The American Vice Presidency (35 page)

The nation’s fourth accidental president generally trod carefully in legislative affairs but did use his veto power on a few occasions. To great surprise as an old spoils man, Arthur vetoed a classic “pork-barrel” rivers and harbors appropriations bill through which legislators had approved millions of dollars for their districts for years.
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Congress overrode the veto, but Arthur won wide editorial praise for his action.

After a respectful grieving period following Garfield’s death, Arthur had the White House redecorated and opened it to a great many sumptuous dinners, with his sister Mary serving as hostess for her widowed brother. He eventually took to the presidency with relish, and his personal demeanor did much to counter the negativity and doubts that had greeted his assumption of the first office. In 1882, however, he suffered an attack of what later was described as Bright’s disease, a serious kidney ailment that often proved fatal. In March 1883 he confided to his son, Alan, that he was so ill he could hardly perform his presidential duties, and in May the
Hartford Evening Post
reported, “He has repeatedly given his friends to know that under no conceivable circumstances would he again be President.”
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Nevertheless, Arthur continued to receive favorable comments for his stewardship, which had been greeted with such misgivings upon Garfield’s death. None other than Mark Twain was quoted in the
Chicago Daily News
in August as observing: “I am but one in the 55,000,000; still, in the opinion of this one fifty-five millionth of the country’s population, it would be hard indeed to better President Arthur’s administration. But don’t decide till you hear from the rest.”
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Newspaper surveys of leading Republicans and editors, though, found Arthur trailing Blaine, even in New York samplings. Contrary to certain newspaper reports, Arthur let it be known he would welcome the chance to lead the party again in 1884 but said nothing about the state of his health, which was gradually deteriorating.

At the Republican National Convention in June, Blaine entered as the clear frontrunner. Arthur, who did not attend, ran a respectable second on the first ballot but slipped gradually, and Blaine was nominated on the fourth roll call. When Tom Platt, who seconded Blaine’s nomination, asked Conkling to endorse his candidate, lawyer Conkling characteristically and acidly replied, “No thank you. I don’t engage in criminal practice.”
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That fall, Blaine narrowly lost the presidency to the Democratic governor Grover Cleveland of New York. Arthur, his health further declining, returned quietly to his law office in New York, where on November 17, 1886, he finally succumbed to Bright’s disease. Chosen vice president in an irresponsible manner and often at odds with the president he served while in that position, Chester Arthur comported himself honorably as Garfield’s successor in achieving some of the fallen president’s prime objectives. Associated with political corruption in his earlier years, he redeemed his reputation with his signature on the most significant civil service reform of his time.

THOMAS A. HENDRICKS

OF INDIANA

I
n the annals of American vice presidents, no occupant of the office had a more tortuous route to achieving it than the Democrat Thomas A. Hendricks of Indiana. In the course of that route, he earned a controversial reputation as an opportunist with views on race that cast a shadow on a political career marked by as many defeats as victories.

Rejected as a vice presidential running mate of Samuel J. Tilden of New York in 1876, Hendricks was first used eight years later as a foil in an effort to block the presidential nomination of Governor Grover Cleveland of New York. When that failed, he became Cleveland’s successful running mate in a balancing move on the 1884 Democratic ticket, marking the party’s first victory since the Civil War. Only nine months later, sudden death claimed him, leaving his record marred by a clinging racial bias.

Ironically, as a young lawyer Hendricks brought suit against a white neighborhood tough who assailed and sought to get a black boy thrown into jail simply for talking to him. Hendricks got the assailant jailed instead by convincing a jury that attacking one of inferior social position was a greater offense.
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That case, however, did not foretell a racial animosity that would later surface in his political career.

Born in a farmhouse near Zanesville, Ohio, on September 7, 1819, Hendricks was six months old when his father, John, moved the family to Indiana and became a successful farmer and operator of a general store
in Shelbyville. After graduating from Hanover College, young Hendricks studied law, began a practice in Indiana, and in 1848 entered politics, winning a seat in the Indiana House of Representatives. He was a delegate to the state constitutional convention, where he revealed his anti-black bias, leading an effort to enact “Black Laws” upholding racial segregation and limiting immigration of free blacks into Indiana. In one speech, he declared, “The races are different—physically, intellectually and morally.… They cannot meet and mingle, in a state of social and political equality without a violation of the laws of nature and a gross outrage of all our better feelings, and without producing a degradation of our own race.”
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In 1850 Hendricks was elected to Congress, served two terms, and as a disciple of Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois was a strong supporter of popular sovereignty and the extension of slavery into the West. He backed Douglas’s controversial Kansas-Nebraska Act, which repealed the Missouri Compromise, costing Hendricks reelection. In 1860 he ran for the governorship of Indiana but lost.

With the outbreak of the Civil War, Hendricks became a War Democrat in the state party deeply split over the war. He found himself in sharp conflict with the leading Indiana Peace Democrat, Jesse Bright, the U.S. Senate president pro tem, who in early 1862 was expelled for writing a letter to the Confederate president Jefferson Davis, suggesting that the rebel army buy rifles from an Indiana firm. Hendricks was elected by the state legislature to take the seat in the next term. Meanwhile, he rallied fellow War Democrats to defeat anti-war resolutions in the state legislature.

Upon taking his seat in the Senate in 1863, where there now were only ten Democrats to thirty-three Republicans, Hendricks became the party leader and as a War Democrat had frequent access to President Lincoln while maintaining a partisan posture. Shortly before Lincoln’s death, Hendricks called on the president at the White House, where Lincoln told him, “We have differed in politics, Senator Hendricks, but you have uniformly treated my administration with fairness. Presently there will be no differences between us.” Whereupon Lincoln took Hendricks by his arm and led him to a window overlooking the Potomac and beyond, into Virginia, saying, “Within a few months there will be such universal good feeling over there that it will bring us all together.”
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It was hardly one of Lincoln’s most prophetic visions.

In a speech on the Senate floor on April 7, 1864, one week before the assassination, Hendricks opposed abolition on these grounds: “It is not a favorable time for us to lay our hand upon the work of the fathers.” With the nation at war and with the Southern states excluded, he argued, the move should await bringing them back into the fold.
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He insisted he was never in favor of the subjugation of the South, but for “the prosecution of the war upon such a policy as will secure a return of the Southern people, that there may be prosperity and greatness and enterprise of the North at the same time.”
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Indeed, after Lincoln’s death Hendricks was conspicuously sympathetic to southern whites and hostile to freedmen’s rights. He opposed the postwar constitutional amendments that were at the heart of Reconstruction—the Thirteenth abolishing slavery, the Fourteenth providing due process protection, and the Fifteenth barring denial of suffrage on racial grounds. He reminded Radical Republicans that Lincoln had declined to sign, and instead had pocket-vetoed, the Wade-Davis Bill, which would have barred reentry of southern states unless 50 percent of their citizens signed an iron-clad oath that they had never supported the Confederacy.

Hendricks also fought against the repeal of the fugitive slave laws prior to the constitutional abolition of slavery and generally resisted all forms of social integration. “I say we are so different,” he observed emphatically, “that we ought not to compose one political community.”
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And later: “I say that our fathers were right in saying that this was a white man’s government, to be controlled by white men. I say that I do not deem the negro to be my equal.”
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When the Indiana legislature went Republican in 1868, Hendricks was not offered a second U.S. Senate term. Critics argued that he had not originated nor was he identified with any prominent policy or legislation and that he was noted principally as an obstructionist, especially on issues involving race and Reconstruction. Despite his skimpy record of achievement in the Senate, however, Hendricks was popular there for his candor and leadership of the minority views he represented.

Despite those controversial positions, Hendricks was offered as a presidential candidate that year at the Democratic National Convention, in New York, and in a tempestuous and drawn-out fight over three days, he actually led the balloting briefly on the twenty-second ballot, before the
delegates turned to Governor Horatio Seymour of New York. Hendricks subsequently returned to Indiana and ran for its governorship once more but was again defeated. He was mentioned again as a presidential prospect in 1872 but instead ran for the governorship of Indiana yet again, and this time he won. Coming from an important swing state, Hendricks seemed poised for another presidential bid in 1876, but investor advocates of “hard money” achieved the nomination of their like-minded Tilden.

As a consolation, Hendricks, as an advocate of “soft money” to ease farmers’ ability to pay their debts, was made the Democratic vice presidential nominee to balance Tilden’s currency stand. In his acceptance speech, he struck a conciliatory note, observing, “Gold and silver are the real standards of value,” but adding, “Our national currency will not be a perfect medium of exchange until it shall be convertible at the pleasure of the holder.”
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The Democratic ticket of Tilden and Hendricks won the popular vote by 251,000 ballots but fell one vote short of an electoral college majority. Then a special commission awarded all disputed votes in four states to the Republican ticket of Rutherford B. Hayes and William A. Wheeler, and the election was theirs.

Four years later, Indiana Democrats considered pushing Hendricks for president one more time, but while on vacation in Hot Springs, Arkansas, he suffered a stroke. He later also developed a lameness in one foot, but nevertheless in 1884, with an ailing Tilden declining a second try himself, Hendricks made known he was willing once again. Tilden, hearing that Hendricks had talked of a reprise of the Tilden-Hendricks ticket, chided him, “I do not wonder, considering my weakness!”
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But by now Hendricks was seen as a perennial candidate for some office or another, and he attended the Democratic convention in Chicago in early July prepared to nominate the former Indiana senator Joseph E. McDonald.

In the first session, the temporary chairman, Governor Richard B. Hubbard of Texas, drew cheers and applause for Tilden and Hendricks for their honorable acceptance of the election commission’s denial of their 1876 quest. Nevertheless, the nomination seemed well in hand for Governor Grover Cleveland of New York, with the convention’s largest delegation behind him. But rival Tammany Hall Democrats, led by New York City mayor John Kelly, launched a stop-Cleveland scheme, whereby the frontrunner might be derailed by the backing of a dark horse, settling on a
willing Thomas Hendricks. Early the next morning, when the popular Hoosier, “robbed” of the vice presidency in 1876, entered the hall, Kelly men jumped up and tried to launch a loud floor demonstration and stampede for him. But only the Tammany men joined the cry of “Hendricks! Hendricks!”
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An alert Cleveland man had caught wind of the scheme, roused Cleveland delegates from their beds to block it, and the brief insurrection was snuffed out.
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Cleveland prevailed as a hard-money advocate who could not only win New York but also bring liberal Republicans to his camp, and Hendricks, once again as a ticket-balancing soft-money man from a swing state, landed the vice presidential nomination a second time.
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In the fall campaign, Cleveland essentially stayed on the sidelines, making only two explicitly political appearances while his Republican opponent, James G. Blaine, the “plumbed knight” of Maine, traveled widely. But Hendricks, determined not to have the national office elude him as it had as Tilden’s running mate in 1876, campaigned hard, particularly after July 21, when the Buffalo
Evening Telegraph
broke the sensational news that Cleveland had fathered a son born of a local widow ten years earlier.