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as himself to scrutiny.” It all somehow sounded plausible.

Lamont wanted to know what Hudson thought he should do.

“Turn them over to the governor, Dan, and let him deal with them. I cannot see that you can do anything else.”

Lamont agreed. It might be just the thing they needed to “fight this other devilish thing.” He meant Maria Halpin.

Lamont walked out of the office, and when he returned, Grover Cleveland was with him. Cleveland squeezed his bulky frame into Lamont’s chair and read the letter. Then he studied the supporting documents that had been mailed with it. When he was finished, he leaned his elbow on the desk and stared out the window, pondering the view of the park in front of the State Capitol building. Then he gathered the papers into a neat little stack.

“I’ll take these,” he announced. “Say nothing about them to anyone. I say this to both of you. Dan, send for this man to bring his proof as soon as he can. Promise to pay his expenses. When that man does come, bring him directly to me. I will deal with him.”

When Cleveland left the office, Lamont and Hudson stared at each other. They were speechless. “I’ll be hanged!” Hudson said. “He’s going to use them after all.”

Lamont was unsure. “I don’t know . . . ”

Five days later, the Kentuckian was in Albany. Lamont told him to wait outside the office and went in to tell Governor Cleveland that the Kentucky tailor was there.

“Bring him to me,” Cleveland said.

Lamont returned with him, and Cleveland stiffly invited him to take a seat. “Are your proofs all here?”

“Yes, sir, all of them.” They were certified copies of public records, plus letters from three witnesses. Taken in total, he said, they told the sordid story behind Blaine’s marriage to his wife of thirty-three years.

Cleveland asked, “Everything is here then, and you are holding nothing in reserve?” When Cleveland was assured that everything was now in his custody, the governor turned to Lamont. “Arrange with this man a proper sum for his expenses, the time he has lost and his good will in the matter, and pay him.”

A brief negotiation followed, after which Lamont wrote out a check, and the fellow was on his way home.

When Lamont went back to find Cleveland, he saw that the papers were laid out on the governor’s desk—Cleveland started to rip them apart. Lamont watched dumbfounded, too shocked to say a word. Then Cleveland called for a porter and ordered him to throw the scraps of paper into the fireplace and set them ablaze. He stood before the fire and watched the documents disintegrate into black soot. Then he turned to his aide.

“The other side can have a monopoly of all the dirt in this campaign,” he said.

Nevertheless, the grubby story found its way into print on August 8, in the pages of the Indianapolis Sentinel, a rabble-rousing Democratic newspaper in Indiana. Cleveland told Lamont he was “very sorry it was printed.”

“I hope it will die out at once,” he said.

The backstory was this: In 1850, Blaine was just out of college and teaching at a military academy in Kentucky when he met another teacher, Harriet Stanwood, who came from a wealthy Maine family. They fell in love and, six months later, became engaged. Not long thereafter, word reached Blaine that his father had died in Pennsylvania. He made the arrangements to attend the funeral and settle his father’s estate, not knowing when or if he would ever return to Kentucky. And so on June 30, 1850, in the presence of a few trusted friends, Blaine wed Harriet Stanwood in a quickie ceremony conducted by an itinerant preacher. Alas, the preacher failed to procure a proper marriage license—technically, the Blaines were not legally married. Nine months later, when Harriet was pregnant with her first child, she and Blaine decided to take their vows in church, this time in the presence of family members. The date was March 25, 1851. Their son Stanwood Blaine was born eleven weeks later.

Out of this romance, the Sentinel, under hard-line publisher and editor John C. Shoemaker, spun a lurid story, accusing