CHAPTER NINETEEN

An Attack in Savannah

IN DECEMBER 1882, the lame-duck Congress overhauled the country’s civil service. Three months later, it finished its work by laying the keel of the modern American navy.

Many Americans didn’t see the point. The European powers were an ocean away and America had no overseas colonies to defend. Since the War of 1812, the US Navy’s principal mission had been to protect American harbors, and nobody expected it to venture too far from shore. But the navy had deteriorated dramatically in the 15 years since the Civil War, making it inferior not only to European navies but to those of some Latin American countries as well. When Arthur took office, it had only 52 ramshackle ships, down from almost seven hundred vessels during the war. Moreover, at a time when other nations were rapidly constructing steel navies, nearly every American ship was made of wood.

The men in the navy weren’t much better than the ships. There were 1,817 officers in the US Navy, one for every five seamen. Many high-ranking officers were political appointees, and more than a few were incompetent drunkards. Some had been treating the ships under their command as private yachts. “Never was there such a hopeless, broken-down, tattered, forlorn apology for a navy,” one British journal asserted.

From the time he took office, Arthur pushed for improvements in both the navy and the merchant marine. He recognized that European powers had designs on Latin America, and that the United States would need overseas markets for its booming productive capacity. “We must be ready to defend our harbors against aggression,” he declared in his first Annual Message to Congress, “to protect, by the distribution of our ships of war over the highways of commerce, the varied interests of our foreign trade and the persons and property of our citizens abroad; to maintain everywhere the honor of our flag and the distinguished position which we may rightfully claim among the nations of the world.”

In Secretary of the Navy William E. Chandler, President Arthur had just the right man to wring the required money out of a reluctant Congress.

Born in 1835, in Concord, New Hampshire, Chandler studied law at Harvard and served in the state legislature. In 1864, the navy department employed him to prosecute fraud in the Philadelphia Navy Yard. President Lincoln later appointed him to be the navy department’s solicitor and judge advocate. During the Grant administration, Chandler was the principal lobbyist for John Roach, a prominent shipbuilder and the secretary of the Republican National Committee.

The morning after the 1876 election between Samuel Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes, Chandler had arrived in New York to learn that his party had, it appeared, lost the White House. But then he ran into the managing editor of the Times, who told him that Tilden’s margin of victory was razor thin, and that the final result would depend on the count in South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana. On his own initiative, Chandler immediately wired Republicans in those states, instructing them to concede nothing. He soon set out for Florida to represent the Republican National Committee’s interests, and played a leading role in turning the election in favor of Hayes and the Republicans.

When the navy secretary began pushing for more ships, Capitol Hill skeptics snickered at Chandler’s connection to Roach the shipbuilder, but Arthur and Chandler were undaunted. Not long before Chandler’s appointment, the House Committee on Naval Affairs had studied the issue and called for the appointment of a Naval Advisory Board. Chandler chose the members, and in December 1882 the panel recommended the construction of three steel cruisers and a dispatch boat. At Chandler’s request, the resulting legislation included a provision barring the repair of any vessel if the expense exceeded 20 percent of its original cost. The clause guaranteed the retirement of many aging and obsolete ships—and enraged congressmen eager to hand work to their local navy yards. Nevertheless, Congress approved the bill and Arthur signed it into law in March 1883. “I think that I did my best work in destroying the old Navy, although I did build four new ships,” Chandler later quipped.

The ships that were built were not large or powerful by European standards—some nations had ships that displaced 15,000 tons, while the largest of the new American ships displaced only 4,500. But Arthur and Chandler set the United States on course to become a world naval power. During the next four years, Congress authorized 30 additional vessels with an aggregate displacement of 100,000 tons.

By the time Arthur signed the navy bill, he was mentally and physically exhausted. “I have been so ill since the adjournment [of Congress] that I have hardly been able to dispose of the accumulation of business still before me,” the President confided to his son in a letter dated March 11, 1883, a week after the 47th Congress completed its work and left town.

The 48th Congress would not convene until December 1883, giving Arthur the opportunity to take a real vacation. In April, he decided, he would travel to a newly popular destination for wealthy Americans: Florida. The Sunshine State had a salubrious climate, and it was a hunting and fishing paradise. President Arthur, a first-class angler, was eager to experience it.

On April 5, 1883, the presidential carriage halted outside the Baltimore and Potomac station. As usual, pedestrians gawked at Arthur’s elegant equipage: his landau was painted a mellow green with red trim, and the harness was heavily mounted with plain silver. The horses were a perfectly matched pair of mahogany bays with black points, without a white spot anywhere. The animals, half-brothers, had been raised by the same man and were always driven together. The president climbed out looking healthier and more cheerful than he had in a long time. He would be traveling to Florida with a tight group of aides and personal friends: Chandler, who was fast becoming his most trusted adviser; Charles E. Miller, a close friend from New York; his private secretary, Fred Phillips; Aleck Powell, his trusted valet and doorkeeper; and the White House chef, “Monsieur Cuppinger,” who sported an apron, a baker’s cap, and a waxed moustache. Four reporters also were allowed to tag along.

As the other travelers boarded the fast mail train that would carry them south, the rotund French cook scurried around the platform searching for a hamper of provisions sent to the White House by mistake. He was still looking when a gong sounded and the conductor shouted, “All aboard!” As the train rolled out of the station, Arthur exchanged his high silk hat for a broad-brimmed, light-colored felt one. By the time the grass-grown streets of Alexandria, Virginia, came into view, he began to feel, finally, that he was out of harness.

But the next two days of train travel were hardly an idyllic escape. Between Petersburg, Virginia, and Weldon, North Carolina, a punctilious conductor, unaware that Arthur was aboard, ordered the commander in chief to hand over the fare. Arthur was reaching for his wallet when a porter prevailed on the conductor to stand down. Outside Wilmington, North Carolina, the train was stalled for more than an hour while workmen changed the tracks to a wider gauge. Unable to sleep, Arthur sat astride a camp stool on the rear platform of his car. He was wrapped in a thick coat, and wore the felt hat he had put on when his journey began. In the glare of an engine’s headlight, he puffed a cigar as a damp breeze blew in from the Cape Fear River, laden with the aromas of turpentine and resin. A group of black men, who had come to the station with lanterns and torches to see the president, stood in a silent semicircle, watching him smoke.

During a short stop in tiny Folkston, Georgia, the president emerged from the train smirched with dust and soot from the wood-burning locomotive. Chandler’s face was darkened with layers of Georgia dirt, and rivulets of perspiration traced bright lines of mud across the chef’s broad face. “I have poot on tree shirt dees tay,” Monsieur Cuppinger grumbled to reporters, one of whom took a stab at recreating the chef’s French accent for his readers. “Ven I poot on vun, in fife minute it look like I sweep de shimney.”

So far, only the people of Goldsboro, North Carolina, had come out en masse to greet the president. That changed in Jacksonville, Florida, where Arthur and his companions gladly left the rails to board the steamboat that would take them up the St. Johns River. Several military companies and city leaders wearing swallow-tail coats with posies in their buttonholes greeted Arthur and led him through cheering crowds to a carriage drawn by six gray horses. A cannon belched a salute and brass music blared. The cacophony startled the horses, but the driver deftly guided the prancing animals through the city to the wharf, where Arthur and his companions boarded the steamboat Frederick De Bary.

Arthur lit a cigar and stood on deck chatting with Chandler as the De Bary steamed upriver, leaving the twinkling lights of Jacksonville behind to explore the darkness ahead. Magnolia, Green Cove Spring, and other riverside towns burned bonfires and lit up the sky with fireworks as the president passed by. The party turned in early—though at six feet two inches tall, Arthur struggled to sleep in a berth that was only five feet eight inches long. Following the narrow windings of the river, the De Bary crept past cypress trees draped with gray moss and blue and white herons stalking in pools along shore. Water hens, curlews, and long-billed sandhill cranes flew overhead, uttering strange cries as they fluttered away.

At noon the next day, the De Bary reached breeze-ruffled Lake Monroe. The steamboat headed for the north shore and the town of Enterprise, where a crowd waited on the wharf. As the boat approached, soldiers fired a 21-gun salute and more people, many of them black, streamed out of a nearby hotel to greet the president. When the De Bary reached the pier, a young African American man named Jackson rushed on board and met Arthur in the forward saloon. Jackson, dressed patriotically in a red shirt, a white necktie, and a blue coat with a badge on it, had traveled 35 miles with a gift from the black community: a young bald eagle. Arthur expressed his appreciation, but said he was obliged to decline the bird, since he could not take it with him.

The next stop for the president and his party was Sanford, on the south shore of the lake. They visited an orange grove—Chandler threw off his coat and climbed a tree to pick three juicy samples—and spent the evening at a hotel called the Sanford House. At dusk, in a wide hall where guests gathered to chat and play cards, a black musician strummed a banjo accompanied by a half dozen singing and dancing comrades. “Oh! Where is my beauty gone? Meet me by moonlight alone,” the troupe sang. Arthur and his party enjoyed the entertainment until close to midnight, when the performers passed a hat for coins and bowed to the president before departing.

Arthur spent the next week in the interior of Florida, enjoying the strange scenery, the fragrance of the pinewoods and the magnolias, and the fishing on the Kissimmee River, where he caught bass, trout, and catfish from a dugout canoe, and where Fred Phillips shot an alligator. One evening, the presidential party visited Fort Gardiner, where they met Tom Tigertail, a Seminole chief who was accompanied by two of his wives, his baby, and his mother. The chief wore “a gay bandana handkerchief” wrapped around his head like a turban, with several feathers stuck in its folds. The flaps of his calico shirt floated in the breeze, and his legs were bare. He shook hands with the president and replied to his questions in a solemn monotone. The Seminole’s stern features spread into a smile, however, when Arthur drew a cigar from his pocket and offered it to him. The chief grabbed the cigar, bit off the end, and snatched the cigar from Arthur’s mouth to light his own.

By the end of the week, the president’s cheeks were “burned to blisters” from the sun—a condition he treated by bathing them with hazel extract—and he had been mauled by mosquitoes. He was ready to return to the coast and begin the long trek home. Traveling by steamboat and wagon, the presidential party reached the port of St. Augustine on April 15. At dawn three days later, the Tallapoosa weighed anchor and steamed north with the presidential party on board. It was bound for Savannah, where Arthur and his companions would board a train for the trip home.

Within half an hour, the Tallapoosa was rolling in heavy seas. Waves dashed over the starboard bow, exploding in clouds of spray. Arthur had risen early, and was standing on the quarterdeck with Chandler, Phillips, and two ladies who had joined the party for the trip to Savannah. After 15 minutes, the navy secretary muttered an apology through ashy lips and fled to his stateroom, followed shortly by the two female passengers. Arthur endured the corkscrew motion of the ship a bit longer before he too grew pale and lurched to his room. The next morning, he was the only one who showed up to breakfast.

Cheered by the return to solid ground, the queasy passengers were in high spirits when they arrived in Savannah on April 19. Once again, African Americans were especially excited to greet a president from the party of Lincoln: nearly two hundred black residents clustered on the wharf when Arthur arrived. The president shook hands with all of them—some more than once. Despite the scorching sun, he toured Savannah in an open carriage and attended a rifle-shooting contest in a park on the outskirts of the city. The organizers of the event served him a sumptuous lunch, highlighted by deviled crab and the local delicacy, “Savannah shrimp salad.” True to form, Arthur “partook of this agreeable dish very liberally.” Afterward, he rode back into town to attend an official reception at the City Exchange building.

Arthur returned to the Tallapoosa, anchored just off the city docks, shortly before midnight. The water was calm, and the ship lay like a log on a sand bank. Chandler and Phillips thought the president was in an unusually cheerful mood—the vacation had done him good. He smoked a final cigar and went to bed.

At about 2 a.m., Arthur bolted awake. A sharp pain ripped into his abdomen, he was trembling, and his brow was beaded with clammy sweat. He tried to call out, but the only sound that escaped his lips was a raspy whisper. Finally he managed to cry weakly, “Aleck… Aleck!” The valet rushed into the president’s stateroom and was shocked at what he saw: Arthur was as pale as his pillow. Powell immediately summoned the ship’s physician, Dr. Black. “I saw instantly that he was grievously ill,” the doctor recalled. “I knew that speedy and heroic treatment was necessary.” He called for pails of hot water, dunked towels in them, and applied them to the president’s body. He tried mustard poultices and sedatives, but after two hours he had not relieved Arthur’s agony. Chandler, who had joined the others at Arthur’s bedside, said he would telegraph Washington at 6 a.m. if his condition remained dire. The ship’s surgeon frequently checked the president’s pulse, and he grew increasingly alarmed as the time ticked by without any improvement. He feared the country was about to lose another president—and on his watch. After hours of fruitless treatment, Dr. Black administered an enema, which seemed to give Arthur some relief. The president dozed off, and the crisis passed. Chandler returned to his stateroom.

Arthur, still under the influence of the sedatives, drowsed throughout the morning. He refused nourishment until 11 a.m., when he requested ginger ale and swallowed it with relish. Late in the afternoon, he crawled out on the upper deck to get some fresh air, but he was pale and feeble, and soon returned to his bed.

Dr. Black told Chandler and Phillips that Arthur had suffered an acute attack of indigestion, caused by overeating, overexposure to the sun, and the “malarious” night air he had breathed on Florida’s rivers. Had he been as seasick as the other passengers between St. Augustine and Savannah, the doctor speculated, he might have avoided the episode. Instead, he was “stirred up by the heavy seas.” Chandler briefed reporters, and the president’s illness was front-page news.

Arthur remained weak and dreaded the prospect of another dusty train trip, but he was eager to get back to Washington. Late on the afternoon of April 21, 1883, the presidential party rode to the Savannah train station to begin the journey home. While waiting for his private car to be attached to the fast mail train, an angry Arthur learned that his illness had become public knowledge, and that Phillips had failed to mention that hundreds of telegrams had poured in, anxiously inquiring about his condition. When the train left Savannah, Arthur sat moodily in the corner of his car, alone. For supper he drank a cupful of chicken broth, but turned away other food. Soon afterward he ordered his bed made up and retired, complaining of a pain in his side.

When the train reached Washington at 9:30 p.m. on April 22, Arthur’s son, the attorney general, a handful of friends, and a mob of newspaper reporters were waiting on the platform. The president stepped out into a hail of questions. What had caused his attack in Savannah? Was he fully recovered? Was it likely to happen again? Arthur downplayed the significance of the incident, claiming he had never felt better in his life. Standing in the glare of the lights on the platform, he appeared to be fine. A friend made his way forward and shook the president’s hand. “How are you feeling? I came down here because I feared from the reports that you might be seriously ill.” Arthur smiled. “I am feeling perfectly well—as well as ever, in fact. I have not been sick at all.”

Buttonholed by a Tribune reporter, Chandler backtracked from what he had told the correspondents traveling with the presidential party. “The president’s slight indisposition at Savannah I attribute to a long ride in the hot sun, but it lasted only a few hours,” he said. “The statement telegraphed by some of the correspondents giving him ‘malaria’ and ‘chills’ are purely sensational. He had had neither at any time. On the other hand, he has been greatly benefited by his excursion, and has visibly gained in health and vigor.”

The reporters “recorded many incidents which actually occurred,” Chandler said, “but are all blessed with lively imaginations and great rhetorical gifts.”

After returning from Florida, President Arthur surprised civil service reformers—and Julia Sand—by proving that his conversion to the cause was sincere.

After he had signed the civil service bill in January 1883, Arthur took his time choosing people to serve on the new Civil Service Commission, causing some reformers to wonder whether he intended to make the appointments at all. But in February he had named three members who were qualified and dedicated to reform. Then, when the commission issued its rules in May 1883, reformers feared Arthur would gut them. Instead, he accepted them with only minor modifications. “The reports, republished from time to time since [the rules] were submitted to the effect that they were being badly cut up and changed were very wide of the mark,” the Times acknowledged.

As the months went by, it became clear that the president was implementing the regulations with vigor. Addressing the Civil Service Reform League in August 1883, Conkling’s bête noire, George William Curtis, complimented Arthur for “his desire to give the reform system fair play” and noted that his attitude was surprising, given his history. “The president’s previous course, and his faith in the spoils system as essential to effective party organization, had excited great apprehension that he would use his vast patronage in a manner to confirm and aggravate the evils of that system,” Curtis said. “But this apprehension has not been justified.”

Then Curtis went further, praising the president for rejecting his New York cronies’ demands for jobs and favors—and for confounding his critics.

The president’s steady refusal to satisfy the faction of his party which demands that the public patronage shall be prostituted to a factional interest is most honorable to the magistrate; and, whatever exception may be taken to many acts of the administration in regard to appointments and removals, it will not be denied by fair men of every party that a president whose accession by means of a most tragical event was generally regarded as a serious misfortune, if not calamity, has not only allayed all apprehension of a gross misuse of the patronage of the government, but by his pacific and temperate administration has gained the approval of the country.

For once, the Stalwarts agreed with Curtis. The president served his machine buddies the finest food and wine when he hosted them at late-night dinners in the Executive Mansion. But he withheld the political plums they assumed would be theirs once their good friend “Chet” was in the White House. “We regard Arthur as our leader,” said one, “and when he became president, knowing as he did the thankless tasks we have to do here, we expected that we would be appreciated—not to say rewarded. We thought he would throw in our direction enough patronage to make our work less onerous. On the contrary, he has done less for us than Garfield, or even Hayes.” For many members of Conkling’s old machine, Arthur’s refusal to help Tom Murphy, who had fallen on hard times, was especially egregious. “I tell you it is pretty hard to see Murphy, who made Arthur, going around without a cent in his pocket, and Arthur running the whole United States, and too timorous to reward Tom Murphy with any position whatever.”

John Smyth, who had been one of Conkling’s top lieutenants, grumbled that “no one who had ever arisen to great power in this country ever caused so many wrecks to be scattered on the shore.”

By the early 1880s, Yellowstone National Park, which had been established in 1872, was under increasing pressure from mining companies, loggers, and hunters who wanted to overturn the federal prohibitions against resource development. So far, the park’s remote location had limited the number of visitors, but the extension of the Northern Pacific Railroad to nearby Livingston, Montana, promised to open America’s first national park to the world—and many were interested in profiting from the anticipated influx. In December 1882, General Philip H. Sheridan, whose military jurisdiction included the park, produced a much-publicized report in which he warned against leasing the park to private corporations, which were already deploying swarms of lobbyists on Capitol Hill.

Arthur was sympathetic to Sheridan’s view. In his second Annual Message to Congress, he called for legislation to preserve forests in the public domain. “The condition of the forests of the country and the wasteful manner in which their destruction is taking place give cause for serious apprehension,” he declared. “Their action in protecting the earth’s surface, in modifying the extremes of climate, and in regulating and sustaining the flow of springs and streams is now well understood, and their importance in relation to the growth and prosperity of the country can not be safely disregarded.”

Sheridan believed Arthur would be an even stronger ally if he could experience the wonders of the park for himself, and in January 1883 he and Senator George G. Vest, a Missouri Democrat, began planning a presidential tour. Some months later, Arthur formally accepted the offer. He had heard there was spectacular fishing in the West, and he was desperate to escape Washington. Furthermore, his health remained fragile, and he hoped that another vacation would reinvigorate him. Sheridan drew up plans designed to give him plenty of rest and relaxation.

Arthur departed Washington on the morning of July 30, 1883. Two days later, in Louisville, he participated in ceremonies opening the Southern Cotton Exposition and was cheered by boisterous crowds. “I have often heard, of course, of the hospitality of the Southern people, but it has never been my privilege before to see it so exemplified,” Arthur told a reporter. “Did your impressions sustain Louisville’s reputation for beautiful ladies?” the correspondent asked. “I had heard much of that, too, and am thoroughly converted on that score,” the president replied. “I had chance to see two things on which Kentucky plumes herself—her horses and her beautiful women—and now I am a thorough believer in both of them.”

Arthur’s locomotive was decorated with American flags, and his portrait was mounted over the headlight, above a wreath of evergreens and an elaborate arrangement of flowers. Crossing into Indiana, the train curled under bluffs, past fields of rustling corn tassels and meadows filled with nodding flowers. During a stop in Lafayette, a policeman with a tin star on his lapel struggled to control a thousand people by wielding a wagon spoke as a club. Arthur, wearing a blue flannel suit and a Scotch silk cap, delighted the crowd with his prediction that Indiana would soon be one of the greatest states in the Union. After his speech, a young African American boy gave him a “ship of state” made of flowers and a plaque thanking him for his devotion to “justice to an oppressed people.”

To welcome Arthur to Chicago, the Chicago Daily News published 15 columns of letters from distinguished Americans assessing the president’s performance. “I can hardly imagine how he could have done better, in the very trying circumstances which surrounded his administration,” the famous clergyman Henry Ward Beecher wrote. Mark Twain cautioned that he was only one man among 55 million Americans, but that in his view “it would be hard indeed to better President Arthur’s administration.” Chicago reporters thought Arthur had changed in appearance—mostly for the better—since he had been in town for the dramatic 1880 convention. His hair and muttonchops were streaked with gray, giving him a more distinguished look, and he now had “far less of the flabby—some might say beefy—appearance which then somewhat forcibly struck the average beholder.”

Arthur was taken aback by the aggressiveness of the Chicago press—especially reporters’ use of a new journalistic technique called “interviewing.” When one reporter observed, “your administration is meeting with considerable popular favor,” Arthur’s ears pricked up, but he suspected a trap. “Yes? Well, I am glad to hear it,” he replied suspiciously. The reporter tried to ask a follow-up question, but Arthur shut him down. “You really must excuse me. I make it a habit not to talk politics with you gentlemen of the press.… By the way, I hope you are not interviewing me—I believe that is the word—or intending to quote what I have been saying.”

Arthur wanted to “have a good time and get away from official cares,” and during his three weeks in Yellowstone, he did just that. He and his companions rose at 5 a.m., and by 6 they were in the saddle. They rode until the afternoon and then camped beside a stream so they could spend the afternoon hunting, fishing, and hiking. They crossed the Continental Divide three times, and at one point camped at a point nine thousand feet above sea level. One day toward the end of the trip, Arthur and Senator Vest caught 105 pounds of fish. The president said his sojourn in the park was “better than anything I ever tried before,” and by the time it was over he felt “strong and rested.”

On September 4, 1883, he returned to Chicago on his way back to Washington, looking fit and tanned from the days he had spent outdoors. The throngs of politicians and party officials in the Grand Pacific Hotel, where Arthur was staying, seemed to herald the beginning of the 1884 campaign. “Whether it was the intention of the managers or not the Arthur boom was pushed for all it was worth,” the Times observed. The enthusiasm for Arthur contrasted sharply with the scene in the same hotel three years earlier, when Republicans could hardly hide their distaste for the man chosen to be Garfield’s running mate. “The feeling expressed was that if Arthur was only an accident, he is a pretty fair one, and deserved to be rewarded for the trials which came to his lot out of the great calamity,” one reporter wrote.

Arthur’s handlers and local supporters thought a public reception would highlight the president’s strong political standing and win him additional friends. The following night from 8 o’clock until 10, Arthur stood in the same Grand Pacific parlor where he had accepted the vice-presidential nomination in 1880 and “submitted to the pump-handle operation,” affably greeting the nearly ten thousand people who wanted to meet him. When the parlor doors were shut and it was finally over, local leaders looked forward to a few hours of more intimate socializing with the president. But Arthur quickly donned an overcoat and escaped. “I know you will excuse me for not talking to you at any great length tonight, as I am somewhat exhausted after the reception,” he said. “I thank you for the reception and for your sweet music. Leaving you my very best wishes, I bid you good night.”

Arthur arrived in Washington on September 7, 1883. Publicly, he said he was in excellent health, and that the trip had done him good. Privately, he sent an urgent summons to his personal physician: his arms and legs were swollen, he told the doctor, and he was in excruciating pain.