To Arthur’s horror, when Guiteau was arrested immediately afterward, he proclaimed his support for the Arthur-Conkling wing of the Republican Party-which had been resisting Garfield’s reform attempts-and exulted in the fact that Arthur would now be president. On the morning of July 2, 1881, a deranged office-seeker named Charles Guiteau shot President Garfield in a Washington railroad station. Just months into Garfield’s presidency, Arthur’s meaningless post suddenly became critical. The second place on the ticket seemed to be a safe spot for one of Conkling’s flunkeys They chose Arthur, and the Republicans triumphed in November. Party elders were desperate to placate him, realizing that Garfield had little hope of winning in November without the help of the New York boss. But after 36 rounds of voting, the delegates instead chose James Garfield, a longtime Ohio congressman.Ĭonkling was enraged. Conkling and his machine wanted the party to nominate former president Grant, whose second administration had been riddled with corruption, for an unprecedented third term. Two years later, Republicans gathered in Chicago to pick their presidential nominee. In 1878, reform-minded President Rutherford B. “You are one of those goody-goody fellows who set up a high standard of morality that other people cannot reach,” he said. When an old college classmate told him that his deputy in the Custom House was corrupt, Chet waved him away. He lived in a world of Tiffany silver, fine carriages, and grand balls, and owned at least 80 pairs of trousers. Under the rules of the Custom House, whenever merchants were fined for violations, “Chet” Arthur took a cut. From that perch, Arthur doled out jobs and favors to keep Conkling’s machine humming. Grant appointed Arthur collector of the New York Custom House. It was at Conkling’s urging, in 1871, that President Ulysses S. It was a partisan game, and to the victor went the spoils: jobs, power and money. Arthur and his cronies didn’t view politics as a struggle over issues or ideals. For the machine, the ultimate prize was getting and maintaining party control-even if that meant handing out government jobs to inexperienced men, or using brass-knuckled tactics to win elections. Senator Roscoe Conkling, the all-powerful boss of the New York Republican machine. Seeking greater wealth and influence, he became a top lieutenant to U.S. During the Civil War, when many corrupt officials gorged themselves on government contracts, he was an honest and efficient quartermaster for the Union Army.īut after the war Arthur changed. As a young attorney, Arthur won the 1855 case that desegregated New York City’s streetcars. Once there, he became a lawyer, joining the firm of a friend of his father’s, who was also a staunch abolitionist.Īnd so he started down an idealistic path. Shortly after graduating from Union College in Schenectady, Arthur did what many ambitious young men from the hinterlands do: He moved to New York City.
Even in the North, abolitionism was not popular during the first decades of the 19th century, and Arthur’s father-known as Elder Arthur-was so outspoken and uncompromising in his beliefs that he was kicked out of several congregations, forcing him to move his family from town to town in Vermont and upstate New York. presidency can have on a person, deserves to be remembered.Īrthur was born in Vermont in 1829, the son of a rigid abolitionist preacher. But Arthur’s story of redemption, which illustrates the profound impact that the U.S. Arthur’s statue in Madison Square Park, erected by his friends in 1899, is ignored. Most visitors to Arthur’s brownstone at 123 Lexington Avenue in New York City are there to shop at Kalustyan’s, a store that sells Indian and Middle Eastern spices and foods-not to see the only site in the city where a president took the oath of office.
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