“Chet Arthur? President of the United States? Good God!”
The peculiar politics that put Chester Arthur in the White House
(Donald Trump is getting closer to deciding on a running mate for the GOP 2024 ticket, so we’re taking a look at the politics of vice presidential selections … and at a few consequential or surprise choices throughout American history. Previous posts looked at how choices are impacted by the politics of the moment, and at the v.p. selections of Harry Truman and Andrew Johnson.)
The surprise selection of Chester Arthur for vice president
There have been some unusual veep selections in American history, but it’s hard to find a political choice more curious than the one that elevated Chester Arthur to the vice presidency and then, through an accident of history, to the White House.
The Arthur story begins in 1880, with a Republican Party split into two factions and riven by a dispute over whom to nominate for president. With Rutherford Hayes choosing not to run for re-election, one half of the party wanted to nominate Ulysses Grant for a then unprecedented third term as president (four years after his previous term ended after 1876), while the other half preferred the popular Senator James G. Blaine of Maine.
The faction that united behind Grant was known as the Stalwarts because of their “stalwart” defense of party traditions, including a deep-rooted system of political patronage. At the time, it was customary for winners of national elections to gain control of tens of thousands of government jobs to hand out to party supporters, a benefit known as the spoils system.
The Blaine supporters, meanwhile, were known as the Half-Breeds because they were said to be half-loyal to Grant and half-loyal to the idea of government reform, with a particular interest in modernizing the civil service so that government would rely less on potentially corrupt patronage appointments.
At that June’s Republican convention in Chicago, the two sides fought to a draw. Through 33 ballots, neither was able to gain a majority. Then, on the 34th ballot, the Wisconsin delegation tried to break the deadlock by shifting 16 votes to Ohio Representative James Garfield, a nine-term House member who’d been a Major General during the Civil War. Garfield wasn’t an official candidate and hadn’t expressed interest in running, but the unexpected move gave delegates a way out of their Grant-Blaine deadlock. Two ballots, later Garfield won the nomination when Blaine freed his delegates to support Garfield as long as it would block Grant and the Stalwarts from winning.
When the vote ended, the Stalwarts were distraught over Grant’s defeat. Knowing this, the convention agreed to nominate a Stalwart for vice president. When New York Congressman Levi Morton turned down the opportunity, the delegates surprisingly turned to Chester Arthur, an attorney and the former Collector of the New York Customs House.
The Customs House job was a plum patronage position and it mostly involved collecting duties on imports, so it was hardly typical preparation for national office. But Arthur was the choice of New York Stalwarts, whose support would be crucial in the fall election. Tired after 36 ballots of voting, the delegates didn’t give much thought to Arthur’s qualifications for the vice presidency — this nomination was based strictly on the politics of the moment in order to win the support of the New York GOP.
So it was that the completely unexpected ticket of James Garfield and Chester Arthur headed into the 1880 election against the Democrats, who had nominated General Winfield Scott Hancock for president and Indiana Rep. William English for vice president.
In the end, it was one of closest elections in history. Of more than 9 million ballots cast, less than 10,000 votes separated the contenders, with Garfield winning 48.3-48.2%. The Electoral College margin was wider, with Garfield prevailing 214-155 due to his strength in the North.
James Garfield’s assassination
Less than four months after his inauguration, President Garfield was shot by an assassin on July 2, 1881, while walking through the Baltimore and Potomac railway station in Washington. Garfield initially survived the shooting, but suffered a series of infections caused by doctors who probed his wound with hands and instruments that hadn’t been sterilized, which wasn’t yet a common medical practice. Today, it’s thought the president may have survived if he’d received better medical care. Instead, Garfield died on September 19.
Soon thereafter, a messenger appeared at Arthur’s door in New York City, informing him of Garfield’s death. The vice president had never aspired to the presidency and, according to a report, upon hearing the news about Garfield he broke down, “sobbing like a child, with his head on his desk and his face buried in his hands.”1 That night at 2:15 a.m., in the front parlor of his home, Chester Arthur took the oath of office as the 21st president.
The country reeled from the twist of fate that elevated Arthur to the presidency. As one person exclaimed: “Chet Arthur? President of the United States? Good God!”2
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The Arthur presidency
By most accounts, though, Arthur had a modest yet successful presidency. His biggest achievement was the 1883 passage of civil service reform, which ensured that federal employees would be hired on merit rather than by their ties to a politician, and he also took steps to modernize the Navy.
Politically, Arthur found himself in somewhat of a political no-man’s land. The Stalwarts forsook him when he went down the path of civil service reform, while the reformers never fully embraced him because he’d come into office as a Stalwart. Arthur made a half-hearted attempt to win the presidency on his own in 1884, but with no real base of support in the party he failed to win the nomination, which went to James Blaine.
Arthur may not have had a particularly consequential term in office, but in contrast to someone like Andrew Johnson, the Arthur presidency didn’t turn out to be the disaster that might have been expected given his previous experience and the way he was gifted the vice presidential nomination. Nevertheless, it’s a lesson in how inexperienced vice presidents who are selected for purely political reasons can still end up in the top job … and how the presidency of the United States can, after all, turn on a twist of fate.
This essay was written for Substack, but parts of it were adapted from my book, Quest for the Presidency: The Storied and Surprising History of Presidential Campaigns in America (Lincoln, Nebraska: Potomac Books/University of Nebraska Press, 2022).
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Jared Cohen, Accidental Presidents: Eight Men Who Changed America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019), 170.
Kenneth D. Ackerman, Dark Horse: The Surprise Election and Political Murder of President James A. Garfield (Falls Church, Virginia: Viral History Press, 2011), 341.
It’s constantly amazing to me that our early government (nearly all of the first century) was run by people with no experience nor expertise. It’s amazing the democratic experiment survived.
Fascinating