CHAPTER SIX

The Shoddy Aristocracy

EARLY IN THE evenings, they put on velvet coats and convened around the curved mahogany bar at the Astor House. Beneath a blanket of cigar smoke, they haggled over boots and bullets, caps and carriages, with lips slickened by beer foam and roasted meat. They dined at Delmonico’s, where partridge stuffed with truffles—a house specialty—cost a sum that could support a soldier and his family for a year. Afterward they headed to the theater, or to one of the city’s six hundred brothels, which operated so openly the madams of the finest houses were featured prominently in the penny press and New York guidebooks.

Their wives, cocooned in mink and sable, passed the days at the milliner’s or at department stores. As the ladies promenaded down Fifth Avenue or Broadway, many protected their silk gowns from the slush and mud with Mme. Demorest’s Imperial “dress-elevator,” a popular contraption with weighted strings that allowed the women to raise or lower their skirts. On Sundays the prosperous couples circled Central Park in gleaming carriages, sporting thousand-dollar camel’s hair shawls purchased at Stewart’s.

The demand for such shawls was “monstrous,” and why not? Nearly every city industry was being stoked by war contracts, and while young men were being slaughtered on the battlefield, contractors and speculators in New York were getting rich. The need for soldiers’ uniforms and a steep tariff on imported clothing boosted the garment industry. The city’s ironworks flourished by filling the navy’s orders for vertical and horizontal engines, boilers, furnaces, plates, and anchors. Cooper, Hewitt & Co. turned out gun carriages and gun-barrel iron. The Enterprise Rubber Works prospered on orders for hard rubber flasks, cups, and buttons. The city’s carriage makers were producing hundreds of ambulances and baggage wagons. Before the war there had been a few dozen millionaires in New York. By the end of it, there were several hundred. “Things here at the North are in a great state of prosperity. You can have no idea of it,” the successful New York merchant William Dodge wrote to a friend in England in 1863. “The large amount expended by the government has given activity to everything and but for the daily news from the War in the papers and the crowds of soldiers you see about the streets you would have no idea of any war. Our streets are crowded, hotels full, the railroads, manufacturers of all kind except cotton were never doing so well and business generally is active.”

Dodge might have been proud of his city’s resourcefulness, but many others were appalled by the “shoddy aristocracy” created by the provision of substandard supplies to Union troops. In July 1864, Harper’s Monthly denounced the contractors and speculators who were profiting from the carnage. “It is in our large cities especially where this boasted insensibility to the havoc of war is found. It is there in the marketplace and exchange, where fortunes are being made with such marvelous rapidity, and in the haunts of pleasure, where they are being spent with such wanton extravagance, that they don’t feel this war,” the author lamented. “They are at a banquet of abundance and delight, from which they are not to be unseated, though the ghosts of the hundreds of thousands of their slaughtered countrymen shake their gory locks at them.”

Chester Arthur wanted to claim a seat at that banquet. His time as quartermaster had made him an expert on military supplies and government contracts, and in 1863 his political patron Edwin Morgan became a US senator. Arthur cashed in on his knowledge and connections by lobbying for clients seeking government contracts in Washington and Albany. He reunited with his friend Henry Gardiner, and their firm “became celebrated for the speed with which it could draft and put through legislative bills.” Arthur also collected lobbying fees from R. G. Dun, the owner of the Mercantile Agency, the nation’s first credit reporting firm. With his ballooning income Arthur purchased a brownstone row house at 123 Lexington Avenue, between East 28th and 29th Streets. It was five stories high, with cast iron railings that rose along the wide brownstone stoop before turning to form balconies at the parlor windows. Nell filled the house with the finest furniture and accessories, and Chester hired a staff of Irish immigrant servants. The young couple finally had a home suitable for lavish entertaining.

Elder Arthur, the Irish immigrant preacher, might have made a biting remark or two about his son’s servants, had the two men communicated more often. But their relationship turned chilly during the war. Chester’s parents were pressed for money, but their lawyer son didn’t volunteer to help them, and he rarely visited. Religion played a role in their estrangement. Unlike several of their older sisters, Chester and his younger brother William, a major in the 4th New York Volunteer Artillery, rejected the fervid faith of their parents. Sometimes Chester attended a local Episcopal church with Nell—that is what proper people did. But his life in Manhattan—the lavish parties, the extravagant meals, and the mad scramble for wealth and status—mocked Elder Arthur’s backwoods fundamentalism. “Dear Son, how long will you live in rebellion against God and refuse to obey his commandments?” Malvina Arthur wrote to William in January 1863. “O that God would answer this my prayer, that before I am taken from life, you and Chester may come out publickly [sic], confess Christ, and be willing to be fools, for his sake. I know that he will lead you to everlasting life and glory if you are willing.”

On the muggy morning of July 8, 1863, Northern newspapers triumphantly detailed the Union’s bloody victory at Gettysburg the week before. “The enemy, by a partially secret and ignominious retreat, has awarded to this gallant army the acknowledgment of victory. His forces are now on their way back to Virginia, beaten, weakened and demoralized by a terrible defeat; he is hotly pursued, a victorious army on his rear, a strong local force on his flank, and a swollen river in his front, are the obstacles to his successful retreat,” a New York Times correspondent wrote. The same day, the papers confirmed that after an 11-day siege, Union troops under the command of General Ulysses S. Grant had taken the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg. This second triumph handed control of the Mississippi River to the Union, a vital strategic advantage. The fall of Vicksburg, according to the Times, was “the crowning sheaf in the full harvest of Independence Day Victories.”

But the piercing rays of those triumphs—signs that the war might finally be turning in the Union’s favor—could not penetrate the black night that had enveloped Chester and Nell. At 6 a.m. that morning, as early risers in the North read the encouraging news from Pennsylvania and Mississippi, William Lewis Herndon Arthur died from a mysterious illness. He was only two and a half years old. “We have lost our darling boy,” Chester wrote to his brother William. “He died yesterday at Englewood, N.J., where we were staying for a few weeks—from convulsions, brought on by some affection of the brain. It came upon us so unexpectedly and suddenly. Nell is broken hearted. I fear much for her health. You know how her heart was wrapped up in her dear boy.”^* Arthur, a sensitive and emotional man, was crushed by his son’s death. His consuming grief was compounded by guilt, since he and Nell were convinced the boy had fallen ill because they had overtaxed his brain with intellectual demands. When they had a second son, Chester II (who would be known as “Alan”) in July 1864, the Arthurs indulged him lavishly to prevent a recurrence of the tragedy.

A month after they became parents for the second time, the Arthurs’ happiness was dampened by frightening news from Virginia: Chester’s brother, William, had been shot and seriously wounded at Ream’s Station while commanding a battalion of artillery. The young major was transported to Seminary Hospital in Washington, and Chester rushed there to visit him.

The red-brick hospital, one of more than 50 that treated wounded soldiers in the capital, was a converted women’s seminary at the rear of the Union Hotel in Georgetown. Sitting at the bedside of his ailing brother, Chester could hear long trains of army wagons rumbling by on N Street. Glancing out the window, he could see surgeons in passing ambulances attending to the wounded. Other vehicles were crammed with amputees on their way to be fitted for artificial limbs, or were stacked with rough coffins. Barouches with wounded officers rolled by, followed by carriages “loaded with pretty children with black coachmen, footmen, and maids.” “[William] is hit in the face, the ball entering the right side of the cheek just above the upper lip—passing straight through and coming out at the back of the head. I cannot see why it did not kill him outright but think it must have been a ball from a hunting rifle—the hole it made being very small,” Chester reported in a letter to his sister Mary. “He suffers greatly from the matter running from the wound internally which chokes him and makes him constantly uncomfortable.”

The bullet damaged William’s hearing—he was left almost totally deaf—and dug a jagged scar across his face, but he survived. When William was well enough to leave the hospital, Chester accompanied him to New York to help him settle into a new life. Chester reached out to Edwin Morgan for help, and the senator helped secure a commission in the regular army for his protégé’s brother.

By this time, Arthur had become so disenchanted with the Lincoln administration he was “almost a copperhead” and “would not vote at all rather than vote for Lincoln for next President,” according to one of his sisters. During the summer of 1864 the Confederates showed they had plenty of fight left in them, despite their crushing defeats at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. In July, Confederate troops under the command of Lieutenant General Jubal Early came within five miles of the White House, firing on Fort Stevens in Northwest Washington as Lincoln watched from the parapet. The Confederates killed, wounded, or captured more than 65,000 Union soldiers during that bloody summer, compared to 108,000 Union casualties during the first three years of the war. The horrifying losses resulted in a new nickname for General Grant, who was now the commander of all Union forces: “The Butcher.” The depressing developments on the battlefield convinced many in the North that it was time to elect a president who would make peace with the South.

Arthur’s own doubts about the war eased his conscience as he hustled to profit from it. As Lincoln fretted over his dimming reelection prospects, Arthur took on a new lobbying client: a New York hatter named Thomas Murphy, who hired Arthur to represent him in Washington. Murphy had been accused of delivering inferior hats and caps to Union troops, and Arthur’s patron Edwin Morgan happened to sit on the special Senate committee investigating the matter. Arthur’s work on behalf of his unscrupulous client blossomed into a personal friendship, and the two men became partners in several real estate speculations.

In November 1864 Lincoln won a second term, his fortunes boosted by Northern elation over the fall of Atlanta two months before. His defeated Democratic opponent was George McClellan, a former Union general running on a “peace platform” that promised a truce with the Confederacy (though McClellan earlier had repudiated that position). This time Lincoln won 55 percent of the popular vote and 212 of 233 electoral votes—a landslide.

In New York, the Union ticket swept the Democrats in the contests for governor and other statewide offices, but the results were much tighter: a razor-thin margin of just 8,000 votes out of 730,000. The state election was notable for an important innovation in campaign finance: it was the first in which Republicans relied heavily on financial contributions from government employees and contractors to bolster their candidates. Morgan played an important role as head of the Republicans’ Union Executive Committee, charged with collecting assessments from postmasters and other appointees who owed a political debt to the party. Morgan tapped Arthur and Murphy to collect the assessments and to gather donations from their wealthy contractor friends.

Six months after the elections, on April 3, 1865, George Templeton Strong was walking down Wall Street when he caught sight of a brief announcement on the bulletin board of the Commercial Advertiser: “Petersburg is taken.” Desperate for details, Strong rushed inside the newspaper office to find a man behind the counter, slowly painting an update on a large sheet of brown paper. “Richmond is… ” the man had written. “What’s that about Richmond?” Strong demanded. Without answering, the man continued to write. Slowly, a capital “C” appeared on the paper, then a capital “A.” Suddenly Strong saw what the man was writing: “Captured!”

As word spread that the Confederate capital had fallen, throngs of people descended on Wall Street, cheering and singing patriotic songs. They belted out “Old Hundred” and “John Brown” and “The Star-Spangled Banner,” repeating the last two lines of Francis Scott Key’s song (which had not yet become the national anthem) again and again. Each time they finished it, they let loose a massive roar and waved their hats in unison. Men embraced, kissed each other, and then retreated into doorways to dry their eyes before returning to the celebration. On April 9, Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Grant in the McLean House in the village of Appomattox Court House. The Civil War was over.

Less than a week later, the jubilation turned to shock, grief, and rage. “O, fatal day. O, noble Victim. Treason has done its worst,” Horatio Nelson Taft, a US Patent Office examiner, wrote in his diary late on the night of April 14, 1865. “The President has been Assassinated. It has just been announced at my door that he was shot a half hour ago at Fords Theatre. Is it possible? I have just come from near the scene, it is too True.” In the 10 days following Lincoln’s death, New York stopped: shops closed and residents and business owners draped black and white muslin around every column and façade, “so that hardly a building on Wall Street, Broadway, Chambers Street, Bowery, Fourth Avenue [was] without its symbol of the profound public sorrow.” People pinned rosettes to their windows, and even the poorest households displayed tiny twenty-five-cent flags with scraps of crape attached. “Never, I think, has sorrow for a leader been displayed on so great a scale and so profoundly felt,” Strong wrote in his diary. “It is very noteworthy that the number of arrests for drunkenness and disorder during the week that followed Lincoln’s murder was less than in any week for very many years!” The mood was somber, but fury bubbled underneath the placid surface: many New Yorkers who had expressed pity for their defeated Southern brethren when Lee surrendered—some had even called for a general amnesty—now demanded to see leading rebels dangling from the hangman’s noose.

With the approach of summer, returning Union veterans began streaming into the city. Some came by sea, but most rode trains to Jersey City and then took the ferry to Manhattan. They landed near the open space by the Battery and marched uptown with yapping dogs—company mascots—trailing behind them. Some of the men wore “wide-awake” military caps, while others donned simple straw hats. But even those who had changed into civilian clothes were immediately recognizable by their knapsacks, bronzed faces, and loud talk. Raucous crowds cheered the return of famous units such as the 90th Illinois Volunteer Infantry, better known as the Irish Legion. The homecoming of the 52nd New York Infantry Regiment, made up almost entirely of German immigrants, was more sobering: of the 2,600 men who had been on its muster rolls, only 300 returned.

Lucrative military contracts vanished with the war’s end, but the friendship between Arthur and the hatter Thomas Murphy deepened. In November of 1865, Arthur helped Murphy win election to the New York Senate from a predominantly Democratic district. Murphy’s 39th Street home became the de facto headquarters of New York’s conservative Republicans. To Nell’s consternation, Chester was there almost every night, smoking cigars, drinking whiskey, and talking politics into the early morning hours. He was stimulating company, always ready with a humorous story or apt limerick. “Sooner or later, but always unfailing, was the well-known ring and footstep of General Arthur, as we used to call him,” recalled another frequent visitor to Murphy’s house. “Always smiling and affectionate in manner toward his friends, and apparently attached to Mr. Murphy’s family as though they were his nearest and dearest relatives.” After long nights at Murphy’s house Arthur typically slept in, arriving late or not at all to his law office. He set up an office in his home so at odd hours he could make up the legal work he was missing.

Arthur made valuable connections at Murphy’s house. Charles Folger was a moody state senator from Geneva who chaired the powerful judiciary committee and often spent the entire weekend at the Murphy residence. Another regular was Richard Crowley, a state senator from Lockport and one of Folger’s closest friends. General George Sharpe, the head of the Bureau of Military Information during the war, became a special agent of the US State Department, which sent him to Europe in 1867 in search of Americans who might have been involved in the Lincoln assassination. Alonzo B. Cornell, son of the university founder, was a member of the Republican state committee who helped oversee the construction of the new state capitol at Albany and ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor in 1868.

The late nights of eating and drinking added pounds to Arthur’s large frame, and gave his cheeks a ruddy color. But those changes were less profound than the effects the long nights had on his political outlook—and on his character. The country faced great questions in the aftermath of the Civil War—the reunification of North and South; race relations and civil rights for the freed slaves; rapid industrialization and the growing economic and political power of large corporations. Arthur and the other men who convened nightly at the Murphy house were intensely interested in politics, but it was the pursuit and maintenance of political power that animated their discussions, not the ways in which it might be used to solve the pressing questions of the day. Silas Burt, a fellow Union College graduate with a reformist bent, observed that Arthur “expressed less interest in the principles then agitating parties than in the machinery and maneuvers of the managers.”

With Senator Morgan’s assistance, Arthur’s standing in the party rose steadily. In 1867, he joined the executive committee charged with setting party policy and supervising assembly districts in New York City, and the next year he assumed a similar position at the state level. Arthur’s political prospects took a hit in 1869 when New York Republicans declined to nominate Morgan for a second Senate term, choosing former governor Reuben E. Fenton instead. But Arthur soon found an even more powerful patron.

* It was typical for a man of Arthur’s time to focus on his wife’s feelings and to downplay his own—strong emotions were the province of women, not gentlemen. Arthur and his contemporaries had a more intimate relationship with death than twenty-first-century Americans do. People died at home, not in hospitals, and often at young ages.