Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [104]
Conkling was going home to Utica, to the three-story gray stone mansion on the Mohawk River that he had bought with a single year’s salary when he was practicing law. His wife, a quiet, practical woman who recoiled from her husband’s political and social intrigues, lived there with their daughter in relative seclusion. Since taking his place in the Senate fourteen years earlier, Conkling had made only rare and brief appearances in Utica, and he did not plan to stay long now.
Although, in the wake of his humiliating defeat, he vowed that he was “done with politics now and forever,” no one who knew him believed that he was about to bow out gracefully. Conkling would never again debase himself by asking for a single vote. Fortunately, votes were no longer necessary. He had, he believed, something much more valuable than a Senate seat. He had Chester Arthur.
Like Conkling, Arthur had largely disappeared from view after Garfield’s shooting. It was widely assumed that he was in close and constant discussions with the man who had made him, planning for the day when he would be king, and Conkling his Cromwell. So little respect was there for the vice president, and so openly had he aligned himself with the president’s fiercest enemy, that to accuse him now of conspiring with Conkling was simply stating the obvious. “I presume that if Mr. Arthur should become President, in his ignorance and inexperience he would be compelled to rely on some one more capable than himself,” the political writer George William Curtis shrugged. “Obviously that person would be Mr. Conkling.”
Hatred for Conkling and Arthur grew with each setback Garfield suffered. Newspapers only fueled the fire, assuring readers that, while they prayed for their president’s recovery, these two men plotted how best to take advantage of the tragedy. “Disguise it as they may seek to do,” one article read, “the men who have chosen to assume an attitude of hostility to the Administration are speculating hourly upon the chances of Garfield’s life or death.”
Enraged by the very idea of Arthur taking over the presidency, Americans across the country readied themselves as if for battle. Some took a tactical approach, frantically trying to revive the rumor, started during the campaign, that the vice president had been born in Canada, and so was constitutionally prohibited from becoming president. Others were ready to take more drastic measures. Police departments prepared their men for riots as agitated crowds gathered in city streets. In Ohio, men angrily proclaimed that they would not hesitate to “shoulder their muskets and go to Washington to prevent the inauguration of Arthur.”
As they oiled their guns, however, the object of their wrath, the once-preening politician whom they pictured waiting hungrily in the wings, sat alone in a borrowed house, terrified and distraught. To the few people who were able to see him in those first days after the shooting, Arthur seemed not just concerned or saddened, but shattered. His friends were reminded of the dazed, hollow man he had been little more than a year earlier, when he had lost his wife to pneumonia. “There is no doubt that he is suffering keenly,” one man confided to a reporter. “No one can look on him for a moment without being convinced of that fact. He cannot, if he would, control the evidences of his feelings.”
The day after the shooting, Arthur had arrived in Washington at 8:00 a.m. and gone directly to the White House. Although Bliss had refused to let him see the president, Arthur had stayed for nearly two hours. A senator waiting in Joseph Stanley Brown’s office caught sight of him as he paced the halls and noted with astonishment that the vice president “seemed to be overcome.” Before Arthur left, Lucretia agreed to see him. Eager to express his sympathy to the first lady, he found to his embarrassment that he was “unable to conceal his emotion,” tears filling his eyes and his voice tightening as he tried