DEATH OF GARFIELD

853

Thomas C. Platt, requested, almost demanded, that the appointment be withdrawn. But the President refused, no doubt through the influence of Blaine, for Garfield had no personal object in offending Conkling or promoting Robertson. Various writers have asserted that Blaine was a neutral observer, and had nothing to do with this appointment or with the refusal to withdraw it. But this contradicts the logic of the whole situation. Garfield was not a powerful leader, as was Blaine. He had reached the limit of his capacity in Congress, while that of Blaine was yet unmeasured. Nor had Garfield the will power, the moral fiber, to stand out for a principle, and it was only natural that he leaned heavily upon his great secretary of state. The course of the President in this affair can be explained only by attributing it to the influence of Blaine. When Conkling and Platt discovered that they could not secure the withdrawal of the name of Robertson, nor prevent its confirmation by Platt resign. Conkling and the Senate, they resigned petulantly from that body, expecting to be vindicated by a reelection by the New York legislature. But both were defeated. This closed the public career of Roscoe Conkling - but we shall meet him once more in this history.

This episode opened wide the breach in the Republican party. The Conkling wing was known as "Stalwarts," the Blaine-Garfield wing as "Half-breeds." Alarming was the condition of Assassination the party, when suddenly the country was thrown into of Garfield, consternation at the assassination of the President. The July 2, 1881. assassin was Charles J. Guiteau, a disappointed office seeker, a rattle-brained egotist from New York who claimed to be a "Stalwart

of the Stalwarts," a "lawyer, theologian, and politician." He declared that the President's "removal" was a political necessity, as it would reunite the Republican party. He was plainly a man of disordered brain, nor was the country warranted in crying out frantically for his blood. After a long trial the following winter he was convicted and put to death. He should have been shut up for the rest of his natural life in an insane asylum. The jury simply reflected public opinion, which clamored for the prisoner's life.'

President Garfield was shot through the body. It was at first thought that he would die within the hour; but he rallied, and lin

1 One of the experts employed to pronounce on the sanity of Guiteau acknowledged, twenty years later, that they all agreed that he was insane, but feared to say so because of the excited state of the public. For a fuller account of the Garfield

gered for many weeks through the hot summer months. The nation waited and hoped and prayed. The illustrious patient bore up bravely; he never groaned nor complained; he signed a few official papers, but was never able to raise his head from the pillow. In August the President was removed to a cottage by the sea; but the benefit was slight, and on the night of September 19 he died. A few hours later-some hours before day the next morning Chester A. Arthur was sworn into the great office in his own house in the city of New York, and the government passed into the hands of the Stalwarts. The dead President was borne to Cleveland, Ohio, the beautiful lake city near which he had been born and had always lived, and here, on a grassy mound, amid a countless throng of weeping admirers, the body was laid to rest.

CIVIL SERVICE REFORM

Chester Allan Arthur had been an obscure politician in New York, and was known as a leader in polite society circles rather than as a statesman. No man had ever become President of the United States who was so little known to the great public as was Arthur, and many were alarmed because his ability and character were unknown, and especially because they feared that he would represent, not the country as a whole, nor even the great party that had elected him, but the faction of that party to which he belonged. But Arthur was not long in the presidential chair before he put all such fears at rest. He rose above all subserviency to faction and even to his party; he became the people's President in the true sense of the term; and so wise and able was his administration that nothing except Blaine's powerful hold on the party prevented his nomination for another term. The Cabinet was gradually changed until none of the Garfield Cabinet remained except Robert T. Lincoln, son of the great war President.

This administration was not marked by any great and stirring events. The interest of the people was enlisted in the centennial celebration of the surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown in 1781, in the great industrial exposition of 1881 at Atlanta, Georgia, in another greater one at New Orleans three years later, and in two American exploring expeditions into the Arctic seas.

1 So impartial and independent was Arthur's course, and so decidedly did he refuse to cater to the Stalwart faction, that even Conkling soon became estranged from him.

REFORM IN THE CIVIL SERVICE

Star-route

855

The attention of the public was also attracted in 1881 by the "Star-route" frauds. These routes were mail lines in the interior of the country where the mail could not be carried by railroad or by steamboat. Thomas J. Brady, second assistant postmaster-general, S. W. Dorsey, a Republican senator from Arkansas, and others, were accused of conspiring with certain mailcarrying contractors to defraud the government. For several years the combination stole from the government about half a million dollars a year. The business was broken up by publicity and the dismissal of several prominent officials. Some of the alleged conspirators were put on trial, but no punishments followed.

frauds.

We now come to the chief legislative movement of the Arthur administration - the reform in the civil service. When the federal government was organized, the civil service officials were appointed without any limit as to time, but their tenure of office was wholly subject to the appointing power, the President.

2

Civil service

For half a century the spoils system had held full sway. Public officials had come to feel that they were serving their party rather than their country, or were simply receiving their just reward for mere party zeal. The system was pernicious and destructive of all good government; but, against the protests of many honest men, it continued unbroken till Grant became President. A fruitless effort was then made to reform the civil service. In 1871 Congress, forced by public opinion and in spite of the protests of the professional politicians, passed an act authorizing the President to make certain changes in the methods of appointing reform. subordinate officers. Grant thereupon appointed a civil service commission of eminent men, who established a system of competitive examinations for appointments to office. This system continued for three years when Congress, again under the sway of the politicians, refused longer to vote money to carry it on, and it had to fall to the ground. President Hayes throughout his term of office made strenuous but futile efforts to reëstablish the reform in the service. The evil system might have continued indefinitely but for the tragic taking off of Garfield. His death was an indirect result of the pernicious system, for it was a New York appointment that tore open the half-healed wound in the Republican party and rent it in twain,

1 The name

these routes.

"star" route arose from the use of a star on the map to indicate

2 For the Crawford Act and the origin of the spoils system, see ante p. 466

and it was a disappointed office seeker that took his life. Public opinion now called with overmastering power for a reform in the civil service, and Congress heeded the call of its master.

In 1882 Mr. Pendleton, a Democratic senator from Ohio, introduced a bill to reestablish the civil service on the merit system. Both houses were Republican, but the autumn elections swept that party from power in the House. The leaders of the party saw in this a warning from an impatient public that trifling with civil service reform would be tolerated no longer, and, by an almost unanimous vote, the Pendleton measure became law in January, 1883. At first but few classes came under the new law, but successive Presidents have enlarged the list until it includes nearly every branch of the government service. President Arthur with sincerity and courage set about putting the new law into operation, and it is a matter of great gratification to the country that all our recent Presidents have in this way limited and restricted their own power, and that of their chief supporters, for the good of the public service. Other legislation of importance that marked the official term of President Arthur included the "Edmunds law" against polygamy in the territories, aimed chiefly at the habits of the Mormons of Utah, and a tariff act. The tariff was at this time rapidly becoming a prominent issue. The high duties of war times had been for the most part retained, and a cry from the West for a reduction of duties was too strong to be resisted. As early as 1872 a general outcry from the West against the high tariff resulted in the reduction of many duties; but three years later, when the clamor had subsided, the duties were quietly restored. Again, in the early eighties, the subject came to the front. In 1882 a tariff commission, recommended by President Arthur, was appointed. This commission made a report to Congress in December, 1882, and out of this grew the tariff of 1883, a measure that pleased no one. It was an abortive attempt to reduce the duties, but while it reduced them on many articles, it actually raised them on such articles as woolen dress goods, where a reduction would have brought relief. Thus far the tariff was not strictly a partisan question, nor had it been so for nearly forty years; but it was soon to become the chief issue between the two great parties.

1 Taussig's "Tariff History," p. 234.

GROVER CLEVELAND

857

A POLITICAL REVOLUTION

For four and twenty years the Republican party had held supremacy in the government. In that time its achievements had been great. But the party had made many serious blunders, and on these its powerful rival had fattened until it now seemed ready to seize the reins of government.

The Republican convention met in Chicago the first week in June, 1884. There were many candidates, but the idol of the party was "the magnetic man from Maine," and his nomination was assured from the beginning. Blaine led all others on the first three ballots and was nominated on the fourth. The convention then wisely chose for second place one of the most prominent of the leaders of the Stalwarts, General John A. Logan of Illinois. In the platform the party fulsomely praised itself for its past good deeds, pronounced for a protective tariff, and heartily indorsed civil service reform.

The Democrats met in the same city a few weeks later and nominated Grover Cleveland, governor of New York, for President, and Thomas A. Hendricks of Indiana for Vice President. In their platform they pointed out the moral decay of the Republican party, and mercilessly arraigned that party for not keeping faith with the people, making, at the same time, the most glowing promises to correct every abuse if the people would intrust them with power. They also called for a reduction of the tariff without injuring "any domestic industries."

The Prohibitionists nominated Governor John P. St. John of Kansas for President. The Greenback, now called the National party, chose Benjamin F. Butler as its standard bearer, and Butler was also nominated by the new-born Anti-Monopoly party. The great interest of the people, however, centered in the candidates of the two great political parties. Of these two men one had been in the public gaze as a party leader for many years, and frequent have been our references to his career; the other was a new star in the political sky.

Grover Cleveland, the son of a clergyman, was born in New Jersey in the same year and the same month that witnessed the inauguration of Martin Van Buren, the only President yet elected from New York. A few years later the family moved to a village near Syracuse, New York, where most of Grover's boyhood was spent.