Epilogue

THE STORM OF the century sneaked into the city on a Sunday, disguised as steady rain. On Monday, March 12, 1888, New Yorkers woke to find their metropolis clamped in the jaws of a blizzard. A howling wind corkscrewed through the streets, toppling signs, horse cars, and telegraph wires, and piling sticky snow into huge drifts. The city looked like a battlefield, with only a few scattered wagons and feeble pedestrians rambling through the wreckage. Travel was treacherous—50 trainloads of passengers were stuck on the main lines. One elevated train, on its way from Harlem to Wall Street with a contingent of stockbrokers, had to be abandoned at 23rd Street, having taken nearly four hours to make it that far. The marooned passengers sheltered in nearby restaurants and hotels, where the bars and billiard rooms were packed for the rest of the day. Of the 500 brokers who usually toiled on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, only 21 made it in.

Roscoe Conkling, now an attorney in private practice, was due in court that morning to defend the will of the widow of A. T. Stewart, the department store magnate. Undaunted by the weather, he managed to travel from his lodgings at the Hoffman House, on Broadway between 24th and 25th Streets, to the courthouse downtown, only to receive word that the judge was snowbound and had postponed the hearing. Conkling went to his office on the corner of Broadway and Wall Street to work for a few hours.

Late in the afternoon, with the blizzard still raging, the lawyer decided he’d better head back to the Hoffman House, roughly two and a half miles away. The few horse car drivers who were operating in the snow were demanding $50 for a ride uptown—more than $1,200 in today’s dollars. Indignant, Conkling set out on foot. “It was dark, and it was useless to try to pick out a path, so I went magnificently along, shouldering through drifts, and headed for the north,” he recalled. By the time he reached Union Square, at 14th Street, Conkling was exhausted. Somewhere in the middle of the park, he got stuck in a drift up to his arms. Blinded by the windblown snow, it occurred to him for the first time that the blizzards described by Russian novelists were not pure fiction. For a few mournful moments, the indefatigable ex-senator “came as near giving right up and sinking down there to die as a man can and not do it.” Finally, on the verge of being buried alive, Conkling summoned the strength to go on.

Three hours after leaving his office, Conkling stumbled into the New York Club on 25th Street. He was caked in snow and ice, but he was safe. Hearing Conkling recount his adventure, the men at the club had a hard time believing he had come all the way from Wall Street.

At first, the only consequence of Conkling’s harrowing experience was a slight cold. He ignored his doctor’s recommendation to rest, and carried on with his work. But his condition worsened, and two weeks after the blizzard, he couldn’t get out of bed. About a week later, he slipped into a coma from which he never woke. He died on April 18, 1888, at the age of 59. An editorial in the Times predicted that “the name of Roscoe Conkling is one that will live in this State. No more striking personality ever appeared in the arena of New-York politics.”

It concluded charitably: “Beneath a cold, proud and pompous exterior Mr. Conkling carried a warm heart.”

Eleven years later, many of the surviving members of Conkling’s Republican machine gathered in the northeast corner of Madison Square to honor Chester Arthur, the man who had kept the machine running. A group of Arthur’s friends had raised $25,000 to erect a statue of the late president, and on June 13, 1899, several hundred people waited in the afternoon sun for the unveiling of the bronze figure, which was concealed by an American flag. The featured speaker was Elihu Root, Arthur’s personal lawyer, whom the president had tapped to be US attorney for the Southern District of New York. (Root would go on to serve as secretary of war in the McKinley and Roosevelt administrations, and was later elected to the US Senate.)

Root began by recalling the summer of 1881—President Garfield lingering on his deathbed, the strife within the Republican Party, the horror and rage many Americans felt when an assassin’s bullet put one of the leading Stalwarts on the threshold of the presidency. “Dark suspicions and angry threatenings filled the public mind, and for the moment there was doubt—grave doubt—and imminent peril that the orderly succession of power under the Constitution might not take its peaceful course,” Root said.

Surely no more lonely and pathetic figure was ever seen assuming the powers of Government. [Arthur] had no people behind him, for Garfield, not he, was the people’s choice; he had no party behind him, for the dominant faction of his party hated his name, were enraged by his advancement, and distrusted his motives. He had not even his own faction behind him, for he already knew that the just discharge of his duties would not accord with the ardent desires of their partisanship and that disappointment and estrangement lay before him there.… He was alone. He was bowed down by the weight of fearful responsibility and crushed to the earth by the feeling, exaggerated but not unfounded, that he took up his heavy burden surrounded by dislike, suspicion, distrust, and condemnation as an enemy of the martyred Garfield and the beneficiary of his murder. Deep and settled melancholy possessed him; almost despair overwhelmed him. He went to power walking through the valley of the shadow of death, and ascended the steps of a throne as one who is accused goes to his trial.

But in Chester Arthur, Root continued, “our ever fortunate Republic had again found the man for the hour.” Arthur earned the people’s trust by respecting the memory and goals of his fallen predecessor, Root said, and “the dignified courtesy of his manners and the considerate sincerity of his speech conciliated the friendship even of his enemies.” Arthur recognized that the moment Garfield died, Arthur was “no longer a leader of a faction, but the president of the whole people, conscious of all his obligations and determined to execute the people’s will.”

Root finished speaking at 3:30 p.m., and then Arthur’s sister, Mary Arthur McElroy, who had served her widowed brother as First Lady, pulled a cord to reveal the statue. The nine-foot figure portrayed Arthur having just risen from a chair, standing perfectly and confidently straight. The spectators cheered.

As the crowd dispersed, those heading downtown likely noticed another statue, slightly smaller, that stood in the southeast corner of Madison Square: a bronze figure of Roscoe Conkling. The boss glared across the square, seemingly still perturbed at the unexpected president who quit the machine to serve his country.

When President Arthur’s son Alan died in 1937, his son—Chester Arthur III—inherited 1,800 documents by and about his grandfather. For almost four decades, the papers had been locked away in a Colorado Springs bank vault, hidden from historians. When the president’s grandson read them, he was most intrigued by the 23 letters from Julia Sand.

Eager to learn more about his grandfather’s mysterious correspondent, Arthur placed an advertisement in the New York Herald Tribune on February 10, 1938, seeking information from Sand’s surviving relatives, if there were any. The Herald Tribune and other papers turned the query into a story, and Arthur soon heard from one of Sand’s nephews. Paul B. Rossire, a retired businessman living in Miami Beach, told Arthur about his aunt and the political discussions that roiled mealtimes at 46 East 74th Street. “Every one, especially Aunt Julia, was interested in politics,” he told Arthur. “It was all civil service. The Tariff—do you ever hear anything about that now? I was brought up on it.”

Rossire vividly recalled the magical evening in August 1882 when the president of the United States paid a surprise visit to his Aunt Julia. “A wonderful short rig drove up with two men on the box in claret livery,” he remembered. The members of the Sand household were astonished when the president was announced “but managed nevertheless to remain in the room during the entire visit of the president with his young lady adviser.”

Following the death of their mother, Julia and her two sisters moved to a small apartment in Brooklyn. “A talented woman, something of a blue-stocking,” according to her nephew, Julia wrote occasionally for magazines but gradually withdrew from the world. She died in 1933 at age 83, having never disclosed that as a young woman, she had been the conscience of a president.