Chester A. Arthur

• 1. Introduction

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  Chester Alan Arthur became the 21st president of the United States at 2:15 in the morning on the 20th of September 1881. He took the oath inside his own house on Lexington Avenue in New York City, from a judge named John R. Brady. The news that President James A. Garfield was dead had reached him only hours before.

  Arthur had spent his working life in the back rooms of New York politics, not in public view. Reformers saw him as a symbol of how government jobs were traded for loyalty and cash. Even his own party had treated him as a convenient name to balance a ticket.

  This documentary follows a schoolteacher, a lawyer, a wartime quartermaster and a customs collector who ended up holding the highest office in the country. It asks how a man so closely tied to a political machine got there, and why so many people were surprised by what he did once he had the job.

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• 2. Preacher's Son to Quartermaster

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  Chester Alan Arthur was born in 1829 in Fairfield, Vermont, the fifth of nine children. His first name honored Chester Abell, the physician and family friend who assisted at his birth. His middle name came from his paternal grandfather, Alan Arthur.

  His father, William Arthur, was born in 1796 in County Antrim, Ireland, to a Presbyterian family. William studied at college in Belfast, then crossed to Lower Canada around 1819 or 1820. While teaching in Dunham, Quebec, he met Malvina Stone, a Vermont woman whose grandfather Uriah Stone had served in the Continental Army. The couple married on the 12th of April 1821.

  William later gave up both his law studies and his Presbyterian upbringing to become a Free Will Baptist minister. He was an outspoken abolitionist, and that often made him unpopular with his congregations. The friction helped keep the family moving through towns in Vermont and upstate New York until they settled in Schenectady in 1844.

  Those moves later gave his son a political headache. When Arthur was nominated for vice president in 1880, a New York attorney named Arthur P. Hinman suggested he was born in Ireland and arrived at age 14. If true, the Constitution's natural-born-citizen clause might have disqualified him. When that story went nowhere, Hinman tried a new rumor that Arthur was born in Canada. It failed too.

  One early teacher described the boy as "frank and open in manners and genial in disposition." During the 1844 presidential election, Arthur and other young Whigs rallied behind Henry Clay, and he joined a brawl against students who favored James K. Polk. He also wore a green coat to show support for the Fenian Brotherhood, an Irish republican group founded in America.

  Arthur entered Union College in Schenectady in 1845 and studied the classical curriculum. He joined the Psi Upsilon fraternity, led the debate society as a senior, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. After graduating in 1848 he taught school in Schaghticoke and later in North Pownal, Vermont. James A. Garfield taught penmanship at that same school three years afterward, but the two never crossed paths.

  In 1853 Arthur arrived in New York City to read law with Erastus D. Culver, an abolitionist lawyer and family friend. He was admitted to the bar in 1854 and joined Culver's firm. That firm was then pursuing Lemmon v. New York with John Jay, grandson of the Founding Father of the same name. Jonathan Lemmon, a Virginian, was passing through New York with eight enslaved people, and Culver argued that New York law freed anyone brought there. The New York Court of Appeals upheld the argument in 1860. Campaign biographers later gave Arthur much of the credit, though his role was minor.

  In 1854 Arthur did lead a civil rights case of his own. Elizabeth Jennings Graham had been physically removed from a streetcar by a conductor because she was black. Arthur won, and the verdict led to desegregation of the city's streetcar lines.

  In 1856 Arthur courted Ellen Herndon, daughter of the Virginian naval officer William Lewis Herndon. That year he and his new law partner, Henry D. Gardiner, traveled to Kansas to consider buying land. Violence between pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers raged there, and Arthur sided firmly with the anti-slavery side. After three or four months the two genteel New Yorkers gave up on frontier life. Back in New York, Arthur comforted his fiancée after her father was lost at sea in the wreck of the SS Central America. They married in 1859 at Calvary Episcopal Church in Manhattan.

  In 1861 Governor Edwin D. Morgan named Arthur engineer-in-chief on his military staff, a minor patronage post until the Civil War began in April. Suddenly New York had to raise and equip armies larger than any the country had seen. Arthur was commissioned a brigadier general in the quartermaster department. He proved so efficient at housing and outfitting the troops pouring into New York City that he became inspector general in March 1862 and quartermaster general that July.

  He could have gone to the front. The 9th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment elected him its colonel, and he was also offered command of the four-regiment Metropolitan Brigade. At Morgan's request he turned down both. His closest brush with the fighting came in May 1862, when he traveled to inspect New York troops near Fredericksburg, Virginia. Over the following months he helped enlist New York's quota of 120,000 men.

  The post was political, and it ended in January 1863 when the Democrat Horatio Seymour became governor. Arthur asked to be reappointed after Reuben Fenton won in 1864, but Fenton belonged to a different Republican faction and had already promised the job to someone else.

  Grief came in 1863, when the Arthurs' two-year-old son, William Lewis, died of what the record calls convulsions. They lavished attention on their next son, Chester Alan Jr., born in 1864. Meanwhile Arthur's law firm flourished on contacts from his militia years, and a new client, the Republican politician Thomas Murphy, would soon change the direction of his career.

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• 3. The Collector

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  Roscoe Conkling, an eloquent congressman from Utica, was a rising star in New York's conservative Republican organization when the war ended. Arthur worked in the same machine as Conkling, Thurlow Weed and William H. Seward. He rarely stated his own political ideas. In that world, loyalty and hard work mattered more than stated positions.

  Conkling went to the United States Senate in 1867 and took notice of Arthur. By 1868 Arthur chaired the New York City Republican executive committee and was raising money for Ulysses S. Grant. Party business kept him out most nights, and his wife resented his absences. In 1869 he became counsel to the New York City Tax Commission at $10,000 a year, and he resigned in 1870 when Tammany Hall Democrats under William M. Tweed won the legislature. In 1871 Grant offered him the post of Commissioner of Internal Revenue, and he declined.

  In July 1870 Grant appointed Arthur's friend Thomas Murphy as Collector of the Port of New York. Grant and Murphy had bonded over a shared love of horses during summer vacations on the Jersey Shore. Murphy was a war profiteer with ties to Tammany Hall, yet Conkling got the Senate to confirm him. The Collector hired hundreds of workers to gather tariffs at the nation's busiest port. Those workers were expected to pay political contributions called assessments back to the machine, which made the jobs very desirable.

  In December 1871 pressure forced Grant to ask for Murphy's resignation. John Augustus Griswold and William Orton each turned down the job and recommended Arthur. The New York Times remarked that Arthur had moved "like a mighty undercurrent" in Republican politics, shaping the party in New York more than any other man.

  As Collector, Arthur controlled nearly a thousand jobs. His salary started at $6,500, but a system called moiety also paid senior employees a share of seized cargoes and fines. His total income topped $50,000, more than the president earned. He was popular with importers and with his staff. In 1872, as reform sentiment grew, he renamed the assessments "voluntary contributions," although the practice continued. Then in 1874 Custom House employees were caught improperly assessing fines against an importer to raise their own pay. Congress repealed the moiety system, and Arthur's income fell to $12,000 a year.

  His four-year term expired on the 10th of December 1875, and Conkling arranged his reappointment by Grant. Then Rutherford B. Hayes won the presidency after months of dispute over twenty electoral votes from Florida, Louisiana, Oregon and South Carolina. Hayes took office pledged to reform patronage, and in 1877 he and Treasury Secretary John Sherman aimed at Conkling's machine. Sherman ordered a commission led by John Jay, Arthur's old colleague from the Lemmon case, to investigate the Custom House. Jay concluded that 20% of the employees were expendable. Arthur appointed a committee of workers to choose the cuts, and he carried them out after a written protest. The commission still criticized him in a second report.

  Hayes then issued an executive order barring federal officeholders from taking part in "the management of political organizations, caucuses, conventions, or election campaigns." Arthur, Naval Officer Alonzo B. Cornell and Surveyor George H. Sharpe refused to obey. Sherman encouraged Arthur to resign and offered him the consulship in Paris, which he refused. In September 1877 Hayes demanded the three men's resignations, and again they refused.

  Hayes sent the Senate three replacements, among them Theodore Roosevelt Sr., all supporters of Conkling's rival William M. Evarts. The Commerce Committee, chaired by Conkling, rejected them unanimously. The full Senate voted down Roosevelt 31-25 and Prince by the same margin. Edwin Merritt was confirmed only because Sharpe's term had expired.

  In July 1878, while Congress was in recess, Hayes fired Arthur and Cornell and installed Merritt and Silas W. Burt on temporary appointments. He offered Arthur the Paris consulship once more as a face-saving gesture, and Arthur again declined. When the Senate reconvened in February 1879, it confirmed Merritt 31-25 and Burt 31-19, giving Hayes his biggest civil service victory.

  Arthur used his free time to help elect Edward Cooper mayor of New York City. In September 1879 he became chairman of the New York State Republican Executive Committee, a post he held until October 1881. He and Conkling pushed a ticket of Stalwarts, as Conkling's faction was now known, and Cornell won the gubernatorial nomination 234-216. The Stalwart ticket won the election, partly because the Democratic vote split.

  Arthur had only days to enjoy it. On the 12th of January 1880, his wife, Ellen, died suddenly while he was in Albany planning the year's political agenda. He was devastated, and perhaps felt guilty. He never remarried.

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• 4. Accidental Vice President

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  The 1880 Republican National Convention deadlocked through thirty-six ballots. Conkling's Stalwarts wanted ex-president Grant, while the Half-Breeds backed Senator James G. Blaine of Maine, who was friendlier to civil service reform. With neither side near a majority, delegates settled on a dark horse, Ohio Congressman and Civil War general James A. Garfield.

  Garfield's supporters knew they would struggle without New York's Stalwarts, so they offered the vice presidency to one of them. Levi P. Morton, their first choice, asked Conkling and declined on his advice. Conkling told Arthur to refuse as well, expecting a Republican defeat. Arthur accepted anyway.

  The journalist William C. Hudson later claimed to have witnessed their argument. According to Hudson, Arthur told Conkling that the vice presidency was "a greater honor than I ever dreamed of attaining." Conkling relented and campaigned for the ticket.

  The Democratic nominee, General Winfield Scott Hancock, was popular and had avoided firm positions on most issues. Republicans opened with the "bloody shirt," the claim that electing Democrats would undo the Union victory. With the war fifteen years past and Union generals heading both tickets, it landed weakly. They switched to warning that Democrats would lower the protective tariff and flood the country with cheap European goods. That message hit hard in New York and Indiana, where many worked in manufacturing. Hancock hurt himself by calling the tariff "a local question."

  Candidates did not campaign personally then, but Arthur oversaw the New York effort and raised money as state chairman. Republicans carried New York by 20,000 votes. Turnout of qualified voters reached 78.4%, the highest ever recorded, and Garfield won the popular vote by only 7,018. The Electoral College count was 214 to 155.

  After the election, Arthur pressed Garfield in vain to fill key jobs, especially Treasury, with New York Stalwarts. Garfield instead named Blaine, Conkling's arch-enemy, as Secretary of State. A month before inauguration, Arthur gave reporters a speech hinting that Republicans had won Indiana by illegal means, and it damaged his standing. By the 4th of March 1881 the two men were estranged, even though Garfield did eventually name the Stalwart Thomas Lemuel James as Postmaster General.

  Conkling and fellow New York senator Thomas C. Platt resigned that spring to protest Garfield's replacing Merritt with William H. Robertson at the Custom House. In early July the Senate was in recess, so Arthur went home to New York City and then traveled with Conkling to Albany. Conkling hoped the legislature would quickly re-elect him and thereby defeat the Garfield administration.

  On the 2nd of July, still in Albany, Arthur learned that Garfield had been shot. The assassin, Charles J. Guiteau, was a deranged office seeker who expected Garfield's successor to give him a patronage job. Guiteau announced to onlookers, "I am a Stalwart, and Arthur will be President!" He was found mentally unstable, and his link to Arthur dated only from the 1880 campaign.

  Twenty-nine days before his execution, Guiteau wrote a long, unpublished poem claiming Arthur knew the assassination had saved "our land." He wrongly presumed Arthur would pardon him.

  Far more troubling was the absence of any legal guidance on presidential succession. As Garfield lingered, no one knew who could wield presidential authority. The Senate had also adjourned without choosing a president pro tempore, the officer who would normally follow the vice president. For two months a void of authority hung over the executive office. Garfield was too weak to work, and Arthur was reluctant to be seen acting as president while Garfield lived. All through the summer he refused to travel to Washington.

  Before leaving New York, Arthur prepared a proclamation calling the Senate into special session and mailed it to the White House. That would let senators convene at once and choose a president pro tempore who could take over if Arthur died. After he reached Washington, he destroyed the mailed copy and issued a formal call himself.

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• 5. Stalwart in the White House

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  Arthur arrived in Washington on the 21st of September and swore the oath a second time the next day, before Chief Justice Morrison R. Waite. Doubt lingered over whether a state court judge could administer a federal oath, and he wanted no flaw in the procedure.

  While a remodeling he had ordered was carried out, he stayed at the home of Senator John P. Jones. The project included an elaborate fifty-foot glass screen by Louis Comfort Tiffany. His sister Mary Arthur McElroy served as hostess for the widowed president, and Washington gossiped about its most eligible bachelor. Arthur stayed devoted to his late wife's memory. His son, Chester Jr., was a freshman at Princeton, and his daughter Nell joined him in 1882 after a stay in New York with a governess. He shielded her from the press as much as he could.

  Most of the cabinet he inherited had been his opponents within the party, and it soon began to come apart. In October 1881 Treasury Secretary William Windom resigned to run for the Senate in Minnesota. Arthur replaced him with his friend and fellow Stalwart, Charles J. Folger. In December, Attorney General Wayne MacVeagh resigned despite Arthur's personal appeal, believing a reformer had no place in this cabinet. The new Attorney General was Benjamin H. Brewster, a Philadelphia lawyer and machine politician reputed to have reformist leanings.

  Blaine left the State Department as soon as Congress reconvened. Conkling expected to take his place, but Arthur picked Frederick T. Frelinghuysen of New Jersey, a Stalwart whom Grant recommended. Only Secretary of War Robert Todd Lincoln served through the whole term. There was also no vice president, because the 25th Amendment did not yet exist.

  Reformers expected little. In the 1870s, contractors on star postal routes had been greatly overpaid with the help of officials including Second Assistant Postmaster General Thomas J. Brady and former senator Stephen Wallace Dorsey. Arthur had worked closely with Dorsey before becoming president, and reformers feared he would let the investigation die. Instead Brewster continued the inquiry begun under MacVeagh and hired two prominent Democratic lawyers, William W. Ker and Richard T. Merrick, to strengthen the prosecution. Arthur forced out officials suspected in the scandal.

  The 1882 trial produced convictions for two minor conspirators and a hung jury on the rest. Then a juror said the defendants had tried to bribe him, and the judge set the guilty verdicts aside. Before the second trial, Arthur removed five federal officeholders who sympathized with the defense, including a former senator. That trial ran from December 1882 to July 1883 and ended without a conviction. The failure tarnished the administration, but the fraud was stopped.

  Garfield's death at the hands of a disappointed office seeker had sharpened public demand for civil service reform. Senator George H. Pendleton of Ohio had introduced a merit-based bill in 1880, requiring examinations for civil servants. Arthur called for such legislation in his first annual address to Congress in 1881, but Congress did not act. In the 1882 elections Democrats campaigned on reform and Republicans lost seats. The lame-duck Congress then passed Pendleton's bill 38-5 in the Senate and 155-47 in the House. Arthur signed it on the 16th of January 1883.

  The law covered only 10% of federal jobs at first and depended on the president to enforce it. Supporters still doubted Arthur, but he moved fast to name the Civil Service Commission: Dorman Bridgman Eaton, John Milton Gregory and Leroy D. Thoman. Silas W. Burt, the chief examiner, was a longtime reformer who had been Arthur's opponent at the New York Custom House. The commission issued its first rules in May 1883. By 1884, half of postal officials and three-quarters of Customs Service jobs were to be filled on merit.

  That year, Arthur said the system was effective in "securing competent and faithful public servants." The former chief of a spoils machine had become the president who started to dismantle one.

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• 6. Ledgers and Borders

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  By 1882 the federal surplus had reached $145 million. The government had collected more than it spent every year since 1866, thanks to wartime taxes. Democrats wanted lower tariffs to cut both revenue and the price of imported goods. Republicans argued that high tariffs protected wages in manufacturing and mining, and they preferred more spending on internal improvements and fewer excise taxes.

  Arthur sided with his party. In 1882 he called for ending excise taxes on everything except liquor and for simplifying the tariff structure. That May, Representative William D. Kelley of Pennsylvania introduced a bill creating a tariff commission, and Arthur signed it but filled the panel mostly with protectionists. In December 1882 the commission surprised Republicans by recommending cuts averaging between 20 and 25%.

  Congress ignored that advice. The House Ways and Means Committee offered a 10% reduction, and after negotiation with the Senate the final bill cut tariffs by an average of just 1.47%. It passed narrowly on the 3rd of March 1883, the last full day of the 47th Congress. Arthur signed it, and the surplus remained.

  Congress tried the other side of the ledger with the 1882 Rivers and Harbors Act, which spent an unprecedented $19 million. Arthur was not against internal improvements, but the bill's scale and its focus on particular localities troubled him. On the 1st of August 1882 he vetoed it, to widespread public praise. His veto message said the money served purposes "not for the common defense or general welfare." Congress overrode him the next day. Republicans first called the law a success but later decided it helped cost them seats in 1882.

  Immigration drew even more attention. In July 1882 Congress easily passed a bill regulating steamships that carried immigrants, and Arthur surprised lawmakers by vetoing it and asking for revisions. They made them, and he signed it. In August he also signed the Immigration Act of 1882, which taxed each immigrant 50 cents and barred the mentally ill, the intellectually disabled, criminals and anyone likely to need public assistance.

  The Burlingame Treaty, ratified by the Senate in January 1868, had allowed Chinese immigrants to enter the country freely. After the Panic of 1873, Chinese workers were blamed for depressing wages. In 1879 Congress passed a Chinese Exclusion Act that sought to override the treaty, but President Hayes vetoed it.

  In 1882, after China agreed to revisions in a treaty of 1880, Senator John F. Miller of California introduced another bill. It would have blocked Chinese laborers for twenty years. Both houses passed it by overwhelming margins, and Arthur vetoed it, ruling that the 20-year ban breached the treaty, which allowed only a "reasonable" suspension. Eastern newspapers praised the veto, while Western states condemned it.

  Congress could not override him, so it cut the ban to ten years. Arthur still objected to excluding Chinese laborers but accepted the compromise and signed the act on the 6th of May 1882. It exempted diplomats, teachers, students, merchants and travelers, and it was widely evaded.

  Beyond the border, Blaine had proposed a Pan-American conference in 1882 to discuss trade and to end the War of the Pacific between Bolivia, Chile and Peru. When Frelinghuysen succeeded him at the end of 1881, the conference lapsed, and Frelinghuysen also dropped the peace effort, fearing the United States would be drawn into the war. Arthur and Frelinghuysen kept encouraging hemispheric trade. A reciprocal tariff treaty with Mexico was signed in 1882 and approved by the Senate in 1884, but the House never passed the legislation to put it into effect.

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• 7. Steel, Rights, and the Court

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  After the Civil War, the United States Navy shrank from nearly 700 vessels to just 52, most of them obsolete. In his 1881 annual message, Arthur called for a stronger fleet. When Navy Secretary William H. Hunt resigned in April 1882, Arthur appointed the Half-Breed William E. Chandler on Blaine's recommendation, and gave him full authority.

  Chandler was an aggressive administrator. He purged the service of officers loyal to wood-and-canvas warships and created the Naval War College. An advisory board he appointed aimed to build a fleet that could protect American interests thousands of miles away rather than only coastal waters. Congress funded three steel protected cruisers, the Atlanta, Boston and Chicago, plus an armed dispatch-steamer, the Dolphin. Together they were known as the ABCD Ships or the Squadron of Evolution.

  All the contracts went to the low bidder, John Roach & Sons of Chester, Pennsylvania, although Roach had once employed Chandler as a lobbyist. Democrats turned against the New Navy after winning the 48th Congress and refused money for seven more steel warships. The last of the new ships entered service in 1889. Chandler scrapped costly outdated vessels and said he did his "best work in destroying the old navy."

  The Signal Corps also promoted the Lady Franklin Bay Expedition to the Arctic during Arthur's term. Two crew members reached a new Farthest North record, but only seven of the original twenty-five men returned alive.

  In the South, white Bourbon Democrats had regained power after Reconstruction, and Republicans were shrinking as Black voters were disenfranchised. A new party, the Readjusters in Virginia, won an election on promises of more school funding for Black and white schools alike and the end of the poll tax and the whipping post. Arthur steered federal patronage in Virginia through the Readjusters instead of the Republicans, and he did the same in other states with independents and Greenbackers.

  Some Black Republicans felt betrayed. Others, including Frederick Douglass and ex-Senator Blanche K. Bruce, backed the approach because the independents held more liberal racial views than the Democrats. It only worked in Virginia, and by 1885 the Readjuster movement was collapsing.

  When the Supreme Court struck down the Civil Rights Act of 1875 in the Civil Rights Cases of 1883, Arthur told Congress he disagreed. He could not persuade it to pass a replacement. He did intervene to overturn a court-martial ruling against the Black West Point cadet Johnson Whittaker, after Judge Advocate General David G. Swaim found the case illegal and based on racial bias. In 1882 he signed the Edmunds Act, which made polygamy a federal crime and barred polygamists from public office and voting, a step aimed at the LDS Church in Utah Territory.

  On Native American policy, Arthur asked Congress to increase education funding, and in 1884 it did, though not as much as he wished. He favored allotment, under which individuals instead of tribes would own land. Congress did not act until the Dawes Act of 1887. Liberal reformers backed the system, but most allotted land was eventually resold cheaply to white speculators.

  Settlers and ranchers kept pressing on Native lands. Arthur first resisted, but Interior Secretary Henry M. Teller assured him the Crow Creek Reservation in Dakota Territory was unprotected. In 1885 Arthur opened it to settlers by executive order. His successor, Grover Cleveland, found the title belonged to the Native Americans and revoked the order within months.

  Arthur filled two Supreme Court vacancies. After Associate Justice Nathan Clifford died in July 1881, Arthur nominated Horace Gray of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. Gray was easily confirmed and served until resigning in 1902.

  When Associate Justice Ward Hunt retired in January 1882, Arthur first nominated his old boss, Roscoe Conkling. He doubted Conkling would accept but felt obliged to offer his former patron a high office. The Senate confirmed him, and Conkling declined, the last time a confirmed nominee has done so. Senator George Edmunds also declined. Arthur finally chose Samuel Blatchford, a judge on the Second Circuit for four years, who was approved within two weeks and served until his death in 1893.

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• 8. Final Years and Reputation

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  Shortly after becoming president, Arthur was diagnosed with Bright's disease, a kidney ailment now called nephritis. He tried to keep it private, but by 1883 rumors spread as he grew thinner and looked older. In April 1883 he traveled to Florida to recover and instead suffered intense pain. Later that year, on the advice of Missouri Senator George Graham Vest, he visited Yellowstone National Park. Reporters went along and helped publicize the national park system. After two months of travel he returned to Washington refreshed.

  As 1884 approached, Blaine was the favorite for the Republican nomination, and Arthur considered running for a full term. He found that neither faction would back him fully. The Half-Breeds stood behind Blaine, Stalwarts were undecided, and reformers leaned toward Senator George F. Edmunds. Business leaders and Southern Republicans who owed their jobs to his patronage supported Arthur, but he had already decided against a serious campaign. He kept up a token effort, fearing that quitting would raise doubts about his record and his health.

  Blaine led the first ballot at the June convention and had a majority of 541 votes by the fourth ballot, to Arthur's 207. Arthur telegraphed his congratulations and accepted defeat calmly. He took no part in the fall campaign, which Blaine later blamed for his loss to Grover Cleveland.

  Two months before his term ended, New York Stalwarts asked Arthur to run for the Senate, and he declined. He returned to his New York City home and to his old law practice, Arthur, Knevals and Ransom, as counsel only. He took few assignments and was often too ill to leave the house.

  After spending the summer of 1886 in New London, Connecticut, Arthur became seriously ill. On the 16th of November he ordered nearly all his personal and official papers burned. The next morning he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage and never regained consciousness. He died on the 18th of November at age 57. A private funeral on the 22nd at the Church of the Heavenly Rest in New York City drew President Cleveland and ex-President Hayes. Arthur was buried beside his wife at Albany Rural Cemetery in Menands, New York. His post-presidency of one year and eight months is the second shortest among presidents who outlived their terms, after James K. Polk's three months.

  In 1889 the sculptor Ephraim Keyser placed a monument on the plot: a giant bronze angel laying a palm leaf on a granite sarcophagus. In 1898 sculptor George Edwin Bissell created a 15-foot bronze statue of Arthur for Madison Square in New York City. It was dedicated in 1899 and unveiled by his sister Mary. Secretary of War Elihu Root called Arthur wise in statesmanship and firm and effective in administration, while admitting he was isolated in office and unloved by his own party.

  The verdict of Arthur's own era was kinder than the one that followed. Journalist Alexander McClure wrote, "No man ever entered the Presidency so profoundly and widely distrusted as Chester Alan Arthur, and no one ever retired... more generally respected, alike by political friend and foe." The New York World said at his death that no duty was neglected and no adventurous project alarmed the nation. Mark Twain wrote, "It would be hard indeed to better President Arthur's administration."

  Then the memory faded. In 1935 the historian George F. Howe noted an obscurity in strange contrast to Arthur's significant part in American history. By 1975 Thomas C. Reeves was crediting appointments that were unspectacular but sound, and an administration untouched by the corruption of the era. Biographer Zachary Karabell wrote in 2004 that, though stretched physically and emotionally, Arthur strove to do what was right for the country. Modern historians generally rank him as a mediocre or average president.

  In 1938 the Post Office issued a stamp with his face, and in 2012 a one dollar coin carried his likeness. Nick Offerman played him in the 2025 Netflix miniseries Death by Lightning. His Manhattan townhouse was sold to William Randolph Hearst, and since 1944 it has housed Kalustyan's Spice Emporium.

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