CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“A Great Deal of Soap”

REPUBLICANS DREW INSPIRATION from their nominee’s life story. James Abram Garfield was an impoverished farm boy who grew up to become a scholar, a school president, a Civil War general, and a congressman—proof, it was said, that in America courage and resolve could overcome any disadvantage.

Born in 1831 in a log cabin in the backwoods of Ohio, James was a toddler when his father Abram died, leaving his mother Eliza to manage the family farm and raise James and his two older siblings alone. It was a harsh life, and James was desperate to escape it. His formal schooling was limited, but he devoured piles of books, and he was inspired by a series of nautical novels to become a sailor. At 16, he left home to work on Cleveland’s Lake Erie waterfront.

Garfield didn’t find high seas romance on the Ohio and Erie Canal. Moving barges loaded with iron and copper ore from Western mines to Eastern factories required teams of horses and mules to tow the vessels. Garfield worked as a bowman, deckhand, and steersman, grueling labor made more miserable by swarms of mosquitoes and frequent tumbles into the muddy water. In October 1848, he gave up his seafaring dreams and returned home.

Garfield heeded his mother’s pleas to pursue an education. He began at Geauga Academy in nearby Chester, where for a year and a half he studied grammar, mathematics, philosophy, ancient and modern languages, and elocution. He excelled as a member of the debate society, finding “glory in defending unpopular truth against popular error.” In the fall of 1851, Garfield continued his studies at Western Reserve Eclectic Institute in Hiram, which was poorly staffed and funded but which allowed motivated students to study the classical curriculum at an accelerated pace. Garfield read Homer, Livy, and Demosthenes in the original Greek and Latin and mastered geometry on his own—all while earning a living as a janitor. When he wasn’t studying or sweeping, Garfield relaxed by hunting, fishing, playing billiards, and socializing with his female classmates. (One of the young women, a shy, dark-eyed brunette named Lucretia “Crete” Randolph, eventually became his wife.)

The Eclectic Institute did not award bachelor’s degrees, so in September 1854 Garfield enrolled at Williams College in Massachusetts. Between his first two terms, Garfield taught penmanship at a small school in North Pownal, Vermont. (The year before, the position had been filled by a young man from upstate New York—Chester Arthur.)

Studying at Williams awakened Garfield’s interest in politics. He attended the antislavery lectures of Henry Ward Beecher, and was exposed to the great issues of the day, from the Kansas conflict to the Crimean War. He gave his first political stump speech in the spring of his senior year, at a meeting in support of Republican presidential candidate John C. Frémont. After graduating from Williams with honors in 1856 (he had been admitted as a junior), Garfield returned to the Eclectic Institute as an instructor in classical languages, though he also taught English, history, geology, and mathematics. In 1857, he became president of the school.

By this time Garfield was a sought-after Republican spokesman, and in 1859 he was elected to the Ohio Senate. The chamber’s youngest member earned the respect of his elders with his oratory, his grasp of complicated issues, and his facility in forming friendships. During the 1860 presidential campaign, Garfield traveled the state speaking in support of Republican nominee Abraham Lincoln.

An ardent abolitionist, Garfield preferred war to the extension of slavery to new territories. “I do not see any way, outside a miracle of God, which can avoid civil war with all its attendant horrors,” he wrote a friend in January 1861. “I am inclined to believe that the sin of slavery is one of which it may be said that without the shedding of blood there is no remission.” In April he welcomed the fall of Fort Sumter, believing it would rouse the North to crush the Confederacy. By the fall, he was a colonel in command of the 42nd Ohio Infantry.

Garfield shined as an officer. In January 1862 at the Battle of Middle Creek, his outnumbered troops seized control of eastern Kentucky from the rebels, earning him a promotion to brigadier general and a mention in the New York Times. In September 1863, he was chief of staff to General William S. Rosecrans at the disastrous Battle of Chickamauga. After accompanying Rosecrans to a relatively safe position, Garfield rode to the front under enemy fire to survey the situation for his commander, helping to save the Army of the Cumberland. Rosecrans was discredited by the defeat, but Garfield was promoted to major general.

Garfield had national political ambitions, and throughout the war he tried to publicize his exploits. In November 1862 he had been elected to the US House of Representatives—though he had not campaigned for the position—and in December 1863 he resigned from the military to take his seat in Congress. As a radical Republican in Washington, Garfield supported the vigorous prosecution of the war, the seizure of rebel property in the North, and the execution or exile of Confederate leaders.

During Reconstruction, Garfield grew more moderate. To assuage angry Democrats after the disputed 1876 election, he backed the end of military occupation of the South, effectively ending Reconstruction. He was a skilled parliamentarian, and as Republican minority leader during the Hayes administration, he brokered compromises between his party’s warring factions and with the Democrats. “He was a man who gained friends on both sides of the aisle, and was noted as having a great fondness for peering and jumping over the garden wall of politics to play with those on the other side,” one journalist recalled.

At a time when Capitol Hill was rife with corruption, Garfield could not escape the taint of scandal. He was one of several congressmen to accept stock in Crédit Mobilier, allegedly in exchange for using their influence to weaken oversight of the company. He also was linked to a corrupt paving contract, and was criticized for backing a retroactive salary increase for members of Congress.

While some saw in Garfield an admirable instinct for compromise, others perceived an absence of firm conviction. “He was a large, well developed, handsome man, with a pleasing address and a natural gift for oratory,” John Sherman observed. “But his will power was not equal to his personal magnetism. He easily changed his mind, and honestly veered from one impulse to another. This, I think, will be admitted by his warmest friends.”

Whether positive or negative, Garfield’s political dexterity would figure prominently in the 1880 campaign. To beat Democratic nominee Winfield Scott Hancock—another Civil War hero—the Republican nominee would have to unite Conkling’s Stalwarts with Blaine’s Half-Breeds, at least temporarily. And to do that, Garfield had to convince both factions he would advance their interests as president.

Garfield’s first challenge was to craft an official letter of acceptance that would appeal to everyone. In writing it, he solicited the opinions of a wide array of Republicans, including Arthur. In the final version, published on July 12, Garfield declined to endorse Hayes’s civil service measures and renounced his order barring federal officeholders from participating in politics. He also pledged to consult with Congress in filling federal posts. Garfield’s careful language was intended to get Conkling and the Stalwarts to work hard for the ticket. Reformers noticed. In a letter to Garfield, Carl Schurz lamented the candidate’s “positive abandonment of ground taken, and to a great extent maintained, by the present Administration with regard to the civil service.” Schurz said Garfield’s letter had been “universally interpreted as opening a prospect of the reestablishment of the party machine in the civil service.” Garfield could only hope that Conkling had drawn the same conclusion.

Given his history at the Custom House, Arthur’s own letter of acceptance was less surprising. Like Garfield, he thought federal officeholders should be free to engage in politics, and he questioned the wisdom of using civil service exams in hiring them. He emphasized, however, that “appointments should be based upon ascertained fitness” and that “positions of responsibility should, so far as practicable, be filled by the promotion of worthy and efficient officers. The investigation of all complaints, and the punishment of all official misconduct, should be prompt and thorough. These views, which I have long held, repeatedly declared, and uniformly applied when called upon to act, I find embodied in the [platform] resolution, which, of course, I approve.” Arthur’s civil service pronouncements prompted a chuckle from George William Curtis. “Arthur’s letter is very amusing to one who knows of some of his performances, as I do,” he wrote to Silas Burt.

Conkling quickly got over his anger at Arthur for accepting the vice-presidential nomination. In mid-July, he and his protégé traveled to Canada for several days of salmon fishing. “Every day and everything was enjoyable,” Conkling wrote a friend upon his return. “Arthur’s constant effort was to make everybody else happy. No wonder we all like him.” But Garfield’s acceptance letter and the rapprochement with Arthur were not enough to get Conkling to work for the Republican ticket. Conkling wanted concrete assurances that a Garfield administration would respect him and his New York machine—a personal pledge, delivered by the candidate himself.

Garfield left his farm in Mentor to meet with Conkling in New York on August 3, 1880. Arthur and Governor Alonzo Cornell greeted Garfield in Albany and traveled with him to Manhattan. At 7:25 p.m. on August 4, a booming artillery salute at Harlem heralded the approach of Garfield’s train, and 15 minutes later it steamed into the Grand Central Depot, welcomed by an enthusiastic crowd of three thousand. Outside the station, under a leaden sky, Garfield climbed into a waiting carriage and rode through muddy streets to the Fifth Avenue Hotel. There he found the lobby, the corridors, the hotel entrance, and the street overflowing with more supporters.

The candidate must have been pleased—until he realized that Conkling, who had checked into the Fifth Avenue Hotel two days earlier, was nowhere to be found.

Arthur and his associates were left the unenviable task of explaining Conkling’s absence. They told Garfield that Conkling had empowered them to negotiate on his behalf, but the nominee expressed his “chagrin, mortification and indignation” at the senator’s insult. “Telegrams were sent to various points where it was thought Mr. Conkling might be, explaining the great embarrassment and begging him to return,” recalled Thomas Collier Platt, one of the Conkling men left to meet with Garfield. “[But] he went where he knew no importunities could follow.”

Early the next morning, Garfield met privately with Arthur, Platt, and two New York congressmen who were Conkling lieutenants, Levi P. Morton and Richard Crowley, in Morton’s hotel suite. The men exchanged greetings, took their seats, and then sat for several minutes in an awkward silence. The fuming Garfield spoke first, demanding to know why Conkling was not there. The Conkling men tried to calm the nominee by arguing that Conkling’s absence was a good thing, because it would make it more difficult for people to accuse the two of them of cutting a deal. Garfield wanted assurances that Conkling would deliver at least two or three speeches for him in Ohio, and when Conkling’s men agreed, he reluctantly accepted them as the boss’s representatives. With that settled, Platt got right to the point.

“Mr. Garfield, there seems to be some hesitation on the part of the other gentlemen present to speak; but I might as well say that we are here to speak frankly and talk business,” he began. “The question we would like to have decided before the work of this campaign commences is whether, if you are elected, we are to have four years more of an administration similar to that of Rutherford B. Hayes [or] whether you are going to recognize and reward the men who must do the work in this State.” In other words, if Conkling’s Stalwarts helped deliver New York, they expected to be rewarded with control of New York patronage. If Garfield could not make such a promise, the Stalwarts would “retire from the active work of the canvass.”

According to Platt, Garfield responded by harshly criticizing the Hayes administration and its civil service reforms. He recognized Conkling’s control of the New York party machinery, acknowledged he could not win the election without Conkling’s help, and promised that the Stalwarts’ wishes “should be paramount with him, touching all questions of patronage.” Garfield said he would have to reward the New Yorkers who had sided with him in Chicago, but that he would “consult with [Conkling’s] friends and do only what was approved by them. These assurances were oft repeated, and solemnly emphasized, and were accepted and agreed to by all those present,” Platt recalled.

Afterward, Garfield and Morton retired to another room to discuss fundraising. Morton said he could collect a large amount of money from New York businessmen, but only if Garfield promised to make him treasury secretary or minister to England, or put him in charge of funding the federal government’s bonded debt. Garfield gave his word that he would. After the meetings, Arthur and the other participants told reporters they were perfectly aligned with Garfield, and “no obstacles stood in the way of the prosecution of a zealous and vigorous contest.” Several days later, Conkling met with Arthur at the Fifth Avenue Hotel so Arthur could brief him on what Garfield had said. Apparently Conkling was satisfied, because he subsequently announced he would personally campaign for the Republican ticket.

But what the Stalwarts understood as an ironclad promise to protect their patronage power meant something different to Garfield, who believed he had held firm against Conkling’s demands. “No trades, no shackles, and as well fitted for defeat or victory as ever,” he wrote in his diary after he returned to Mentor. The gap in their perceptions would loom large in the cataclysmic events of the next year.

Arthur, whose responsibilities as Garfield’s running mate were minimal, managed the day-to-day operations of the New York campaign. From his headquarters at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, Arthur recruited speakers and coordinated campaign rallies and meetings in New York. He also organized a Midwest speaking tour by Conkling and Grant. Political operatives and eager volunteers, including the strange preacher who had survived the collision of the Stonington and the Narragansett, buzzed around the parlors of the hotel, looking for assignments.

Arthur’s most important task was fundraising. He oversaw the distribution of letters requesting “voluntary” contributions from Custom House employees, judges, police officers, postmasters, and lighthouse keepers—anybody who drew a public paycheck. Even construction workers building the new capitol in Albany were not spared. Arthur also helped Morton collect contributions from wealthy businessmen, with much of the money earmarked for Indiana, one of two states (along with Ohio) that would vote in October. The Democrats had won Indiana in 1876 and 1878, and Republicans were determined to return it to their column in 1880.

Democratic newspapers and party operatives portrayed the vice-presidential nominee as a political hack, a crook who would stop at nothing to secure votes for his side. The Democrats hired a New York attorney to explore rumors that Arthur was born in a foreign country and thus ineligible for the vice presidency. At first the lawyer claimed Arthur was born in Ireland, then in Canada. But the charges gained little traction.

In the end, Garfield and Arthur triumphed by fewer than 10,000 votes, out of nearly nine million ballots cast. Arthur’s impact was most evident in the Electoral College, where New York’s 35 votes gave Garfield a total of 214. If Hancock, who won 155 electoral votes, had captured New York, he would have won the election.

Hancock went to his grave convinced that he, like Tilden in 1876, had been cheated of the presidency. The chairman of the Democratic National Committee claimed there were at least 20,000 illegal votes cast in New York—roughly the Republicans’ margin of victory in the state. Democrats groused that Republicans had imported voters from Vermont, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, and even Canada to ensure victory in the Empire State.

At the Fifth Avenue Hotel, Arthur basked in the victory. He, as much as anybody else, was responsible for the Republican triumph—and everybody knew it. As vice president he would have to learn how to preside over the US Senate, but that was a minor matter. His main job would remain the same: doing whatever he could to strengthen the Conkling machine. As for the vice presidency, he didn’t expect it to be very taxing. “Thank you for your congratulations and good wishes,” he wrote to Mary Dun, the wife of his friend R. G. Dun, owner of the credit reporting company that would become Dun & Bradstreet. “I hope that you and your husband appreciate the fact that it is considered a part of the Vice President’s duty to ‘go-a-fishing’ and I hope we shall go together always.”

Garfield’s hard work began at once. His first task as president-elect was to select a cabinet both Half-Breeds and Stalwarts could accept. Reformers, meanwhile, were urging him to disregard politics in making his selections. It was an impossible task, and Garfield hit the first hurdle at the end of November, when he met with Levi Morton. In return for his fundraising services, Morton expected to be offered one of the jobs Garfield had promised him during their summer meeting at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Morton’s preference, he told Garfield, was to be treasury secretary. But the president-elect either had a different memory of his summer pledge or, with the White House won, no longer felt bound to honor it. He told Morton he could not head the treasury because of his ties to Wall Street. When they met again the next day, Garfield proclaimed, “I will not tolerate nor act upon any understanding that anything has been pledged to any party, state, or person.”

The Stalwarts were angry, and they rejected the consolation prize, secretary of the navy, that Garfield subsequently offered to Morton. But this slight paled in comparison to the news that Garfield had tapped James G. Blaine to be secretary of state. Conkling and his men considered Blaine to be their archenemy and feared he would dominate the pliable Garfield. They had good reason to be wary: in a December letter to Garfield, Blaine referred to the Stalwarts as “all the desperate bad men of the party” and advised the president-elect, “they must have their throats cut with a feather”—that is, the deed must be done silently, without calling attention to itself.

As the political storm clouds darkened over Conkling’s realm, Kate Sprague appealed to the one person who might be able to press her lover’s case with Garfield: Chester Arthur. She told Arthur that Conkling had given her a lithograph of the vice president–elect. “The Senator, your friend, never passes the table where the likeness stands, that he does not apostrophize it with some hearty expression of real affection, such is rare in man to man & a tribute from this self-contained but noble & true nature that any man may feel fond to possess,” she wrote him on January 18. “Garfield & Sherman & Blaine (as it looks to private forecast) are to combine forces to overthrow & crush the power that saved them, but which they recognize only to fear & hate.… Surely, the Senator’s friends, his tried friends & true will not cripple or soon embarrass the man to whom they owe so much?”

Kate need not have doubted Arthur’s loyalty to the boss—the two men soon were living together in Washington in a house on 14th and F Streets. But she overestimated Arthur’s influence with Garfield. Arthur’s standing in the incoming administration was not enhanced by an ill-considered—and perhaps drunken—speech he gave at Delmonico’s just three weeks before the inauguration. The dinner was in honor of Stephen Dorsey, the head of the National Republican Committee during the campaign, and focused in large part on the Republicans’ surprising victory in Indiana. The elaborate floral decorations included an Indiana state seal with the prairie, rising sun, and buffalo in the design made of flowers, grass, and moss. Two hundred prominent Republicans from New York and around the country attended, including Grant, John Jacob Astor, J. Pierpont Morgan, Jay Gould, Thurlow Weed, and Henry Ward Beecher.

By the time Arthur rose to speak, the men had been eating and drinking for three hours, and they had lit their cigars. It was a friendly crowd, largely made up of experienced campaigners and Republican financiers. But reporters were there, too, and even though Arthur acknowledged their presence he went ahead with remarks that reinforced the widely held view that he was a machine politician unfit for high office. “I don’t think we had better go into the minute secrets of the campaign, so far as I know them, because I see the reporters are present, who are taking it all down; and, while there is no harm in talking about some things after the election is over you cannot tell what they may make of it, because the inauguration has not yet taken place,” he began. “If I should get going about the secrets of the campaign, there is no saying what I might say to make trouble between now and the 4th of March.

“Indiana was really, I suppose, a Democratic state,” he continued. “[But] it had always been put down in the book as a state that might be carried by close and careful and perfect organization and a great deal of—” Arthur paused, and several audience members called out “soap!”—slang for purchased votes. The crowd laughed. “I see the reporters are here, and therefore I will simply say that everybody showed a great deal of interest in the occasion, and distributed tracts and political documents all through the country.” The audience loved it. When the laughter and cheering finally subsided, he went on. “If it were not for the reporters I would tell you the truth, because I know you are intimate friends and devoted adherents to the Republican Party.”

Arthur’s amusing performance was a big hit at Delmonico’s, but it played differently outside the restaurant. “The cynicism of this, coming from such a veteran Machinist as Mr. Arthur, was not surprising, but people were rather shocked—though we do not see why they should have been—when they remembered that it came from the lips not of Mr. Conkling’s ‘lieutenant’ in this city, but of the Vice-President-elect of the United States,” E. L. Godkin wrote in the Nation. “We say we ‘do not know why they should have been,’ because nobody but the extraordinarily simpleminded can have supposed that making Mr. Arthur Vice-President would, at this time of his life, raise him above the arts which he has practiced for so many years.”

The weather on Inauguration Day was raw and slushy, forcing ladies on the spectators’ stand to wrap themselves in carriage rugs and boys to crawl underneath their mothers’ shawls in search of warmth. Sodden flags clung to their staffs, and banners and bunting hung limply on houses, trees, and telegraph poles. Out-of-town visitors had taken every room in town, forcing hundreds to sleep on cots set up in hotel parlors. Now thousands of spectators were arrayed along Pennsylvania Avenue, shivering and stamping their feet in more than an inch of snow, many wondering why they had come at all. Their spirits lifted when they saw a glittering forest of bayonets approaching. The Cleveland Mounted Troop, which had accompanied Garfield from Ohio, surrounded the pair of four-horse carriages carrying Garfield and Arthur from the White House to the Capitol. From the sidewalks, windows, and temporary balconies, spectators cheered as the procession passed by.

In the Senate Chamber, where Arthur and incoming senators would be sworn in, the colorful dresses and fluttering fans of the mostly female crowd were like butterflies that had alighted on the wooden chairs. Several dozen diplomats had come to witness the ceremonies, some wearing ordinary evening dress, others in uniforms heavy with gold lace and the jeweled badges of ancient orders. The Turkish minister wore a red fez, and the elderly Chinese representative wore a silk petticoat with a fur-lined cloak. Frederick Douglass, with his nimbus of white hair, and the defeated Hancock in full military regalia stood out in the crowd. At 11:55 a.m., onlookers filled all the seats and nearly all the standing room, but word reached the elderly Senate doorkeeper that Garfield and Arthur were still more than five minutes away. To prevent them from being late, he seized a staff and turned back the minute hand of the Senate clock by five minutes.

When Garfield arrived, he walked into the chamber arm-in-arm with President Hayes. The two men took chairs in front of the Senate secretary’s desk, a vantage point that allowed them to see their wives, who were sitting together. Lucy Hayes, wearing a sealskin dolman over a black brocaded silk dress and a white bonnet with ostrich feathers, held a large bouquet of lilies of the valley. At her right sat Lucretia Garfield, who wore a dark green velvet dress and matching bonnet. The nation’s new First Lady held a bouquet of red roses, flowers that failed to brighten her plain, careworn face. To Arthur, the wives’ presence must have been a wrenching reminder that Nell was not there to share his achievement. After outgoing Vice President William Wheeler introduced Arthur to the chamber, the widower bowed low and gracefully before asking the assembled senators for forbearance as he learned the rules of their institution. Then he turned to Wheeler, raised his right hand, and took the oath of office.

After Vice President Arthur swore in the new senators, everybody adjourned to the east front of the Capitol to watch the presidency change hands. Many in the crowd of 50,000 couldn’t help but focus on Arthur: the stylish New Yorker, dressed in light trousers, a blue Prince Albert coat, a colored necktie, and light gloves, was “strong, keen-eyed, and handsome as ever, and because of his commanding form and military bearing, a central attraction.”

On his second day in office, President Garfield sent his list of cabinet appointees to the Senate, and it included none of Conkling’s Stalwarts. Without an ally in the cabinet besides Arthur, the Stalwarts’ last hope was that Garfield would give them control of key federal posts in New York, especially the collectorship of the Custom House. Their situation seemed to brighten on March 22, when Garfield nominated five Conkling men to fill two US attorney posts, two marshal posts, and the collectorship of Buffalo. Earlier Garfield had appointed Levi Morton as minister to France—not one of the jobs he had promised the financier at the Fifth Avenue Hotel, but close. Perhaps Garfield wasn’t determined to destroy the New York machine after all.

The next day, Arthur was presiding over the Senate when an emissary from the White House handed him a list of additional nominations. When Arthur saw the name at the top of the list, he immediately folded the paper, leaving the name exposed, and summoned a page to deliver it to Conkling. Conkling, stone-faced, read the note and then rose from his seat to show it to Platt, now the junior senator from New York. The news it contained was grim: without consulting Conkling or Platt, Garfield had nominated a new Custom House collector. His choice was William Robertson, who was a powerful New York state senator, a member of the Republican state committee, and an avowed enemy of Conkling and the Stalwarts. “The nomination of Senator Robertson was a complete surprise,” a Sun reporter wrote. “There seems to be but one opinion to-night, and that is, that by this nomination Garfield and Blaine invite immediate attack from Conkling, and no one seems to doubt that they will be gratified.” For Garfield, as for Hayes, there was a broader principle at stake. “This brings on the contest at once and will settle the question whether the President is registering clerk of the Senate or the Executive of the United States,” he wrote to a friend.

Hoping to change Garfield’s mind, Stalwarts visited the White House and organized New York import merchants in opposition to Robertson, but the president would not budge. Arthur was intimately involved in these efforts—proof, critics said, that he was Conkling’s flunkey and a traitor to the administration he served. Arthur’s contributions were “reprehensible and disgusting in the second officer of the Government,” the Chicago Evening Journal proclaimed. Republicans “did not elevate him to the high position he now holds in order that he might condescend to foment jealousies and to grease the New York machine, nor to play the boss at the back of Lord Roscoe, but to deport himself in a gentlemanly and respectable manner.”

Arthur didn’t hide his loyalties in a conversation he had with Herald editor J. L. Connery in early May. Hoping to recruit Connery as an ally, Conkling had invited Connery to a private meeting in the Washington boarding house where he and Arthur were renting rooms. Conkling was not there when the editor arrived, so Arthur sat down with him to smoke and chat until the senator showed up.

Connery wasn’t sure why Conkling had summoned him. “What is all the mystery about?” he asked Arthur.

“Garfield has not been square, nor honorable, nor truthful with Conkling,” Arthur replied. “It is a hard thing to say of a president of the United States, but it is, unfortunately, only the truth. Garfield—spurred by Blaine, by whom he is too easily led—has broken every pledge made to us. Not only that, but he seems to have wished to do it in a most offensive way.”

“How so?”

“It is a long story, and I would rather you received it from Conkling himself.”

Conkling soon joined the men, “quite serene and unconcerned, like one who had well breakfasted.” But a shadow crossed his face when Arthur told him Connery wanted to hear the case against Garfield. Forcing a smile, the senator reminded Connery of an earlier meeting, during which the editor had pledged the Herald’s general support for the Stalwarts. That was true, Connery acknowledged, but he needed to know more before he would consider launching a direct attack on the president.

Conkling had been leaning against the mantelpiece, but now he started pacing the floor silently, occasionally glancing at Connery in an “extremely disagreeable” manner. In calm, measured tones, he rehashed the Chicago convention and Garfield’s surprising—and to his mind, suspicious—nomination. His hands were clasped behind his back as he stalked back and forth, and with each trip, the springs of his rage wound tighter and tighter. His voice grew louder as he railed against Robertson’s “base perfidy” in abandoning Grant for Garfield at the convention. But he saved his sharpest scorn for Blaine. It was Blaine who pestered the president night and day about the need to crush the New York machine; Blaine who “infused backbone into the president whenever the slightest sign of limpness appeared”; and Blaine who had convinced Garfield that Robertson and the other Chicago traitors should be rewarded.

Conkling paused for a moment to rifle through his papers, pulling out a January article from the Tribune detailing Garfield’s intention to reward the New Yorkers who had sided with him in Chicago. “The administration’s idea of the best way to foment no quarrels is to make war—war, sir!—war upon the larger branch of the Republican Party of the Empire State!” Conkling, trembling with rage, threw down the clipping and pointed his finger menacingly at Connery. “What was the meaning of that article? What was the meaning of it, if not to give me timely warning that the men who had voted faithfully for Grant—the men who clung to their pledges and honor—need expect no quarter from the administration, while the men who had basely violated their pledges by abandoning Grant for Garfield, and thereby turned the tide of voting in favor of Garfield, were to be rewarded for their treachery?”

Now Conkling turned his attention to the promises Garfield made at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. “How willing Garfield then was,” he sneered, “when everything looked blue and defeat seemed to stare him in the face; how willing he was to concede anything and everything to the Stalwarts if they would only rush to the rescue and save the day!”

On May 9, 1881, Republican senators discussed the Robertson nomination for five hours. Conkling spoke for two and a half of them, repeating the arguments he had made to Connery and accusing Garfield of acting in bad faith. Many of the senators were sympathetic, and wished Garfield had not flouted senatorial courtesy in making the appointment. Even so, some grumbled that it was impolitic to defy a GOP president still trying to find his footing. The reservations had spread by the time the Republicans reconvened a few days later, and it quickly became apparent that most of the senators were not willing to stand with Conkling. Enraged, the New York boss stormed out of the room, vowing never again to attend another party caucus.

Conkling and the Stalwarts seemed to be out of options. Shut out of the cabinet and denied the patronage of the Custom House, they would be hard-pressed to maintain their hold on New York. But Senator Platt had an idea. He persuaded his boss that a bold play was required, one that would dramatize their stand and demonstrate that New Yorkers stood squarely behind them. Arthur opposed Platt’s plan, but Conkling decided it was the only chance he had.

On May 16, Arthur entered the Senate Chamber a few minutes late, and during the opening prayers he seemed flushed and nervous. He soon regained his composure, and when the prayers and the official recounting of the previous day’s proceedings were finished, he coolly handed a note to the clerk, who read it aloud:

Sir:

Will you please announce to the Senate that my resignation as Senator of the United States from the State of New-York has been forwarded to the Governor of the State? I have the honor to be, with great respect, your obedient servant.

Roscoe Conkling

Many of the senators, engrossed in private conversations or reading papers at their desks, didn’t hear the announcement, but those who did gasped in disbelief. Senator Conkling what? Surely there had to be some mistake. Somebody asked the clerk to repeat the message. He did, and then Arthur handed him another one. This was Platt’s resignation, and by the time the clerk finished reading it, the Senate was in an uproar. The Times grasped for words to describe the scene. “The sensation created to-day by the announcement of the resignations of Messrs. Conkling and Platt was not exceeded by any event that occurred in the most exciting days of the rebellion.”

Conkling and Platt resigned to demonstrate just how deeply the Robertson nomination had offended them—but they had no intention of leaving the Senate permanently. The New York legislature was in Republican hands, and they assumed their allies in Albany would quickly reelect them to their posts (American voters did not directly elect senators until 1913), thereby sending a powerful signal to Garfield that Empire State Stalwarts were not to be trifled with.

But cracks in the scheme appeared almost immediately. The dual retirement produced the intended drama—but not the hoped-for sympathy and support. Conkling and Platt expected GOP senators to delay the Robertson nomination until they were restored to their positions. But even supportive senators decided that since Conkling and Platt had deserted them, they were no longer bound by senatorial courtesy to oppose Robertson. Two days after Conkling and Platt stepped down, the Senate confirmed him as collector with only a handful of dissenting votes.

A few newspapers praised Conkling and Platt for taking a principled stand. “There are two men in the country at least to whom self-respect is more than office; two men who will not sit silently and see their state antagonized,” the Chicago Inter Ocean editorialized. “Senators Conkling and Platt have not resigned out of pique nor for nothing,” the Indianapolis Journal agreed. The Robertson nomination, it said, “was solely, purely, an attack on Mr. Conkling—so conceived, so understood, so expressed by every one.” But according to the Times, most New Yorkers felt “impatience and disgust that the State should have been made the laughing-stock of the country by the childish display of temper on the part of its Senators.”

Still, the Times hoped some good might come from the episode—though it would not be an outcome Conkling would like very much. “It is to be hoped that the risk and humiliation now so needlessly brought upon the party may open the eyes of reasonable Republicans to the absolute necessity, from a party point of view, of a reform that shall take the public service out of politics,” the Times opined. “When the management of patronage ceases to be the chief occupation of our Senators, such mortifying situations as that in which we are now involved will become impossible.”

Several days later, Arthur sneaked into the side entrance of the Fifth Avenue Hotel for a meeting with Conkling that went past midnight. After a few hours of rest, Arthur hosted Conkling and a larger group of loyalists at his Lexington Avenue brownstone. The latest intelligence from Albany was that resistance to reelecting Conkling and Platt was stronger than expected; the Stalwarts decided that Conkling, Platt, and other top machine men should go to the state capital to ensure the game was won. Vice President Arthur would join them there, even though the ultimate point of their mission was to humiliate President Garfield.

Conkling was ebullient on May 24, 1881, when he and Arthur checked into the Delavan House in Albany, cheered by a crowd that filled the hotel corridors “almost to suffocation.” Usually, the senator ignored the hotel clerk and went straight to his room. This time, he signed the register boldly, flashed a “winning smile” for the crowd, and shook dozens of hands on his way upstairs.

Setting up headquarters in a Delavan House parlor, Conkling began lobbying state lawmakers that same day. He was uncharacteristically cordial, and “put up with even the most tiresome men without shrinking.” Arthur stood by his side, cooling his flushed face with a large fan. He was playing the same role he’d played for a decade: Conkling’s loyal lieutenant. But now he was Vice President Arthur, and many thought it was unseemly for him to use the weight of his office to serve the boss. The Tribune contrasted Arthur’s behavior with that of previous vice presidents from New York. “It is not enough to say that no one of them was ever guilty of such an impropriety as this; it would never have been possible for one of them to conceive of such a gross lapse of dignity,” it charged. “If General Arthur does not desire four years of public contempt he would do well to desist from the business in which he is now engaged before his inexcusable indiscretion becomes a National scandal.”

The legislature’s first vote, on May 31, indicated serious trouble for Conkling and Platt. The minority Democrats, who had sworn to support one of their own, coalesced behind two candidates, one for each of the open Senate seats. But there were 18 Republican nominees for Platt’s seat, and 20 for Conkling’s. With 105 Republican lawmakers present, Conkling could muster only 35 votes, while Platt got 29. Each man was the leading GOP vote getter in his race, but their totals were far short of the majority needed to win. The result was a deadlock.

Under state law, if the legislature was unable to fill the Senate vacancies on its first day of balloting, it had to meet every day and vote at least once each day until a choice was made. Conkling and his loyalists girded for a protracted fight; they were ready to keep the legislature in Albany for the entire summer if they had to. If they could hold on that long, perhaps New York voters would break the logjam by changing the composition of the legislature in that fall’s regular elections.

The daily balloting, which continued for the next month, was front-page news in the Times and other newspapers. On the seventh ballot, Republican Chauncey Depew passed Platt. On the 16th, former vice president Wheeler passed Conkling. But because no man had won a majority, the balloting went on. After the 22nd ballot, one exasperated legislator suggested keeping the legislature in session on bread and water until two senators were elected. At the end of June, Democrats challenged Stalwarts to a baseball game, to relieve the monotony and to raise money for the widow of a laborer who had been killed constructing the new capitol building.

On July 1, after the 31st ballot, Platt suddenly quit the race. The New York papers were coy about the reason. The Sun referred to “an alleged escapade last night on the part of a prominent Senatorial candidate (not Roscoe Conkling), involving family honor,” while the Times mentioned talk “of social rather than political character,” adding that “there is no occasion to repeat the stories which are told and retold here in explanation of his disappearance as a candidate, nor to distress anybody with the scandal.”

The Chicago Tribune had no such compunctions, and gleefully recounted the tale for its readers on July 1. Two nights before, it reported, an aide to one of the state senators opposed to the Stalwarts’ reelection saw Platt sneaking a woman down an isolated corridor of the Delavan House and entering room 113. The woman was not Mrs. Platt, and “thinking that something was in the wind,” the aide reported what he had seen to a number of his allies. After a brief discussion, 17 of them went to room 113 to investigate. Somebody found a stepladder, and one of the men used it to peek through the window above the door. A bright light was burning inside the room, so the first man—and the others who subsequently took their turns—had a clear view. “The details of the scene are unfit for publication,” the Tribune reported. “It will suffice to say that the couple were scantily attired and were caught in flagrante delictu [sic].”

The Stalwarts’ grim situation had just gotten decidedly worse. Reporters were eager to buttonhole Conkling and Arthur to ask them about their strategy in light of Platt’s withdrawal. But the boss and his lieutenant had left town on board the steamship St. John. They planned to spend the weekend in Manhattan, plotting their next moves.