education, which, he believed, was the foundation of freedom. He discussed the national debt, the challenges facing farmers, and the importance of civil service reform—at which point, a journalist noted, Roscoe Conkling, sitting directly behind Garfield, “smile[d] quietly at the hard task which Gen. Garfield had marked out for himself.”
It was when he spoke about the legacy of the Civil War, however, that Garfield was most passionate. With victory, he told the crowd standing before him, had come extraordinary opportunity. “The elevation of the negro race from slavery to the full rights of citizenship is the most important political change we have known since the adoption of the Constitution,” he said. “It has liberated the master as well as the slave from a relation which wronged and enfeebled both.” Listening to Garfield speak, a reporter in the crowd of fifty thousand realized that, all around him, “black men who had been slaves, and who still bore upon their persons the evidence of cruel lashings,” were standing peacefully, even cheerfully, next to “Southern white men, who had grown poor during the war but who seemed, nevertheless, to harbor no ill-feelings.”
The painful past, however, had not been forgotten, nor did Garfield believe it should be. As he spoke, former slaves in the crowd openly wept. “The emancipated race has already made remarkable progress,” he said. “With unquestioning devotion to the Union, with a patience and gentleness not born of fear, they have ‘followed the light as God gave them to see the light.’ … They deserve the generous encouragement of all good men. So far as my authority can lawfully extend they shall enjoy the full and equal protection of the Constitution and the laws.”
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