The American Vice Presidency

by Jules Witcover

  In 1871, a fierce political power struggle erupted between rival Republican factions in Louisiana, catching President Ulysses S. Grant in the middle, with Wheeler ultimately drawn in to arbitrate as chairman of the House Committee on Southern Affairs. The factions conducted separate conventions, nominated candidates for the governorship and other offices, and vied for control of the state. In a highly irregular military involvement in politics, Grant sent federal troops to protect the radical faction’s convention in a federal building. The battle threw the state into chaos as, in effect, the two governors and two state legislatures clashed, with Grant vacillating on the role of federal troops and making a hash of his reconstruction efforts in the state. He tried to kick the ball to Congress while having to send federal troops to New Orleans to quell street violence.

  The turmoil continued through 1874 and into 1875, until Wheeler led a committee investigation into the fiasco in New Orleans, where he encountered local abuse, was threatened with assassination, and on one occasion was fired on.6 He eventually negotiated a truce between the factions, which was endorsed by the House and known as the Wheeler Compromise. It basically recognized William Pitt Kellogg of the radical faction as governor and seated enough Democrats in the lower house of the state legislature to gain control, while the state Senate remained Republican.

  The deal subsequently was violated by the state’s Democrats, including a failed effort to impeach Kellogg, and Grant essentially was content to be rid of the mess.7 Wheeler took from the experience the sense that it was folly for the North after the war to try to impose its will on the South, including enforcement of the new constitutional guarantees to the freedmen, with the continued presence of federal troops.

  In 1876, Wheeler was chosen by the rival Democratic caucus in the House to serve on a special committee to investigate Grant’s war secretary, William Belknap, a Civil War general, on impeachment charges of corruption. Belknap was accused of accepting large kickbacks in the award of military contracts in Indian Territory, with his first wife a collaborator. Despite his government salary of only eight thousand dollars, he and his wife staged extravagant parties, which eventually raised eyebrows and brought about articles of impeachment against him. With the House committee poised to vote on those articles, Belknap sped to the White House and gave his resignation to the president, bursting into tears. Nevertheless the House voted unanimously to send the articles to the Senate, where a majority approved all charges but not the two-thirds required, so Belknap was acquitted.

  In contrast, a Wheeler colleague, Robert H. Ellis, wrote of Wheeler later, “Other men have not accounted it an offense to use knowledge obtained by them as legislators as a basis for investments and business transactions.… With simple tastes, [Wheeler] has never been greedy of gain either for its own sake or the luxury it would buy. As a legislator, the thought never occurred to him that his influence could bring riches, and not the shadow of a stain rests on his name.”8 And when Congress voted a raise for itself, castigated by critics as “the salary grab,” Wheeler wrote to the secretary of treasury, “As this measure was opposed by my vote in all its stages, it does not comport with my views of consistency or propriety to take the above sum to my personal use. I desire, therefore, without giving publicity to the act, to return it to the treasury, which I do by enclosing herewith five-twenty bonds of the United States, purchased with said funds and assigned by me to you for the sole purpose of cancellation.”9

  If the self-effacing congressman Wheeler ever had any further political ambition, it had been to become Speaker of the House. In 1872, when James G. Blaine of Maine ran for the office, Blaine’s archrival, Senator Roscoe Conkling of New York, proposed to back Wheeler against him. Wheeler would have no part of it and supported Blaine. Now, in 1876, Conkling and Blaine were both vying for the Republican presidential nomination along with two favorite-son governors, Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio and John F. Hartranft of Pennsylvania. Wheeler also was nominated as a long shot. Conkling again was bent on stopping Blaine, and when it became clear that Conkling could not be nominated himself, he and allies threw the Empire State’s support to Hayes.

  When the first roll call of the states began on June 16, Blaine finished first but well short of the required majority. Hayes was far behind in the pack, and Wheeler was at the bottom with only three votes. As Blaine slipped and Hayes climbed slowly, votes seesawed in several states until New York withdrew Conkling’s name on the seventh ballot, and Hayes was nominated. Wheeler subsequently was proposed for vice president among other more well-known Republicans and was nominated. Hayes, on hearing of his name, asked his wife, “Who is Wheeler?”10

  Many years later, Wheeler was memorialized in historian Allan Nevins’s foreword to John F. Kennedy’s Pulitzer prize-winning Profiles in Courage, offering an exchange between Conkling and then congressman Wheeler. Conkling was said to have proposed, “Wheeler, if you will act with us, there is nothing in the gift of the State of New York to which you may not reasonably aspire.” Wheeler is said to have replied, “Mr. Conkling, there is nothing in the gift of the State of New York which will compensate me for the forfeiture of my self-respect.”11

  In the campaign between Hayes and the Democrat Samuel Tilden, one of the most tumultuous and contentious presidential campaigns up to that time, Wheeler was asked to address some mass meetings in his state, but he begged off pleading weariness and ill health, adding, “I regret I was nominated. You know I did not want the place. I should have gone back to the House, and into a Republican majority. I should have almost to a certainty, been its Speaker, which I would greatly prefer to being laid away.”12 In saying this, he left no doubt that he considered presiding over the Senate if elected vice president comparable to being put in the ground.

  Democratic speakers focused on the many tales of scandal and corruption in the Grant years, and through it all Wheeler emerged with his reputation intact as a man of incorruptible integrity, unsusceptible to the temptations of personal ambition or wealth.

  Tilden and his running mate, Thomas Hendricks of Indiana, won 51 percent of the popular vote to 48 percent for Hayes-Wheeler, but neither side had the required majority in the electoral college, throwing the election into the House of Representatives. The votes in three southern states still under federal occupation—South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana—were contested, and finally a joint bipartisan commission of House, Senate, and Supreme Court members awarded all the disputed electors to Hayes and Wheeler in a 8–7 vote, declaring them elected by a single electoral vote. Ironically, one of those three states that made Wheeler vice president was Louisiana, where a year earlier his adjudication of its gubernatorial and legislative elections had resulted in a compromise that seemed to please no one and was later violated by the state’s Democratic leaders.

  In presiding over the Senate, Wheeler cast only six tie-breaking votes in four years, one of which helped seat William Pitt Kellogg, from Louisiana, in the Senate. This was the same man who had become governor of the state in the compromise struck by Wheeler in his thankless arbitration mission handed to him by Grant.

  As vice president, Wheeler had little influence in the Hayes administration, but the president did occasionally sound him out on personalities in the cabinet. For example, about his secretary of state, William Evarts, Hayes wrote in his diary: “Mr. Vice President does not like Mr. Evarts. He thinks E. is not frank to those who speak about appointments. He does not say so, but by an equivocal, noncommittal way of talking allows them to hope. When there is no hope tell the man so. He will be disappointed at the time, but it is the best way. Mr. Wheeler is right. Prompt and square talk is in the long run safest and is just to the parties concerned. I must also bear this in mind.”13

  But Hayes excluded Wheeler from cabinet meetings and party caucuses, to Wheeler’s consternation, and the vice president generally felt he was a lost soul, even to the point of remarking about attending church: “I hear the minister praying for the president, his Cabinet, bo
th Houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, the governors and legislatures of all the states and every individual heathen … and find myself wholly left out.”14

  Wheeler, an old-fashioned homebody, was, however, often invited to the White House for social occasions, such as they were. As a widower in his sixties, he was a frequent Sunday night visitor, leading psalm singing in the library, with Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz at the piano.

  Hayes’s failure to admit Wheeler to his inner circle was somewhat surprising, because well before the 1880 election, when the president let it be known he would not be seeking a second term, he mused in his diary about his successor: “If New York could with a fair degree of unity present a man like say the vice president … he probably could be nominated.” But considering the turmoil among the state’s Republicans, the chances of their putting forward someone like Wheeler, who was at such odds with Conkling, did not seem likely.15 If Hayes, in considering who might best take his place in the Oval Office upon his own retirement, really thought of Wheeler, one might have expected he would have made much greater use of him, rather than allowing him to wallow in customary vice presidential isolation and boredom. But Wheeler seems to have suffered in silence, satisfied that it was customary and proper that the man sentenced to the office be required to wait in the wings.

  After leaving the vice presidency, Wheeler ran for the U.S. Senate despite his unhappy tenure as its presiding officer, but lost and retired from public life. On June 4, 1887, days short of his sixty-eighth birthday, he died in his hometown of Malone. Apparently no American vice president sought less from the office and received less from it than this decent and unpretentious country lawyer.

  CHESTER A. ARTHUR

  OF NEW YORK

  One of the least likely men ever to become vice president became as well one of the least likely men ever to become president. Chester Alan Arthur, a little-known customhouse collector of the Port of New York, ousted from that position earlier on allegations of corruption, was chosen as the running mate of the 1880 Republican presidential nominee, James A. Garfield. Only four months after they took office, Garfield was assassinated by a man who, although unknown to Arthur, proclaimed on committing the foul deed that he had done it to put Arthur in the White House.

  Nothing in Chester Arthur’s beginnings or early years warranted such an event propelling him to national awareness and prominence. “Chet,” as he was known as a boy, was born on October 5, 1829, into placid and nonpolitical circumstances in North Fairfield, Vermont, the son of a Baptist minister who preached in various churches in Vermont and neighboring upstate New York, until the family settled in Schenectady. Arthur attended Union College and graduated from it as a Phi Beta Kappa in 1848, then taught school, studied law, and was admitted to the bar in 1854 in New York City, where he started a small law firm. Sympathetic to abolition, he helped gain the right of black men to ride New York streetcars and the freedom of eight slaves brought into New York by a Virginia owner.1

  During the Civil War, Arthur became a judge advocate general and later quartermaster general of the New York militia, giving him a military credential helpful when he entered politics, as well as the right to be called “General,” although he never served in combat. Originally considering himself a Whig, Arthur was exposed early to the rough-and-tumble tactics of boss Thurlow Weed and joined the conservative wing of the Republican Party.2 In 1867 at the party’s state convention he hooked up with the man who soon would be both ally and rival on the state and national stages, the charismatic but tempestuous Roscoe Conkling. Arthur quickly became a loyal lieutenant in the Conkling organization, and after Conkling helped elect General Ulysses S. Grant as president in 1868, the grateful Grant rewarded him by appointing his friend Arthur to the lucrative job of New York customhouse collector.3

  Grant was reelected in 1872 and toyed with seeking a third term in 1876 but was rebuffed, whereupon Conkling sought the Republican presidential nomination himself, with Arthur’s loyal support. At the party’s national convention in Cincinnati in June, Conkling, after trailing badly, threw his support to the eventual nominee, Governor Rutherford B. Hayes of Ohio, with Arthur dutifully falling in line. Arthur raised money and rallied New York voters for Hayes, hoping to keep his job at the customhouse if the Ohioan was elected over the Democrat Samuel J. Tilden.

  But upon election, the reform-minded Hayes, well aware of allegations of payroll padding and other corruption at the customhouse, ordered an investigation of it. Among the allegations against Arthur and other “spoilsmen” were demands of salary kickbacks of from 2 to 6 percent to the Republican Party and as much as fifty thousand dollars a year in port fees siphoned off for the collector himself, about as much as the president’s annual salary at the time.4 The New York Times, however, at first defended Arthur, saying that while the customhouse was “the most investigated place in the country,” it had “come out from each ordeal without a single breath of allegation against its head.”5

  Hayes instituted a civil-service merit system that angered both Arthur and Conkling, and Arthur was obliged to testify before a commission created by Hayes. He repeatedly insisted that although he was under great pressure to hire political friends he had given jobs only to qualified applicants. Hayes meanwhile forbade all federal workers from participating in political campaigns and other activities, a blow aimed at the heart of the Conkling organization.

  Hayes eventually called for the resignations of Arthur and two Conkling men, and when Hayes nominated two replacements for them, Conkling led the Senate in refusing to confirm the men. Ultimately, however, they were replaced in what the editor E. L. Godkin called “an effective blow struck at what [was] worst in the present system” and at Conkling and his machine.6 The bitterness continued through Hayes’s presidency, and when Hayes decided not to seek a second term, and Grant, fresh from a long European tour, expressed interest again in a third presidential term, Conkling immediately took charge, along with Arthur.

  At the Republican National Convention in Chicago, they stood firm through thirty-four ballots, until a longshot, the freshman senator James A. Garfield, made a stirring speech, and some New York delegates, in defiance of Conkling, switched to him on the thirty-fifth ballot, securing his nomination. As a gesture of conciliation, Conkling was offered the right to name Garfield’s running mate. Arthur, learning of the offer, approached Conkling, who told him Garfield was certain to lose and advised him to forget about it. Arthur was overheard by a reporter replying, “The office of vice president is a greater honor than I ever dreamed of attaining. A barren nomination would be a great honor. In a calmer moment you will look at this differently.” But Conkling snapped back, “If you wish for my favor and respect, you will contemptuously decline it.” Arthur’s reply, according to another bystander, was: “Such an honor and opportunity comes to very few of the millions of Americans, and to that man but once. No man can refuse it, and I will not.” Whereupon Conkling turned and stalked from the room.7

  Garfield meanwhile had just offered the vice presidential nomination to another New Yorker and friend, Congressman Levi P. Morton, a wealthy and prominent banker. Morton also consulted with Conkling and decided he would turn down the offer, easing the dilemma. Arthur’s name went before the convention, and he was nominated on the first ballot, so little did the delegates think of his troubles at the New York customhouse.

  On the Democratic side, the former Union general Winfield S. Scott was nominated for the presidency with the former congressman William H. English of Indiana as his running mate. In August, Garfield swallowed his pride and went to New York to make peace with Conkling, but the New York Republican boss would not meet with him. Many reformers in the state also held their noses at having Arthur on the ticket. E. L. Godkin, the editor of the Nation magazine, wrote derisively of Arthur’s nomination: “There is no place in which his powers of mischief will be so small as in the vice presidency.” With Garfield only forty-eight years old and in robust health, Godkin a
dded that the chances of Arthur being called to the presidency was a “too unlikely contingency to be making extraordinary provision for.”8

  At the White House, Hayes noncommittally called the nomination of Garfield “the best that was possible,” but he was not so charitable about the selection of Garfield’s running mate. “The sop thrown to Conkling in the nomination of Arthur,” he growled, “only serves to emphasize the completeness of his defeat. He was so crushed that it was from sheer sympathy that this one was thrown to him.”9 Sympathy, however, was something seldom extended to the spiteful and combative Conkling; the gesture obviously was extended more out of fear about what wrath the vituperative party leader might impose on the Garfield campaign if completely ignored.

  In the fall electioneering that followed, all the nominees stayed off the campaign trail and limited themselves to writing letters of acceptance that essentially endorsed their parties’ platforms. Arthur, apparently to counter his record as New York customhouse collector, made a point of noting that he favored continued civil service reform. But one of his principal points was a slap at his own removal as collector: “The tenure of office should be stable.”10 Garfield, in a new campaign phenomenon, greeted hosts of daily callers from the front porch of his farmhouse in Mentor, Ohio.