Chester A. Arthur
Chester Alan Arthur was the 21st president of the United States, serving from 1881 to 1885. He was a Republican from New York who previously served as the 20th vice president under President James A. Garfield. Assuming the presidency after Garfield's assassination, Arthur's administration saw the largest expansion of the U.S. Navy, the end of the so-called "spoils system", and the implementation of harsher restrictions for migrants entering from abroad.
Arthur was born in Fairfield, Vermont, and practiced law in New York City. He served as quartermaster general of the New York Militia during the American Civil War. Following the war, he devoted more time to New York Republican politics and quickly rose in Senator Roscoe Conkling's political organization. President Ulysses S. Grant appointed him as Collector of the Port of New York in 1871, and he was an important supporter of Conkling and the Stalwart faction of the Republican Party. In 1878, following bitter disputes between Conkling and President Rutherford B. Hayes over control of patronage in New York, Hayes fired Arthur as part of a plan to reform the federal patronage system.
During the 1880 Republican National Convention, the extended contest between Grant, identified with the Stalwarts, and James G. Blaine, the candidate of the Half-Breed faction, led to the compromise selection of James Garfield as the nominee for president. Republicans then nominated Arthur for vice president to balance the ticket geographically and to placate Stalwarts disappointed by Grant's defeat. Garfield and Arthur won the 1880 presidential election and took office in March 1881. Four months into his term, Garfield was shot by an assassin; he died 11 weeks later, and Arthur assumed the presidency.
As president, Arthur presided over the rebirth of the U.S. Navy, but he was criticized for failing to alleviate the federal budget surplus which had been accumulating since the end of the Civil War. Arthur vetoed the first version of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, arguing that its twenty-year ban on Chinese immigrants to the United States violated the Burlingame Treaty, but he signed a second version, which included a ten-year ban. He appointed Horace Gray and Samuel Blatchford to the Supreme Court. He also enforced the Immigration Act of 1882 to impose more restrictions on immigrants and the Tariff of 1883 to attempt to reduce tariffs. Arthur signed into law the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883, which came as a surprise to reformers who held a negative opinion of Arthur as a Stalwart and product of Conkling's organization.
Suffering from poor health, Arthur made only a limited effort to secure the Republican Party's nomination in 1884, and he retired at the end of his term – as a result, he is the most recent president to have never contested an election as his party's presidential nominee. Arthur's failing health and political temperament combined to make his administration less active than a modern presidency, yet he earned praise among contemporaries for his solid performance in office.
Early life
Birth and family
Chester Alan Arthur was born in Fairfield, Vermont. Arthur's mother, Malvina Stone, was born in Berkshire, Vermont, the daughter of George Washington Stone and Judith Stevens. Her family was primarily of English and Welsh descent, and her paternal grandfather, Uriah Stone, had served in the Continental Army during the American Revolution.Arthur's father, William Arthur, was born in 1796 in Dreen, Cullybackey, County Antrim, Ireland, to a Presbyterian family. William's mother was born Eliza McHarg and she married Alan Arthur. William graduated from college in Belfast and migrated to the Province of Lower Canada in 1819 or 1820. Malvina Stone met William Arthur when Arthur was teaching in Dunham, Quebec, near the Vermont border. They married in Dunham on April 12, 1821.
The Arthurs moved to Vermont after the birth of their first child, Regina. They quickly moved from Burlington to Jericho, and finally to Waterville, as William received positions teaching at different schools. William Arthur also spent a brief time studying law, but while still in Waterville, he departed from both his legal studies and his Presbyterian upbringing to join the Free Will Baptists; he spent the rest of his life as a minister in that denomination. William Arthur became an outspoken abolitionist, which often made him unpopular with some members of his congregations and contributed to the family's frequent moves.
In 1828, the family moved again, to Fairfield, where Chester Alan Arthur was born the following year; he was the fifth of nine children. He was named "Chester" after Chester Abell, the physician and family friend who assisted in his birth, and "Alan" for his paternal grandfather. The family remained in Fairfield until 1832, when William Arthur's profession took them to churches in several towns in Vermont and upstate New York. The family finally settled in Schenectady, New York, in 1844.
Arthur had a brother, George, who died as a toddler, and seven siblings who lived to adulthood:
- Regina, the wife of William G. Caw, a grocer, banker, and community leader of Cohoes, New York, who served as town supervisor and village trustee
- Jane
- Almeda, the wife of James H. Masten who served as postmaster of Cohoes and publisher of the Cohoes Cataract newspaper
- Ann, a career educator who taught school in New York and worked in South Carolina in the years immediately before and after the Civil War
- Malvina, the wife of Henry J. Haynesworth who was an official of the Confederate government and a merchant in Albany, New York, before being appointed as a captain and assistant quartermaster in the U.S. Army during Arthur's presidency
- William, a medical school graduate and career Army officer and paymaster who was wounded during his Civil War service. William Arthur retired in 1898 with the brevet rank of lieutenant colonel, and permanent rank of major.
- Mary, the wife of John E. McElroy, an Albany businessman and insurance executive, and Arthur's official White House hostess during his presidency
Education
Arthur spent some of his childhood years living in the New York towns of York, Perry, Greenwich, Lansingburgh, Schenectady, and Hoosick. One of his first teachers said Arthur was a boy "frank and open in manners and genial in disposition". During his time at school, he gained his first political inclinations and supported the Whig Party. He joined other young Whigs in support of Henry Clay, even participating in a brawl against students who supported James K. Polk during the 1844 United States presidential election. Arthur also supported the Fenian Brotherhood, an Irish republican organization founded in America; he showed this support by wearing a green coat. After completing his college preparation at the Lyceum of Union Village and a grammar school in Schenectady, Arthur enrolled at Union College there in 1845, where he studied the traditional classical curriculum. He was a member of the Psi Upsilon fraternity, and as a senior he was president of the debate society and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. During his winter breaks, he served as a teacher at a school in Schaghticoke.After graduating in 1848, Arthur returned to Schaghticoke and became a full-time teacher, and soon began to pursue an education in law. While studying law, he continued teaching, moving closer to home by taking a job at a school in North Pownal, Vermont. Coincidentally, future president James A. Garfield taught penmanship at the same school three years later, but the two did not cross paths during their teaching careers. In 1852, Arthur moved again, to Cohoes, New York, to become the principal of a school at which his sister, Malvina, was a teacher. In 1853, after studying at State and National Law School in Ballston Spa, New York, and then saving enough money to relocate, Arthur moved to New York City to read law at the office of Erastus D. Culver, an abolitionist lawyer and family friend. When Arthur was admitted to the New York bar in 1854, he joined Culver's firm, which was subsequently renamed Culver, Parker, and Arthur.
Early career
New York lawyer
When Arthur joined the firm, Culver and New York attorney John Jay were pursuing a habeas corpus action against Jonathan Lemmon, a Virginian slaveholder who was passing through New York with his eight slaves. In Lemmon v. New York, Culver argued that, as New York law did not permit slavery, any slave arriving in New York was automatically freed. The argument was successful, and after several appeals was upheld by the New York Court of Appeals in 1860. Campaign biographers would later give Arthur much of the credit for the victory; in fact his role was minor, although he was certainly an active participant in the case. In another civil rights case in 1854, Arthur was the lead attorney representing Elizabeth Jennings Graham after the conductor physically removed her from a streetcar because she was black. He won the case, and the verdict led to the desegregation of the New York City streetcar lines.In 1856, Arthur courted Ellen Herndon, the daughter of William Lewis Herndon, a Virginian naval officer. The two were soon engaged to be married. Later that year, he started a new law partnership with a friend, Henry D. Gardiner, and traveled with him to Kansas to consider purchasing land and setting up a law practice there. At that time, the state was the scene of violent confrontations between pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers, and Arthur lined up firmly with the latter. The rough frontier life did not agree with the genteel New Yorkers; after three or four months the two young lawyers returned to New York City, where Arthur comforted his fiancée after her father was lost at sea in the wreck of the SS Central America. In 1859, they were married at Calvary Episcopal Church in Manhattan. The couple had three children:
- William Lewis Arthur, died of "convulsions"
- Chester Alan Arthur II, married Myra Townsend, then Rowena Graves, father of Gavin Arthur
- Ellen Hansbrough Herndon "Nell" Arthur Pinkerton, married Charles Pinkerton