ARTHUR, Chester Alan
(1830–86), 21st president of the U.S. (1881–85),
who rose above a background of political corruption to head a reform-oriented
administration that enacted the first comprehensive U.S. civil service
legislation.
Arthur was born in Fairfield, Vt., on Oct. 5, 1830, the son
of a poor country preacher. He graduated from Union College in Schenectady,
N.Y., taught school, and then studied law and opened a practice
in New York City before the American Civil War. A moderate abolitionist,
he defended several runaway slaves and was an early activist in
the New York Republican party. With the coming of the war, Arthur
became New York’s quartermaster-general in charge of supplying
the state’s volunteers with equipment. He performed this
huge administrative task with efficiency and scrupulous honesty,
earning an important place for himself in the state Republican organization,
which was dominated by the so-called Stalwart faction. In 1871 he
became collector of the Port of New York. Arthur administered the
collection of customs with his usual care and honesty while directing
his approximately 1000 employees in doing political work for the
state Republican party and its leader, Senator Roscoe Conkling.
Arthur’s position became difficult when the federal
government investigated the Custom House and issued an order banning
civil servants from managing political affairs. When Arthur ignored
the order at Conkling’s request, President Rutherford B.
Hayes had Arthur and his naval officer, Alonzo B. Cornell (1832–1904),
removed from office. But Arthur retained the support of the New
York party, and when James A. Garfield was nominated for president
in 1880, his managers chose Arthur as their vice-presidential candidate to
placate the Conkling faction. After Garfield’s election,
Arthur became his ally in a dispute with Conkling. Garfield died,
the victim of an assassin, on Sept. 19, 1881, and Arthur became
president.
Arthur as president put his Stalwart friends behind him, committing
his administration to moderate reforms and maintaining the dignity
of his office. He renovated the White House with his own ample funds
(he had invested his money wisely over the years) and entertained
in an opulent but tasteful style. He gradually changed Garfield’s
cabinet, but his own administration never took on any distinctive
tone. He supported the civil service reform bill that became law
in 1883, but never became fully identified with it in the public
mind. Similarly, he worked toward the first downward revision of
the tariff since the Civil War, but the bill, achieved in 1883,
scarcely made a dent in the structure of protection. He vigorously
prosecuted frauds uncovered during the Garfield administration,
but the government failed to gain convictions. Arthur vetoed a Chinese
exclusion bill that clearly violated a treaty with China and also
vetoed a wasteful rivers and harbors bill, which Congress promptly
passed over his veto.
Arthur succeeded in gaining respect as president, but he generated
little political enthusiasm. And, unknown to his contemporaries,
he was dying of kidney failure. He effectively hid his illness from
the public and even made desultory attempts at the Republican nomination
for 1884, but this was probably only because of intense pride. Leaving
office in 1885, honored but unlamented, he died of nephritis on
Nov. 18, 1886.
Arthur’s career was representative of a major transition
in Gilded Age politics. He lived through, and in many ways represented,
the rise of intense factionalism, its collapse in the late 1870s
and early ’80s, and its legacy in a more bureaucratic and
cautiously reformist Republican party that emerged in the 1880s.