commercial ship disaster in American history. William Herndon was captain of the steamer Central America, which had sailed for New York from the Caribbean side of Panama with 575 passengers and crew and thirty thousand pounds of gold from California. In mid-September 1857 off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, the ship was caught in an autumn hurricane. Herndon exhibited cool heroism in supervising the transfer of 152 women and children to another vessel. Having done all he could, he stayed with those who could not be saved and went down with his ship. In tribute to his valor, towns in Virginia and Pennsylvania were named after him, as were three naval ships—a destroyer in 1925, then another destroyer and a transport during World War II.5

Arthur concluded that Bleeding Kansas, torn by violent strife between pro-slavery and anti-slavery forces, was no place to settle and raise a family, and with Nell’s loss of her father, he returned to New York and managed the legal and business affairs of the Herndon family. When he married Nell at Calvary Episcopal Church on October 25, 1859, his personal life and his professional life were on the upswing. Soon the Civil War would put a strain on the first and greatly enhance the second.

CHAPTER 3

Political Rise

As the 1850s neared their end, prospects for avoiding civil strife were fading. For several decades, the South had been falling behind the North in wealth and in population. Industrial development brought the Northern states more wealth, more jobs, more people, and more political power. The North supported high tariffs to protect business and jobs from foreign competition. Southerners, dependent on agricultural exports—especially cotton, tobacco, and indigo—called for low tariffs, which permitted

Reviews for Chester A. Arthur

[writemoves · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I agree with comments made by other reviewers that the book was more about the times and the events during Chester Arthur’s presidency then about Arthur and how he handled the presidency. There were no major political crises or major world events that Arthur had to confront. He rebuilt the navy and made efforts to clean up the civil service. It was interesting that he had to make decisions about Chinese immigration. Reminds me of the current situation with Mexican immigration into the United States.

Arthur had significant health issues that he was able to overcome while president. He died shortly after he left office. Relatively thin book, a little over 180 pages. Arthur seem to run a caretaker Administration. No major achievements… No major errors.

[gregdehler · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Over reaches in its attempt to portray as a good president who heroically overcame his background. Short on some details, while there are sections and even chapters that a hardly mention Arthur at all.