Sparks Commentary: Why is Chester A. Arthur now considered one of the “least memorable” presidents?

On July 2nd, 1881, Charles J. Guiteau shot the 20th President of the United States. The president was James A. Garfield, the predecessor of Chester A. Arthur. And Garfield had taken office only four months before. When Garfield was shot in the Baltimore and Potomac Railway Station, his assailant was immediately apprehended there. When a police officer asked Mr. Guiteau why he had shot the president, Guiteau did not immediately respond. But the press later revealed a letter in which Guiteau described his bizarre motives, saying that he would make his “friend Arthur President.” (See the relevant portion of the letter here.) Thus, people initially wondered if Vice President Chester A. Arthur was involved in the murder. After all, the vice president was next in line for the presidency, if Garfield should later happen to die from his gunshot wounds. Fortunately for Chester A. Arthur, it was later established that Guiteau had acted alone, and was wholly unconnected with the vice president. All of this was true, and Arthur was indeed innocent of this kind of wrongdoing. But two months after the shooting, President James A. Garfield died in his bed. Thus, Chester A. Arthur then became the 21st President of the United States. But who was Chester A. Arthur, and where did he come from? That is what this post will now attempt to explain.

Chester A. Arthur

Early life (including his political career), through the presidential elections of 1880

Chester Alan Arthur was born in Vermont in 1829. He was the fifth of what would eventually be nine children. But the family moved often during his childhood, giving rise to rumors that Mr. Arthur was born “outside” of the United States. If so, this would have rendered him ineligible to serve as either vice president or, most importantly, president. But it nonetheless seems clear that Chester A. Arthur was indeed born in Vermont, as he said that he was. Mr. Arthur would spend most of his life in nearby New York. Chester A. Arthur went to college, where he studied the traditional Classics curriculum of the time. Later on, Mr. Arthur went to law school, and became a lawyer in New York City. During the American Civil War, Chester A. Arthur served as “quartermaster general of the New York militia” (as Wikipedia has put it). After the war, Chester A. Arthur returned to his law practice, but soon began to rise in politics. Chester A. Arthur served in the political machine of Roscoe Conkling, which would later facilitate Arthur’s rise to the White House. As Wikipedia puts it, “President Ulysses S. Grant appointed [Arthur] as Collector of the Port of New York in 1871, and he was an important supporter of Conkling and the Stalwart faction of the Republican Party. In 1878, following bitter disputes between Conkling and President Rutherford B. Hayes over control of patronage in New York, Hayes fired Arthur as part of a plan to reform the federal patronage system. In June 1880, the extended contest between Grant, identified with the Stalwarts, and James G. Blaine, the candidate of the Half-Breed faction, led to the compromise selection of Ohio's Garfield for president. Republicans then nominated Arthur for vice president to balance the ticket geographically and to placate Stalwarts disappointed by Grant's defeat.” (Source: Their page on “Chester A. Arthur”) Garfield and Arthur then narrowly beat the Democratic candidate Winfield Scott Hancock in the general election. Garfield had just become the president of the United States, and Chester A. Arthur had become the vice president.

Contemporaneous depiction of Garfield assassination, with James G. Blaine at right

President Garfield is assassinated, making Chester A. Arthur into the new president

But Garfield’s tenure in office was rather a short one. As mentioned earlier, he was shot at the railway station only four months into his presidency. However, Garfield would linger on his deathbed for two additional months after that. During the deathbed period, it initially looked like Garfield might survive his wounds. But one of Garfield’s doctors badly bungled the president’s medical care. The nation thus watched with great interest, and so did the vice president: Chester A. Arthur. Eventually, Garfield died on September 19th, 1881 of the earlier gunshot wounds – and the complications from the poor medical treatment for those wounds. Garfield had been in office only six months in all. Chester A. Arthur then took the oath of office, and succeeded Garfield as president. Later, President Arthur would see to it through legal channels that his predecessor’s assailant, Charles J. Guiteau, was executed for the shooting – which had now turned into a murder. President Arthur had been cleared of all involvement in the murder. But he remained unpopular for other reasons, as I will now show. Specifically, the president broke with the Roscoe Conkling political machine that had propelled him into both of these offices. President Arthur no longer wanted to take orders from Senator Roscoe Conkling. The president had made a dangerous enemy, and would soon discover that people who can make presidents … can very often un-make them.

Senator Roscoe Conkling

Chester A. Arthur serves the remainder of Garfield’s term, and is then voted out in 1884

President Arthur was sowing the seeds of his own political demise. But as Wikipedia puts it, Chester A. Arthur “presided over the rebirth of the U.S. Navy, but he was criticized for failing to alleviate the federal budget surplus which had been accumulating since the end of the Civil War. Arthur vetoed the first version of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, arguing that its twenty-year ban on Chinese immigrants to the United States violated the Burlingame Treaty, but he signed a second version, which included a ten-year ban.[footnote] He appointed Horace Gray and Samuel Blatchford to the Supreme Court. He also enforced the Immigration Act of 1882 to impose more restrictions on immigrants and the Tariff of 1883 to attempt to reduce tariffs. Arthur signed into law the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 [a project of his predecessor Mr. Garfield], which came as a surprise to reformers who held a negative reputation of Arthur as a Stalwart and product of Conkling's organization.” (Source: Their page on “Chester A. Arthur”) By taking on the Conkling machine, President Arthur was fighting corruption in politics, and he would soon pay a terrible price for it. Chester A. Arthur was a Republican, so the incumbent thus ran for his party’s presidential nomination in 1884. Again, he had only been nominated for the vice presidency before this. But President Arthur was in poor health, so the Republican nomination instead went to his Secretary of State, James G. Blaine – a popular candidate from the previous election. But Blaine was viewed as corrupt, and inadvertently alienated Catholic voters at the last minute. Thus, the presidency instead went to the relatively-unknown Democratic nominee Grover Cleveland. Grover Cleveland thus began his first term of office in 1885. Chester A. Arthur then retired from politics, and returned to his law practice in New York State. In 1886, the former president suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, and never regained consciousness. Thus, the former president Chester A. Arthur died the following day at the age of 57. His immediate successor Grover Cleveland was still in his first term of office.

Chester A. Arthur

Concluding comments on Mr. Arthur’s presidency, which may be better than it’s remembered

Chester A. Arthur is seldom remembered today at all. Indeed, some have cited him as one of the “least memorable presidents” (a rather dubious distinction). He’s one of a forgotten group of post-Civil-War presidents, from both major political parties. But his presidency would nonetheless leave its mark upon American history. Chester A. Arthur is usually placed in the middle of American presidents, as an “average” or “mediocre” president. I offer this as my own verdict as well. He wasn’t exactly one of the best presidents, but nor was he one of the worst. He paid a price for taking on corruption in his own party, and he truly deserves some credit for that – even if he had helped it before. It is understandable that he is usually forgotten, but all presidents are important. Thus, I offer this blog post as a way of remembering his legacy, and his subsequent impact upon history.

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Part of a series about

The Presidents

1. George Washington
2. John Adams
3. Thomas Jefferson
4. James Madison
6. John Quincy Adams
7. Andrew Jackson
16. Abraham Lincoln
18. Ulysses S. Grant