The American Vice Presidency

by Jules Witcover

  Instead of campaigning, Arthur, now the state Republican Party chairman, immersed himself in the campaign’s details, personally scheduling and overseeing the travels of Grant and Conkling in New York and the Midwest. Arthur assessed “voluntary contributions” from federal and state workers in great amounts in much the same way he had done as the customhouse collector. Garfield and Arthur carried New York State, and in the largest turnout of qualified voters in the nation’s history, 76.4 percent, they were elected over Hancock and English.

  After the inauguration, Arthur, with his long experience as an effective “spoilsman” in New York, hoped and expected to have a major say in the distribution of patronage, especially to the Empire State. But Garfield made clear from the first: “I will not tolerate nor act upon any understanding that anything has been pledged to any party, state or individual.”11 When Conkling, rebuffed over several Garfield decisions, turned to his old political subordinate Arthur, he found the new vice president ill-positioned to be of much help.

  In mid-March, Conkling was summoned to the White House, where Garfield told him he was willing to make several New York appointments involving Conkling men, but not to the lucrative customhouse post once held by Arthur. Two days later the names of five Conkling men were sent to the Senate, but none for a cabinet post. Worse for Conkling, Garfield made an appointment that the New York Herald deemed a direct slap at Conkling, putting in the New York customhouse “a sharp politician … who [would] know how to work it for all it is worth against Conkling.”12

  Demonstrating where his loyalty rested, Arthur went to the White House at one point to urge Garfield to pull the offending job offer, but to no avail. Instead the president, determined to establish his primacy, withdrew the nominations of the five Conkling men. Conkling and Tom Platt, New York’s other U.S. senator, were outraged and submitted their resignations to Arthur in the presiding officer’s chair, sending the chamber into an uproar.

  Conkling and Platt returned to Albany to push for their speedy reelection as a further demonstration of their political strength at home and that their fight with Garfield was not over. Vice President Arthur also returned to Albany to aid his old political colleagues. The New-York Tribune warned: “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 moral of his performances is that we must not expect to change a man’s nature by electing him to the Vice-Presidency.”13

  The fight over the reelection bids of Conkling and Platt droned on for more than seven weeks, with no resolution. All this time, Arthur put his vice presidency on the back burner as he stayed at Conkling’s side in Albany, returning to Washington only on weekends. On July 1, Platt suddenly dropped his bid for Senate reelection, after a Republican foe on a stepladder peered through an open transom of a hotel room and caught him in bed with a woman who was not his wife. The story swept through Albany and beyond, but Conkling and Arthur held firm.14

  That same morning at Washington’s Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station, President Garfield strolled in with Secretary of State James Blaine on his arm. The president was en route to the commencement exercises at his alma mater, Williams College, in central Massachusetts, and then on to a vacation with his family. Already aboard the train were four other cabinet members and their wives, awaiting Garfield and Blaine. Suddenly a short and scrubby-looking man with a dark brown beard appeared behind them, drew a revolver and shot Garfield in the back. As the president fell, the attacker fled, but a District of Columbia policeman who had heard the shots ran down the man in the station’s reception room and arrested him. “All right,” the man said quietly. “I did it and will go to jail for it. I am a Stalwart, and Arthur will be president.”15

  The assailant was identified as Charles Guiteau, a mentally unbalanced government job seeker with grandiose ideas about obtaining a diplomatic post. The forty-eight-year-old assailant knew neither Garfield nor Arthur but had sent Garfield letters expressing interest in working in Vienna or Paris, and after the election was given to hanging around the State Department, where Blaine once encountered him and told him to stop making a pest of himself. When caught, police found on him a letter dated that day in which he had written that he bore “no ill will toward the President … [but] his death was a political necessity.”16 Garfield in fact was still alive, but severely wounded.

  In another letter to Arthur, Guiteau informed him of what he had done, assuming Garfield was dead, and offered recommendations for a new cabinet. There was some immediate speculation, soon ended, that Arthur might have been involved in a plot. In any event, his qualifications to assume the presidency immediately came under editorial fire. The New York Times declared, “Active politicians, uncompromising partisans, have held before now the office of the Vice President of the United States, but no holder of that office has ever made it so plainly subordinate to his self-interest as a politician and his narrowness as a partisan.”17 Twice after hearing the news, Arthur went to the White House inquiring about Garfield’s condition but was not told.

  Through all this, Conkling clung to his effort in Albany to be reelected to the Senate. When the Conkling forces finally went down to defeat in late July, some of his old Stalwarts called on him at his Fifth Avenue Hotel suite to commiserate, but Chester Arthur was not among them now. By this time Garfield’s condition had seriously deteriorated, and the vice president secluded himself in his home in New York, where no word was passed to him about the prospect of having to assume presidential responsibilities. At August’s end, Blaine proposed to the cabinet that Arthur be called to Washington to take over the presidential duties, inasmuch as the Constitution said only that the “Powers and Duties” of the presidency were to “devolve” to the vice president “until the disability [of the president] be removed.” But Arthur declined even to rush to Washington. The end for Garfield finally came on September 19, and a state supreme court judge was produced to swear Arthur in as the twenty-first president.

  His ascendancy was marked by considerable apprehension, in light of his checkered career as a close ally of Conkling, even to the point of breaking with Garfield in their notorious clash over federal patronage to New York. Governor Charles Foster of Ohio put the matter as optimistically as possible in predicting, “The people and the politicians will find that Vice President Arthur and President Arthur are different men.”18

  Arthur’s vice presidency had lasted only six months, and the shock of his elevation, as well the springing of a flood of hopeful goodwill from the country, seemed to sober him to his new responsibility. He was advised by friends to keep Garfield’s cabinet for a time if only for the appearance of continuity, but many expected, and many others feared, that he would bring Conkling into his inner circle. The new president asked all cabinet members to stay on at least until the next session of Congress in December, and all did. In mid-October, however, Blaine asked to be allowed to resign, as friends urged him to prepare to make another presidential bid in 1884.

  Conkling, still nursing his political wounds and hatred of Blaine, made clear his desire to replace his old enemy as secretary of state. But Arthur was well aware by now that such a move would be seen widely as turning his new administration over to his old political chieftain. Conkling himself called on the new president, offering to serve in his cabinet and presenting him with federal patronage demands for New York, the foremost of which was removal of Garfield’s choice as collector of the New York customhouse.

  Conkling, rebuffed, left in renewed anger. Other Conkling machine Stalwarts were invited to sumptuous White House receptions and dinners, but there was no rush to give them positions as had been widely expected. One old machine friend, John O’Brien, observed, “He isn’t Chet Arthur any more, he’s the president.”19

  Arthur did, however, retain some sense of obligation toward Conkling. In February 1882, he sent his old political boss’s name to the S
enate to fill a vacancy on the Supreme Court, but Conkling rejected it and retired from public life. During this time, Garfield’s assassin was tried for murder and convicted. An appeal to Arthur to intervene on the grounds of insanity was rejected, and Guiteau was hanged.

  In the congressional elections of 1882, continued allegations of government corruption contributed to Republican loss of the House and a narrower majority in the Senate. To the amusement of many, Arthur, the old Conkling political spoils man, in his first annual address to Congress embraced Garfield’s call for civil service reform, including competitive tests for government jobs based on the British system. In January 1883, Congress passed and Arthur signed an act establishing the bipartisan Civil Service Commission, following the lead laid down by Garfield.

  The nation’s fourth accidental president generally trod carefully in legislative affairs but did use his veto power on a few occasions. To great surprise as an old spoils man, Arthur vetoed a classic “pork-barrel” rivers and harbors appropriations bill through which legislators had approved millions of dollars for their districts for years.20 Congress overrode the veto, but Arthur won wide editorial praise for his action.

  After a respectful grieving period following Garfield’s death, Arthur had the White House redecorated and opened it to a great many sumptuous dinners, with his sister Mary serving as hostess for her widowed brother. He eventually took to the presidency with relish, and his personal demeanor did much to counter the negativity and doubts that had greeted his assumption of the first office. In 1882, however, he suffered an attack of what later was described as Bright’s disease, a serious kidney ailment that often proved fatal. In March 1883 he confided to his son, Alan, that he was so ill he could hardly perform his presidential duties, and in May the Hartford Evening Post reported, “He has repeatedly given his friends to know that under no conceivable circumstances would he again be President.”21

  Nevertheless, Arthur continued to receive favorable comments for his stewardship, which had been greeted with such misgivings upon Garfield’s death. None other than Mark Twain was quoted in the Chicago Daily News in August as observing: “I am but one in the 55,000,000; still, in the opinion of this one fifty-five millionth of the country’s population, it would be hard indeed to better President Arthur’s administration. But don’t decide till you hear from the rest.”22 Newspaper surveys of leading Republicans and editors, though, found Arthur trailing Blaine, even in New York samplings. Contrary to certain newspaper reports, Arthur let it be known he would welcome the chance to lead the party again in 1884 but said nothing about the state of his health, which was gradually deteriorating.

  At the Republican National Convention in June, Blaine entered as the clear frontrunner. Arthur, who did not attend, ran a respectable second on the first ballot but slipped gradually, and Blaine was nominated on the fourth roll call. When Tom Platt, who seconded Blaine’s nomination, asked Conkling to endorse his candidate, lawyer Conkling characteristically and acidly replied, “No thank you. I don’t engage in criminal practice.”23

  That fall, Blaine narrowly lost the presidency to the Democratic governor Grover Cleveland of New York. Arthur, his health further declining, returned quietly to his law office in New York, where on November 17, 1886, he finally succumbed to Bright’s disease. Chosen vice president in an irresponsible manner and often at odds with the president he served while in that position, Chester Arthur comported himself honorably as Garfield’s successor in achieving some of the fallen president’s prime objectives. Associated with political corruption in his earlier years, he redeemed his reputation with his signature on the most significant civil service reform of his time.

  THOMAS A. HENDRICKS

  OF INDIANA

  In the annals of American vice presidents, no occupant of the office had a more tortuous route to achieving it than the Democrat Thomas A. Hendricks of Indiana. In the course of that route, he earned a controversial reputation as an opportunist with views on race that cast a shadow on a political career marked by as many defeats as victories.

  Rejected as a vice presidential running mate of Samuel J. Tilden of New York in 1876, Hendricks was first used eight years later as a foil in an effort to block the presidential nomination of Governor Grover Cleveland of New York. When that failed, he became Cleveland’s successful running mate in a balancing move on the 1884 Democratic ticket, marking the party’s first victory since the Civil War. Only nine months later, sudden death claimed him, leaving his record marred by a clinging racial bias.

  Ironically, as a young lawyer Hendricks brought suit against a white neighborhood tough who assailed and sought to get a black boy thrown into jail simply for talking to him. Hendricks got the assailant jailed instead by convincing a jury that attacking one of inferior social position was a greater offense.1 That case, however, did not foretell a racial animosity that would later surface in his political career.

  Born in a farmhouse near Zanesville, Ohio, on September 7, 1819, Hendricks was six months old when his father, John, moved the family to Indiana and became a successful farmer and operator of a general store in Shelbyville. After graduating from Hanover College, young Hendricks studied law, began a practice in Indiana, and in 1848 entered politics, winning a seat in the Indiana House of Representatives. He was a delegate to the state constitutional convention, where he revealed his anti-black bias, leading an effort to enact “Black Laws” upholding racial segregation and limiting immigration of free blacks into Indiana. In one speech, he declared, “The races are different—physically, intellectually and morally.… They cannot meet and mingle, in a state of social and political equality without a violation of the laws of nature and a gross outrage of all our better feelings, and without producing a degradation of our own race.”2

  In 1850 Hendricks was elected to Congress, served two terms, and as a disciple of Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois was a strong supporter of popular sovereignty and the extension of slavery into the West. He backed Douglas’s controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise, costing Hendricks reelection. In 1860 he ran for the governorship of Indiana but lost.

  With the outbreak of the Civil War, Hendricks became a War Democrat in the state party deeply split over the war. He found himself in sharp conflict with the leading Indiana Peace Democrat, Jesse Bright, the U.S. Senate president pro tem, who in early 1862 was expelled for writing a letter to the Confederate president Jefferson Davis, suggesting that the rebel army buy rifles from an Indiana firm. Hendricks was elected by the state legislature to take the seat in the next term. Meanwhile, he rallied fellow War Democrats to defeat anti-war resolutions in the state legislature.

  Upon taking his seat in the Senate in 1863, where there now were only ten Democrats to thirty-three Republicans, Hendricks became the party leader and as a War Democrat had frequent access to President Lincoln while maintaining a partisan posture. Shortly before Lincoln’s death, Hendricks called on the president at the White House, where Lincoln told him, “We have differed in politics, Senator Hendricks, but you have uniformly treated my administration with fairness. Presently there will be no differences between us.” Whereupon Lincoln took Hendricks by his arm and led him to a window overlooking the Potomac and beyond, into Virginia, saying, “Within a few months there will be such universal good feeling over there that it will bring us all together.”3 It was hardly one of Lincoln’s most prophetic visions.

  In a speech on the Senate floor on April 7, 1864, one week before the assassination, Hendricks opposed abolition on these grounds: “It is not a favorable time for us to lay our hand upon the work of the fathers.” With the nation at war and with the Southern states excluded, he argued, the move should await bringing them back into the fold.4 He insisted he was never in favor of the subjugation of the South, but for “the prosecution of the war upon such a policy as will secure a return of the Southern people, that there may be prosperity and greatness and enterprise of the North at the same time.”5
r />   Indeed, after Lincoln’s death Hendricks was conspicuously sympathetic to southern whites and hostile to freedmen’s rights. He opposed the postwar constitutional amendments that were at the heart of Reconstruction—the Thirteenth abolishing slavery, the Fourteenth providing due process protection, and the Fifteenth barring denial of suffrage on racial grounds. He reminded Radical Republicans that Lincoln had declined to sign, and instead had pocket-vetoed, the Wade-Davis Bill, which would have barred reentry of southern states unless 50 percent of their citizens signed an iron-clad oath that they had never supported the Confederacy.

  Hendricks also fought against the repeal of the fugitive slave laws prior to the constitutional abolition of slavery and generally resisted all forms of social integration. “I say we are so different,” he observed emphatically, “that we ought not to compose one political community.”6 And later: “I say that our fathers were right in saying that this was a white man’s government, to be controlled by white men. I say that I do not deem the negro to be my equal.”7

  When the Indiana legislature went Republican in 1868, Hendricks was not offered a second U.S. Senate term. Critics argued that he had not originated nor was he identified with any prominent policy or legislation and that he was noted principally as an obstructionist, especially on issues involving race and Reconstruction. Despite his skimpy record of achievement in the Senate, however, Hendricks was popular there for his candor and leadership of the minority views he represented.

  Despite those controversial positions, Hendricks was offered as a presidential candidate that year at the Democratic National Convention, in New York, and in a tempestuous and drawn-out fight over three days, he actually led the balloting briefly on the twenty-second ballot, before the delegates turned to Governor Horatio Seymour of New York. Hendricks subsequently returned to Indiana and ran for its governorship once more but was again defeated. He was mentioned again as a presidential prospect in 1872 but instead ran for the governorship of Indiana yet again, and this time he won. Coming from an important swing state, Hendricks seemed poised for another presidential bid in 1876, but investor advocates of “hard money” achieved the nomination of their like-minded Tilden.