A Secret Life: The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland

by Charles Lachman

  Grover moved in with Uncle Lewis, Aunt Margaret, and their two children, Gertrude and Cleveland. Gertrude was enthusiastic and always seemed to be “full of fun.” Cleveland Allen had had a sickly adolescence and suffered from periodic “spells of derangement,” which may have meant epilepsy.

  Grover and his cousin Cleveland, who were close in age, could often be found fishing in the Niagara River. One day, the duo was admiring a giant yellow pike that must have weighed at least fifteen pounds. Generally regarded as the tastiest of all freshwater fish, yellow pike are also aggressive and predatory, as Grover learned when he tried to pry open its razor-sharp teeth with a stick. The stick slipped, the pike’s mouth snapped shut on Grover’s hand, and his injury was so severe he came close to losing two fingers.

  The two-story Allen house, constructed of stone and rough stucco, was square and solid, with a veranda out front where the Allens gathered as a family on the warm summer evenings. Behind the house was an orchard with apple, peach, plum, and cherry trees. Beyond that flowed the Niagara River at a swift current, churning up pockets of snowy white foam. It was a splendid vista. The Breckinridge Street Church, just across the street, is where Grover sometimes joined the Allens in Sunday worship. Also on Breckenridge lived a playful little boy, Timothy J. Mahoney, who was ten years old when Grover moved in with the Allens. Timothy first saw the unfamiliar teenager picking cherries in the orchard.

  “Who’s the new fellow?” Tim asked the Allen family handyman.

  “Name’s Cleveland,” the handyman answered. “Father’s dead. Used to be a minister down east somewhere. Boy’s come to live with his uncle and aunt.”

  Tim was the neighborhood mischief-maker-in-chief, always getting into some scrape. He often sneaked through a gap left by a missing plank in the Allen’s picket fence and filled a basket with pears. His petty crime spree came to an end when he ensnared himself in the fence, looked up, and saw Cleveland Allen clutching a fistful of his pants. Grover enjoyed Tim’s company, and he became a sidekick of sorts.

  The Allens treated Grover like a son. He accompanied his uncle to the state fair in Utica. Aunt Margaret purchased Grover a formal dress coat—it was the first one he ever owned—and got him to agree to pose wearing it. He looked stiff and uneasy in the photograph.

  There were some anxious days at the Allen house when Grover developed a high fever and severe abdominal pain—classic symptoms of typhoid fever, caused by ingesting contaminated food or water and spread via substandard public sanitation. It was touch-and-go for the next four weeks. The Allen family physician prescribed the starvation diet, sometimes known as the absolute diet. It meant absolutely no food for up to three days and was meant to heal intestinal ruptures. Somehow, Grover survived.

  When he recovered, Grover resumed work on the herd book. Grand Island, where Lewis Allen raised his cattle, is a thirty-three-square-mile land mass in the Niagara River that lies near the international border between Canada and the United States. In those days, Grand Island was reached by a ferry powered by horses on a treadmill. When Grover Cleveland stepped onshore, he found an island blessed with magnificent forests of white oak trees and swarming with geese, ducks, and other game birds. Hawks and eagles patrolled the sky. The water held an inexhaustible source of yellow pike, sturgeon, and bass. For someone with Grover’s appreciation of nature, it was a wonderland.

  Lewis Allen’s farm produced more than three hundred tons of hay annually, and the island soil also proved ideal for fruit trees. Indeed, the first peaches to be grown in Western New York were picked on Grand Island. For the farmers who lived there, though, it was an isolating existence; and the wells produced bitter-tasting water high in sulfuric content, which made for “very poor tea.” This was a real problem considering that the inhabitants of Grand Island were of English, Irish, and Scottish descent. Settlers had to resort to building cisterns on their rooftops to store decent drinking water from rainfall.

  Grover tended to his uncle’s cattle and kept the books. Eventually, more than 125,000 Shorthorns would be registered in the American Herd Book. But mostly, when he went to Grand Island to put in a full day’s work in the summer and fall of 1855, he ended up fishing with his cousin Cleveland. Even so, Lewis Allen must have been pleased with his nephew’s industry and work ethic because in November, when the first edition of the herd book was completed, he paid Grover $60—$10 more than the arrangement called for—for a job well done.

  All this time, Grover kept pressing his uncle for those lawyer connections. Finally, Lewis delivered. Looking at the field of attorneys in the city of Black Rock, Lewis settled on Daniel Hibbard, a justice of the peace who lived on Breckenridge Street and had once served as postmaster. “Grover, you had better go up and see Hibbard,” Lewis told his young charge.

  Grover showed up at Hibbard’s Black Rock office just down the street from the Allen house. The interview was a disaster. It seems that Hibbard treated Grover like a supplicant, or some hard-up urchin looking for a handout. Perhaps he questioned Grover’s credentials; after all, the teenager had no college education. Quick to take offense, Grover found Hibbard’s questions to be so “impertinent” he walked right out. When Lewis heard about what had happened, he generously let it go as one of those things. Grover, he was coming to understand, was a “high-spirited boy.”

  Lewis tried again. He rode into downtown Buffalo and went to the offices of Rogers, Bowen & Rogers, one of the city’s leading law firms, with a notable history dating back to Millard Fillmore, the thirteenth president of the United States. He wanted to have a word with the fifty-five-year-old senior partner, Henry W. Rogers. In the pecking order of Buffalo citizenry, Rogers ranked as one of the “solid men” of the city. He was witty and acerbic and an outstanding orator before a jury. His family Bible at home chronicled the full record of his distinguished line in America, going back to Thomas Rogers, the eighteenth of forty-one signatories of the Mayflower Compact. When Lewis asked Rogers if he would hire a new boy, the cantankerous Rogers was not very keen on doing this favor, even for Lewis Allen. Then he did say that he was always interested in having “smart boys” around. It was the opening Lewis was looking for. He told Rogers there was a “smart boy at my house who wanted to come in and see what he could do.” Rogers must have looked at his old friend with some resentment. Next to Millard Fillmore, Lewis Allen was probably Buffalo’s leading citizen. He had founded the city’s fire, marine, and life insurance companies; fought for the enlargement of the Erie Canal; had served in the state legislature in the 1830s; and regularly exchanged correspondence with some of the most admired men in America, men like Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, William H. Seward, and General Winfield Scott. To cross Lewis Allen was probably unthinkable when the favor to be granted was so inconsequential. Besides, Rogers had an affinity for taking on the nephews of prominent people. Sherman S. Rogers, the third named partner in the firm, was his twenty-five-year-old nephew.

  Rogers pointed to a spare desk tucked into the corner of his office. “Well,” he said, “there’s a table.” An understanding was reached. For the first two months, Grover would work for no pay, but once he had proved his value, they could talk salary. No promises were made; apparently, Rogers wanted to leave all options open in the event that this Grover Cleveland did not prove to be as smart a boy as his uncle had said he was.

  The law firm was located at Spaulding’s Exchange, a five-story office building owned by the former mayor of Buffalo, at 162 Main Street. It was a hub of business and commerce. On the ground floor were the Bank of Attica and an array of shops and stores. The second floor held the offices of Farmers and Mechanics Bank. On the upper floor was the law firm of Rogers, Bowen & Rogers.

  On Grover’s first day at Rogers, Bowen & Rogers, he immediately realized that no one wanted him there. Old Man Rogers set the tone when Grover introduced himself; he responded by tossing a copy of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England on the desk that had been set aside for the new boy. The book was, of cou
rse, the foundation of all the laws in the United States and England. It landed on the desk with a loud thunk and a cloud of dust.

  “That’s where they all begin,” Rogers informed the confounded young man and, with that, walked away. Thus was launched the legal career of Grover Cleveland. He opened the book with what must have been total bewilderment and began to read. For the rest of the morning, the other partners and clerks ignored him. Around noon, the office cleared out. Everyone went to lunch, but no invitation was extended to the new clerk on tryout. When evening came and it was time for everyone to go home, Grover waited at his desk for a summons or some signal that it would be appropriate to leave. Before he knew what was happening, the office was empty. The last man out actually locked the door. Grover was trapped inside. Whether this was another act of humiliation or he had just been forgotten, no one can say. Surely Grover felt hurt by the way he had been treated, but to his credit, he took it as another challenge. “Someday I will be better remembered,” he recalled thinking that night. He was stuck in the office until the following morning.

  Several days later, Lewis Allen asked his nephew, “How are you getting on at the office?”

  “Pretty well, sir. Only, they won’t tell me anything.”

  The next time Lewis came face-to-face with Rogers, he repeated his nephew’s complaint.

  “If the boy has brains, he’ll find out for himself without anybody telling him” was Rogers’s crusty response, but it belied the realization he was coming to that the boy was worth mentoring. He told Lewis that Grover could stay on. As for salary, Lewis told Rogers to pay his nephew what they could afford. It came to $6 a week, which Grover found to be “very satisfactory.”

  Grover was at his desk one Thursday afternoon in mid-October, bleary-eyed from work and feeling a little out of sorts because he had received just one letter from his family in two weeks. So he put Blackstone aside and wrote a letter to his sister Mary, who had recently given birth to her first child who, in jest, Grover called “little what’s-his-name.” For the most part, Grover wrote, he was feeling “pretty well encouraged.” Things had settled down at Rogers, Bowen & Rogers; he had full access to the firm’s law library for his studies, and his physical presence in a thriving practice allowed him, through continual exposure, to absorb the law. He was proving his worth, he told Mary, and the lawyers at the firm, above all Dennis Bowen, were “very kind to me.” They were even promising him a promotion, but he was worrying about his finances, which, he complained, left him in a state close to poverty. The work was piling on at the firm, but Grover said he didn’t mind—“the more I do, the more I learn.” He told Mary that he was looking to find a room to rent before he overstayed his welcome at the Allen house. He had also had enough of trudging two miles to work and two miles back every day, so he wanted a place of his own close to the law office. He was going to check out another boardinghouse when he got off work that evening.

  A month later, Grover finally found a place to live that fit his budget, and moved into the dreary $40-a-week room in a second-class hotel at 11 Oak Street in town. Like any robust young man just starting out, he tried to keep his spirits up, even if his pocket was feeling “light.”

  New Year’s Eve 1855 found Grover in a contemplative mood. Buffalo had been hard hit by a wicked northeaster that had slammed the Mid-Atlantic states before heading into New England. The streets were slicked over with ice, and gentlemen with plans for the evening were cautioned to wear cork-bottomed heels for traction, particularly if they intended to drink wine or hard liquor. Apparently, the nineteen-year-old lad had no plans for New Year’s Eve, which he dismissed “as any other day to me and no better.” He sat in his room all night, feeding anthracite into the heater to ward off the “dreadful” chill. On the bustling street outside his hotel room, Grover could hear the steady jingle of sleigh bells. In the distance came cannon fire and the celebration of the New Year. He was already lamenting the slow decay of his once-lithe frame, owing mainly to his overindulging himself at meals and his steady consumption of beer, which would have truly upset his father. He missed his siblings; his brother Cecil had not written in months, and Grover had no idea where he was. On the whole, he wrote Mary, he was trying to be happy—“though sometimes I find it pretty hard.”

  One year later, Grover was living at the Southern Hotel at Seneca and Michigan Streets. He had a roommate, though they were so poor the only room they could afford was a low-ceilinged cockloft. Christmas held no special meaning for Grover; not one relative or friend had sent him a gift. He spent a pleasant New Year’s Day attending a performance of acrobats at a Buffalo theater, and then, to his relief, the holidays were over. He found himself back at work on a Sunday, January 3.

  Grover’s grievances started piling up the moment he entered the office at 9:00 a.m. and found it to be as cold as an icebox. He was entering the second year of his apprenticeship at Rogers, Bowen & Rogers, and Henry Rogers and Dennis Bowen, he told Mary, were assuring him that if he continued doing well, “I’ll make a lawyer.” Under the new arrangement with the firm, he was now being paid $500 a year—an “enormous sum,” he acerbically called it.

  “O God! That bread should be so dear, and work should be so cheap,” Grover wrote Mary. It was getting under his skin. He had come to the conclusion that the partners at Rogers, Bowen & Rogers were exploiting his hard labor.

  “I am so ashamed of myself after allowing such a swindle to be practiced upon me. It shows how selfish the men I have to do with are, and how easy it is to fool me.” As he thought more about the deal, his irritation grew. “From the bottom of my soul I curse the moment in which I consented to the contract.” For extra cash, Grover had arranged to take a brief leave from the law firm to assist Uncle Lewis in the publication of the next annual edition of the Shorthorn Herd Book. He dreaded going to Black Rock because it diverted him from his legal work, but “for the sake of the pay,” he had agreed to help out. Grover finished his disheartened letter to Mary with the pronouncement that his fingers were growing so numb from the cold in the office he could not write another word.

  In May 1859, after three and a half years of devoted learning, Grover Cleveland went before the New York State Supreme Court, presented his credentials and letters of recommendation, and was admitted to the bar. He was twenty-two years old.

  Grover stayed on at Rogers, Bowen & Rogers, but now in the bumped-up position of managing clerk, at an annual salary of $1,000. Good son that he was, each month Grover tucked what extra cash he could spare into an envelope and mailed it to his widowed mother in Holland Patent. Ann Cleveland was the glue that bound the far-flung Clevelands together as a family. Even as his relationship with his other kin, even Mary, grew more distant, Grover worshipped his mother. “The truth is I have a great deal to do nowadays and am getting quite out of the habit of writing letters,” he informed Mary. Grover also cut his ties with another beloved relative, his uncle Lewis Allen. His regular visits to Black Rock had dropped off, and after he received his law license, it ceased altogether, except when Grover had important family news to communicate that made the trip absolutely necessary. The great issue of slavery, which was tearing North and South apart, was crushing Grover’s attachment with the uncle who had done so much to launch his career.

  Grover was a partisan Democrat. To him, abolitionists were extremists, and the Democratic Party was solid and conservative—values that held real appeal for him and also happened to match his personality. In 1856, he marched in the torchlight procession that celebrated the victory of James Buchanan in the presidential election. Under the guidance of Dennis Bowen, who had once served as a Democratic alderman from the tenth ward, he started taking an interest in politics, volunteering as a ward heeler. It was pound-the-pavement machine politics at the street level. Assigned to Buffalo’s second ward, a neighborhood populated by German immigrants, Grover was handed a list of reliable Democratic voters and issued instructions to lead them to the polls on Election Day. Going door-to-d
oor was humbling, but for a young lawyer keen on making his mark in local politics, it was compulsory work.

  As Lewis Allen watched Grover’s political stance take shape, he mourned; it was like experiencing a death in the family. Lewis was a proud Yankee who had presided over the first Republican Party convention in Erie County in 1855. For him, the Fugitive Slave Act was a hateful piece of legislation. Remarks he made thirty years later indicate that his nephew’s political evolution still rankled: Allen stated that he was a “pronounced opponent” of Cleveland’s position. “Politically, we differed,” he simply said.

  In the transformational presidential election of 1860, Grover Cleveland supported the Democratic Party standard-bearer, Stephen A. Douglas, over the candidacy of Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln won the election and took New York State’s thirty-five electoral votes. Buffalo also went for Lincoln. The nation now stood on the brink of civil war.

  President-elect Lincoln bade Springfield, Illinois, farewell on a wet and bitterly cold morning and embarked on a twelveday journey via railroad to his inauguration in Washington. On Saturday afternoon, February 16, the train pulled into Buffalo for a tumultuous reception at the railroad depot. Crowd control was nonexistent, and for a few terrifying moments, it was feared that Lincoln was in physical danger from the crushing throng; but he was able to make his way to the balcony of the American Hotel, and there he delivered a speech advising his countrymen to “maintain your composure” in these perilous times.