Chester A. Arthur

by Peter Cates

Chester Arthur

For me, 21st President Chester Alan Arthur (1830-1886) always gave the impression of being a stuffed shirt prig with his Billy goat sideburns and mustache. But, like his predecessors and, as of 2023, his 25 successors, he was certainly a fascinating individual with a story uni­quely his own.

The tag, Gentleman Boss, became attached to him; during his years of political leadership, he was described by one journalist of the era as “usually wearing a Prince Albert coat, buttoned closely in front, with a flower in the upper button-hole and the corner of a colored silk handkerchief visible from a side pocket.”

Arthur’s childhood involved frequent changes of address and biographers have no certainty as to whether he was born in Vermont or upstate New York.

His mother, the former Malvina Stone (1802-1869), came from a very tough background in very rural Vermont while his father, William (1796-1875), was born in Ireland and was a Baptist preacher whose happy-go-lucky disposition may have led to frequent changes of churches in Vermont and upstate New York .

Arthur’s siblings included six sisters and two brothers, most of whom lived to ripe old age into the 1900s.

Arthur worked his way through law school by teaching and was admitted to the bar in 1853. He struggled to find work his first two years in Manhattan but in 1855 represented an African-American woman who had been refused transportation on a streetcar.

The client was awarded $500 and Arthur’s arguments resulted in other African-Americans receiving better treatment on public transportation.

In 1859, Arthur married Ellen Herndon (1837-1880) and they had three children – a son who died at three years old and another son and daughter, both of whom lived into the 1900s like several aunts and uncles.

Arthur’s wife died from pneumonia shortly before he became president, so his sister Mary McElroy (1841-1917) very effectively assumed hostess duties in the White House.

During the 1860s and ’70s , Arthur rose higher in New York state politics with the help of a few rather devious individuals but he kept his own hands clean and proved very effective as a Quartermaster General during the Civil War in charge of supplies for the troops; and in 1871 as collector of customs for the Port; and maintained his own reputation for complete honesty. Ironically, he never served in Congress before being nominated by the Republican strategists as Garfield’s vice-president and then, after his predecessor died from bullet wounds, entering the White House.

Arthur achieved Civil Service reforms but little else and eventually lacked the support of his own party because of its feuding divisions.

In 1884, the Democrats sent Grover Cleveland to the White House. Totally exhausted by his workloads, Arthur’s health went downhill within 20 months after leaving Washington and he died on November 18, 1886, at the young age of 56.

James Garfield (left), Lucretia Garfield (right)

by Peter Cates

James Garfield

Former 20th President James Abram Garfield (1831-1880) was the last of the Ohio Republican Triumvirate to serve in the White House, following his predecessors Grant and Hayes.

Garfield grew up in poverty on a farm and was the youngest of five children, three of whom died before he was born (One brother James Ballou Garfield died at the age of three in 1829.); only one sister, Mary (1824 – 1884) lived to adulthood, surviving her youngest brother by four years.

Garfield’s father Abram (1799-1833) was born in Worcester, New York, while his mother, the former Eliza Ballou (1801 – 1888) had spent her childhood in Richmond, New Hampshire, and outlived both of her surviving adult children.

To avoid starvation, Garfield and his sister helped their mother on the farm with all of the heavy work and he did not begin his formal education until the age of 18. Being a quick learner, he breezed through college and, at the age of 25 and already an accomplished teacher, became president of his alma mater, Hiram College.

Garfield was also an Orthodox Christian and became a highly accomplished preacher and orator. Listeners felt, as one wrote later, “as if they had been transplanted away from earth to some tranquil, beautiful region of heaven.”

His talent as a speaker served him well when he ran successfully for the Ohio Senate in 1859 and later for the U.S. House of Representatives.

Like his two Ohio predecessors, Garfield served with distinction as an officer during the Civil War.

Ironically, for reasons too detailed to go into, he was elected to the U.S. Senate while still Representative but never served there because, about the same time, he became the Republican candidate for the White House and won by a narrow margin over his Democrat opponent General Winfield Scott Hancock (1824 – 1886).

Garfield’s major accomplishment as president may have been pushing the investigation into fraudulent expenditures in the U.S. Post Office which involved a number of high-ranking fellow Republicans, resulting in indictments and prosecution.

Unfortunately, his presidency was short-lived.

On July 2nd, 1881, the president was at the D.C. train station heading to New England with his two sons when the psychotic Charles J. Guiteau (1841 – 1882) fired two bullets into Garfield, who very strangely was traveling without any bodyguards, as Lincoln’s assassination had been considered a fluke and his successors saw little need for protection.

After two months of being unsanitarily poked and probed, President Garfield died on September 19, and was succeeded by Vice-President Chester Alan Arthur (1830 – 1886).

Garfield married Lucretia Rudolph (1832 – 1918) who was a calm and supportive wife and shared with her husband a love of books. Like former First Lady Lucy Hayes, Lucretia was also a college graduate. They had seven children, among whom two died by the age of three while the others lived to ripe old age.

Rutherford B. Hayes

by Peter Cates

Rutherford B. Hayes

Former 19th President Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822-1893) wrote at the age of 19 of his determination “to use what means I have to acquire a character distinguished for energy, firmness and perseverence.”

Through a career that included Brigadier General during the Civil War, U.S. Congressman and Governor of Ohio, Hayes acquired a reputation for courage (Hayes was wounded five times during the Civil War and maintained the respect of his men), honesty, fiscal conservatism and social reform, as well as “energy, firmness and perseverence.”

Among his accomplishments while governor, he pushed for voter registration, battled election fraud, reformed the civil service, got improvements in prisons and mental hospitals, and troubleshooted the founding of Ohio State University.

Although a Republican, he consistently stood apart from partisanship and for what was right.

During the 1876 Republican primary, Hayes and Maine’s James G. Blaine were the leading contenders but Blaine’s hopes and popularity were tainted by yet another of the scandals that much too frequently reared their ugly heads during his political tenure. Therefore, some of the smarter party regulars saw the impeccably honest Hayes as their best hope and he won, in a close convention battle among the delegates meeting in Cincinnati.

The presidential race itself was arguably the closest one in history between Hayes and the Democrat, New York Governor Samuel J. Tilden, who also had accomplished reforms in his home state – a major one smashing the corrupt political gang of Boss Tweed at Tammany Hall.

The issues involved in Hayes defeating Tilden by just one hotly contested vote are much too detailed to go into at length but one of them was the ending of Reconstruction in the South.

While in office for just one term, Hayes’s other major accomplishment was civil service reform in which all federal government employees were prohibited from taking part in political organizations.

Lucy W. Hayes

Hayes married Lucy Ware Webb (1831-1889) in 1852 who became the first First Lady to be a college graduate. She was also a member of the Women’s Temp­erance Society and thus referred to as “Lem­onade Lucy” because she banned alcohol from the White House (In reality, it was her husband who banned alcohol but she gladly shouldered the blame.).

She was also, according to others, one of the kindest, sweetest human beings who ever lived and was the first First Lady to invite an African-American musician to perform at the White House.
The couple had seven sons and one daughter, of which three boys died in infancy, while the others lived well into the 1900s, daughter Fanny dying at 83, in 1950.

Hayes’s vice-president was New York Representative William A. Wheeler (1819-1887) whose own reputation for honesty matched that of the president. When Wheeler was mentioned to Hayes as a running mate at the Cincinnati convention, Hayes uttered, “WHO IS WHEELER?”, but both men became very close friends.

Widlliam A. Wheeler

Julia Dent Grant

by Peter Cates

Julia Dent Grant

Former First Lady #18 , Julia Dent Grant (1826-1902) hated to leave Washington when her husband Ulysses (1822-1885) decided enough was enough after his two terms in the White House.

She wrote, “Dear Washington, how I love you, with your beautiful, broad, generous streets and blue skies! The sun shines always there for me.”

Born into a wealthy Missouri family, Julia had a father who re­main­ed an unreconstructured Southerner for the re­mainder of his life even when staying with his daughter and son-in-law during the White House years.

She met her future husband in 1844, married him four years later and gave him four children, each of whom, unusual for those days, survived well into 20th century adulthood.

Her White House hostessing included up to 29 courses to a meal, Roman punch further easing the stomachs of guests between the pot roast and dessert and at least six glasses of wine.

Up to that point, the Grants were the youngest couple to occupy 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Volumes of fascinating material on Grant and his life and family exist, of which some examples are offered:

He was extraordinarily skilled at breaking horses but was a so so student at West Point.

Introverted by nature, he preferred drinking by himself at the off-limits pub to any social occasions.

He loved the novels of Sir Walter Scott but read very little else.

He once stated that he had been told so often that “a noun is the name of a thing” he believed it.

There was never a day during the Civil War when he didn’t drink nor a day after when he did.

He detested dirty jokes and cussing and the troops under his command were very careful with their language around him.

He was President Lincoln’s fourth Commander-in-chief of the Union forces but the first successful one, scoring victories at Vicksburg, Chattanooga and Petersburg.

He would fight alongside his men in battle with bullets flying around him.

When Grant and General Robert E. Lee (1807-1870) met at Appomattox to broker the terms of surrender, they were both suffering from migraines.

As to music, Grant knew two kinds; “one is Yankee Doodle, the other ain’t. ”

His presidency eased the national debt, and signed into law the Justice Department but otherwise was rocked by endless scandals.
Grant based his cabinet appointments more often on personal friendship than on professional qualifications .

Grant detested military parades.

His father learned to be a tanner from the abolitionist John Brown and moved to Ohio from Kentucky because he detested slavery; needless to say, he and Julia’s father avoided each other at the White House.

Grant’s sons Fred and Ulysses Junior constantly beat their father at wrestling matches.

Due to some bad investments, by 1884 Grant was destitute and dying of throat cancer. Mark Twain offered to publish his Memoirs which the former president completed just two days before he died. The book sold many copies, left his widow and family well provided for, and is considered a classic.

Andrew Johnson

by Peter Cates

Andrew Johnson

Seventeenth President Andrew Johnson (1808-1875), by his own hard-working ethic and insatiable desire to honorably better himself, became the kind of speaker that one New York Times correspondent would write with grudging admiration how this individual “cut and slashed right and left, tore big wounds and left something behind to fester and remember. His phraseology may be uncouth, but his views are easily understood and he talks strong thoughts and carefully culled facts in quick succession.”

As with several other presidents, Johnson was born into poverty; his early years were spent in North Carolina, his father died when Johnson was three, and his mother apprenticed the boy to a tailor.

He became a very skilled tailor but disliked his boss and ran away, eventually relocating in the Tennessee mountain village of Greeneville where he set up his own very successful tailoring business.

When 15 year old Eliza McCardle (1810-1876) first saw Andrew, she commented to a friend, “There goes my beau;” they were married a year later in her mother’s house, the ceremony being presided over by Mordecai Lincoln, the uncle of the former 16th president, Abraham Lincoln.

She helped immensely with her husband’s education, especially in arithmetic and writing. And, when her husband became interested in politics, she fully supported his ambition, but rarely joined him in public appearances.

Johnson was elected mayor of Greeneville, served in the state legislature and five terms in the House of Representatives, and as governor and U.S. Senator before being picked by Abraham Lincoln to replace Maine’s own Hamilton Hamlin as vice-president when Lincoln was elected to a second term in 1864.

Andrew Johnson’s speeches and convictions resonated with the farmers and day laborers of the Tennessee mountains and valleys, a constituency that had little use for the wealthy plantation slave owners. Johnson was against high tariffs and wasteful government spending because they raised the cost of living for working people, spoke up for freedom of speech and religion and, although a Democrat, maintained a feisty independence in what was morally right.

Before Bill Clinton, and later Donald Trump, Andrew Johnson was the only president to undergo an impeachment trial, due to the obnoxious Radical Republicans who were doing their best to subvert the executive and judicial branches in attempts to pursue their own agendas, especially in relation to revenge against the former Confederate states and its citizens. Johnson, like his predecessor Lincoln, believed in a more moderate policy of healing and reconciliation as best for the country, which antagonized most of Congress; his acquittal was due to the vote of one man, Senator Edmund Ross, of Kansas, who was one of the subjects of JFK’s 1956 book, Profiles in Courage.

Droves of fascinating material on Johnson’s own presidency exists and could prove that his ranking as one of the worst presidents is grossly unfair.

In 1874, Johnson became the only former president to be re-elected to the U.S. Senate, was strangely given a hero’s welcome by the entire chamber including his former political enemies. Being a gentle forgiving man, Johnson shook hands with these enemies.

He died within six months of a stroke while visiting his daughter in July 1875, at the age of 66.

A visitor to the White House, Charles Dickens described Johnson’s face as “remarkable…indicating courage, watchfulness and certainly strength of purpose.”