It's On My Mind

Chester A. Arthur, the twenty-first president of the United States, was the fifth child of a Baptist minister. He was born on October 5, 1829, in Fairfield, Vermont. His Baptist minister father, William Arthur, hailed from Ireland, and his mother, Malvina Stone Arthur, was from Vermont. During Chester Arthur’s childhood, his family moved around Vermont and upstate New York for his father’s work.

Chester, or “Chet,” as he was known, attended Union College in Schenectady, New York. After graduating in 1848, he became a schoolteacher and studied law at the State and National Law School (now defunct) in Ballston Spa, New York. In the early 1850s, he served as the principal of schools in North Pownal, Vermont, and Cohoes, New York. In 1854, he was admitted to the New York bar and began practicing law in New York City.

Arthur took office after the death of President James Garfield (1831-1881). Although Garfield initially survived the shooting on July 2,1881, he battled infections and died two months later, at age 49, on September 19. In the early hours of September 20, Arthur was sworn in as president at his Manhattan brownstone at 123 Lexington Avenue by a New York state judge. Two days later, in Washington, D.C., Arthur was given the oath of office by the chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Arthur was the second vice president to become chief executive due to an assassination.

As president from 1881 to 1885, Arthur advocated for civil service reform. A Vermont native, he became active in Republican politics in the 1850s as a New York City lawyer. In 1871, an era of political machines and patronage, Arthur was named to the powerful position of customs collector for the Port of New York. He later was removed from the job by President Rutherford Hayes (1822-1893) in an attempt to reform the spoils system.

Elected to the vice presidency in 1880, Arthur became president after Garfield died following an assassination attempt by a disgruntled job seeker. Although Chester Arthur had risen to power through machine politics, once in the White House he surprised Americans (and alienated Conkling and other supporters) by moving past partisanship.While in office, Arthur rose above partisanship and in 1883 signed the Pendleton Act, which required government jobs to be distributed based on merit. Suffering from poor health, he did not run for reelection in 1884.

Publisher Alexander K. McClure recalled, “No man ever entered the Presidency so profoundly and widely distrusted, and no one ever retired … more generally respected.”

Chester A. Arthur’s administration marks a period of transition in American politics. Women were beginning to take an active role, pressing strongly for women’s suffrage and prohibition of alchoholic beverages. Above all, the era was characterized by civil service reform, which would eventually weaken the grip of traditional ethnic and party loyalties. Despite having advanced in his career through managing the New York political machine, Arthur showed tremendous flexibility and a willingness to embrace reform. He stands as an important transitional figure in the reunification of the nation after the bitter turmoil of the Civil War and Reconstruction.

Chester Arthur – President 1881-1885

The Presidential biographies on WhiteHouse.gov are from “The Presidents of the United States of America,” by Frank Freidel and Hugh Sidey. Copyright 2006 by the White House Historical Association.

James Garfield was elected as the United States’ 20th President in 1881, after nine terms in the U.S. House of Representatives. His Presidency was impactful, but cut short after 200 days when he was assassinated.As the last of the log cabin presidents, James A. Garfield attacked political corruption and won back for the Presidency a measure of prestige it had lost during the Reconstruction Period.

He was born in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, in 1831. Fatherless at two, he later drove canal boat teams, somehow earning enough money for an education. He was graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts in 1856, and he returned to the Western Reserve Eclectic Institute (later Hiram College) in Ohio as a classics professor. Within a year he was made its president.

Garfield was elected to the Ohio Senate in 1859 as a Republican. During the secession crisis, he advocated coercing the seceding states back into the Union.

In 1862, when Union military victories had been few, he successfully led a brigade at Middle Creek, Kentucky, against Confederate troops. At 31, Garfield became a brigadier general, two years later a major general of volunteers.

Meanwhile, in 1862, Ohioans elected him to Congress. President Lincoln persuaded him to resign his commission: It was easier to find major generals than to obtain effective Republicans for Congress. Garfield repeatedly won re-election for 18 years, and became the leading Republican in the House.

At the 1880 Republican Convention, Garfield failed to win the Presidential nomination for his friend John Sherman. Finally, on the 36th ballot, Garfield himself became the “dark horse” nominee.
By a margin of only 10,000 popular votes, Garfield defeated the Democratic nominee, Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock.

As President, Garfield strengthened Federal authority over the New York Customs House, stronghold of Senator Roscoe Conkling, who was leader of the Stalwart Republicans and dispenser of patronage in New York. When Garfield submitted to the Senate a list of appointments including many of Conkling’s friends, he named Conkling’s arch-rival William H. Robertson to run the Customs House. Conkling contested the nomination, tried to persuade the Senate to block it, and appealed to the Republican caucus to compel its withdrawal. But Garfield would not submit: “This…will settle the question whether the President is registering clerk of the Senate or the Executive of the United States…. shall the principal port of entry … be under the control of the administration or under the local control of a factional senator.”

Conkling maneuvered to have the Senate confirm Garfield’s uncontested nominations and adjourn without acting on Robertson. Garfield countered by withdrawing all nominations except Robertson’s; the Senators would have to confirm him or sacrifice all the appointments of Conkling’s friends. In a final desperate move, Conkling and his fellow-Senator from New York resigned, confident that their legislature would vindicate their stand and re-elect them. Instead, the legislature elected two other men; the Senate confirmed Robertson. Garfield’s victory was complete.

In foreign affairs, Garfield’s Secretary of State invited all American republics to a conference to meet in Washington in 1882. But the conference never took place. On July 2, 1881, in a Washington railroad station, an embittered attorney who had sought a consular post shot the President.

Mortally wounded, Garfield lay in the White House for weeks. Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone, tried unsuccessfully to find the bullet with an induction-balance electrical device which he had designed. On September 6, Garfield was taken to the New Jersey seaside. For a few days he seemed to be recuperating, but on September 19, 1881, he died from an infection and internal hemorrhage.

James Garfield – President 1881

October 1, 2019 (Tuesday)
A bit of trivia: A telephone was installed in the White House during the Hayes administration. It was virtually useless because hardly anyone else had one.
Rutherford B. Hayes was born October 4, 1822, in Delaware, Ohio. He died January 17, 1893, in Fremont, Ohio. He was the 19th president of the United States (1877-81).
After graduating from Kenyon College at the head of his class in 1842, Hayes studied law at Harvard, where he graduated in 1845. Returning to Ohio, he became a successful attorney in Cincinatti. In 1852 he married Lucy Ware Webb), a cultured and unusually well-educated woman for her time. After combat service with the Union army, he was elected to Congress (1865-67) and then to the Ohio governorship (1868-76).
In 1875, running for governor the third time, people throughout the nation took notice of his promoting the idea of a sound currency backed by gold. The following year he became his state’s favorite son at the national Republican nominating convention, and won the presidential nomination. Hayes’s unblemished public record and high moral tone offered a striking contrast to widely publicized accusations of corruption in the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant (1869-77).
After the election, Hayes’s campaign managers challenged the validity of the returns from South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, and as a result two sets of ballots were submitted from the three states and an electoral dispute commanded attention. Eventually a bipartisan majority of Congress created a special Electoral Commission to decide which votes should be counted. While the commission was deliberating, Republican allies of Hayes engaged in secret negotiations with moderate Southern Democrats aimed at securing acquiescence to Hayes’s election. On March 2, 1877, the commission voted along strict party lines to award all the contested electoral votes to Hayes, who was thus elected with 185 electoral votes to opponent Tilden’s 184. The result was greeted with outrage and bitterness by some Northern Democrats, who thereafter referred to Hayes as “His Fraudulency.”
As president, Hayes promptly made good on the secret pledges made during the electoral dispute. He withdrew federal troops from states still under military occupation, thus ending the era of Reconstruction (1865-77). He promised not to interfere with elections in the former Confederacy. He appointed Southerners to federal positions, and he made financial appropriations for Southern improvements. These policies aroused opposition by conservantives. He reformed the civil service by substituting nonpartisan examinations for political patronage. He demanded the resignations of two top officials in the New York Customhouse (including Chester Arthur, the future president) provoking a bitter struggle with powerful people.
During the national railroad strikes of 1877, Hayes sent federal troops to suppress rioting. His administration was under continual pressure from the South and West to resume silver coinage, outlawed in 1873. Many considered this proposal inflationary, and Hayes sided with the Eastern, hard-money (gold) interests. Congress, however, overrode his veto of the Bland-Allison Act (1878), which provided for government purchase of silver bullion and restoration of the silver dollar as legal tender. In 1879 Hayes signed an act permitting women lawyers to practice before the Supreme Court.
Hayes refused renomination by the Republican Party in 1880, contenting himself with one term as president. In retirement he devoted himself to humanitarian causes, notably prison reform and educational opportunities for Black young people in the South.

Rutherford B. Hayes – President 1877-1881

October 1, 2019 (Tuesday)

The material in today’s blog came from the web site, “America’s Story.” The blog is about Ulysses S. Grant, the 18th president of the United States of America, who served two terms, 1869-1873 and 1873-1877.

One of the most honored and respected military leaders in U.S. history never even wanted a military career. Despite that, he became a general and served two terms as president of the United States. Ulysses S. Grant, born on April 27, 1822, in Point Pleasant, Ohio, wrote, “A military life had no charms for me, and I had not the faintest idea of staying in the army even if I should be graduated, which I did not expect.” However, Grant did graduate from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1843 and later began leading soldiers in battle.

The quiet, unassuming, and keenly intelligent Grant suddenly found himself on the battlefields of the Mexican War (1846-48), a conflict he personally opposed but fought with great bravery. (During the Mexican War, the U.S. fought its neighbor to the south over disputed Texan land.) After the war, he returned home to wed his longtime fiancé, Julia Dent, but the couple had only four years together before Grant was transferred. Even a promotion did not relieve Grant’s longing for his family and boredom with army routine. The 32-year-old captain resigned his commission in 1854.

After failed business ventures, Grant returned to the army in 1861. Within months, he was promoted to brigadier general and placed in charge of 20,000 Union troops, which he led to many victories during the Civil War. Grant commanded larger and larger armies as the war went on and, by 1864, he commanded the whole U.S. army as general-in-chief. Just as he had drifted into the military, Grant drifted into politics. He easily won the presidential elections of 1868 and 1872. In 1884, the war hero, diagnosed with cancer, managed to write one of the finest military autobiographies ever written. It was published by his friend, Mark Twain. Have you ever read the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant?

Ulysses S. Grant – President 1869-1877

My notes (from Charles Fake):
Admittedly, this assessment of Grant is very favorable and does not mention the scandals of his his appointees and his perceived (by some) alcoholism. As time has gone by, his reputation and accomplishments as a military man and a political figure have risen in the estimation of many historians. He characterized his shortcomings as “errors of judgment, not intent.” His magnificent tomb, in New York City, is being refurbished in preparation for a public celebration of the Bi-Centennial of his birth in the year 2022. If the story of Grant’s life is of special interest to you, I suggest further reading of the subject.

October 1, 2019 (Tuesday)
The material in this blog has come from the web site, “Biography.”
Much of it is copied “word for word.”

James Buchanan was born in Cove Gap, Pennsylvania, on April 23, 1791. His father, James Sr., was a well-to-do merchant and farmer, and his mother, Elizabeth, intelligent and well-read. As a young boy, Buchanan was educated at the Old Stone Academy in his village, and later, Dickinson College, where he was nearly suspended for bad behavior before finally graduating in 1809.

After graduating from college, Buchanan moved to Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where he studied law, and, in 1812, he was admitted to the bar. Shortly thereafter, he enlisted in the military at the start of the War of 1812 and participated in the defense of Baltimore.

In 1814, at age 23, Buchanan began what would be a long political career when he was elected as a member of the Federalist Party to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. He later won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, where he served five consecutive terms, from 1821 to 1831. In 1832, when Andrew Jackson was elected to his second term as president, he appointed Buchanan as his envoy to Russia, a post in which Buchanan further proved his aptitude as a diplomat.

In 1834 Buchanan returned to the United States and won a seat in Senate as a Democrat, a position he would hold for the next 10 years, until, in 1845, he resigned to serve as James K. Polk’s secretary of state, a position he used to further an expansionist agenda. In 1852, he made an unsuccessful bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, losing to Franklin Pierce, who, after being elected president, made Buchanan his minister to England.

In 1856 Buchanan successfully defeated Republican candidate John C. Fremont and, on March 4, 1857, was sworn in as the 15th president of the United States. In his inaugural address, Buchanan, who had won, in no small part, due to the support he had garnered in the southern states, reiterated a belief that had been one of the major running points of his campaign: that slavery was a matter for states and territories to decide, not the federal government. He went on to suggest that the matter was one that would be easily resolved, both “speedily and finally.” Historians have cited these remarks as indicative of Buchanan’s fundamental misunderstanding of the issue.

Shortly after his inauguration, the Dred Scott decision was delivered, essentially stating that the federal government had no right to exclude slavery in the territories. Around this time, Buchanan also attempted to resolve the slavery dispute in Kansas, so that it could agree on a constitution and be admitted to the Union. Buchanan supported the pro-slavery Lecompton constitution, which passed the House but was blocked by the Senate and ultimately defeated. By the end of Buchanan’s presidency, the slavery issue threatened to tear the country apart.

When Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, the possibility that several states would secede was approaching likelihood. In his final address to Congress, Buchanan argued that while the states had no legal right to secede, the federal government had no right to prevent them from doing so. Despite Buchanan’s attempts to prevent it, on December 20, 1860, South Carolina became the first state to secede. By February 1861, six more states followed suit and the Confederate States of America was formed. When Buchanan left office on March 3, 1861, to retire to his estate outside of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he left the nation on the brink of civil war.

In his retirement, Buchanan devoted much of his time to defending his handling of events leading to the Civil War, for which he was ultimately blamed. In 1866 he published a memoir, in which he laid blame for the war on abolitionists and Republicans. The book was ignored, and Buchanan retreated into privacy. He died on June 1, 1868, at the age of 78, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and was buried in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

In 1819, Buchanan became engaged to Ann Caroline Coleman, the daughter of a wealthy iron mogul. Their engagement was an unhappy one, however, and amidst rumors that Buchanan was seeing other women, Coleman broke off the engagement. She died shortly thereafter, leaving Buchanan brokenhearted, and her family to blame him for her death, to the point that they would not let him attend her funeral. Buchanan vowed to never marry, and he never did. When Buchanan eventually won the presidency, his niece Harriet Lane assumed the responsibilities of first lady. James Buchanan is the only bachelor president in U.S. history.

James Buchanan – President 1857-1861