Chester Arthur: The Most Forgettable President?

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Welcome back to Biographics! I’m your host, Eric Malachite, and today’s protagonist is none other than President Chester Arthur, with a script by the ever-factual Larry Holsworth. If Larry has provided his socials, they’ll be linked next to my storytelling. Deep dive channel, story rant, my analog horror project, and more. With that said, let’s jump into it!

Chester Allen Arthur was the second American to ascend to the presidency as a result of the assassination of his predecessor. When he did so, few believed he was up to the task. He served the remaining three years of the term that James Garfield had been elected to, and upon its completion, chose to retire rather than seek office on his own. Nonetheless, upon the completion of his term, he left office to considerable accolades. Mark Twain famously wrote of his presidency, “It would be hard indeed to better President Arthur’s administration.” Similar applause came from leading newspapers and political friends and foes alike. History, though, has not treated Arthur so kindly. In 2019, Time Magazine released a list of the top 10 forgettable presidents, and Chester Arthur topped the list. He is generally regarded as an average president today—not a failure, but far from an arousing success. Arthur would likely have agreed with that assessment.

Chester Arthur’s parents met and married in Canada. His father, William Arthur, was born and educated in Ireland before he moved to Ontario, where he met and eventually married Malvina Stone. The couple moved to Vermont following their 1821 marriage, living in several different towns as William worked as a school teacher. By the mid-1820s, William had abandoned his teaching profession and his Presbyterian faith, becoming a Free Will Baptist and an ardent abolitionist. In 1828, William and his growing congregation moved to Fairfield, Vermont. The following year, they welcomed their fifth child, whom they named Chester Allen Arthur. Eventually, the Arthurs had nine children, seven of whom were lucky enough to live to adulthood.

For the next few years, the family moved frequently as William’s preaching and abolitionist leanings alienated the communities in which they settled. After brief stays in several small Vermont and New York towns, the family settled in Schenectady, New York, in the early 1830s. William continued to travel to nearby towns and revival meetings while his growing brood remained in the Schenectady region. Arthur’s chaotic early childhood later led to accusations by political opponents that he had not been born in the United States, with rumors focusing on him being born in Canada and thus ineligible for the office of Vice President. These rumors dogged him during his term as president, though historians have established that he was, in fact, born in Vermont. Arthur was thus the first American president to face questions over whether he had been born in the United States.

Arthur completed his basic education in Schenectady and Greenwich, then called Union Village, where he showed an early interest in politics as well as pride in his Irish heritage. As a student, he joined groups that eventually organized as the Fenian Brotherhood, frequently wearing a green coat to display his allegiance. He supported the views of the Whig Party and its most powerful spokesman, Henry Clay of Kentucky. The Whigs were conservatives opposing the westward expansion known as Manifest Destiny and a powerful presidency. They supported protective tariffs, limited immigration, and federal support of national infrastructure. Arthur’s lifelong conservatism developed during his days as a student. He attended higher learning in Schenectady at Union College and worked as a school teacher during breaks. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1848.

For the next few years, he worked as a school teacher in several New York communities while reading law in his spare time. Eventually, he moved into school administration, serving as the principal in a co-host school before relocating to Boston Spa, where he studied law. In 1854, Arthur was admitted to the New York Bar and began practicing law in New York City at the firm of Culver, Parker, and Arthur.

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Now back to the most forgettable president in history.

In 1855, Chester Arthur represented the plaintiff in a New York case called Jennings v. The Third Avenue Street Car. A Black woman, Elizabeth Jennings, had boarded a streetcar to take her to a church where she was an organist. The streetcar conductor had first denied her boarding, claiming the car to be full. After it was pointed out that there were in fact several seats open, the conductor claimed her presence was distasteful to the other passengers. When the other passengers pointed out that this was not the case, the conductor physically evicted Jennings from the car.

At the time, most of New York’s numerous streetcar companies were privately owned, and unfortunately, nearly all of them practiced some form of racial discrimination, refusing to accommodate Black and, in some cases, Irish riders. The Jennings case drew the attention of several New York newspapers, among them the influential New York Tribune, then published by Horace Greeley. Several Black churches and other organizations protested against the action as well as the discrimination practiced by the streetcar companies. Part of the protest took the form of the lawsuit, in which Arthur represented Jennings.

Arthur argued the case before a jury, and Judge William Rockwell, in his instructions to the jury, stated that “colored persons, if sober, well-behaved, and free from disease, have the same rights as others and could neither be excluded by any rules of the company nor by force or violence.” Elizabeth Jennings was awarded $250 in damages, roughly $88,000 in 2023 money. The Third Avenue Street Car Company issued orders desegregating their streetcars and platforms. It was the beginning of desegregation for all of New York’s burgeoning mass transit industry and thrust Chester Arthur into local prominence as an attorney and civil rights advocate.

In 1856, Arthur started a new law partnership with Henry Gardner, and the two relocated to Kansas with the idea of establishing a practice in the rough-and-tumble frontier of the pre-Civil War days. Neither found the atmosphere in what was then called Bleeding Kansas to their liking, and they returned to New York in late 1856. Back in New York, Arthur married Ellen Herndon, the daughter of a recently deceased naval officer, and reestablished a law practice. Eventually, Ellen and Chester had three children together. The firstborn, a son named William, died in 1863 at the age of two. Another son, Chester II, and a daughter, Ellen, lived well into the ensuing 20th century.

The Whig Party self-destructed in the 1840s and 1850s as internal tensions over states’ rights, western expansion, tariffs, and other issues of the day splintered its ranks. From some of the shards of the old Whig Party emerged the Republican Party, and Chester Arthur found himself aligned with its views. In the late 1850s, Arthur used his growing prestige in New York legal and political circles to obtain the appointment of Judge Advocate General in the New York militia. At the time, well-organized militias formed the backbone of the American military system since large standing armies were generally frowned upon by the federal government.

Arthur’s interest in a military post was as much political as it was patriotic. In early 1861, Arthur received the appointment as engineer-in-chief on the military staff of New York Governor Edwin Morgan. The appointment was an example of political patronage and was largely a sinecure until President Lincoln’s request for volunteers to end the southern insurrection later that year. Suddenly, New York needed to recruit, equip, and train military forces in larger numbers than had ever been attempted before or even anticipated. They also needed to be housed and fed. Arthur undertook those responsibilities and more, rising in rank and prestige during the first year of the Civil War. He did not serve at the battlefront but rather fought the war of the bureaucracies, dealing with contractors, vendors, and those seeking political patronage. He achieved considerable success; New York regiments were well-equipped and trained during his time at the helm.

He lost his position when a Democratic governor was elected in New York in January 1863 and returned to his law practice. The New York draft riots and other protests and investigations into corruption in the state-run military systems took place that year, but Arthur was not in office at the time, and his reputation remained unsullied by the results. In 1864, another Republican was elected governor, but he had already promised the post previously held by Arthur to another political crony, and Arthur did not return to military duty. However, he continued to gain prominence in the New York Republican Party as well as at Tammany Hall. Arthur was a significant fundraiser for the Republican and eventually the Union Party, which returned Abraham Lincoln to the White House in the election of 1864.

Former Governor Morgan continued to build and strengthen his local political machine and forged some alliances with the Democratic Tammany Hall. Arthur was a major component of Morgan’s group and well-positioned to advance politically by the end of the Civil War.

Machine politics were nothing new in post-Civil War New York, with the Democrats dispensing political favors and exercising political power through the machine run from Tammany Hall. The Republicans had many tentacled political machines of their own, including those of Edwin Morgan and Roscoe Conkling’s machine. When Conkling was elected to the United States Senate in 1867, he used his influence to have Arthur appointed as chairman of the Republican executive committee for New York City. The position provided Arthur with a platform to bestow patronage and thus build political alliances.

Arthur continued to build relationships in New York City and Albany, supported by Conkling’s machine. In 1869, Arthur became chief legal counsel to the New York City Tax Commission. The job was highly lucrative, paying $10,000 annually, or about $225,000 in 2023. Arthur was forced to resign in 1871 when Tammany Democrats achieved a majority in the state legislature, but President Ulysses Grant, grateful for Arthur’s support in the presidential election of 1868, offered Arthur the position of Commissioner of Internal Revenue. Arthur respectfully turned the president down; he had another position in mind—one from which he could significantly build his base of political support.

In December 1871, President Grant, urged by Senator Conkling and other leading Republicans, appointed Chester Arthur as Collector of the Port of New York. The Port of New York, then the busiest in the United States, needed thousands of workers to assess and collect tariffs on goods shipped into the United States. The Collector was responsible for all of them, thus Arthur had the ability to bestow jobs on thousands of workers, hiring and firing at will and using the workers to achieve political aims through controlling how they voted. The docks and warehouses of the day were largely unregulated, unions were scarce and mostly impotent—it was machine politics at its finest.

The system as it then stood also ensured that Arthur, as well as other senior customs authorities, received a percentage of the fines levied against transgressors of the tariff system. Arthur’s annual compensation exceeded $50,000 per year, more than $1 million today, and he enjoyed it by dressing and acting the part of a wealthy man. While modern observers looking back over one and a half centuries likely view the system as irretrievably corrupt, it was entirely legal at the time and, in fact, it was how the party in power stayed in power.

Still, elements of reform emerged within the Republican Party, which divided into factions. The ultra-conservatives called themselves the Stalwarts and resisted reforms to the civil service and the patronage system. Arthur and Conkling aligned themselves with the Stalwarts. Yet reform slowly gained ground. In 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes won the still-disputed presidential election after several months of quibbling over electoral votes from Florida, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Oregon. Under Hayes, numerous reform initiatives were passed in Congress.

Arthur was removed as Collector of the Port of New York in 1878. Hayes offered Arthur, whose power in Republican politics remained substantial, the position of Consul General at the United States Embassy in Paris. Arthur declined. In January 1880, as Arthur mulled over his future in Albany, his wife remained in New York City. In January, she attended a benefit concert in New York representing her husband. She complained to her friends of having a cold and retired from the event early. Two days later, on January 12th, she died of pneumonia. Arthur was devastated and would later write, upon being elected Vice President, “Honors to me are not what they once were.”

Although Arthur was one of the most powerful politicians in the Republican Party and in New York State, he had never run for elective office on any level. As the election of 1880 loomed at the Republican convention in Chicago, the Stalwarts stood in opposition to the reform wing of the party, who called themselves the Half-Breeds. The convention struggled to find a candidate able to unite the wings of the party, eventually turning to James Garfield of Ohio to be the Republican standard bearer. Garfield recognized the need to appease the Stalwarts and unite the party, as well as to balance the ticket geographically if there was to be any chance of defeating the Democrats and their candidate, General Winfield Scott Hancock, a hero of the Battle of Gettysburg. The Republicans turned to Arthur, a Stalwart who could all but guarantee the party would carry New York and most of the northeastern states. Garfield’s home state of Ohio was also considered to be an easy pickup for Republicans.

Nonetheless, neither Garfield nor Arthur had run for office, and in Arthur’s case, he had never even been elected by voters, building his resume solely through political appointments. Protective tariffs were a major issue of the campaign, with Republicans charging the Democrats would reduce them, allowing cheap imported goods to rob Americans of jobs. Another issue was immigration, with Republicans demanding limited immigration from Europe and none from Asia.

In the end, the Republican ticket prevailed, as it had in every presidential election since 1860. Following the election, Arthur attempted to use his influence to have fellow Stalwarts and political allies appointed to key positions within the incoming administration. Garfield largely ignored Arthur’s suggestions and instead appointed several opponents of the Stalwarts. By the time the new administration took office on March 4th, 1881, Garfield and Arthur were barely speaking to each other.

Their Congress was evenly divided in the Senate, which seated 37 Democrats, 37 Republicans, and one independent. Although Arthur could cast the deciding vote in the event of ties, the Senate struggled to confirm many of Garfield’s appointments. The House could do little more than await events in the Senate. The government was effectively deadlocked throughout the first session of Congress. The Senate went into recess in May 1881, and Arthur went home to New York. From there, he traveled to Albany, where he learned on July 2nd that Garfield had been shot.

The president had been awaiting a train at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad Station in Washington when approached by an assassin who fired two shots with a revolver. Garfield was hit in the back and in the arm. His assassin, as he was seized by onlookers, shouted, “I am a Stalwart, and Arthur will be president.” Upon being shot by a disgruntled political office seeker named Charles Guiteau, President Garfield was returned to the White House conscious and able to consult with his physicians over his chances. At first, he seemed to be recovering, but doctors were unable to remove the bullet. Several innovative attempts to locate the bullet, including a primitive metal detector built by Alexander Graham Bell, failed in Bell’s case because the president was reclined on a bed of metal springs, which confused the detector.

In September, his doctors removed the president to Elberon, New Jersey, in the vain hopes that care could aid in the stricken man’s recovery. James Garfield died of sepsis on September 19th, 1881, in New Jersey, more than two months after having been wounded by the assassin’s bullets. During that time, the United States had been without a chief executive. There was no 25th Amendment at the time, which dictated the role of various government officers should the president be incapacitated, nor had Chester Arthur moved to ascend to the presidency. Arthur viewed such an action while the president was still alive to be unseemly.

Throughout that long summer, as Garfield struggled for life, Chester Arthur remained in New York, staying at his Lexington Avenue home. He learned of Garfield’s death on September 19th and took the oath of office at home. In the early morning hours of September 20th, he traveled by train to Long Beach, New Jersey, for Garfield’s funeral, returned to New York, and then journeyed to Washington, arriving on September 21st. He refused to go to the White House, taking up residence at the home of a friend, Senator John Jones. At first, this was to allow Mrs. Garfield sufficient time to mourn before moving out of the residence, and later to allow significant renovations to the executive mansion to be completed.

A strange thing happened to the