This article is a part of our series From Lighthouses to Electric Chargers: A Presidential Series on Transportation Innovations 

Let’s start with some presidential transportation trivia:

1. Which president of the United States was most directly involved in the racial desegregation of public transportation?

If you answered, “Lyndon Johnson,” picturing him signing the Civil Rights Act in 1965, you’d be overlooking another of our presidents, who as a young lawyer litigated the case that prevented New York City horse-car operators from discriminating against Black passengers.

2. Which Vice-President’s unexpected succession to the presidency involved a dramatic moment aboard a transportation vehicle?

If you again answered, “Lyndon Johnson,” picturing his dour face while taking the oath of office aboard Air Force One parked in Dallas after JFK’s assassination, you’re overlooking an earlier Veep, who was disembarking from a steamboat when he heard the news that his president had been shot.

Sorry, Robert Caro. You picked the wrong guy.

The answer to both these questions is: Chester Alan Arthur, who served as president from September 1881 to March 1885,[1] filling out the term of the murdered James Garfield.[2]

While those bits of transportation trivia stand out in Arthur’s career, the overall arc of his life also reflects the evolving nature of American transportation over the course of the 19^th century. In particular, his political career is a case study in the power that railroad finance came to have on the nation’s politics. Arthur, whose career prior to the vice presidency and presidency was steeped in political fundraising, was one of the first money-savvy political operators to develop a mutually beneficial financial relationship with the corporate tycoons, many of them rail barons (or stock-manipulating would-be barons) who influenced American politics and government in the Gilded Age.

Arthur literally grew up during the same era the railroads did. In his youth, waterborne transportation and horsedrawn coaches and wagons were the backdrop for several junctures of his personal life. Born in 1829, four years after the opening of the Erie Canal, Arthur was raised in upstate New York amidst the industrialization and trade that the new waterway induced. He spent part of his childhood in Perry, New York, named for U.S. Navy Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry, hero of the Battle of Lake Erie in the War of 1812. The name of the town was a harbinger of the connection between the eastern seaboard and the interior, signaling New Yorkers’ recognition of the importance of trade between the two regions via the Canal and Lakes.

When Arthur was a teenager, his family lived in Schenectady, a major water and rail transportation hub. He reached adulthood as Schenectady solidified its position as a multi-modal trans-shipment point, located on the banks of the Mohawk River, which connected the Erie Canal with the Hudson. Schenectady was also the meeting point of nascent railroads like the Saratoga and Schenectady, the Mohawk and Hudson, the Albany and Buffalo, and the Utica and Schenectady. Don Rittner, Schenectady’s city and county historian, once went so far as to claim that the convergence of so many lines made the town the “first railroad junction in America” and “the rail hub of America” in the 1830s, when Chet Arthur was a boy.[3]

Later in Arthur’s lifetime, many of those local carriers would gradually be consolidated by the powerful Vanderbilt family into the mighty New York Central System, which would become a financial benefactor to Arthur in his political career. Another company vital to Schenectady started as a canal builder, then re-invented itself as a railroad with the same name: the Delaware and Hudson. Its main lines intersected close to the campus where Arthur earned his college degree and accreditation to practice law. The D & H would endure as a corporate entity until its 2015 dismemberment between Canadian Pacific and Norfolk Southern, 130 years after Arthur’s death.[4] Schenectady also became a center of U.S. railroad locomotive manufacturing during Arthur’s lifetime, at the Alco plant.

Arthur remained in the area to earn his degrees at Union College. Coming of age surrounded by all these transportation facilities in upstate New York presented opportunities to a young man. The nearby Erie Canal even played a vital non-transportation role for him in one incident. He and his prankster classmates came up with a brilliant action to protest the college’s practice of ringing a large bell to awaken them at 6:30 AM for prayers. The students stole the bell, hauled it the short distance to the banks of the canal, and dumped it into the water. [5] No doubt they appreciated the convenience of this infrastructure.

After earning his law degree, Arthur sailed down the Hudson to establish himself as an attorney in the growing City of New York. As an ambitious young lawyer, he took on the controversial case that established racial integration on New York City transit vehicles, decades before the Civil War and well over a century before President Lyndon Johnson signed federal laws instituting integration nationwide. The son of an abolitionist preacher, Arthur was inclined to fair treatment of all races.

In 1854, Elizabeth Jennings, a 27 year old Black woman who taught at the African Free School, was roughly ejected from a common carrier Third Avenue streetcar because she was Black. Jennings asked the firm where Arthur worked to represent her – and ultimately, by setting precedent, represent all Black New Yorkers. Arthur, age 24 and a junior practitioner, stepped up to successfully litigate against the horsecar company, winning Jennings $250 in punitive damages. “For years after, the Colored People’s Legal Rights Association celebrated the anniversary of the verdict,” Arthur’s biographer writes of the pioneering case.[6]

The newspaper founded and edited by the abolitionist Frederick Douglass published an article about the case in 1855.

While that public transit case was a highlight in Arthur’s early professional life, boats continued to feature in major incidents in his personal life. In 1857, he left the comforts of New York City to seek his fortune in Kansas, then riven by battles over the extension of slavery, which Arthur opposed. He spent a month in St. Joseph, Missouri, a port on the Missouri River then beyond the reach of railroads. He watched as horse-drawn “freighter” carriages and settler “wagon trains” were marshalled and set out for the west. (The legendary “pony express” from St. Joseph to Sacramento would be inaugurated three years after Arthur passed through.) After cooling his heels for a month awaiting favorable navigational conditions, he availed himself of a steamboat churning 8o miles down the Big Muddy to Leavenworth, Kansas. “It is a great waste of time to travel on the river,” he wrote home to his fiancée, Nell. Water levels were “so low that the boats can make but slow progress, but even then it is much preferable to” travelling by land aboard the stagecoaches that rattled along rutted trails.[7]

A ship of different sort unexpectedly caused Arthur to truncate his exploration of Kansas. Uneasy as an abolitionist amidst pro-slavery violence in “Bleeding Kansas,” Arthur probably eagerly awaited mail from family and friends back east. In September 1857, he received a telegram from his fiancée Nell. Her father, Captain William Lewis Herndon, was a famous Naval commander, known for his explorations of the Amazon basin and nearly three decades of sailing the world’s seas. Nell’s telegram informed Arthur that her father had died at sea in the sinking of his ship, the Central America, in a terrible Atlantic storm. The gallant Herndon reportedly performed many acts of heroism, evacuating other people to lifeboats before donning his dress uniform and going down on the bridge of his foundering ship. Arthur, also gallant, hurried home from Kansas to the East Coast to comfort (and marry) Nell.

After serving in the Union Army during the Civil War, Arthur re-settled in New York City to practice law and pursue a career in politics. Engaging in politics in the 1870s meant engaging with railroad companies, the first sizable corporations the U.S. ever had. (Agriculture, other resource extraction, and textiles were enormous economic sectors employing millions of Americans, but those activities were not controlled by large corporate entities until later in 19^th century, decades after railroad companies like Union Pacific, Central Pacific, New York Central System or the Pennsylvania Railroad Railroads had consolidated themselves into large corporations.)

Railroads were by far the most politically influential, and sometimes the most politically detested, forces in the U.S. in that era, contributing to campaigns, bribing officials, and lobbying for favorable legislation and subsidies. (Canal companies were similar, but of a smaller scale and diminishing in importance by Arthur’s political career. New York Governor Samuel Tilden, the 1876 Democratic nominee for president, made his reputation for rectitude in part on “breaking up the Canal Ring,” a cabal that had held sway over the New York legislature for years.)

In Washington D.C., the administration of President Ulysses S. Grant was rife with scandal, much of it related to railroading. The Credit Mobilier scam involved overpaying for construction, and kickbacks from building, the Union Pacific.[8]

Chester Arthur made his way up the Republican Party hierarchy as a prodigious fundraiser, which inevitably equated to being chummy with the railroad tycoons and lobbyists who funded the politicians. He was rewarded with a public sector job. President Grant’s appointments were made with political purpose, and Grant gave Chester Arthur’s career a huge boost by appointing him to the coveted position of U.S. Customs Collector for the port of New York, by far the nation’s largest import/export harbor.

This position continued Arthur’s lifelong association with waterborne transportation, and positioned him to handle vast sums of public money. At the time, New York harbor was responsible for 75% of all import duties collected in the entire nation, and the tariff brought in just over half of all revenue to fund the federal government. The Collector not only managed millions of dollars, but also influenced the employment of hundreds of workers, a practice of patronage that predated the creation of the civil service. The “spoils” of victory were distributed by “spoilsmen” like Arthur. In the 1870s, he and his allies in the “machine,” notably boss Thurlow Weed and Senator Roscoe Conkling, directed dollars and jobs to reward and enrich their friends and maintain their hold on power.

Arthur might have lived out his career in this lucrative but relatively obscure position if not for the mysterious horse-trading that animated vice presidential nominations in that era. The 1880 Republican convention deadlocked for multiple ballots in choosing a presidential nominee, until delegates turned to a compromise candidate, James Garfield, of the Midwest. His unexpected nomination led to turmoil about balancing the ticket with a vice president from the east, but many of the prominent possibilities (like Conkling or James G. Blaine) were either too controversial or more likely were uninterested in becoming vice president, perceived as a meaningless job. Yet the New York machine, dominating the economy and the party’s finances, wanted one of its men in some proximity to power.

To the surprise of many, perhaps including Arthur himself, the dealmakers engineered Arthur’s nomination as the vice presidential candidate on Garfield’s ticket. He had not been a governor, had not been a senator, had not served in the House or a legislature or a mayor’s role. But he knew how money worked, in particular, political money. (Both of President Grant’s vice presidents were implicated in bribery scandals, so knowledge of finance and disregard for ethics were familiar attributes in the vice presidential suite.)

Vice presidents of the era, particularly those like Arthur who were chosen to mollify one faction of a party, were expected to remain obscure, and rarely played any meaningful role in the president’s administration.  After Garfield was elected, Arthur complied with this tradition in great style, continuing to spend a lot of his time at the opulent Gilded Age social events in New York City where he had been an elegant fixture for years, known as one of the most expensively-dressed men in the city. Nobody asked how he maintained his lavish lifestyle on his modest government salary.

Once again, however, fate intervened in Chester Arthur’s life – and yet again, a ship was part of the scene.

As vice president, Arthur had no good reason to loll around in dull Washington D.C.  Why would a New Yorker waste his time in the nation’s capital when he could continue his exciting lifestyle of habituating the smoke-filled rooms and fine restaurants of New York City and the state capital in Albany?[9] On the evening of July 1-2, 1881, Vice President Arthur and his patron Senator Roscoe Conkling were returning from various Empire State machinations as passengers on the overnight Albany to New York City steamboat, the Saint John.

Currier and Ives lithograph, circa 1878.

The vessel had been built as the largest inland waterway craft in the world, powered by two huge paddlewheels, one on each side. Its opulent furnishings and sophisticated clientele were a contrast to the rudimentary steamer Arthur had relied on in the shallow Missouri over twenty years earlier. Smooth passage down the deep Hudson was luxurious and routine. As the ship neared the dock in Manhattan, however, a commotion broke out on the pier, and a worker tried to yell inexplicable news to one of the crew on deck as the vessel neared the wharf. A telegram messenger jumped on board, urgently seeking the vice president. The message was: President Garfield had been shot that morning in Washington D.C.

The attack on Garfield had its transportation angle as well: he was shot in a railway station. The president remained conscious as he was taken back to the White House, where doctors attended to him for weeks as his condition fluctuated. Arthur remained in New York much of the summer, where his leading biographer writes, “Arthur was afraid to appear in public.”[10] He was targeted with vicious press criticism and even death threats, because Garfield’s crazed assailant had reportedly confessed that his motive in eliminating Garfield was to elevate Arthur to the Oval Office.

Conspiracy theorists alleged that Arthur had been in on the plot – an accusation with zero evidence. Arthur’s biographer also conjectures the Veep laid low due to sensitivity about not appearing to have assumed power while Garfield was alive. Much of the party leadership, who had supported Garfield because of his inclination for reforms like instituting civil service and anti-corruption measures, already disliked Arthur, who had become the vice presidential nominee only to mollify the corrupt wing of the party that opposed such reforms.

Despite these awkward circumstances, Arthur, a minister’s son, also wanted to assure the Cabinet that the government was stable, and subtly reassure them that if (“god forbid”) Garfield succumbed, the transition would be smooth. In mid-July he left seclusion in his Manhattan townhouse and travelled to Washington D.C., starting by ferry from Manhattan to the Pennsylvania Railroad terminal in New Jersey, then connecting to an overnight train to Washington. He paid an awkward call on the ailing Garfield in his sickroom at the White House and met with Cabinet officers. Many of them were reportedly appalled at the prospect that this New York political hack, despite all his dandy wardrobe and meticulously groomed mutton chops, might become president.

After this brief visit to the capital, Arthur returned home to New York. Remaining out of sight was possible in those dog days of 1881, when Washington D.C. was a slow town, the U.S. was not a superpower, and running the Executive Branch did not involve any split-second decisions. For months, the federal government could run on inertia, without anyone really exercising the powers of the presidency.

Garfield was moved by train to the New Jersey shore in late August, the doctors believing that ocean breezes would aid his recuperation. Nevertheless, the infections from the bullet which had remained in his body since the July 2 shooting continued to fester. On the evening of September 19, 1881, Garfield died. An hour later, around 11:30 PM, a newspaper reporter knocked on the door of Vice President Arthur’s brownstone row house on Lexington Avenue between East 28^th and 29^th Streets in Manhattan, to inquire whether Arthur would make a statement. The puzzled servant who answered the door, according to Arthur’s leading biographer, asked what possible matter Mr. Arthur should be expected to make a statement about at that hour. The news of Garfield’s death had not yet reached Arthur’s house. The vice president came to the entry vestibule, and learned from the newspaper reporter that he was now about to be President.

Arthur was sworn in as president early on the morning of September 20 in his home, then set off to meet Garfield’s widow and advisors, taking a ferry across the Hudson to the Central of New Jersey Railroad terminal, where he connected to a train down to the shore where Garfield’s body lay. New President Arthur and former President Ulysses S. Grant, also a New York resident, accompanied Garfield’s body and family and cabinet back to Washington D.C. That journey began on temporary track that had been laid to the cottage where Garfield had suffered his final days and died. The route eventually converged with main lines, passing through Princeton Junction, Trenton, Philadelphia and Baltimore. The journey took about six and a half hours from the Jersey Shore to Washington D.C., arriving at the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad depot, the terminal where Garfield had been shot.

When presidential power transferred to Arthur, cynicism ran high among the political observers who feared his wheeling and dealing as a “spoilsman” would continue in the White House, and that he would oppose the creation of the civil service, which Garfield had favored. He surprised the critics.  In his three and a half years as president, he rose to the occasion and was not a mere pawn of the corrupt Republican political machine that had brought him to prominence. He was open to reforms, and retained many of Garfield’s initiatives and reputable appointments. (The Cabinet included Secretary of War Robert Todd Lincoln, son of Abraham and Mary Lincoln.[11])

Arthur also continued to exhibit racial enlightenment compared with other white politicians of the era. In 1883, when a reactionary Supreme Court invalidated the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and hastened the demise of Reconstruction and the rise of Jim Crow, President Arthur called (in vain) for Congress to pass new legislation to replace it, calling for civil rights. He opposed efforts to restrict immigration, including his courageous veto of the Chinese Exclusion Act (in part perhaps because the labor was beneficial to railroad construction.) His lifelong connection to water transportation led him to support expansion of the U.S. Navy and Merchant Marine, and his experience as the Customs Collector for busy New York Harbor conditioned him to support infrastructure investment and international trade, and legislation like the Rivers and Harbor Bill.

Railroad and boat trips played a role in Arthur’s presidency, as he took advantage of the new Gilded Age infrastructure to travel more than earlier presidents had been able to do. He enjoyed a train trip from Washington D.C. to Yellowstone Park, with stops in large and small cities along the way.

The president (seated in the middle of his entourage at Yellowstone.)  Source: Library of Congress.

Later in his term, he travelled by train to Florida, where he rode the steamboat Frederick de  Bary up the St. John River from Jacksonville to Sanford, went fishing on the rivers and lakes, then sailed aboard the coastwise steamer Tallapoosa from St. Augustine, Florida to Savannah, Georgia, before returning to Washington D.C. by rail.[12] (On one leg of the southbound trip, somewhere between Petersburg, Virginia and Weldon, North Carolina[13], a conductor asked Arthur to show his ticket, before someone in the entourage decreed that the president did not require proof of payment, as he was part of the official party that had chartered the whole car from the railroad company.[14] (This section of trackage is now owned by CSX, and serves as the route of Amtrak’s Palmetto, Carolinian, Silver Star, Silver Meteor and Auto Train.)

Arthur did not officially seek election in his own right in the election of 1884, though by some accounts he wanted the Republican Party to nominate him. His ambivalence about the position, stemming in part from the hostility he had faced on his ascent due to Garfield’s assassination, was no competition for the ambitious James G. Blaine of Maine, who became the Republican nominee. Blaine lost to Democrat Grover Cleveland in November 1884.

After leaving the White House in March 1885, the true reasons for Arthur eschewing another term became clearer, as his health, which had been precarious when he was president, visibly declined. He died November 17, 1886, age 57, merely 20 months after leaving the Presidency, due to Bright’s disease and cerebral hemorrhage.[15] His gourmand lifestyle and ample physique may have contributed to his demise.

Chester Arthur’s story ends with one final transportation vignette after his death. His body was taken from his Lexington Avenue rowhouse to a brief funeral in midtown Manhattan, and then to the Grand Central Depot – the train station built in 1871 which would be replaced by Grand Central Terminal in 1913. Arthur’s coffin was placed in the ornate personal railcar of the Vanderbilt family, heirs to the tycoon who had consolidated many railroads into what became the mighty New York Central System, stretching from New England to the Mississippi. Arthur, the man, was associated with these Gilded Age barons because of his fundraising and deal-making in politics, but the train carried him back to the soil of his youth, where those railroads had shaped him and the nation as they both grew.

His funeral train steamed north along the Hudson – the same waterway he had plied by steamboat on his many trips to the state capital, including the fateful evening before Garfield had been shot. Segments of this stretch of track have historical significance as being the route of three different presidential funeral trains: President Lincoln in 1865 (between the Bronx and Albany), former President Arthur in 1886, and President Franklin Roosevelt (the segment between the Bronx and Hyde Park) in 1945.

Chester Arthur was laid to rest in Albany Rural Cemetery in Menands, New York. His hillside grave is not far from the banks of the Hudson River, adjacent to a branch of the former Delaware and Hudson Railroad and across town from the former Vanderbilt-controlled New York Central System line where today’s Amtrak Empire Service trains climb the grade between Arthur’s familiar state capital of Albany and his adolescent home of Schenectady. The man who had been an “unexpected president,” was born, lived and died in a geography and era where transportation continually evolved with unexpected changes.

David Bragdon is a lifelong transportation maven who has spent a lot of his life in New York City and Portland, Oregon. He has been an agent for Panamax grain ships on the lower Columbia River; President of an elected regional government and Metropolitan Planning Organization; the Executive Director of TransitCenter, an applied research and advocacy foundation; and a taxi driver. His transportation pursuits have included jump-seating 747 freighters into the Soviet Far East; taking passage on a Dutch containership through the Strait of Malacca; and riding in the locomotive of a freight train from Council Bluffs to Des Moines. He currently lives 200 meters from the banks of the Hudson River. Late on moonlit nights, David watches a double-paddle-wheeler ship steam past on its overnight run between Albany and New York City. Chester Arthur is aboard, slumbering soundly in a first-class cabin after enjoying a sumptuous dinner in the vessel’s salon. He and David communicate in their dreams.

Notes

[1] Unless otherwise noted, primary source for this essay is The Unexpected President: the Life and Times of Chester A. Arthur, by Scott S. Greenburger, 2017, Hachette Book Group.

[2] Like all other 19^th century Vice Presidents who ascended upon the death of a president, Arthur did not win another subsequent four year term himself. They contrast to the four 20^th century vice presidents who succeeded a deceased President and subsequently won election in their own rights.

[3] http://www.donrittner.com/his310.html

[4] https://www.american-rails.com/delaware.html

[5] Greenberger, page 12.

[6] Greenberger, page 22

[7] Greenberger, page 30

[8] One day, another future vice president would sit on Union Pacific’s board of directors: Dick Cheney.

[9] The saying in New York City goes, “No former New York City Mayor has ever attained ‘higher office,’ because there is no higher office than being Mayor of New York City.”

[10] Greenberger, page 102

[11] Secretary Lincoln would later become president of the Pullman Palace Sleeping Car Company, the nation’s dominant railroad car manufacturer – a career trajectory illustrating the links between the political leadership, including the military, and the railroad industry.

[12] Greenberger, p 215

[13] Greenberger, p 211

[14] Greenberger, p 212

[15] The second shortest post-presidency in U.S. history, after James K. Polk’s.