Destiny of the Republic - Candice Millard [40]
When he finished his address, Garfield stood for a moment on the portico, his hands raised to the sky. “There was the utmost silence,” one reporter wrote, as the new president appealed “to God for aid in the trial before him.”
The trial, in fact, had already begun. The rivalry between the two factions within the Republican Party had only deepened since the convention in Chicago nine months earlier. Roscoe Conkling’s fury at Grant’s defeat had turned to outrage when it became clear that Garfield would not bow to his every demand. In August, in a desperate attempt at reconciliation, party bosses had arranged a meeting at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York. Garfield had traveled all the way from Mentor for it, but Conkling, who lived in New York, had not even bothered to appear. “Mr. Garfield will doubtless leave New York thoroughly impressed with the magnanimity of our senior Senator,” a journalist sneered.
Conkling, it was later discovered, was in another room in the same hotel while the meeting was being held. He did not miss the opportunity, however, to let Garfield know what was expected of him. Through his minions, Conkling laid out his expectations, which, not surprisingly, revolved around patronage—its continuation and his control over it. Not hesitating to make the most audacious demands, he insisted that Garfield let him choose the next secretary of the treasury. Conkling would later claim that Garfield had agreed to everything, but Garfield said he offered nothing more than the assurance that he would try to include Stalwarts in his cabinet and, when appropriate, consult with Conkling. “No trades, no shackles,” Garfield had written in his diary after the meeting, “and as well fitted for defeat or victory as ever.”
Since Garfield’s election, Conkling had decided to take a more direct approach. If Garfield would not let him personally select the cabinet, he would dismantle it, one appointee at a time. In a letter he had written to Garfield just days before the inauguration, Conkling had warned the president-elect that he would be wise to keep in mind who was really in charge. “I need hardly add that your Administration cannot be more successful than I wish it to be,” he wrote. “Nor can it be more satisfactory to you, to the country, and to the party than I will labor to make it.”
Garfield saw the truth in this threat before his administration even began. On March 1, Levi Morton, a Stalwart who had accepted his nomination as secretary of the navy, was pulled from his sickbed in the middle of the night, forced to drink a bracing mixture of quinine and brandy, and driven to Conkling’s apartment—known widely as “the morgue”—to answer for his betrayal. At four the next morning, exhausted and defeated, Morton wrote a letter to Garfield asking him to withdraw his nomination.
Two days later, on the morning of his inauguration, Garfield lost yet another cabinet member to Conkling. At 8:30 a.m., he learned that Senator William Allison, who, just the day before, had agreed to be his secretary of the treasury, had also changed his mind. “Allison broke down on my hands and absolutely declined the Treasury,” Garfield wrote in his diary. Like Morton, Allison was clearly unwilling “to face the opposition of certain forces.”
Almost as maddening as Conkling’s sabotage of his administration was the fact that Garfield’s efforts to reunify the party and, he hoped, to reassemble his cabinet were thwarted at every turn by the men who were supposed to be on his side. The Capitol building, where Garfield had spent seventeen years of his life, suddenly seemed a snake pit, a place where vicious, small-minded men lay in wait, ready to attack at the first sign of weakness. “The Senate,” Henry Adams would write a few years later in