The American Vice Presidency

by Jules Witcover

  As a consolation, Hendricks, as an advocate of “soft money” to ease farmers’ ability to pay their debts, was made the Democratic vice presidential nominee to balance Tilden’s currency stand. In his acceptance speech, he struck a conciliatory note, observing, “Gold and silver are the real standards of value,” but adding, “Our national currency will not be a perfect medium of exchange until it shall be convertible at the pleasure of the holder.”8 The Democratic ticket of Tilden and Hendricks won the popular vote by 251,000 ballots but fell one vote short of an electoral college majority. Then a special commission awarded all disputed votes in four states to the Republican ticket of Rutherford B. Hayes and William A. Wheeler, and the election was theirs.

  Four years later, Indiana Democrats considered pushing Hendricks for president one more time, but while on vacation in Hot Springs, Arkansas, he suffered a stroke. He later also developed a lameness in one foot, but nevertheless in 1884, with an ailing Tilden declining a second try himself, Hendricks made known he was willing once again. Tilden, hearing that Hendricks had talked of a reprise of the Tilden-Hendricks ticket, chided him, “I do not wonder, considering my weakness!”9 But by now Hendricks was seen as a perennial candidate for some office or another, and he attended the Democratic convention in Chicago in early July prepared to nominate the former Indiana senator Joseph E. McDonald.

  In the first session, the temporary chairman, Governor Richard B. Hubbard of Texas, drew cheers and applause for Tilden and Hendricks for their honorable acceptance of the election commission’s denial of their 1876 quest. Nevertheless, the nomination seemed well in hand for Governor Grover Cleveland of New York, with the convention’s largest delegation behind him. But rival Tammany Hall Democrats, led by New York City mayor John Kelly, launched a stop-Cleveland scheme, whereby the frontrunner might be derailed by the backing of a dark horse, settling on a willing Thomas Hendricks. Early the next morning, when the popular Hoosier, “robbed” of the vice presidency in 1876, entered the hall, Kelly men jumped up and tried to launch a loud floor demonstration and stampede for him. But only the Tammany men joined the cry of “Hendricks! Hendricks!”10 An alert Cleveland man had caught wind of the scheme, roused Cleveland delegates from their beds to block it, and the brief insurrection was snuffed out.11

  Cleveland prevailed as a hard-money advocate who could not only win New York but also bring liberal Republicans to his camp, and Hendricks, once again as a ticket-balancing soft-money man from a swing state, landed the vice presidential nomination a second time.12 In the fall campaign, Cleveland essentially stayed on the sidelines, making only two explicitly political appearances while his Republican opponent, James G. Blaine, the “plumbed knight” of Maine, traveled widely. But Hendricks, determined not to have the national office elude him as it had as Tilden’s running mate in 1876, campaigned hard, particularly after July 21, when the Buffalo Evening Telegraph broke the sensational news that Cleveland had fathered a son born of a local widow ten years earlier.

  The story was spread widely by other newspapers, often without noting that Cleveland was a bachelor at the time. The Democratic candidate, however, admitted he was the father of the boy who bore his name and that he had assumed responsibility, providing for the child’s needs and helping the woman, Maria Halpin, who had fallen into heavy drinking, in relocating and starting a business. The boy was settled in an orphanage and later adopted. The episode gave rise to the oft-repeated Republican campaign chant: “Ma! Ma! Where’s my Pa? Gone to the White House, ha, ha, ha!” Cleveland’s demeanor after the boy’s birth, however, on balance probably won as much voter support as his paternity cost him.13

  The Tilden-Hendricks ticket received an unexpected boost when, during a dinner in Blaine’s honor at the plush Delmonico’s in Manhattan, the pastor of the Murray Hill Presbyterian Church, Dr. Samuel D. Burchard, rose and grandly promised Blaine: “We are Republicans, and we don’t propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been Rum, Romanism and Rebellion.” The Democrats had assigned a stenographer to take down remarks at the dinner, and soon the slur, interpreted as aimed at the Irish Catholics and the South, was spread across the country.14 It was estimated later that Burchard’s remarks cost Blaine critical Irish and Catholic votes, particularly in New York. Cleveland and Hendricks won by the narrowest margin up to that time, with 48.5 percent of the vote compared with 48.26 percent for Blaine and his running mate, John A. Logan.

  Blaine later wrote to a friend, Francis Fessenden, “I should have carried New York by 10,000 if the weather had been clear on election day and Dr. Burchard had been doing missionary work in Asia Minor or Chochin China.”15 As for the paternity issue involving the Democratic nominee, the party faithful were soon riffing, “Hurrah for Maria! Hurrah for the kid! I voted for Cleveland, and damned glad I did.”16

  As vice president, Hendricks had little influence in the Cleveland administration and, as a champion of agrarian interests, differed with the new president’s business and industrial orientation. Also, as a seeker of federal patronage for Indiana Democrats, he lacked the zeal for reform that became a hallmark of Cleveland’s presidency and was unsympathetic to Cleveland’s embrace of civil service improvements under the Pendleton Act.

  Hendricks’s own pressures on the administration for more patronage jobs to Indiana Democrats earned him the derogatory label “Vice President of the Spoilsmen.” He did, however, abide by the civil service reforms, while noting that only 15,000 federal employees were subject to them, leaving 125,000 others to be dealt with through old-fashioned patronage.17

  In the spring of 1885, Hendricks set off on a vacation to Atlantic City and then on to Yale and Harvard for receptions and speeches at their law schools. Once home in Indianapolis, he and his wife enjoyed a round of social events with friends, and he appeared to be in good health. But on November 24 at a reception he suddenly looked pale and tired, and a doctor was called. Hendricks told him, “I am free at last.” He went to bed and never woke up, dying peacefully at age sixty-six.

  For the fifth time, the vice presidency became vacant as a result of the death of its occupant. Thus, in ten of the first eighteen presidencies, there was no sitting vice president, raising a serious question of prospective presidential succession. But the vice presidency by now had come to be so lightly regarded that few seemed to care. Upon Hendricks’s death, the order of presidential succession set in 1792 placed the Senate president pro tem and then the Speaker of the House next in line. But both offices were also vacant at this time, and there was also the possibility, with the Republicans in the majority in the Senate, that the next successor would be of the opposite party to the Democrat Cleveland.

  Therefore, in 1886, Congress passed a law removing congressional leaders from the line and replaced them with the president’s cabinet members behind the vice president, making more likely that a new president would be of the same party. The secretary of state, as the senior cabinet official, would be first, followed by the others according to the date their department was established. That procedure remained until 1947, when congressional leaders were returned to the order, with the House Speaker first and then the Senate president pro tem, on the grounds that any president should first have been elected by the people.

  The new line of presidential succession could not of course be attributed solely to Hendricks’s sudden death. But the congressional leaders were alerted once more to a long-neglected problem, although the new line of succession did not deal with the issue of a vice presidential vacancy itself. That would take more vacancies and eighty years before ratification of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, providing for the presidential nomination of a new vice president with the assent of Congress. In the end, Hendricks’s service in the second office could be said to be memorable chiefly for an action taken by others upon his leaving it.

  LEVI P. MORTON

  OF NEW YORK

  Levi Parsons Morton was one of the nation’s most successful bankers and bu
sinessmen when he began dabbling in the world of politics, then eventually became vice president of the United States in the election of 1888. From the humblest beginnings he built a fortune, became a lieutenant of the New York political boss Roscoe Conkling, and passed up a chance to be vice president under President James A. Garfield before accepting the office under President Benjamin Harrison. After undistinguished service in that office, he became the governor of New York but never really mastered the skills of politics, unlike the skills of finance, which had made him a giant in that world.

  Morton came from a long line of Puritan New England stock. In 1814 his father, the Reverend Daniel Oliver Morton, had moved from the family home in Middleboro, Massachusetts, to Shoreham, Vermont, near Lake Champlain. In 1816 Daniel graduated from Middlebury College, took over a small Congregational church, and married his wife, Lucretia, who on May 16, 1824, gave him a son, Levi. The father was a strong advocate of temperance in alcohol and also a condemner of slavery. In his church he set aside a “negro pew” for the few slaves in the community to share in the Sabbath worship. Despite young Levi’s thorough grounding in the religious life, he chose a career in business rather than in the church, leading one of his grandfathers to write, “I hear that Levi is prospering in this world’s goods. I fear lest it be at cost to his soul.”1

  Because Levi’s father could not afford to send him to college, at age fourteen the boy took a job in a general store in Enfield, New Hampshire, for a salary of fifty dollars a year plus room and board in the home of his employer. He moved on to a somewhat more lucrative job in Concord, and when the prospering owner decided to open a branch in Hanover, home of Dartmouth College, he sent Levi to manage it. At the age of twenty-one Levi took over the branch when the owner was about to close it.2 There he also met and married his future wife, Lucy Young Kimball. She didn’t care for his first name, so she took to calling him by his initials, and he came to be known among his family and closest friends as LP.3

  With his business prospering, Morton became active in the civic and then the political communities. As an ardent Whig, he served as the toastmaster at a celebratory dinner after the election of President Zachary Taylor in 1848. He joined a series of large business and banking firms and in 1851 took a partner, Junius Spencer Morgan, father of J. Pierpont Morgan, a rising young banker. They merged into a broader firm called J. M. Beebe, Morgan and Company. Finally, he moved to New York and, with another partner, set up his own wholesale dry goods firm called Morton, Grinnell and Company.4

  In advance of the Civil War, Morton focused on buying southern cotton for the textile mills in New England and sending northern manufactured products to the South, an arrangement demolished when war broke out in 1861. As the war progressed, his business recovered, and he segued into banking, forming Morton, Bliss and Company, which was linked to a London house known as Morton, Rose.

  During the war, British shipping firms built warships for the Confederacy in violation of international neutrality laws. Afterward, Senator Charles Sumner, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, demanded that Britain pay huge compensation, including the U.S. annexation of Canada, for damages inflicted on American ships by British-built Confederate vessels. They came to be known as the Alabama Claims, after one such ship that had sunk or damaged Union shipping. Into this controversy stepped Morton and his British partner, Sir John Rose, to engage in international arbitration. The British finally agreed to pay fifteen million dollars, to be disbursed through Morton, Rose, and beyond that the Americans consented to ignore the British dealings with the Southern rebellion.5

  In the same year, Morton’s wife, Lucy, died, and two years later he married Anna Livingston Reade Street, a New York socialite who brought him entrée into the city’s social and political circles. He already had become a friend of President Grant and one of Grant’s main political backers, Senator Roscoe Conkling, boss of the New York Republican Stalwarts.

  In 1876 Morton became the financial chairman of the Republican National Committee, and two years later he won a seat in Congress from a fashionable Manhattan district. A tall and erect man of quiet elegance, he immediately took his place as an important cog in the Conkling machine and as a desirable host of social and political gatherings at his spacious home. Among his friends in Congress was Representative James A. Garfield of Ohio.

  In 1880, Morton attended the Republican National Convention as part of Conkling’s effort to win a third presidential term for Grant and to block his bitter rival, James G. Blaine. Morton cast his vote for Grant through all thirty-six ballots, even as a resulting deadlock led the Blaine forces to throw their votes to Garfield, a late dark-horse entry. Garfield, realizing he needed a New Yorker as his running mate, turned to Morton, who after seeking Conkling’s advice declined the nomination. Garfield then offered it to another New Yorker and Conkling man, Chester Arthur, who became vice president and then president upon Garfield’s assassination.

  Morton instead agreed to serve as Garfield’s campaign finance chairman, apparently assuming he would be appointed secretary of treasury in a Garfield administration. But Garfield was reluctant to choose a prominent banker, although Morton had agreed to give up his professional endeavors to serve. Garfield later wrote in his diary that Morton was “under misapprehension” that he had been promised the treasury post, insisting, “It would be a congestion of financial power at the money centre and would create jealousy in the West.”6

  Morton, reelected to the House, meanwhile had cast his eye on the U.S. Senate seat, and Conkling calculated that placing him in the cabinet would clear the field for his own friend Tom Platt, also seeking the seat. Morton, feeling he was entitled to the Senate post after having given up the vice presidential nomination, demanded that Conkling ask Platt to withdraw, but Conkling declined.

  Garfield and Morton remained on good terms through all this, and shortly before Garfield’s inauguration he offered Morton the cabinet position of secretary of the navy, which Morton accepted. Conkling was not pleased; he informed Garfield that New York would rather have no cabinet seat if it could not be the Treasury. In the middle of the night, Conkling and Vice President Elect Arthur urgently went to Morton’s lodgings, roused him, and got the loyal Conkling lieutenant to withdraw his acceptance of the navy post. In his diary the next day, Garfield wrote, “Morton broke down on my hands under the pressure of his N.Y. friends, who called him out of bed at 4 this morning to prevent his taking the Navy Dep’t.… The N.Y. delegation are in a great row because I do not give the Treasury to that state.”7

  Many other Morton friends urged him not to pass up the chance to serve in the Garfield cabinet in some capacity. He wrote later about contacting Garfield to tell him of his willingness: “I would, if he so desired, accept the position of Secretary of the Navy, but as I had been a hard-working business man, I should prefer, if agreeable to him, the post of Minister to England or France.… He then offered me the position of Minister to France, which I accepted.”8

  Morton had not yet sailed for Paris when Garfield was shot at the train station in Washington, D.C., on July 2, 1881. Eighteen days later, when Morton departed, the president was still clinging to life. His death on September 19 brought home Morton’s realization of his fateful decision in declining Garfield’s offer to be his vice presidential nominee. Morton remained in his diplomatic post, performing largely ceremonial duties, including presiding at France’s presentation of her gift of the Statue of Liberty, destined to grace the entrance to New York Harbor.

  Platt backed Morton for the Senate in 1885 and again in 1887 to no avail, as the New York Republicans were badly split. In 1888, James Blaine, in declining health, chose not to seek the presidential nomination again, and Platt put New York behind the Indiana senator Benjamin Harrison, the grandson of President William Henry Harrison, the hero of the Battle of Tippecanoe. Blaine, vacationing in Italy, wrote Morton, “The tendency I think is toward a Western candidate for President. If this is so, you will have a splendi
d opening for V.P. if you desire it and set your New York friends to work.”9

  Morton did so and was nominated. He admittedly was not much of a public speaker and left that aspect of the campaign to the articulate Harrison, concentrating instead on organization, fund-raising, and his broad contacts in the business and banking world. The Republican ticket lost the popular vote by ninety thousand ballots but won in the electoral college over the Democrats Grover Cleveland, the president seeking reelection, and his running mate, Allan G. Thurman of Ohio. In demeanor, Harrison and Morton offered the country a cameo of solid Republicanism of conservative and religious values.

  As president of the Senate, Morton chaired a body heavily populated with successful businessmen and bankers like himself, of which he was among the most prominent. But his business acumen was of little help to Harrison on critical political matters. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts at one point sought to bring to the floor a so-called force bill that would have obliged the southern states to permit black men to vote in protection of their civil rights. The rigorously even-handed Morton declined to interfere with a Democratic filibuster, and the force bill finally was moved aside without action.10

  By 1892, Morton’s independence as president of the Senate had cooled Harrison toward him, and he was dropped from the Republican ticket, replaced by an old New York friend and publisher, Whitelaw Reid. Blaine resigned as Harrison’s secretary of state to run again for president himself, and old party bosses like Platt and Matthew Quay of Pennsylvania signed on with Blaine. Platt meanwhile, foreseeing a likely Harrison defeat at the hand of Cleveland seeking to regain the presidency, persuaded Morton to run for the governorship of New York in 1894. Cashing in on his great popularity in his home state, Morton won easily, providing a steady and reliable hand in business and banking experience to the state.