A Secret Life_ The Lies and Scandals of President Grover Cleveland - Charles Lachman [10]
Grover followed the grim news from his desk at Rogers, Bowen & Rogers. With his legal career finally taking off, he ran for ward supervisor from Buffalo’s second ward and was elected by 509 votes. When Buffalo elected a Democrat as district attorney, Grover was offered the post of assistant DA; but he had a lot to think through before he could accept the job. His salary at the district attorney’s office would be $500 a year—half the salary he was pulling in at the law firm. Dennis Bowen did not want to lose Grover, but he was also urging his young associate to see the big picture and take the prosecutor’s position. One other factor moved Grover to finally say yes. The new DA was Cyrenius C. Torrance, already an old man when he won the election by 1,700 votes. The major focus of his life was operating a mill he owned in a village outside Buffalo, so in all likelihood, he would be an absentee DA. Grover would pretty much have a free hand in running the office. He was sworn in as assistant district attorney on New Year’s Day 1863.
Seven months later, in July 1863, the Civil War draft began. The names of eligible recruits were written on small pieces of paper and then stuffed inside a drum-shaped box that was turned on an axle. The local enlistment board drew the names at the provost marshal’s office. These came from the so-called first class of eligibility—unmarried men from twenty to forty-five years of age, and married men from twenty to thirty-five. Erie County’s quota came to about 2,000 men. Just his luck, Grover Cleveland’s name was pulled on the first day.
Buffalo was a tinderbox. Just a week earlier, riots had erupted on the docks between Irish laborers and black longshoremen. One antiwar politician was accused of inciting the rabble to drive out every Negro and “black Republican.” The city braced for an outbreak of violence.
When Fred Cleveland heard that his brother Grover had been drafted, he sent word offering to take his place. But Fred, who had mustered out of the army two months earlier, had “done enough,” Grover decided. Besides, Grover said, “I have my man.”
George Beniski was thirty-two years old when he met Grover Cleveland for the first time. Beniski was a sailor on the tugboat Acme, which carried cargo of flour, pork, lard, and other goods from Buffalo to Detroit, across Lake Erie. A Great Lakes sea captain, George Reinhart, had heard that Grover was looking for a conscript to take his place in the Union Army. Reinhart knew it was a knotty problem and suggested George Beniski. On August 20, 1863, six weeks after Grover was drafted, Reinhart took Beniski to see Grover in his grimy little prosecutor’s office at the Erie County courthouse. When Grover was introduced to Beniski, he must have thought, here was the perfect man. The Polish-born Beniski had immigrated to the United States in 1851, spoke English with a thick accent, and stood just under five foot four. He had a round face, big ears, a low forehead, and elaborate tattoos on his hands. Beniski was illiterate and had no family. He could not even spell his name—he wrote the letter X as his mark.
Cleveland got right down to business. He offered to hire Beniski for $150 to serve as his substitute in the war. Beniski definitely got the impression that Grover had borrowed the money from Reinhart, and the sailor may have been illiterate, but he knew how to drive a bargain. “I knew that the bounty then was three hundred dollars,” Beniski later recalled. So he asked Grover for better terms. “I told him if he would . . . help me out if I came out alive, I would go for him. This he agreed to.” Beniski also asked Grover to “get