CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“He Is Our President”

IN THE FIRST-FLOOR parlor, Rollins, Root, Reed, and Police Commissioner Stephen French watched Powell rearrange the green curtains and light the chandelier. Chester Alan Arthur II, a student at the College of New Jersey (later called Princeton), stood with them, having raced his coupe to Lexington Avenue when he heard that Garfield’s death was imminent.

Alan had arrived just in time to see his father become the 21st president of the United States.

Judge John R. Brady of the New York Supreme Court, who had been fetched out of bed, administered the oath of office at 2:15 a.m. Arthur recited the words solemnly, kissed his son, and accepted the congratulations of his friends. There were several carriages and a handful of reporters outside Arthur’s brownstone, and French had ordered two police officers to patrol the sidewalk in front. Otherwise, there was nothing to indicate that history had been made behind the closed blinds of 123 Lexington Avenue. Too nervous and excited to sleep, President Arthur retired to the second-floor library to chat and smoke with Reed. It was nearly 5 a.m. when he turned down the gaslight and went to bed.

Two hours later, the neighborhood servants stepped outside to scour the steps and sidewalks with their brushes and brooms. Arthur was still sleeping, and Powell had to turn away a steady stream of messengers and visitors as the sun rose higher. By late morning, knots of curious New Yorkers were gathering on the sidewalk in front of Arthur’s brownstone, their interest heightened by the appearance of a coach drawn by a pair of spirited bays. This was the carriage that would take Arthur to the ferry of the Central New Jersey Railroad. He was going to Long Branch for the afternoon, to view Garfield’s body and comfort his widow.

Dressed in black, with red and swollen eyes, President Arthur finally emerged shortly after 11 o’clock, looking a decade older than Vice President Arthur had the day before. Accompanied by his son, he tipped his hat and climbed into the waiting carriage as Powell mounted the box. The driver snapped the reins and the horses galloped down Lexington Avenue.

That afternoon, Arthur leaned on Blaine for support as he stood on the lawn behind the Elberon Hotel, staring at the Francklyn Cottage. The doors and windows facing him were closed, and soldiers in fatigues were busy packing away all of the medical appliances that had been brought from Washington. Fearing he might weep again, Arthur turned his face toward the sea.

The next day Arthur went back to Long Branch to board the funeral train that would carry Garfield’s remains to Washington. He left Manhattan early, with a hatbox and two leather trunks marked “C.A.A.” He was wearing a Prince Albert coat, buttoned up tight, and a black silk tie. On the train ride to the shore, he held his crape-banded hat on his lap and stared out the window, sunk in solitude. Former president Grant, who rode the same train, didn’t dare disturb him.

At the Elberon railway station, Arthur and Grant transferred to the funeral train. The engine was the same one that had borne the injured Garfield to Long Branch, but now the dark red woodwork on the outside of each car was draped in black cloth. Arthur and Grant settled into a first-class passenger car, joining members of the cabinet and other dignitaries. Mrs. Garfield and her household were in a special drawing-room car usually reserved for the president of the railroad. It had a library, and was equipped with “electric knobs for the summoning of a waiter.” In the car that carried Garfield’s coffin all the seats had been removed, and the casket sat on a draped dais, guarded at each corner by a sitting soldier. A tall cross of yellow and white rosebuds, carnations, tuberoses, and smilax was tipped against it. At 10 a.m., the wheels grated on the rusty temporary tracks and the train began its sad journey south.

Thousands stood alongside the tracks to watch the train pass by. Flags fluttered at half-staff, and the roofs of houses and factories were festooned in black. In sparsely settled country, farm families paused in their fields, while at Princeton Junction, three hundred college students tossed flowers. Just beyond Trenton, nuns wearing black gowns and white coifs stood with their pupils. At the suburban stations outside Philadelphia, onlookers were so still and solemn the policemen deployed to maintain order had little to do.

At 4:30 p.m., the funeral train clattered into the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad depot—the station where Guiteau had fired his fatal shots almost three months before. Hissing steam hushed the waiting crowd. Mrs. Garfield disembarked first, wearing a long veil that nearly touched the ground. The widow was taking her family straight to the home of Attorney General MacVeagh, where they would stay until the ceremonies in the capital were over. She did not want to step foot in the White House ever again.

Eight US Army artillerymen hoisted Garfield’s coffin onto their shoulders and carried it slowly toward the street, halting at the gate as a band played “Nearer, My God, to Thee.” When the last note had died away, the soldiers placed the coffin in a hearse hitched to six gray horses, each led by a groom. Arthur and members of the cabinet climbed into carriages in front of the hearse. On either side of the vehicle, and streaming far behind it, were two hundred army and navy officers in full-dress uniform.

Police officers, on horseback and on foot, guarded both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue to prevent people from impeding the funeral procession as it traveled the three-quarter-mile route from the depot to the Capitol. The sidewalks were packed with spectators, and hundreds more watched from windows and roofs. The dipped colors and drum rolls of Garfield’s inauguration had been inverted—now the flags were draped and the drums were muffled, a black-and-white negative of that faraway day.

At the Capitol, the artillerymen carried the coffin inside the rotunda and set it on a catafalque covered in heavy black velvet, the same one that had supported Lincoln’s casket in 1865. The lid of the coffin was lifted, and Arthur and Blaine shuffled around to take a last look at the slain president. Garfield’s face was pinched and shrunken—nearly unrecognizable. Earlier in the day, during a public viewing at the Francklyn Cottage, some had cried out in surprise and pain at the sight, but Arthur and Blaine betrayed no emotion. After a few moments, they headed for the east door and their waiting carriages.

The next day, as tens of thousands of Americans filed past Garfield’s body, Arthur repeated the oath of office before US Supreme Court Chief Justice Morrison Waite. About 40 people witnessed the event in the Vice President’s Room in the Capitol, including former presidents Hayes and Grant, associate justices John Harlan and Stanley Matthews, members of Garfield’s cabinet, seven senators, and six House members.

Standing ramrod straight, Arthur pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and began to read the three paragraphs he had written. “For the fourth time in the history of the Republic its Chief Magistrate has been removed by death,” he began. “All hearts are filled with grief and horror at the hideous crime which has darkened our land, and the memory of the murdered President, his protracted sufferings, his unyielding fortitude, the example and achievements of his life, and the pathos of his death will forever illumine the pages of our history.

“Men may die, but the fabrics of our free institutions remain unshaken,” he said, his voice trembling. He looked up from his text and gazed directly at the audience.

All the noble aspirations of my lamented predecessor which found expression in his life, the measures devised and suggested during his brief Administration to correct abuses, to enforce economy, to advance prosperity, and to promote the general welfare, to ensure domestic security and maintain friendly and honorable relations with the nations of the earth, will be garnered in the hearts of the people; and it will be my earnest endeavor to profit, and to see that the nation shall profit, by his example and experience.

The speech was well received, but Arthur “entered the White House as President with either the hostility or the distrust or the coldness of nine-tenths of the American people,” according to Chauncey Depew. His political position was weak: Garfield’s cabinet members were expected to resign, and Blaine, John Sherman, and other leading Republicans were already plotting to seize the GOP nomination from him in 1884. The likelihood that this accidental president would serve a single term diminished his leverage on Capitol Hill.

Julia Sand acknowledged the peculiarity of Arthur’s position in a second letter to him, which she wrote a week after he took the oath of office in the Capitol. The whole country was in mourning, but she understood that nobody was suffering quite like him—not even Garfield’s family.

And so Garfield is really dead and you are President. For a time it seemed as if we all were mistaken—as if he meant to disappoint our fears. Then I felt I owed you an apology for what I had written. Perhaps I owe you one now, for writing at all. My only excuse for this letter is the deep sympathy I feel for you in your sorrow. All through these sad, dreary days, I have followed your name in the newspapers with the feeling that you were the chief mourner. Even contemplating the wife, the mother, the children of the departed, has not changed your position. Great as their suffering is, it is what hundreds, in the obscurity of private life, have suffered before them—what thousands suffered in the old war times—& they have the consolations which come to all who mourn for the brave and the true. But your affliction is different. The very thoughts which assuage their grief but add a pang to yours. What we all endured during the terrible months of anxiety just past, you too endured, intensified a thousand fold by the reflection that you were the one human being to benefit by his death, that you had been opposed to him, that some believed you capable of having plotted for his cruel end. You were alone in your sorrow—perfectly isolated.

Sand was intimately familiar with the grief so many American families had endured in “the old war times.” In September 1862, her beloved older brother Henry Sand, a captain in the 103rd New York Volunteers, had been mortally wounded during the Battle of Antietam. When the color bearer of the regiment was shot down, Captain Sand seized the flag and ran along the line exhorting his men. But a rebel sharpshooter shot him in the thigh. He died from his wounds at a hospital in Sharpsburg, Maryland, six weeks later.

But after expressing sympathy for Arthur’s political predicament and mental state, Julia Sand sought to pump up his confidence. “You are a better & a nobler man than you were a very short time ago,” she assured him. “Nothing could be more beautiful than the manner in which you have borne yourself through this long, hard ordeal. The people feel it so.

“You have disarmed the majority of your opponents,” she continued. “It is true some regard your whole course as a matter of policy, your conduct as a fine piece of acting—perhaps they have an appreciation of what is fine in nature—& they expect that soon you will change. It is sad to endure, when your motives all are good. But it is what you will have to bear—the natural consequence of your past career. However, in time, you can prove to them that they are mistaken.”

Sand was right: Arthur’s dignified behavior during the torturous summer of 1881 had softened the public’s attitude toward him. “His conduct during the trying period of President Garfield’s struggle with death has been such as to command the respect of those most disposed to find fault with him,” the Times observed. “He has effaced himself after a fashion as manly as it was statesmanlike.… He has never visibly lost sight of the fact that he was merely the Vice-President of the United States, watching like the rest of his fellow-citizens over a life which he and they were alike sincerely anxious should be spared.”

Even the reform-minded Tribune was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. “It is not the time to recall past mistakes or to insist upon any harsh interpretation of acts which may be open to question,” it argued. “He is our President, made such by an awful calamity which has chastened the hearts of all good citizens.”

But even those who praised Arthur were uneasy about the men he had huddled with as Garfield succumbed to his wounds. They were the men he had always leaned on: Roscoe Conkling and the Stalwarts, and in the wake of Garfield’s death their motives and methods inspired greater distaste than ever before. The Times acknowledged that Arthur’s loyalty to his friends was understandable, and had carried him far. But it warned that qualities praiseworthy in a private citizen or local pol could destroy a presidency. “If he is to prove equal to the great position he occupies he must know principles rather than individuals, he must subordinate personal preference as well as acquired prejudice to the accomplishment of certain well-defined public ends.” The Tribune suggested that Arthur could earn “the loyal and powerful allegiance of those true hearts now mourning for the death of Garfield,” but only “on one simple condition—that he be President of the Nation and not the chief of a faction.”

The editorial writers urged Arthur to leave Conkling and his cronies behind—and to go further, by actively pursuing civil service reform. “He can disarm the public distrust which his elevation excites by leaving undone anything that is obviously superfluous, and by walking steadily in the path of reform which was marked out for his predecessor,” the Times wrote. “He can earn for himself everlasting odium and for his party disunion and defeat by repeating as President blunders which he has already made in a lower sphere.”

In the days following the inauguration, there were ominous signs. Arthur wanted the White House to be thoroughly cleaned and redecorated before he moved in. In the meantime, he took up residence at the Capitol Hill home of Senator Jones. When Jones traveled to Utica to meet with Conkling the week after Arthur moved in, many took it as evidence that New York’s ex-senator would be the real power in the new administration. Conkling’s advice for Arthur, delivered to Jones, was to keep Garfield’s cabinet in place until Congress reconvened in December. By that time, he predicted, public excitement over the momentous events of the past months would have faded, and Arthur would be free to make whatever changes he wished without much criticism. Conkling was clearly energized by what Jones told him about President Arthur’s plans. Bidding the Nevada senator farewell at the Utica station, Conkling had “that air of one whose defeat has been changed into victory.” He bowed and shook hands with anybody who approached him, and he looked much healthier than he had when his Senate seat slipped away from him in Albany.

When Arthur became president, John Hay, who had been personal secretary to President Lincoln, was filling in for Whitelaw Reid as editor of the Tribune while Reid was on an extended trip to Europe. Like many Republican reformers, Hay feared the worst. “Everything is at sea about Arthur,” he wrote to Reid in London. “Perhaps the cable will tell you in a day or two what he is up to. But at present the Cabinet knows nothing whatever of his intentions. The facts are: 1. He is living with Jones. 2. Jones has gone to Utica to confer with Conkling. 3. The Grant crowd seems happy.”

Arthur’s return to Manhattan at the end of September added fuel to such fears. He claimed he had come home to turn over his law business and arrange for some of his personal possessions to be transferred to Washington, but newspapers noted the stream of Stalwarts coming in and out of the Lexington Avenue brownstone. Senator Jones came directly from his Utica meeting with Conkling who, it was said, wanted to replace his hated rival Blaine as secretary of state. Some suspected Arthur was in town to work his old magic in the upcoming New York elections. Republican leaders in Garfield’s home state of Ohio warned that Conkling’s influence on Arthur might dampen GOP turnout there, perhaps handing the governor’s office, the legislature, and Ohio’s congressional delegation to the Democrats. “Let President Arthur show a disposition to be advised or led by ex-Senator Conkling and there will be no voice raised for him in Ohio and no hand held out to help his Administration,” a Times correspondent warned. “The feeling toward Mr. Conkling throughout this state is one of anger, distrust, and disgust; and law-abiding as are the people of Northern and Central Ohio, the late senior Senator from New-York could hardly travel about here in safety from open insult, if not from bodily harm.”

Even Arthur’s biggest fan, Julia Sand, was concerned. “Well, you have gone. So much the better. But they say you are coming back again, very soon. Please don’t!!!” she wrote to him in a letter dated October 5. “New York is the one spot on the continent where you positively ought not to be this fall. If your private affairs require attention, show your patriotism in letting them suffer. It will take months for you to live down the injury you have done yourself in being here for just a few days. And it is not for the good of the country that it should lose confidence in you now.”

Taken at large, one branch of the Republican party is about as good as the other—“that man from Maine” [Blaine] does not lead a band of angels, any more than that man from the other place—but in the state of New York it is different. Here an absolute right & wrong are in conflict. Unfortunately, you have been connected with the side which represents the wrong—“the machine”—the thing which I politely request you to smash. Perhaps it was expecting too much of human nature that you should take pride in doing that. But no effort on your part is necessary. Only be passive. Stay in Washington, absorbed in national affairs, not showing by the movement of an eyelash that you take an interest in what is going on here. And when the electioneering excitement is over, you have merely to bow gracefully to that great law of nature, the survival of the fittest. Depend on it, the fittest will not be your old machine. If there is a soul in the Republican party, it is on the other side.

Then, for the first time, Sand revealed a little more about her own life and reasons for writing him.

And now you are thinking that I am insanely conceited for giving you such an avalanche of ideas? Probably. I admit I have let facts speak loudly against me. Yet I am not prompted by egotism. I know that my opinion, as mine, can have no weight with you. If it has any value, it is because we are strangers, because our paths have never crossed & are not likely ever to meet, because while taking an intense interest in politics, I have no political ties.… But I will not trouble you much oftener—possibly this is the last time. There are reasons why it is difficult for me to write to you. I am not fond of talking, when it is to no purpose. Soon you will show what you intend to do. Half measures have no place in your programme—they would make too flat a failure. If you choose one course, you will have all the praise you want, without mine. If you choose the other, I shall know that if my first appeal to you was in vain, nothing that I could say to you now would avail. But I will not admit that “if”—I intend to go on having faith in you.

Sand held on to the letter for a few days before mailing it. On October 8, she added a postscript. “By the way, do you take any care of your health?” she asked the president. “Perhaps naturally it is good; but, there are limits to human strength. You have been under a great nerve strain for months past. And now we read constantly of your being ‘hard at work,’ or ‘receiving callers,’ but rarely of your going anywhere. You ought to be out every day and early in the day too—not when the sunset chill is in the atmosphere & malaria is prowling around in search of its victims.”

Nothing supplies the place of fresh air and sunshine. By force of will we can accomplish a great deal, &, under the excitement of it, fancy that we are thriving, but if the health is neglected, the break down is certain to come—& when it comes, it is not easily mended. If one thing more than another would make the duties of your position intolerable to you, it would be to have to meet them with a perpetual headache. Therefore ward it off—do not sit still all day & let the blood go crowding to your brain. If you are not too heavy—your pictures vary about 100 lbs in weight—and it would be cruelty to animals to have a depressing effect upon them—why not ride on horseback all through the bright, bracing autumn weather? Of all things in the world, that is the exercise which most quickly sets the blood in motion & brings refreshment alike to body & mind.

She offered one more bit of political advice—that Arthur should keep the popular postmaster general Thomas James—before concluding with words of encouragement. “You have a great responsibility resting on you, but you will prove equal to it. With the best hopes & wishes for your future, farewell. Sincerely, your friend, J.I.S.”

At noon on October 8, Conkling sat down with President Arthur for the first time. The two old friends met in Jones’s grand granite house, in the second-floor room Arthur was using as an office. Arthur’s private secretary and the clerical staff he inherited from Garfield occupied almost the entire first floor. Each day messengers scurried back and forth from the White House, carrying mail and documents to be examined and signed. Reporters assumed Arthur and Conkling were discussing the new cabinet and Conkling’s place in it. Reformers held their breath, sure that Roscoe Conkling’s puppet was about to bring the worst features of New York machine politics into the White House.

In fact, much of the discussion revolved around a single, familiar issue: the New York Custom House. Conkling needed control of Custom House patronage to revive his sagging political fortunes and rebuild his Empire State machine. Conkling had lost his Senate seat fighting Garfield over the appointment of William Robertson as collector. Now Garfield was dead, and the new president was a Stalwart. To Conkling, Arthur’s obligation to his friends was clear: he must fire Robertson and put a Stalwart in his place.

Conkling’s request—or was it an order?—surprised the president. Conkling was frozen in one of his withering stares. Eyes flashing, jaw clenched, the New York boss might have been back on the Senate floor, eviscerating another impudent opponent. Arthur felt the heat rising in his cheeks, and suddenly his collar seemed to tighten around his neck. He had always been loyal to Conkling and the machine. Even as vice president he had gone to Albany to help the boss, and had endured vicious criticism because of it. He knew that if he had not been Conkling’s man, Republicans would not have put him on the ticket with Garfield.

But watching Garfield’s long ordeal, and the suffering of the dying man’s family, had greatly affected Chester Arthur. Secluded in his Lexington Avenue brownstone as the summer dragged on, he had contemplated his own history, and the place he might occupy in the history of his country. He had been a machine politician for decades, but before that he had been something else: the son of a backwoods preacher; the young lawyer who helped integrate New York City’s streetcars; the Union Army quartermaster who served his country honorably while so many others fed from the public trough.

Arthur did not want to be disloyal. He valued Conkling’s support and friendship, and told him so. Nevertheless, he said, he was “morally bound to continue the policy of the former president.” No—he would not remove Robertson from the Custom House.

Conkling’s eyes grew wide. Pounding his fist on the table, he bellowed that Arthur was not bound “morally nor politically nor any other way.” Again, he argued that Robertson’s presence at the Custom House was an affront to the Stalwarts. But Arthur stood firm. He knew the American people would never have chosen him to be president. Now he was determined to show he was worthy of the job.

Upon his return to New York, Conkling disparaged Arthur as a traitor and a coward, and most of Arthur’s old cronies from the machine agreed. But at least one Stalwart understood what Arthur had done. “The president is right,” John O’Brien told a reporter. “He isn’t ‘Chet’ Arthur anymore—he’s the president and must demonstrate that he’s nobody’s servant.”

Arthur did not want to banish Conkling from his circle of advisers, but when it came to Collector Robertson, he would not budge. “For the vice presidency I was indebted to Mr. Conkling,” he said. “But for the presidency of the United States, my debt is to the Almighty.”