Chester A. Arthur: Tragedy Leads to Presidency
THIS BOOK IS ELIZABETH JENNINGS’S STORY, but many readers may be curious about Chester A. Arthur and what happened to him after the court case.
Except for a three-month adventure to Kansas with a friend, Chester Arthur continued to live in Manhattan and work at the law firm. During the Civil War he was deeply involved with the Union cause, eventually rising to the rank of general in the Union army.
When the war was over, he became active in what was known as machine politics, the Democratic Party organization, often referred to as Tammany Hall, which played a major role in controlling New York City and New York State politics. Over time Chester Arthur became more powerful and connected. In 1880 James A. Garfield, who was running for president of the United States, chose him as his vice-presidential running mate, and they won the election.
Tragically, President Garfield, after less than four months in office, was shot by a man named Charles J. Guiteau at the Baltimore and Potomac railroad station in Washington, D.C. Garfield died eleven weeks later in Elberon, New Jersey, at the seashore where he had been taken in the hope that he might recover.
This meant that Chester Arthur became president, but it was a job he really didn’t want. His wife had died the year before. He was said to never have recovered from her death. His grief, and his own failing health, affected his time in the White House.
He had other reasons to grieve as well. Like Elizabeth Jennings and her husband, Charles Graham, Chester Arthur and his wife, Ellen, lost an infant son in 1863.
While lacking the leadership skills to become an outstanding president, he had a major success by signing a series of treaties known as the Geneva Convention. The treaties dictate the humane treatment during wartime of civilians, prisoners of war (POWs), and wounded soldiers, and are still largely in effect today.
He also established what is called civil service in the federal government by signing the Pendleton Act. This meant that federal jobs were to be awarded on the basis of merit, not political connections.
When Chester Arthur became president, and again after he died in 1886, the Elizabeth Jennings story was briefly reintroduced to the public. The New York Times, for example, highlighted the Jennings case as one of Chester Arthur’s triumphs as a young lawyer many years before.
Both Chester Arthur and Elizabeth Jennings died from complications of what was then called Bright’s disease, a chronic inflammation of the kidneys. It seems likely that after that day in court in 1855, they never crossed paths again.
Near the end of President Arthur’s life, on a railroad trip he took across the country, many of those waiting to greet him were black men and women. An especially supportive group honored him at the Lafayette, Indiana, train station on July 31, 1883, presenting him with a plaque thanking him for his dedication to “justice to an oppressed people.” In black communities across the United States people had not forgotten that in his days as a young lawyer Chester Arthur had accepted and won an important case called Elizabeth Jennings v. Third Avenue Railroad Company.
A portrait of Chester A. Arthur.