MISTER SMILEY

 

I can't make my mind up about Schuyler Colfax (above). Was he a crooked, intriguing politician, as a wise man once said, or was he a working class hero who rose to the second highest office in the land by his own honest efforts? If it helps, Abraham Lincoln never trusted him. But, as the media types like to prattle, he had an appealing story. 

The smiler entered this world in New York City, heir to a prominent family name, but his father had died of tuberculosis five months before he was born. That made the newborn infant and his mother Evelyn, a burden on the family. 

In November of 1836 she married an ambitious widower, 24 year old George W. Mathews. The following summer Mathew's moved his new wife, his 11 year old stepson and his own daughter by train and canal boat to the the glacier-plowed flat lands of northern Indiana, along the Michigan border. 

Mathews opened a general store in the village of New Carlisle, but his real interest was politics. Three years later, in 1841, he was elected on the Whig Party ticket as auditor of St. Joseph County. 

So he moved the family again, to the county seat, at the south bend of the St. Joseph River - South Bend, Indiana (above). Fifteen year old Schuyler was hired as his stepfather's deputy.

At 19 the fair haired, soft blue eyed Schuyler and a partner pooled their resources to buy a failing weekly newspaper, which they renamed the “St. Joseph Valley Register”. In their premier editorial they declared their paper “shall be inflexibly Whig...On the issue of slavery we shall take the middle ground...we shall be fixedly opposed to enlarging the borders of slavery even one inch...and shall hail with happiness the day the Southern States shall...adopt a feasible plan for emancipation...”

They had just 250 subscribers, and ended the first year $1,400 in debt. But by 1844 they had made the paper such a success that Schuyler Colfax could afford to marry, and ten years later the teetotaler was elected to Congress, as a member of nascent Republican Party. He was just 31 years old.

In Congress they called the short Hoosier “Smiley” Schuyler (above), because of his ready grin and amiable nature. But there was a brain behind the benign smile and crude enunciation, and his ambition burned bright. Four years later, with his help, Republicans won control of the House of Representatives, and in 1860, the White House itself.  Schuyler expected to given a cabinet post, perhaps Postmaster General - he had chaired the postal committee in Congress. But he was told in a private conversation “Mr. Lincoln said...that with the troubles before us I could not be spared from Congress...” Instead Lincoln picked Caleb Smith, also from Indiana as Postmaster.  After this rebuff, Schuyler drew closer to the Radical Republicans, demanding immediate emancipation of all slaves.

In 1862, in a stunning midterm election upset, nervous Pennsylvania voters responded to the idea of four million slaves suddenly being freed by replacing radical Republican Speaker of the House Galusha Grow with the pro-union Democrat William Henry Miller. In Grow's absence, Schuyler campaigned to win the now vacant Speakership. And again Lincoln (above)  moved to block him, urging his political ally Montgomery Blair to campaign against Schuyler because he was “"a little intriguer...aspiring beyond his capacity, and not trustworthy” In one of Lincoln's few failures, the popular Schuyler easily won election as Speaker of the House, despite his Hoosier twang and lack of diction - he'd left public school when his family left New York.

His approach to being Speaker was described as “a slap-dash-knock-'em-down-auctioneer style.” He knew the rules of the House by heart, and used then to keep the government moving to support the war effort. He also helped to push through the transcontinental railroad funding bills, a matter close to Lincoln's heart, as before the war he'd been a lawyer defending the railroads. 

But Schuyler had also become a confidant of the humorless Radical Republican Secretary of the Treasury Salome P. Chase, who in the fall of 1862  tried to squeeze his rival, moderate William Seward, out of Lincoln's cabinet. Schuyler was not among the Congressional delegation which in December went to the White House to demand Lincoln fire Seward, and he was not there the next night when Lincoln confronted the conspirators, and forced Chase to retreat. But after this lesson in power politics, Schuyler tried to move closer to Lincoln.

When Schuyler's wife died in 1863, Lincoln attended her funeral. And after the crucial 1864 election was won, Schuyler assisted the President by helping to remove the thorn of Chase from his cabinet. He worked to convince the pompous Secretary to exchange his cabinet post for the robes of Chief Justice. And on 14 April, 1865, just before leaving for a tour of the California end of the transcontinental railroad, the Speaker met with the President. At that meeting Lincoln invited Shulyer to accompany him to the theater that night, but Schuyler begged off. And so Schuyler missed being an eyewitness at the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

It was Speaker Schuyler Colfax who oversaw passage of the Thirteen Amendment, abolishing slavery in the United States, and after the war, the 14th Amendment, which gave African Americans the right to vote.  Later he led the forces that impeached Lincoln's reluctant successor, President Andrew Johnson. The impeachment trial failed in the Senate by one vote. But two years later, Schuyler used that half victory to maneuver against 11 other candidates to win the nomination for Vice President, on the 11^th ballot alongside Presidential nominee Ulysses Simpson Grant. However that nasty victory left Schulyer with new enemies, and ensured that Grant would never trust him. Still Schuyler made history, because with his election that November he became the youngest Vice President in history, and also the first man to have presided over both the House of Representatives and the Senate. (In 1932 Texan John Nance Garner became the second.) 

Two weeks after the election, the widower Schuyler married again, this time to 34 year old Ellen M. Wade, niece of Ohio Senator Benjamin Wade. For a few weeks he was on top of the world. Then in January of 1869 Francis Adams Jr. broke the details of the Credit Mobilier scam in the magazine North American Review.

Before construction began in 1865, the men who sat on the board of the Union Pacific Railroad had created a  general contractor company called Credit Mobilier, and awarded them the contract to actually build the eastern end of the transcontinental line. They, of course, also sat on the board of Credit Mobilier. And they ensured that every bill Mobilier submitted, no matter how outrageous or inflated, was paid by the Union Pacific. Over the four years of construction, Credit Mobilier siphoned off every dime (and more) that a patriotic public paid for UP stock.

 By spreading Mobilier stock around congress, any obstructions were overcome, so that, in May of 1869, when the last rails were joined at Promontory Summit (above), the Union Pacific was $18 million in debt ($245 billion today). Meanwhile  everyone holding stock in the little known Credit Mobilier made out like bandits – one of whom was Schuyler Colfax.

When asked about stock dividends he had received from Mobilier, Schuyler (above, center, in his Odd Fellows robes)  insisted “I am an honest man...I never took anything that wasn't given to me.” It was probably the dumbest thing he ever said, so dumb, he may have never said it, but also so accurate, it stuck.  Shortly there after Grant privately urged his Vice-President to resign. Grant insisted he wanted to appoint Schuyler as Secretary of State . “In all my heart I hope you will say yes,” wrote Grant. But Schuyler knew that as Veep he could only be removed by a messy impeachment trial, while cabinet members could be simply fired, and he refused the offer.

However he did announce, just two years into his term, in September of 1870, that after almost two decades in Washington, “My ambition is all gratified and satisfied.” Luckily, so was his fortune. He had decided to retire from politics, he said. Schuyler didn't mean it of course, he was only 47 years old. But the announcement forced his critics to move onto criticizing somebody else. Then, as he had done in the past, as the next election approached, Schuyler announced that reluctantly, at the urging of his friends, he had decided to stand for re-election for “the old ticket”. Then he dropped a bombshell. Since the Credit Mobilier scandal had tainted the party, he suggested that maybe Grant should be replaced at the top of the ticket

Grant's response was what you might expect. He decided to replace Schuyler Colfax with Senator Henry Wilson, of Massachusetts (below) - known as the “Natick Cobbler”. 

It was an odd choice, since most people in Washington figured the shoemaker (above) was responsible for the defeat at the First Battle of Bull Run, because he had leaked Union battle plans to his mistress and Confederate spy, Rose Greenhow. But Wilson was a loyal radical Republican, and the Credit Mobilier scandal had already split the party, with newspaperman Horace Greeley running on the “Liberal Republican” ticket.

Determined to avoid an open floor fight at the Philadelphia convention (above), the internecine warfare went on in the backrooms, as Schulyer and Wilson supporters tried to out-promise and out-threaten each other. It was decided on the first ballot, sort of.  Schulyer received 308 ½ votes, and Wilson got 399. 

Immediately the Indiana delegation ask to change their vote, and quickly Wilson became the unanimous choice. The clever man from South Bend had been out flanked. Grant and Wilson won, and Schulyer was out, but not forgotten.

In January of 1873 Schulyer was called before a House committee, where under oath he denied receiving a $1,200 check for Credit Mobilier dividends. But the Committee had a bank deposit slip for that amount in Schulyer's own handwriting.  Democrats in the house voted to impeach the likable Colfax, but the Republicans saved his behind.  Still, he was, finally, done in Washington. The next year, when the stock market imploded, brought down in part by the failure of the Union Pacific railroad, a bankrupted investor was heard to complain, “It was all Schulyer Colfax's fault, damn him.”

So, not yet fifty, the orphan (above)  returned to South Bend, determined to rebuild his reputation. Where future generations of disgraced politicians would go on cable TV,  Schulyer Colfax went on the lecture circuit. Here his amiable and folksy veneer earned him generous speaking fees. And in the stories he told, old opponents became close intimates. He claimed that in 1864 Lincoln had confided his horror at the cost of war. “Why do we suffer reverses after reverses! Could we have avoided this terrible, bloody war!” his Lincoln said.  It might have happened that way, but the words seem far too melodramatic.

Schulyer made a good living, but the travel was exhausting. On Monday, 12 January, 1885, he left his home in South Bend, Indiana, to give a speech in tiny Rock Rapids, Iowa .  Schulyer took a train to Chicago, where he transferred to the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad.  At about ten the next morning he arrived at their station on Riverfront Street in Mankato, Minnesota (above). In the bitter cold he had to rush, dragging his luggage, three- fourths of a mile to the Union Pacific station on 4^th Street.

The problem was, it was -30 Fahrenheit (-34 Celsius), and it took him almost thirty minutes to make the bitter journey.  Five minutes after arriving at the station, he suffered “a fatal derangement of the heart's action”, and dropped dead.  Nobody knew who he was until they checked the papers in his pockets. Oh, how the mighty had fallen.  He was not yet 60 years old, and left his widow and only child an estate valued at $150,000 ($3.5 million today).

A newspaper man penned the ambitious Shulyer Colfax's best epitaph: “A beautiful smiler came in our midst, Too lively and fair to remain; They stretched him on racks till the soul of Colfax, Flapped up into Heaven again, May the fate of poor Schuyler warn men of a smiler, Who dividends gets on the brain!

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BORDER LINE CHESTER A. ARTHUR

 

I think we have all seen his photo, but I doubt if many of you have seriously gazed into the chubby self satisfied face of President Chester A. Arthur and wondered what made him such a clothes horse? You ought to. It was the key to his character.

“Elegant Arthur” was a vain, shallow, mutton chopped political hack who owned 80 pairs of trousers, and who rarely wore the same pair twice. “Chet”, as his friends liked to call the 6 foot 2 inch dandy raconteur, spent more on hats than most Americans earned in a year. Chester was a product of the spoils system. In six years as the Collector of the Port of New York, with a salary of $6,500 a year, Chester amassed a fortune of $3 million. And yet it was not his sticky fingers which endangers his reputation to this day . It was his massive ego, which inspired him to tell one little white lie . He fibbed about how old he was.

Chester had never held elected office before joining the Republican national ticket in 1880. He was the choice of Senator Roscoe Conkling (above), boss of the Stalwarts -  the renamed Tammany Hall graft machine. 

The arrogant "Lord Roscoe" controlled all political favors in the state of New York, the most populous state in the nation. And in antebellum America nobody could win the Presidency without his approval. So, in the election of 1880 Conkling forced James Garfield to accept Chester Arthur as his Vice President. 

The Republicans needed the help. During the campaign Democrats spread the rumor that Chester Arthur had actually been born in Ireland,  and thus was not eligible to serve as Vice President. Candidate Arthur refused to even dignify the charge with a response, even though at least one Republican politician wondered why Chester didn't just “say where he was born, and put an end to all this mystery.”

King Roscoe's help made all the difference. Out of 4 million votes cast that Tuesday, 8 November, 1880, Garfield and Chester Arthur received just 1,898 more votes than Civil War hero Winfield Scott Hancock and Indiana banker William English. It was a bitter pill for the Democrats to swallow. But if Garfield was President, he was firmly in the pocket of the senior Senator from New York. 

Then, in December, President-elect Garfield started ignoring Conkling's picks for cabinet positions, Infuriated, King Roscoe decided to remind Garfield just how powerful he was. He resigned from the Senate. His plan was that the New York state senate would immediately and obediently re-elect him. But Roscoe had made too many enemies. After  a two month long battle, Conkling was replaced by the one term non-entity, Elbridge Gerry Lapham,  And that quick, Garfield became undisputed head of the Republican Party, determined to rid American politics of corrupt king makers - like Conkling. 

That December the drama of Conkling's fall filled the front pages of America's newspapers. But in the middle of the month, a small item in the back pages of The New York Times noted that Arthur P. Hinman, working for the Democratic party, had arrived in St. Albans, Vermont, to investigate the new Vice President-elect Chester Arthur's ancestry. If Chester noticed that small item in the paper, and I bet he did, it must have made him more than a little nervous.

They had picked their man well. He was a loyal Democrat with a flexible moral compass. Hinman was just scrapping by as a lawyer with offices at 14 Wall Street. But he saw himself as a noble warrior, and was given to writing poetry. Recently he had even been published in the Harper’s Magazine. That poem began, "My back is to the wall, My face is to my foes, That surge and gather around me, Like waves that winter blows”.  And this was the combative and contentious romantic bull dog  who set up shop in the town of St. Albans, 15 miles south of the Canadian border. 

Interviewed by the Times in the American Hotel at the corner of Main and Lake Streets,  Himman claimed his investigation had uncovered that Chester A. Arthur was actually, “born in Canada....that he was 50 years old in July instead of October...and generally that he is an alien and ineligible to the office of Vice-President.” It would prove hard to disprove the allegation. Vermont did not begin recording and issuing birth certificates until 1857 - 28 years and a month after Arthur's birth. Yet, the tiny article, printed under the headline “Material For a Democratic Lie”, caused barely a hiccup back in Washington. After all Chester was just the vice president. He did not matter.

Still, it was just one more reason why, after taking the oath in March of 1881, President Garfield had bared Chester Arthur from even entering the White House (above). Garfield had decided on civil service reform, doing away with the profitable spoils system.

Then, on 2  July , in a Washington, D.C. train station, President Garfield was gunned down. In September, 88 days later, Garfield died of blood poisoning, and abruptly, the charming but vapid Chester A. Arthur was President, and the assassin had publicly tied the new POTUS to the murder.

What happened next did not improve the trouser snake's public image. Chester refused to occupy the executive mansion until Lewis Comfort Tiffany had spent two months and lots of public money redecorating it, with pomegranate plush drapes and a floor to ceiling ornate wood and glass screen (above) jammed into the main entrance hall. To complete the grotesque gilded age transformation of a national monument, 24 wagon loads of historical paintings, furniture and furnishings accumulated by Presidents John Adams through Ulysses Grant were sold at auction. It was just one more reason why a journalist would later write, “No man ever entered the Presidency so profoundly and widely distrusted as Chester Alan Arthur.”

The Democrats saw a quick opening, but Hinman rushed his shot and he missed. His new conspiracy theory presented in the fall and winter of 1881, was a repeat of what he had told the Times, with a few more details. But again the story fell apart. This time there was the testimony of Chester Abell, the doctor who delivered the future President. The boy was even named after him.

Dr. Abel insisted Chester had been born in tiny Fairfield, Vermont, about half way between St Albans and the Canadian border. 

And although the father, William Arthur (above), had not become a naturalized American citizen until 1843, there was no doubt Chester's mother, Malvina, born in 1821, was blatantly American born. 

Malvina's (above) grandfather had fought in the American Revolutionary Army, for crying out loud. So when Chester Arthur was born in October of 1830 he was automatically an American citizen, like his mother, no matter what his father's status.  And once President Chester Arthur began to crusade for the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act, his public image improved and most people forgot the Democratic smear.  In fact the public began to notice that Chester was just so...likeable. It even began to look as if he might even run for re-election. And that meant that Arthur Hinman would be back.

Lawyer Hineman's third theory was a nice little story. See, Malvina's parents had lived for years just 8 miles over the border, in Dunham, Quebec (above).  William and Malvina had met and eloped in Dunham. 

So it would have perfectly natural for Malvina to seek her mother's help in minding her four older girls when it came time to deliver Chester (above) in the fall of 1830.  And as for Dr. Abel's testimony, well, the old man was just confused. See, two years earlier,  in 1828, there had been another son, named Chester Abel Arthur, born in Fairfield, Vermont. That 1828 infant was the child Dr. Abel had remembered. But that baby had died before his first birth day. There was no record of the 1828 birth, or the 1828 death. Bu then there was no record of Arthur's 1830 birth either, not in Vermont or Canada. But, said Hinman, that was the way it had happened.  

Years later, when applying to Union College in Schenectady New York, young Chester Alan Arthur (above) had appropriated his dead brother's birth date and location, making him an American citizen and qualifying him for student aid.  It was such a good story that Hinman put it all down in a book, “How A British Subject Became President of the United States”, which Democratic publishers were happy to release in the summer of 1884, with another Presidential election approaching. That same year, with the popular Arthur likely to be on the ballot, the new theory was summarized  in an article Hineman  wrote for the Brooklyn Eagle Newspaper.  And that got reprinted all over the country.

It might have caught on. It might have become a majestic conspiracy theory, like the rabbit Alice followed, or a million other myths created by political hacks.  And the Democratic party might have fallen down that rabbit hole in the election of 1884. The American people have always been drawn to conspiracy theories, be it FDR sacrificing Pearl Harbor in 1941, or  Lee Harvey Oswald's claim he was a patsy in November of 1963, or the black helicopters hiding in National Parks in the 1990's, or even Donald Trump's malicious lie about a stolen election.   But reality intervened in 1884 when President Chester Arthur fell ill and decided not to run for re-election. And as quickly as that, Arthur Hinman lost his livelihood. He had become irrelevant, the Jeb Bush of his age, leaving behind a brown smudge as his only contribution to the historical record.

Chester Alan Arthur left the White House in March of 1885 a very sick man. On 16 November, 1886 he ordered his son to burn all his personal papers, reducing to ashes all the shady deals he had cut while a loyal Stalwart for Senator Conkling.  And then on 18 November, he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, and died. Mark Twain, the man who had invented the title “Gilded Age”, offered a powerful obituary; “It would be hard indeed to better President Arthur's administration”

After his work as a hatched man dried up, Arthur Hinman suffered the roller coaster life of a political flunky, in with one administration, out with the next. His law business fell off and his was forced to move to cheaper space at 644 Hancock street in Brooklyn. But then the worm turned again and by 1901 he was back at 375 Fulton Street, just blocks from City Hall in Manhattan.  But he never lost his pugnaciousness. 

In October of 1904, the now aging lawyer got into a fist fight with an undertaker, a Mr. Joseph P. Pouch. Hinman had represented Pouch's  wife in their divorce case, and when the judge awarded her custody of their 7 year old child, Arthur Hinman offered to effect the transfer, to avoid an unpleasant  confrontation. With any other lawyer that might have worked. But Hinman was never one to suffer an insult. He belted Joe in the eye, and Joe pounded Himman in the face and head. Poor Joe got arrested for contempt of court, and Mrs. Pouch got her child. 

And Arthur Hinman got the fight he always relished. It was straight out of  the final stanza of his poem, where Arthur recalls his “life of combat”; "I stand, poor speck of dust, Defiant, self reliant, To die – if die I must.” Well, hell, we all must.

And the mystery of Chester Alan Arthur's birth would not be finally be answered until 1949 when Chester A. Arthur's great-grandson donated the family bible to the New York Public Library. And there, recorded in the handwriting of the President's father, William Arthur, are listed in order, the births of all nine of his children. 

The name of the first male and fifth child is indeed Chester Alan Arthur. But the birth date is October 5, 1829. It was the same year William Arthur was elected to the school board in Fairfield, Vermont. And all the great mystery and drama compounded by politicians over the birth place of President Chester Alan Arthur, boiled down to a  vain man's vanity about his age. He wanted to appear a year younger than he actually was.  Simple, and foolish. But human.

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